The Story
How to begin? I suppose I'll begin by saying my life changed in the spring of 1974.
I was in my sophomore year of high school in the small town of Delavan, Wisconsin. We lived in a beautiful house on the lake. My brothers and I had friends over that day helping us put our boat dock in for the summer. One of our friends had a joint of marijuana on him. I had never tried it before - I had always been against it until that day. That day I made a choice to try it. We smoked it before going to work on the dock. Needless to say the dock didn't get put in that day. I was too freaked out and stoned!
After that day I continued to smoke marijuana, and not long afterwards I began experimenting with other drugs. I somehow managed to graduate from high school and get a good job working as a machinist. I was stoned all the time, even at work. I had no idea that the drugs were affecting my decision-making processes and that the next decision I would make would change my life, again.
In 1980 I was asked by a friend if I would like to move to Florida with him and I did, just like that! I packed everything I owned in my Mustang and took off. We arrived in Southwest Florida at a small town called Everglades City, on the edge of the Everglades National Park and the "Ten Thousand Islands."
Shortly after arriving, I began work with my friend on a boat trapping stone crabs. My first day of work was also my first night of hauling pot. My second day of work went the same way. I had worked two days and two nights, and I had earned $5,000 each night smuggling over 50,000 pounds of marijuana. Not bad for two nights work!
That was just the beginning. The smuggling continued and it seemed to have no end. It became almost routine, pulling traps and catching stone crab by day and hauling pot at night. As the work increased so did my pay. After those first two nights my pay per job increased to anywhere from $25,000 a night to $70,000 a night depending on how many tons the load was. The loads ranged in size from 15 tons to as much as 50 tons.
In the beginning we were working a lot. Once or twice a week was the usual rate but there was a time when I worked 28 nights in a row. There was so much money coming at me I couldn't remember which job I was being paid for. My position in our little organization at this time was one of a crew man on the larger boat that went offshore to unload the mothership. It transported the marijuana into shore where the smaller boats would take the drugs through the shallow waters of the 10,000 Islands to a small fishing village located on Chokoloskee Island. From there, it would get stashed in someone’s house. Imagine every room in your house, including your garage, stacked to the ceiling with bales of pot.
All of this was done between sun down and sun up. The next day our shore crew would load the bales into cars, trucks, vans, motor homes and even dump trucks. If we could stuff it into it, it went! Chokolskee Island was connected to Everglades City by a causeway and from there, it went out-of-town to US 41 and on towards Miami in broad daylight under everyone’s noses.
I always told myself I would never be one of the guys that drove the stuff to Miami. On the road you are all alone, except for the guys running the route in other vehicles to keep in contact with everyone else with two meter radios. These guys were keeping an eye on the highway patrol and local sheriffs. There was a margin of safety provided, but in the event you were stopped all you could do was hit the Everglades and run, if running was even possible.
I preferred the safety of being on the big boat offshore. We always had a chase boat at our side. A chase boat is a very powerful and fast boat you could jump onto and to get a way in a hurry if the radar shows an unidentified vessel approaching. If everything was all clear we would simply go back and re-board our boat and continue on our way.
Our Saltwater Cowboy Chase Boat
These were the years of the Miami Cocaine Wars. The Cubans and the Colombians in Miami were killing each other left and right over who was going to control the drug trade in and out of the city. Miami became “Paradise Lost" according to Time Magazine. When the United States government and its Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) stepped up their efforts to regain control of Miami, they also set their sights on our little neck of the woods on the Southwest Coast of Florida.
When they finally came, they came in two waves. The DEA called them “Operation Everglades One” and “Operation Everglades Two”. These two operations were reasonably successful in that they did manage to seize some property and the guys we were working for who were setting up jobs for us.
They must have been thinking that if you cut he head off the snake, the body will die. But that didn’t happen. Things slowed down for a while. About three weeks after these operations went down, a Cuban friend of mine from Naples and a Cuban friend of his from Miami came knocking on my door and said, “We have a lot of stuff to move - can you do it?”. I said, “Hell yes!”
Once again, my life had just changed. I just went from working jobs to setting them up and, in the process, increasing my pay from $50,000+ per job to $500,000 to $1 million+ per job. I was making connections in Miami and those led to connections in Colombia. You see, Cubans and Colombians did not work well together - after all, they were still killing each other in the streets of Miami. So in order for these deals to work, they put a white guy like me in the middle - someone they could both trust to handle their loads. If I wasn’t moving their loads for them, I was either in Miami or in Colombia working out the details like transfering of money and checking the quality of the product. Even paying off certain people in Law Enforcement to look the other way, etc…
Let me drop back for a moment and remember what I said earlier about my decision-making processes. At this point in my life, I never worried about getting caught or even about being in danger, even though everyone I was associated with now except for my own crew were carrying guns. We never carried guns - there was no need to. We weren’t violent - we were just a bunch of good old boys who had a unique skill set and who were making a pile of cash. We were modern day pirates.
But my decision-making process broke down when I failed to realize the real danger I was putting myself in. I was now involved with some of the most dangerous people on our planet. At that time I never even gave it a second thought. All I could see was how easy it was to get these loads past the law and the rush I felt standing in a room filled with money, knowing that I could do anything I wanted and buy anything I wanted. I had justified everything I was doing because of my own abuse of the drugs and my greed and the simple fact that we just couldn’t get the drugs into this country fast enough because the demand was so great.
In the eight years I was involved in smuggling, an estimated 5 million plus pounds of Colombian marijuana and over 100,000 pounds of cocaine was brought in through our little corner of the world, unseen, and distributed throughout the United States.
The Florida Everglades - Our Waterways
It all ended for us in 1988 when the United States Government, the US Attorney’s Office, the DEA, the United States Customs Office, the US Marshal’s Office and state and local law-enforcement initiated “Operation Peacemaker”. This operation was directed specifically at us. Their years of frustration and their inability to stop what was going on led them to get one of our own to betray us.
The domino effect was now in motion. One after the other, each one of us was indicted on federal charges of importation of marijuana or cocaine and conspiracy to import and distribute marijuana or cocaine in the United States. I was handed a piece of paper that day. It said, The United States of America verses Timothy S. McBride. I tried to imagine it, the most powerful nation on Earth against me. It was mind blowing. After the dust of this operation settled, 141 people, including myself, went to prison. I was sentenced to 10 years mandatory to life. The war on drugs had finally caught up with us!
Life is full of choices. Each and every day we have choices to make. From simple choices such as turning left or turning right to some of the more difficult choices. Should I be pressured by my friends to drink or do drugs? It’s at this time you should be listening to that voice inside you - not just hearing it but LISTENING to it. This voice is you, this voice is who you are. Whatever comes our way, whatever battles we have a raging inside us, we always have a choice.
Life taught me that we won’t always make the right choices, but it’s what we learn from making them that makes us who we are. I have learned that abusing drugs and being a criminal and a pirate in order to make millions of dollars is not worth losing any of the precious years of this life I have been given or especially losing my life alltogether.
Once again my life has changed. I am older now and when I look back at my life I have a deep sense of regret for having touched millions of lives in such a negative way. I’ve been given another chance, another choice, and this time I choose to dedicate this half of my life to helping children, young adults and adults make the right choice and turn their back on drugs and on the kind of person I once was.
I am a father now, my son and daughter are at the age where they can be as easily influenced as I was. They are the most precious thing in the world to me, as all children are to their parents. I will not let this happen to them and I will no longer stand by and let it happen to any other child, young adult or even an adult!! I intend to make a difference.
I have begun and I am inviting every man, woman and child to join with me in fighting our own war. I’ve been asked time and time again, “Can one person make a difference in this world?” I say, “YES!”. You ask me how? I say, “each of you be that one person!”
All I should have thought,
but have not thought.
All I should have said,
but have not said.
All I should have done,
but have not done.
I pray to God for forgiveness.~ Timothy McBride
( The Saltwater Cowboy )