By Andy Rosenblatt
John West Thatcher is just not your common, run-of-the-mill, wicked, bizarre, long-haired, hippie drug smuggler. For starters, Thatcher doesn’t drink, curse or smoke. Not even cigarettes. He’s a God-fearing, born-again Christian who eats lunch at his unpretentious desk, wets his hair and combs it straight again, works six days every week and goes to church on the seventh.
He’s additionally a Kiwanis Membership member, Davidson School trustee, retired lieutenant colonel and chairman of the Miami chapter of Youth for Christ. With a canopy like that, who would ever suspect that Thatcher is the primary cocaine importer in Florida, possibly within the nation—a distinction he earned with out actually making an attempt. Or spending a day in jail.
John Thatcher’s enterprise is bananas. Actually. He imports the yellow fruit from Colombia to Miami, 150 million rectangular tropical delights every year. He additionally imports—inadvertently—plenty of cocaine, one thing Thatcher, a deacon of the Presbyterian Church, finds onerous to clarify. The nostril sweet is available in with the remainder of Thatcher’s cargo on the three huge banana boats he owns. Like Thatcher’s bananas, the coke is available in bunches. Generally 50 kilos, generally 150 kilos at a time.
What the railroad did for the American West, the banana boat is doing for Colombian cocaine. The connection is straightforward and environment friendly. Within the final three years, effectively over a ton of coke has moved via it. Over 750 kilos has been wasted by Customs narcs who watch all banana boats that dock in Tampa or Miami. The highest three seizures on the DEA all-time hit parade occurred on banana boats. Collectively, the seizures account for one out of each eight kilos of coke the feds have put their palms on, an unimaginable $190-million payload of snow. For each pound that’s wasted, it’s sure that three, 4 or possibly 5 kilos find yourself in somebody’s nostril.
The banana boat provides the big-time coker some important benefits. Scheduling is one in all them. At the very least two banana boats depart Colombia for Florida each week. Their schedules are as common because the airways’, and there’s much less probability of shedding your baggage.
The banana boats journey the quickest water route potential; they’re nonstop and refrigerated in addition. In contrast to their airborne competitors banana boats require no overhead, because the coker, in essence, is hitching a journey. There’s no upkeep or licenses to fret about. Not even fuel.
One other huge benefit is the banana boat’s dimension. The 300-foot-long ships could seem like big hulks of scrap steel and twisted metal to the untrained eye, however they provide cokers as much as 90,000 cubic ft of cupboard space and 1,000,000 and one nooks and crannies to cover a stash.
The one restrict is the coker’s creativeness, which is to say no restrict in any respect. Coke has been discovered in all places on Thatcher’s ships. Within the pipes, the partitions, {the electrical} paneling; in oil containers and cleaning soap containers. Additionally within the crew’s lockers, the bilge, deserted mills, rope lockers, the engine room, the galley and in tin cans. If an acceptable compartment can’t be discovered, it might probably normally be constructed. Cokers have put in false pipes, false partitions and false flooring.
A stash of 157 kilos was discovered within the banana boat’s bilge behind 6,000 containers of bananas and a layer of decking. One other 42 kilos was inadvertently found by a fastidious feminine narc who marveled about one boat’s galley crew and the way they neatly wrapped their rubbish. The “rubbish” she stumbled previous was price $10 million on the road.
A number of the greatest locations to place small quantities of coke are on Thatcher’s crew. Every banana boat carries extra mules than a field of borax cleaning soap. The mules pack coke within the heels of their footwear, their underwear, their crotches and generally their girdles. The mules are recruited in Turbo, Colombia, the place the banana boats dock. The choice course of is just not an arduous one. Any sailor who understands that there are rewards for poor imaginative and prescient and penalties for sharp eyes can qualify. Mules coming into Miami can count on $1,000 or extra for each kilo that’s safely delivered.
Luis Eduardo Arias by no means collected his mule’s price. He by no means safely delivered his cocaine. Arias as soon as tried to maneuver 18 ounces of coke off the banana boat Cubahama by stuffing it deep inside his stained jockey shorts. However it wasn’t the telltale bulge of Arias’s crotch that gave the Colombian sailor away. It was the empty quart bottle of Pepsi he by no means returned.
Two Customs narcs routinely trailed Arias as he left the banana boat, crossed the Miami River and walked to Little Havana, Miami’s Cuban, coke-snorting enclave. They didn’t discover the enormity of the sailor’s groin. At the very least initially. They did discover the soda bottle and have become suspicious when Arias entered a comfort retailer however didn’t return the bottle for a deposit.
“The Colombians are creatures of behavior identical to the remainder of us,” one of many arresting narcs later stated. “None of them would go up an opportunity to deposit a bottle. Not one of many huge ones that pay a dime.”
Joaquin Fernandez additionally acquired burned. Not by Customs; by a competing mule. On a moist and uncomfortable August evening in Tampa, Fernandez walked the deck of the banana boat EA, fought with the mosquitoes and waited for his contact. It wasn’t lengthy earlier than a boyish-looking American appeared. “Puta,” the American stated in the course of his dialog, “is Spanish for whore.”
That was Fernandez’s sign. The Colombian moved again into his quarters with nice goal. He then bumped into the engine room and began eradicating the 117 bolts that saved the hatch plate on the water tank and everybody from his stash. Fernandez labored quick, however the previous couple of bolts had been caught. The American who had boarded the boat provided a hand. As Fernandez moved away to make room, he turned and pissed in his pants. 4 different males had been standing behind him. All of them carried weapons. The boys had been Customs brokers, tipped off by one other sailor suspected of carrying his personal load.
Arias and Fernandez ended their American trip by being hauled earlier than a federal choose and given a lecture and a fantastic they couldn’t pay earlier than being deported to Turbo, a fishing village turned increase city on the Colombian coast from whence they got here.
Just about nothing occurs in Turbo—a city of 30,000 inhabitants, small bars and rutted streets—that doesn’t contain bananas or cocaine. A one-wharf city, 22 miles from the top of the closest paved highway, Turbo sits on the sting of the Colombian jungle, the place the wealthy soil produces tens of millions of Cavendish bananas and the encircling hills produce communist guerrillas.
Bananas present a lot of the jobs in Turbo. Cocaine supplies a lot of the wealth. In the most effective of occasions, bananas retail for 25 cents a pound. Cocaine, at any time, sells for greater than ten occasions the freemarket worth of gold. Turbo’s snowfall has given Colombian cokers the cash essential to purchase the quickest planes, the largest haciendas and the prettiest girls. It has given profitable mules the possibility to buy one in all Colombia’s most sought-after standing symbols—a home with a concrete flooring.
In Turbo, the clever peasant drinks his aguardiente, a transparent liquid comprised of the essences of anisette and kerosene, together with his eyes turned towards the bottom. That could be a certain strategy to keep alive in Colombia’s Dodge Metropolis. Just one Turbo official ever had visions of changing into Wyatt Earp, and he’s useless. He was the captain of the port of Turbo, and three years in the past he tried to cease the cokers. The captain was shot useless within the city sq. at midday. His assassins had been by no means apprehended. There have been no witnesses. The boys of Turbo proceed to drink with their heads lowered.
Certainly one of Thatcher’s banana-boat captains calls Turbo “the top of the world.” It’s a good place for a gringo to get mugged whereas making an attempt to freelance cocaine.
However getting coke aboard a banana boat is not any downside for Colombia’s cocaine cartel. It takes 30 hours, 100 Colombian stevedores and Thatcher’s 20-man crew to load one boat with bananas. It takes solely a modest tip paid to the proper Colombian customs inspector to get a stash aboard.
“Anybody with a raft or a canoe,” admits Thatcher, “has entry to our ships.” One DEA agent who has been to Turbo and provides the cokers there appreciable credit score believes they may load a submarine.
Thatcher, the Colombians and our personal narcs have tried every part to peel the Banana Boat Connection. There was one effort to go away just one door on the ship open, however that proved inefficient. There was additionally an try to limit the crews’ shore depart and forbid them an opportunity to see their girls pals. That almost provoked a mutiny.
The Colombians have beefed up their customs element in Turbo, however obligation there may be thought-about as engaging as Vietnam. Most Colombians simply sit tight in Turbo and wait for his or her tour to run out.
The narcs who cowl the Miami waterfront are extra enthusiastic. There’s one thing about this cat-and-mouse sport via an oily, dirty, scorching banana boat hull that warms the cockles of a narc’s coronary heart. The entire thing is paying homage to Mad journal’s “Spy vs. Spy” and, what the hell, it’s taxpayer financed.
“We research them and so they research us,” defined one narc. “We all know their modus operandi and so they know ours. Many of the mules aren’t dumb. They ship scouts out to the ship’s bridge with binoculars. Generally we’re eyeball to eyeball. The entire thing is enjoyable.”
The narcs don’t prefer to lose at this sport, however the odds are towards them by advantage of their numbers. It takes six narcs a minimum of half a day to completely search a banana boat. That’s extra males than Customs can repeatedly afford. Customs has to accept surveillance of crew members and spot checks.
John Thatcher additionally takes the Banana Boat Connection to coronary heart. He’s accomplished every part he might to destroy it. For years, Thatcher tried to strike on the cokers with the vengeance of Frankenstein making an attempt to slay his monster. There have been occasions that Thatcher couldn’t sleep at evening, so he tried tongue-lashing the crew. Behind his again, in Spanish, they laughed, so Thatcher started to fireside them. He fired anybody suspected of being a mule, from sailors to their captains. The turnover charge on Thatcher’s ship soared to over one hundred pc a yr.
In one in all his extra determined moments, Thatcher spent a number of thousand {dollars} using sleuth Ivan Nachman to go to Colombia and break up the smuggling ring. Nachman is a former Miami constable who was raiding lockers at Miami Excessive, trying to find heroin, when he wasn’t testing bulletproof vests in his workplace with a Smith & Wesson .38. Nachman’s seek for heroin produced 4 ounces of grass. His seek for an ideal bulletproof vest produced a couple of holes within the partitions of his workplace.
Nachman left Thatcher’s headquarters for Colombia armed together with his sun shades, his cowl as a photojournalist and a way of bravado developed within the years when copping a couple of joints from a hippie was thought-about an enormous bust. Nachman returned with a portfolio of shiny photos of the Colombian countryside, an equally flashy invoice and no important new info. The Banana Boat Connection continued undisturbed.
Alongside the Miami River, John West Thatcher is usually known as the “man who smuggles bananas and imports cocaine.” The tag used to make Thatcher offended. Now, in an unguarded second, he can discuss cocaine and snigger.
Forty-six kilos of coke was not too long ago seized close to Thatcher’s ship Oro Verde, which in Spanish means “inexperienced gold.” Thatcher now thinks he could rename the ship Oro Blanco, or “white gold.”
Learn the complete challenge right here.