Smugglers 3 Accidental Kingpin (5 page)

CHAPTER
5

The next night they attacked my warehouse and my house. The warehouse was totally empty, but the gun fight at my house went on for a long time, until a neighbor called the cops. Two squad cars pulled up, and within a short time they were full of holes and the occupants dead. I had put two snipers on my roof with 7-mm mags, and they never quit firing. Every window on both floors was shot out and the dead bodies in my courtyard and driveway up to the gate totaled in the teens.

Six or eight cop cars pulled up, accompanied by a Miami SWAT team truck full of ready to rock and roll SWAT team members. They started shooting and arresting people on the spot. Soon there were several hundred Mexicans dead or under arrest and in hand cuffs.

The cops took me and several of my men downtown. The jig was up. There was no doubt about me being a major drug dealer. From now on the authorities would be on my tail trying to catch me.

My attorney loved this new turn of events.

When we were released and back to my house, the cleaning crew had been there for twenty four hours. The windows were being repaired and several hundred bullet holes were being filled in, but the entire front of the house needed repainting.

The neighbors had gotten a petition to force me out of the neighborhood. Now no one even waved to me as they passed. I guess they too knew who I was and where my money comes from.

I found a place in a high-rise, a penthouse for twenty-five thousand a month, fully furnished and with a special key to get the elevator to take you up. I figured I would be safer there, but I still had two twenty-four hour a day guards who lived on site.

I bullet-proofed the twin doors at the front and put in an arsenal and several thousand rounds of ammo. If they were going to get me, it had to be in one of my cars coming or going from my condo.

I was warned by the cops on my payroll that all my phones were tapped, and that I was under surveillance twenty-four/seven.

I lived in a fish bowl, and soon I sold my house and bought one hundred acres up by Fort Lauderdale. I would build there, “in the middle.”

The Mexicans were back up to speed in a matter of days. All their men had been replaced. They were mostly illegals who spoke only Spanish and worked cheap and our jails were better than their lives at home anyhow. They would kill you for one hundred bucks, so for them to get an all-out raid on somebody’s house or business was no big deal.

I got in my hard top Jag in the underground parking. It had been bullet proofed, all windows, tires, doors, everything. I could never have a convertible because the top makes me vulnerable. I decided to take a spin around to see if I could see any of my men or theirs. I took with me one guard who was armed with a machine gun.

I went through most of Miami and the surrounding towns but never saw any of my men, just theirs. When we got back I figured out that my sales were off by forty percent even with the free drugs and money from them.

Jesus, they’re winning. With all the killings, high-jackings, stealing of millions of dollars in drugs, not to mention the twenty million in cash I took at the warehouse, they were winning.

In the morning after sleeping on it, I had the head of my security approach the cartel to set up a meeting. Two days later a box arrived by messenger downstairs. I had it sent up. When I opened it, my security chief’s head was in the box with a note that read, “There’s no stopping now. Hide if you can.”

Maybe it’s time. Time to walk away. Time to get out. Time to disappear. Time to change my name and life.

After all, I had two hundred million dollars in cash, and two hundred million in real estate which I would just walk away from. If I tried to sell it, it would leave a paper trail. Some was free and clear, but it didn’t matter. I had enough money for four or five generations of family if I left now.

Over the next two or three days I had four cars driven to our warehouse in New York. I packed two small bags containing some cash. My wife and I’d buy all new clothes when we got to wherever. I left all my houses, boats, cars, and furniture. Everything except my wife and two kids.

I took my private plane to New York then sent it back, knowing they would see where it was.

Over the next week in New York I got fake IDs for me and the family and bought a five year old Dutch Star forty foot diesel pusher motor home pulling a five year old XR7. We bought clothes at Penney’s and threw the jewelry in the river. My wife put up a scene about her eleven carat emerald cut engagement ring going in the river, but our lives depended on getting rid of all trappings of wealth. We must dispose of it all completely or die.

CHAPTER 6

My plan was to drive into the belly of the beast. I would drive to Miami where I would leave the RV on the street and take the high speed ferry to Bimini and go from there.

On the trip from New York to Miami we didn’t get stopped once. We looked like a regular family on vacation or snow birds driving a five year old rig.

I left the Dutch Star in a parking lot of a Wal-Mart where I went inside to buy some things before I exited and got a cab to a middle of the road Holiday Inn to join the family. We walked to dinner that night at a steak house. I had gotten their tickets on the high speed ferry for the next morning at seven, and we each carried one suit case full of the usual stuff a family would take for a week on vacation.

In the morning we got on the ferry without incident. In less than two hours, we were going through customs in Bimini. We got a cab and went straight to the Beach Hotel and Casino where we took two adjoining rooms. The place was nothing special, just an average hotel where lower middle class families tended to spend their vacations.

I sat down with Mariposa and Vicente. “Okay, kids, you know that something has happened to my business. These things happen,” I reassured them. “And don’t worry, I saved up enough money that we can find a nice new place to live. It’s just, well, we have to change our names. It’s like a game, we’ll pretend to be a new family, so Mariposa, you are now Maria, and Vicente, you can be Teo. Our last name is now Rodrigues. I’ll be Dad, no more Papa, you understand. And Mama is now Mom. We are just an average American family on vacation, and if anyone asks why you aren’t in school, say you are homeschooled by Mom, which is the truth, because I brought along some schoolwork.”

Maria and Teo groaned, and I laughed. Mom just rolled her eyes, but I knew we were all on the same page. “Okay, Maria and Teo, off
to the pool for some swimming! Mom and I will be down shortly.”

After they left carrying some fins and swim goggles, Lucia turned to me. “So, Mr. Rodrigues, do you have a first name?”

“Call me anything, just don’t forget to call me for dinner—and don’t forget the drinks,” I teased her.

“So, you are saying I can name you anything I want?”

“Within reason,” I said, smiling at her. She looked more relaxed than I’d seen her in a long time. With her long black hair tied back in a low ponytail, she looked like a young girl again, almost like she’d looked when we first met. I felt an erection push on my zipper.

She noticed and pushed herself against my body so I could feel her breasts swelling against my chest. “Why don’t you call me Don?”  I said.

“Don. Like Don Johnson,” she mused, looking up at me through her incredibly thick lashes. “I’ve never fucked a Don,” she added, reaching for my zipper.

Her hand found its way to my pulsing erection, and in moments we were both naked on the bed, grabbing at one another. We hadn’t had sex in months, so we made up for lost time. I sucked on her breasts which swelled under the lathing of my tongue. She in turn massaged my dick, until I  couldn’t stand it any longer. I pushed myself inside her and came so fast, I was left breathless. My mouth moved to hers for a deep satisfying kiss, but I knew she had not reached satisfaction. I wanted to hear her moan out my new name.

“Call me Don. I want to hear it,” I growled.

“Don,” she breathed into my mouth. “Fuck me, Don.”

“I’ll do better than that,” I said and gently pushed her legs wide, giving me access to her womanhood. “You’ve had a bikini wax,” I said with surprise.

“Yes, you like it?”

“I more than like it,” I said, lowering my mouth to taste her. I lathed her clit until she was screaming for release, which came in shuddering waves. I lifted my head and swung my body over hers, pushing my renewed erection inside her. We convulsed together, both of us screaming with release.

Later, laying in one another’s arms, Lucia said, “I like this new guy, Don. I want a new name, too, Mr. Don Rodrigues. What do you want to call me?”

“Hmmm,” I mused, “I think you look like an angel but act like a little devil.”

“Oh, I like the Angel part. That’s what the world can see, and I will save the devil for you!”

So we were now a new family, a dad with two kids and a mom so hot I was dizzy with anticipation the rest of the day.

We finally joined the kids at the pool, settling in at the poolside bar to watch them while we drank to our newfound love and our new identities.

“Let’s rent a house or condo,” Angel suggested.

“Yes,” I agreed, “we can find one and offer a one year contract, whether we stay the year or not. We will then look settled, and no one will ask questions. It was a good plan, one that would not raise any suspicions here, and cash didn’t either.

Bimini was perfect for us except drugs were everywhere. The island was awash in cocaine, probably from me or the Mexicans. The next day Angel and I arranged for a sitter for the kids and went to look at condos and houses for rent. We decided we would be safest in a condo on the second floor.

I kept in touch with what was going on back home by reading the Miami Herald, which reported that the killing had stopped, but the talking heads on TV and the politicians in front of the camera were telling listeners how they are working every day to stamp out drugs. What B.S.  Half of them were on my payroll and the other half were becoming multi-millionaires because of their involvement in the war on drugs, which makes more money than the actual drugs.

We moved into the condo, bought a couple of cars and explored the island. We all took up SCUBA diving and bought a small boat. In general, we got to know each other again as a family, and Angel and I renewed our sex life, which had faded to almost nothing back in Miami.

The months flew by, and soon we were coming up on a year. One day at a street fair I bought a book called
The Pocket Guide For Surviving Doomsday Or Double Your Money Back
. In this book the author talked about the safest place to be in an emergency or crisis: it was on a big boat. Apparently a boat is easy to defend, and nobody can get your address, because it can be moved at a moment’s notice. Not to mention there are no tax or property records on file for anyone to track you down.

The very next day I started looking at eighty-five to one hundred footers. I found a Choy Lee eighty-eight footer that seemed OK, and best of all it only drew five and a half feet of water. The owners wanted to sell it quickly because their business was failing. I made them a cash offer of four million to close at the end of the month with a nonrefundable deposit of one hundred thousand dollars. I put a fuse on my offer of three days, take it or leave it.

They took the deal, and we accomplished the sale of the boat in less than one hour. A cashier’s check from a bank in the Cayman Islands was handed over as payment.

We moved aboard, and Angel and the kids loved it. We kept the same captain and crew totaling four men and decided to hire boat cleaners at ports of call.

After the initial month on board our new home we went to dinner one night at the yacht club where we met a couple named Bob and Karen living on a sixty foot Bayliner named the Adventurer. They had been living on their boat for about two years, hopping from island to island in the Caribbean. Over the next month we struck up a friendship and did a lot of diving together, plus shopping and dinners.

One night after having dinner on my boat, Bob and I were on the aft weather deck smoking Cuban cigars and drinking beer.

“So, Bob, what kind of business did you retire from?”

He told me the story of Mack and Terry and two black dancers and the gun fights fought in Miami and the Keys and how they got the boat
.

“And you, what did you used to do?”

“I was a real estate investor in New York,” I lied. “I did well, but apparently not as well as guys in the drug business.”

After a couple of months of being friends he let it slip one day that Mack and Terry had been killing the Mexican cartel members from Tucson to the Keys for over three years before they died.

That night we decided to take the boats and go to South Bimini. We anchored at Honeymoon Harbor for a week.

Cocaine was available wherever we went, and even more so in South Bimini. I had always known it had been a way point from Columbia to Miami for cocaine since the mid-eighties, as seen in the movie “Blow.” One Island had been bought by the ex-partner of George from the movie. He either bought everybody out or drove them off. One couple’s bodies were never found, but their boat was discovered full of blood and bullet holes.

We left for Honeymoon Harbor in three days. The captain said that we draft six feet and if the entrance to the harbor had filled in, we would have to go straight to town and get a slip. We’d see when we got there and take it real slow.

In less than half a day we could see the uprights lined up to guide boats through the channel next to the
shore where the deeper water was, which led to town or Honeymoon Harbor. The Bama Flats as they are called are nine feet deep and run for three million square miles. Even more amazing is the water in the flats, so clear with a slight tint of blue. “Look!” I called out to the kids who joined me at the railing. “You can read the ingredients on a Coors can on the bottom!” I said. This gave the kids hours of fun.

The water was so clear it was invisible and boats seem to simply take flight.

We finally got into Honeymoon Harbor and set the anchors. There were three other boats in the harbor, from a fifty foot Cat with two couples on board to a one hundred foot Broward with an old woman and a gigolo on board. Only one boat had kids on board about our son and daughter’s ages. They could ride Jet Skis or dive together.

The first night we had a relaxing dinner on our boat. The meal consisted of fresh caught fish, grilled and topped with a
kick-ass mango papaya salsa. The kids fell asleep early, tired from all the fresh air and excitement of being in a new place.

We adults sat around smoking Cuban cigars and drinking margaritas until midnight when we called it quits. Angel and I had just finished making love and were snuggled together when small planes buzzed overhead, heading toward one of the private air strips close by.

We soon discovered this was a nightly occurrence. One night I counted a dozen or so planes coming or going, all flying over us with their lights off. It wasn’t too hard to figure out what was going on.

We spent the next week diving and partying with our new neighbors. It seems the fifty foot Cat and the one hundred foot Broward had been docked at the same place some years back at Bay Side Marina in the Keys. One of the men on the Cat used to go with the marina owner Nikki, who had been murdered by her lover, a black dancer named Isabelle
who had disappeared into thin air, and even weirder, Mack, the old runner at the marina got shot and died. For a while, apparently, murder had been on the menu at the Bay Side Marina, the location of some heavy cocaine smuggling for about twenty years.

I was happy to be out of danger, for there are no old kingpins. They were either in the ground or in jail, their families almost always left destitute. That wasn’t going to happen to me or my kids.