Parties, women and Lear jets: Lowcountry smugglers of old were flashy - and paid well
The weed came from Colombia or Jamaica, and the hash was from Lebanon, but in the 1970s and 80s Lowcountry most of the drug smugglers were homegrown.
Kingpin Barry “Flash” Foy of Charleston was a Columbia boy. He had scrapes with the law early in life and ended up learning the smuggling trade in Florida. He said when things got crowded down there, he landed on Hilton Head, invited by his friend and fellow smuggler Les Riley, who also grew up in Columbia.
Almost 200 people, all but a couple of them with no prior criminal record, were swept into a mighty rush of cash, marijuana and hashish that crash landed with indictments and jail time for many of them in a legendary twist of Lowcountry lore called “Operation Jackpot.”
And it could soon become a movie.
“We laundered a lot of money,” Foy, now 67, told The Island Packet and The Beaufort Gazette in a recent interview. “Millions. Plural. Tens of millions.”
For the kingpins, that meant parties, women, Lear jets, luxury cars, yachts and oceanfront homes.
Others could get $10,000 for serving as a lookout or a decoy, $10,000 to $50,000 to help unload a boat, $250,000 for lending out a trawler for a night. A boat captain and crew could earn $400,000.
Other smugglers also showed up on Hilton Head. And with an army of local recruits, boats full of drugs were soon sneaking through the rowdy tides of a South Carolina coastline that had protected pirates and rum-runners before them. They delivered loads of pot or hash to McClellanville, and Edisto, St. Helena, Dataw and Pine islands.
“Hilton Head had a lot of advantages,” Foy said. “It had a lot of perfect places for smugglers. It had docks. It was remote in a sense. It had easy access to the ocean. It was a cool place.”
Prosecutors said that smuggling “rings” led by Riley and Foy imported 347,000 pounds of marijuana and 130,000 pounds of hashish. They also made cases involving two other “rings” with activities stretching from Florida to Virginia.
So much pot was flowing that bales sometimes washed ashore, or bobbed around offshore. Locals called them “square grouper.”
High timesBeaufort County was awash in rumors, as the major drug smuggling ring stretched from 1973 to 1983.
“The gentlemen smugglers were the epitome of an overindulgent lifestyle,” wrote former Beaufort Gazette reporter Jason Ryan in his 2011 book, “Jackpot: High Times, High Seas and the Sting That Launched the War on Drugs.”
“The smugglers bought fur coats, cashmere clothing, and thick gold chains ...
“They ordered the most expensive bottles of wine and champagne when dining out, but not necessarily the best. Sometimes they dined in, ordering one of everything on the room service menus. One smuggler was said to have taken a date aboard the Concorde jet to Paris for dinner, then jetted back home that same night, just because they could.”
Foy had an oceanfront home at the end of Mallard Road in North Forest Beach.
“We partied every night,” he said in his recent interview. “How could you not?”
So many smugglers were living near Foy’s place that a friend labeled it “DDOA, or Drug Dealers of America,” Ryan wrote.
Fellow smuggler Riley retired at one point and had a young family — enjoying Hilton Head’s fishing, Montessori school, bike paths and Tiki Hut bar — before being pulled back into the trade, Ryan wrote.
“The babies needed shoes, who knows?” Foy said in his recent interview. “There was always some reason to keep the ball rolling.”
Ironically, the money that drove the show ended up killing it. With more money, it was harder to keep everybody happy, Ryan said in a recent interview. And it was a logistical challenge: What do you do when your closet is literally full of cash? How do you keep from creating paper trails when you buy stuff or invest it?
The trail of money — and one person testifying against another within the chain of a drug ring — ultimately did them in.
David Lauderdale: 843-706-8115, @ThatsLauderdale
Aug 11, 2017 Operation Jackpot changed law enforcement while busting more than 100 people in South Carolina Lowcountry marijuana and hashish smuggling rings in the 1980s. Today they’re called “gentlemen smugglers,” and they might make it a movie. | READ
This story was originally published August 18, 2017 at 9:19 AM with the headline "Parties, women and Lear jets: Lowcountry smugglers of old were flashy - and paid well."