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we never talked about being fugitives because at that point we didn't know later on when we were started to find
00:00:06
out we still didn't talk about it then either because you've all been raised with this one rule which is don't tell
00:00:15
and it's very hard you know even now to the states it feels surreal to talk about it so openly
00:00:23
Tyler weatherall has lived all over the world she grew up in 13 houses in five countries and no matter where her family
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went the rule was always the same don't talk so when I was nine years old I remember coming home from school one
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day with my sister and we saw these two characters in our front room there are two strangers I sort of
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remember them being these Shady looking figures um and we went to let ourselves in and Mum
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was there at the at the back door to greet us and she told us that we should go back to our neighbor's house
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um who was a good friend of ours and wait there for her and we could tell that there was
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something a mess in the way that she said this so we went back to our neighbor's house and
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I remember even that night we we ended up staying over because she'd phoned and said that Granny was sick and that she
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would uh see us the next day and that night sleeping at our friend's house we whispered about it and even
00:01:28
then we knew something was wrong um that these people who were in our living room represented something was
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going to change um and it was maybe a week later and she hadn't woken me up for school one
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morning and I actually remember I remember really vividly because I thought that we've been allocated a day
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off I thought it was a reward for something uh and I was excited to buy this day off and I went downstairs and
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Mum was waiting for us and her she had this amazing bed we call it the never-ending bed it's this enormous
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king-sized bed where we've spent many mornings and Christmases and birthdays and where I would curl up when I was
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sick and she was sitting up in this bed waiting for me and my sister we made a round of tea and we all got in
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and she told us that there was something important she was going to have to tell
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us um that something had happened and things were going to be quite difficult for
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some time and then she told us that dad was a fugitive he was wanted by the police and
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that they were looking for him and that he had gone that she didn't know where and she
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didn't know when we'd be able to speak to him again foreign she told us that in all probability
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Scotland Yard had bugged our phone and our perhaps our car perhaps our house and that we had to be careful about what
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we said about Dad and about the times we had spent with him because we didn't want to give them any information they
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might be able to use and then we noticed them shortly after that I remember my sister pointed them
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out to me one day that they followed the car home from school and then you're never sure you don't
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know if they're following you you don't know if they're there but you know they might be and that kind of creates quite
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pervasive sense of anxiety uh a sense of being watched what did you think your father had done
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I had no idea you know I was so young and what do you know at you know 9 and 10 11 12.
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um you don't know a lot you don't have a look very nuanced understanding about the nature of different crimes so when
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you when you have like I understood he must have done something pretty bad because all these people are after him
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and I I couldn't imagine that it was something small all this trouble uh but you think about could he have robbed a
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bank could he have killed somebody you know I never really thought that that was a possibility but you're running
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through this the type of crimes that you're aware of in your head and I spend a lot of time thinking about what he
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might have done but I never came I never landed on anything firm [Music] hi I'm Ben and I'm Tyler's father and
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the first time I ever sold pot was I rolled a hundred hundred joints for the Beatles
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And I was paid a dollar a joint Ben is a pseudonym he agreed to speak with us on
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the condition that we didn't use his real name he grew up on Long Island in the 1950s he went to school at the
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University of Pennsylvania where he studied finance and then he got a job on Wall Street he was successful both in
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his real job and his side job selling pot at first I was very nervous around but I
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had a Wall Street business I was doing well and it made me very nervous to be around
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pot I was afraid I was going to lose my license and slowly over time I became more and more comfortable with larger
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amounts of pot uh and I had a friend who was bringing a pot from Florida and they were at first they were
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bringing it up in suitcases and they would actually put the suitcases on airplanes at that point they were
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unchecking suitcases for terrorists and sometimes they just put the suitcases on the on the plane without
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even a person being on and someone would pick it up at the other side so it was definitely more fun than Wall
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Street and the people were a lot nicer and there was demand in the in the country for more and more pot this was
00:05:44
the uh this was the mid 70s then and then I finally left Wall Street and I moved to California
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and my and my business grew to the point where other people who were bringing in
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pot would come to me to sell the pot so at that point I realized that uh well maybe I should
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bring be bringing in the pot since uh not reselling it for these other Smugglers
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and what I started to do was take my Wall Street principles one of the things that I had learned in Wall Street and
00:06:26
started to apply it to the pot business such as raising money to finance a trip um paying people who are three to one on
00:06:39
investment and then we started to um actually develop a marketing they started putting decals on the bags of
00:06:48
pot so people could recognize their brand and the stakes kept getting higher what is it about risk that's so
00:06:56
appealing I guess it's the reward uh and and maybe the unknown I always like to gamble not wild gambling but measured
00:07:13
gambling and that's why the stock market appeals and it still does it's a little
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bit of the unknown that makes it more interesting not knowing what's going to happen every day
00:07:23
he was also making a ton of money he collected art vintage cars he built a huge Yellow House in Northern California
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with a two-acre lake an octagonal tennis court so balls couldn't collect in the corners they had ponies an elaborate
00:07:40
playground for his kids we were just a normal family living a very idyllic life and um
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and then I would go off and make my pay phone calls and have secret meetings and of course it's uh it was scary but
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you you don't realize what level of fear you're able to deal with until you're faced with it
00:08:07
once they installed a false wall in the back of a truck and then went to Goodwill and filled it with Furniture
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thinking that if they got stopped no one would want to unpack all of that and even if they did the pot was still
00:08:20
hidden behind the false wall they chartered planes one time he commissioned a hundred foot three-masted
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Schooner to sail from Thailand to Tacoma Washington packed with pot he was an actual drug kingpin at the top
00:08:36
of his game but then everything went wrong he packed up his wife and kids and started running
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I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal [Music] I had everything at that point I really should have stopped and and
00:09:01
then a person that I was involved smuggling with was doing another venture and he asked me if I wanted to invest
00:09:13
which I was tempted and I clearly shouldn't have and I I did invest and I also had some of my friends invest
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in the in the venture and where it was supposed to be a small Adventure it kept getting
00:09:30
larger and larger what do you mean what type of venture well the Venture was our
00:09:38
contact in Thailand they would isolate a piece of property in Thailand in the jungle
00:09:45
and they would just grow pot dedicated to our venture and there would be entire families and
00:09:52
communities that all they did was grow and package the pot and they would put them in 10 pound
00:09:59
Vacuum Pack bags with our label but then things started to fall apart I was really worried that everybody would get
00:10:09
in in trouble and everybody's going to lose the money and it was quite substantial
00:10:14
it was uh about 35 000 pounds of Thai so that was worth about 50 million dollars
00:10:26
Ben says he made sure he never left a paper trail but six months later he learned that not everyone had been so
00:10:34
careful one of the men he'd been working with was raided and identifying information
00:10:39
about Ben was found in some of the documents at that time I was receiving or information about what the fvr was
00:10:50
doing on the investigation uh how I received it is not important but it reached a point
00:11:01
where I realized that uh it was going to fall apart for me and I had the choice of fighting it
00:11:10
which I knew I would lose based on on the way things came apart uh Reagan was President and Nancy Reagan
00:11:19
was saying no to drugs and the sentences were beginning to be Draconian and they
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were trying to make examples so I could be facing uh 20 years to life for organized crime
00:11:35
and so I talked about it with my wife and she was always quite adventurous as well she was a very interesting
00:11:43
brilliant lady and but she really you know didn't want to see me go to the prison
00:11:49
and so we talked about it and I did a bunch of research on which countries had extradition which didn't
00:11:56
or I had some friends in Europe that were living very nicely in the south of France and in England as fugitives
00:12:05
and seem very happy [Music] so they drove through the night they packed up the family into the cars we
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had one suitcase each in a small bag and we drove um through the night to the airport to
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fly first to Rome and then onward from there and the plan was that we would fly that first leg of
00:12:30
the journey and our real names and we didn't plan to stay in Rome so at that point we would have created a false
00:12:37
Trail leading to Rome and I know that night when mum was pulling out of the driveway there was definitely a fear
00:12:45
that we might be followed my main reason really was to I wanted to be with the kids when they were young I
00:12:53
felt if I had to go to prison later if they were more formed and and had more time with me and the family uh
00:13:02
those early years I felt was more important than the later years did you have enough money to run
00:13:08
comfortably how much money were you leaving with uh absolutely I had enough money to live comfortably and I was also
00:13:16
somewhat uh knowledgeable about investing it so I could make more money with the money I
00:13:24
have plenty of money to leave without no problem millions and millions of dollars
00:13:28
or Millions yes I think at that time when I left I had I think like five million dollars
00:13:38
liquid liquid how difficult was it to keep what was going on from your children did they just think this was a
00:13:45
big adventure well they didn't know what was going on to them it was uh we we first went to
00:13:54
Portugal and the kids were young so they were too young to really have a sense of what was going on
00:14:02
and we went to a nice community and they went to a pretty good European schools and we got a lovely family life
00:14:11
Tyler's family was constantly on the Move Rome Portugal England the south of France back to England he wanted to
00:14:20
resurrect that life that we'd given up that beautiful life in the yellow house he wanted to make it better and to fix
00:14:26
it but in doing that and in that fixation on that goal he lost himself to that and he became I think quite distant
00:14:34
for mum um his entire life revolved around talking to lawyers on the phone he was
00:14:42
also his organization by the time um he got into trouble had grown into about 20 people and each of those people
00:14:48
who were implicated he was trying to support so some of them were also in hiding some of them were going through
00:14:54
the court system back in the States and I you know I think deep down he felt incredibly responsible uh for them and
00:15:02
had a a burden of guilt as well that it had all Fallen apart like this and so those were his days was on the phone
00:15:11
trying to contain This Disaster that happened and in everybody's lives and I think that took that put an enormous
00:15:20
strain on their marriage and it couldn't sustain that and I think by that point um it was very difficult for my mum to
00:15:29
accept how far this had changed our lives uh and how much she had to sacrifice in order for him to be free
00:15:45
thank you foreign might be the right word I I think she was rightfully angry that he had put us in a
00:16:04
situation and we were the ones at home with Scotland Yard with him down our neck
00:16:10
and also a sense of you know when was this going to end Tyler's mother and father separated he
00:16:17
moved to London and they worked together to make sure he saw the kids as much as
00:16:21
was safely possible most of all she felt like the FBI had taken away our lives completely and she didn't want them to
00:16:33
win she supported Dad when Dad was on the run and made sure that um he got to see us and
00:16:41
she I mean by supported I mean she helped him see us basically and helped him have
00:16:47
a relationship with us in London Ben lived in a townhouse and had the attic converted into a playroom
00:16:54
for the kids when they visited Tyler remembers getting to watch The Simpsons and ordering pizza he was living under
00:17:01
his false identity and he was going and paying taxes under his false identity he
00:17:06
had legitimate businesses he once got a speeding ticket and actually went to court for his speeding ticket
00:17:14
and they didn't know anything so it seemed pretty secure but he also wasn't making the money he used to be making
00:17:20
and that money was dwindling I think he never found he had something like uh two
00:17:26
hundred thousand dollars of gold buried in someone's back Garden which he never found again so he started to invest
00:17:32
money for another pair of drug smugglers and he he saw this he didn't see this as risky
00:17:40
at the time for him it was the sense of getting back to his financial roots with
00:17:45
Scotland Yard showing up at Tyler's mother's house the family devised an elaborate method of secret communication
00:17:52
so the way it works is he we would have the numbers of the various pay phones and then we would set three appointments
00:18:01
to speak at three different pay phones with a different time and date for each one and the reason you do always work
00:18:09
three in advance was that if you missed one there'd be a chance to catch up on the next one and you if you missed that
00:18:15
one too you know that there was something wrong and there'd be a third final phone call just in case but you
00:18:21
always wanted to make sure that those phone calls were planned in case one was missed and that was a warning system as
00:18:26
well so if we didn't hear from him on those occasions or if he didn't hear from us he'd know something was wrong
00:18:31
and he always in the phone calls and he also wrote us letters he never specified
00:18:37
where he was and he had the letters are fascinating because you can see him trying to tell
00:18:42
us about what he's doing and trying to connect with us while giving away absolutely nothing in case the letters
00:18:46
were intercepted these secret visits and phone calls and coded letters worked pretty well her father kept moving from
00:18:55
place to place managing to evade a rest to celebrate Tyler's 12th birthday it was arranged that she and her sister
00:19:03
would travel to St Lucia to be with their father the girls made it there safely but on
00:19:09
the actual day of Tyler's birthday authorities showed up at Tyler's mother's house in England hoping to find
00:19:17
Ben and they raided the house searching for evidence of where we were and they found I think we've never known
00:19:25
exactly what they found we think maybe our flight details were maybe one of our jacket pockets or something we'd
00:19:31
overlooked um something small and that's when they came for us in St Lucia Tyler's mother called Ben to warn him
00:19:41
Tyler remembers the phone call she'd had a wonderful birthday they'd gone scuba diving and seen a volcano and we got
00:19:49
back and we were gonna go and have lobster that evening in Rodney Bay um and I'd never had Lobster before so
00:19:56
this was pretty exciting and we've gone up to get dressed for the evening and we
00:20:01
came back down me and my sister and we saw him in his office dressed for dinner on the telephone and we knew at that
00:20:10
point and we knew we knew immediately Ben told the girls to pack their bags and they took a car to the airport and
00:20:19
halfway along the road he stopped in the middle of this um banana field and he got out and he said that's as far as he
00:20:29
was gonna go with us and the driver would get us to the airport safely and we'd been flying all over the world at
00:20:34
this point by ourselves so we knew what we were doing um and he said goodbye and he was sorry
00:20:38
he screwed up my birthday and uh and I remember this image of him looking out the back of looking at the back of the
00:20:47
car and he was standing on this this road in the early morning the sport bag sort of thrown over his shoulder
00:20:53
waving goodbye at us and we didn't know you know when we would see him again or how long it would be
00:21:02
seven months later Tyler and her sister got a letter I'll be content just to know that you
00:21:08
are well and together if you miss me just think of that wonderful time together and know that it
00:21:15
will surely happen again life is long and full of surprises much much love Dad thank you
00:21:26
he was convicted under the continuing criminal Enterprise statute sometimes called the Kingpin statute as well as a
00:21:34
hundred odd different charges over the years every time he was going on the run or
00:21:40
changing identities each of these things carried charges and so he had the original charges then he had later
00:21:45
charges from when he was investing the money for the other set of Smugglers he ended up occurring I think 143 different
00:21:53
charges against him he was given a month to get his Affairs in order before his prison sentence
00:21:59
began I remember we went to Alcatraz which is uh you would think a strange thing to do when you're about to start a
00:22:06
prison sentence but I guess that counts as sightseeing and we made jokes all the
00:22:10
way through um but during this time he also sat us down and for the first time he told us what
00:22:16
he had done it was surreal to hear it at last and also to hear my dad talk about drugs
00:22:24
which by this point I kind of understood what drugs were but I really didn't know
00:22:28
very much so to hear that he was a pot Smuggler was wild it blew my mind the things and
00:22:35
not just any pot smoker that he had been a major pot Smuggler he was sentenced to 10 years at the
00:22:42
Lompoc federal correctional institution in the end he served five years and a few months
00:22:49
I think the kids were angry with me for a long time for doing that last deal while I had kids and
00:23:00
um at first I didn't accept responsibility I always saw myself as a a victim because the way things fell
00:23:07
apart but after a time I did accept that it uh that I screwed up and I never should
00:23:14
have done been involved at all and uh if you could go back to that time when you
00:23:20
were young with a Wall Street job all above board would you do anything differently
00:23:26
yeah the only thing that I would do differently is I wouldn't do that last deal after Ben got out of prison he moved
00:23:39
back to Northern California and he's gone back to his original career as an investment advisor
00:23:49
do you ever do something or say something and or think something and realize that
00:23:56
oh I'm just like my father uh [Laughter] I think the thing I think about most I think that I still now one of the things
00:24:08
I still work through is the knee joint reaction when when things are tough of oh I could just jump
00:24:15
on a plane and go and that would make everything okay and that's a that's a complicated one
00:24:22
because obviously that didn't make everything okay when we were younger in all reality Dad should have done his
00:24:28
time straight off the Baton that was the most sensible thing to do um and yet there's this part of me when
00:24:34
things are hard that wants to get on a plane and disappear criminalists produced by Lauren Spore
00:24:53
Nadia Wilson and me audio mix by Rob Byers Matilda folino is our intern Julian Alexander makes original
00:25:01
illustrations for each episode of Criminal you can see them at thisiscriminal.com and we're on Facebook
00:25:07
and Twitter at criminal show if you want to know more about Tyler weatherall's life and her father you can
00:25:14
read her book it's called no way home criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina public radio wunc we're a
00:25:24
proud member of radiotopia from PRX a collection of the best podcasts around and we're excited to tell you about the
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latest from radiotopia showcase the great God of depression the Greek god of depression tells the
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story of a literary genius a brain scientist and their shared quest to understand the secrets of creativity
00:25:46
foreign here I was 10 years ago sort of at the height of my so-called career I was you
00:25:54
know success I'd made money I was at critical Acclaim still with all of that I felt like an absolute loathsome
00:26:02
complete worthless object who hadn't done anything and whose entire trajectory of my life had had gone up
00:26:11
and then was plunged down into absolute zero pit go listen special thanks to adzerk for providing
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their ad serving platform to radiotopia I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal [Music]