The Golden Gate Smuggling Company: A San Francisco Marijuana Empire

By Brett Douglas

In 1979, Brett Douglas was a twenty-eight-year-old US Marine Corps veteran working as a commercial tuna fisherman in California. That year, a young man named Bruce Perlowin came looking for professional seamen and found a few, including the author. The fishermen he recruited became a crew that played an integral part in smuggling more than 250 tons of marijuana that FBI agents credited to the Perlowin Conspiracy.

The Golden Gate Smuggling Company provides a true, behind-the-scenes story of The Company, the largest marijuana smuggling operation in the history of San Francisco. In the early 1980s, commercial tuna fishermen used long-range tuna boats specially outfitted for the eight-thousand-mile round-trip between San Francisco and Colombia. Each boat carried at least 30 million dollars worth of marijuana to the Companys private pier in the San Francisco Bay area. Douglas, a fisherman who lived through it all, narrates this adventure from load number one to the federal courthouse in San Jose four years later.

Through the story of the Company, Douglas chronicles a laid-back, Californiastyle drug-smuggling empire that operated free of Hollywood clichs: no guns, no violence, no dramatic shoot-outs or car chases.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 24, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462055678

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Copyright © 2011 by Brett Douglas.

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-5565-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-5566-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-5567-8 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011917149

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 10/18/2011

Contents

Forward

Preface

The Golden Gate

Smuggling Company

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Afterword

Endnotes:

Forward

By Bruce Perlowin, CEO Marijuana Inc. (PCIO.pk)

West coast Pacific seamen are a totally different breed altogether. I greatly admire the captains and crews (mostly fishermen) that worked for me and braved the unpredictable and rough seas of the Pacific Ocean from the west coast of Columbia to the west coast of the USA. In the CNBC documentary file Marijuana, Inc. the segment on my marijuana smuggling organization made the long ocean voyages seem routine and effortless. The reality of these ocean voyages was far from it. A unique breed of Pacific seamen made one of the largest pot smuggling operations in the U.S. from 1978 to 1983 possible. This book is a first-person account of one of these wonderful seamen, Captain Brett.

Piloting a small fishing boat 300 miles off the Pacific coastline took sophisticated skill sets in various areas. Many of these trips were filled with dangers, disasters and complications that rivaled the experiences of swashbuckling pirates in the days of old. In smuggling marijuana, it isn’t what goes right that counts for a successful outcome; it’s how well an organization responds to obstacles that occur along the way. Finding solutions quickly and competently to problems as they developed was a key factor to our overall success. Our sea captains and their crews had to adapt to situations quickly and resourcefully with expert knowledge—a type of courageous intelligence partnered with kahonees as big as the largest swells the Pacific Ocean could throw at them.

I grew up observing the ‘weekend captains’ of the south Florida smuggling business. Boats motored 50-100 miles over often calm seas to a rendezvous spot and then returned with loads of Columbian or Jamaican bales. Any tom, dick or harry could do it. In contrast, our bold group of adventurous and resourceful seamen pioneered a whole new marijuana smuggling route. Our fishing boats would log 8,000 miles round trip over five weeks of sea time. Our captains and crews navigated 800,000 square miles of giant ocean swells and angry, unpredictable seas. The boats and equipment were as unfailingly rugged and seaworthy as the captains and crews who piloted them. This bold group of individuals was perfect for what I needed in establishing the largest marijuana smuggling operation the USA had ever seen.

There are no landmarks out in the Pacific Ocean; no city lights to guide you back in like on the Florida coastline. LORAN navigational signals don’t exist in most of the Pacific and our west coast captains had to know their stuff running 300 miles off the coastline. By their very nature, this tough and courageous breed of Pacific seaman loved the challenge and excitement of running boatloads of marijuana bales—bringing in a catch way more lucrative than fish! This book describes the true life experiences of one of the best seamen in my organization—Captain Brett. His vivid accounts of the day-to-day experiences of an expert marijuana smuggler will have you on the edge of your seat. This beautifully-narrated description is one-of-a-kind. In his own words, Captain Brett will give you a feeling of what it was like to be a modern-day pirate in the world of marijuana smuggling. Looming catastrophes, emergencies and dangers happen all the time, and you are about to read the true life account of how we dealt with each one. Once again, I have to say to Captain Brett—another job well done! And to the men who served with him, thank you for being on my team! Read on.

Preface

It has now been over thirty years since the day I sat in the back seat of a small car in Sausalito, California, and watched a baby-faced young man named Bruce Perlowin count money in the front seat. After a few minutes he finished and reached over the seat holding my paycheck in both hands. My paycheck was twenty-five thousand dollars, in cash.

He looked at me and asked, Would you like to make some more money?

I was a twenty-eight-year-old Marine veteran currently scratching out a living as a deck hand on a commercial fishing boat. I was looking for a way to get ahead and didn’t mind breaking a few rules if I could earn enough money to buy a salmon boat. I lived in the harsh world of commercial fishing and the deck hand job was a lot of dangerous work, but not very lucrative. If you could scrape together enough money to buy a fishing boat you had a much better opportunity to make a decent living and live the American dream.

You bet. I replied in a heartbeat.

Thus, an adventure began to unfold that would take me to parts of the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific Ocean I barely knew existed. This was San Francisco in the Seventies, recruiting people to be a pot smuggler was easy. It was a pretty common topic of conversation in bars where fishermen and other seamen hung out. There was easy money to be made, just go for a boat ride and collect the cash.

Between 1979 and 1983 a small group of commercial fishermen helped make San Francisco Bay home to the largest marijuana smuggling operation in West coast history. Bruce was the head of the operation, a very successful smuggler from Florida who had transferred his operation to California in search of a safer route to Colombia’s herbal treasures. Almost all of the commercial fishermen and boats came from Moss Landing, the fishing port in the center of Monterrey Bay one hundred sea miles southeast of San Francisco. That’s where I came in; I was a Moss Landing fisherman and happened to be the deck hand on the boat that delivered the first load into the Company’s dock in San Francisco Bay.

The events that unfold in this book are true and international in scope, but primarily focus on the stretch of California coastline from Monterrey Bay to Bodega Bay, the port of Moss Landing, and San Francisco.

It was natural for a guy like me to try and help satisfy the consumer demand and maybe make some money at the same time, tax-free money. Of course I knew it was against the law to smuggle marijuana, yet no one was going to get hurt. I had been to Vietnam and was on active duty during the Watergate scandal. I knew what my government thought was illegal didn’t apply to them, why should it apply to me? I, like the others, had grown up in the turbulent times of the Sixties. Monumental events unfolded during my school years, assassinations (President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr.), the Kent State Massacre, civil rights marches, love-ins, and marijuana. The Vietnam War was brought into our home on a daily basis with televised, graphic violence and body count reports that reminded many of us young jocks of a ballgame. The evening news also became a grim reminder of the future that awaited those who were unable to go to college and get a draft deferment.

In consideration of the times, it’s not surprising that virtually all of the California fishermen who got involved with The Company were Vietnam War veterans with irreverent attitudes towards authority. We all had friends who would later be immortalized on the Vietnam Memorial in Washington and knew we had narrowly escaped the same fate. I’ll leave the right or wrong debate about the war to people who like to argue such things, but it fundamentally changed the way our generation looked at authority, especially the US Government’s kind of authority.

That attitude gave us a persona of prohibition-style folk heroes, modern day good ‘ol boys running marijuana past the federal agents instead of moonshine. San Francisco has always been a town that embraces outlaws and outrageous characters and marijuana smuggling fit right in with The City’s four hundred year history. Let’s face it; marijuana prohibition doesn’t work, at least not in California. It’s classified as medicine, now, three decades later. A patient doesn’t even need a pharmacy prescription, just a note from a doctor.

I began writing this story down on paper over fifteen years ago when Bruce Perlowin, no longer a baby-faced young man, asked me for a contribution to a series of magazine articles he was preparing for publication. I soon discovered that writing is hard work and very time consuming, especially for someone that doesn’t know how to type or use word processing software. I created a few pages about one of my trips, but quickly stalled out and lost interest. I didn’t have the time to take on a second occupation.

I began my current writing activity a few years ago when a friend approached me about writing a monthly column to address electrical problems unique to boats. Gus and his wife, Monica, publish on-line newsletters for local marinas. The articles for Gus were well received and he encouraged me to develop my skills and expand my subjects. Without that encouragement I doubt this book would have been written, thanks Gus.

A series of surgeries on my hands and a total knee replacement forced me into early retirement as a marine electrician, but in turn freed up my time to expand my writing projects.

Shortly after my knee surgery Bruce contacted me with an offer to participate in a movie project about his smuggling operation tentatively named The King of Pot. I was asked to be a consultant for the boat scenes and put together a timeline of the more memorable experiences during the years the Company operated. Since I’m too young to get a Social Security check every month a chance to earn some movie money was very appealing.

I started out with a simple idea; create a timeline of all the trips and outline the boat routes from San Francisco to Colombia, real basic stuff. I quickly discovered I’m not a good enough writer to be very concise; I need more words to properly convey my thoughts. Four months later the simple outline had turned into four chapters that told the beginning of the Company and the first two trips I participated in. I thought that was all a movie director would want given a movie’s time constraints. I sent a copy around to Bruce, Bobsan, Geppetto, and Surfer Bob. Their reaction was unanimous and surprising; they all loved it and wanted me to write more. The conversations we had about the old days became part of this project and helped fill in the blanks.

My wife encouraged me to expand the story into a book that told the entire tale and perhaps take my place among published historians. She has provided tremendous support and encouragement and this would not have been possible without her help.

Once I began research for a novel-length book I soon realized there wasn’t a lot of credible material available on-line and the memories of the participants were less than perfect. Therefore, I have kept the focus of the book on my experiences and memories of events which I personally participated in. I have used the recollections of Bobsan, Geppetto, Surfer Bob, and Bruce where appropriate to fill in the narrative. All the pictures are mine that I have saved over the years or have recently taken. The charts were the contribution of Bobsan who generously donated his time and computer skills to this project.

I did find a small clue in the Berkley Monthly which led me to the Monterrey County History Curator, Dennis Copeland, and he uncovered the newspaper articles written by Alex Hulanicki for the Monterrey Peninsula Herald in March, 1986. Those articles were a tremendous help in gathering facts of the operation in the Moss Landing area. Thanks, Dennis.

No matter your personal feelings about marijuana, it’s always played a large part in American history and does so to this day. I have always loved the subject of history and am humbled by the opportunity to add some pertinent material, even though it’s of a questionable nature.

Brett Douglas

The Golden Gate

Smuggling Company

"In Florida, you bring in a boat load of fish and everybody thinks its marijuana. In San Francisco, you bring in a boat load of marijuana and everybody thinks its fish."

Bruce Perlowin.

The eighty foot shrimp boat was quietly drifting fifty miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge. The ocean swell was rocking the boat back and forth with the wind humming in sync through the rigging aloft. After thirty days, the Detroit diesel that had been running non-stop and providing a reassuring drumbeat to life at sea was now silent. The only sounds were the wind and the waves breaking against the hull. We were fifty miles from the end of a four thousand mile sea voyage and powerless; the boat slowly being pushed farther away from the California coast by the prevailing wind and current. Surfer Bob and I had tried to restart the engine for hours before we came to the sad realization that it wasn’t going to happen. The fishing boat Karen Lynn was now adrift.

Near midnight, hours later, I lay on a mattress wedged into the leeward corner of the wheelhouse. I listened to the ocean slap against the boat’s hull and wondered what would happen next. I had spent the afternoon and evening on the radio trying to contact my friends ashore without success. Where in the hell were they? We were expected, weren’t we? We hadn’t had a decent meal, a beer, or a hot shower in over a month. I was cold, hungry, and a little pissed off that no one had answered the radio calls. We needed help and we couldn’t call the Coast Guard. You see, we were also loaded with a twenty ton cargo of top-grade Punta Roja, Colombia’s finest marijuana. About forty million dollars’ worth…

Chapter One

The Early Years

1%20Chapter%20One.jpg

The author on the back deck of the Annie Gray

Everything written here is true as I remember it. A long winding road led me to being adrift off the California coast with a small fortune in marijuana. It had been roughly a year since the day I first met Bruce Perlowin, later to be labeled The King of Pot by the Berkeley Monthly. What follows is the story of a commercial fisherman who got involved with the largest marijuana smuggling operation in west coast history.

I became a member of the kick-off team, the sole deckhand on a sixty-foot tuna boat that delivered the first twenty-ton load of Colombian marijuana to the company pier in San Francisco Bay. I followed that trip with three more in the next three years. My smuggling career ended with my conviction and sentencing in the San Jose Federal Courthouse in February, 1984, alongside several of my friends.

Born and raised in Sunflower, Kansas, I read a lot of books and dreamed about the real world beyond the endless farmland of my youth. I dreamt of travel and adventure beyond the tractors and barns.

My mother’s side of the family hailed from the Missouri Ozarks, the annual Fourth of July family reunion was the highlight of my summer vacation. She came from a big family and it would bring together my uncles, fourteen in all, to tell their war stories. After dinner they would break out the whiskey jugs they called Waynecounty. I was probably ten years old before I realized that Wayne and county were two different words. I thought Waynecounty was what everyone called a jug of whiskey. I’m pretty sure their beverage of choice evaded liquor taxes; my mom’s ancestors settled these parts before the Civil War and moonshine stills were a fact of life.

The stories would get a lot better after the glasses were filled a couple times. It wouldn’t be long before the little ones were chased off to the small cabin where we slept on the floor. Drunken veterans get loud, though. I didn’t know all the words at first, but my older cousins would help out with the definitions. Me and my cousins always tried to swear as much as possible so we could impress each other with our maturity.

My uncles all served in the Navy during WWII, my father was the exception. He was a Marine veteran of the South Pacific and had fought against the Japanese. It was obvious early on to me that they were all very respectful of the Marine. My dad wasn’t someone you took lightly if you were smart, and with good reason.

A total jock from birth, I won the high school state championship in weight lifting and achieved all-American status in football. After graduating from high school in Kansas City I went to the United States Military Academy at West Point with an athletic appointment to play football. Military academies don’t give scholarships; you have to be appointed. In my case I was