Tony Thompson - Reefer Men: The Rise and Fall of a Billionaire Drug Ring

TONY THOMPSON

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Hodder and Stoughton
An Hachette UK Company

Copyright Tony Thompson 2007

The right of Tony Thompson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN: 9781444719864
Book ISBN: 9780340899359

Hodder and Stoughton
An Hachette UK Company
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He smokes a reefer, he gets high.
Then he flies to the sky.
That funny, funny, funny reefer man.
Cab Calloway, Reefer Man

I can smoke anything I even smoke that tied stick.
Tied stick?
That stuff thats tied to a stick.
Oh, Thai stick.
Cheech and Chong, Up in Smoke

For Harriet

Also by Tony Thompson

Gangland Britain
Gangs

All they had to do was sit back and wait.

It had taken months of planning, millions of dollars of investment and the combined efforts of more than three hundred people from five different countries to pull it off, but the drugs were finally on their way.

In a quiet corner of a plush Bangkok restaurant the man behind the massive shipment, an eternal hippy named Brian Daniels, nursed a drink and contemplated his next move.

In little more than a decade The Ring a loose-knit collective of British, American and Australian entrepreneurs that Daniels had established had smuggled more than $1 billion worth of marijuana into the United States and beyond. The business now operated on such a vast scale that just one shipment was enough to lower the price of pot along the entire West Coast of America.

Daniels had arrived in South East Asia at a time when the main drug associated with the region was opium. Marijuana was indigenous, particularly in the north-east of Thailand where the dried leaves were used as a seasoning in curries, but few locals smoked the weed and it barely figured in the illicit export trade at all.

Daniels soon changed all that. He forged alliances with the warlords who held sway over the remote regions where the drugs could be grown, helped to introduce new seed stocks and state-of-the-art agricultural techniques to boost production and quality. Within the space of a few years he found himself at the head of an enterprise that offered all the profit of the opium trade with only a fraction of the risk. What started out as little more than a group of college dropouts looking for cheap dope to peddle to their friends had evolved into one of the most sophisticated and profitable drug rings on the planet.

Organised as a series of independent cells, each receiving their drugs from Daniels, the leadership of The Ring was composed of adrenaline junkies amongst them helicopter pilots, rally drivers, powerboat racers, deep-sea salvage experts and members of the Armys elite special forces whose methods were as slick as they were successful.

They chartered planes to fly over their smuggling routes to warn of nearby coastguard patrols. They used a network of informers and moles to feed false information to government agents, sending them off on outrageous wild goose chases. They even hired market research consultants to study the techniques used by unsuccessful gangs and ensure they would not make the same mistakes.

Over the years Daniels and other key members of The Ring had become multi-millionaires many times over and built up lifestyles to match. They owned sprawling estates in the heart of the English countryside, massive ranches teeming with wild horses in the Old West, and swish houses and apartment complexes in cities such as London, Paris, Hong Kong and New York. They owned whole fleets of luxury sports cars and had chauffeur-driven limousines and private jets on permanent standby. One bought an incredible yacht that didnt just have a helicopter landing-pad: it had its own helicopter.

The drugs kept getting through and the money kept piling up. Even the smugglers themselves were astonished at the seemingly endless demand for more and more marijuana.

I dont even know who the fuck smokes all this shit, said Thomas Sherrett, an Oregon-based importer and distributor, as he casually handed over $6 million in cash to two Mafioso money collectors sent by his main supplier. I figure they got like a few thousand people locked in rooms that have joints going day and night. Ive been doing this for twenty-two years who the fuck would smoke all that pot?

Over the years the members of The Ring had enjoyed a run of extraordinarily good fortune, but now the stakes were getting higher. Scotland Yard, the FBI, US Customs and the Drug Enforcement Administration were all closing in on their operations.

Several members had already been arrested and some had secretly testified before various grand juries. Others were believed to have become informants, and were suspected of turning up at crucial meetings while wearing wires or allowing incriminating phone calls to be recorded. Several major shipments had been intercepted. The gangs own informants did their best to keep them one step ahead but everyone was getting increasingly paranoid. No one knew who could be trusted.

Some of the cells, such as the one run by brothers Chris and Bill Shaffer, had shut down all together. In 1987 the pair, admired throughout the drug underworld for their smuggling skills, had successfully landed 42 tons of marijuana in a single operation. What made this particular venture unique is that it had taken place right under the noses of the DEA, who had been tipped off about the importation and were keeping the gang under close surveillance at the time. The brothers were now laying low in London, living a life of luxury with the $60 million they had made in the space of just two years.

Another cell working with Daniels was the one run by longtime smuggler Dennis Ingham. That had briefly run into problems when Ingham himself had been arrested while planning a new importation, but others in his gang had busted him out of prison to ensure the smuggle went ahead.

Then there was the cell led by Briton, Michael Forwell. Knowing that the good luck he had experienced up until then could not possibly last, he decided on a more elaborate plan.

He and his team would, they decided, smuggle one final shipment. It was to be so vast and so profitable that the key members of his organisation would be able to maintain their glitzy lifestyles indefinitely without ever having to resort to crime again.

Brian Daniels had long specialised in supplying multi-ton loads, usually organising three or four boatloads each year, but this one was special. At 72 tons it was the largest single shipment The Ring had ever attempted. The wholesale value of the load was close to $300 million. The street value was in excess of $1 billion.

To put that into context: during the whole of 2004 the total amount of cannabis seized by HM Customs and Excise in the UK the country with the highest levels of cannabis use in Europe was 58 tons.