Speaker 1: You're listening to a Mother Maya podcast.
Speaker 2: Mama Maya acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters
Speaker 2: that this podcast is recorded on.
Speaker 1: I didn't know my real name or his real name
Speaker 1: until after that point. So when I was known and
Speaker 1: the Scott Into I turned up on the doorstep. A
Speaker 1: week or so later, a mom took us aside and
Speaker 1: told us that dad had committed a crime when we
Speaker 1: were young, and he was in trouble with the law
Speaker 1: and the police were looking for him, and he had
Speaker 1: gone into hiding. That this had been going on for
Speaker 1: our whole lives.
Speaker 3: From Mama Maya, you're listening to no filter. I'm Kate Langbrook,
Speaker 3: and as far as I know, I've always been Kate
Speaker 3: lane Brook. In fact, I was Catherine Langbrook, but I
Speaker 3: knew that was me. Tyler Weatherall had to rediscover who
Speaker 3: her parents were countless times, and it makes you think,
Speaker 3: how much do you really know about your parents when
Speaker 3: you're a kid. If you're fortunate, you get to take
Speaker 3: that for granted that their mom and dad do. They
Speaker 3: just head off to work, maybe in a suit, and
Speaker 3: your main concern is what's on the dinner table that night.
Speaker 3: For Tyler things were a little different. She was just
Speaker 3: nine years old when she began to realize that her
Speaker 3: dad didn't have a conventional job. In fact, he didn't
Speaker 3: really have a job at all, unless you consider running
Speaker 3: from the law as a fugitive a job. It wasn't
Speaker 3: until Tyler was an adult and after the law had
Speaker 3: caught up with her dad, that she began to make
Speaker 3: sense of her childhood and understand who her father had
Speaker 3: been all along. It is a wild story, And as
Speaker 3: I read her memoir No Way Home, all I kept
Speaker 3: thinking was.
Speaker 2: This sounds like a movie script. Tyler weatherall, Yes, this
Speaker 2: has been said.
Speaker 1: It's hard to believe sometimes that it all was true.
Speaker 3: And that it happened to you in your life and
Speaker 3: what happened to you or the life that you lived
Speaker 3: started really even from before you were born. Yes, definitely,
Speaker 3: and with a huge cast, well not a huge cast,
Speaker 3: but a huge cast of characters because they assumed a
Speaker 3: lot of different identities.
Speaker 2: And different names. But the patriarch was your dad. Can
Speaker 2: you talk us through first of all, because I'm very
Speaker 2: well aware that.
Speaker 3: In your book, your memoir Life on the Run with
Speaker 3: a Fugitive Dad, you kind of play with the timeline
Speaker 3: of it, what you realized through the prism of being
Speaker 3: a young child versus what you realized in adulthood and
Speaker 3: in retrospect playing out. But for the purpose of our listeners,
Speaker 3: we're going to try and tell her in a more
Speaker 3: sort of linear sense. Can you introduce me and our
Speaker 3: listeners to you and your family members.
Speaker 1: So there's five of us. My mom and my dad
Speaker 1: actually met in the sixties, fell in love, lost touch
Speaker 1: with each other, then met up again in the late
Speaker 1: seventies and got back together. So it was a lifelong
Speaker 1: love story for both of them. My eldest brother, Evan,
Speaker 1: he is seven years older than me. He actually has
Speaker 1: a different dad, my mom's second marriage. And then there
Speaker 1: is my middle sister, Caitlin, who is two and a
Speaker 1: half years older than me and me and her have
Speaker 1: the same dad. And then me, I'm the baby of
Speaker 1: the family.
Speaker 3: Your mom's name Sarah Sarah, So they had this, i
Speaker 3: mean also very sweeting love story. Your mom was very young,
Speaker 3: she was very beautiful, She was a model.
Speaker 1: Her life story in of itself could have been an
Speaker 1: entire book, or in fact several. Her story is incredible.
Speaker 1: She ran away from home at sixteen years old and
Speaker 1: married a forty year old film director her first marriage,
Speaker 1: who'd met her walking down the Chelsea Road and fallen
Speaker 1: for her. He realized that she was pretty much no
Speaker 1: good as a wife and wasn't really up to doing anner,
Speaker 1: so he sent her out with a portfolio photos that
Speaker 1: he had taken and had sort of started her modeling career,
Speaker 1: which took her to Paris, and then it took her
Speaker 1: to New York. And in New York, that's where she
Speaker 1: met my dad while she was still with her first husband,
Speaker 1: and three days later she decided he was way more
Speaker 1: fun and much more exciting and walked out on her
Speaker 1: first husband and moved in with my dad, and that's
Speaker 1: where their story began. She is a deeply independent, wildly intelligent,
Speaker 1: brilliant and funny, totally original and totally unpredictable. You know.
Speaker 1: She would come out with wonderful wittessisms all the time,
Speaker 1: and she's one of these delightful people that I think
Speaker 1: when she walks into a room, she's that person that
Speaker 1: everyone notices, and she has always been that way. So
Speaker 1: she was that way, you know, until the very end,
Speaker 1: and I think that was what my dad felt for
Speaker 1: when she walked into his apartment as a seventeen eighteen
Speaker 1: year old.
Speaker 2: So when Sarah met beIN, what was been doing at
Speaker 2: that time.
Speaker 1: So my dad was born in New York and actually
Speaker 1: had a very wholesome middle class upbringing and a second
Speaker 1: generation Jewish family. I went to college and he was
Speaker 1: working on Wall Street. I think at the time he
Speaker 1: might have been with Ella Frostchild. So his career was
Speaker 1: very much starting as a person in finance, and then
Speaker 1: he would pack up, weigh his suit, put in his
Speaker 1: locker at work, put on a cape and a pair
Speaker 1: of cowboy boots, and go out nine party.
Speaker 3: Okay, So that was very much I guess that wild
Speaker 3: kind of Wall straight.
Speaker 2: I mean, it could have been a white pick at.
Speaker 3: Fence, but these were people who were kind of not
Speaker 3: normies at heart.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I don't think my dad was necessarily representative
Speaker 1: of his Wall Street community he had. You know, he
Speaker 1: is a deep lover of pleasure. He's a hedonist at heart,
Speaker 1: a lover of people. I think there was two versions
Speaker 1: of him. There was a version that found excitement on
Speaker 1: Wall Street, which is really just a form of sort
Speaker 1: of gambling, which he also loved. And then at night
Speaker 1: he had this alternative life where he was hanging out
Speaker 1: with artists and musicians, and I think he was always
Speaker 1: drawn to that something, you know, he and I share,
Speaker 1: Like one of his early gigs before he was in
Speaker 1: the drug business, was he to have Brian Epstein at
Speaker 1: a party, and Brian had taken a shine to him
Speaker 1: and hired him to roll joints for the Beatles. So
Speaker 1: when I did really think was rolling joints, packing them
Speaker 1: in a cigarette packet, giving them to Brian Epstein and saying,
Speaker 1: you know, these were going to the Beatles. So you know,
Speaker 1: he was having a pretty wild time. And that was
Speaker 1: when he was still at college, so he was moving
Speaker 1: in these worlds, and as was my mum when she
Speaker 1: as a model in the city, So they were both
Speaker 1: kind of part of a very interesting scene, you know.
Speaker 1: She'd even as after the book was finished, I'd hear
Speaker 1: stories that she'd tell me that I didn't know at
Speaker 1: the time when I was writing this, and she told
Speaker 1: me that one time she set fire to her apartment
Speaker 1: on the Apprai side and had nowhere to go, so
Speaker 1: she moved into the Chelsea Hotel, was moving down with
Speaker 1: that whole set there, you know, And I had no
Speaker 1: idea she'd live there, right.
Speaker 2: How did the fire start? By the way, do we
Speaker 2: know was it candles? Was it a joint?
Speaker 1: I think it was AND's burning in the classic.
Speaker 3: So we know that your dad obviously when you were
Speaker 3: saying he was, he was a bon vivant. Basically, he's
Speaker 3: the sort of man that you could fall in love
Speaker 3: with after three dates and up end your whole life.
Speaker 1: Definitely. I think in some ways Mum was also the
Speaker 1: person who would say yes to you know, someone opens
Speaker 1: the door and there's an interesting room and side and
Speaker 1: she's going to walk into it if it amuses her,
Speaker 1: and I think they fell in love. It was really
Speaker 1: for both of them their first major of love. Mum's
Speaker 1: first husband had really been to escape what was for
Speaker 1: her quite a difficult childhood, and she saw him as
Speaker 1: a way out. And then when she met Dad, I
Speaker 1: think the two of them fell hard for each other
Speaker 1: and by the sounds of it, were having the times
Speaker 1: of their lives, well, early sixties, very wild and fun.
Speaker 3: I want to read this from an essay that you wrote.
Speaker 3: I would later learn that when I first arrived in
Speaker 3: England in nineteen eighty seven as a three year old girl.
Speaker 3: My family was on the run from the FBI. Dad's
Speaker 3: organization had been charged with smuggling one hundred tons of
Speaker 3: marijuana worth nearly half a billion dollars from Thailand into
Speaker 3: the US in the late seventies and early eighties. The
Speaker 3: investigation started before I was born. By the time I
Speaker 3: was one, there was a surveillance team at the end
Speaker 3: of our driveway. So your dad went from rolling joints
Speaker 3: for the beatles to basically running is that a consortium?
Speaker 2: Was he a drug overlord?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 3: What was he in the scheme of things that led
Speaker 3: the FBI to be survailing him and the whole family.
Speaker 1: Well, the official charges continued criminal enterprise a CCEE or
Speaker 1: the al capone charge. In their eyes, he was a kingpin.
Speaker 1: In his eyes, he was an outlaw.
Speaker 2: R tons one hundred tons of outlaw.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he got really carried away. I think it's easy
Speaker 1: to say that things grew very quickly, and every time
Speaker 1: he got away with it, it cemented in him the
Speaker 1: belief that he could get away with it and he
Speaker 1: was never going to get caught. And I think the
Speaker 1: sense of being impervious to harm and having luck on
Speaker 1: your side, and the kind of the cheek of it,
Speaker 1: almost the audacity that the hoobris is immense, but incrementally
Speaker 1: over time from those first joints rolled for the Beatles
Speaker 1: to that point with the kingping charge. Because he hadn't
Speaker 1: got in trouble until the very last deal, or any
Speaker 1: trouble that had come he'd been able to deal with
Speaker 1: through his connections or through money. I think he felt
Speaker 1: like nothing could, nothing could bring him down, and in
Speaker 1: his eyes, no one was getting hurt. In his eyes,
Speaker 1: it was a victimless crime. It was part everyone was
Speaker 1: smoking it and he was getting him and his friends
Speaker 1: very rich.
Speaker 2: Well, I had to get it from some way, exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And I think part, you know, when he was
Speaker 1: starting out in the business, it was under Jimmy Carter.
Speaker 1: It was the sixties, people rolling joints and smoking them
Speaker 1: in the cinema, walking down the streets. It was a
Speaker 1: very different environment than what happened under Reagan and what
Speaker 1: happened once it was the eighties. And I think he
Speaker 1: didn't update his you know, his risk analysis. Things had
Speaker 1: changed and we were taking or were enormous at that point,
Speaker 1: and he had a lot to lose at that stage.
Speaker 3: She was a doubt he didn't update his risk analysis,
Speaker 3: but he was hitting his KPIs.
Speaker 2: From the sense of things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that that's fair to say. I think
Speaker 1: maybe he over exceeded his KPIs in fact. Yeah, when
Speaker 1: he started out, Dad would often talk about having a
Speaker 1: very He thought of himself as very risk adverse, which
Speaker 1: is obviously everybody else quite hilarious what he was taking on,
Speaker 1: But for him, he was He approached the drug business
Speaker 1: with the tools he'd learned on Wall Street and felt
Speaker 1: like he was analyzing. He was assessing these risks as
Speaker 1: he was going along and deciding what risks he could take,
Speaker 1: which is why it grew incrementally, because he would be
Speaker 1: looking at it like a business structure of supply and
Speaker 1: demand and risk assessment. He approached it with that mindset,
Speaker 1: which is probably why he was good at it to
Speaker 1: the point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you were only a child at that time time,
Speaker 3: At what point in your and very young child, at
Speaker 3: what point did you realize that your dad was in
Speaker 3: trouble with law and when you discovered that and the
Speaker 3: impact that that had on your life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I had no idea growing up. We just accept
Speaker 1: the world that were given as kids. We don't question,
Speaker 1: we don't start to question, so we're a bit older.
Speaker 1: So as a girl, a young girl when I you know,
Speaker 1: I was born in California, which is where dad got
Speaker 1: in trouble and we went on the run when I
Speaker 1: was eighteen months old, so I was very young. So
Speaker 1: my first memories were in houses in Portugal and then
Speaker 1: France and then the UK, and then my parents separated
Speaker 1: when I was four, so all I had ever known
Speaker 1: was kind of those early years, having a sitinerant existence,
Speaker 1: and then my dad being this exciting, fun guy that
Speaker 1: would take me on holidays in ski trips, and I
Speaker 1: understood there was something unusual about our family. We'd lived
Speaker 1: in by the time I was nine years old, thirteen
Speaker 1: houses in five countries, and I knew that that wasn't normal,
Speaker 1: but I quite enjoyed the ways in which it wasn't normal.
Speaker 1: I would tell people and I could see that they
Speaker 1: found it odd, and I liked that curiosity, that thing
Speaker 1: that made me different. I never really questioned the excuses
Speaker 1: that my parents gave me for why our childhood did
Speaker 1: be in that way. I really had no idea until
Speaker 1: two agents from Scotland Yard turned up when I was
Speaker 1: nine years old. On our doorstep in our house that
Speaker 1: we lived in with mom now in Bradford and Even
Speaker 1: and they turned up one day looking for Dad, and
Speaker 1: Mom didn't tell us straight away. She sent us out
Speaker 1: to go to a neighbor's house, and we ended up
Speaker 1: staying the night at the neighbor's house. And I remember
Speaker 1: my sister and I thinking that that was odd, but
Speaker 1: not really being able to think about why it might
Speaker 1: be odd. Certainly we didn't suspect what was actually happening,
Speaker 1: which is what they brought my mum in for questioning.
Speaker 1: They were looking for Dad, and that was when it
Speaker 1: all started up again. He had us essentially escaped their
Speaker 1: attention from California, gone into false identity. The identity that
Speaker 1: I grew up believing was who he really was. The
Speaker 1: name that I thought was mine.
Speaker 2: What name was that, Tyler Kine, Tyler Kaine.
Speaker 3: You thought your name was Tyler Kane, So you thought
Speaker 3: your dad's name was Kine.
Speaker 1: Yes, I didn't know my real name or his real
Speaker 1: name until after that point. So when I was nine
Speaker 1: and this got into her turned up on the doorstep
Speaker 1: a week or so later, her mom took us aside
Speaker 1: and told us that Dad had committed a crime when
Speaker 1: we were young, and he was in trouble with the
Speaker 1: law and the police were looking for him, and he
Speaker 1: had gone into hiding. That this had been going on
Speaker 1: for our whole lives, and the crime he committed it
Speaker 1: was back in California, which is where we were born,
Speaker 1: and that's why we had left and told us that
Speaker 1: our names weren't our own. But we're living under so
Speaker 1: a total you know, it's just like everything you've believed
Speaker 1: to be true subtenly changes and this person that you
Speaker 1: you know dad to me. Me and Dad were always
Speaker 1: incredibly close. He was a very loving dad. He was
Speaker 1: always very hands on. He was always looking for fun
Speaker 1: games to make up with us or ways to like,
Speaker 1: ways to engage with us. He was very engaged in
Speaker 1: fun Dad, And this idea that he had the secret
Speaker 1: that he had kept from me was very hurtful. And
Speaker 1: I think at that age I was stony nine, so
Speaker 1: it didn't fully make sense the way things don't you're
Speaker 1: that young. The hardest thing was that he had left
Speaker 1: and we didn't know where he was and we didn't
Speaker 1: know when we would get to see him again. And
Speaker 1: I think that was what was most hurtful in those
Speaker 1: early years.
Speaker 3: After this shortbreak, Tyler tells me how the family dealt
Speaker 3: with the fallout of the truth coming out, and how
Speaker 3: to be honest when the house is being bugged.
Speaker 2: Don't go anywhere?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 3: The conversation with your mum, which so I mean, can
Speaker 3: you imagine having to have a conversation with your two
Speaker 3: daughters that encompasses so much, actually destroys so much of
Speaker 3: the mythology of their childhood and their father, and also
Speaker 3: sets the scene for how you're going to have to
Speaker 3: proceed into this new life. You don't know what that's
Speaker 3: going to be. Where did that conversation take place? Where
Speaker 3: were you? Where were you and your sister? Were you
Speaker 3: in your bedroom? Were you did she say? I've got
Speaker 3: something to.
Speaker 2: Tell you girls? How does how does a how does
Speaker 2: a woman do that?
Speaker 1: I'm sure it was a conversation she had hoped she
Speaker 1: would never need to have with us. We were late.
Speaker 1: I woke up that morning and I noticed we were
Speaker 1: late for school. Was after the time in the morning
Speaker 1: I would normally get us up. So I went downstairs
Speaker 1: and was confused. Mamy handn't awakeness woken us up, and
Speaker 1: she gathered us all together. I was actually just me
Speaker 1: and my sister. My brother was away at boarding school,
Speaker 1: and she told us that she had something to tell us,
Speaker 1: and we were in her bed. And amazingly, this bed
Speaker 1: had traveled with them from California. I was one of
Speaker 1: these items that she had just kept in the ship
Speaker 1: over to Europe. And she was very fond of us
Speaker 1: that this is incredibly cumbersome. I became kind of symbolic
Speaker 1: of home for all of us. I was born in
Speaker 1: that bed, and so she gathered us here and that
Speaker 1: was where the conversation happened. And she was very careful
Speaker 1: in her telling. I imagine she thought very carefully about
Speaker 1: what she wanted to say to us and how she
Speaker 1: wanted to phrase it, and also what she didn't want
Speaker 1: to say to us. And I know now that one
Speaker 1: of the reasons she was being so careful was to
Speaker 1: make sure it was as unscary as it possibly could
Speaker 1: be for her girls, but also because she suspected the
Speaker 1: house was bugged, and so whatever she was saying, she
Speaker 1: in all probability. Scotland George were listening. So when she
Speaker 1: was talking about what she knew about where Dad was
Speaker 1: or the nature of his crimes. She was quite vague,
Speaker 1: and then I think we took the rest of the
Speaker 1: day off school and tried to make sense of this
Speaker 1: new world. And the strangest thing about it was that
Speaker 1: we had to keep on pretending like everything was the
Speaker 1: same as of course. And one of the biggest things
Speaker 1: she impressed upon us was the importance that we talked
Speaker 1: to no one about it. We weren't to tell our friends,
Speaker 1: We couldn't talk to anybody, and she was always scared
Speaker 1: that they might try and approach us and pretend to
Speaker 1: be parents or friends, parents, or you know, something like this,
Speaker 1: and try and talk to us about and find out
Speaker 1: from us where Dad might be. And she was very
Speaker 1: protective of wanting to make sure that never happened. So yeah,
Speaker 1: she talk to anyone about about it, and not to
Speaker 1: be careful somebody approached us to talk to us in public.
Speaker 3: Looking at it through the prism of a nine year
Speaker 3: old girl, you would have had like a girlfriend at
Speaker 3: school that you were quite close to, and what you
Speaker 3: would normally do was be like, guess what I found
Speaker 3: today that my name's not Tyler Kan I've had it
Speaker 3: like you would. You knew somehow not to do any
Speaker 3: of that, and you knew that from really through your
Speaker 3: whole life, when you were moving from country to country.
Speaker 3: So you're nine and you're relatively settled at this point
Speaker 3: in the UK with your mom who separated from your father.
Speaker 3: But there's still they still seem to be quite harmonious
Speaker 3: more or less.
Speaker 1: I think mum, I know now that she was very
Speaker 1: angry with him. Sure everything happened, and one of the
Speaker 1: reasons we'd moved to where we were living then outside
Speaker 1: of London and Bradford even was because she was trying
Speaker 1: to put some distance between them. She felt like he
Speaker 1: had and he had ruined their lives. That everything they
Speaker 1: had loved, their home, the marriage, their safety had all
Speaker 1: been jeopardized by his decision to keep smuggling drugs. And
Speaker 1: I didn't know at the time why she found it
Speaker 1: so hard to spend time with him. They had an
Speaker 1: arrangement though she always knew that we should spend you know,
Speaker 1: she really believed that it was important for us to
Speaker 1: have a relationship with him, and she always made sure
Speaker 1: that we did our every other weekend staying at our
Speaker 1: dad's house, and that we would have some holidays with him.
Speaker 1: So they shared custody, and that was amicaboraf But no,
Speaker 1: they weren't friends, and she spent as little time as
Speaker 1: she could with him or talking to him.
Speaker 3: So you'd had this idyllic obviously through your baby eyes,
Speaker 3: the Yellow House. That was a very beautiful and significant
Speaker 3: place for you. Where did you go after that?
Speaker 1: I was born in the Yellow House in California, and
Speaker 1: I had just shived to years there and then we moved.
Speaker 1: We were moving quite quickly. At first. We went first
Speaker 1: to Rome and stayed there briefly with another fugitive family.
Speaker 1: After that we went to a house in the coast
Speaker 1: of Italy. I believe it's hard to remember the order now.
Speaker 1: When I was writing the book, I had a list
Speaker 1: all the houses and the dates so I could keep
Speaker 1: it straight. And then I think we after that we
Speaker 1: moved to the place where we settled, so we went
Speaker 1: to a flat and Chelsea for a minute. After Chelsea,
Speaker 1: we took a train across France and Spain down to Portugal,
Speaker 1: which is where we settled for a year or nearly
Speaker 1: a year, and we were quite happy there. And then
Speaker 1: Dad realized that he could be extradited from Portugal. No
Speaker 1: longer felt secure and so decided that we had to
Speaker 1: leave again, which was very hard for Mom because she
Speaker 1: felt she found good schools, we found friends, she liked
Speaker 1: the house.
Speaker 2: She just shaped the bead.
Speaker 1: All the things that just arrived at the time, curring.
Speaker 1: You know, they bring they you know, they shipped the
Speaker 1: things over. They'd only just got there. I actually don't
Speaker 1: know if they even got to the house. I think
Speaker 1: they took so long that they got rerouted to the
Speaker 1: next house. And then we went to the south of France,
Speaker 1: to Mujan, where Mum was started to become very unhappy
Speaker 1: with what was being asked of her. She had agreed
Speaker 1: to go on the run, thinking it sounded preferable to
Speaker 1: being a mother of three with an incarcerated husband for
Speaker 1: an unknown amount of time, and they mistakenly believed that
Speaker 1: they could make a deal with a bit of time
Speaker 1: and distance and for Dad to serve less time than
Speaker 1: he would have been facing, which all seems very wishful thinking,
Speaker 1: but I guess at the time that's what they believed.
Speaker 1: Over the years, it became clear that this wasn't going
Speaker 1: to happen, and that their life of living under false
Speaker 1: identities not really even able to have real friends because
Speaker 1: you have this huge secret living amongst a community of
Speaker 1: other fugitives where everyone really Mum would get so frustrated,
Speaker 1: they'd all talk up being fugitives all the time. She
Speaker 1: wanted a real life and friends and family and a
Speaker 1: home and security, and not to be looking in the
Speaker 1: revery mirror wondering when they're going to turn up again.
Speaker 1: And eventually that became all too much for her to
Speaker 1: ask of her and that's when their marriage broke down
Speaker 1: and she left with us.
Speaker 3: It's interesting because being an expat anyway, your life is
Speaker 3: kind of shrink wrapped. But if you then narrowed that
Speaker 3: world down even more to the fact that you've only
Speaker 3: got to hang out with other fugitives and criminals who
Speaker 3: are on the run, that makes that a really tiny,
Speaker 3: intense world.
Speaker 1: Yes, and people who were all experiencing stress. It's a
Speaker 1: very anxiety inducing existence to be waiting to get caught
Speaker 1: and also really inconvenient. You know that, how do you
Speaker 1: get kids in school when you're trying to live under name?
Speaker 1: What do you do about medical stuff? Like? You know,
Speaker 1: your your every interaction comes with this extra burden.
Speaker 2: So you would always go to school.
Speaker 1: We always went to school. I got the best deal
Speaker 1: of my siblings because I was the youngest. So by
Speaker 1: the time I was being schooled, Mum had left Dad
Speaker 1: and we were living in England, and some that took
Speaker 1: some of the pressure off. We kept our fake I
Speaker 1: mean I always kept my first name was always the same,
Speaker 1: but we used fake surname because that's what we've been
Speaker 1: envolved in school in and I so I sat of
Speaker 1: school in England. My siblings were schooled in Portugal in France,
Speaker 1: so their schooling suffered a little bit from it. But no,
Speaker 1: we were always in school and a Mum always made
Speaker 1: sure education was really important. She did a really good
Speaker 1: job of making our childhood as normal as possible under
Speaker 1: the circum stances. It's very unnormal, but very hard to
Speaker 1: make it so it felt, and I guess that's why
Speaker 1: it was possible for me to not have an idea
Speaker 1: until Scotland Yard turned up again that there was anything wrong.
Speaker 1: The worst thing I thought that it ever happened was
Speaker 1: that they broke up, and I was heartbroken that they'd separated.
Speaker 3: What were the other fugitives? What were the what were
Speaker 3: they fuging from?
Speaker 1: Almost all of them were other drug smuggling friends and
Speaker 1: a lot of them had worked with Dad in his organization.
Speaker 1: You know, they did some big smuggles. There was a
Speaker 1: lot of people down the train of command, and some
Speaker 1: were other fugitives that they had been introduced to. So
Speaker 1: when you know, you've got to think this is pre Internet,
Speaker 1: not that you'd google it or anything. Getting the information
Speaker 1: was quite difficult on how to do this. So there
Speaker 1: was this network exchanging information about how you go about
Speaker 1: doing all the things you had to do. You'd get
Speaker 1: your how to go about getting a good fake identity,
Speaker 1: which borders were good to cross, which were no goes.
Speaker 1: Like they exchanged information which may do quite close to
Speaker 1: these people. Some were people that Dad knew from before,
Speaker 1: some were people that he'd been introduced to amongst this network.
Speaker 1: You always used your fake names so people wouldn't know
Speaker 1: your real identity, so if they were to get caught,
Speaker 1: they couldn't give you up, though that was always a risk.
Speaker 1: Some of these families had kids too, so we, unbeknownst
Speaker 1: to us at the time, would hang out with these
Speaker 1: other fugitive kids and some of them might have since
Speaker 1: been in touch with and we've talked about all the
Speaker 1: different lives that we told or how we found out
Speaker 1: or what happened or how parents were eventually caught. And
Speaker 1: it's a very unique set of hardships and absurdities of
Speaker 1: being a fugitive kid. So I find that I can
Speaker 1: now spot them when someone is telling me about and
Speaker 1: I hear the types of lies they're telling them, Like,
Speaker 1: I don't suppose you were on the run? Were you?
Speaker 2: Why? How often does that happen?
Speaker 1: Three times?
Speaker 2: Wow?
Speaker 3: Yeah, in just a moment, Tyler shares just how to
Speaker 3: maintain a relationship with someone on the run.
Speaker 2: Will be right back.
Speaker 3: So your dad's plan was I mean, there was a
Speaker 3: method to his madness.
Speaker 2: I guess you could say was.
Speaker 3: That he thought that he could go to Portugal and
Speaker 3: resettle the family because there was not an extradition treaty there,
Speaker 3: but then found out that it excluded drug crimes.
Speaker 1: Yep, that's right.
Speaker 3: So that blew the whole thing up. And was it
Speaker 3: at that point your mum went.
Speaker 2: I'm done.
Speaker 3: I need a life that's not on the run. But
Speaker 3: your father obviously still had to continue to be on
Speaker 3: the run. So how would you see him given that
Speaker 3: it was so important for your mum, for you kids
Speaker 3: to maintain your relationship with him, how did they work
Speaker 3: that out?
Speaker 2: And where would you meet your dad?
Speaker 1: So there was a period of time. So they separated
Speaker 1: when I was four, and there's a period of time
Speaker 1: until I was nine where Dad had really successfully evaded
Speaker 1: the authorities. He was living under his feet name Martin Kin,
Speaker 1: and he was he'd got a speeding ticket and went
Speaker 1: to court to argue his ticket. He had brank accounts,
Speaker 1: He had a fully fledged paper trail that connected him
Speaker 1: to this man, his fake identity. So at that point
Speaker 1: when they separated, he considered turning himself in because he
Speaker 1: had lost the thing that he most wanted to save.
Speaker 1: I mean, all along he realized that he jeopardized what
Speaker 1: made him happiest, such as his family, and once the
Speaker 1: marriage broke down and he was only seeing us every
Speaker 1: other weekend, he was terribly lonely, living under a fake
Speaker 1: identity in London at that point because mum had wanted
Speaker 1: to go back to England. My mum's English and her
Speaker 1: family were in the UK and she wanted to reconnect
Speaker 1: with them, and so he found himself living this very
Speaker 1: isolated existence. At that point, he thought about turning himself in,
Speaker 1: but they weren't looking for him. Anymore. It had been
Speaker 1: you know, five years at that point, more or less
Speaker 1: since the start of the investigation. They'd got a number
Speaker 1: of other people he had disappeared, so we decided to
Speaker 1: see how things win. And for a couple of years
Speaker 1: he was living a normal ish life. He had a
Speaker 1: couple of restaurants on the Kensington Road in London and
Speaker 1: managed them or as an in them. He had a few,
Speaker 1: you know, side businesses, and things were kind of normal,
Speaker 1: and that probably just saw him like you had any
Speaker 1: other dad, you know, of a separated you know, every
Speaker 1: other weekend we'd see him, and it was it was
Speaker 1: perfectly normal. When they started looking for him again. What
Speaker 1: had happened during this time was he had reconnected with
Speaker 1: a pair of drug smuggling brothers that he had worked
Speaker 1: with on some of the early drug deals, early smuggles
Speaker 1: he had done. They weren't involved in the last deal
Speaker 1: that he did, the one that went wrong and led
Speaker 1: to his eventual led to the discovery of his crimes,
Speaker 1: and so he reconnected with them and they had kept smuggling,
Speaker 1: and they had accrued a huge amount of money and
Speaker 1: didn't know what to do with it. So they hired
Speaker 1: him for his financial expertise, getting back to his Wall
Speaker 1: Street roots he had, and this is such a dad thing.
Speaker 1: He didn't really see it as a risk because he
Speaker 1: was just investing their money. For them, he was laundering money, obviously,
Speaker 1: but for him, it was going back to his Wall
Speaker 1: Street roots and looking for good investments and ways to
Speaker 1: build their portfolio. So he was buying fine art and
Speaker 1: he was going and testing vintage Ferraris, and he was
Speaker 1: having quite a wonderful time and his life had become
Speaker 1: quite fun and interesting and glamorous again. He had a
Speaker 1: girlfriend and of course we know what's going to happen here,
Speaker 1: Like they got in trouble, and when they got in trouble,
Speaker 1: they tried hard to protect him and could have given
Speaker 1: up his name a lot sooner, but they didn't, and
Speaker 1: eventually they were put in a corner where they were
Speaker 1: accused of withholding information and their deals with the authorities
Speaker 1: would have fallen apart if they didn't give up his name,
Speaker 1: and they got warning to him so he would know,
Speaker 1: and that's when he disappeared again, knowing that they had
Speaker 1: his new identity, Martin Kin. And that's when Scotland Yard
Speaker 1: turned up on our doorstep. And in the years that followed,
Speaker 1: that's when our lives as kids became very strange.
Speaker 3: When you say Scotland yard turned up. Were they following
Speaker 3: you as children? Would they follow you to school?
Speaker 1: So when they turned back up first they just were
Speaker 1: asking mum where he was. They just missed him by
Speaker 1: twenty four hours. They turned up his house, raided his house,
Speaker 1: and he wasn't there, and they were obviously pretty pissed
Speaker 1: that this had happened, and they knew her mom was
Speaker 1: Mum was living under her real name by that point,
Speaker 1: and turned up looking for him and see if she
Speaker 1: had any information. After that point, we started to notice them.
Speaker 1: We sort of noticed them waiting sort of in a
Speaker 1: car across the road from outside our school. We would
Speaker 1: notice that they were following us home. We would sense
Speaker 1: that we suspected they were listening to our phone calls
Speaker 1: that we didn't know. Mom feared they bugged the car
Speaker 1: as well, So we were careful about the conversations we
Speaker 1: had in the car. We were careful about the conversations
Speaker 1: we had in the house. We didn't really talk about
Speaker 1: it a great deal because of this sort of war
Speaker 1: of are they listening, are they around the corner. When
Speaker 1: we did need to talk about it, we'd take the
Speaker 1: dog for a long walk and in the middle of
Speaker 1: a field where you can really check out if anyone's
Speaker 1: surveying you, that's where we'd have these conversations. Mum had
Speaker 1: been under when they first started the investigation back in California.
Speaker 1: Dad had taught her how to spot tale, how to
Speaker 1: tell if your phone was bugged, so she had some
Speaker 1: skills at this stage that she could use. So we
Speaker 1: were aware as kids that we were being followed, and
Speaker 1: it was very weird to have like childhood conversations with boyfriends,
Speaker 1: you know, your first like your kid, and you spend
Speaker 1: hours on the phone with your friends, or you have
Speaker 1: those boys called the house because they're still house them
Speaker 1: and all those conversations, and in the back of my head,
Speaker 1: I'd be like, are they listening to this? Real they were,
Speaker 1: and we had to keep it very secret. And then
Speaker 1: at some point Dad managed to get word to us
Speaker 1: to meet to range Away to see and that first
Speaker 1: we took, our first trip was terrifying for everybody because
Speaker 1: none of us knew if we were going to get caught.
Speaker 1: I still don't know entirely why Mom agreed to do it.
Speaker 2: Where was it to the first treat.
Speaker 1: We didn't know it was happening until we met up
Speaker 1: with the guy who was going to take us so,
Speaker 1: a friend of my dad's who wasn't ever in the
Speaker 1: drug business so he wouldn't be into surveillance, someone that
Speaker 1: the authorities wouldn't know about, met up with us in
Speaker 1: a pub in the countryside, and Mom handed us over
Speaker 1: to him. We knew him, we'd had breakfast with him,
Speaker 1: you know, he wasn't a stranger to us, and he
Speaker 1: drove us to Paris where Dad was waiting. We only
Speaker 1: knew what was happening at the point where we met
Speaker 1: up with him in the pub and Mom explained to us,
Speaker 1: and I was thrilled. I was going to go see
Speaker 1: my dad. I missed him terribly. It'd been month at
Speaker 1: that point that we'd been separated. And we took the
Speaker 1: ferry across to Paris and then drove the rest of
Speaker 1: the way, and it was really exciting, and there was
Speaker 1: still a way that Dad had a making these trips
Speaker 1: feel kind of normal. I think my sister found them
Speaker 1: harder because she was more aware of the risks and
Speaker 1: also aware of how hard Mom found it. To say
Speaker 1: goodbye to us, and how scared Mom was that at
Speaker 1: any point if he were to be arrested while we
Speaker 1: were there, what would happen to us. But once that
Speaker 1: first trip was successful and they didn't follow us, then
Speaker 1: there were more. Then we started this time where we
Speaker 1: would me and Katie after school would go to payphones
Speaker 1: where we'd had arranged a series of phone calls with
Speaker 1: Dad at times and different addresses at different payphones, where
Speaker 1: he would call the payphone when we got there and
Speaker 1: we'd be able to chat to him, And it was
Speaker 1: always different schedules, so they weren't following us everywhere we went.
Speaker 1: They mainly followed mom, and we'd occasionally notice that they
Speaker 1: were there, and we'd be kids in phone booths. So
Speaker 1: we spent time having these candesetine phone calls with their
Speaker 1: dad from phone booths all over the city, and then
Speaker 1: we'd have trips out to see him, taken by our
Speaker 1: big brother or by a friend of my dad's, and
Speaker 1: never knowing if this was the one that they were
Speaker 1: going to intercept us, or if this was the one
Speaker 1: where they figured out what was happening and followed us.
Speaker 1: And once there was a near miss and we had
Speaker 1: to pack up in the middle of the night and
Speaker 1: move from where Dad was staying. But on the whole
Speaker 1: it felt like we were getting away with it, and
Speaker 1: Dad again felt like he was getting away with it.
Speaker 1: Then that sense of hubris was growing again.
Speaker 3: And at what point, So it was when you were
Speaker 3: twelve they stopped getting away with it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I told are your birthday?
Speaker 1: Yeah, So we'd have this strange period of time. So
Speaker 1: it'd been you know, two and a half years of
Speaker 1: Dad moving quite quickly. We didn't often visit him in
Speaker 1: the same place twice. He was different locations around France mainly,
Speaker 1: and we'd go see him and he'd be back with
Speaker 1: his community fugitives that we'd lived with and your kids.
Speaker 1: So some of those fugitive kids again we were hanging
Speaker 1: out with, none of us knowing of what was going on,
Speaker 1: and we never talked to them about it. I think
Speaker 1: there was one time when some other fugitive kids got
Speaker 1: told the secret that all of our parents were drug
Speaker 1: smigelers and that we were on the run from the FBI,
Speaker 1: and we were asked to like help them work through it,
Speaker 1: and both me and my sister were like, well, no
Speaker 1: one was there to help us, and we don't know
Speaker 1: what to say, and the only rule we have is
Speaker 1: don't tell anyone. So we had this strange period of time.
Speaker 1: And then Dad was looking for a business opportunity to
Speaker 1: make money again and something that wasn't going to get
Speaker 1: him in trouble, and that's hard when you're on the
Speaker 1: run and living under fake identity. And he had the
Speaker 1: opportunity to go manage a hotel on a Caribbean island
Speaker 1: and Saint Lucia. The guy had no idea, obviously about
Speaker 1: his background, so he went out there and managed his
Speaker 1: hotel and eventually convinced mom. Dad is very persuasive. He's
Speaker 1: very confident and calm, and it makes it hard when
Speaker 1: you try and tell him to be worried about something,
Speaker 1: to feel like you're not that you're worries are justified
Speaker 1: because he brushes them away. So somehow it convince Mom
Speaker 1: that we were going to fly out and visit him
Speaker 1: in Saint Lucia for my twelfth birthday. This time, i'd
Speaker 1: been another long gap between seeing him, and he was
Speaker 1: really excited. He wanted to show us this really beautiful place,
Speaker 1: this island. He wanted to show us him working in
Speaker 1: a job, as a real job with an office. He
Speaker 1: was proud and meet all the people he'd met out there.
Speaker 1: He was out there with his girlfriend.
Speaker 2: Still the same girlfriend.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the same girlfriend through it all. Wow. And we
Speaker 1: had two really beautiful weeks there learning to scuba dive
Speaker 1: and hanging out being beach kids. And it was on
Speaker 1: one of the final nights when we were getting ready
Speaker 1: for going out for dinner for my twelfth birthday. It
Speaker 1: arranged a special dinner in the main capital city there.
Speaker 1: We're going to go eat lobsters, and we were excited
Speaker 1: and we were getting ready, me and my sister for
Speaker 1: the evening and we came down to meet Dad in
Speaker 1: the office and we could just straight away we saw
Speaker 1: the look on his face and we knew immediately what happened.
Speaker 1: We could tell he was on the phone, and we
Speaker 1: could tell it was Mom, and we knew that this
Speaker 1: was it. There was just a gravitas to him and
Speaker 1: a heartbreak. All through those years of being on the run,
Speaker 1: he was always looking for a solution, for a way out,
Speaker 1: and he's an optimist and he kept thinking that that
Speaker 1: there was a way And I think when they found
Speaker 1: out he was in Saint Lucia. I think that it
Speaker 1: suddenly dawned on him that there wasn't going to be
Speaker 1: a way out. They had turned up at mum's house.
Speaker 1: They had found our flight details and they were on
Speaker 1: the way to the island. So there was a ticking
Speaker 1: time clock there and dinner was canceled.
Speaker 2: That apology was canceled. Oh, dinner was canceled.
Speaker 1: I was screwing up my birthday, which is one of
Speaker 1: those things. You know, it's always heartbreaking when you're a kid,
Speaker 1: And I think this is what so much of it
Speaker 1: comes down to, is when you see your parents's mistake
Speaker 1: making people, and it dawns and you really for the
Speaker 1: first time that they're just like everybody else and that
Speaker 1: they've screwed up. And that night Dad was trying to
Speaker 1: figure out flights as soon as he could get us
Speaker 1: off the island before he worried about his own situation.
Speaker 1: He needs to make sure we were on our way home.
Speaker 1: Had made him swear to get us home safely. And
Speaker 1: I remember going into his room and his house where
Speaker 1: he was living there, and we'd we were in a
Speaker 1: little cabana next door, and I went into his room
Speaker 1: and he was crying and it's just that, you know,
Speaker 1: senor your parents cry when your kid is always discombobulating.
Speaker 1: It's like the world is as as the world isn't
Speaker 1: what you imagined it to be. And seeing his tears
Speaker 1: was really hard, and I also was angry at the
Speaker 1: same time and frightened. So that night we slept and
Speaker 1: we woke up early before dawn and left to go
Speaker 1: to the airport, and we dropped Dad off on the way,
Speaker 1: kind of in the middle of this road and said
Speaker 1: Doug goodbyes, and without knowing if we would see him again,
Speaker 1: or when we'd see him again, or what he was
Speaker 1: going to do, but knowing that this was really the
Speaker 1: end of the whole journey. And I don't remember. Weirdly,
Speaker 1: I don't remember the flight home at all, like, not
Speaker 1: one thing about it. My sister has different details. We
Speaker 1: were sunburned apparently, and someone gave us something for a sunburn,
Speaker 1: but I don't remember any of it at all until
Speaker 1: we got back home and Mom was waiting for us.
Speaker 2: Had she been arrested? Your mom when the police had
Speaker 2: come to the house.
Speaker 1: Yes, they had come to the house, and they had
Speaker 1: been tipped off by one of Dad's associates. That Dad
Speaker 1: always spent my birthday with him, and that was the
Speaker 1: tip they've been waiting for. One of the reasons why
Speaker 1: I would felt this kind of absence of their presence
Speaker 1: was they knew that on my birthday that he would
Speaker 1: see me, So they waited for my birthday, and on
Speaker 1: that day they went and found Mom and said, where
Speaker 1: are your kids?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know an amazing thing, as you're telling me that.
Speaker 2: I was rooting.
Speaker 3: So hard for your dad that even through you introducing
Speaker 3: me to him like this, the power of him as
Speaker 3: a character and his force of life is so strong
Speaker 3: that I know that he's a criminal, and I know
Speaker 3: he's doing criminal things. I really wanted him to not
Speaker 3: get arrested.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's hard not to root for him.
Speaker 1: That is, he's a good guy. He's a loving good guy.
Speaker 1: And I know that he committed this crime, which isn't it.
Speaker 1: You know, he's an enormous amount of pot into the US,
Speaker 1: but pot's legal now. And there's also a sense to
Speaker 1: which I'm not justifying him breaking the law, but he
Speaker 1: believed that what he was doing was harmless, and I
Speaker 1: think something that me and him had to work through
Speaker 1: over the years after that time when I was as
Speaker 1: a teenager, very angry.
Speaker 2: That wasn't the end of my conversation with Tyler.
Speaker 3: In part two of Tyler's movie, Like Real Life Story,
Speaker 3: we go into when her father went to prison and
Speaker 3: what it was like to visit him, and years later
Speaker 3: she sat down with him to document his life story,
Speaker 3: which would pave the way for her debut book, No
Speaker 3: Way Home, a Memoir of Life on the Run. Tyler
Speaker 3: also has a new book out. It's called Amphibian. If
Speaker 3: you'd like to read it, there's a link in our
Speaker 3: show notes. See you in part two. Follow the link
Speaker 3: in the show notes.