When Ken Behr smuggled 600 pounds of ganja from Jamaica to South Florida in the mid 1970s, it was so open that he could just fly the weed straight over the Caribbean on a small plane to a makeshift runway. And there was no cartel in control of the turf so hippies like him and his friends could be major players without violence.
“It was wide open. Figure Silicon Valley in 1975, everybody building their own home computers or the great Gold Rush of the 1840s. Anybody could do anything. The cops were on the take,” Ken tells me.
By the cocaine boom of the 1980s, the drug money was off the charts, building much of the Miami skyline and penthouses that stockbrokers live in today. This provoked President Ronald Reagan to crack down with Navy ships and radar but Ken says this only put the price up and helped his business.
“I never made more money. Thank God for Ron Reagan. And I loved his wife’s advertising campaign.”
Along with the profits, however, came the Cuban and Colombian mobs and an explosion of violence; Ken was robbed of his earnings at gun point and his crew began trading blow for heavy weapons with U.S. soldiers. In the end, of course, Ken was caught and, like many others, made a deal; he worked for the DEA for two years as an undercover to avoid a 55-year sentence.
Ken makes these revelations about the South Florida trafficking scene in his new book “Confessions of a Marijuana Mercenary” (more info here). I interview him in this truly fascinating episode of the CrashOut Chronicles podcas; the video is above or here is a link for the pure audio version.
LINK TO PURE AUDIO VERSION OF PODCAST.
Ken gives enlightening insight into how the economics of trafficking work. But he also shows how messed up the war on drugs is; he describes DEA informing as a multi-level marketing scheme to seize assets.
“In the end, it’s all about the Benjamins. It’s all about the money. Yeah, they want to take drugs off the street. But they want Porches, boats, cars, houses. The gold that the drug dealers work so hard to make was needed to fund the drug wars.”
Today, the drugs are far more lethal and fighting over their profits is far bloodier. But this description of law enforcement, and its failures, still holds true.
Copyright Ioan Grillo and CrashOut Media 2024
Confessions of a Marijuana Mercenary