Speaker 1: School of Humans. It's nineteen eighty six and I'm eleven.
Speaker 1: This year stands out to me for many reasons. For one,
Speaker 1: it introduced the cool ranch Dorito, a coveted slumber party
Speaker 1: junk food for me and my friends who came over
Speaker 1: to watch Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Labyrinth, and Pretty and Pink,
Speaker 1: which all came out that year. I also remember the
Speaker 1: horrific Challenger Space Shuttle disaster. The spaceship blew up on
Speaker 1: live TV in front of every American kid, including me
Speaker 1: watching at school with my classmates. And at this time,
Speaker 1: my Saturday morning cartoons were frequently interrupted by Ronald and
Speaker 1: Nancy Reagan's relentless Just Say No campaign. Not long ago,
Speaker 1: in Oakland, California, I was asked by a group of
Speaker 1: children what to do if they were all for drugs,
Speaker 1: and I answered, just say no. That's Nancy Reagan. After
Speaker 1: her husband Ronald Reagan, a former blist movie actor, was
Speaker 1: elected president in nineteen eighty, his administrations Just Say No
Speaker 1: ads and PSA's flooded TVs and radios urgently instructing American
Speaker 1: kids to stand up to drugs, just say no, and
Speaker 1: turn in anyone using drugs to the police, including your parents. Today,
Speaker 1: there's a drug and alcohol abuse epidemic in this country
Speaker 1: and no one is say from it. Drugs steal away
Speaker 1: so much, they take and take, until finally, every time
Speaker 1: a drug goes into a child, something else is forced out,
Speaker 1: like love and hope and trust and confidence. Drugs take
Speaker 1: away the dream from every child's heart and replace it
Speaker 1: with a nightmare. In nineteen eighty six, Reagan's Anti Drug
Speaker 1: Abuse Act is passed. The Act renewed the war on
Speaker 1: drugs and instituted mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug offenses,
Speaker 1: and maximum sentences ran to life. That year, my dad
Speaker 1: does a trip moving so much pot that if he'd
Speaker 1: gotten caught, he could have received a lengthy prison sentence
Speaker 1: under Reagan's new law. Now, this trip is a major success,
Speaker 1: but it's also the beginning of the end of my
Speaker 1: dad's career as a pot smuggler, because, like success, rip
Speaker 1: offs are very common in the illicit, all cash world
Speaker 1: of smuggling, And following the biggest triumph of my dad's
Speaker 1: career came the biggest ripoff of his life. I'm Rainbow
Speaker 1: Valentine and this is disorganized crime smuggler's daughter rolling the douving, young,
Speaker 1: free and groovy, making it up. We rolled along, rolling
Speaker 1: along far out the country, roll he rag in the
Speaker 1: Golden ganging York State, making it up as we roll along?
Speaker 1: Did mom just leave? How do I know how many
Speaker 1: things come? I'm coming up around here? Will you join
Speaker 1: us for them? With your key for the stories about Arlados?
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty six, my dad is rolling along in
Speaker 1: his cross country smuggling enterprise, and his personal silk road
Speaker 1: is a well oiled machine. He's honed his skills accomplishing
Speaker 1: smuggling success with his handful of trusted colleagues in Marin
Speaker 1: County in New York. Most Saturdays, he takes me and
Speaker 1: my little brother to the grown Ups Mill Valley baseball
Speaker 1: game at the foot of Mount tam and the Crisp
Speaker 1: Marine Air the ball game I mentioned in episode one
Speaker 1: when I learned that most of the players were coincidentally
Speaker 1: also smugglers. Now this game is where fun and business converge.
Speaker 1: During these ball games, my dad gets friendly with a
Speaker 1: player we're calling baseball. A sparkly, cheerful art and theater
Speaker 1: enthusiast working in the same trade as my dad, but
Speaker 1: a different scene. Now, baseball has around thirty thousand pounds
Speaker 1: of Mexican pot coming in and needs some people to
Speaker 1: distribute it. Also, by the way, Baseball is the smuggler
Speaker 1: who coined the term savings them loam the smugglers bank.
Speaker 1: He told me about this trip, it was I'm in
Speaker 1: a huge load of Mexican came in. You know, well,
Speaker 1: twenty five thirty thousand pounds. That that's big. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's big. So my dad teams up with Baseball as
Speaker 1: one of his distributors and over six months smuggles over
Speaker 1: one third of Baseball's thirty thousand pounds of Mexican pot.
Speaker 1: My East Coast guy says, yeah, I think we can
Speaker 1: do a lot of this back east. We're using the
Speaker 1: biggest rental truck you can rent, twenty four footers and
Speaker 1: filling it with a time at a time, because there
Speaker 1: was really a lot of it. Part of my dad's
Speaker 1: job on all of his tricks, particularly bigger ones like this,
Speaker 1: was quality control. Raised by a professional art critic, My
Speaker 1: dad is a discerning connoisseur of everything, including pot, and
Speaker 1: he preferred to distribute quality pot. Now, according to my dad,
Speaker 1: great weed is aromatic, not full of shake or seeds
Speaker 1: and comes in loose, fluffy bales, not firm pressed bricks.
Speaker 1: When you get that big, you've got to separate the
Speaker 1: good stuff from the mediocre stuff from the shitty shake.
Speaker 1: So after running out of all the good stuff, there
Speaker 1: were two other levels, and I remember doing one deal
Speaker 1: locally with the low level stuff and the guy bought
Speaker 1: five hundred pounds for cash, and I made a hundred
Speaker 1: bucks a pound on it. So in one two hour segment,
Speaker 1: I made fifty grand. Holy yeah, which was coold. This
Speaker 1: trip with Baseball is the most successful of my dad's
Speaker 1: twenty two years in smuggling, and he says it's the
Speaker 1: happiest story of his career, from the excellent colleagues he
Speaker 1: worked with, to the slickness of the operation and how
Speaker 1: much money he ended up making. To give you a perspective, Divonne,
Speaker 1: the whole trip I ended up over six months selling
Speaker 1: thirteen thousand pounds, which was the biggest trip I had
Speaker 1: ever done, and it was so comfortable and easy. We
Speaker 1: got into this regular flow which was fabulous and and
Speaker 1: didn't really have competition because we were one of the
Speaker 1: two big distributors of the whole thing, and they just
Speaker 1: loved it, and we were easy to deal with, and
Speaker 1: we through that period of time we made about seven
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash. Seven hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty thousand dollars in nineteen eighty six is worth over
Speaker 1: one point seven million dollars in today's money. By the way,
Speaker 1: this is the seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in
Speaker 1: cash my dad absurdly laundered in socks in episode six.
Speaker 1: So to celebrate the success of the trip, my family
Speaker 1: went on a fancy vacation to Barbados. We went holidays
Speaker 1: fairly regularly to Caabo, Saint Lucas, Hawaii, Yllapa, a remote
Speaker 1: Mexican destination for psychedelic pioneers and hippies. I see a
Speaker 1: pattern now. We usually vacationed in between trips with family
Speaker 1: friends who, of course, it turns out we're also pot smugglers.
Speaker 1: So we had a vacation. Yeah, yeah, we had a
Speaker 1: which was really abraded. Yeah, we did. We celebrated. So
Speaker 1: we booked this villa in Barbados for ten days. It
Speaker 1: was I don't know, six bedrooms, and it had a pool,
Speaker 1: and it had a chauffeur and a maid and a
Speaker 1: cook and a just a whole several people who were
Speaker 1: always there working or would take you anywhere, or would
Speaker 1: do anything. And it wasn't on the water. It was
Speaker 1: up on the hill above town and we went there
Speaker 1: for Thanksgiving. We're eating flying fish every day, fried fish.
Speaker 1: It was delicious. Right, we had the flying fish, and
Speaker 1: so they would bring in fresh fish that was good.
Speaker 1: Who was delicious? It was amazing. I'll never forget this
Speaker 1: trip one because of its grandeur, but also it coincided
Speaker 1: with the appearance of Haley's Comet, only visible to the
Speaker 1: naked eye every seventy five to seventy six years. So
Speaker 1: do you remember seeing Haley's commet at Narvators? Do you
Speaker 1: remember that we watched it right one one night by
Speaker 1: the people by the pool of the big right, which
Speaker 1: was next to the polo field. That was that big
Speaker 1: grass thing was a polo field next to them, next
Speaker 1: to that long pool. Haley's Comet has been recorded since
Speaker 1: ancient times and in civilizations around the world, and has
Speaker 1: been associated with both good and bad omens, perhaps a
Speaker 1: foreshadowing of my family's approaching hardships. This family vacation was
Speaker 1: the last time we celebrated a successful trip. The last
Speaker 1: time my dad splurged on decadence and the last time
Speaker 1: money came easily, it was the end of my family's
Speaker 1: monetary wealth and cushy lifestyle. Of course, my dad didn't
Speaker 1: know that yet, nor did he know that he was
Speaker 1: about to make one of the worst judgment calls of
Speaker 1: his life. I'm Rainbow Valentine, and this is disorganized crime.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back. So before getting into my dad's
Speaker 1: big financial misstep, let's go back to the Reagans. With
Speaker 1: the passage of Reagan's Drug Abuse Act, the stress of
Speaker 1: my parents double lives was compounding. The Just Say No
Speaker 1: campaign flooded radios, TVs, and billboards across the country. I
Speaker 1: reached back out to Dennis McNally, our official counterculture historian,
Speaker 1: to talk about the Reagans and just say now to
Speaker 1: understand the Reagans. So it's important to go back a
Speaker 1: little bit. In nineteen sixty six, he ran for a
Speaker 1: governor of California, and he ran, in various subtle ways,
Speaker 1: on a platform attacking the students at Berkeley who had
Speaker 1: had the free speech movement in nineteen sixty four. He
Speaker 1: conflated the students at cal Berkeley with hippies and said
Speaker 1: that his famous line was that hippies were like, let's say,
Speaker 1: they had hair like Jane, talked like Tarzan, and smelled
Speaker 1: like the chimp with a cheetah or whatever it was called. Secondly,
Speaker 1: he attacked He ran an anti black campaign against the
Speaker 1: people who had rioted at the Watts riots in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty five, and that is of what got him elected.
Speaker 1: This is the platform that got Reagan elected California governor
Speaker 1: in the sixties and US President in nineteen eighty. Nancy
Speaker 1: Reagan had these extreme pretensions to the real social upper class,
Speaker 1: to the the you know, the old money that in
Speaker 1: some way still still runs America, and one of the
Speaker 1: other And one of the side effects of that and
Speaker 1: the holding over from his opposition to cal Berkeley and
Speaker 1: the free speech movement, was just saying no. The the
Speaker 1: impact of just saying no was simply to lump all
Speaker 1: drugs together, and so anybody that had anything to do
Speaker 1: with drugs, no matter what the drug, was going to
Speaker 1: get as much time as the judges could figure out
Speaker 1: to give them. Simply it harshed everything you didn't want
Speaker 1: to get caught much of. Just say no and The
Speaker 1: Anti Drug Abuse Act was targeted at crack and cocaine,
Speaker 1: but as Dennis said, all drugs and drug users were
Speaker 1: lumped together as one melodramatic evil. The Anti Drug Abuse
Speaker 1: Act of nineteen eighty six required a minimum sentence of
Speaker 1: five years for drug offenses that involved one hundred kilos
Speaker 1: of marijuana, plus a minimum sentence of ten years for
Speaker 1: drug offenses that involved one thousand kilos of marijuana. Now
Speaker 1: one hundred kilos is roughly two hundred and twenty pounds.
Speaker 1: A thousand kilos of pot is over two thousand, two
Speaker 1: hundred pounds. With the thirteen thousand pounds my dad had
Speaker 1: just smuggled, he could have been sentenced to decades under
Speaker 1: the new law. So one thing we've done this season
Speaker 1: is show the fun side of disorganized crime, because my
Speaker 1: mom and dad remember their past truly with the glass
Speaker 1: half full. They're fun and funny people, and there's always
Speaker 1: a ridiculous twist to their stories. That was totally interesting mom,
Speaker 1: Because my mom and I recently visited with one of
Speaker 1: her old girlfriends whose brothers were busted and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: drive home. My mom began having revelations. Um, you said
Speaker 1: you had a plan B. What was your plan B?
Speaker 1: I'll have to remember, you know I had passed sports
Speaker 1: and to go to just gonna go to Europe. You
Speaker 1: know you could do that then because there was no
Speaker 1: day trouble. Did you have like passports and different names? Yeah,
Speaker 1: different names made the past the sky that I knew
Speaker 1: here was like this really sleazy counterfeter. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: where are those passports now? Oh? We burned everything, you know,
Speaker 1: way long time ago. You burned it. We didn't sell them.
Speaker 1: They'd evaporated somehow, you know, the evaporated. That's not possible.
Speaker 1: That's one of our terms for losing. It's evaporated. So
Speaker 1: this podcast has brought up a lot of repressed memories
Speaker 1: and emotions within my parents. That was cathartic for my
Speaker 1: mom to remember. She'd suppressed a ton of fear and
Speaker 1: stress over the years, raising kids and hiding the business.
Speaker 1: She told me more while she was watering in the garden,
Speaker 1: the stress of being Yeah, but I was trading a dune.
Speaker 1: I would I'd rather be comfortable than in poverty and
Speaker 1: have to keep my mouth shut. I'd rather be comfortable
Speaker 1: and have another I doned it once with her doctor.
Speaker 1: My mom just revealed what was going on at the house.
Speaker 1: It was too stressful to hold it in. I don't
Speaker 1: know something about it. I just like blurted it out,
Speaker 1: like we are so much weighted around. It's just, you know,
Speaker 1: there's a hundred pounds in the basement. I'm freaking out,
Speaker 1: and he said, oh, that's what's going on. It's hard
Speaker 1: to keep secrets. I'm trying to think if there's any
Speaker 1: girlfriends that knew my secrets. I don't know. I couldn't
Speaker 1: talk to a therapist around her. That can't keep any
Speaker 1: secrets from moving. Under the Reagan administration, people were getting
Speaker 1: busted for pot and going to jail in alarming numbers
Speaker 1: because cannabis laws were draconian. In nineteen eighty eight, the
Speaker 1: Anti Drug Abuse Act was enhanced, which doubled down on
Speaker 1: policies to create a drug free America. As a result
Speaker 1: of these laws and the impact on the drug smuggling community,
Speaker 1: my parents were under enormous stress, more stress than ever before,
Speaker 1: and according to scientific research, stress and decision making are
Speaker 1: a terrible combination. To understand this further, I called my
Speaker 1: dad's friend, psychiatrist and neuroplasticity expert, doctor Michael H. Moscowitz.
Speaker 1: Now he's been working in public health and medicine for
Speaker 1: almost forty years. I used to babysit his kids when
Speaker 1: I was a teenager driving to my job, and the
Speaker 1: car given to me when I turned sixteen a giant
Speaker 1: American former pot smuggling boot of a vehicle. I was
Speaker 1: so embarrassed to drive it. So, you know, it's interesting
Speaker 1: because you know, the effects we see in people's behaviors
Speaker 1: is that they become less effective in problem solving, planning,
Speaker 1: executive function, all those types of things. And that means
Speaker 1: that when people are stressed, they're going to make mistakes.
Speaker 1: They're going to say and do things that they don't
Speaker 1: really mean, but then now they have to own them.
Speaker 1: They're they're going to really not function at in an
Speaker 1: optimal way. But when that when that stressful chemistry gets
Speaker 1: trapped in that area of the brain, it shuts off
Speaker 1: the other parts of the brain that we use to
Speaker 1: reason and do other things so that we can make
Speaker 1: a decision to do what has to be done and
Speaker 1: not weigh it over and think about it and run
Speaker 1: it through a lot of different processes. What about What
Speaker 1: are your thoughts on people making financial decisions in stressful times, well,
Speaker 1: you know, if you can avoid it, you should avoid it. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: those decisions sometimes come up and force themselves on people.
Speaker 1: I would say in that circumstance, it would be great
Speaker 1: if people just kind of stepped back before they made
Speaker 1: those decisions, did some deep breathing, if they knew meditation,
Speaker 1: to meditate a little bit, just really try to get
Speaker 1: themselves calm down and slow everything down before they make
Speaker 1: those decisions, because the fireworks going off in their brain
Speaker 1: is really going to make it hard for them to
Speaker 1: make a decision that's rational and will hold up. Yeah. Awesome.
Speaker 1: I read that in the Psychologist, one of the journals,
Speaker 1: that they discovered people when under stress sort of ignore
Speaker 1: the negative outcomes of a situation and focus on the
Speaker 1: positive outcomes. Yeah, it's true, and it's one of those
Speaker 1: things that involves in a bunch of different chemistry in
Speaker 1: the brain and different regions of the brain that are
Speaker 1: being lit up and set off. We have a reward
Speaker 1: center deep in our brain that is good on most things,
Speaker 1: but when people are in a stressful situation, it tends
Speaker 1: to shift over to more addictive and compulsive behaviors than
Speaker 1: healthy ones. So feeling stressed changes how people weigh risk
Speaker 1: and reward. When under stress, people pay more attention to
Speaker 1: the upside of a possible outcome. The research found stress
Speaker 1: makes people focus on the way things could go right
Speaker 1: instead of wrong, and start paying more attention to the
Speaker 1: positive information and discounting negative information. So when stressed out
Speaker 1: people are making a difficult decision, they may pay more
Speaker 1: attention to the upsides and less to the downsides. So
Speaker 1: that is perhaps why my dad ends up putting his
Speaker 1: trust in the unscrupulous hands of the wrong person. Stresses
Speaker 1: one factor. Also, my dad's rising star could have made
Speaker 1: him feel invincible, regardless who knows, but que the Green Beret,
Speaker 1: I'm Rainbow Valentine and this is disorganized crime. We'll be
Speaker 1: right back. So after we return from the family vacation
Speaker 1: to Barbadoes, my dad feels a lot of rusher to
Speaker 1: clean his money, so he buys some wine his money
Speaker 1: laundering investment of choice, but he's on the lookout for
Speaker 1: other investment opportunities because seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars
Speaker 1: is a lot of money to launder? Is this the
Speaker 1: most cash you've ever had? My own? Yeah, my own
Speaker 1: and stashing what do I do with it? How do
Speaker 1: I launder this money? Among other things. Yeah, back then,
Speaker 1: so I'm feeling, oh my god, I've got all this money.
Speaker 1: I've got to do something with it. I don't know
Speaker 1: why I felt so pressed to do anything with it,
Speaker 1: but just be for a while. I was thinking too
Speaker 1: quickly and not just appreciating being where I was. I
Speaker 1: met some one of your classmates fathers one day in
Speaker 1: a carpool. This is the Beret, the Green Beret, the
Speaker 1: Green Beret, and he was driving to Mercedes, I think
Speaker 1: at the time. And I made up with this guy
Speaker 1: who who starts to smooth talk me. And I'm gonna
Speaker 1: need a break here first before I get into this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a rough story. Yeah, take a break for a minute. Now.
Speaker 1: This story is challenging for my dad to tell. He's
Speaker 1: still angry about it towards the Green Beret, but also
Speaker 1: towards himself, because, as he sees it, his unfortunate financial
Speaker 1: choice put his family in jeopardy and everything on the line.
Speaker 1: So let's go back to the beginning. It all started
Speaker 1: when I made a new friend. When I was in
Speaker 1: fourth grade. A new girl joined our class, an only child.
Speaker 1: She lived with her glamorous mom, who wore sparkly makeup
Speaker 1: every day, unlike most of the artsy hippie moms who
Speaker 1: only wore makeup on special occasions. By fifth grade, I
Speaker 1: became good friends with the new Girl, and her single
Speaker 1: mom's townhouse became a favorite slumber party location. We didn't
Speaker 1: have to share the TV with any siblings. She lived
Speaker 1: near the mall, which we were allowed to explore on
Speaker 1: our own, and her mom would get us junk food
Speaker 1: that none of the hippie moms would ever consider. The
Speaker 1: New Girl was super fun, kind and joyful, and she
Speaker 1: loved giving everyone makeovers and crimping her hair with her
Speaker 1: cool eighties crimping iron. I'll call her Chipmunk. Eventually, Chipmunk's gruff,
Speaker 1: sunglass wearing, chain smoking dad moved to the area, and
Speaker 1: Chipmunks split her time between her parents' condos. This was
Speaker 1: the green beret. You got your third cup of coffee
Speaker 1: for this one. Hu. I was making a lot of
Speaker 1: money fairly quickly and regularly, so I sort of was
Speaker 1: now on the lookout for where to put it, like
Speaker 1: I needed to put it anywhere other than where I
Speaker 1: should have left it. We had run into each other somehow,
Speaker 1: so what I remember more than anything, you know, I
Speaker 1: don't remember what we talked about, other than to say
Speaker 1: he said to me, I'll show you how to make
Speaker 1: real money. Chipmunk's dad was also not an artsy hippie.
Speaker 1: He said he'd once been a Special Forces operative, hence
Speaker 1: the alias square and stocky. He looked like a meaty
Speaker 1: Germanic refrigerator, and he constantly smoked cigarettes, which was unusual
Speaker 1: amongst my friend's parents. He always wore prescription sunglasses even inside.
Speaker 1: His eyes were really visible, and unlike Chipmunk's vibrant mom,
Speaker 1: he didn't seem to like kids. He was imposing, grumpy
Speaker 1: and casually racist, stewing simmering in a miasma of cigarette smoke.
Speaker 1: In retrospect, my dad and I realized he was kind
Speaker 1: of like Derth Vader. He was eyes almost like. I think,
Speaker 1: he had a vibe of like the dark, like Star
Speaker 1: Wars dark Empire. Yeah, he was. He was hypnotic. He
Speaker 1: was very Star Wars villain nat Yeah, why are people
Speaker 1: all around Darth Vader doing his bidding now? However, even
Speaker 1: though Chipmunk's dad definitely hadn't been a psychedelic pioneer, and
Speaker 1: he wasn't remotely artsy or intellectual. He was a good talker,
Speaker 1: a really good talker, and my dad and Chipmunk's dad
Speaker 1: seemed to hit it off in some weird way. Soon
Speaker 1: it appeared that they were doing business together. And just
Speaker 1: like me and my friends didn't really know what my
Speaker 1: dad did for a living, we also didn't know what
Speaker 1: Chipmunk's dad did for a living. But it didn't matter
Speaker 1: because we didn't care. We cared about the MTV Countdown,
Speaker 1: sixteen candles and scoring craft macaroni and cheese, all of
Speaker 1: which were provided at Chipmunk's house. And my dad doing
Speaker 1: business with chipmunk Dad was great for me because Chipmunk
Speaker 1: and I got to spend even more time together, which
Speaker 1: was always super fun. Real estate, yeah, oh yeah, he
Speaker 1: was doing development, he was doing deals. My parents have
Speaker 1: explained to me what they understood the Green Beret's supposed
Speaker 1: business ventures to be, and it's still somewhat confusing, which
Speaker 1: is what he was aiming for. Here's my mom's take
Speaker 1: on it. What kind of power did you see him?
Speaker 1: How over dad? She could hypnotize people and assure them
Speaker 1: that he was like divinely guided or something he was,
Speaker 1: but he you know, in business like he knew and
Speaker 1: you'd explained it's really weird schemes like and you wouldn't
Speaker 1: understand what they were saying about, you know, different transactions
Speaker 1: should do with the bank, because the bank was trying
Speaker 1: to put him in person because he had gotten caught.
Speaker 1: He why piece of pacy was in the perfect place
Speaker 1: because he first he tugged at our heartstrings. Oh with
Speaker 1: this bank trying to put him in jail, you know,
Speaker 1: this bank thing, and so we believed him. He didn't
Speaker 1: do anything. I think what the Greenberry scam was. You
Speaker 1: would find a teetering company like that was having a
Speaker 1: hard time getting funding, and he talked them into selling
Speaker 1: it to him for a legal letter from the bank
Speaker 1: saying they would back it. So they would have this
Speaker 1: company on the Virgin collapse and do well with it.
Speaker 1: They would find a naive investor like Walter, and then
Speaker 1: he would just pump him up with like, oh, this
Speaker 1: company can really do great because we have this company,
Speaker 1: and then we have this rock company over here, and
Speaker 1: this shock company here, and this floor X come there,
Speaker 1: and we'll go squeeze shale for more oil and we'll
Speaker 1: put them all together and there'll be a combination. So
Speaker 1: you were caught up in you know, we would just
Speaker 1: only be a part of a scam. It was all
Speaker 1: a pyramid like weird pyramids. So Chipmunk's dad portrayed himself
Speaker 1: as a big time developer with real estate opportunities across
Speaker 1: the country, and he operated a confusing pyramid like scheme
Speaker 1: scamming businesses and investors out of money. And he started
Speaker 1: his scam by tugging at my trusting, empathetic parents hippie
Speaker 1: heart strings. I spent months living in Palm Springs with
Speaker 1: him off and on. In eighty six six. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: was down there a lot trying to get this deal.
Speaker 1: And again it was another deal of assets that had
Speaker 1: been impossible to develop. But it was huge. I can't
Speaker 1: remember how huge. I mean, could have been a couple
Speaker 1: of million anchors. Holy Yeah. He was into mining in
Speaker 1: Colorado at one point, and we were into mining in Mississippi.
Speaker 1: We had some kind of a guy, I don't know
Speaker 1: what it was, gravel or some such thing, among other things.
Speaker 1: To assure his investors, e My dad, the Green Beret,
Speaker 1: would hand over some of his own assets as collateral
Speaker 1: for one of their deals. He handed over a supposed
Speaker 1: Van Dyke painting to my parents. Now it may have
Speaker 1: been authentic, but knowing now what we know about the
Speaker 1: Green Beret, I can only assume if the Van Dyke
Speaker 1: painting wasn't a forgery, it was stolen. There was a
Speaker 1: time at which, like a fool, I even had in
Speaker 1: my hands what was supposed to be a Van Dyke painting.
Speaker 1: It's probably ten feet tall and I had I had
Speaker 1: it in a specifically climate controlled locker in New York
Speaker 1: that kept artwork. So he was into art, because I
Speaker 1: thought he was into all sorts of He was into
Speaker 1: anything that he could use leverage on. Basically, his deal
Speaker 1: was to use assets that were not as valuable as
Speaker 1: they could appear to be to leverage against loaning money.
Speaker 1: Is what I think as I look back. He was
Speaker 1: in any place he could scam where the dollar you know,
Speaker 1: where the numbers were hitting seven or eight figures. The
Speaker 1: Greenberret kept pitching my dad on enticing projects that he
Speaker 1: promised would reap in a ton more money for my dad,
Speaker 1: plus it would come back clean. So my dad, hypnotized
Speaker 1: by the Greenberry's slick talk, and under immense stress, continue
Speaker 1: to believe that positive outcomes would materialize, and Dad kept
Speaker 1: investing in Chipmunk's dad's deceptions. He would suck it out slowly,
Speaker 1: fifty grand at a time for one thing or another,
Speaker 1: and it happened over a prolonged period of maybe a
Speaker 1: year or more. After middle school, me and Chipmunk went
Speaker 1: to the same private college prep high school in Marin.
Speaker 1: It's the late eighties, and things start to go downhill
Speaker 1: between our dads. At some point during my high school years,
Speaker 1: my parents begin to hate the Green Beret, like really
Speaker 1: loathe him. Clearly a business deal had gone wrong between them,
Speaker 1: but I didn't know the details. After high school, Chipmunk
Speaker 1: and I drifted apart, and while we reconnected in our
Speaker 1: adult years on social media, were old friends rather than
Speaker 1: close friends. Part of the reason is because I've always
Speaker 1: known that her dad in some way stool money from
Speaker 1: my dad. It was always a deal is going to
Speaker 1: be closed Tuesday or Friday. That was the song. You
Speaker 1: could almost make up a song about him called Tuesday
Speaker 1: or Friday because next Tuesday we're gonna it's gonna close
Speaker 1: and all this money is gonna go into it. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was like it was this mantra, but I would
Speaker 1: constantly bug him about deal. I mean I realized probably
Speaker 1: I don't know, within the year obviously, but I stayed
Speaker 1: in touch for years and years to you know, waiting
Speaker 1: for the big hit. I don't know what I was hoping.
Speaker 1: I mean, I really have trouble putting my head back
Speaker 1: into that headspace now, because all I can the headspace
Speaker 1: goes to what a dumb shit I was, you know, Okay,
Speaker 1: I mean, why not one hundred grand and say enough already?
Speaker 1: You know, it's so I can't even quite greed back
Speaker 1: to greed. Did you make any money off of the
Speaker 1: Green Beret money off of No? It was a one
Speaker 1: way street all the way. The bigger the money, the
Speaker 1: bigger the sharks. That's the nature of life, my gullible,
Speaker 1: adrenaline junkie, money obsessed psychedelic pioneer Dad. His work in
Speaker 1: the smuggling world was done primarily in good faith deals
Speaker 1: done on handshakes between largely honest counterculture outlaws. So Dad
Speaker 1: approached the street world to clean his money in the
Speaker 1: same way, which ultimately was foolish because not everyone is
Speaker 1: honorable and ethical. As Dad's attorney Bernie Siegel said, in
Speaker 1: the late eighties. The quality of the criminal has gone downhill.
Speaker 1: Now I understand Bernie was talking about people like the
Speaker 1: Green Beret, a dishonest criminal and shameless con man, different
Speaker 1: from a psychedelic outlaw. Was that paperwork between you? No?
Speaker 1: What he knew? It's real simple. He knew that I
Speaker 1: could never do anything to him because it was illegal money.
Speaker 1: So he did you know your apostle work? Clearly, he
Speaker 1: was clear about the fact that he could just continue
Speaker 1: sucking money until I would stop giving it, and there
Speaker 1: would be nothing I could do about it because I
Speaker 1: couldn't go to the police. There was never closure, there
Speaker 1: was never a fu No. He just sort of disappeared
Speaker 1: and would never talk to me, you know. And if
Speaker 1: I wanted to, I could chase him and find me easily,
Speaker 1: But for what purpose to spit in his face? It
Speaker 1: wasn't worth the energy. In total. My Dad ends up
Speaker 1: giving the Green Beret five hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: Do you remember ever, like telling Dad not give any
Speaker 1: more money to the Green Beret? Oh? Yeah. I went
Speaker 1: over there one day and I said, don't you take
Speaker 1: any more moneage from Walter. We're tapped out. Just leave
Speaker 1: us alone. And then that afternoon Walter went over and
Speaker 1: he the Green Beret, got Walter to sign over the
Speaker 1: Standyke painting that was not our storage unit in New
Speaker 1: York City. This painting is the collateral the Green Beret
Speaker 1: had given to my dad, and my dad unfathomably gives
Speaker 1: it back to him. It's like he was under Darth
Speaker 1: Vader's power. It was like some kind of like weird
Speaker 1: collateral they were moving around was a hot Vandyke painting
Speaker 1: and I saw at once. We went to the storage
Speaker 1: and saw it, and it was supposed to be, you know,
Speaker 1: an asset for us in case they didn't pay us back.
Speaker 1: So the Green Beret was like a conn man. He
Speaker 1: was fast hered. Walter hippotas do his fitting. Okay, So
Speaker 1: Reagan wants pot smokers and smugglers to rot in prison,
Speaker 1: and my Dad's overburdened neurons are firing, causing him to
Speaker 1: potentially focus solely on positive outcomes. The lucrative deals the
Speaker 1: Green Barrat promises will close on Tuesday or Friday, resulting
Speaker 1: in clean cash for our family to live on. So
Speaker 1: my dad under the extreme stress of working in an
Speaker 1: extremely high stakes business under attack from the federal government,
Speaker 1: supporting a family of five trusted the wrong person, made
Speaker 1: a bad decision and gave five hundred and fifty thousand
Speaker 1: dollars to the Green Beret, believing he would be true
Speaker 1: to his word, launder the money and return it to
Speaker 1: my dad. Well, that never happened. Every good con man
Speaker 1: has a great show. Just like my dad was excellent
Speaker 1: at his job as a pot smuggler, the Green Beret
Speaker 1: was excellent at his job as a first class a
Speaker 1: one grifter and thief. Big wins are often accompanied by
Speaker 1: big losses. Easy come, easy go. It's a cliche for
Speaker 1: a reason. The grifter stole from the perfect victim, a
Speaker 1: counterculture outlaw who couldn't go to the law for justice,
Speaker 1: and he wouldn't stoop to violence. Shit happens and how
Speaker 1: we deal with it and forms one's daily joy and contentment.
Speaker 1: My parents are big on letting things go, not dwelling
Speaker 1: on the past, focusing on the positive. Easier said than done.
Speaker 1: After my dad loses five hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: my family begins our slide into a lower economic class,
Speaker 1: and as the late eighties march into the early nineties,
Speaker 1: Reagan pours a ton of money into the drug Enforcement administration,
Speaker 1: and my dad colleagues start getting busted or fleeing the country.
Speaker 1: As money's getting tight, my dad starts selling off her
Speaker 1: family's assets, and me and my siblings begin an unwitting
Speaker 1: adjustment to a life of financial stress. But the worst
Speaker 1: consequence of the Green Beret's audacious theft was my dad's
Speaker 1: gradual descent into a year's long depression, Ignited by a
Speaker 1: sense of failure to his family and bolstered by his
Speaker 1: childhood of constant criticism from his father. My dad wore
Speaker 1: a melancholy coat of shame self loathing for years to come.
Speaker 1: The Green Beret's torch of deceit with a slow burning,
Speaker 1: long lasting fire of guilt, remorse, and embarrassment within my dad,
Speaker 1: which thirty years later is finally waning. What lesson can
Speaker 1: I learn from this tobacco? Well, don't assume you know
Speaker 1: who your parents are, where they come from, and what
Speaker 1: they're dealing with. Be aware that insecurity, greed and hubris
Speaker 1: are human and laid to downfalls. And be mindful of
Speaker 1: naivete thinking all people have good intentions, The assumption that
Speaker 1: all people are honest and good is a dangerous expectation
Speaker 1: in a world of resource inequality. Survival is based on resources,
Speaker 1: and the struggle for resources is as old as the
Speaker 1: origins of life, which, by the way, are single celled
Speaker 1: microorganisms known as prokaryotes, whose energy came from carbon and
Speaker 1: sunshine almost four billion years ago. Well, my dad's energy,
Speaker 1: in the form of five hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: was lost, but thankfully he remained a free, honest outlaw
Speaker 1: under the radar of the federal government. The green beret
Speaker 1: is the tip of the misfortune Iceberg, with his ominous
Speaker 1: negative energy, heading the wheels in motion for a string
Speaker 1: of terrible developments coming up. In the next episode, I
Speaker 1: talked with a pot smuggler I've known since I was six,
Speaker 1: who went to a federal prison for years. And we'll
Speaker 1: hear about close associates and my parents whose family was
Speaker 1: torn apart when one brother is sentenced to ten years
Speaker 1: in a federal prison and the other becomes a fugitive.
Speaker 1: I'm Rainbow Valentine, and this is Disorganized Crime Smuggler's Daughter.
Speaker 1: Disorganized Crime Smuggler's Daughter is written and recorded by me.
Speaker 1: Rainbow Valentine. Our producers are Gabby Watts and Taylor Church.
Speaker 1: Executive producers are Brandon Barr, Ryan Lavin, Elsie Crowley and
Speaker 1: Me at School of Humans, and Connell Burn and Charles
Speaker 1: Bryant at Iheartradiant. Our music is by Gabby Lala and
Speaker 1: Claire Campbell, with a rich theme by Mark Karen Andy.
Speaker 1: You can follow us online at Disorganized Crime podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: Write the story doing as we met am by steeping
Speaker 1: Princess of the Red Trees. She Hess, keep it real,
Speaker 1: handshake seals the deal, Wrap the stack, sealed, meal and
Speaker 1: road up. These all greas rolling, Dooby Young, rich and groovy,
Speaker 1: making it up. We rolled along, Rolling along, Far Country, Roll,
Speaker 1: Rolling along Far Country Roll, Run in Aloe, Far Country
Speaker 1: Roll