Speaker 1: School of Humans. Okay, so it's the late eighties and
Speaker 1: the Reagan's new minimum drug sentencing laws are in place,
Speaker 1: and the nation is swept up in an anti drug
Speaker 1: just Say No fever. Thanks to First Lady Nancy Reagan,
Speaker 1: my pot smuggler dad has experienced his biggest smuggling success
Speaker 1: followed by the biggest rip off of his career. So far,
Speaker 1: He's doing primarily smaller local deals and fruitlessly waiting for
Speaker 1: the Green Beret grifterer to clean and return Dad's foolishly
Speaker 1: entrusted money. I'm headed towards high school and into the
Speaker 1: rhythmics the Indigo Girls in comedy, watching a lot of
Speaker 1: old Saturday Night Live with Gilda Belushi and the Cone Heads.
Speaker 1: At the same time, my mom's friend's family gets into
Speaker 1: a smuggling trip that goes terribly wrong. My parents had
Speaker 1: a good friend younger than them who were calling the kid.
Speaker 1: He was a carpenter and built my dad a custom
Speaker 1: case for his pot weighing scales, which my dad used
Speaker 1: to carry the scales in for local deals. Well, in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty eight, the kid and his brother, mister High
Speaker 1: get busted bringing in thousands of pounds of pot via
Speaker 1: Oregon's Columbia River. The kid calls my dad in a panic.
Speaker 1: His brother's been busted, headed to prison, and instead of
Speaker 1: joining his brother in prison, the kid's going to flee
Speaker 1: the country with his wife and child. So the sister
Speaker 1: of these busted brothers lived across the street from the
Speaker 1: house I was born in. Remember that hippote hobbity house
Speaker 1: with a secret room. So I've known the sister of
Speaker 1: the busted brothers my whole life. She's in the rock
Speaker 1: and roll industry, and I went to school with her kids.
Speaker 1: Like the rest of the family friends I've recently discovered
Speaker 1: were also smugglers. Had no idea that this former neighbor
Speaker 1: and mother of my school friends was also involved in
Speaker 1: pot smuggling, albeit peripherally. We'll call her Grandma Bella because today,
Speaker 1: after years of working in San Francisco's rock and roll industry,
Speaker 1: her favorite job as being a grandma. As her grandchildren
Speaker 1: romped in the garden, I spoke to Grandma Bella about
Speaker 1: the abrupt and catastrophic finale to her brother's pot smuggling careers.
Speaker 1: In today's episode, we learn about the traumatic, real life
Speaker 1: ramifications of the Reagan administration's drug laws as more smugglers
Speaker 1: in our family circle were sent to prison or fled
Speaker 1: the country. I'm Rainbow Valentine and this is disorganized crime
Speaker 1: smuggler's daughter and grooving far country boden Gan State making
Speaker 1: it up. As part of this podcast is the history
Speaker 1: and the laws changing and what happens. So it's the
Speaker 1: eighties that the law had just changed two months earlier,
Speaker 1: and with my mom talking to Grandma Bella. Grandma Bella
Speaker 1: is my mom's friend whose two brothers were busted smuggling
Speaker 1: afghany pot into Oregon via the Columbia River. They had
Speaker 1: it all set up. It was a boat on the
Speaker 1: Columbia River, and that was when paranoid sisters said, are
Speaker 1: you sure you should be doing this? With a new
Speaker 1: drug plaw changes and then my only applies to cold
Speaker 1: So all these guys who've been dealing in bat for
Speaker 1: all these years thought that it was nothing and that
Speaker 1: only the crack people and so forth we're going to
Speaker 1: be getting in trouble. A drug bust is the seizure
Speaker 1: of illegal drugs by law enforcement. And after this bust,
Speaker 1: Grandma Bella's role is to get her mom out of
Speaker 1: Portland and bring her back to Mill Valley. Her mom
Speaker 1: was staying in a rental apartment used as a safe
Speaker 1: house for the trip, which means the apartment was filled
Speaker 1: with all sorts of evidence of the trip, including paraphernalia, receipts,
Speaker 1: and so much more. And whoever rents the safe house
Speaker 1: could also go to prison for five to ten years.
Speaker 1: The last thing Grandma Bella wants is for her senior
Speaker 1: citizen mom to join the rest of the family in prison.
Speaker 1: My mother to Portland and used her house, her apartment
Speaker 1: as a meeting place. So my mother's apartment is full
Speaker 1: of all this name of the boat stuff and just
Speaker 1: do you name it? So my mom is kind of clueless.
Speaker 1: She thinks it's cool because she smokes pot, doesn't think
Speaker 1: anything of it, and she thinks that it's a wild ride.
Speaker 1: And before by the time I see her again, she's
Speaker 1: talking like a pot dealer. Grandmabella's mom is defiantly resisting
Speaker 1: moving back down to Mill Valley. She has no idea
Speaker 1: that she's in jeopardy of being busted as well, and
Speaker 1: she's being totally uncooperative against her will. We're packing her up,
Speaker 1: and I'm determined that we're going to get every single
Speaker 1: thing out. So I'm going through books. Sure enough, there'd
Speaker 1: be a plane ticket, all this kind of stuff. And
Speaker 1: she's mad at meanwhile, and so I made my sister
Speaker 1: and my sister in law stamp all night. I'm like, no,
Speaker 1: you're not going to bed. Nobody's going to bed. So
Speaker 1: this is clean, and I mean clean. I just was
Speaker 1: petrified from my mother. So we get it all done.
Speaker 1: We've got everything ready. The guy with the from Mill
Speaker 1: Valley has arrived, ready to take her stuff. And by
Speaker 1: that time I've sort of got her convinced you've got
Speaker 1: to leave. Mom. She goes, oh, wait a bite. There
Speaker 1: is one more space that we forgot to get to him.
Speaker 1: Right outside her apartment is a storage area. So we
Speaker 1: go outside to the storage area and none of us
Speaker 1: are tall enough to get the stuff. So this guy
Speaker 1: from upstairs, her friend, comes down and down falls this
Speaker 1: big thing of rifles, yep, rifles, and possessing these rifles
Speaker 1: could add nine years to the sentence of anyone who
Speaker 1: had just gotten busted, which could be almost twenty years
Speaker 1: in prison. And they all have the name of the
Speaker 1: boat up gets funny, Hey, this is what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: So they're antique guns. And the reason that they are
Speaker 1: not on the boat is because they got rid of them.
Speaker 1: But they didn't want to get rid of them because
Speaker 1: they're value. The first thing is I said, gotta get
Speaker 1: rid of these, mom, so you gotta do it. Ill
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna do it. Why the hell should I
Speaker 1: have to do it. I didn't make this miss And
Speaker 1: the guy who's supposed to be driving her stuff back goes,
Speaker 1: I'll take them, Like your idiot, you can't take them.
Speaker 1: They're part of a crime thing. You want to go
Speaker 1: to jail. He's like, well, they're really good. What are
Speaker 1: you gonna do it for? Like, I don't know, but
Speaker 1: my mom is gonna get rid of them. You're gonna
Speaker 1: drive her and she's gonna find she knows the area.
Speaker 1: I don't. So they finally come back a few hours
Speaker 1: later and I go, great, where'd you put them? She goes, well,
Speaker 1: we just couldn't find any place satisfactory. So and so
Speaker 1: we put them in somebody's backyard under a log, under
Speaker 1: a log. It's just what Yeah? And I said, my mother,
Speaker 1: what if the people have children? What if those guns
Speaker 1: are loaded? Did you check them? No? I didn't want
Speaker 1: to touch that, But Mom, what if somebody gets killed
Speaker 1: as a result of this? You can't leave them there?
Speaker 1: Are you kidding? All right, let's go. So Grandma Bella
Speaker 1: and her mom rent a car to retrieve the guns
Speaker 1: from under the log, but unfortunately her mom forgets where
Speaker 1: the log is. I mean, Portland is an especially log
Speaker 1: abundant city. Numerous times I said, Mom, I see over
Speaker 1: there that there's another thoroughfare, another avenue. Are you sure
Speaker 1: you weren't on that avenue? What do you think I'm
Speaker 1: an idiot? Of course I was, and I tell you
Speaker 1: if I were, they're on this avenue. So finally, after
Speaker 1: we don't find them for hours, I go over to
Speaker 1: the other avenue and we find them right off the bat.
Speaker 1: Now I'm really ready to kill her. The next task
Speaker 1: is to figure out where to put the guns, and
Speaker 1: Grandma Bella decides to bury them in a hole in
Speaker 1: some back road in rural Oregon, lush with forests and
Speaker 1: BlackBerry brambles. We found plenty of deep poles. But the
Speaker 1: problem is every time we pull over to drop them,
Speaker 1: another car would go by. Who would then have seen
Speaker 1: our car and be and you holding rifles? Yeah? How
Speaker 1: can it be so difficult, and the movies it always
Speaker 1: looks like, oh, we're just gonna throw his body overboard.
Speaker 1: Everything's fine, And I was just so. We get all
Speaker 1: the way back to Portland where we'd started from, and
Speaker 1: we still have the damned bag of let's run the
Speaker 1: la car. So we we end up finding, yes, an
Speaker 1: industrial area that is nothing industrial and throwing them in
Speaker 1: a you know, the dubster. Stressed, exhausted, and cranky, Grandma
Speaker 1: Bella and her mom fight all the way back to
Speaker 1: a motel where they meet with the rest of the
Speaker 1: family to determine their next move. Now, the bust happened
Speaker 1: the day before. Grandma Bella he's cleaning out her mom's apartment.
Speaker 1: She explained to us what happened. The ship previously used
Speaker 1: for research but converted and they were to meet out
Speaker 1: in the middle of the ocean somewhere and exchange money
Speaker 1: per hash And I'm nervous, but I think, well, they're
Speaker 1: also smart, and they hired this guy who's was a
Speaker 1: professor of drama at some university to be the captain
Speaker 1: of the ship, and he's a smart guy. They're all hippies.
Speaker 1: I just need to echo, Grandma Bella. These smugglers hired
Speaker 1: a hippie drama teacher to be the ship captain, absurd.
Speaker 1: The way they got arrested was there was too much
Speaker 1: of the product, which means when the boat came back
Speaker 1: to shore they had to spend three days making extra containers.
Speaker 1: And my brother who got caught, had to rent a truck,
Speaker 1: an extra flatbed truck. He put it his own name
Speaker 1: in his own credit guard who was terrible as a smuggler.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you now, this is absolutely taboo in smuggling.
Speaker 1: Never use your real name. He knew that they were
Speaker 1: following him when he pulled out, and the way they
Speaker 1: had gotten caught was the DA and some customs officials
Speaker 1: and somebody else were coming into port. They saw the
Speaker 1: boat and the custom guy because I bet you that's
Speaker 1: a smuggler boat, and the other one said, nah, it's
Speaker 1: just a research ship. So they took a little bit
Speaker 1: and they watched it, and my brother said, you know,
Speaker 1: they were following him. He didn't know what to do.
Speaker 1: This is mister high. He had millions of dollars worth
Speaker 1: of stuff in the back of the truck that he
Speaker 1: felt he was responsible for, because he said, if it
Speaker 1: weren't for that, I would have driven a truck into
Speaker 1: the bay, into the ocean and taken my chances. He
Speaker 1: pulled over at a truck stop, and he kept trying
Speaker 1: to get a hold of the other brother. He couldn't
Speaker 1: get a hold of him. And then one of the
Speaker 1: guys came over and said, don't you think this has
Speaker 1: gone on long enough? And my brother said, yeah, late eighties,
Speaker 1: And so he went out to the truck and he
Speaker 1: gave them permission to search, which he shouldn't have done.
Speaker 1: Oh God, but they would have just gotten it. He
Speaker 1: just was sick of it too. Now. Grandma Bella's young brother,
Speaker 1: my dad's friend who built him a customed scale carry case.
Speaker 1: The kid was not on the ship when the DA
Speaker 1: busted everyone. The kid and the rest of the family
Speaker 1: were at the motel trying to figure out what to do.
Speaker 1: And that's when the kid decides to flee with his
Speaker 1: wife and kids to Central America. Meanwhile, Grandma Bella's family
Speaker 1: bonded together to try and help her older brother, mister High,
Speaker 1: with his impending trial. We hired a lawyer, we took
Speaker 1: out a huge amount of money on our house to
Speaker 1: pay for it, and his wife was going to pay
Speaker 1: us back when she sold her house, but instead they
Speaker 1: seized her house, even though it had nothing to do
Speaker 1: with the bust man. They'll get anything they can, so
Speaker 1: we went into debt just like and I learned that
Speaker 1: it is your business what your family is doing, because
Speaker 1: you pay for it too. They're not out there as
Speaker 1: an island of like, oh, leave me be, You're just paranoid,
Speaker 1: which is what the other brother liked to say to me.
Speaker 1: And no, it turns out I wasn't paranoid enough. And
Speaker 1: I mean I remember going into my Central American brother's
Speaker 1: closet and just smelling his clothes and crying, knowing that
Speaker 1: I wasn't going to see him till God knows when
Speaker 1: he had to be on the run. My mom and
Speaker 1: dad knew very little about this trip when it was happening.
Speaker 1: They heard about it, but they didn't know any details
Speaker 1: until now after we talked with Grandma Bella. What was
Speaker 1: clear to my parents and to Grandma Bella was that
Speaker 1: the trip was poorly executed. Grandma Bella's brothers took a
Speaker 1: lot of extreme risks without taking extra precautions. I just
Speaker 1: thought they overstretched their imagination. They didn't really know what
Speaker 1: they were doing. They had, you know, antique guns didn't work.
Speaker 1: It wasn't properly thought done by proper the proper way.
Speaker 1: I mean, why are they taking a big boat into
Speaker 1: a big river system that's you know where there's like
Speaker 1: all those those gatekeepers, the Homeland Security people, I mean
Speaker 1: they were there then to the coast guard. You just
Speaker 1: didn't go round too thirty mile limit with your load
Speaker 1: of rifles, and you know, they didn't know the rules.
Speaker 1: You had to stay within your boundaries of knowing what
Speaker 1: you were doing big time. You know. Probably that's why
Speaker 1: we've survived because we were cautious. So you felt they
Speaker 1: didn't They were not meticulous, they were I felt that
Speaker 1: they weren't um professional. I mean they had all the
Speaker 1: receipts for the boats and they had nothing together right
Speaker 1: like they Grandma Bella told us they had made t
Speaker 1: shirts with their smugall name. Yeah, oh god, yeah, that
Speaker 1: was unbelievable. No, my parents never did trips like this,
Speaker 1: which is one of the reasons they never got caught.
Speaker 1: My dad remained in one role during his twenty two
Speaker 1: years smuggling career as a distributor. My dad never won
Speaker 1: on the boots he says he didn't want to get
Speaker 1: that close to the flame. Well I knew was that
Speaker 1: demandatory minimums were absolutely byzantine, you know, and that just
Speaker 1: don't get caught. I mean there was there was one rule,
Speaker 1: don't get caught. He asked me for help, and there
Speaker 1: was nothing I knew to do there, I mean I didn't.
Speaker 1: It was such that I had no details of any
Speaker 1: kind other than he was scared to death and he
Speaker 1: got out of down very quickly and with his wife
Speaker 1: and kids. Grandma Bella's brothers were whiskier than my parents
Speaker 1: and took fewer precautions. And also they did this Afghani
Speaker 1: Hash Columbia River trip right after Reagan's minimum drug sentencing
Speaker 1: laws were bolstered, and unfortunately they experienced the harshest consequences.
Speaker 1: Grandma Bella's oldest brother, mister High, got out of prison
Speaker 1: a couple of years early for good behavior. Her other brother,
Speaker 1: my parents friend, the kid, still lives out of the country.
Speaker 1: Coming up, we hear from another counterculture smuggler I've known
Speaker 1: for forty years, a good friend of mine who spent
Speaker 1: three years in a federal prison for poct I'm Rainbow Valentine.
Speaker 1: This is disorganized crime. We'll be right back. When I
Speaker 1: was sixteen, I worked for my hippie elder friend Gracie Albright,
Speaker 1: making thousands of pounds of tabouli in five gallon buckets
Speaker 1: for a music festival in exchange for free tickets and
Speaker 1: VIP access. And despite being up to my elbows literally
Speaker 1: in citrus soaked cracked wheat for a week, it was
Speaker 1: the most fun I've had while doing manual labor. Okay,
Speaker 1: I've just landed in Vencino County. There she is driving
Speaker 1: up in her badass heavy duty truck. If I were
Speaker 1: to cast Wonder Woman's mom, it would be Gracie Albright,
Speaker 1: almost larger than life. Greasie Albright is strong, confident, brave,
Speaker 1: enormously compassionate, brilliant, hilarious, and the most spectacular maker of amazing,
Speaker 1: large scale things comparable to a Broadway spectacular, Burning Man
Speaker 1: installation or Hollywood extravaganza. Gracie is the kind of person
Speaker 1: you want with you during the apocalypse because she will
Speaker 1: make sure you survive and thrive. I met her when
Speaker 1: I was six via my hippie theater community, the same
Speaker 1: place I'm at. Candy Can. A couple of years after
Speaker 1: I helped her make thousands of pounds to Bouley, thousands
Speaker 1: of pounds of pot caught up to my friend and employer,
Speaker 1: Gracie Albright. She spent several years in federal prison in
Speaker 1: the nineties for pot. Now Greasy experienced what my parents
Speaker 1: luckily avoided, and I wanted to find out how she'd
Speaker 1: been caught and what prison had been like for an
Speaker 1: ethical counterculture outlaw. Well, one of the things that really
Speaker 1: blew my mind is that when I walked in past
Speaker 1: where the glass door shut, it was actually just a
Speaker 1: big glass door. You walked in the door and went
Speaker 1: banged behind you. I got this huge pain in my
Speaker 1: breast and I said, oh my god, Patrick Henry, give
Speaker 1: me liberty or give me death. Who knew that freedom
Speaker 1: was something you actually physically felt in your breast. My
Speaker 1: breast was sore for a few weeks until I got
Speaker 1: used to it. It was the strangest thing. It was like,
Speaker 1: I had no idea. It kind of blew me out
Speaker 1: of the water that one. So. Gracie worked in pot
Speaker 1: smuggling for about five years as a driver this is
Speaker 1: the mid eighties. She also had her own business, a
Speaker 1: straight job and pot smuggling was always a side hustle,
Speaker 1: providing her with extra money for prasias centrals, like going
Speaker 1: to the dentist. And I mean, it wasn't an intentional
Speaker 1: move on my part to become somebody that was selling marijuana.
Speaker 1: I was actually doing other things. Yeah, if you thought
Speaker 1: asked me what I was doing, I wouldn't tell you
Speaker 1: I was a marijuana person. And in fact, even when
Speaker 1: I was doing a lot of it, it wasn't the
Speaker 1: main thing about what I was doing. It was just
Speaker 1: a side deal. You know. It was great. You could
Speaker 1: fix your teeth, you could take a vacation, paint us
Speaker 1: the picture of what you didged and walk us through
Speaker 1: what you were doing, and then walk us through. I
Speaker 1: was driving to the site and loading a rented RV
Speaker 1: full of suitcases, and then coming up to San Francisco
Speaker 1: and parking at the airport where suitcases are completely common,
Speaker 1: and people would come pick it up, and a few
Speaker 1: weeks later they I'd go down and collect the money
Speaker 1: and drive back. I asked Greasie how they masked the
Speaker 1: cannabis aroma on the road. Her answer is so simple,
Speaker 1: so obvious, and totally brilliant. We'd load up for the
Speaker 1: return trip, and we'd cook bacon and eggs and then
Speaker 1: we'd have bacon hamburgers, and then we'd have bacon on
Speaker 1: our steaks. And we know we were we wore plaid
Speaker 1: shirts and we called it the bacon Mobile and bacon Moobile.
Speaker 1: One time we were in a hotel and we had
Speaker 1: a whole load in the hotel with us, and I
Speaker 1: was spraying like deodorant spray in the air because he
Speaker 1: could just smell it through everything. And I set up
Speaker 1: smoke alarm and I went, you know, so there was
Speaker 1: there was you know, moments did what happened? Nothing? Nothing
Speaker 1: that you know what happened is we all got a
Speaker 1: big adrenaline rush. Even though she wasn't a full time smuggler,
Speaker 1: Greasie also had to figure out things like how to
Speaker 1: launder her money. She worked in hospice in San Francisco
Speaker 1: during the AIDS crisis of the nineteen eighties, and she
Speaker 1: did a true fuck you to the man to clean
Speaker 1: her money. Might be one of my favorite parts of
Speaker 1: her story. So the gay boys were really pretty pissed off.
Speaker 1: All the gay boys that were dying of AIDS. I
Speaker 1: knew them because I'd been in the Castro working hospice shifts.
Speaker 1: There was at that time a tremendous number of the
Speaker 1: gay population. Their mates were already dead, their parents may
Speaker 1: not accept them, and they didn't have children yet because
Speaker 1: that hadn't gotten normalized, their actualized, and so boy did
Speaker 1: they need hospice. And not only that, they were pretty
Speaker 1: pissed off, many of them, because I mean, that whole thing,
Speaker 1: if it's the gay disease, so it's not important to us.
Speaker 1: Kind of attitude that seemed to exist on some level.
Speaker 1: So if you give more than a nine nine hundred
Speaker 1: and ninety nine dollars to a bank or to anybody,
Speaker 1: they have to say where they got it, if it's cash.
Speaker 1: So I got to give my lawyer nine hundred ninety
Speaker 1: nine dollars because the government really wanted to know how
Speaker 1: I was paying for my legal help. And my lawyer
Speaker 1: said to me, they're gonna subpoena this information. You have
Speaker 1: to get me personal checks. So I came home and
Speaker 1: I went, oh my god, I've got to give him,
Speaker 1: you know, one hundred and fifty thousand dollars or the
Speaker 1: personal checks. And so I went and I gave cash.
Speaker 1: The gay boys saved me to people that were dyeing
Speaker 1: the whole community, the whole castro took. They went out
Speaker 1: and found the dying boys to give me personal checks
Speaker 1: for ten, fifteen, twenty thousand dollars and they took the cash.
Speaker 1: And so when the government wanted to know where the
Speaker 1: money had come from, there was like pictures of all
Speaker 1: the texts, but all the people that had donated were
Speaker 1: gone and then and it was just they loved that
Speaker 1: they could do that last or they probably still did
Speaker 1: more revolutionary acts after that. So Gracie never technically got busted.
Speaker 1: There wasn't a moment where she was caught red handed
Speaker 1: in the act, and there was no evidence she'd been
Speaker 1: a smuggler, but the government got her on conspiracy. Gracie's
Speaker 1: indictment transpired in the early nineties when the government was
Speaker 1: avidly enacting Reagan's mandatory minimum sentencing laws, aiming to imprison
Speaker 1: as many drug offenders as possible, and conspiracy to commit
Speaker 1: a drug offense was considered as bad as executing the misdeed.
Speaker 1: Here's Bill Panzer, the cannabis attorney I chatted with in
Speaker 1: episode three. Conspiracy is when two or more people agree
Speaker 1: to do something illegal. And they take at least one
Speaker 1: step in furtherance of the conspiracy. But yeah, conspiracy as
Speaker 1: a fell in the Under federal law, the conspiracy potential
Speaker 1: penalty would be the same as if you completed the conspiracy.
Speaker 1: So Gracie got caught because someone she worked with was
Speaker 1: caught and facing imprisonment. They turned a dime. They rolled,
Speaker 1: which means to turn in others to the cops in
Speaker 1: exchange for freedom. With Reagan's harsh mandatory minimums, rolling on
Speaker 1: your colleagues was one of the only ways to save
Speaker 1: your own skin, you know, Mandatory minimum sentences, people going
Speaker 1: away for her redness, amounts of time for cannabis, which
Speaker 1: no one should go to jail for cannabis period, and
Speaker 1: other drugs too. I mean, you know, it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's like almost it's okay to kill somebody, just don't
Speaker 1: smoke a joint while you're doing it. You had these
Speaker 1: draconian sentences, which then because of the only way out
Speaker 1: of it was to cooperate. It changed the industry. A
Speaker 1: friend of mine who recently retired, who did this ship
Speaker 1: for like forty or fifty years, you know, always had
Speaker 1: a hat in his office, a little baseball cap that said,
Speaker 1: nobody talks, everybody walks, and there was a lot to that.
Speaker 1: And you know, and look when you when you got
Speaker 1: a twenty one year old kid and you're threatening him
Speaker 1: with five years in prison, Well, when you're twenty one
Speaker 1: years old, five years last forever. When you're forty five
Speaker 1: years ain't that long anymore, you know, So there wasn't
Speaker 1: that much of a threat. And when you start talking
Speaker 1: about mandatory ten, of which you're serving eighty five percent,
Speaker 1: none of this two for one stuff. You're serving ten
Speaker 1: years cents, you're going to serve eight and a half years.
Speaker 1: You get fifty four days a year off good time,
Speaker 1: fifteen percent. That's it. So when you're talking about a
Speaker 1: mandatory ten, a mandatory twenty, you had a lot more
Speaker 1: people cooperating, pointy fingers of people dropping dimes on people,
Speaker 1: ratting people out. And that's really how the whole warren drugs,
Speaker 1: you know, the criminal justice sne became it's just get someone,
Speaker 1: tell them you're going to prison for the rest of
Speaker 1: your life unless you give me someone else. And people
Speaker 1: start giving up their wives, their brothers, their daughters, their husbands.
Speaker 1: You know, it was horrendous Greasie and her lawyer worked
Speaker 1: for a couple of years on the case. She poured
Speaker 1: all her resources, time, energy, money into the tobacco. She
Speaker 1: becomes broke, has to send her child to live with relatives.
Speaker 1: The Feds threatened eight years, but with the effort she
Speaker 1: and her lawyer pour into the case, Greasie manages to
Speaker 1: only be sentenced to three years for conspiracy to smugglepot
Speaker 1: sometime in the vague future. So Greasie prepares for prison.
Speaker 1: She puts her business on hold, says goodbye to her
Speaker 1: child and family, and reports to serve three years. Gracie
Speaker 1: was allowed to select the first prison she went to.
Speaker 1: Unlike any good hippie, she picks the prison with the
Speaker 1: best vegetables. It was like looking through a book and
Speaker 1: taking a college has salad are somebody wrote a little
Speaker 1: book about all of them? Was your god? My lawyer yeah, said,
Speaker 1: there's no guarantee, but you could pick your first and
Speaker 1: second choice here and if there's room, I think they'll
Speaker 1: try and place you there because they don't really want
Speaker 1: to give you a hard time. Tell me about prison,
Speaker 1: to walko, to paint us the picture. What does prison
Speaker 1: look like? Where are you sleeping? What are you doing
Speaker 1: day to day. What do you miss drinking water? You know?
Speaker 1: One of my friends said, what would you like when
Speaker 1: you get in there? And I said, but you tape
Speaker 1: the birds that sing in the morning on the lake,
Speaker 1: so that I've got that sound in the morning when
Speaker 1: I wake up. And then I got to my cell
Speaker 1: and when you opened the window, there was a marsh
Speaker 1: and so right away I felt like that was a
Speaker 1: gift from the universe. Gracie spent most of her three
Speaker 1: years in a medium security prison, but she ended up
Speaker 1: moving around several times, so I was moved around to
Speaker 1: three different prisons in a short time. So I really
Speaker 1: got to see kind of the different kind of institutions
Speaker 1: America has, and a lot about how they run and
Speaker 1: what goes on, and it's you know, tell us about
Speaker 1: it wor well, you know, there's also really sweet moments
Speaker 1: waking up after a little LSD trip because you have
Speaker 1: to do something to alter your conscious and then you
Speaker 1: just can't. I just needed some cheering up, so I
Speaker 1: would take some. And you know, Sunday morning, waking up
Speaker 1: or I hadn't been to sleep, but everybody else was
Speaker 1: waking up and it was like just all these sweet
Speaker 1: human beings running around and borrowing quarters from each other
Speaker 1: and checking to see if everyone had enough. Long we
Speaker 1: detergent because it was a day off, and it was
Speaker 1: just the women were very kind to each other and
Speaker 1: very sweet and very supportive, and the rules were different
Speaker 1: in every prison. In some prisons there was cameras on
Speaker 1: you and you couldn't touch each other, and that was
Speaker 1: difficult because you could get in serious trouble for giving
Speaker 1: somebody a hug when their mother died. And in other
Speaker 1: places you could get in serious trouble for allowing yourself
Speaker 1: to get a sunburn, even though they didn't provide hats
Speaker 1: or sunscreen or sunglasses. And many times you had to
Speaker 1: work outside, and you know what, the infraction was called
Speaker 1: destruction of government property. Even though Greasy remembers sweet moments,
Speaker 1: prison is not a slumber party. One prison she lived
Speaker 1: in went through a crisis situation concerning a plan between
Speaker 1: the guards and a male prisoner to blow up the
Speaker 1: women's prison. At one point, some dude had stolen some too. Anyway,
Speaker 1: he had a network, and there was a men's prison
Speaker 1: and a women's prison, and this helicopter was aiming to
Speaker 1: come into the men's side and escape with somebody. And
Speaker 1: how they were going to do it was they were
Speaker 1: going to bomb the women's side, distract everybody, and then
Speaker 1: land and take the dude out. So they were just
Speaker 1: gonna bomb us. And so all of a sudden, all
Speaker 1: these fans rushed into the middle of the prison, all
Speaker 1: armed with their guns drawn, and la la la and
Speaker 1: low and behold, they took away a bunch of the guards,
Speaker 1: and the guards had sold us. They had for six
Speaker 1: figures agreed to put a bomb off on our side.
Speaker 1: So that was one of the times I thought, oh
Speaker 1: my gosh, wow, death for pot that would be a
Speaker 1: wild thing. Gracie overwhelmingly feels her experience in prison was surreal,
Speaker 1: just totally bizarre. I got to ride Conair. You know,
Speaker 1: we were out there on the tarmac when they moved
Speaker 1: us from one prison to another at the airport, like
Speaker 1: got us chain, We're handcuffed, we're chain our hands are
Speaker 1: chained to our waist. The chain goes down to our
Speaker 1: feet and our ankles are chained so you can sort
Speaker 1: of shuffle and you have to walk up the airplane
Speaker 1: steps like that, and there's all these dudes standing around
Speaker 1: with machine guns and you know, ah, there you are
Speaker 1: and you think, oh gosh, I'm sent somebody else's movie.
Speaker 1: One of the takeaways Gracie has from prison is the
Speaker 1: absurdity of who was imprisoned federally. Some of her fellow
Speaker 1: convicts include a woman who tried to assassinate President Ford.
Speaker 1: Another prisoner worked in mail delivery and threw away the
Speaker 1: junk mail because she wanted to go home early as
Speaker 1: it was nine degrees outside. Then she was sent to
Speaker 1: federal prison because throwing away mail, including junk mail, is
Speaker 1: a federal crime. And there were other smugglers, a woman
Speaker 1: serving fifty years for pot, plus a crew of parakeet smugglers.
Speaker 1: And you know there was then the parakeet smugglers. Oh
Speaker 1: you know, people that smuggled rare birds. I mean people
Speaker 1: that had been busted pain in Yosemite in federal prison. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because maybe a kid saw them do it. Most of
Speaker 1: the people in women's prison are actually victims, and quite
Speaker 1: a few of them were afraid to go when it
Speaker 1: was their time to go because they just went out
Speaker 1: set themselves up for it. I mean, no one was
Speaker 1: working with these women are helping them figure out why
Speaker 1: they maybe should stop making terrible choices or you know,
Speaker 1: and they'd end up with these abusive boyfriends. And you know,
Speaker 1: in prison, everyone is assigned a job. Gracie was in
Speaker 1: charge of recreation, and she headed up a dedicated meditation group.
Speaker 1: And one thing, another funny thing about prison is that
Speaker 1: there's lots of prison literature in prison, so you go
Speaker 1: to the library and you can read about everybody that
Speaker 1: was ever in prison. Gracie was eventually transferred to a
Speaker 1: penitentiary in the Pacific Northwest, where male prisoners were allowed
Speaker 1: to hunt and would provide fresh meat for everyone else
Speaker 1: locked up. Let's just take a moment on that. The
Speaker 1: male prisoners were given guns to go out and hunt
Speaker 1: for food. I've been watching and we didn't even have
Speaker 1: to wear uniforms. And there was all these northwesterners, god
Speaker 1: knows what they were in prison for. There were dudes
Speaker 1: in there that had been busted for this or that
Speaker 1: or the other thing. And they owned these giant ranches
Speaker 1: that had walk in freezer to the next ranch, and
Speaker 1: so they would fill our prison freezer. They couldn't feed
Speaker 1: themselves unless they fed everybody. So we would get like
Speaker 1: we would have salmon for dinner, and we would have
Speaker 1: bear for dinner and we would have Elk for dinner
Speaker 1: and Moose for dinner. I mean, it was sort of weird.
Speaker 1: And we had karaoke night. You know. Oh, I had
Speaker 1: plenty of fun. There was this one prison guard that said, oh,
Speaker 1: you're having fun and he said, you're enjoying yourself And
Speaker 1: I said, well why not? I mean, am I going
Speaker 1: to be miserable? Why waste my time being miserable. I
Speaker 1: spent a lot of time being outraged and how crazy
Speaker 1: it all was. But when I got to the halfway house,
Speaker 1: I remember they made me go to this counselor and
Speaker 1: the councilor said, she said, I don't usually get people
Speaker 1: that aren't bitter. I said, I'm not bitter. I knew
Speaker 1: I was breaking the law. After release, Greasie gets sent
Speaker 1: to a halfway house for how long were you there?
Speaker 1: They held me for a while. But I work in
Speaker 1: rock and rolls, who I got to go out in
Speaker 1: the evenings and there is another great story about how
Speaker 1: you're really being held by criminals even though you're not.
Speaker 1: So I would come back in and there was only
Speaker 1: a dude on at three in the morning when I
Speaker 1: would come home from work. But it was a job.
Speaker 1: They were required by law to let me go to work,
Speaker 1: even if it was at the you know, rock and
Speaker 1: roll palaces. And I would come in and they I
Speaker 1: had to agree to a P test every single time
Speaker 1: I came in with the mail guard watching. And so
Speaker 1: you know what he did. He tried to sell me
Speaker 1: his P for seventy dollars and I said, how do
Speaker 1: I know your P is clean? I know mine is?
Speaker 1: Fuck off? You know, I mean, really yeah, just kind
Speaker 1: of nuts, I know. Just it was so surreal. I
Speaker 1: called it marshmallow world. You look for where something is
Speaker 1: and what it is just keeps moving. It's all moving.
Speaker 1: Life is kind of like that. In the end, it
Speaker 1: turns out, but it was like so extreme there. Now today,
Speaker 1: after spending three years in prison and leaving pots smuggling behind,
Speaker 1: Gracie says, what she feels most acutely is relief. In
Speaker 1: the years since then, it was cool not to be frightened.
Speaker 1: You know. At some point while I was in a
Speaker 1: sweet Buddhist nun that used to come meditate with us
Speaker 1: wrote a book about freedom, and she interviewed me and
Speaker 1: I said, oh, I'm much freer now, And that made
Speaker 1: her sort of curious, and I said, well, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm free of all the little white lies because you
Speaker 1: can't tell people that you're going to go sell a
Speaker 1: pound a pot, so you tell people you're going to
Speaker 1: the movies, and so you lie all the time to
Speaker 1: protect people. So it's well motivated, but it's still little lies,
Speaker 1: and they get heavy after a while, you know, and
Speaker 1: so it's really, you know, I'm so glad that it's legal,
Speaker 1: because it's a shame lies just they're not you know,
Speaker 1: they are sort of unclean and they do have a
Speaker 1: certain weight. And so it was a sacrifice to be
Speaker 1: one of those people that insisted on being a beneficial
Speaker 1: thing and you know, fock for laws basically, So like
Speaker 1: my parents, Greasie lived a double life and it eventually
Speaker 1: became overly burdensome. Neither she nor my parents regret being
Speaker 1: pot smugglers because they believed in the product and the cause. However,
Speaker 1: the mental hardship of working outside the law is real,
Speaker 1: deeply taxing, and accumulates over time, no matter how honorable
Speaker 1: you or the product are. And Gracie was fortunate because
Speaker 1: she was part of a tight knit community that took
Speaker 1: care of her and her child and she had a
Speaker 1: great legal team, plus returned to her neighborhood as a hero.
Speaker 1: I was really lucky so many of the women went home.
Speaker 1: I mean, I got to come home a hero. So
Speaker 1: I'd go dancing and there'd be one hundred dollar bill
Speaker 1: in my pocket that I didn't know who'd put there.
Speaker 1: I'd come to work and there would be a thousand
Speaker 1: dollars in a brown paper bag on my desk, and
Speaker 1: it was like, you know, none of my stuff disappeared
Speaker 1: other than what it cost me to defend myself and
Speaker 1: everybody else. And I spent plenty on that. I spent
Speaker 1: everything on it. I was broke when I finally got there.
Speaker 1: The reason I stopped fighting was because I was completely
Speaker 1: out of money. But I didn't lose anything because of
Speaker 1: my lifestyle, and people just took care of it for
Speaker 1: me while I was gone, and they did my work
Speaker 1: for me, and it just, you know, nothing left. But
Speaker 1: I certainly had to develop a new sense of the
Speaker 1: worth of a dollar when I got out. So watching
Speaker 1: their colleagues and friends get busted, go to prison or
Speaker 1: flee the country was horrifying for my parents. Along with
Speaker 1: a sadness of watching their friends' lives between apart was
Speaker 1: the terror that people would turn a dime. My par
Speaker 1: could only hope that they would be spared if any
Speaker 1: of their colleagues rolled like Gracie's associate. Growing up, because
Speaker 1: I didn't know my parents were lawbreakers, I never felt
Speaker 1: unsafe or worried that I would come home from school
Speaker 1: and find my parents in jail or our bags packed
Speaker 1: to flee the country. However, this podcast, Pilgrimage into Pandora's
Speaker 1: pot Box, is continuously uncovering surprising disclosures and discoveries. Let
Speaker 1: me scrape my jaw off the floor at once again
Speaker 1: and share a recent one. I was talking with my
Speaker 1: mom and she casually mentions in the late eighties they
Speaker 1: could have been busted the same way as Gracie. When
Speaker 1: a family friend with whom we'd vacationed in Kauai and
Speaker 1: whose daughter gave me a Culture Club cassette tape for
Speaker 1: my tenth birthday was busted and rolled on everyone but
Speaker 1: my dad. She told on everybody but us, really all crew.
Speaker 1: Why didn't he tell on you? Yeah, because we had
Speaker 1: because you had a baby, and nobody else did. So
Speaker 1: my mom thinks he busted associate didn't roll on my
Speaker 1: dad because of me and my siblings. The busted colleague
Speaker 1: was also a family man, and to save his skin
Speaker 1: and keep his family intact, he turned a dime on
Speaker 1: his bachelor associates. My dad, a fellow family man, remained unnamed.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating a bizarre to consider I'd potentially been an
Speaker 1: unwitting shield for my parents. In the next episode, Dad's
Speaker 1: pot smuggling career takes a dangerous in devastating turn when
Speaker 1: Dad goes to New York and does the trip that
Speaker 1: ultimately becomes his final straw. I'm Rainbow Valentine and this
Speaker 1: is Disorganized Crime Smuggler's Daughter. Disorganized Crime Smuggler's Daughter is
Speaker 1: written and recorded by Me Rainbow Valentine. Our producers are
Speaker 1: Gabby Watts and Taylor Church. Executive producers are Brandon Barr,
Speaker 1: Brian Live and Elsie Crowley and Me at School of
Speaker 1: Humans and Connel Burn and Charles Bryant at iHeartRadio. Our
Speaker 1: music is by Gabby Lala and Claire Campbell, with original
Speaker 1: theme by Mark Karen and Me. You can follow us
Speaker 1: online at Disorganized Crime Podcast dot com. Right novel story
Speaker 1: Doing as with Me Tamble by steep and Princess of
Speaker 1: the red Wood dreams, she says, keep it real. Handshake
Speaker 1: seals the deal, wrap the ska sealed meal, going up
Speaker 1: these old threads, golding to Doobie, Young, rich and groovy,
Speaker 1: making it up. We roll along, rolling along for country roll,
Speaker 1: rolling along for a country roll, Rolling along for a
Speaker 1: country roll.