Speaker 1: Ridiculous crime. It's a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Zaren Elizabeth, Sarah, how are you.
Speaker 3: I'm doing pretty well. Just been in here waiting for you,
Speaker 3: all excited to see you, and you walk in with
Speaker 3: that big smile.
Speaker 2: It's so good to see you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, I'm hoping things are gonna look up.
Speaker 3: Oh. Same, I'm trying to be positive to positive.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm trying to be optimistic and being like I've
Speaker 5: been watching a lot of stuff about Vietnam.
Speaker 4: Well that helps to be for me.
Speaker 5: It provides perspective to go from like sixty like early sixties.
Speaker 5: I actually started, like you know, at the end of
Speaker 5: World War Two, at the coverage, and then by the
Speaker 5: time you get to sixty eight and everything's just mad revolution,
Speaker 5: Like okay, I can kind of see how these things,
Speaker 5: you know, break and change. So it was just giving
Speaker 5: me a little like, Okay, we've gotten through crazier.
Speaker 3: You know that's true.
Speaker 4: That's true. Listen aside from you binge watching Vietnam documentaries.
Speaker 3: Yes, you know, it's ridiculous.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, do I Elizabeth. I saw this and
Speaker 5: I had to tell you about it. There was this
Speaker 5: woman named Marsha Morgan was forty eight years old at
Speaker 5: the time, and she did what I have occasionally done
Speaker 5: when you look at your window and you see someone
Speaker 5: who's parked in front of your replace, and you're.
Speaker 3: Like, what the hell are they doing on my parking
Speaker 3: spot right on.
Speaker 4: The public street, on the public street, but you.
Speaker 5: Still look at it as like your parking spaces right
Speaker 5: in front of your place. I admit it makes no sense.
Speaker 5: It's not one of my best qualities, but I have
Speaker 5: gotten upset when I'm like, what are they doing parking there?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 5: So she did something I can totally understand. She went
Speaker 5: out and tried to do something about it. She wasn't violent,
Speaker 5: she wasn't like mad destructive. She just took a bunch
Speaker 5: of toilet paper and she like toilet papered the car
Speaker 5: that was parked in what she conceived of as her space. Now,
Speaker 5: what I've left out was that when she did this,
Speaker 5: she was dressed as a hot dog. She had gotten
Speaker 5: home and decided not to take off her hot dog costume. Instead,
Speaker 5: she just had a couple of drinks, She got tossed,
Speaker 5: and then she decided, I need to go settle up
Speaker 5: with a car out front.
Speaker 3: When she was arrested. She was still in the hot
Speaker 3: dog costume.
Speaker 4: This is a costume for work.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 5: I'm assuming maybe I might put on something comfortable.
Speaker 3: I put on her mobile driver costume.
Speaker 4: Like if I had to go home in a hot
Speaker 4: dog costume, the first thing I do is take off the.
Speaker 2: Hot dog, one would think, I think.
Speaker 4: Can we also talk about how expensive it is to
Speaker 4: toilet paper a car?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 4: Yeah, you don't even egg things anymore, exactly.
Speaker 5: Know, it's wasting that This was a couple of years ago.
Speaker 5: This was in like, well, it was twenty twenty five.
Speaker 5: It wasn't that long ago.
Speaker 2: It was one year.
Speaker 3: Again, the toilet paper was still expensive.
Speaker 4: Right, and everything's expensive.
Speaker 5: She got a five hundred and fifty dollars fine on
Speaker 5: top of her lost toilet paper. I guess the cops
Speaker 5: weren't impressed with that hot dog costume. Now, I don't
Speaker 5: think I should have to tell you this, but this
Speaker 5: did occur in Saint Petersburg, Florida.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Also, by the way, when I was reading other stories
Speaker 5: of the news about crime, there's a neighborhood called Madera
Speaker 5: in Florida, which is in the Saint Petersburg area. Oh, man,
Speaker 5: did that one come up a lot in the stories?
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, if you go like to read the Smoking Gun, right,
Speaker 5: which happened to be like like just cruising through, so
Speaker 5: it's a little light reading. And it was just Madera
Speaker 5: Madera Madeira. I'd never heard of it before. Now I
Speaker 5: know all about it.
Speaker 3: Apparently it's a rough spot.
Speaker 4: Interesting.
Speaker 5: A lot of people like hitting each other with a
Speaker 5: slice of pizza, you know, throwing nachos at your dress. Yeah, well,
Speaker 5: one person like stole a taco.
Speaker 2: It was a lot of foods, a lot of food based.
Speaker 5: And then also meth and alcohol based crimes, that's all.
Speaker 5: Sometimes it's like I got drunk and I threw the
Speaker 5: pizza at my mother.
Speaker 3: I like it. Okay, So there you go, ridiculous, right.
Speaker 4: You know what else is ridiculous? Get them Smugglers Blues.
Speaker 4: This is Ridiculous Crime A podcast about absurd and outrageous capers, heists,
Speaker 4: and cons. It's always always ninety nine percent murder free
Speaker 4: and one hundred percent ridiculous.
Speaker 3: Oh you damn right, I am so right, always right
Speaker 3: zerin sore Rain.
Speaker 4: You love a good tale of adventure on the high seas.
Speaker 5: I love a good tail of adventure in you love pirates,
Speaker 5: a huge van of pirates.
Speaker 3: If I could have a job occupation of choice, pirate.
Speaker 2: You love vikings, basically a pirate of the ancients.
Speaker 4: Yes, and you love tales of dirt bags with feathered hair,
Speaker 4: loading up boats with pounds of weed and running their
Speaker 4: goods to the land of apple pie, baseball in sync,
Speaker 4: garbage disposals, red solo cups, and medical bankruptcy.
Speaker 5: Yes, I do love sixties and seventies in particular, and
Speaker 5: up to the eighties. Drug smuggling in the Florida Ky
Speaker 5: get to the USA.
Speaker 4: Yeah, drug smugglers. Okay, so they make amazing ridiculous.
Speaker 3: Criminals, totally, just amazing.
Speaker 4: And it's in part because of the way they spend
Speaker 4: their ill gotten gains, Like they do a ridiculous job,
Speaker 4: they buy ridiculous things.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's just a circle of ridiculous and.
Speaker 4: Maybe because they dip into their own supply. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's an explanation, you possibly red it. So I've got
Speaker 4: this guy for you today. A lot of the parts
Speaker 4: of his story sound a little familiar because we've heard
Speaker 4: them in other stories. Okay, here, like they're the tropes,
Speaker 4: these required elements, the basics of seventies and eighties drug smuggling.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, let's be real.
Speaker 4: It never gets old.
Speaker 3: No go fast boat, low flying planes exactly.
Speaker 4: So today Randy Lanier, Oh, he's an all timer, mister Burnette. Yes,
Speaker 4: I fess then you've heard of him.
Speaker 3: My friend Derek actually recommended I look into his story.
Speaker 4: I'm glad you got this well, I've stole it out
Speaker 4: from under you. He was born in Lynchburg, Virginia. Nineteen
Speaker 4: fifty four was the year his dad was a draftsman.
Speaker 4: His mom was a caretaker at a mental hospital. It
Speaker 4: is hard working folks. He was close to his grandparents
Speaker 4: and he loved countrying it up at their place on
Speaker 4: the James River. The Gold Country boy. Yeah. When he
Speaker 4: was fourteen, he and his family moved to Hollywood, Florida,
Speaker 4: which is not too far from Fort Lauderdale. The vibe
Speaker 4: in the late sixties was mellow, like long haired beach hippies,
Speaker 4: cool music, yeah, you know, cooltoons, drugs. So Randy he
Speaker 4: started working construction.
Speaker 3: Okay, I respect.
Speaker 4: He was like a typical teen for the time and
Speaker 4: the place. He had a ponytail. He wanted to make
Speaker 4: a little.
Speaker 2: Cash, swing a hammer, the ponytail.
Speaker 4: Well, the ponytail got him a reputation that basically manifested
Speaker 4: what was to come. Because he had the ponytail shows up.
Speaker 4: Guys on the crew thought that he'd be able to
Speaker 4: hook him up with pot, because well that's the thing
Speaker 4: not to even sell, but like, do you know where
Speaker 4: you could find him? And I thought, I bet you
Speaker 4: could relate to that because you had long dreadlocks when
Speaker 4: you were working constructions.
Speaker 3: Yes, And they always expected me to have pot on me, Like, oh,
Speaker 3: we're gonna go take a break. See you want to
Speaker 3: come with us? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Or know where you could get it? Oh?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I definitely hook him up.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I think you were probably able to accommodate
Speaker 4: the requests. Maybe so this kid though he's just a
Speaker 4: kid with a ponytail. But you know, if people ask,
Speaker 4: you're like, well all right, let's make this happen. So
Speaker 4: Randy started selling pot.
Speaker 3: There you go.
Speaker 4: He was readying himself for another summer of construction site
Speaker 4: drug deals, and then his dad was like, you gotta
Speaker 4: cut your hair. No way, man, as Crosby steals Nash
Speaker 4: and Young saying, almost cut my hair. It happened just
Speaker 4: the other day. It was getting kind of long. I
Speaker 4: could have said it was in my way, but I didn't,
Speaker 4: And I wonder why I feel like letting my freak
Speaker 4: flag fly. Yeah, so he wanted to let his freak
Speaker 4: flag fly, and how thank you.
Speaker 2: So you know what he did.
Speaker 4: He got out of town.
Speaker 3: Oh, He's like, forget the scissors, give me the cartones.
Speaker 4: So he hitchhiked to Canada.
Speaker 2: From Hollywood, Florida.
Speaker 4: Yeah, with a bag of pot, four hits of acid,
Speaker 4: and five dollars. Okay, you know, just like that sweet
Speaker 4: heroin Cherub David Crosby saying in the same song, when
Speaker 4: I finally get myself together, I'm going to get down
Speaker 4: in some of that sweet summer weather. I'm going to
Speaker 4: find a space inside to laugh, separate the wheat from
Speaker 4: the chev Yeah. So it was a great summer. And
Speaker 4: when he got backed on, he decided to ride the high.
Speaker 4: So he dropped out of school. It became a full
Speaker 4: time weed dealer. Okay, he did all the like late sixties,
Speaker 4: early seventies weed dealer stuff.
Speaker 3: So like.
Speaker 4: According to Rolling Stone Magazine, he quote at one point
Speaker 4: packed the air vents of a Folkswagen Beetle with marijuana
Speaker 4: and headed off to Aspen to meditate with a guru.
Speaker 3: Yes, except for the air cooled engine part.
Speaker 2: That's a little problem, a little problem there.
Speaker 4: So by the time he was nineteen, he'd earned enough
Speaker 4: as a local dealer to buy a twenty seven foot
Speaker 4: Magnum sport powerboat.
Speaker 3: Damn Son.
Speaker 4: He was making cash, you know, and there's nothing like
Speaker 4: a young weed dealer with a gofest like what could
Speaker 4: go wrong?
Speaker 3: Sarin, He've stepped up in class.
Speaker 4: As Randy tells it. Quote, about six months later, a
Speaker 4: buddy asked me if I was interested to go and
Speaker 4: go into the Bahamas and put some grass on my boat.
Speaker 4: It seemed like an adventure, So I did it.
Speaker 3: Oh man, I love when people used to call it cras.
Speaker 4: I was just going to say, I that is my
Speaker 4: favorite of all the weed terms. I think so because
Speaker 4: it's so like, it's so time specific. M Yeah. Anyway, Uh,
Speaker 4: they skanoodled on down to the Bahamas. They loaded seven
Speaker 4: hundred and fifty pounds of that stickyicking into the boat.
Speaker 4: Then they cruise back up to Fort Lauderdale super easy.
Speaker 4: And it made him five grand. So five grand in
Speaker 4: nineteen seventy three is just over thirty seven thousand dollars today.
Speaker 3: That's not bad for basically a day and a half
Speaker 3: FLT work.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, so, Randy, he did some math in his head.
Speaker 2: B boo babu.
Speaker 3: Beat that.
Speaker 4: One boat can land him five k No problem? What
Speaker 4: about two? Well, heck, what about three? He bought two
Speaker 4: more speed boats to go first, and he had it made.
Speaker 4: He married his high school sweetheart. Like things are on
Speaker 4: the uptick, it was just all so easy. You know,
Speaker 4: you slip down to the island, you pick up the cargo,
Speaker 4: head back to Florida.
Speaker 3: He doesn't want to go to Nassau.
Speaker 4: Slide into the canals under cover of darkness.
Speaker 3: Them on the Florida coast.
Speaker 4: Well, this is so many inlets, Randy said, quote it
Speaker 4: was a smuggler's paradise. It was like the pirate days,
Speaker 4: Like you want a time machine to.
Speaker 3: Go back to.
Speaker 5: Then I would be satisfied with the late seventies. I
Speaker 5: actually literally be fine with that.
Speaker 4: And so like South Florida, weed dealers started hiring him
Speaker 4: and he'd make the pickups and they'd cut him in
Speaker 4: for thirty percent of the load. So fast forward a
Speaker 4: couple of years and The Rolling Stone wrote quote Lanier
Speaker 4: had three stash houses humming in the Bucolic horse country
Speaker 4: west of Fort Lauderdale and was earning hundreds of thousands
Speaker 4: of dollars.
Speaker 2: So he had to have some.
Speaker 4: Cover for all of this, Like, how do you explain this?
Speaker 4: He started a business, So nineteen seventies Fort Lauderdale, Like,
Speaker 4: what's a happening? Successful business for that time and place. Well, No,
Speaker 4: if you had said jet ski rental, you would be
Speaker 4: today's winner, I miss, I mean, come on, it's right there,
Speaker 4: right there, Burnette. So you know, a man has to
Speaker 4: have hobbies. Of course, Randy, like you liked to go
Speaker 4: fast boats, jet skis. And it was in nineteen seventy
Speaker 4: eight that he went to a Miami car show in
Speaker 4: nineteen seventy eight Miami Car all the Way wild. Oh yeah,
Speaker 4: So there he saw a car club booth and he
Speaker 4: like chatted with them all, Hey, kiky, what's up, checked
Speaker 4: out a brochure, and then signed up for a racing class.
Speaker 3: Oh smart, like bomb Bonderette style.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Randy later said, quote, I didn't have a clue. I
Speaker 4: just drove, yes man, and drove did Zaren So he
Speaker 4: worked the grassroots circuit for a while just like gunning
Speaker 4: and funning. Then came the nineteen eighty to twenty four
Speaker 4: Hours of Daytona race.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, and driving on the sand real things. Yeah.
Speaker 4: A friend of his worked for Janet Guthrie and she
Speaker 4: was one of the first women to compete in professional racing.
Speaker 4: And his buddy was like, hey, you want to hear
Speaker 4: some hot gossip. Randy's like, yeah, it's like Janet sick.
Speaker 4: He's like, really six sick, you know, she just has
Speaker 4: like an upset stomach. Oh, And He's like that doesn't
Speaker 4: qualify as hot gossip. He's like, you should spend some
Speaker 4: time around the track. This is about as good as
Speaker 4: I can get. So they were looking for someone to
Speaker 4: take her place at twenty four Hours of Daytona, and
Speaker 4: Randy was like, look, no further, I'm your guy. So,
Speaker 4: according to Rolling Stone quote, climbing into the Ferrari five twelve,
Speaker 4: Lanier drove several practice laps fast enough to impress the team.
Speaker 4: He and two other drivers kept the car in third
Speaker 4: place for eighteen hours before Lanier destroyed the Ferrari's gearbox.
Speaker 4: Oh so he was shining on the track apparently, and
Speaker 4: he was also shining back at the office, not the
Speaker 4: jet ski rental office, but the drug smuggling office. No, yeah,
Speaker 4: that one. And so he had expanded and he had
Speaker 4: a business partner, fellow by the name of Ben Kramer
Speaker 4: Ben Cream. They went to high school together and they
Speaker 4: had similar interests. See Ben had just gotten out of
Speaker 4: prison for selling weed. So they were sympathico.
Speaker 2: Yes, And with Ben, Randy.
Speaker 4: Could really like upscale, upsize his efforts.
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, I mean he's graduated from the Iron Bar
Speaker 5: University exactly.
Speaker 2: So faster boats, bigger boats, more boats.
Speaker 4: I'm talking sixty five foot wooden trawller.
Speaker 3: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: And then like big fishing boats, then.
Speaker 4: A whole fleet of tug boats.
Speaker 3: Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 4: He just went nuts.
Speaker 3: So he's like, they're going to look past those.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So then he gets bigger contracts he got we're
Speaker 4: talking Colombia.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So they weren't middlemen anymore.
Speaker 2: They went to the source was smuggling more.
Speaker 4: Money for them. So Randy bought a Norwegian fishing trawler
Speaker 4: called Ursa Major, and he took it down to Colombia
Speaker 4: and he came back with fifteen thousand pounds of Colombian gold.
Speaker 4: Can I tell you about this particular stream tons of Colombian.
Speaker 4: Colombian gold is a legendary pure sativa cannabis stream yes
Speaker 4: originating from the Santa Martin Mountains in Colombia. Renowned for
Speaker 4: its energetic uplifting a and high THHC levels around eighteen
Speaker 4: to twenty percent. It is popular for daytime, used to
Speaker 4: combat stress and depression. Featuring a distinct skunky lime forward around.
Speaker 4: It is relatively easy to grow tall plant.
Speaker 5: I bet it would drive Cheech and Chong absolutely sideways
Speaker 5: with like desire.
Speaker 4: I just cracks me up. When people talk about weed,
Speaker 4: they talk about wine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, with a tear water with lemon.
Speaker 4: It makes sense.
Speaker 3: The es and this are fantastic. So their top note
Speaker 3: is something of an alfalfa.
Speaker 4: Well, you go from like wine moms to weed moms.
Speaker 3: That's true.
Speaker 4: That's the whole thing. So there's Randy with his boat
Speaker 4: just like crammed with Colombian gold marijuana. He pulled off
Speaker 4: the coast of Florida and his crew motored up in
Speaker 4: a bunch of big zodiac rafts. They filled the zodiacs
Speaker 4: with fifty pound bales he.
Speaker 2: Just wrapped, okay, and then the zodiacs made.
Speaker 4: Their way to a beach where like a strobe light
Speaker 4: was flickering wow to signal.
Speaker 3: Them this is like the old like rum runners approached.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, your boy, the real McCoy right, So.
Speaker 4: They would like they would run the boats up onto
Speaker 4: the beach because there's zodiacs just flat right there. And
Speaker 4: then there was a human chain of unloaders who ran
Speaker 4: the bales from the boats to a bunch of vans
Speaker 4: waiting in a parking lot, and then the vans would
Speaker 4: drive to one of Randy's stash houses. Randy sold it
Speaker 4: all the next day. His take four point five million dollars.
Speaker 4: It was like fifteen million today one night. Yes, So
Speaker 4: Randy and his wife Pam, they're living it up, like
Speaker 4: they got this new five bedroom house with a private lake,
Speaker 4: got a couple of rotwilers patrolling rock whilers, patrolling the grounds.
Speaker 3: So she fully knows what he does for a living.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, a Porsche Benzo. It's not bad for the
Speaker 4: owner of a chain of jet ski rental shops. Yeah,
Speaker 4: you know, but hey, it's for Lauderdale. Things were big,
Speaker 4: but they were about to get bigger.
Speaker 3: I love bigger.
Speaker 4: Let's take a break. When we come back, I'll tell
Speaker 4: you about Randy's next seriously audacious plan Randy Lanier. No,
Speaker 4: you're Zaron Brunette, but I want to tell you about Randy.
Speaker 4: You today, you'll be Randy weed smuggler extraordinary. So here
Speaker 4: we are in nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 3: What a time, What a year.
Speaker 4: Randy had a bunch of weed distributors, and one of
Speaker 4: them introduced Randy and his partner Kramer, to Tip O'Neill,
Speaker 4: who then became a tugboat captain for them.
Speaker 3: It's in the Miami area.
Speaker 2: I'll just keep running with it.
Speaker 4: We get to and then the estate if tip O'Neil
Speaker 4: can come after me anyway, So he introduces Ben and
Speaker 4: Randy to this other smuggler, George Brock. Now Brock had
Speaker 4: a vision. See he knew this other guy, Eugene Fisher.
Speaker 4: Fisher owned a shipyard. He also owned an ocean going barge.
Speaker 4: Oh he put on there like the flat decked time,
Speaker 4: big as a football field. So Brock he did some calculations.
Speaker 3: Beboo babo beat weed in this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he was like a barge could hold more than
Speaker 4: one hundred tons of marijuana. And that's like more than
Speaker 4: two hundred thousand pounds of weed totally. So according to
Speaker 4: rolling Stone quote. The scheme was simple, but ingenius. Welders
Speaker 4: sealed the bales under steel plates. The secret compartments were
Speaker 4: then filled with seawater so that a curious customs official
Speaker 4: would find only Brian. In early nineteen eighty three, the
Speaker 4: barge sailed up New York's East River and docked at
Speaker 4: the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Damn side living low, like pulling
Speaker 4: two hundred thousand pounds, it's like winds up being a
Speaker 4: little bit less than that of weed up into.
Speaker 3: Brooklyn, right into New York's harbor.
Speaker 4: This is insane. So they get to the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Speaker 4: Randy's guys used welding torches to cut through the ballast
Speaker 4: tanks inside one hundred and thirty thousand pounds of Columbian gold.
Speaker 5: That's all, by the way, a lot of work to
Speaker 5: cut through with welders torches. Yeah, it's like the place
Speaker 5: you would get caught after all that work when you
Speaker 5: get welding down there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So the tanks are opened, another crew comes moves
Speaker 4: the bales of weed into tractor trailers like big rigs.
Speaker 2: Yeah totally, And so now Randy is rich, rich, oh
Speaker 2: big time.
Speaker 4: Doing the math from the ursa minor job. That run
Speaker 4: had to be worth thirty nine million, which is one
Speaker 4: hundred and twenty four million today. But you figure he's
Speaker 4: got to cut all these other folks in a blue
Speaker 4: blah profit.
Speaker 3: But that's a big time job.
Speaker 4: So that money immediately began burning a hole in his pocket. Yeah,
Speaker 4: he put a lot of it into putting together a
Speaker 4: professional racing team like race car. Yeah, he bought two
Speaker 4: race cars, bought a warehouse to uses the home base.
Speaker 4: He hired an ex Formula one crew chief and a
Speaker 4: team of mechanics.
Speaker 5: What classes he racing Formula one, Formula not NASCAR Formula one.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he graduated go fast. He called his new racing
Speaker 4: team blue Thunder.
Speaker 2: Whin yeah so good.
Speaker 5: And that was this is like early eighties, so the
Speaker 5: TV show and movie Blue Thunder had probably come out.
Speaker 5: He's imitating possibly the helicopter.
Speaker 4: Right right, So just like in most professional sports, if
Speaker 4: you have money, you can buy success totally. And so
Speaker 4: at the end of the nineteen eighty four season, look
Speaker 4: at the Dodgers, right, Randy was named Camel GT Champion
Speaker 4: as well as most Improved Driver. Really improved Driver is
Speaker 4: like the best worst award I can think of getting
Speaker 4: most improved. So the smuggling had never stopped. He had
Speaker 4: a team to fund now and they so they did
Speaker 4: another barge run. This one had seventy five tons of
Speaker 4: Colombian gold in it. He was making tens of millions
Speaker 4: of dollars. His lifestyle reflected it. He had like expensive cars,
Speaker 4: vacation hull, the.
Speaker 3: Most feathered hair you've ever seen feathered.
Speaker 4: I feel like he and his crew probably all walked
Speaker 4: around in those like football jerseys that are cut off
Speaker 4: like half short, say Hawaii eighty four.
Speaker 5: And then like the short short cutoff jeans shorts, Yeah,
Speaker 5: with the fraying at the bottom, a little bit of
Speaker 5: white pocket exactly.
Speaker 4: Pockets longer than the than the inn scene. So the money,
Speaker 4: all this money has to be laundered, of course, naturally,
Speaker 4: and so Randy and Ben they had a bunch of
Speaker 4: foreign bank accounts shell companies, and one of these companies
Speaker 4: funded the construction of a one hundred thousand square foot
Speaker 4: casino called the Bell Gardens Bicycle Club in Bell Garden, California.
Speaker 4: It's now called Park West Bicycle Casino, and it's still
Speaker 4: like a poker card room. The whole thing was funded
Speaker 4: by a variety of drug smugglers. It was like a cooperative. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it was as a means to launder money. And it's
Speaker 4: like both during construction and in the operation. And it
Speaker 4: was actually Ben's dad who was the guy behind the
Speaker 4: whole card room plan. Anyway, the laundering operation was huge.
Speaker 4: There were tons of fake corporations.
Speaker 3: I wonder how much crack money went into this, because
Speaker 3: it's the early eighties in.
Speaker 4: Your bell Garden, I think, yeah, Bellgard.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: One of their fake companies was called g Reedy Holding Company.
Speaker 5: Greedy Greedy, Oh right, even better.
Speaker 4: They used banks in England, Panama, Hong Kong, British Vision Islands,
Speaker 4: other places, all.
Speaker 3: The best money laundering spots.
Speaker 4: And what was Randy up to right now?
Speaker 3: What was now?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 4: Glad that I made you ask? That he was training
Speaker 4: for the Indianapolis five hundred are you kidding? And the
Speaker 4: number one race in America, So Randy had the money
Speaker 4: to go full in on training. In May nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 4: a week before the race, he learned that his distributor
Speaker 4: in Louisiana had been arrested and was cooperating with the FBI. Oh,
Speaker 4: and the FBI was surveilling Randy oh no, yeah, this
Speaker 4: is a week before the Indy five hundred, and so
Speaker 4: there was another shipment on its way in. As he
Speaker 4: heard all of this, eighty three tons of weed on
Speaker 4: its way to Louisiana.
Speaker 3: Whoa on the barge going to New Orleans?
Speaker 4: Basically, yeah, thereabouts, Randy got in touch with the captain
Speaker 4: of the ship and was like, redirect, redirect, don't go
Speaker 4: to Louisiana.
Speaker 2: He tells him, head south, tolle.
Speaker 4: Go through the Panama Canal. Oh wow, then head north
Speaker 4: in the Pacific to California.
Speaker 3: Guys like.
Speaker 4: All of this is right when he's getting ready for
Speaker 4: the Indy five hundred, Like, if this is.
Speaker 3: Stressful, I got a focus, I got them Andretti's.
Speaker 4: Years later, Dale Earnhardt Junior went marvel at these circumstances
Speaker 4: on his podcast while interviewing Randy Dale Junior. U. But
Speaker 4: Randy races and he still managed to come in just
Speaker 4: nine cars behind.
Speaker 2: What that's not bad at all.
Speaker 4: He was actually the only rookie driver to finish that year. Really,
Speaker 4: and he clocked the fastest speed in history during pre
Speaker 4: qualifying lapse, breaking Michael Andretti's previous record.
Speaker 3: What past that crowd?
Speaker 4: This is an awards banquet after the race, and Randy
Speaker 4: was presented with the Indy five hundreds Rookie of the
Speaker 4: Year Award.
Speaker 2: Get it signed, Randy.
Speaker 4: So he's like floating on air at this point, like
Speaker 4: what a life is racing in the Indy five hundred.
Speaker 4: He's driving exotic cars, living in palatial homes, smuggling tons
Speaker 4: of weeds.
Speaker 3: He is living the early eighties dream right now, dreams right.
Speaker 4: But then don't forget there's that barge that he had
Speaker 4: to be just a few months after his turn in
Speaker 4: the eighty five hundred, finds himself sitting in a rented
Speaker 4: car in a parking lot near a harbor on the
Speaker 4: San Francisco Bay there waiting on that boat that was
Speaker 4: originally headed for Louisiana.
Speaker 3: Where do they plan on, Doc?
Speaker 4: And I kept they kept saying near San Francisco, and
Speaker 4: I'm thinking, like South City, some of.
Speaker 3: Those could have been Oakland. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 4: But here's the thing, though, is that the Oakland, like
Speaker 4: all those port slips, are so union controlled you can
Speaker 4: just roll up. That's why I think it's going to
Speaker 4: be like Hunter's Point.
Speaker 5: Yeah, baby, that's a little a little bit more loose. Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 5: I would have gone to Long Beach where you can
Speaker 5: actually bribe people.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I guess it's also a Union stronghold.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but it's a little bit bigger. There's enough, there's
Speaker 5: enough to get lost in Margache.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 5: Could have known a Richmond, they could have been That's
Speaker 5: what we're with all the metal salvage. People are definitely
Speaker 5: looking past that. And there's a lot of like you know,
Speaker 5: Asians like travel, so like they thought it Like, I
Speaker 5: don't know what's what the words is coming from.
Speaker 4: I'm just trying to think of the size of this barge.
Speaker 4: Where would it go. This us to be fascinating for
Speaker 4: people who have no idea about the layout of San
Speaker 4: Francisco Bay anyway, cargo options exactly. So he's sitting in
Speaker 4: a parking lot near harbor on the Bay waiting for
Speaker 4: the boat. He gets a message on his radio.
Speaker 3: And he's still under FBI investigation, and he knows it, and.
Speaker 4: He knows it. There's trouble with the cargo. Water got
Speaker 4: into the one of the sealed compartments full of weed,
Speaker 4: and the marijuana was rotting and putting off methane.
Speaker 3: Oh god.
Speaker 4: And when the crew went to use torches to cut
Speaker 4: open the compartments. Explosion and fire, Oh because methane. Of course,
Speaker 4: two of the guys died, so moment of silence for
Speaker 4: one percent. So the remaining crew, they're worried that the
Speaker 4: whole thing is going to go right. Yeah, So they
Speaker 4: salvage what they could without opening the other compartments. How
Speaker 4: they do that, I don't know, And they shipped off
Speaker 4: what they could in trucks and then the barge was
Speaker 4: set out into the ocean and scuttled, went to the
Speaker 4: briny deep holding the two expired welders too. There are
Speaker 4: many tragic tales in Davy Jones's locker.
Speaker 3: You're telling you?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so Randy, Yeah, this I feel like was like
Speaker 4: a turning point for Randy. He went back to Florida
Speaker 4: a changed man. The whole thing rattled him, and he
Speaker 4: knew the Feds were sniffing around, so he started to
Speaker 4: get super paranoid.
Speaker 3: One of his fans his racing career is going well,
Speaker 3: so he's now got something to lose.
Speaker 4: Sure, sure, but it's like he's kind of crossed a
Speaker 4: line with this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, definitely this point, he moved out.
Speaker 4: Of his fancy house and into a condo that he
Speaker 4: rented under a fake name.
Speaker 3: Huh. So he's basically like low key on the run. Yeah.
Speaker 4: He always used payphones to make calls, never landlines, and
Speaker 4: certainly no like early cell phones. He went in and
Speaker 4: out of the back doors of stores and restaurants and businesses.
Speaker 4: He was like Henry Hill, Yeah, and fellas driving around
Speaker 4: looking at the exactly that a shoe dropped. In October
Speaker 4: of nineteen eighty six, the DEA pressed charges on eleven
Speaker 4: people for engaging in a major drug and money laundering organization.
Speaker 4: Three of those people were at the center of it all,
Speaker 4: Randy Ben and Ben's dad, Jack Kramer. Remember Jack was
Speaker 4: the casino one. By the way, Jack Kramer was married
Speaker 4: to Meyer Lanski's niece.
Speaker 2: Oh he deep yes, world.
Speaker 4: So the charges detailed their efforts to smuggle more than
Speaker 4: one hundred thousand pounds of marijuana into South Florida between
Speaker 4: September of nineteen eighty three and June of nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 3: And now he's in a new race, which is who's
Speaker 3: going to flip on who first?
Speaker 4: Uh huh. But he's not even talking about the aren't
Speaker 4: talking about New York California. This is just the South.
Speaker 3: Florida stuff they know about you down there.
Speaker 4: Now, Randy had broken his leg in a crash at
Speaker 4: the Michigan five hundred oh and like, bad luck is
Speaker 4: all he knew at this point, so he surrendered to
Speaker 4: the FEDS. He posted one hundred thousand dollars bail and
Speaker 4: was released. Okay, Now, remember when I said just moments
Speaker 4: ago that they weren't even talking about New York or California.
Speaker 3: It wasn't.
Speaker 4: I take that back. Oh. A couple months later, FBI
Speaker 4: comes at him for smuggling one hundred and fifty tons
Speaker 4: of marijuana into US ports over a three year period.
Speaker 5: I have one question, Elizabeth, why was he still in
Speaker 5: the country. They had gotten him out there at this point.
Speaker 5: You got that kind of money, you need to run
Speaker 5: something tight.
Speaker 4: So when you add it all up, Randy and company
Speaker 4: were busted for bringing more than six hundred thousand pounds
Speaker 4: of marijuana into the country six hundred thousand pounds with
Speaker 4: a Z at the end pounds. In February of nineteen
Speaker 4: eighty seven, Randy was doing.
Speaker 5: Court, so the FED basically, anybody like you know, our parents' age,
Speaker 5: probably smoked some of the pot.
Speaker 3: That he brought into the country.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly if you were smoking Colombia.
Speaker 4: You were smoking Colombian gold.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, anywhere on the.
Speaker 5: Eastern seaboard in particular perhaps and perhaps parts of.
Speaker 4: California sit around the Bay.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So Randy has to go to court February nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 4: and the Feds were like, you have some options. You
Speaker 4: can face a life sentence, or you can turn state's
Speaker 4: evidence and get ten years. Randy's like, I'll take option three. Saren,
Speaker 4: close your eyes. Yes, I want you to picture it.
Speaker 4: You work at a bagel shop in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Speaker 4: It's the morning rush. Various professionals wait in line for
Speaker 4: their bagels and coffee. You are working their register. People
Speaker 4: in suits, construction workers in their gear, doctors and nurse
Speaker 4: from the hospital down the road. They all wait patiently
Speaker 4: for their choice of shmear. Above you, a TV shows
Speaker 4: the local morning news. The volume's low. The owner has
Speaker 4: it on so the customers can see the weather and
Speaker 4: traffic while they wait in the morning, and any crazy
Speaker 4: major news stories. Right now, the screen above you shows
Speaker 4: a weather radar map. The sky is clear for the
Speaker 4: foreseeable future. The door chimes as another customer comes in
Speaker 4: and joins the line. You finish taking an order, ringing
Speaker 4: them up, and then looking at the line to call
Speaker 4: the next person. Everyone in line is now looking up
Speaker 4: at the TV screen. You turn around and stare up
Speaker 4: at it. A reporter stands across the street from Grand
Speaker 4: Gates outside a super fancy home. Behind him, two cops
Speaker 4: in tactical gear walk by. You see someone in a
Speaker 4: DEA windbreaker talking to a lady in an FBI windbreaker
Speaker 4: alphabet soup. One of the guys in line cracks. The
Speaker 4: lady in front of him laughs. You look back at
Speaker 4: the line, and the man three customers looks like he's
Speaker 4: seen a ghost. He stares at the screen for a
Speaker 4: little while longer, and then ducks out a line and
Speaker 4: races to the payphone against the wall. He puts in
Speaker 4: a quarter, pulls a folded up sheet of paper from
Speaker 4: his back pocket, and dials a number. He seems to
Speaker 4: read from the paper. He waits, and when it seems
Speaker 4: like someone has answered, he says, Uh, yeah, yet, my wife,
Speaker 4: Pam Lanier is a patient there. She just had a baby,
Speaker 4: our baby a couple days ago. Uh can you connect
Speaker 4: me to her room? The guy waits in silence, staring
Speaker 4: out the window of the shop. It's funny. No one
Speaker 4: ever uses the payphone in here. Well every now and then,
Speaker 4: and it's almost always to call home to ask someone
Speaker 4: what they wanted or what they would want as a substitution.
Speaker 4: If their first request is sold out, you hear a
Speaker 4: lot of honey, did you want onion with the locks capers?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 4: Okay. In fact, that's why the owner had the phone
Speaker 4: company install the phone inside so that out on the
Speaker 4: sidewalk more convenient for the customers. He thinks of everything.
Speaker 4: You expect the guy to ask us wife if she
Speaker 4: wants poppy seed or an egg bagel that maybe he
Speaker 4: couldn't remember. Instead, you hear him.
Speaker 2: Say whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Speaker 4: Slow down. The babysitter said, what, Yeah, I know they're
Speaker 4: at the house. I just saw it on the news. Yes,
Speaker 4: I am aware. When am I coming to get you?
Speaker 4: The man stares out the window. A customer walks by
Speaker 4: him to leave, setting off the door time. Finally he speaks,
Speaker 4: I'm leaving. I'm not coming to get you, he says.
Speaker 4: Then he hangs up the phone and walks out of
Speaker 4: the shop. You've been so distracted. You weren't listening to
Speaker 4: the lady in front of you as she rattled off
Speaker 4: her very intricate order. You ask her to repeat herself,
Speaker 4: and she sighs. You look back up at the screen.
Speaker 4: Everything clicking, Hot dog, you just saw a drug kingpin. Yes, Zaren,
Speaker 4: let's take a break and let me return. We'll go
Speaker 4: find Randy. Okay, all right, Zaren. Before the break, I
Speaker 4: was telling you about how Randy saw his house getting
Speaker 4: raided while he was waiting in line to pick up
Speaker 4: bagels for his wife. Very well rendered after she gave
Speaker 4: birth to their second child.
Speaker 3: So that was real.
Speaker 2: That was that was real?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So their first kid was at home with the babysitter. Randy,
Speaker 4: not a good dad, decided to just make a break
Speaker 4: for it, and also not a good husband.
Speaker 3: I mean, I liked his instinct to run.
Speaker 5: I think he should have done it much earlier, and
Speaker 5: he probably should have taken his wife and children with him, right,
Speaker 5: I mean, that's why you get the money.
Speaker 2: Right, exactly.
Speaker 4: So he hitched a ride in a big rig and
Speaker 4: rode all the way up to Pennsylvania. Okay, and then
Speaker 4: he used a phony passport.
Speaker 3: Good move.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he used a fake passport, got on a flight
Speaker 4: to London, okay, and it was there that he met
Speaker 4: up with someone, his girlfriend. Oh no, oh, Zaren, you
Speaker 4: had to believe a guy like this would be stepping
Speaker 4: out on his wife.
Speaker 3: He probably should have. You know why, I'm so innocent,
Speaker 3: so naive.
Speaker 4: You know why why? Because he is a piece of Yeah.
Speaker 4: So he met the girlfriend.
Speaker 3: He didn't enjoy the research.
Speaker 4: He'd met the girlfriend, Maria de la LuSE Maggie, while
Speaker 4: still in Florida. The two of them met up in
Speaker 4: London and then just like flitted around Europe living it up.
Speaker 4: Oh god, Remember he had tons of money and offshore accounts.
Speaker 3: He's got a pregnant wife at home.
Speaker 2: He just gave birth postpart.
Speaker 4: So Randy and Maria they're staying in five star hotels.
Speaker 3: When they were doing that part.
Speaker 4: But they're doing that, yeah, exactly, five star hotels, rolling
Speaker 4: the dice in Monte Carlo, while Pam was back home
Speaker 4: nursing a newborn, while the FBI pawed through her underwear
Speaker 4: drawer like this is fun. Everybody's having fun, I tell you.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 4: The thing is, there were some loose ends Randy had
Speaker 4: to tie up. He had to make a trip to
Speaker 4: Antigua to deal with some property he owned there. Why,
Speaker 4: he had a sixty foot Hatteras fishing boat there too,
Speaker 4: And the ship's captain was an old smuggling buddy of his,
Speaker 4: so when he and Maria got there, they trust. Yeah,
Speaker 4: they stayed on the boat and they figured they just
Speaker 4: like chill for a couple of weeks, like sip cocktails,
Speaker 4: soak in the sun.
Speaker 5: Do you think they took a boat from Europe over
Speaker 5: I think they probably flew and then just got.
Speaker 4: About and then well they had fake passports since yeah,
Speaker 4: they just wanted island time. And then they're like, okay,
Speaker 4: you know it'd be great is once we're done here,
Speaker 4: we'll just take this boat and sail to Spain. How
Speaker 4: funny is that there we go, everybody's having funds.
Speaker 3: There, so uh, my favorite foods.
Speaker 4: One early morning in late October nineteen eighty seven, the
Speaker 4: ship pulled into a small harbor and there was a
Speaker 4: ship behind them, a big old gray one, and Tiguan
Speaker 4: government and the captain's like, you know, they're probably going
Speaker 4: to check our papers, and so they they're watching this
Speaker 4: big gray boat and then they see a small boat
Speaker 4: full of guys in uniforms with guns pulled, pull away
Speaker 4: from the big gray boat and head for Randy's vessel.
Speaker 3: They're going to board us.
Speaker 4: So Randy just like starts barking at the captain, like
Speaker 4: put the zodiac in the water, bro jump. He jumps
Speaker 4: in and speeds away, leaving Maria and the captain behind him.
Speaker 3: Of course, total scumbag, Maria.
Speaker 4: If he did it to someone else, he'll do it
Speaker 4: to you. It's words to live by, ladies. Probably, I
Speaker 4: know there are a lot of gals not along right now.
Speaker 4: If he did it to someone else, he'll do it
Speaker 4: to you.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah.
Speaker 4: So Randy reached the dock at the harbor, hopped out
Speaker 4: of the Zodi. Keep in mind he was just chilling
Speaker 4: on the boat right island time. He's he's wearing bag
Speaker 4: strimped swim trunks, flip flops, no shirt, and he had
Speaker 4: noe to go but run up this hill covered in
Speaker 4: saw palmettos, those sharp growing palm bushes.
Speaker 3: God, those things ripped him up to get torn up.
Speaker 4: His feet were bleeding.
Speaker 3: Oh sure, luddy, you could just follow the blood trail.
Speaker 4: And it's not like the antigues were only coming in
Speaker 4: him on the water.
Speaker 5: They were waiting on land too, so I am sure
Speaker 5: the coast guards probably involved as well.
Speaker 4: A bunch of jeeps pulled up at the bottom of
Speaker 4: the hill and they were like, Randy, stop, Randy, and
Speaker 4: he just like kept scrabbling, and they pulled their rifles,
Speaker 4: and you know, is like pants are sagging, and they
Speaker 4: can see the top of his butt, his flip flops.
Speaker 2: He's blew out a flip flop.
Speaker 4: Randy stop, and so then they pull out the rifles.
Speaker 4: Randy stops scrabbling, did they No. He limped back down
Speaker 4: the hill, topless, sunburned, bloody. So the police put them
Speaker 4: on a plane. They're like, you're out of here, buddy.
Speaker 4: We don't want your smuggling as types here. So they
Speaker 4: flew him to Puerto Rico, where he was arrested by
Speaker 4: the FEDS, because, contrary to common ignorant notions, Puerto Rico
Speaker 4: was part of the United States.
Speaker 3: Yes, and the DEA has full jurisdiction.
Speaker 4: So a lot had been happening in the eight months
Speaker 4: that he was on the Lamb.
Speaker 3: He was on the Lamb for eight months.
Speaker 4: Yeah. The FEDS tore up his dad's yard and found
Speaker 4: two million dollars hidden inside PVC pipes. Meanwhile, he's like,
Speaker 4: you know, sipping champagne in Paris. They ransacked another relative's
Speaker 4: house and found five hundred thousand dollars in the basement.
Speaker 3: Is going down like his address book. Let's just make
Speaker 3: a date to day.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they tracked bank accounts, businesses. They connected the dots
Speaker 4: to the casino in California.
Speaker 3: Naturally, so now they're all screwed.
Speaker 4: They seized his houses, in his cars, Pam. Pam was
Speaker 4: a single mother with two kids now who had to
Speaker 4: get a job cutting fruit at the local supermarket in
Speaker 4: order to make ends meet. That's how Pam was doing.
Speaker 4: His trial began in July of nineteen eighty eight. Two
Speaker 4: dozen members of his crew testified against him.
Speaker 2: Who dozen ouch.
Speaker 3: Right to remember that race that's talking about who going
Speaker 3: to flip on?
Speaker 5: Who?
Speaker 4: We found computers exactly to the first heat was wild,
Speaker 4: so prosecutors laid it all out. He and his partners
Speaker 4: had trafficked more than three hundred tons of marijuana into
Speaker 4: the US. They'd run a smuggling empire that covered like
Speaker 4: almost a dozen states, employed hundreds of people, So I
Speaker 4: mean they were job creators, and Randy had made somewhere
Speaker 4: around sixty eight million dollars along the way.
Speaker 3: And he didn't think to put more of it overseas
Speaker 3: his dad's backyard.
Speaker 4: No, he only two million was in his dad's A
Speaker 4: lot of it was overseas.
Speaker 3: Okay, good for him.
Speaker 4: So the trial lasted three months. There were sixty four witnesses.
Speaker 4: It generated more than ten thousand pages of transcripts. Yeah.
Speaker 4: So in the end, he and Ben and Fisher were
Speaker 4: convicted of drug trafficking, fraud, and running a continuing criminal enterprise.
Speaker 4: The government was ordered to seize one hundred and eighty
Speaker 4: million dollars of their assets collectively, and this became the
Speaker 4: largest federal forfeiture in US history. Randy got sentenced to
Speaker 4: life in prison without possibility of parole. His dad got
Speaker 4: time for burying the money in his own lawn. Randy's
Speaker 4: brother didn't get charged, but the government seized his house
Speaker 4: and auctioned it off because it was used for illegal activities.
Speaker 4: Oh really, Oh freedom. Maria got nine years for Monday laundering.
Speaker 4: Pam divorced Randy.
Speaker 3: She didn't catch any charges, you know, Pam didn't she.
Speaker 4: Didn't catch charges. She divorced Randy. So Randy and Maria
Speaker 4: got married while respectively behind bars.
Speaker 3: Huh.
Speaker 4: Sure, Randy was put in medium security lockup, but he
Speaker 4: had to be moved around a lot because he kept
Speaker 4: trying to escape. At one prison, Randy tried to escape
Speaker 4: by hiding inside a vending machine that was going to
Speaker 4: be taken out to get fixed, and at another he
Speaker 4: went on, here's when you're gonna like, according to Rolling
Speaker 4: Stone quote, using a contraband phone, he conspired with a
Speaker 4: helicopter pilot to spirit him from the exercise yard. A
Speaker 4: prison official, alerted to the plan, summoned Laneer to his office.
Speaker 4: If you think you're landing a helicopter in this prison,
Speaker 4: he worn, I'm shooting you, and I'm shooting your helicopter.
Speaker 2: Down France helicopter escapes.
Speaker 4: But you know his wasn't the only one, really remember
Speaker 4: Ben Kramer. In nineteen ninety, one of Kramer's buddies tried
Speaker 4: to put together an escape using a helicopter. They were
Speaker 4: going to have it fly into the exercise yard of
Speaker 4: the Dade Metropolitan Correction Center where Ben was serving time,
Speaker 4: and like pick him up and then per the publication
Speaker 4: Jelopnik quote. Not surprisingly, the plan didn't work, as Kramer
Speaker 4: held onto the runners of the helicopter. It's rear rotor
Speaker 4: became entangled in a fence, oh, causing the machine to
Speaker 4: come crashing down into the yard. Creamer's offered a broken
Speaker 4: leg in the incident. Was so the Feds had had enough.
Speaker 4: They sent Randy to the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado,
Speaker 4: where he was held Supermax where he was held in
Speaker 4: solitary confinement. Oh lord, I don't think the escape attempts
Speaker 4: were worth it to end up there, but Randy like
Speaker 4: he chilled out. Eventually he took up meditation, painting, chess, yoga.
Speaker 4: In late twenty fourteen, his lawyer and the government's attorney
Speaker 4: filed a succession of motions, all sealed in federal court.
Speaker 4: See Randy as I said, he was supposed to be
Speaker 4: serving life.
Speaker 3: Yeah, suggesto, right, But.
Speaker 4: For reasons that never really became known or clear, that changed.
Speaker 4: Randy attended a phone conference and was told by the
Speaker 4: judge that he would be granted time served was years. No,
Speaker 4: so was twenty fourteen bomber years. So he got out
Speaker 4: October fifteenth. Twenty fourteen had been released back in nineteen
Speaker 4: ninety nine. Yeah, yeah, but it didn't matter because they
Speaker 4: weren't married anymore anyways, recently broke up in prison, so good.
Speaker 4: According to Rolling Stone quote after his release, Lanier lived
Speaker 4: in a half way house and drove for Uber, which
Speaker 4: he pronounces Youber. And now part of the conditions of
Speaker 4: his release is that he had to live in that
Speaker 4: half way house for six months. He then had three
Speaker 4: years of supervised release where he couldn't have guns or booze.
Speaker 4: In twenty eighteen, he worked part time instructing non professionals
Speaker 4: at the Homestead Miami Speedway, and he's now CEO at
Speaker 4: a nonprofit called Freedom Grow, which helps provide quote services, comfort,
Speaker 4: and eventually freedom to other non violent cannabis offenders.
Speaker 3: Huh, so he's trying to help his people.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and he also, at least does of twenty twenty two,
Speaker 4: is licensed to grow weed in New Jersey.
Speaker 2: Really they came, apparently they did.
Speaker 4: And he appears on the Weirdest podcast. Like I think
Speaker 4: he got into bodybuilding because he shows up on those
Speaker 4: types of shows a lot. He's like, oh, ripped all
Speaker 4: the pictures in his prison. Yeah, and then there's all
Speaker 4: the racing stuff. Car guys love it.
Speaker 5: Of course I thought about that, you said earlier. Dale
Speaker 5: or podcast podcast.
Speaker 4: Sizarin, what's your ridiculous takeaway here? Uh?
Speaker 5: I know this is foolish, and I know this is
Speaker 5: probably wrong, but I think I would have been a
Speaker 5: hell of a pot smuggler in the seventies and eighties,
Speaker 5: and once I hit a certain level, I wouldn't have
Speaker 5: been throwing my money into trying to beat Mario Andretti
Speaker 5: on the race track. I'd be trying to beat my
Speaker 5: way to Monaco to watch races and live up my life.
Speaker 5: The life because they can never get enough, these guys.
Speaker 5: They're always like, let me go a little bigger. Yeah,
Speaker 5: let me get a barge and go into New York.
Speaker 3: Harbhere. I'm like, bro, you have already crossed the line.
Speaker 4: But you could have enough money to live comfortably for
Speaker 4: the rest of your life and just disappeared.
Speaker 3: Into double digit millions.
Speaker 5: You can live so well around the world, know exactly,
Speaker 5: especially you're not planning to pay taxes, and you can
Speaker 5: actually invest in some legitimate business. Do you have the
Speaker 5: half of the talent or your partner does. But no,
Speaker 5: they're always like, let me go a little bigger. I
Speaker 5: know this one smuggler he got a hundred million and
Speaker 5: also another competing with people that they really should.
Speaker 3: Not be competing.
Speaker 4: That is also my takeaway why they don't know when
Speaker 4: to stop right and so know how to be happy,
Speaker 4: and then they never wind up being able to enjoy
Speaker 4: it because they either get crazy paranoid, or they're you know,
Speaker 4: they lose it all or whatever it is. I mean,
Speaker 4: these are the stories that we tell. Maybe there are
Speaker 4: those out there who really pull it off as I
Speaker 4: enjoy it.
Speaker 5: I know some people who are in the high stakes
Speaker 5: international pot smuggling business and they all have like lots
Speaker 5: of homes around the world and managed to do it well.
Speaker 5: And I myself managed to get in and out of
Speaker 5: crime without having to do anytime, So like, it can
Speaker 5: be done as long as you set your sights on
Speaker 5: the horizon and not on some other dude.
Speaker 4: Yeah, good, good advice. You know what I would like
Speaker 4: as a talk bag?
Speaker 3: Hell yeah, oh my god, super.
Speaker 4: I love g.
Speaker 6: Hi, Saron and Elizabeth Blake.
Speaker 5: Here.
Speaker 6: I was just listening to your dolphins on LSD episode
Speaker 6: that I wanted to let you know because you said
Speaker 6: you haven't heard anything lately about using AI to decode
Speaker 6: animal language, but there is a program out there. It's
Speaker 6: called Project SETI. That's c E t I. I guess
Speaker 6: a take on SETI. Yes, and they are using AI
Speaker 6: to decode sperm whale code, which is amazing, and they're
Speaker 6: actually learning quite a few things. So I follow them
Speaker 6: on LinkedIn. It's super cool.
Speaker 4: That's awesome.
Speaker 3: Thank you for that. You just made me so happy.
Speaker 5: I'm one hundred per see if they have anywhere else
Speaker 5: because I'm not on LinkedIn, but I will co check.
Speaker 5: Maybe I can just find a normal website SETTI CTI.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he love it. Thanks for that.
Speaker 3: That's dope.
Speaker 4: That's it for today. You can find us online at
Speaker 4: ridiculous Crime dot com. We're also at ridicular Crime on
Speaker 4: Blue Sky on Instagram. Check it out, go to YouTube
Speaker 4: if that's where you do your podcast stuff Ridiculous Crime pod,
Speaker 4: or email us at ridiculous Crime at gmail dot com.
Speaker 4: Most importantly, leave us a talkback on the iHeart app.
Speaker 4: It's free. Please reach out. Ridiculous Crime is hosted by
Speaker 4: Elizabeth Dutton and Zaren Burnett, produced and edited by Indy
Speaker 4: five hundred, Grand Champion Most Improved Dave Cousten, starring Annals
Speaker 4: Rutgers Judith. Research is by Fort Lauderdale City council member
Speaker 4: Versa Brown and Antiguin Police Chief Jabari Davis. The theme
Speaker 4: song is by barge operator Thomas Lee and jet Ski
Speaker 4: instructor Travis Dutton. Post wardrobe is provided by Botany five
Speaker 4: hundred guest heron makeup by Sparkleshot and mister Andre. Executive
Speaker 4: producers are pit crew chief Ben Bolin and bagel chef
Speaker 4: Noel Brown. Ridicous Crime Say It One More Time Ridiqulious Crime.
Speaker 1: Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio. Four more podcasts
Speaker 1: from my heart Radio. Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.