“Yeah mon”,  he said when I asked him if he really was from Belize.  We were sitting in the Federal Bureau of Prisons Transfer Center in Oklahoma City , Oklahoma,  me headed to Beaumont Federal Corrections Institute in Beaumont , Texas and he to La Tuna FCI in El Paso, Texas.  He called himself Frenchy, named for his Cajun roots on his maternal grandmother’s side, and he looked like the typical coonass with a full head of black, curly hair and a grizzled face caused by too much sun on the salt and hard living.    For the next week we talked all day and into the night until lockdown at 9:00 pm.  He told me wild stories of drug running on the open seas of the Caribbean.  His father was a sea captain and so was he.  He smuggled weed and coke from South and Central America, mostly to the Bahamas.  I was hooked.  It was something I had always wanted to do and here was my chance.  You see, I was a smuggler, too, but my route was between Durango, Mexico and San Antonio, Texas, mostly ounces of chiva (black tar heroin).   The Caribbean had always been a dream to me.  You know, crystal clear waters and palm trees, island girls and white sand beaches.  I was on it, doggone it!

He was in federal custody because of a minor insurance scam in Louisiana, something about a car wreck and bogus repair.  He was a part-time tugboat captain and had spent some time in the Louisiana bayou town of Morgan City, where he picked up the charge.  However, he was plucked off his 50 ft. sailboat off the coast of Colombia by the U.S. Coast Guard  (the World Police), where they pulled him over, so to speak, and discovered a U.S. warrant.   He was headed to Barranquilla to pick up 20 keys of Columbia’s finest yayo.  Lucky for him they got him going down and not on the return trip, or he would have been doing 27 years in federal custody, instead or 27 months.  Oh, how he hated the US after that!   I really couldn’t’ blame him.  Why the U.S. Coast Guard think they have jurisdiction in international waters is a topic for another day.