Roger Nelson - Sugar Alpha: The Life and Times of Senor Huevos Grandes

SUGAR ALPHA

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SEOR HUEVOS GRANDES

ROGER AND MELISSA NELSON

iUniverse, Inc.
Bloomington

Sugar Alpha

The Life and Times of Seor Huevos Grandes

Copyright 2013 by Roger and Melissa Nelson.

Author Credits: Melissa Nelson and Matthew Nelson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8939-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8941-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8940-3 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013909455

iUniverse rev. date: 06/10/2013

CONTENTS

This book is dedicated to my father, Roger Nelson, who inspired many by his outrageous and extraordinary adventures, and to all who dare to live the dream.

The events depicted in The Sugar Alpha Chronicles actually happened. Some names, dates and locations have been changed to protect the innocent, the guilty, and the unindicted, and some literary license has been taken to fill in gaps and smooth out the narrative where the record was fuzzy or non-existent, but the bottom line is: All of it is truth, most of it is factand the more outrageous and unbelievable any part of it seems, the more likely it is to be both truth and fact.

Another fact is that my dad and I wouldnt have been able to complete The Sugar Alpha Chronicles without a lot of help from people who wanted as much as we did to share his story with the world. First thanks, of course, go to my mom, Jeanie, who stood by my side through the entire project. And thanks to my dads skydiver friend who transcribed the hand-written and typewritten pages onto a computer so we could actually do something with it when my dad finished his sentence.

Next, thanks to the friends and family members who recalled so many narrative pieces of that era, and the advisors who helped me track down various records. I also owe a debt of thanks to those who helped me find the police and court documents related to my dads adventures, many of which were not computerized and thus physically difficult to find.

Next, thanks to Ben Lowe, love of my life, business partner, and sounding board through good moments and bad as I put together Sugar Alpha .

Thanks also to my publishers, whose 2012 review notes and recommendations about Sugar Alpha were so pivotal in shaping its final form.

Which brings me to my next thank you; to Robin Black Death Heid, a longtime skydiver, pioneering BASE jumper, prolific and respected writer-editor, and a friend of my dadswho had years before sent Sugar Alpha to him on a 3.5-inch disc, then died before they could ready it for publication. The disk ended up forgotten in a file box until Robin found it while looking for something else and called to ask me what was going on with it. He was happy to hear I was working on it, and he offered his services, but I told him I was almost done, thanked him for calling, and said Id get in touch if I needed himbut I was sure I wouldnt.

Then I got the publishers notes and knew I needed him after all, so I sent him an email. He was at that moment on a mountain in the middle of China, judging a wingsuit BASE jumping race that was being broadcast live to 100 million-plus Chinese and other Asians, an event that would have made my dad laugh at the Sugar Alpha audacity of it all. Robin said hed love to help me get it over the finish line, so when he got back to the U.S., he checked out the publishers notes, then tuned up the work my dad and I did to match their notes and recommendations.

My final thanks goes to you, dear readers, for trusting that Sugar Alpha was a good way to spend your time and money. I guarantee you wont be disappointed!

You are about to read one of the most rollicking, real-life adventure stories ever written: Sugar Alpha , the first half of Roger and Melissa Nelsons Sugar Alpha Chronicles , the original draft of which Roger wrote while doing time in federal prison for tax evasion and running a Continuing Criminal Enterprise. Roger died in a skydiving accident before he could get it ready for prime time, so his daughter Melissa took the project to the next level, then enlisted me to put the finishing touches on this tale that will make you mad and happy and keep you amazed and utterly entertained from the first word to the lastwhich pretty much also describes the amazing man around whom the whole tale revolves.

Roger Nelson lived life out of the box. Whatever he went after in life, he injected into it big dreams and big ideas, always framed by those two big questions that are the holy grail for out-of-the box thinkers: Why? and Why not?

Roger went after three main things in life; sport parachuting and drug smuggling, two activities connected by a love for adrenalin, adventure and high-wire-without-a-net consequences if you make too many mistakes; and his family, the needs and wants of which were usually out of sync with and often diametrically opposed to the wants and needs of his other loves.

Lets start with parachuting, the arena in which I knew himor knew of himfor close to 20 years. When he died in 2003 at age 47, Roger Nelson had more than 9,000 jumps, 100 hours of freefall time, multiple instructor ratings and a two-year stint as a director on the board of the U.S. Parachute Association. He was also a commercially-rated pilot with more than 10,000 flight hours.

Beyond the numbers, however, Roger left a legacy not only as one of sport parachutings most dynamic, colorful and controversial characters, but as one who arguably accomplished more than anyone before or since to change the sports thinking and practices so it could develop it into the amazing extreme sport community it is today.

He organized parachute centers more like ski resorts and hosted large skydiving boogies that were basically raves with airplanes and parachutes as well as the standard partying that went along with that. He engineered competitive skydiving innovations so far outside the box but still inside the rules that flummoxed event organizers disqualified his team the first year he did it only to well, youll learn in Sugar Alpha what finally happened.

Not long after that, Roger developed student training and equipment doctrine so outrageously different but so unassailably better than the status quo that it shook the souls of parachutings thats-the-way-weve-always-done-it crowd and changed almost everything about how people now learn to skydive. And all along the way, his personality and personal adventures gave rise to stories told so many times around so many parachute center fire pits that they became legends and cartoonsexcept that, as it turned out, the more outrageous and unbelievable the tale was, the more likely it was to be true.

Thats because Roger Nelsons second great adrenalin love was drug smuggling, a secret life he began living not long after he started jumping. Hed done low-level drug dealing in high school and, out-of-box thinker that he was, he noticed a lot of airplanes sitting at airports doing nothing when they could be in the air doing something productive. He also noticed that both pilots and skydivers seemed to like living on the edge as much as possible even if they werent exactly thinking outside of the boxso he combined these two elements and his alchemy produced a gold mine of adrenalin, adventure, cannabis, cocaine and Krugerrands. Roger was unarguably a drug smuggler par excellence and one of the most innovative and methodical drug outlaws who ever ran a gig. As he did with parachuting, he challenged conventional wisdom and came up with ways to bring top-shelf weed into the United States that both satisfied his customers and boggled the minds of federales and fellow smugglers alike when they figured out what he was doing. It was not for nothing that he was known among drug smugglers as Seor Huevos Grandes .