Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey guys, this is Jake Halbern, host of Deep Cover.
Speaker 1: We're currently working on season two and we'll be sure
Speaker 1: to let you know when it will be coming out.
Speaker 1: But in the meantime, we have our first bonus episode
Speaker 1: for you. The supply side today's bonus episode. It's actually
Speaker 1: a story that I really wanted to include in season one.
Speaker 1: In fact, to tell you the truth, I had this
Speaker 1: big debate with my producer Karen Shakerjee. I kept saying, look,
Speaker 1: we got to include this story. She was like, it's awesome,
Speaker 1: but it's kind of a tangent, like a crazy side trip,
Speaker 1: and it just doesn't fit. Karen, she was right, kind
Speaker 1: of annoyingly, she's almost always right. But fortunately this story
Speaker 1: it's perfect for bonus episode because one thing that we
Speaker 1: really didn't get into during season one was the suppliers,
Speaker 1: the Colombians, the guys who actually harvested all those crops
Speaker 1: of marijuana. If you recall, that's where Ned ultimately wanted
Speaker 1: to go down to Columbia. He had a source named
Speaker 1: Simone who had all kinds of connections down there. These
Speaker 1: are the people that would have supplied the drugs to
Speaker 1: likely rich. There are the people that controlled everything on
Speaker 1: an Earth coast to Columbia. But in the end, and
Speaker 1: spoiler your guys, So if you haven't heard episode nine yet,
Speaker 1: hit pause, because Ned ends up leaving the FBI and
Speaker 1: the suppliers, well, they just kind of slipped away naturally.
Speaker 1: This was one piece of the puzzle that still really
Speaker 1: intrigued me. So in this episode, we're going to do
Speaker 1: a deep dive into the marijuana industry down in Columbia,
Speaker 1: and our guide, interestingly enough, is a guy who once
Speaker 1: helped supply Mike Vogel back in the day. Remember Mike,
Speaker 1: I had it in such a way that I really
Speaker 1: control the marijuana industry in Michigan, Anna Iver and all
Speaker 1: the rest. He was the grocery guy, the distributor with
Speaker 1: the big warehouse. Anyway, I heard about the supplier from
Speaker 1: a customs agent, and I was intrigued. I had this
Speaker 1: one question in particular that I wanted to run by him.
Speaker 1: If you remember from season one, our smugglers had all
Speaker 1: his products stuck down in Columbia, one million pounds of marijuana,
Speaker 1: and so I'm kind of wondering, what does the bullion
Speaker 1: pounds of marijuana look like a fucking mountain that's Tommy Powell.
Speaker 1: My name is either Tommy, tom or Thomas, depending on
Speaker 1: who I'm talking to. Tommy is to my friends, Tomas
Speaker 1: people that don't know me, and Thomas is for the government.
Speaker 1: I'm seventy two, I'm a lifelong vegetarian. I'm in great health,
Speaker 1: and I look forward to another thirty or four years.
Speaker 1: Tommy was a self identified smuggler and salesman for about
Speaker 1: a decade. He started in the early seventies. He was
Speaker 1: this American ex pat used to live and work down
Speaker 1: in Columbia inspecting marijuana crops. He's responsible for bringing in
Speaker 1: over three hundred thousand pounds of marijuana himself. Not just that,
Speaker 1: he estimates he helped supply a bunch of other smugglers
Speaker 1: who brought in somewhere in the range of two to
Speaker 1: three million pounds. But Tommy was the guy. He would
Speaker 1: be on the ground in Colombia and would often find
Speaker 1: himself in some pretty dicey situations. He's lived a crazy life,
Speaker 1: even by the standards of the character. As you got
Speaker 1: to know in season one, Jake, I can't describe the
Speaker 1: walk into the mountains. I mean, so treacherous, so treacherous.
Speaker 1: There was this one section. It's probably a hundred yards
Speaker 1: where there's a walk it's probably about three feet wide,
Speaker 1: and it's over this cliff and the drop is probably
Speaker 1: a thousand feet or five hundred feet or something. Some
Speaker 1: seriously scary if you look over the edge when you're walking,
Speaker 1: you really don't want to do that. So how does Tommy,
Speaker 1: a dude from Michigan end up living down in Columbia
Speaker 1: inspecting marijuana crops? Turns out it's kind of a wild story. Initially,
Speaker 1: he was a dealer in ann Arbor around the same
Speaker 1: time Mike Vogel was getting started. Mike Vogel I'm familiar with.
Speaker 1: He used to sell my reefer in Detroit before he
Speaker 1: got involved with those other criminals. At the time, Tommy
Speaker 1: says he was smuggling his reefer, as he calls it
Speaker 1: in from Mexico, but the product wasn't so great, nothing
Speaker 1: to rag about. Eventually, Tommy gets in trouble with the
Speaker 1: law when a drug sniffing dog named Bomber finds a
Speaker 1: foot locker of weed at the airport. Police played at
Speaker 1: sly and followed the foot locker as it was picked
Speaker 1: up and then taken to a house. The cops eventually
Speaker 1: barged in and made arrests Tommy. He was at the
Speaker 1: house he got arrested. We found news articles documenting all this.
Speaker 1: By the way, bottom line, this is bad news for Tommy.
Speaker 1: But Tommy says that his case was thrown out because
Speaker 1: the judge ruled it was an illegal search and seizure.
Speaker 1: Bomber apparently was not authorized to sniff that foot locker. Still,
Speaker 1: it was a close call, and so Tommy decides to
Speaker 1: go clean for a while. Anyhow, so I said, ah,
Speaker 1: I'm retiring. So I decided to go to Gainesville and
Speaker 1: visit my brother Billy. And at that time, water beds
Speaker 1: were real popular, and so I filled up my van
Speaker 1: with like about fifty water beds and that drove down
Speaker 1: to Gainesville and start selling them out of the back
Speaker 1: of my van. And so I was so successful at it.
Speaker 1: I mean I was doing good. I was selling thousands
Speaker 1: of them. But as you've probably gathered, he gets drawn
Speaker 1: back into the marijuana business. He meets a guy who
Speaker 1: offers some some new product imported from Jamaica. This, by
Speaker 1: the way, is the early nineteen seventies, and the export
Speaker 1: market for Jamaican weed is expanding. In the US, the branding,
Speaker 1: for lack of a better word, was good. Bob Marley
Speaker 1: was becoming a household name. Tommy says the Jamaican buds
Speaker 1: were a real upgrade from the Mexican stuff that he'd
Speaker 1: been peddling. So I started taking his Jamaicans up to
Speaker 1: ann Arbor and I probably sold Jesus Coming Guy alone
Speaker 1: twenty thousand and thirty thousand pounds maybe of his reefer.
Speaker 1: So while I'm selling it, I'm getting this Oh shit,
Speaker 1: this stuff is not good. It's good. It's better than
Speaker 1: that Mexican ship, but it's good. So I put it
Speaker 1: in my mind. I says, man, I'm going to go
Speaker 1: to Columbian and see if I can get from better
Speaker 1: reefer out of there. And the reason that he says
Speaker 1: this is because at some point he gets a chance
Speaker 1: to smoke some of that Columbian weed. I think I
Speaker 1: was at a Partian and Arbor and there were some
Speaker 1: hipsters there and they had some Columbian Maryluana and we
Speaker 1: smoked it, and I smoked, and I go home, Shit, man,
Speaker 1: we've got to get this stuff. You know. It was
Speaker 1: that much better. It was two times three times better.
Speaker 1: It looked better you know, and it was definitely had
Speaker 1: a higher THC content for sure. Then one day two
Speaker 1: of Tommy's friends, Ronnie and Dave, propose a kind of
Speaker 1: spur of the moment trip. They said, hey, let's go
Speaker 1: to Columbia. I says, yeah, man, let's go to Columbia,
Speaker 1: go up the north coast and see if we can
Speaker 1: find something out up there. You know. I Jamaican ships
Speaker 1: getting boring. So we got on a plane Abianca flight
Speaker 1: out of Miami, and Ronnie comes up like ten minutes
Speaker 1: after the flight's going and says, hey, man, you want
Speaker 1: to take a hit of ascid? Oh my lord. So
Speaker 1: I says, yeah, man, I'll take a hit of Assis.
Speaker 1: Landed in Bogata and proceeded to go directly to the
Speaker 1: closest house of ill repute and got an aunt of
Speaker 1: cocaine and like five bottles of old par Scotch and
Speaker 1: sat in there and drank in there and did other
Speaker 1: nfarious things, and I crawled out the front door. Tommy
Speaker 1: says that by this point, Ronnie and Dave, there's two
Speaker 1: buddies that he'd flown down with. They were in rough shape.
Speaker 1: They were so freaked out they didn't want to stay.
Speaker 1: So I don't want to stay either, because I'd be
Speaker 1: all alone then and I didn't know anybody, you know.
Speaker 1: So we hopped back on a cane and flew back
Speaker 1: to my Ammy. When you went to Columbia that first time,
Speaker 1: did you actually make contact with any marijuana fellers, No,
Speaker 1: just with the ladies of the night. A few months later,
Speaker 1: Tommy gives it another go, and he has a bold plan.
Speaker 1: He wants to set up a twenty thousand pounds shipment
Speaker 1: of weed. He heads back down to Columbia this time,
Speaker 1: skips the whole acid trip brothel visit, and actually manages
Speaker 1: to get an introduction to a reputable supplier, a very cool,
Speaker 1: nice Columbian guy, the nicest value want to run into
Speaker 1: in the world. And his nickname but we nicknamed him uncle,
Speaker 1: and his name was gamo Avola. He's going up in
Speaker 1: the mountains talk to the farmers, getting whatever you can
Speaker 1: from and he's bringing a spank, samples and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: So it's the stuff's awesome. So yeah, yeah, we'll take
Speaker 1: twenty thousand, he says. Here, okay, I could do twenty thousand,
Speaker 1: I says, well, when it comes down the loaden night,
Speaker 1: he only had sixteen thousands, but that's how the Colombian
Speaker 1: market started. Tommy says he was the guy, like the pioneer,
Speaker 1: who first smuggled really big loads of Colombian weed to
Speaker 1: the United States. It's a bold claim and one that
Speaker 1: I couldn't totally verify, but the timing of it is right.
Speaker 1: Starting in the mid nineteen seventies, weed from Mexico kind
Speaker 1: of lost its popularity, in part because Mexican authorities began
Speaker 1: using a herbicide known as paraquat to poison marijuana crops
Speaker 1: down there. According to declassified CIA documents, American consumers began
Speaker 1: to quote prefer the better manicured and reputedly more potent
Speaker 1: Colombian marijuana end quote. Tommy says he was the guy
Speaker 1: who first brought in large quantities of this more potent
Speaker 1: stuff starting in nineteen seventy two. It's a really big success.
Speaker 1: He buys the weed for six dollars a pound and
Speaker 1: sells it for two hundred and forty pound back in Michigan,
Speaker 1: and it's really good stuff. He keeps making trips down
Speaker 1: there each year. I tried to always get my loads
Speaker 1: together and make sure they're ready by December or I
Speaker 1: had a trip together by December, because that's when they
Speaker 1: did the harvest, and that's when they had the best marijuana.
Speaker 1: Anybody that else goes to Columbian, you know, they all
Speaker 1: went down there and they would take anything they'd stashed
Speaker 1: that reefer in warehouses, you know, and it'd be like
Speaker 1: eight ten months old, you know, and just be trash weed,
Speaker 1: you know. And then they also packed it in bricks,
Speaker 1: these big fifty pound bricks where they use they use
Speaker 1: a press pressing machine and pressed it all up down tight,
Speaker 1: you know, and screwed up all the buds, you know.
Speaker 1: So I started, I demanded that none of mine to
Speaker 1: be pressed like that. I wanted mind to be in pillows.
Speaker 1: We call them, nice fluffy pillows of high quality weed.
Speaker 1: That was the key. Tommy ended up making a lot
Speaker 1: of money, so much money in fact, that he decides
Speaker 1: to hide some of it in the ground. He puts
Speaker 1: three hundred and eighty three eight hundred and forty dollars
Speaker 1: in a suitcase and buried it on some lamb that
Speaker 1: he owned in Michigan. Sometime later, this hunter comes along,
Speaker 1: finds it, and being a good Samaritan, the hunter hands
Speaker 1: it over to the state police. Tommy then tried to
Speaker 1: get the suitcase and the money back. He actually shows
Speaker 1: up with a receipt for the suitcase, proving that hey,
Speaker 1: I purchased this particular handback. He even gave a sworn
Speaker 1: statement saying the money was hit, but he took the
Speaker 1: fifth when it came to explaining how he got it
Speaker 1: no dice. The police wouldn't hand it over the suitcase.
Speaker 1: Though it made big news, newspapers and Detroit wrote about it.
Speaker 1: It was even mentioned on an episode of Sixty Minutes.
Speaker 1: None of his notoriety was especially good for tom in
Speaker 1: the long run. He says it really put him on
Speaker 1: the authority's radar. Not long after this, he was indicted
Speaker 1: by the FEDS, So naturally, Tummy sends to run for it,
Speaker 1: become a fugitive. He flies to Europe, spend some time
Speaker 1: and some money there, and then he bounces around a
Speaker 1: bit to Morocco, the Canary Islands, down to the Bahamas
Speaker 1: before deciding where he'll land next. That so hell, and
Speaker 1: might as well get it over worth. I'm just going
Speaker 1: to Columbia. They're not going to extradite me out of there.
Speaker 1: There are never going to get me out of there,
Speaker 1: you know, I get the world's baddest ass bodyguards. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's kind of how I ended up in Columbia.
Speaker 1: I wanted to be safe, well, relatively safe. There was
Speaker 1: always the danger that he'd fall off one of those
Speaker 1: cliffs or worse. More on this when we come back
Speaker 1: after the break. So Tommy was under indictment in the
Speaker 1: United States, spend some time on the lamb, and then
Speaker 1: moves down to Columbia. He deepens his connections there, makes
Speaker 1: more trips out to the countryside to inspect the weed
Speaker 1: that he wants to buy. Now, typically he didn't do
Speaker 1: this in the fields, but at these makeshift marijuana warehouses
Speaker 1: that were set up right at the base of the mountains.
Speaker 1: And all the while, Tommy says that he maintained his
Speaker 1: distribution network back in Michigan. I controlled the boats from
Speaker 1: the onloading spots, the trucks, and the market and ann arbor.
Speaker 1: You know, already at that point you're telling me that
Speaker 1: you weren't just working supply side. You were actually like
Speaker 1: complete system. Like you were there at the College of
Speaker 1: Vertically Integrated vertically Integrated Marijuana Business. I always did it
Speaker 1: all myself. It's interesting because like with Lee Rich and
Speaker 1: his group, they basically always just subcontracted out to supply.
Speaker 1: They had dance supply partners. If I'm understanding you correctly,
Speaker 1: you're saying that like you manage the supply side yourself personally. Yep.
Speaker 1: I would go on like three days a week and
Speaker 1: go inspect marijuana. And I would inspect marijuana for other
Speaker 1: people too, you know, because some of these smugglers quote
Speaker 1: non quote, they they didn't know how to get it,
Speaker 1: where to get it, who to get it from, and
Speaker 1: how it was going to be safe, and how much
Speaker 1: they were going to pay and all that shit. I
Speaker 1: would take care of all that, especially for my friends. Wait,
Speaker 1: so were you like, were you like a consultant? When
Speaker 1: you say you're doing this for other people? Are you
Speaker 1: are you charging them? Oh? Yeah, I would charge him.
Speaker 1: Might get hard of the load. You're like the guy,
Speaker 1: like you're the equivalent of like the Costco guy who
Speaker 1: like comes in to check out the coffee beans or
Speaker 1: like the grapes or something to make sure that they're
Speaker 1: up to Costco standard. Yeah, it's on one of these
Speaker 1: quality inspection trips. The tummy visits what he calls a
Speaker 1: quote mountain of marijuana out in the Guahira Desert. And
Speaker 1: that's how he knew how to answer my question, what
Speaker 1: does a million pounds of marijuana look like? It was
Speaker 1: it was up in the water here and I was
Speaker 1: looking for a load of sixty thousand I think in
Speaker 1: uh and say, oh, well, we're going to take you
Speaker 1: to this low here and you can pick out whatever
Speaker 1: you want. Well, it was get late in the day
Speaker 1: and we decided to we didn't want to drive in
Speaker 1: the water here and at night. Just something you really
Speaker 1: don't want to do. And because you got M nineteen
Speaker 1: and H and h F a dose F two, you know,
Speaker 1: it's just the FBI and Colombian and the dogs, is
Speaker 1: uh the CI A wait wait, can you just go
Speaker 1: back and explain this again? Do you help me visualize
Speaker 1: a million pounds of marijuana? Like, what does it look like? Well,
Speaker 1: when you're driving up to it, it's like a like
Speaker 1: a big mound or you know, And it was all
Speaker 1: piled up into like a peak. And that's where we
Speaker 1: went and built our little fort spend the night in. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thirty feet thirty five somewhere in there. Wow, that's like
Speaker 1: a three story tall building that was totally amazing. Wait,
Speaker 1: so so you're telling me you climbed up on top
Speaker 1: of this mountain marijuana. You built a fourth out of
Speaker 1: the marijuana. Yeah, we'll put up little you know, put
Speaker 1: up little walls and stuff, you know, and you know
Speaker 1: they're like bricks or like building blox. Hell, it's like
Speaker 1: a you know, a rector set or something, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, what are those what's that where they have
Speaker 1: all the plastic blocks and they build castles and shipped
Speaker 1: out of them here in Florida the Danish company Legos. Yeah, Legos. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was like a lego. It was a meritorial lego.
Speaker 1: It's while he's building his lego for it that he
Speaker 1: gets a sense for exactly what kind of weed this is. So,
Speaker 1: but we went up to the top of the mountain
Speaker 1: and started digging out all the bales. You know, these
Speaker 1: are all like these were hard pressed bales. You know.
Speaker 1: We I never did the hard pressed bales because well
Speaker 1: I did them in the beginning because I didn't know
Speaker 1: any better. I was spent the whole next day going
Speaker 1: through the whole damned lot of the ship and there
Speaker 1: was nothing in there. There was any good. You know,
Speaker 1: it was dry and dusty. It's out in the middle
Speaker 1: of the Wahara Desert. Man, it's probably one hundred degrees
Speaker 1: and it was dry and just dusty, and some of
Speaker 1: it was moldy. And you know, it's just the stuff
Speaker 1: that anam smuggler would go ahead and entertain putting on
Speaker 1: her boats. So, yeah, the mountain of marijuana was made
Speaker 1: of really shitty weed. And Tommy, he didn't do shitty weed.
Speaker 1: He did pillows of the nice fluffy stuff. Tommy has
Speaker 1: a whole process worked out. Once he'd okay a batch,
Speaker 1: he had to move it down from the mountains where
Speaker 1: it was grown and get it loaded up on ships
Speaker 1: bound for America. And this there's no easy task. Even
Speaker 1: the CIA recognize this. In one declassified report from nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty two, it says, quote, the complicated logistics of smuggling
Speaker 1: Colombian marijuana, which calls for massive quantities to be hauled
Speaker 1: over long distances for large amounts of capital, attracted a
Speaker 1: new class of smuggling organizations structured along corporate lines. Yep,
Speaker 1: that's Tommy. And to tackle those logistics, at least at
Speaker 1: the start of the process, he used mules and or donkeys. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot it takes a lot. I mean, okay, look
Speaker 1: at like take a donkey's or more sure footed, and
Speaker 1: they can't carry as much as a mule. So donkey
Speaker 1: could probably carry two hundred pounds maybe two fifty, you know,
Speaker 1: and then a mule another matter, the mule could probably
Speaker 1: carry four hundred. Wow. So it was the mule preparable
Speaker 1: for the donkey. The donkeys were more sure footed. Mules, well,
Speaker 1: sometimes they slipped. And Tommy saw this for himself on
Speaker 1: one very harrowing part of the trail they were traversing
Speaker 1: it at night. He had all his heinekens, all our heinekens.
Speaker 1: He had like six cases of heinekens on that mule.
Speaker 1: And what happened. There's a washout area where the water
Speaker 1: runs down the mountain and it carved a little bee,
Speaker 1: and I was watching it, and the mule stepped in
Speaker 1: that bee and went over the mountain with the heineken.
Speaker 1: So you did you actually see your mule with all
Speaker 1: the hind hims go over the edge. Yea. At the
Speaker 1: end of this ledge, there's there's a little waterfall, you know,
Speaker 1: like a shower built into the side of the cliff
Speaker 1: at the end, and then there's a pool of water
Speaker 1: where there's like a it's like a big jakuzi, I
Speaker 1: mean probably ten fifteen feet across and three or four
Speaker 1: feet deep. And I was sitting in there and drinking
Speaker 1: some toniac and watching the mule, and then he stepped off.
Speaker 1: And I'm telling you what, you never heard anything like
Speaker 1: that in your life. I could never. I mean it
Speaker 1: was the cross between a horse, K mean and a
Speaker 1: donkey bay. I mean, it was terrible sound. And he
Speaker 1: hit the rocks and that was the end of him.
Speaker 1: Once it was down from the mountains, Tommy and his
Speaker 1: associates had to move the stuff to the coast in trucks.
Speaker 1: There were always some military checkpoints, but they knew the
Speaker 1: right guys to pay off. Tommy's an entire business model,
Speaker 1: by the way, matches up almost exactly with the intel
Speaker 1: that the CIA gathered at the time. It's almost as
Speaker 1: if the CIA's report was describing Tommy's operations. The report
Speaker 1: mentioned convoys of up to two hundred mules and the
Speaker 1: fact that smugglers typically placed bribes for each shipment. The
Speaker 1: last stage of the process, according to the CIA report,
Speaker 1: was loading the weed into canoes bringing it out to
Speaker 1: supply boats. Tommy did this in Ta Ganga, a little
Speaker 1: fishing village located on the Caribbean coast of Columbia. Tommy
Speaker 1: says that the harbor was run by the native tribes
Speaker 1: and that the chief was a good friend of his.
Speaker 1: These locals helped him load the weed onto smuggling ships
Speaker 1: that pulled into the harbor, and they would use these dugouts. So,
Speaker 1: you know, they pick up tree and the biggest tree
Speaker 1: they can find, they chop it down and they carve
Speaker 1: out a nice boat, make it into a boat. And
Speaker 1: they had one dug out there. I swear to god,
Speaker 1: it was the biggest thing I ever saw. I was like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, but it was from a big tree
Speaker 1: from Stowe. Gotta be one piece. And that's thing. How
Speaker 1: five thousand pounds. That's basically a canoe that can hold
Speaker 1: five thousand pounds of marijuana. Yeah, it was a one
Speaker 1: of a kind. And that was Tommy's business model, finding
Speaker 1: the fluffy pillows of weed, moving it by donkey, then
Speaker 1: by truck, and then a giant dugout canoe floating into
Speaker 1: shrimp boags, smuggling it back to the US and selling
Speaker 1: it in Michigan. It all worked really well, but Eventually,
Speaker 1: Tommy says, the business warmed down. He got ripped off
Speaker 1: on one load. He decided, know what time to retire
Speaker 1: and really retire. This time he met a Swedish woman
Speaker 1: on the beach into Ganga and she got pregnant. He
Speaker 1: decided he wanted to follow her home to Sweden, but
Speaker 1: first he needed to make sure that he couldn't be
Speaker 1: extradited from there. I remember, he said, the days before
Speaker 1: the internet. So you sides, he needs to go to
Speaker 1: well a law library, a really good law library, the
Speaker 1: International Law Library at Harvard University. You went up to Cambridge,
Speaker 1: mass for this, Yeah, I went there specifically for that.
Speaker 1: I had a good time too. I love sitting on
Speaker 1: that bridge watching all them guys rolling their boats and
Speaker 1: shit like that. But what I did is I had
Speaker 1: some ideas. I had a forger at that time, and
Speaker 1: he's a really good forger, ande he forged some paperwork
Speaker 1: for me. You know that I was a visiting professor
Speaker 1: from the University of Florida, so I could have access
Speaker 1: to the library, and every day I'd go into the
Speaker 1: university and study the Extradition Treaty, a case law with
Speaker 1: Sweden and the United States and I figured out that
Speaker 1: according to the law of reciprocity, that there's no way
Speaker 1: they could get me for a conspira or for the
Speaker 1: one I was really worried about. The one that had
Speaker 1: me with life with no parole plus seventy years was
Speaker 1: continuous criminal enterprise. While continuous criminal enterprise is based on
Speaker 1: predicate defenses. This didn't match any Swedish laws whatsoever. It
Speaker 1: was non extraditable, it was non extraditable crime, and sol
Speaker 1: was conspiracy. Oh, I figured I'm cool in Sweden. So
Speaker 1: he moved to Sweden, married the woman he met on
Speaker 1: the beach, and became a dad. It all worked out
Speaker 1: pretty well for about three years until the US entered
Speaker 1: into a new extradition treaty with Sweden. So much for
Speaker 1: all of his sleothing at the Harvard Law Library, Tommy
Speaker 1: was indicted for conspiracy to import marijuana and extradited back
Speaker 1: to the United States. He ended up spending six years
Speaker 1: in prison before he was finally released in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 1: He says he's very proud that he never cooperated with
Speaker 1: the government. He now lives down in Saint Petersburg. He's
Speaker 1: reinvented himself as a computer expert and he actually got
Speaker 1: a degree in digital forensics at the age of seventy one.
Speaker 1: He's working on a memoir called Reefer, recounting all of
Speaker 1: his life stories, and let me tell you, there are
Speaker 1: a lot of them. Deep Cover is produced by Jacob
Speaker 1: Smith and edited by Karen Shakerjee. Original music and our
Speaker 1: theme was composed by Luis Gara, fact checking by Amy Gaines.
Speaker 1: Miao Bell is Pushkin's executive producer. Special thanks to Julia Barton,
Speaker 1: Heather Fame, Carly Mcleori Lee, Tom Mallad, Maya Kanig, Eric Sandler,
Speaker 1: Maggie Taylor, Kadija Holland, and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: Additional thanks to Jeff Singer at Stowaway Entertainment. You can
Speaker 1: learn more about Tommy Powell on his website Tommy Powell
Speaker 1: dot net, and stay tuned to this feed from more
Speaker 1: bonus episodes and announcements about season two. I'm Jake Holder.
Speaker 1: All right, Tommy, I gotta run, but um, all right, brother,
Speaker 1: it's been real. We'll be able to just together and
Speaker 1: drink some agua dante. That would be great. I look
Speaker 1: overd to it. Thanks that you ever at it. No
Speaker 1: I had it So the last time I drank Agua dente,
Speaker 1: I drank it with the remains of my partner, Victor
Speaker 1: in the Agua dente. For this, two brothers, all three
Speaker 1: of us, they put some of the ashes in the
Speaker 1: Agua dante and did shots of Aguadiente with his bones
Speaker 1: in it. You drank your friend, Yeah, how was that?
Speaker 1: Drinking the remains of your friend and fucking horrible