Speaker 1: Campsite Media. Can you just tell me what you had
Speaker 1: for breakfast? Yeah, so I can set my bone. I
Speaker 1: thought my breath was bad or something. Um, oatmeal. You
Speaker 1: need more than that. Bacon, eggs, ham and cheese, omelet,
Speaker 1: some caviare French toasts? Are we are? We get to go?
Speaker 1: Are we rolling? Hey? Everyone? This week we're taking a
Speaker 1: break from the series to bring you a bonus episode.
Speaker 1: We'll be back to regular programming next week, but right now,
Speaker 1: I want you to meet this guy. He's one of
Speaker 1: the first people I ever spoke to when I started
Speaker 1: working on running Smoke Bones force here Uh freelance writer
Speaker 1: of books, Uh, monthly columnists for magazines? What are you
Speaker 1: write about? All? Racing? Bones is one of my favorite
Speaker 1: motorsports writers out there. A couple of years ago, he
Speaker 1: helped a legendary race car drive to write his autobiography.
Speaker 1: That driver's name was Gary hot Chew Blue. I had
Speaker 1: to wait a year and Alf and my boss up saying, Gary,
Speaker 1: come on, man, there's other people could write this. The
Speaker 1: voice you're hearing, well, that's the man himself, Gary Blue.
Speaker 1: I said, no, there's there's anyone can do it for me.
Speaker 1: Those around me and go up from me and watched
Speaker 1: me race and new my story and new the players,
Speaker 1: and new the people and the bugs, and nobody shouldn't.
Speaker 1: Nobody should have done that. Books look like he did it.
Speaker 1: It's in my words, so he cleaned it up a
Speaker 1: little bit here and there, but it's actually me talking,
Speaker 1: you know. Gary won over a thousand races, several championships,
Speaker 1: and earned himself a reputation as one of the toughest
Speaker 1: competitors in the field, but all of that was overshadowed
Speaker 1: when FBI agents arrested Blue and sixty others for running
Speaker 1: a marijuana smuggling operation. To be clear, Gary's story is
Speaker 1: quite different from Derek's story, but it does show how
Speaker 1: a racers and visions and his skill set can lead
Speaker 1: to success just as easily as it can lead to tragedy.
Speaker 1: I'll let bones take it away. Gary Blue was a
Speaker 1: kid from UH just outside of Miami Hilia, Florida, who
Speaker 1: kind of grew up in the shadow down there of
Speaker 1: guys like Bobby and Donnie Allison and Red Farmer drivers
Speaker 1: who gained spectacular UH fame and NASCAR UH. Gary was
Speaker 1: about a half a generation behind them, so he not
Speaker 1: only saw those guys compete at the local level. They're
Speaker 1: all from South Florida. Um, but they recognized him as
Speaker 1: kind of a hungry young kid who was always sneaking
Speaker 1: into the pits, uh, you know, going to every race possible.
Speaker 1: He would hitchhick with those guys, bum rides to different tracks.
Speaker 1: He just had an enormous hunger and he brought that
Speaker 1: hunger to his own racing once he got to be
Speaker 1: old enough. You know, built cars, uh, you know, using
Speaker 1: the old, tried and true junk yard method back then,
Speaker 1: and UH had a desire that that he kind of
Speaker 1: burned with it. He saw these guys as being the best,
Speaker 1: and he wanted to be at that level, and UH
Speaker 1: worked his way from the South Florida tracks to dirt
Speaker 1: tracks in Pennsylvania, New Jersey. That paid very well. He had.
Speaker 1: He had won all the major short track races that
Speaker 1: he ran. He was definitely one of those guys that
Speaker 1: everybody acknowledged as being super talented, very aggressive personality, fiery,
Speaker 1: you know, had a fight here and there, made an
Speaker 1: obscene gesture to an official here and there. He could
Speaker 1: be a polarizing figure, but as a guy who writes,
Speaker 1: you want to write about interesting people, and Gary was
Speaker 1: always always interesting. There was always something happening around him.
Speaker 1: So you saw Gary race back in the day. I
Speaker 1: saw him race um in the mid seventies for the
Speaker 1: first time at Syracuse, New York. There was a mild
Speaker 1: dirt track at the time. Once a year they'd get
Speaker 1: together and October for this big race on the mile track.
Speaker 1: Gary number one corner. Let's see what happens park, he
Speaker 1: drops back up it. Cozy gets up to the barn.
Speaker 1: Now break Cozy moving into it on a three spot
Speaker 1: and look at Cozy monor Cozy motoring down the back.
Speaker 1: You garry below each till year later he draws a
Speaker 1: lot of four pint car line played between the corner,
Speaker 1: checkered back and ready now they come out a turn
Speaker 1: of a par Yeah, what I come. Gary wanted three
Speaker 1: years in a row, seventy six, seven and eight. And
Speaker 1: then every year we'd go to Florida for Daytona speed
Speaker 1: Weeks and he would compete nearby at New Smyrna Speedway, UH,
Speaker 1: and he was dominant over there quite a bit. So Yeah,
Speaker 1: I saw him in a lot of different UH kinds
Speaker 1: of cars and saw him excel in every one. Of them,
Speaker 1: so again it was it just reinforced what I had
Speaker 1: always heard, which was he was just special. There's four
Speaker 1: quarters are too straight away. It's pretty easy bath. But
Speaker 1: you know what if you get the four quarters better
Speaker 1: and everybody else and didn't have it runs on the
Speaker 1: Stralia away, then it handles down the strailway didn't really
Speaker 1: becomes fast. I never want to reach myself, but I've
Speaker 1: always had a lot of really really really good people.
Speaker 1: Please them me that worked your ass off and works
Speaker 1: hard as they could and had the hard into it
Speaker 1: to win, so we could all win together, and we
Speaker 1: went together. What did you see in Gary's racing style
Speaker 1: that set him apart? The first thing anybody notices about
Speaker 1: him is that he's super aggressive. You know that that
Speaker 1: You know, if the hall opens up, you go for
Speaker 1: right now. Uh. If you can't go inside a guy
Speaker 1: to pass, which is probably the easiest way, just go
Speaker 1: around him, you know. Just don't don't mess around too
Speaker 1: long when you catch a guy do something. Uh. And
Speaker 1: yet a lot of guys who do that, they might
Speaker 1: win one night and then crash the next three nights. Gary,
Speaker 1: even though he had that raw aggressiveness, UH, had a
Speaker 1: way of winning long races, and those things don't always
Speaker 1: go together, so you started to think that there was
Speaker 1: a a real brain there in addition to you know,
Speaker 1: whatever he had naturally, whatever gifts he had, you know,
Speaker 1: balance reflects his eyesight, all the things that go into UM,
Speaker 1: probably any driver. He also had that that ability to
Speaker 1: plot out race. You know. The other thing was the
Speaker 1: fact that he had won, you know in bulky, clumsy
Speaker 1: dirt track modifies and sleek, fast, well handling as false cars.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like, no matter what he got into UM,
Speaker 1: he excelled and then ended up moving back to Florida,
Speaker 1: UH in the late seventies to sort of pursue his
Speaker 1: dream of NASCAR racing. By the late seventies, Gary had
Speaker 1: managed to win just about every major race east of
Speaker 1: the Mississippi and just about anything with four wheels and
Speaker 1: a motor. For a driver of his caliber, there was
Speaker 1: only one thing on his mind, the NASCAR Cup Series,
Speaker 1: the pinnacle of American motorsports. To pursue that dream, Gary
Speaker 1: decided to move back down to South Florida, where he
Speaker 1: knew some race team owners that can help him get
Speaker 1: behind the wheel of a Cup car. I mean everybody
Speaker 1: remembers the show Miami Vice. I think that came out
Speaker 1: maybe in eighty five, but it was based on what
Speaker 1: all those people in Hollywood had seen for the last
Speaker 1: however many years. Gary got back down there in seventy
Speaker 1: eight or seventy nine, UH in Miami, and you know,
Speaker 1: kind of the way he puts everywhere you looked. There
Speaker 1: were people that were driving cars that if you looked
Speaker 1: at him really quickly, wouldn't think they would own. You know,
Speaker 1: a guy that you knew was maybe a Saturday night
Speaker 1: race or shouldn't be driving around in a Mercedes or
Speaker 1: a Ferrari. And then some of these guys were living
Speaker 1: in houses that you knew, based on whatever profession they
Speaker 1: were in, they probably shouldn't have been able to afford.
Speaker 1: And I think he got curious about that and some
Speaker 1: of the people he started driving for. We're most definitely
Speaker 1: wrapped up in that end of life. I mean, I
Speaker 1: remember going to New Smyrna every February and seeing three
Speaker 1: or four guys, uh every year, and they were all
Speaker 1: South Florida guys were you knew there. It wasn't a
Speaker 1: rumor that they'd been involved in something like that. It
Speaker 1: was a well known fact. You know, these guys have
Speaker 1: beautiful race cars and beautiful tow vehicles and gorgeous trailers,
Speaker 1: and you knew the money was coming from somewhere. There
Speaker 1: were no big sponsors on the side of the car,
Speaker 1: and it was kind of just like an open wink wink,
Speaker 1: kind of a secret that that's what they were into.
Speaker 1: It made perfect sense that racers would feature prominently in
Speaker 1: the drug smuggling scene back in the day. The skill
Speaker 1: set that made you successful in the drug business would
Speaker 1: serve you well in racing, and vice versa. I think
Speaker 1: what racers also have is that, you know, that willingness
Speaker 1: to risk things. You know, the best brain all have
Speaker 1: a high degree of being comfortable with risk. They're all
Speaker 1: decisive thinkers. As we said, a lot of them are
Speaker 1: good plan A, plan B, plan C type people. Because
Speaker 1: in a race, you know, it's the old boxing thing.
Speaker 1: Everybody has a plan to get hitting the nose well
Speaker 1: and racing, everybody has a plan till they throw the
Speaker 1: green flag. So if plan A doesn't work, you go
Speaker 1: to plan B. You go to you know, you're gonna
Speaker 1: pass this guy on the outside, and then he moves over,
Speaker 1: so you gotta pass him. On the bottom. You know,
Speaker 1: you're very reactive. And the way Gary says that somebody
Speaker 1: told him, you know, you'd be perfect for this. You know,
Speaker 1: if you want to kind of just get a feel
Speaker 1: for what it's like, you can come on one of
Speaker 1: these trips and you can be what's called a counter.
Speaker 1: And the counter was if you you and your friends
Speaker 1: from South Florida, we're going to the Bahamas somewhere in
Speaker 1: a little cove or someplace, and you were meeting another
Speaker 1: group that was, in this case Colombians, and they had
Speaker 1: a counter on their boat, and you had a counter
Speaker 1: on your boat. And what the counter was was the
Speaker 1: guy who as they unloaded thirty seven bales or whatever
Speaker 1: it was, how whatever the amount was from their boat
Speaker 1: onto your boat, their counter agreed that they had unloaded
Speaker 1: thirty seven, and you were the guy that counted and
Speaker 1: saw that, okay, we've got thirty seven. And then so
Speaker 1: you know he did it the first time. Uh, it
Speaker 1: went off without a hitch. You know, got home, made
Speaker 1: the kind of money that you wouldn't have made if
Speaker 1: you won every race for two or three months at
Speaker 1: the short track level. And I think once you do
Speaker 1: it and get away with it, no matter what it
Speaker 1: is in life, if you get away with something wants,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be easier the second time, I think, and
Speaker 1: it obviously was for him, and you know, you go
Speaker 1: again and then you go again, and I think he
Speaker 1: just sort of found himself deeper and deeper and deeper
Speaker 1: into it until there might come a point where you
Speaker 1: don't even think of yourself as being in it and and
Speaker 1: in it anymore. You you are just in it. Yeahsh
Speaker 1: was winn into you know what I mean? Like, Wowey
Speaker 1: was laid better than Rachel. I can tell you that more.
Speaker 1: After the break you're listening to running Smoked by the
Speaker 1: early the team owners Gary was working with in South
Speaker 1: Florida had managed to get him into a Cup car.
Speaker 1: The equipment wasn't top notch, so Gary wasn't leading laps
Speaker 1: or competing for the win, but he was making a mark. Nonetheless,
Speaker 1: did drug money contribute to him getting all the way
Speaker 1: to the Cup Scares? Yeah? I think on on some
Speaker 1: level it did because it financed his short track stuff.
Speaker 1: He was already unbelievably talented, but he was able to
Speaker 1: do not just him, but I mean he drove for
Speaker 1: some people who were involved in too so you were
Speaker 1: in better equipment than you've ever been in UM. I
Speaker 1: think it made more people look at him for Gary
Speaker 1: Blue entered the Daytona five hundred, the highest profile event
Speaker 1: in the whole NASCAR season. The Daytona five hundred, the
Speaker 1: great American race from every corner of the country. For
Speaker 1: the twenty fourth consecutive year, stock car racing's faithful returned
Speaker 1: last week to Daytona Beach. They partied, They soaked up
Speaker 1: the sun, had beer and barbecue last Sunday the five hundred,
Speaker 1: traditionally a ten car battle all day long and a
Speaker 1: race that tells us a lot about who's gonna run
Speaker 1: strong for the rest of the season. That left Kale
Speaker 1: Yarborough and Darryl Waltrip as the only real contenders, but
Speaker 1: Yarborough couldn't avoid us spinning Gary Blue. Kale made it
Speaker 1: to the pitch, changed tires and held on to finish second.
Speaker 1: Waltrip fell out with a blown engine, avoiding the destruction
Speaker 1: to win it easily. Bobby Allison, though he ran out
Speaker 1: of gas on the cool off laugh and had to
Speaker 1: be pushed to victory lane. Despite some mechanical troubles that day,
Speaker 1: Gary finished in the eleventh place. It would be last
Speaker 1: time he would ever race at Daytona. After that Daytona
Speaker 1: five hundred four days later, UH, seventy different people were
Speaker 1: sort of rounded up in the wee hours of the morning,
Speaker 1: all across Florida, and a couple of more up in
Speaker 1: North Carolina. So there were seventy people in that ring.
Speaker 1: UH indicted. Two drivers will not see action at Richmond.
Speaker 1: They have some explaining to do to the FBI. In
Speaker 1: the pre dawned darkness Thursday morning, federal agents arrested NASCAR
Speaker 1: driver Gary Blue, who finished eleventh and last week's Daytona. Five.
Speaker 1: The drivers and sixty eight other people were indicted on
Speaker 1: drug smuggling charges. Organization would offload marijuana from mother ships,
Speaker 1: bring it into this country, and then have it unloaded
Speaker 1: again and stored. Would be eventually turned over to owners
Speaker 1: or buyers of this marijuana, and the group handling the
Speaker 1: off floating and importation would receive a percentage of the
Speaker 1: marijuana as payment for their services. During its two and
Speaker 1: a half year investigation, the FBI received total cooperation from
Speaker 1: NASCAR in tracing the drug rings efforts to use stock
Speaker 1: car racing as a front for its activities Also arrested
Speaker 1: were a number of mechanics associated with those drivers, and
Speaker 1: six million dollars in property was seized as well. Gary
Speaker 1: was the most visible name on the bunch. I was
Speaker 1: living in Connecticut at the time, and I don't remember
Speaker 1: it was in the Hartford paper or one of the
Speaker 1: one of the New York daily papers, but his picture
Speaker 1: was in their Biggest Life, you know, getting lead out
Speaker 1: and he was wearing a jacket. It was winter, even
Speaker 1: in Florida was winter and having a you know, an
Speaker 1: FBI guy has scored him along, you know, head down
Speaker 1: in the home. It looked like a typical purp walk
Speaker 1: type photo and it was. It was kind of jarring
Speaker 1: at the time, even though it was kind of an
Speaker 1: open an open secret what a lot of those guys
Speaker 1: were doing. It was just like, oh my god, you
Speaker 1: know this. You hate to say, poor Gary because it
Speaker 1: was a mistake that he made, you know, he made
Speaker 1: his own decisions and paid for it. But it was
Speaker 1: there was something I think that resonated in people that
Speaker 1: you know that maybe he was more of a shame
Speaker 1: uh to have that happened to than than some guys were,
Speaker 1: because you kind of thought, and I still think it's
Speaker 1: a what what might have been in the next couple
Speaker 1: of weekends. Guys that sort of knew him before and
Speaker 1: had enough respect for him that without saying this, they
Speaker 1: were kind of saying, you know, you really did screw
Speaker 1: up here. But you know, you're our our friend, you're
Speaker 1: our fellow competitor. Maybe let's not talk about it. You know,
Speaker 1: you don't you don't have to say that. You just
Speaker 1: kind of know, let's not talk about it. But yeah,
Speaker 1: you are ostracized on some level because you're not going
Speaker 1: to get a medicine avenue, you know, advertising executive making
Speaker 1: a sponsorship decision that goes in your favor if you've
Speaker 1: been indicted for drug smuggling. So on that level, yeah,
Speaker 1: he was oscracized. This The sport kind of let him
Speaker 1: stay around, you know, Nascar. I'm sure it was a
Speaker 1: hell of a thing for them to decide, what do
Speaker 1: you do with this guy? He was found guilty. You know,
Speaker 1: it had to be a heck of a a line
Speaker 1: for them to walk and a heck of a fairly
Speaker 1: fast decision for them to make. They have rated winning,
Speaker 1: they got all the money, got all the time. They
Speaker 1: make your rules, they say, what I want to say,
Speaker 1: do what they want to do. That's what the system is.
Speaker 1: You're not going to beat him. Like I said before,
Speaker 1: for your first thing is when they said the United
Speaker 1: States America versus carry blue. That's your first thing right there.
Speaker 1: You think you're gonna go against the United States government
Speaker 1: and vet him here an idiot, here an idiot. But
Speaker 1: you know, he fought it for a long time. They appealed,
Speaker 1: and he continued to race until uh So for four
Speaker 1: years he was out and about, although you know you're
Speaker 1: here in trial a lot of the time. Uh he
Speaker 1: did manage to run and win some fairly big short
Speaker 1: track races in that time. He won the championship of
Speaker 1: a late model series called the All Pro UH Series,
Speaker 1: which was really big in the South. It was kind
Speaker 1: of a maybe like the racing version of single A
Speaker 1: baseball or something, you know, a respected minor league. He
Speaker 1: won the championship for that, went to the awards banquet
Speaker 1: in the beginning of eight seven, celebrated the championship, got up,
Speaker 1: got the trophy, got the pictures, got the prize money,
Speaker 1: the whole deal, and Monday morning he had to turn
Speaker 1: himself in. So the cliche he always uses is that's
Speaker 1: what it felt like to be champion for a day.
Speaker 1: You know, he had Sunday. He did admit that they
Speaker 1: celebrated pretty hard. You know, you've got nothing to lose
Speaker 1: at that point, and UH, Monday morning he had to
Speaker 1: report to UH federal facility and I think the first
Speaker 1: one was Texas, UH and that was it. You know,
Speaker 1: You're flew there on Sunday, reported on Monday, and began
Speaker 1: a series of a few years behind bars. And I'm
Speaker 1: sure that had to be a an amazing UH come
Speaker 1: down for a guy who had been, you know, for
Speaker 1: a lot of his life, had been kind of the
Speaker 1: the toast of the party. And I mean not necessarily
Speaker 1: party parties, but you know, you're the guy in victory lane.
Speaker 1: You're the guy that people want autographs from. You're the
Speaker 1: guy that people want to meet UH. You're the guy
Speaker 1: that car owners want to drive their equipment. You're the
Speaker 1: guy that rivals looked to for inspiration as a driver
Speaker 1: and maybe for UH chassis set up technology, wisdom as
Speaker 1: a competitor. You know, he was. He was always on
Speaker 1: top of his game that way too. So you go
Speaker 1: from being, you know, a guy who has been celebrated
Speaker 1: for most of your life to be in just a
Speaker 1: number uh, in a very very you know, bad place around.
Speaker 1: He reached a point where you realized. I think when
Speaker 1: he first came out, he thought, Okay, I've paid my
Speaker 1: debt to society. I'll make it back. You know, I'll
Speaker 1: win all these major short track races. I'll show everybody
Speaker 1: that I was, that I am what I was before,
Speaker 1: and I'll get back to the cup level. But life
Speaker 1: had moved on, you don't. You're no longer, um, the
Speaker 1: hot young guy that he was at one time, and
Speaker 1: racing had changed to now where you know, a young
Speaker 1: guy was no longer thirty or thirty two. Now the
Speaker 1: young guys were so you know, if you're in your forties,
Speaker 1: you were almost an old man at that point. It
Speaker 1: was gonna be really exceptional if you got there. And yeah,
Speaker 1: he was exceptional talent wise, but you've also got that
Speaker 1: giant albatross around your neck is having been a convicted
Speaker 1: drug smuggler. So there was no upside really for any
Speaker 1: major team hiring a guy like Gary. He was still
Speaker 1: incredibly talented, but there's a lot of incredibly talented race
Speaker 1: drivers out there, and and um, he reached the point
Speaker 1: where he realized he wasn't gonna make it anymore. He
Speaker 1: was living in Charlotte at this time when he was
Speaker 1: trying to rebuild his career and went to Florida, and
Speaker 1: as he puts it, kind of got talked into, well,
Speaker 1: why don't you just go on this one one more run?
Speaker 1: You know, just you know, just you need a little money.
Speaker 1: You know this will be good. And as he said,
Speaker 1: you do it once you're sort of right back into it.
Speaker 1: He jokes about this, but he's also deadly serious when
Speaker 1: he says it. He said, I I approached my smuggling
Speaker 1: like I approached my racing. He was prepared. He had
Speaker 1: contingency plans for everything. Well, he had backup fuel pumps
Speaker 1: and backup you know, backups for backups. He was very
Speaker 1: well prepared if something went wrong in the middle of
Speaker 1: the night on the ocean, where otherwise you just sort
Speaker 1: of float around out there with a broken down boat
Speaker 1: waiting for the somebody to discover you. And if somebody
Speaker 1: is the coast guard or the d e A, you
Speaker 1: know you're going back to jail. I mean, all myself
Speaker 1: is nice as I couldn't life, as I couldn't claim
Speaker 1: as I could and hard at tested, buying different stuff
Speaker 1: and different butters, different he said, I smuggled the same
Speaker 1: way with my boats, because when you break down, you're
Speaker 1: in trouble. You can't show that stuff over. So I
Speaker 1: think that probably the people that were involved in that
Speaker 1: like to having him around because he was good from
Speaker 1: that standpoint. He knew what he was doing. But all
Speaker 1: the preparations and concealed compartments in the world won't help
Speaker 1: if the d a already has eyes on you before
Speaker 1: you even leave the dock. As soon as he picked
Speaker 1: up his load and started back towards land, he was
Speaker 1: surrounded by police. Gary Blue spent the next six years
Speaker 1: in prison and was let out in The shame that
Speaker 1: time is that he didn't learn from his mistake. You
Speaker 1: know your now your family is back into it again.
Speaker 1: Now you're back in prison. Uh, you know, so there's
Speaker 1: two levels of it. It was a shame for so
Speaker 1: many people who knew him to see him go through
Speaker 1: that the first time, because you thought, you know what
Speaker 1: a waste of talent, enormous talent. And I should say
Speaker 1: that the the landscape had changed from a pop culture
Speaker 1: point of view, you know, Miami Vice wasn't cool in
Speaker 1: the nineties, you know what I mean, Nobody looked at
Speaker 1: it like a fun outlaw thing anymore. You know, by then,
Speaker 1: the whole drug thing, you know there, everybody knew by
Speaker 1: then what what told drugs took on families and kids
Speaker 1: and and uh crime in cities. You know, it was
Speaker 1: no longer something you could wink your way through. Nowadays,
Speaker 1: Gary isn't driving anymore, but he's still in the racing world.
Speaker 1: He does work with teams, uh, at different levels of
Speaker 1: the sport, including even like in the NASCAR Truck Series,
Speaker 1: you know, helping teams and mentoring drivers. He's got so
Speaker 1: much to offer. There's definitely a lot still in him.
Speaker 1: But you know, you're now, you're a guy that's seventy
Speaker 1: years old or whatever. In a in a young man's game,
Speaker 1: you can be a mentor. But you know, the the
Speaker 1: ugly truth of it is probably, you know, just simple math,
Speaker 1: most of the young drivers that come up today don't
Speaker 1: remember who he was or what he was, you know,
Speaker 1: when he was winning races in the seventies and eighties.
Speaker 1: It's just a lot of those kids weren't born, you know,
Speaker 1: until until the late eighties or the nineties. You know,
Speaker 1: it's uh, you know how he takes work as and
Speaker 1: when he can find it, and he's he's still really
Speaker 1: respected by certain guys in the sport, By almost everybody
Speaker 1: in the sport that's been around. There are people who
Speaker 1: um held it against him for a long time, didn't
Speaker 1: want anything to do with him, and finally it bothered
Speaker 1: him for a long time. You know, guys he raced
Speaker 1: with people he knew who worked on his cars back
Speaker 1: in the Northeast or back in Florida. You know that
Speaker 1: didn't really want anything to do with him anymore. But
Speaker 1: he finally accepted in his own mind that look, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna say I'm sorry, I did what I did.
Speaker 1: I got caught, ultimately lost a total of ten years
Speaker 1: of his life, you know, behind bars. So as he
Speaker 1: puts it, I've paid my dues. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: say that I what I did wasn't wrong, But I'm
Speaker 1: not going to apologize to you and you and you uh,
Speaker 1: you know this is this is what I did and
Speaker 1: it and it happened, and you know, again, it goes
Speaker 1: right back to who Gary was anyway. He was always
Speaker 1: always the most one of the most interesting guys at
Speaker 1: the racetrack. He's led an incredible life, both good and bad.
Speaker 1: Um and it's you know, I'm sure he has regrets,
Speaker 1: but like he like he put it and still puts it.
Speaker 1: He's he's past the point where he's going to keep
Speaker 1: apologizing for it. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next
Speaker 1: week with more Running Smoke. Running Smoke is a production
Speaker 1: of Campsite Media, Dan Patrick Productions and Workhouse Media, Written
Speaker 1: and reported by me roder Gola. Our producers are Leah Papes,
Speaker 1: Laine Gerbig, and Julie Dennischet. Our editors are Michelle Lands
Speaker 1: and Emily Martinez. Sound designed and original music by Mark
Speaker 1: mc adam. Additional sound and mixing by Ewen Lye from Ewen.
Speaker 1: Additional reporting by Susie McCarthy. Our executive producers are Dan Patrick,
Speaker 1: Josh Dean of camp Said Media, Paul Anderson, Nick Pinella,
Speaker 1: and Andrew Greenwood for Workhouse Media. Fact checking by Mary
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Speaker 1: thanks to Greg Horne, Johnny Kaufman, Sierra Franco, Elizabeth van
Speaker 1: Brocklyn and Sean Flynn