Original subtitles

I feel like a Da Vinci of smugglers.

It's like a huge magic show that you're putting on.

But I'm a high -risk junkie.

I always push things to the limit until it blew up.

If you violated the oath of the cartel, you could be sent to shock.

I thought, this is the end.

This is how it ends.

My life was like insanity, man.

It was the early 70s.

It was the age of Aquarius, the age of drugs, sex, rock and roll.

Freedom. People just wanted to be free.

It was an idealistic period of time.

All across the country and cities, young people were playing music and dancing

and smoking pot.

I was a hippie. I smoked pot every day. I never felt like pot was wrong.

I just thought, wouldn't it be great if pot was legal?

But the fact that pot and hash were illegal was to my advantage because I

more money selling it that way.

I was smuggling hash in from Nepal.

It came in Nepalese antiquity, shipped to Boston, where it was unloaded

and distributed by my best friend, Eric.

On paper, Eric and I should never have really gotten along.

I was a street kid from the inner city of Boston, and Eric was an upper -middle

class kid from Norwood, Massachusetts.

We were completely opposite personalities.

That's for me. Come on. But we had fun together.

Wow, what a beauty, huh? Good.

Boston is the university capital of the United States.

There were a lot of rich kids who just wanted to smoke pot, and it was the

perfect market for us.

We felt indestructible. People were getting high. They loved our product.

Our business grew and became successful.

We had this big pile of cash.

Plenty of women, and we were just having a blast.

And then one night, I met this Colombian guy, and he told me

there's someone I should meet in Colombia.

This guy in Colombia, he runs an organization, Garfil, that grows 50

tons of marijuana a year, and we call him El Padrino, the godfather.

He knows you.

He wants to meet you.

I was 20 years old, and some godfather in Colombia had heard about me, and they

wanted me to go to Colombia to meet them.

That got me excited.

This was a big opportunity.

Colombia was known to have top -quality marijuana, and here was my chance to get

right to the source.

It was dangerous and breathtaking and scary.

But the thing is, I'm a high -risk junkie.

I had a need to always push things to the limit, to build something and keep

building it and building it until it blew up.

So the next morning, I was in a private plane.

flying into northern Colombia to meet the Godfather.

And he says, come on in.

He looked like someone who was deadly serious.

A mysterious, hardwired kind of person.

The feeling that I had was a feeling of distrust.

I'm not sure what's going on here.

I'm out of my element.

We get about 10 miles down the road, and we get to a military checkpoint.

The Godfather handed me the bag.

I open the bag, and I see 50 ,000 pesos,

and I see a revolver.

And he says to me, I want you to offer the guard the pesos first.

And if he doesn't take it, I want you to shoot him.

What have I got myself into?

Then I realized this is a test.

They want to know if I've got the balls.

to go out there and actually shoot someone in the head who doesn't take a

So I had no choice.

I had the money and the gun.

There were so many thoughts going through my head. I hate violence. I've

hated violence.

And I didn't want to shoot him.

So I really hoped that he would take that one.

The God looked at me.

I looked at him.

I take a deep breath.

I hand him the bag of money.

I could tell that he was bewildered.

I needed him to take that money.

He looked at me.

and slowly walked back toward the God house with a bag.

I thought, thank God.

And then I walked back, and he asked, is everything okay?

And I said, yes.

Going on that journey was, that was the test, right?

He's challenging me to see who's the craziest in the room. Is it him or is it

me?

As we got deeper into the jungle, we got to a farmhouse.

I noticed that there were farm workers who were also carrying shotguns and

rifles. It was clear to me at that point in time he was running a very serious

operation.

And then as he got over the hill, I could see down in the valley, as far as

eyes could see, the most beautiful crop of marijuana plant.

I'd never seen so much marijuana in my life.

This was at least 20 ,000 acres.

This is unbelievable. This is probably the largest marijuana field in the

The Godfather explains to me that they've been growing here for 120 years

and distributing our crop in South America.

And then he got down to business.

The Godfather wanted to know, is it possible to move mountains of marijuana

safely from this farm to the U .S.? Their harvest is

50 tons per year.

And I thought, that's a lot of Cupid footage.

Seems insane.

And then he said, don't read me.

He walked me to this barn.

When he opened the door, there it was, like, floor -to -ceiling U

.S. currency.

There were just hundreds of bales of cash.

I just looked at that money, and I thought, I love

this guy.

And then I fell in love with this project.

Then the Godfather told me it would make me filthy rich, that I would make $10

to $13 million a year.

I said, perfect.

I've been doing the same on a very small scale, but I know how this works now.

So I said, yes.

And I'm in.

But then he said, once you agree, you can't get out until I say you're free to

go.

I had no idea what kind of impact that would have on my life.

The Godfather wanted me to start this operation by the time the next harvest

started. And the first thing I needed to do was move to the West Coast.

There has never been anyone who's ever smuggled marijuana up the Pacific Ocean

all the way to the Pacific Northwest.

So it was Eric and I.

This was going to be a huge challenge, and it would make us filthy rich.

The two on two.

Yeah, but I'm not sure. I need to check out that nighttime.

So let's do the second one. Okay, gotcha. Okay.

But how can we not get caught while we're doing this?

This is not like smuggling cocaine or diamonds that you could hide in a

concealed space.

Hang on.

Okay, yeah, it's that one. The cove in the corner.

It's like literally moving a mountain on a boat in broad daylight and nobody

sees it.

See what time that is?

It's like a huge magic show that you're putting on. It's a lot of work, man. A

lot of creativity, though. You appreciate the creativity. Imagine each

those things is a puzzle piece that you're putting together until you get it

right. Then this would be the spot.

I knew that we could get a freighter up the West Coast undetected because Coast

Guard... couldn't board a foreign vessel outside of United States territorial

waters, which was two miles offshore.

Over there. Over there, that's it.

The plan was we would send our boat out to the freighter, and then the marijuana

would be offloaded onto our boat and then brought to shore.

I found a perfect stretch of beach. They had a road that would be perfect for

offloading. Got it?

Perfect. We'll take it.

And now everything was ready for our first shipment with 10 tons of marijuana

it.

I was incredibly nervous and anxious about how this was going to unfold.

Can't see him.

I got nothing so far.

The tense of time is really waiting for the freighter to arrive.

Because you never know, it could get busted on its way.

Just trying some other channels. Come on.

I didn't want to go to prison.

But if anything went wrong on my end, do I think that they would have killed me?

Of course.

I got nothing.

The cartel would slit your throat and feed you to sharks.

Something went wrong already, man.

Maybe, maybe. Hold on, hold on. I got, I think I, hold on.

All of a sudden, the radio came to life.

Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey.

And the captain on the freighter is giving me the coordinates where he is.

But by offloading at night, there was a better chance of not getting caught.

And so we waited for night.

Hey, hey, hey.

And then Eric saw the lights, and it came on.

All the adrenaline started rushing through my body.

Okay, it's time. Let's do this.

We went racing down to the water to go

get that weed.

Good man, good man. Good, good, good man.

And in the meantime, the boat went back out to the freighter to get another

load.

One by one, we started uploading 10 tons of bales into the truck.

And then all of a sudden, Eric saw light.

And there's a helicopter flying around.

My heart stopped.

My first thought was, this is the police.

I felt this panic and tense coldness.

And then it was gone.

All I could think of was, let's hurry it up and get it done. I did it as quickly

as possible.

Come on, come on.

And then the truck drove off to a farm where I distributed it once.

So, job well done.

No one got busted.

Everyone got paid.

You know, happy, joyous pot.

And the next day I woke up and I felt like I had just been in a prize fight,

I felt calm and peaceful.

and like almost in some kind of spiritual high.

Money came back from my distributor in Chicago and went downhill to the cartel,

and $3 million stayed with me as my fee.

I feel like a da Vinci of smugglers.

It was just a moment of joy and celebration

between the two of us.

So I did party and go crazy.

But hanging over the cliff was the next job, right?

After that, we shipped in load after load after load.

We did ten times, ten more, ten more, ten more.

We were shipping in so much marijuana into the U .S.

that I'm pretty sure that most people that smoked pot in the 70s smoked my

The next four or five years were nothing short of a fantasy life.

A non -stop party paradise.

At 28 years of age, I had accumulated wealth of over $30 million.

I had bank accounts where I could literally write checks for millions of

dollars. States that had millions of dollars.

I owned real estate holdings that were worth millions of dollars.

You want to say this can't last, but year after year it lasted.

Hey, come over here. I got something for you.

To the point that you gave up on saying this can't last.

So, you know, my life was like...

Insanity, man.

Then one day, I got a call from the Godfather.

There was something important he wanted to talk to me about.

I wasn't sure what he wanted to talk about.

As far as I was concerned, he was very happy with what I was doing. He was

making a lot of money.

But he said to me, this season, I want to bring all 50

tons at once.

I thought to myself, this is the stupidest idea I've ever heard, right?

Everything's working great. Why would we do that? Why?

Ten tons is the most we've offloaded.

Offloading 50 tons would just take too long.

Usually we get everything done in one night, and doing it this way, it would

expose us for three nights.

Yes, sir.

There was a very good chance we would get caught.

You got it in mind?

I repeat, all 50 tons.

One.

I couldn't even believe it.

But I knew I couldn't change my mind.

Part of the deal was, you can't change your mind.

And out of my mouth came, okay.

So I was, and I knew it.

There's only about six people in the world that could pull off 10 tons.

So to pull off 50, which had never been done, would be pretty difficult to do.

It was crazy, but it was exciting to me. Good job.

It's like the most addictive rush. It's like high -risk behavior rush.

It's like, hey, do you want to go surfing when there's a 2 -foot swell or

-foot swell? You know, I'm out in the 20 -foot swell.

Not long after, I got a call telling me the freighter had left Columbia.

So Eric and I got set into action.

The plan was to offload from the freighter the Helena Star

over the next three nights.

We'd never done this much before. It was going to be dangerous.

Anything could go wrong.

It was painfully exhausting from ice -cold water to a 10 -feet stand

onto a truck.

All of a sudden, we heard a plane,

and that worried me.

At this point in time, it was a U .S. Air Force plane which could measure the

cargo inside of a freighter out at sea. I was very concerned about that.

It was specifically designed to look for freighters that were carrying illegal

drugs.

And then it was gone.

Come on.

I thought, thank God.

We offloaded 13 tons of marijuana into the truck.

We knew that stage one was done, but I had a freighter out there bobbing around

with 37 tons left of weed.

And there were still two more nights of this kind of work.

The next morning, we were just resting and watching TV.

I thought after this, we could retire for

good. When a news bulletin comes on... I

said, wait, that's our freighter.

I could not believe it.

I started thinking about this possible.

Is it possible someone ratted on us?

Okay.

I don't know.

My whole life.

I've never been in trouble with the police, not a single speeding ticket.

And here is my first bus for 37 tons of pot.

Then, the wanted picture

of me.

My first thought was, I look incredibly handsome, and I really love that

picture.

But the truth of the matter was I became highly recognizable.

My face was on newspapers and television stations on every channel.

My bus, 37 tons, was one of the largest U .S. marijuana seizures in history.

We knew it's only a matter of time until we get arrested.

We were both pretty much done and resigned ourselves to that.

But the idea of prison horrified me.

I wanted to breathe free air for as long as possible until somebody forcibly

put me in the cage.

I knew that becoming a fugitive was the only option.

For me, there was no problem. I had nobody who loved me that I had to worry

about or that would worry about me.

But Eric was very much connected to his rich family, so I explained to him,

we're going to be living under fake identities in a foreign country.

You got that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eric had never been to Nepal, never been to India, never been to Colombia in the

jungles. This was all brand new to him.

I called a contact and arranged to buy two passports under a fake name. Come

Go.

My plan as a fugitive was to end up in this safe house in Santa Cruz, Bolivia,

which I had heard about.

Our cover story was we were two musicians that were just going to travel

Central and South America and have a good time.

But first, we had to get to the airport.

What's your name?

The airport

is surrounded with guys, fully weaponized and looking pretty pissed

This is not a place where you could charm your way through customs or

like that.

We had 400 ,000 U .S. dollars with us in a bag.

If we got caught, we were... Because there's no way to hide that, right?

I was worried

that somebody might recognize me as we were going to the airport.

What's your name?

Where are you going to?

We were just really tense.

Next, come on.

Where are you going to?

Eric was never the kind of person that was able to handle dealing with stress.

Next.

We get to the booth.

I was very anxious.

This guy looked at the passport and he said, what's your name?

But out of my mouth came, my name is David Richardson.

My real name.

Not the name that was on the passport.

I couldn't even believe it. I thought to myself, why did you say that?

At that moment, the gig was up.

I've been caught, and it's over.

It's kind of like, oh, well, Mickey Mouse, you know, like the ride's over.

It's over.

And he asked, are you sure?

It says here, Paolo Lapini.

And I just looked at him, and I said, how stupid do you think I am?

Next. I felt a sense of relief, like, yay, we're out of here, goodbye.

We flew to Bolivia, and we

landed in Santa Cruz Airport.

And there's a guy there from the safe house.

You here for us?

With a large gun.

He didn't say welcome or hope you're going to have a great time while you're

with us.

Zero and nothing.

On the ride to the safe house.

I'm apprehensive.

I'm still out of my element.

I could see it on God as we were approaching the safe house.

The air around this place was dead.

The guy who was managing it let us through.

I looked at Eric.

He actually looked bewildered.

Like, What have I got myself into?

What kind of place is this?

I'm sure you thought we'd be staying at a five -star hotel with cabana bars and

lounge chairs, but it was a hideout for criminals of all

sorts.

Smugglers, gangsters, killers, you name it.

I didn't really trust any of them, and I'm sure they didn't trust us.

But at least I was safe.

I guess we were there for a few weeks.

Then one day, we were watching the TV.

That's when I realized my bus turned into a huge media circus.

They took over the world.

So I knew I'd eventually get caught.

I'm not stupid.

It's not a sustainable concept being a fugitive. It's idiotic.

Eric looked really worried.

After that, Eric never left

the cabin.

He was traumatized.

I'm watching my best friend going out of his mind,

which I felt responsible for.

I was getting restless and antsy.

I was missing that adrenaline rush that I lived for most of my life.

Like, what's next? We can't just sit here and do nothing.

All of a sudden, from nowhere,

These three guys that are here, my thoughts were me. I have no idea

what's going on here.

I'm getting down.

I'm getting down. Who sent these guys?

And how did they know I was here?

And they put a bag over my head.

I was scared.

And I thought, this is the end.

You know, this is how it ends.

They threw me in some cheap.

I can't see a thing.

And I'm getting more and more terrified the longer this journey takes.

I'm trying to work out who these guys are.

All I could come up with is they were hired by the U .S. government to kidnap

and bring me back to the U .S. to prison.

But then they tie me to this chair, and this guy comes over, and he says,

so you're the one smuggling marijuana with the Colombian mafiosos, right?

I said, I don't know what you're talking about.

And then one of the guys belted me.

He then said to me, what are the overland routes that the cocaine travel

I don't know what you're talking about.

I realized these guys wanted to know the routes through the jungle to smuggle

cocaine from Colombia.

At this point, I don't think these guys are here to bring me back to the U .S.

to prison.

They were not police.

These guys were clearly a rival cartel.

I felt enraged that this is happening.

Who gives them the right to do that to me?

At which point, I got a whack to the jaw.

I was knocked out two teeth here.

I can't even describe the pain. It was agonizing and it didn't go away.

Over the next few days, I was interrogated and tortured.

The thing is, they got the wrong guy.

I didn't know anything about these roots.

But they didn't believe me.

At one point, they broke out a car battery.

and connected it to my nipples.

The pain was so intense that I kept shaking my head from side to side and

screaming out.

And they continued to ask questions.

The torture was agonizing. It went on day after day.

All the money that I had,

all the success I had, the risk that we took, and here I am. I was going to die.

I surrendered my body, and I just somehow was able to look down from up

In that space, I felt no pain.

At some point, they must have realized that I had nothing to say, and they were

done with me.

So the next thing I know, they put up another black bag over my head. I just

thought, here we go again.

What is this? What's going on? What's next?

The jeep stops.

They take the mask off. I look around, and I see that we're at a Bolivian

prison.

I go, holy, I can't believe this.

They must have given me up.

It was just getting worse and worse and worse.

It looked nothing like an American prison.

It looked like a massive swamp.

Here I was, after being kidnapped and held and beaten in

a jungle, to being kidnapped and held in an oblivion military prison.

I honestly didn't know how much more of this I could take.

The God goes, this is you, isn't it?

They'd be different.

I knew they knew who I was.

My old life is over and a new life is going to begin.

Goodbye, freedom.

I was assigned a bed and handcuffed to it in a cell by myself.

No sheets, no pillows, just a mattress.

And the smell was disgusting.

The food consisted of wet rice and

sloppy meat

rank fish.

So I didn't eat for days.

I could see through the bars.

There was always screaming, dabbing, fighting.

That was normal behavior on a daily basis.

In my spirit, it was once as wild as a wolf and free as any animal that's in

jungle is now caged.

and whimpering.

I knew

that I had hit rock bottom in my life.

All the time I was worried and wondering, what happened to Eric?

Where was he?

Was he alive?

He wasn't a street kid. He wasn't street wise.

My worst fear was that he would be feeling alone and vulnerable.

He wouldn't be able to handle being in prison for years.

He's the kind of guy that someone could beat up or even rape.

Days turned into nights. Nights turned into days.

And it just went on and on and on.

Then one day, all of a sudden, there

was Eric just standing there.

I couldn't believe it.

I just stared at him.

I said to him, you know, I'm...

I'm really sorry.

If you hadn't met me, you never would have ended up in this cell with me. I

responsible for that.

And he said, don't worry about it, man. I made all those decisions myself, and I

don't regret any of them.

We had a great time.

When I heard that, I just had this big inner smile, and it gave me a peace of

mind.

And I knew he was right.

We're alive.

We're breathing in and out, and there was a future ahead. We didn't know what

was, but it was there.

Over the next couple of months, I came to the realization that I have an

obsessive personality.

I'm driven by self -gratification, and I rarely consider the needs of other

people. especially Eric.

I never should have got him involved in this business because if I didn't, he

could have had a very normal middle -class life without me.

Eric was eventually released after serving two years in federal prison.

I served four years of my sentence and was released on parole.

Eric and I stayed in touch until he died of cancer in 1999.

When I look back at my relationship with Eric, what I can honestly say is he's

the only friend I've ever had that loved me unconditionally, and I loved him the

same way.

Over the next two years, I fell in love, got married, and now have two sons.

I had to learn to do for others as I would do for myself.

After 15 years of really hard work, I set up and treated over 25 ,000 people

in drug and alcohol treatment programs throughout the United States.

I've always been an advocate for the legalization of marijuana.

And I love the fact that people smoked pot and became mellow and listened to

music and had a good time.

We'll probably remember those days as the happiest days of our life.

I'm an advocate for people who don't have college education to get good

jobs. in the cannabis industry.

That's why I get involved in helping to legalize that industry.

It's not because I want to make money. I don't care. I've made my money.

What I care about is creating jobs for the unemployable. That's what I care

about.

The moral of the story, I don't think there's a simple moral to this story.

My life was filled with adventure and excitement and challenges.

I wouldn't have changed a thing.

Ha ha ha ha.