Latest news with #TopCat
Irish Times
12-07-2025
- Sport
- Irish Times
Patient Thomas Clarkson ready to put his hand up for Ireland
Top Cat! The most effectual! Top Cat! Who's intellectual! Close friends get to call him 'TC,' Providing it's with dignity! READ MORE Thomas Clarkson , known as TC to his team-mates and friends, gets the reference to the lyrics of the 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon, Top Cat. Leinster forwards coach Robin McBryde got there first when he played the theme tune for the 25-year-old tighthead prop. He's a good sport when the tune breaches the peace in the sweaty confines of a Portakabin at Ireland 's training ground on the outskirts of Lisbon. He occasionally mops his brow and it's nothing to do with the questions, rather the lack of air conditioning in 30 plus degree temperatures. Clarkson lived in Brittas Bay until he was nine, played rugby for Wicklow RFC, before his family – dad Finbarr, mum Nina, and his siblings, Catey, Freddie and Dominic – moved to Blackrock where he went to school, first in Willow Park and then in the senior school. He swam competitively, butterfly his stroke of choice, before rugby subsumed his interest. Rugby was a good fit. 'I was always the bigger kid, so I suppose it was always kind of fun just running through. I always got the ball on tap penalties and stuff,' Clarkson explains. His current Ireland team-mate Nick Timoney coached him in first year. He won a Schools Senior Cup under Liam Turner's captaincy, a Grand Slam with the Irish under-20s in 2019 (the first of two years on the age-grade team), and toured South Africa with Emerging Ireland in 2022. Smaller in stature relative to the behemoths he faced when playing international age-grade rugby, he quickly realised that good technique was a prerequisite. Thomas Clarkson (right) with Peter O'Mahony during Ireland's Autumn Nations fixture against Argentina at the Aviva last November. Photograph: Billy Stickland/Inpho 'I was never the biggest, because coming out of school I was pretty small, only 110kg or something like that. I'm 128kg (now), or something like that. There were lads (at under-20s) that had played (in the French) Top 14 and the (English) Premiership. They were up in the 120kgs then, so I knew I had to be technically good.' Clarkson smiles in recounting the struggle, not so much putting on size but muscle. 'I was pretty chubby leaving school. I got put into fat camp with Dave Fagan (the late Leinster strength & conditioning coach). 'I was put on gym-heavy programmes, trying to put on muscle and get stronger. You see some of lads coming through now, like (Alex) Usanov and Paddy (McCarthy), putting up big numbers in the gym. I was nowhere near that. It's something I had to work on a lot over the last few years. It's probably why it took me a few years before I started playing in bigger games and capped and stuff. 'You can put on loads of weight, and it can be bad weight. You can't move with it on. I think I took it a bit slower, it took me a few years to put it on. Now, I feel like I can move better than when I was lighter.' Ireland's interim head coach Paul O'Connell referenced Clarkson's diligence in working to get the right body shape for a tighthead prop. 'He's been excellent for us. We had him on the Emerging Ireland tour and he's a considerably bigger man since then. Obviously, he's in a pushing competition there in the front row. 'He's worked really hard, even from the Six Nations to the summer tour, he looked even in better shape again and it's a great sign of a guy because he's in that position where he's trying to put on size. It can be hard work at times when you're playing games and training. 'Players know good players. Johnny (Sexton) would have always said that (Clarkson) is a very good footballer, and paid him compliments about his all-round game. He's very comfortable on the ball. He had a few good, tough carries (in Tbilisi), particularly early in the game. Like all these guys they just need time in the saddle. 'There's plenty of things from the game he needs to work on, a little bit on maul defence, but he gets a chance now to go and do it again and show that he can improve.' Thomas Clarkson in action for Leinster against the Bulls in the URC final in June. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho Clarkson made his Leinster debut five years ago and by his own admission he wasn't ready. He isn't patient by nature. 'It was frustrating. I made my debut quite early. There were a few injuries. I probably got thrown in before I'd shown I was ready. 'The fact that I got a taste of that so early, I didn't have to wait so long to break through. It's been frustrating. There have been a few lows.' He continued: 'At the end of the 2023 season, I had a run of games (for Leinster) where the scrums went really badly. It was during the Six Nations (and then) we went to South Africa, I got absolutely destroyed. '(It's the) worst place to go if you're low on confidence. That was probably the lowest. Since then, I've been building nicely.' It taught Clarkson resilience. The lessons were occasionally painful, but the quality of the person and the player ensured he made progress. The rehabilitation process was overseen by Cian Healy, Andrew Porter, Tadhg Furlong and Rabah Slimani in Leinster training. 'You're scrumming against (them), you must learn. When you do get to the standard it gives you confidence for the matches.' Psychologically it allowed Clarkson to shed any doubts. The last couple of years he's kicked on, winning his first Ireland cap against Argentina last November having originally been brought into the squad as a training panellist. Injuries within the squad provided the opportunity, but Clarkson grabbed it with both hands. In Lisbon he will win his eighth cap, a tally he's accumulated in eight months. He's had to remain patient too. 'Tadhg (Furlong) and Slim (Rabah Slimani) got the nod for those few European games. I was getting the matches in between and felt like I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to play well. It wasn't happening and I was feeling a bit low about it. The Glasgow game was when I felt that was probably my best game. 'Different things are expected of you (with Ireland). I want to put my hand up here. These are probably lesser profile games for the public but it's important for me that I can come in off the back of playing well for Leinster and translate it to playing well (for Ireland). 'You're not just going to walk in having played well on the outside. Obviously, they have the lads that they can trust, and they've been in the system for years.' He's earning that faith and trust, game by game. And maybe one day very soon, like Top Cat, Clarkson can become 'the indisputable leader of the gang'.
The Herald Scotland
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Why I'll never forget Cartoonland's Glen Michael
The first two are obvious but the power of Michael was immense. Here was a man with a foreign voice (Devon English) with the ability to transport a 10-year-old to a place he had never even imagined existed. To Cartoonland. This was a world of cheeky, friendly ghosts, wily coyotes and a cute mouse who made his feline housemate's life an unrelenting misery. Glen Michael introduced us to a sailor man with a cute South Pacific hat and much less cute tattoos, and a love for tinned spinach. And through the presenter the youngsters of Scotland were given direct access to traditional Americana via a very loud rooster, a canine sheriff's stolid but stupid deputy and a couple of bears that lived to steal from the picnic baskets of gullible and undeserving humans. And of course, we didn't catch on straight away that the greatest cartoon of all, Top Cat, was a cartoon copy of Phil Silvers' Bilko. But Glen Michael certainly did. Read More: And we loved Glen Michael almost as much as we did the cartoons he showed us when we came home from school. To be honest, aged 10 in 1966 when the presenter's stint began, I was a little too sophisticated to be captivated by Paladin the talking lamp with the dark voice that hinted at something of a pernicious soul. But thanks to the great selection of material – who couldn't laugh at the sheer malevolence of the Roadrunner – the children of the time were happy to go along with Michael's broadening of the programme, to turn it into a mini-variety show with a sense of theatre in which he revealed performing dogs (Rusty and Rudi), used bluescreen to enable him to walk into cartoons and join the action and invited star guests. Glen Michael (Image: Andy Buchanan) It was many years on interviewing Glen Michael that it became obvious how – and why – he had turned a cartoon screening show into variety television. He was variety. Born Cecil Buckland in Devon, his father was a high society butler who once worked at the real-life Downton Abbey. Michael learned by osmosis the power and the need to maintain a fixed smile. Yet, his parents were also part-time performers. "My father was a good singer,' he recalled. 'My mother was a cabaret singer. In those days they would go around doing dinners.' There is no doubt Glen Michael was compelled to become an entertainer. He recalls walking five miles down a country lane at the age of 12 to see a show. "I sat in the audience and was stage struck. From then on, there was nothing else I wanted to do but go on stage. I would come back from school and go up to the bedroom in front of a long mirror and would act things I'd seen in the pictures - Humphrey Bogart and such.' On leaving school, with just £4 in his pocket, the teenager took off for London to pursue a career as a performer. He heard about ENSA, the Forces entertainment service and after a stint driving trucks, he landed a 'spot', in which he performed solo for the first time. (It was also where he met future wife Beryl, a singer and actor. The couple married in 1946, when Michael was 19 and Beryl 23.) His acting career developed, landing a role in a part in the 1950 classic Ealing film, The Blue Lamp, starring Jack Warner and Dirk Bogarde. I didn't know at the time but the director Basil Dearden reckoned Michael could be the next Ian Carmichael. Glen Michael at STV (Image: Scottish television) However, Glen Michael took a bold chance and changed his name and headed north, "On November 15, 1952, I turned up at the Victoria Theatre in Paisley to start rehearsals with Jack Milroy and I didn't know what the hell I'd come to. I didn't know anything about Glasgow or Scotland - and I never went back [to England]. I loved it, I loved the people." I never did see Glen Michael in theatre, but I did see him in television in the early sixties when he appeared as a straight man in the Francie and Josie Show. And he proved to be a perfect foil. (The fact he became friends with the immensely difficult Fulton suggests Michael featured as much grace as he had tolerance). And he proved to be quite perfect as the presenter in Cavalcade. The viewers certainly thought so, at one time receiving over 2,000 letters and postcards a week and he achieved a staggering 98% of Scotland's television audience. Glen Michael loved the adulation. He was showbiz. But when it all stopped, the demand for the personal appearances, the panto runs (surprisingly often cast as the baddie) the broadcasting stints dried up, the man whose cartoons made us laugh 'till we were sore wasn't laughing at all. He didn't enjoy retirement at all. 'Not really. Because I was forced to stop." In later years he enjoyed daytime detective programmes. And football. He didn't much rate children's television today – perhaps a little too fruity, given he sometimes censored the action in the cartoons he fronted. And there was an aura of sadness about the man who felt he could – and should – have performed forever.
Buzz Feed
06-07-2025
- Buzz Feed
I Spent Years Making Millions Smuggling Cocaine For Pablo Escobar And No One Had Any Idea
Back in the 1980s, I was leading a double life. By day, I owned and operated the largest Lamborghini dealership in the United States. But by night, I was secretly flying tons of cocaine for Pablo Escobar and smuggling it into South Florida. I never set out to be a cocaine smuggler. My dad was a real estate developer in Miami and my mom was a homemaker. I had a great childhood. But becoming the victim of a duplicitous con artist completely changed the trajectory of my life and turned me into a different person. And a few years later, I was making tens of millions of dollars every month in the cocaine business. At the height of my success, I owned 30 airplanes, dozens of boats, multiple mansions and Lamborghinis. I even had a pet mountain lion named Top Cat. But it all came crashing down in April of 1988 when I was arrested in an early morning raid by federal agents. As I was crouched on my knees getting handcuffed, and as federal agents surrounded me with guns drawn pointing at my head, I thought to myself, 'How the hell did I get here?' I was born in Cuba back in 1952. At that point my father was a senator, a really respectable and noble man. And all I wanted to do, all I ever wanted to do was follow in his footsteps. The brutal dictatorship of Fidel Castro forced my family to flee Cuba and make a new life for ourselves in South Florida. My dad started working in construction, and before long he became a very successful real estate developer. When I was 17 years old, my dad decided to get into the sugar business. He purchased land in Haiti to build a sugar mill and spent the next few years trying to get that sugar mill up and running. I was my dad's shadow. I followed him everywhere. He wore a suit and had a briefcase. I wore a similar suit and carried a similar briefcase. I was with him at every single business meeting, and he taught me everything he knew. He was the best father any son could have asked for. But tragically, when I was 19 years old, my father got cancer and died quickly over the course of a few months. On his deathbed, he made me promise him that I would get that sugar mill in Haiti off the ground. And I swore to him that I would. Before he passed away, my dad had secured a $14 million loan for the sugar mill in Haiti. But after his death, the bank refused to honor that loan and refused to acknowledge me as a capable heir. They dismissed me as a 'kid' and wished me luck finding the $14 million at another lending institution. I was grieving the loss of my father, and I was desperate to keep the promise I had made to him. I worked all my contacts and my dad's contacts and eventually found a banker willing to loan me the money. All he needed was a $100,000 'good faith' deposit. I was young and desperate, a truly dangerous combination. I didn't suspect that once I made that deposit, that banker would stop talking to me. And then he would start avoiding me. For months. When I eventually showed up unannounced at his office one day, I was stunned to see other victims there demanding their money back, too. That banker turned out to be a ruthless con artist. I was devastated. At that point, I was defaulting on loans my father had already taken out for the sugar mill, for the land and for the machinery. And I was severely in debt to the government of Haiti. I needed money and I needed it fast. It was the mid-1970s and I knew that selling marijuana could make me a lot of cash in a short amount of time. So, I bought a boat and set sail for the Bahamas, where I knew all the pot being sold in South Florida was coming from. I was fortunate to make a great contact when I got there and sailed back to South Florida with a few hundred pounds of weed stashed away in my boat. I paid $25,000 for all that marijuana and sold it for $100,000. It wasn't the $14 million I needed to get the sugar mill in Haiti off the ground, but it was definitely a good start. At that point, I started making regular trips to the Bahamas. But then the weed supply there started to dry up. You see, the marijuana that I had access to in the Bahamas was marijuana the government confiscated ― which ultimately ended up on the black market, where I would purchase it. But there were months when they didn't confiscate much pot ― so there wasn't much I could buy. So I decided to go where the pot grows: Colombia. But to get to Colombia, I would need to buy an airplane and learn how to fly it. So that's exactly what I did. I opened the classifieds section of the newspaper (remember those?) and found a little twin-engine Beechcraft for sale for $50,000. It was a real bucket of bolts, but I bought it and repaired it and quickly learned how to fly. My first trip to Colombia in 1979 was a huge success. I brought back a ton of marijuana and sold it and made a few hundred thousand dollars. At that point I was able to get credit for more marijuana. So, I flew back and got another $800,000 worth of pot. On credit. That turned out to be a huge mistake because I ended up losing that marijuana. I was flying at night and I thought I dropped the marijuana out of my plane onto my boat that was waiting below off the coast of Florida, but it turned out to be someone else's boat. And they made off with my marijuana. I owed those Colombian suppliers $800,000 for that weed. Two weeks later, they sent thugs to kidnap me. And those thugs put a gun to my head and told me that if they didn't get their $800,000 — in 48 hours ― they would kill me. And then kill my entire family. Up until that point, I had avoided anything to do with cocaine. Because in my mind, the cocaine guys were the 'bad guys.' The cocaine guys were the killers. I was just smuggling marijuana to make enough money to get my dad's sugar mill off the ground. But my life was on the line now, and so were the lives of my family. And flying cocaine was 100 times more profitable than flying marijuana. So I flew to Colombia, picked up a load of cocaine, and flew it back. And I made $1 million from doing that one trip alone. I paid the Colombians back their $800,000 and saved my life. But the realization that I could make $1 million a trip flying cocaine changed everything for me. Suddenly my marijuana smuggling days were in the rearview mirror. As a full-time cocaine smuggler, I was making $1 million a week. I quickly developed a stellar reputation in the world of cocaine pilots. Primarily because most cocaine pilots during that time partook in the cocaine they were smuggling, and they were always high. I, on the other hand, had never done drugs in my life. Not marijuana. Not cocaine. Not any drug. That really seemed to separate me from the other pilots of the day who were constantly late and constantly crashing their airplanes, losing loads of cocaine. I was never late. And I never lost a plane load of cocaine. Ever. In 1983, Pablo Escobar sent one of his underlings to summon me. He had heard of me and heard about my reputation for never losing a load and he wanted to hire me to smuggle cocaine for him. After a tense back-and-forth negotiation in his secret lair deep in the Colombian jungle, I agreed to fly 1,000 kilos of coke for Pablo Escobar. And he agreed to pay me $5 million to do it. After I started making weekly $5 million trips for Pablo Escobar, he stopped paying me in cash ― and started paying me in cocaine. The cocaine that Pablo Escobar paid me with, I sold in South Florida and all over the country, becoming a cocaine kingpin in my own right. Sadly, by the time I had enough money to resurrect my father's sugar mill, it was no longer salvageable. The government of Haiti had taken it over years earlier and run it into the ground. This was during the rule of Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, and the nation was in steep decline. As I walked through the rubble where my father's sugar mill once stood, I realized it would never, ever be. So I flew back to Miami and parlayed all the money I was making into a Lamborghini dealership, and I bought a cell phone company ― in the mid 1980s, when cellphones cost $5,000 each. I also started building and selling homes in the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale area and became a real estate developer. In the end — adjusted for inflation — I was grossing nearly $100 million a month at the height of my cocaine career — smuggling and selling tons and tons of cocaine every week. Keep in mind, back in the 1980s, cocaine was selling for as much as $600 per gram. And there are more than 900,000 grams in a ton (plane load) so I was swimming in money. But then one of my underlings got addicted to the coke we were smuggling and got very sloppy. And then he got busted. And he served me up to the Feds on a silver platter in order to get a lighter prison sentence for himself. I was arrested in April of 1988. And in early 1991, I pled guilty to multiple felonies including the distribution of marijuana, the distribution of cocaine and money laundering. I ended up serving a total of 13 years in federal prison. Going to prison was devastating for me. Not just because of the loss of my freedom. But because my family and friends discovered my secret. And I was so ashamed and embarrassed. After I was arrested, my mom came to see me. With a heartbreaking look of pain and disbelief on her face, she said, 'Son, tell me what they're saying about you isn't true.' I still tear up thinking about that moment. Before that, my double life was fueled by compartmentalization. There was 'the good me' that my family knew, who was running successful legitimate businesses and making a lot of money, and who they were extremely proud of. Then there was the 'cocaine kingpin me' who was smuggling and selling tons and tons of cocaine for Pablo Escobar. I meticulously hid that side of me from them, because I knew they would be so ashamed of that version of me they never would have accepted it. As the years passed, I painstakingly kept both worlds, both versions of myself, separate. And as long as these two versions of me never collided, I was able to feel good or at least, OK, about each one of them. But after my arrest, only one version of me remained – the cocaine smuggler. And my family was heartbroken over it for a long time. My family has since forgiven me for the past. But I still can't forgive myself. It haunts me every single day. I've served my time, and I've learned a lot about life being behind bars for 13 years. If I could do it all over again, I would try to pursue a different path in life. As a 19-year-old kid, I made some really bad decisions that snowballed into a series of other really bad decisions that I regret. I'm 73 years old now. I still love Lamborghinis. But my life has taken me in a whole new direction. I've been speaking at high schools and colleges. And for the past few months I've been working on producing a podcast about my life called 'Cocaine Air.' Because I want to share my story with the world, especially with young people, about how one bad decision can lead to 1,000 more and send you in unimaginable directions. But I truly believe there's no mess that can't be cleaned up. And that's how I plan to spend the rest of my time on this Earth. Trying to do good, trying to have a positive impact on the world and using my story to teach young people how not to make the same mistakes that I did.
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Yahoo
I Spent Years Making Millions Smuggling Cocaine For Pablo Escobar And No One Had Any Idea
Back in the 1980s, I was leading a double life. By day, I owned and operated the largest Lamborghini dealership in the United States. But by night, I was secretly flying tons of cocaine for Pablo Escobar and smuggling it into South Florida. I never set out to be a cocaine smuggler. My dad was a real estate developer in Miami and my mom was a homemaker. I had a great childhood. But becoming the victim of a duplicitous con artist completely changed the trajectory of my life and turned me into a different person. And a few years later, I was making tens of millions of dollars every month in the cocaine business. At the height of my success, I owned 30 airplanes, dozens of boats, multiple mansions and Lamborghinis. I even had a pet mountain lion named Top Cat. But it all came crashing down in April of 1988 when I was arrested in an early morning raid by federal agents. As I was crouched on my knees getting handcuffed, and as federal agents surrounded me with guns drawn pointing at my head, I thought to myself, 'How the hell did I get here?' I was born in Cuba back in 1952. At that point my father was a senator, a really respectable and noble man. And all I wanted to do, all I ever wanted to do was follow in his footsteps. The brutal dictatorship of Fidel Castro forced my family to flee Cuba and make a new life for ourselves in South Florida. My dad started working in construction, and before long he became a very successful real estate developer. When I was 17 years old, my dad decided to get into the sugar business. He purchased land in Haiti to build a sugar mill and spent the next few years trying to get that sugar mill up and running. I was my dad's shadow. I followed him everywhere. He wore a suit and had a briefcase. I wore a similar suit and carried a similar briefcase. I was with him at every single business meeting, and he taught me everything he knew. He was the best father any son could have asked for. But tragically, when I was 19 years old, my father got cancer and died quickly over the course of a few months. On his deathbed, he made me promise him that I would get that sugar mill in Haiti off the ground. And I swore to him that I would. Before he passed away, my dad had secured a $14 million loan for the sugar mill in Haiti. But after his death, the bank refused to honor that loan and refused to acknowledge me as a capable heir. They dismissed me as a 'kid' and wished me luck finding the $14 million at another lending institution. I was grieving the loss of my father, and I was desperate to keep the promise I had made to him. I worked all my contacts and my dad's contacts and eventually found a banker willing to loan me the money. All he needed was a $100,000 'good faith' deposit. I was young and desperate, a truly dangerous combination. I didn't suspect that once I made that deposit, that banker would stop talking to me. And then he would start avoiding me. For months. When I eventually showed up unannounced at his office one day, I was stunned to see other victims there demanding their money back, too. That banker turned out to be a ruthless con artist. I was devastated. At that point, I was defaulting on loans my father had already taken out for the sugar mill, for the land and for the machinery. And I was severely in debt to the government of Haiti. I needed money and I needed it fast. It was the mid-1970s and I knew that selling marijuana could make me a lot of cash in a short amount of time. So, I bought a boat and set sail for the Bahamas, where I knew all the pot being sold in South Florida was coming from. I was fortunate to make a great contact when I got there and sailed back to South Florida with a few hundred pounds of weed stashed away in my boat. I paid $25,000 for all that marijuana and sold it for $100,000. It wasn't the $14 million I needed to get the sugar mill in Haiti off the ground, but it was definitely a good start. At that point, I started making regular trips to the Bahamas. But then the weed supply in there started to dry up. You see, the marijuana that I had access to in the Bahamas was marijuana the government confiscated ― which ultimately ended up on the black market, where I would purchase it. But there were months when they didn't confiscate much pot ― so there wasn't much I could buy. So I decided to go where the pot grows: Colombia. But to get to Colombia, I would need to buy an airplane and learn how to fly it. So that's exactly what I did. I opened the classifieds section of the newspaper (remember those?) and found a little twin-engine Beechcraft for sale for $50,000. It was a real bucket of bolts, but I bought it and repaired it and quickly learned how to fly. My first trip to Colombia in 1979 was a huge success. I brought back a ton of marijuana and sold it and made a few hundred thousand dollars. At that point I was able to get credit for more marijuana. So, I flew back and got another $800,000 worth of pot. On credit. That turned out to be a huge mistake because I ended up losing that marijuana. I was flying at night and I thought I dropped the marijuana out of my plane onto my boat that was waiting below off the coast of Florida, but it turned out to be someone else's boat. And they made off with my marijuana. I owed those Colombian suppliers $800,000 for that weed. Two weeks later, they sent thugs to kidnap me. And those thugs put a gun to my head and told me that if they didn't get their $800,000 — in 48 hours ― they would kill me. And then kill my entire family. Up until that point, I had avoided anything to do with cocaine. Because in my mind, the cocaine guys were the 'bad guys.' The cocaine guys were the killers. I was just smuggling marijuana to make enough money to get my dad's sugar mill off the ground. But my life was on the line now, and so were the lives of my family. And flying cocaine was 100 times more profitable than flying marijuana. So I flew to Colombia, picked up a load of cocaine, and flew it back. And I made $1 million from doing that one trip alone. I paid the Colombians back their $800,000 and saved my life. But the realization that I could make $1 million a trip flying cocaine changed everything for me. Suddenly my marijuana smuggling days were in the rearview mirror. As a full-time cocaine smuggler, I was making $1 million a week. I quickly developed a stellar reputation in the world of cocaine pilots. Primarily because most cocaine pilots during that time partook in the cocaine they were smuggling, and they were always high. I, on the other hand, had never done drugs in my life. Not marijuana. Not cocaine. Not any drug. That really seemed to separate me from the other pilots of the day who were constantly late and constantly crashing their airplanes, losing loads of cocaine. I was never late. And I never lost a plane load of cocaine. Ever. In 1983, Pablo Escobar sent one of his underlings to summon me. He had heard of me and heard about my reputation for never losing a load and he wanted to hire me to smuggle cocaine for him. After a tense back-and-forth negotiation in his secret lair deep in the Colombian jungle, I agreed to fly 1,000 kilos of coke for Pablo Escobar. And he agreed to pay me $5 million to do it. After I started making weekly $5 million trips for Pablo Escobar, he stopped paying me in cash ― and started paying me in cocaine. The cocaine that Pablo Escobar paid me with, I sold in South Florida and all over the country, becoming a cocaine kingpin in my own right. Sadly, by the time I had enough money to resurrect my father's sugar mill, it was no longer salvageable. The government of Haiti had taken it over years earlier and run it into the ground. This was during the rule of Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, and the nation was in steep decline. As I walked through the rubble where my father's sugar mill once stood, I realized it would never, ever be. So I flew back to Miami and parlayed all the money I was making into a Lamborghini dealership, and I bought a cell phone company ― in the mid 1980s, when cellphones cost $5,000 each. I also started building and selling homes in the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale area and became a real estate developer. In the end — adjusted for inflation — I was grossing nearly $100 million a month at the height of my cocaine career — smuggling and selling tons and tons of cocaine every week. Keep in mind, back in the 1980s, cocaine was selling for as much as $600 per gram. And there are more than 900,000 grams in a ton (plane load) so I was swimming in money. But then one of my underlings got addicted to the coke we were smuggling and got very sloppy. And then he got busted. And he served me up to the Feds on a silver platter in order to get a lighter prison sentence for himself. I was arrested in April of 1988. And in early 1991, I pled guilty to multiple felonies including the distribution of marijuana, the distribution of cocaine and money laundering. I ended up serving a total of 13 years in federal prison. Going to prison was devastating for me. Not just because of the loss of my freedom. But because my family and friends discovered my secret. And I was so ashamed and embarrassed. After I was arrested, my mom came to see me. With a heartbreaking look of pain and disbelief on her face, she said, 'Son, tell me what they're saying about you isn't true.' I still tear up thinking about that moment. Before that, my double life was fueled by compartmentalization. There was 'the good me' that my family knew, who was running successful legitimate businesses and making a lot of money, and who they were extremely proud of. Then there was the 'cocaine kingpin me' who was smuggling and selling tons and tons of cocaine for Pablo Escobar. I meticulously hid that side of me from them, because I knew they would be so ashamed of that version of me they never would have accepted it. As the years passed, I painstakingly kept both worlds, both versions of myself, separate. And as long as these two versions of me never collided, I was able to feel good or at least, OK, about each one of them. But after my arrest, only one version of me remained – the cocaine smuggler. And my family was heartbroken over it for a long time. My family has since forgiven me for the past. But I still can't forgive myself. It haunts me every single day. I've served my time, and I've learned a lot about life being behind bars for 13 years. If I could do it all over again, I would try to pursue a different path in life. As a 19-year-old kid, I made some really bad decisions that snowballed into a series of other really bad decisions that I regret. I'm 73 years old now. I still love Lamborghinis. But my life has taken me in a whole new direction. I've been speaking at high schools and colleges. And for the past few months I've been working on producing a podcast about my life called 'Cocaine Air.' Because I want to share my story with the world, especially with young people, about how one bad decision can lead to 1,000 more and send you in unimaginable directions. But I truly believe there's no mess that can't be cleaned up. And that's how I plan to spend the rest of my time on this Earth. Trying to do good, trying to have a positive impact on the world and using my story to teach young people how not to make the same mistakes that I did. Do you have a compelling personal story you'd like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we're looking for here and send us a pitch at pitch@
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Yahoo
I Spent Years Making Millions Smuggling Cocaine For Pablo Escobar And No One Had Any Idea
Back in the 1980s, I was leading a double life. By day, I owned and operated the largest Lamborghini dealership in the United States. But by night, I was secretly flying tons of cocaine for Pablo Escobar and smuggling it into South Florida. I never set out to be a cocaine smuggler. My dad was a real estate developer in Miami and my mom was a homemaker. I had a great childhood. But becoming the victim of a duplicitous con artist completely changed the trajectory of my life and turned me into a different person. And a few years later, I was making tens of millions of dollars every month in the cocaine business. At the height of my success, I owned 30 airplanes, dozens of boats, multiple mansions and Lamborghinis. I even had a pet mountain lion named Top Cat. But it all came crashing down in April of 1988 when I was arrested in an early morning raid by federal agents. As I was crouched on my knees getting handcuffed, and as federal agents surrounded me with guns drawn pointing at my head, I thought to myself, 'How the hell did I get here?' I was born in Cuba back in 1952. At that point my father was a senator, a really respectable and noble man. And all I wanted to do, all I ever wanted to do was follow in his footsteps. The brutal dictatorship of Fidel Castro forced my family to flee Cuba and make a new life for ourselves in South Florida. My dad started working in construction, and before long he became a very successful real estate developer. When I was 17 years old, my dad decided to get into the sugar business. He purchased land in Haiti to build a sugar mill and spent the next few years trying to get that sugar mill up and running. I was my dad's shadow. I followed him everywhere. He wore a suit and had a briefcase. I wore a similar suit and carried a similar briefcase. I was with him at every single business meeting, and he taught me everything he knew. He was the best father any son could have asked for. But tragically, when I was 19 years old, my father got cancer and died quickly over the course of a few months. On his deathbed, he made me promise him that I would get that sugar mill in Haiti off the ground. And I swore to him that I would. Before he passed away, my dad had secured a $14 million loan for the sugar mill in Haiti. But after his death, the bank refused to honor that loan and refused to acknowledge me as a capable heir. They dismissed me as a 'kid' and wished me luck finding the $14 million at another lending institution. I was grieving the loss of my father, and I was desperate to keep the promise I had made to him. I worked all my contacts and my dad's contacts and eventually found a banker willing to loan me the money. All he needed was a $100,000 'good faith' deposit. I was young and desperate, a truly dangerous combination. I didn't suspect that once I made that deposit, that banker would stop talking to me. And then he would start avoiding me. For months. When I eventually showed up unannounced at his office one day, I was stunned to see other victims there demanding their money back, too. That banker turned out to be a ruthless con artist. I was devastated. At that point, I was defaulting on loans my father had already taken out for the sugar mill, for the land and for the machinery. And I was severely in debt to the government of Haiti. I needed money and I needed it fast. It was the mid-1970s and I knew that selling marijuana could make me a lot of cash in a short amount of time. So, I bought a boat and set sail for the Bahamas, where I knew all the pot being sold in South Florida was coming from. I was fortunate to make a great contact when I got there and sailed back to South Florida with a few hundred pounds of weed stashed away in my boat. I paid $25,000 for all that marijuana and sold it for $100,000. It wasn't the $14 million I needed to get the sugar mill in Haiti off the ground, but it was definitely a good start. At that point, I started making regular trips to the Bahamas. But then the weed supply in there started to dry up. You see, the marijuana that I had access to in the Bahamas was marijuana the government confiscated ― which ultimately ended up on the black market, where I would purchase it. But there were months when they didn't confiscate much pot ― so there wasn't much I could buy. So I decided to go where the pot grows: Colombia. But to get to Colombia, I would need to buy an airplane and learn how to fly it. So that's exactly what I did. I opened the classifieds section of the newspaper (remember those?) and found a little twin-engine Beechcraft for sale for $50,000. It was a real bucket of bolts, but I bought it and repaired it and quickly learned how to fly. My first trip to Colombia in 1979 was a huge success. I brought back a ton of marijuana and sold it and made a few hundred thousand dollars. At that point I was able to get credit for more marijuana. So, I flew back and got another $800,000 worth of pot. On credit. That turned out to be a huge mistake because I ended up losing that marijuana. I was flying at night and I thought I dropped the marijuana out of my plane onto my boat that was waiting below off the coast of Florida, but it turned out to be someone else's boat. And they made off with my marijuana. I owed those Colombian suppliers $800,000 for that weed. Two weeks later, they sent thugs to kidnap me. And those thugs put a gun to my head and told me that if they didn't get their $800,000 — in 48 hours ― they would kill me. And then kill my entire family. Up until that point, I had avoided anything to do with cocaine. Because in my mind, the cocaine guys were the 'bad guys.' The cocaine guys were the killers. I was just smuggling marijuana to make enough money to get my dad's sugar mill off the ground. But my life was on the line now, and so were the lives of my family. And flying cocaine was 100 times more profitable than flying marijuana. So I flew to Colombia, picked up a load of cocaine, and flew it back. And I made $1 million from doing that one trip alone. I paid the Colombians back their $800,000 and saved my life. But the realization that I could make $1 million a trip flying cocaine changed everything for me. Suddenly my marijuana smuggling days were in the rearview mirror. As a full-time cocaine smuggler, I was making $1 million a week. I quickly developed a stellar reputation in the world of cocaine pilots. Primarily because most cocaine pilots during that time partook in the cocaine they were smuggling, and they were always high. I, on the other hand, had never done drugs in my life. Not marijuana. Not cocaine. Not any drug. That really seemed to separate me from the other pilots of the day who were constantly late and constantly crashing their airplanes, losing loads of cocaine. I was never late. And I never lost a plane load of cocaine. Ever. In 1983, Pablo Escobar sent one of his underlings to summon me. He had heard of me and heard about my reputation for never losing a load and he wanted to hire me to smuggle cocaine for him. After a tense back-and-forth negotiation in his secret lair deep in the Colombian jungle, I agreed to fly 1,000 kilos of coke for Pablo Escobar. And he agreed to pay me $5 million to do it. After I started making weekly $5 million trips for Pablo Escobar, he stopped paying me in cash ― and started paying me in cocaine. The cocaine that Pablo Escobar paid me with, I sold in South Florida and all over the country, becoming a cocaine kingpin in my own right. Sadly, by the time I had enough money to resurrect my father's sugar mill, it was no longer salvageable. The government of Haiti had taken it over years earlier and run it into the ground. This was during the rule of Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, and the nation was in steep decline. As I walked through the rubble where my father's sugar mill once stood, I realized it would never, ever be. So I flew back to Miami and parlayed all the money I was making into a Lamborghini dealership, and I bought a cell phone company ― in the mid 1980s, when cellphones cost $5,000 each. I also started building and selling homes in the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale area and became a real estate developer. In the end — adjusted for inflation — I was grossing nearly $100 million a month at the height of my cocaine career — smuggling and selling tons and tons of cocaine every week. Keep in mind, back in the 1980s, cocaine was selling for as much as $600 per gram. And there are more than 900,000 grams in a ton (plane load) so I was swimming in money. But then one of my underlings got addicted to the coke we were smuggling and got very sloppy. And then he got busted. And he served me up to the Feds on a silver platter in order to get a lighter prison sentence for himself. I was arrested in April of 1988. And in early 1991, I pled guilty to multiple felonies including the distribution of marijuana, the distribution of cocaine and money laundering. I ended up serving a total of 13 years in federal prison. Going to prison was devastating for me. Not just because of the loss of my freedom. But because my family and friends discovered my secret. And I was so ashamed and embarrassed. After I was arrested, my mom came to see me. With a heartbreaking look of pain and disbelief on her face, she said, 'Son, tell me what they're saying about you isn't true.' I still tear up thinking about that moment. Before that, my double life was fueled by compartmentalization. There was 'the good me' that my family knew, who was running successful legitimate businesses and making a lot of money, and who they were extremely proud of. Then there was the 'cocaine kingpin me' who was smuggling and selling tons and tons of cocaine for Pablo Escobar. I meticulously hid that side of me from them, because I knew they would be so ashamed of that version of me they never would have accepted it. As the years passed, I painstakingly kept both worlds, both versions of myself, separate. And as long as these two versions of me never collided, I was able to feel good or at least, OK, about each one of them. But after my arrest, only one version of me remained – the cocaine smuggler. And my family was heartbroken over it for a long time. My family has since forgiven me for the past. But I still can't forgive myself. It haunts me every single day. I've served my time, and I've learned a lot about life being behind bars for 13 years. If I could do it all over again, I would try to pursue a different path in life. As a 19-year-old kid, I made some really bad decisions that snowballed into a series of other really bad decisions that I regret. I'm 73 years old now. I still love Lamborghinis. But my life has taken me in a whole new direction. I've been speaking at high schools and colleges. And for the past few months I've been working on producing a podcast about my life called 'Cocaine Air.' Because I want to share my story with the world, especially with young people, about how one bad decision can lead to 1,000 more and send you in unimaginable directions. But I truly believe there's no mess that can't be cleaned up. And that's how I plan to spend the rest of my time on this Earth. Trying to do good, trying to have a positive impact on the world and using my story to teach young people how not to make the same mistakes that I did. Do you have a compelling personal story you'd like to see published on HuffPost? 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