The History Channel Is Finally Telling
the Stunning Secret Story of the War on Drugs
Jon Schwarz
June 18 2017
https://theintercept.com/2017/06/18/the-history-channel-is-finally-telling-the-stunning-secret-story-of-the-war-on-drugs/
Sunday night and running through Wednesday the History Channel is showing a new four-part series called “America’s War on Drugs.” Not only is it an important contribution to recent American history, it’s also the first time U.S. television has ever told the core truth about one of the most important issues of the past 50 years.That core truth is: The war on drugs has always been a pointless sham.
For decades the federal government has engaged in a shifting series of alliances of convenience with some of the world’s largest drug cartels. So while the U.S. incarceration rate has quintupled since President Richard Nixon first declared the war on drugs in 1971, top narcotics dealers have simultaneously enjoyed protection at the highest levels of power in America.
On the one hand, this shouldn’t be surprising. The voluminous documentation of this fact in dozens of books has long been available to anyone with curiosity and a library card.
Yet somehow, despite the fact the U.S. has no formal system of censorship, this monumental scandal has never before been presented in a comprehensive way in the medium where most Americans get their information: TV.
That’s why “America’s War on Drugs” is a genuine milestone. We’ve recently seen how ideas that once seemed absolutely preposterous and taboo — for instance, that the Catholic Church was consciously safeguarding priests who sexually abused children, or that Bill Cosby may not have been the best choice for America’s Dad — can after years of silence finally break through into popular consciousness and exact real consequences. The series could be a watershed in doing the same for the reality behind one of the most cynical and cruel policies in U.S. history.
The series, executive produced by Julian P. Hobbs, Elli Hakami, and Anthony Lappé, is a standard TV documentary; there’s the amalgam of interviews, file footage, and dramatic recreations. What’s not standard is the story told on camera by former Drug Enforcement Administration operatives as well as journalists and drug dealers themselves. (One of the reporters is Ryan Grim, The Intercept’s Washington bureau chief and author of “This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America.”)
There’s no mealy mouthed truckling about what happened. The first episode opens with the voice of Lindsay Moran, a one-time clandestine CIA officer, declaring, “The agency was elbow deep with drug traffickers.”
Then Richard Stratton, a marijuana smuggler turned writer and television producer, explains, “Most Americans would be utterly shocked if they knew the depth of involvement that the Central Intelligence Agency has had in the international drug trade.”
Next, New York University professor Christian Parenti tells viewers, “The CIA is from its very beginning collaborating with mafiosas who are involved in the drug trade because these mafiosas will serve the larger agenda of fighting communism.”
For the next eight hours, the series sprints through history that’s largely the greatest hits of the U.S. government’s partnership with heroin, hallucinogen, and cocaine dealers. That these greatest hits can fill up most of four two-hour episodes demonstrates how extraordinarily deep and ugly the story is.
First we learn about the CIA working with Florida mob boss Santo Trafficante Jr. in the early 1960s. The CIA wanted Fidel Castro dead and, in return for Trafficante’s help in various assassination plots, was willing to turn a blind eye to the extensive drug trafficking by Trafficante and his allied Cuban exiles.
Then there’s the extremely odd tale of how the CIA imported significant amounts of LSD from its Swiss manufacturer in hopes that it could be used for successful mind control. Instead, by dosing thousands of young volunteers including Ken Kesey, Whitey Bulger, and Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, the agency accidentally helped popularize acid and generate the 1960s counterculture of psychedelia.
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. allied with anti-communist forces in Laos that leveraged our support to become some of the largest suppliers of opium on earth. Air America, a CIA front, flew supplies for the guerrillas into Laos and then flew drugs out, all with the knowledge and protection of U.S. operatives.
The same dynamic developed in the 1980s as the Reagan administration tried to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The planes that secretly brought arms to the contras turned around and brought cocaine back to America, again shielded from U.S. law enforcement by the CIA.
Most recently, there’s our 16-year-long war in Afghanistan. While less has been uncovered about the CIA’s machinations here, it’s hard not to notice that we installed Hamid Karzai as president while his brother apparently was on the CIA payroll and, simultaneously, one of the country’s biggest opium dealers. Afghanistan now supplies about 90 percent of the world’s heroin.
To its credit, the series makes clear that this is not part of a secret government plot to turn Americans into drug addicts.
But, as Moran puts it, “When the CIA is focused on a mission, on a particular end, they’re not going to sit down and pontificate about ‘What are the long-term, global consequences of our actions going to be?’” Winning their secret wars will always be their top priority, and if that requires cooperation with drug cartels that are flooding the U.S. with their product, so be it. “A lot of these patterns that have their origins in the 1960s become cyclical,” Moran adds. “Those relationships develop again and again throughout the war on drugs.”
What makes this history so grotesque is the government’s mind-breaking levels of hypocrisy. It’s like Donald Trump declaring a War on Real Estate Developers that fills prisons with people who occasionally rent out their spare bedroom on Airbnb.
That brings us back to Charles Grassley. Grassley is now chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a longtime committed drug warrior and — during the 1980s — a supporter of the contras.
Yet even Grassley is showing signs that he realizes there may have been some flaws in the war on drugs since the beginning. He recently has co-sponsored a bill that would reduce minimum sentences for drug offenses.
So now that the History Channel has granted Grassley his wish and is broadcasting this extraordinarily important history, it’s our job to make sure he and everyone like him sits down and watches it. That this series exists at all shows that we’re at a tipping point with this brazen, catastrophic lie. We have to push hard enough to knock it over.
the Stunning Secret Story of the War on Drugs
Jon Schwarz
June 18 2017
https://theintercept.com/2017/06/18/the-history-channel-is-finally-telling-the-stunning-secret-story-of-the-war-on-drugs/
Sunday night and running through Wednesday the History Channel is showing a new four-part series called “America’s War on Drugs.” Not only is it an important contribution to recent American history, it’s also the first time U.S. television has ever told the core truth about one of the most important issues of the past 50 years.That core truth is: The war on drugs has always been a pointless sham.
For decades the federal government has engaged in a shifting series of alliances of convenience with some of the world’s largest drug cartels. So while the U.S. incarceration rate has quintupled since President Richard Nixon first declared the war on drugs in 1971, top narcotics dealers have simultaneously enjoyed protection at the highest levels of power in America.
On the one hand, this shouldn’t be surprising. The voluminous documentation of this fact in dozens of books has long been available to anyone with curiosity and a library card.
Yet somehow, despite the fact the U.S. has no formal system of censorship, this monumental scandal has never before been presented in a comprehensive way in the medium where most Americans get their information: TV.
That’s why “America’s War on Drugs” is a genuine milestone. We’ve recently seen how ideas that once seemed absolutely preposterous and taboo — for instance, that the Catholic Church was consciously safeguarding priests who sexually abused children, or that Bill Cosby may not have been the best choice for America’s Dad — can after years of silence finally break through into popular consciousness and exact real consequences. The series could be a watershed in doing the same for the reality behind one of the most cynical and cruel policies in U.S. history.
The series, executive produced by Julian P. Hobbs, Elli Hakami, and Anthony Lappé, is a standard TV documentary; there’s the amalgam of interviews, file footage, and dramatic recreations. What’s not standard is the story told on camera by former Drug Enforcement Administration operatives as well as journalists and drug dealers themselves. (One of the reporters is Ryan Grim, The Intercept’s Washington bureau chief and author of “This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America.”)
There’s no mealy mouthed truckling about what happened. The first episode opens with the voice of Lindsay Moran, a one-time clandestine CIA officer, declaring, “The agency was elbow deep with drug traffickers.”
Then Richard Stratton, a marijuana smuggler turned writer and television producer, explains, “Most Americans would be utterly shocked if they knew the depth of involvement that the Central Intelligence Agency has had in the international drug trade.”
Next, New York University professor Christian Parenti tells viewers, “The CIA is from its very beginning collaborating with mafiosas who are involved in the drug trade because these mafiosas will serve the larger agenda of fighting communism.”
For the next eight hours, the series sprints through history that’s largely the greatest hits of the U.S. government’s partnership with heroin, hallucinogen, and cocaine dealers. That these greatest hits can fill up most of four two-hour episodes demonstrates how extraordinarily deep and ugly the story is.
First we learn about the CIA working with Florida mob boss Santo Trafficante Jr. in the early 1960s. The CIA wanted Fidel Castro dead and, in return for Trafficante’s help in various assassination plots, was willing to turn a blind eye to the extensive drug trafficking by Trafficante and his allied Cuban exiles.
Then there’s the extremely odd tale of how the CIA imported significant amounts of LSD from its Swiss manufacturer in hopes that it could be used for successful mind control. Instead, by dosing thousands of young volunteers including Ken Kesey, Whitey Bulger, and Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, the agency accidentally helped popularize acid and generate the 1960s counterculture of psychedelia.
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. allied with anti-communist forces in Laos that leveraged our support to become some of the largest suppliers of opium on earth. Air America, a CIA front, flew supplies for the guerrillas into Laos and then flew drugs out, all with the knowledge and protection of U.S. operatives.
The same dynamic developed in the 1980s as the Reagan administration tried to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The planes that secretly brought arms to the contras turned around and brought cocaine back to America, again shielded from U.S. law enforcement by the CIA.
Most recently, there’s our 16-year-long war in Afghanistan. While less has been uncovered about the CIA’s machinations here, it’s hard not to notice that we installed Hamid Karzai as president while his brother apparently was on the CIA payroll and, simultaneously, one of the country’s biggest opium dealers. Afghanistan now supplies about 90 percent of the world’s heroin.
To its credit, the series makes clear that this is not part of a secret government plot to turn Americans into drug addicts.
But, as Moran puts it, “When the CIA is focused on a mission, on a particular end, they’re not going to sit down and pontificate about ‘What are the long-term, global consequences of our actions going to be?’” Winning their secret wars will always be their top priority, and if that requires cooperation with drug cartels that are flooding the U.S. with their product, so be it. “A lot of these patterns that have their origins in the 1960s become cyclical,” Moran adds. “Those relationships develop again and again throughout the war on drugs.”
What makes this history so grotesque is the government’s mind-breaking levels of hypocrisy. It’s like Donald Trump declaring a War on Real Estate Developers that fills prisons with people who occasionally rent out their spare bedroom on Airbnb.
That brings us back to Charles Grassley. Grassley is now chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a longtime committed drug warrior and — during the 1980s — a supporter of the contras.
Yet even Grassley is showing signs that he realizes there may have been some flaws in the war on drugs since the beginning. He recently has co-sponsored a bill that would reduce minimum sentences for drug offenses.
So now that the History Channel has granted Grassley his wish and is broadcasting this extraordinarily important history, it’s our job to make sure he and everyone like him sits down and watches it. That this series exists at all shows that we’re at a tipping point with this brazen, catastrophic lie. We have to push hard enough to knock it over.
S 1 E 1
HISTORY CHANNEL:
Acid, Spies, & Secret Experiments
tv-14 v,s,l,dThe roots of America’s War on Drugs reveals secret assassination attempts, the CIA’s bizarre experiments with LSD and support of heroin traffickers, LSD parachuting from the sky, and how it led to a five decade war.
Aired on:
Jun 18, 2017
Available Until:
Jul 24, 2017
Duration:
1h 24m 3s
HISTORY CHANNEL:
Acid, Spies, & Secret Experiments
tv-14 v,s,l,dThe roots of America’s War on Drugs reveals secret assassination attempts, the CIA’s bizarre experiments with LSD and support of heroin traffickers, LSD parachuting from the sky, and how it led to a five decade war.
Aired on:
Jun 18, 2017
Available Until:
Jul 24, 2017
Duration:
1h 24m 3s
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love is alive and well in the Hearts of All the true Brother's. I stepped off the Spiritual Path for a minute and experienced the "Dark Side" and today I walk my talk and live my life according to what The Brotherhood is All about. Sure as Hell was never about Drugs or the ego building greatest smuggler's or even who made the most acid.
Love, Light, Life. All God All the Time. Om Mani Padme Hum
https://www.amazon.com/Lurigancho-Mr-Edward-Padilla/dp/0970620055
Love, Light, Life. All God All the Time. Om Mani Padme Hum
https://www.amazon.com/Lurigancho-Mr-Edward-Padilla/dp/0970620055
"Pirate of Penance"
Before Johnny Depp's Capt. Jack Sparrow,
Eddie "Spaghetti" Padilla Gave Pirates and Love a Bad Name
The Aafje met up with Eddie Padilla at Manzanillo in early 1970. It had been sailed from St. Thomas, and it was now crewed by a half dozen other Brotherhood of Eternal Love members – who had never sailed before in their lives. Eddie had been working for the last year or so, with “Papa” – Pedro Aviles Perez. “Papa” was the Sinaloan marijuana supplier of the Brotherhood. It had been Eddie’s dream to purchase a boat, which he planned to use to smuggle hashish from Pakistan back to the States. Eddie referred to himself as a “spiritual warrior” and the purchase of the boat signified, to him, a fulfilling of a dream. That dream, apparently began with loading up the Aafje with over 1500 kilograms of the best Sinaloan marijuana, while it stood anchor just outside the twelve mile limit. Motor launch after motor launch disgorged their loads to the stately old Aafje, and then, with Eddie and all that “Maui Wowie” material now aboard – they set sail for Maui. -- Eddie Padilla
VIDEO: LOCKED UP ABROAD - HIPPIE MAFIA
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1t3ps4_locked-up-abroad-hippy-mafia_shortfilms
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1t3ps4_locked-up-abroad-hippy-mafia_shortfilms
"Edward Padilla's gritty street prose takes the reader into a desperate Heart of Darkness from which not many could ever emerge. But this gripping narrative turns emergence into a transcendent awakening and genuine rebirth. This is the real stuff, no modifiers required."
John Kent Harrison screenwriter/director "Eddie Padilla embodies so much of the promise and peril of post-War Southern California that it makes your head spin: a multiracial child of the New West; schooled by surfers, street fighters, and smugglers; turned on as a '60s seeker; turned out as a '70s nihilist. In Lurigancho Prison, Peru, a Dante-esque catalog of horrors, Padilla paid for California's broken dreams as much as his own. His brave escape and ongoing recovery offer a dagger of redemption and hope in the fight against 21st century cynicism and apathy." Joe Donnelly co-editor/founder Slake: Los Angeles, author of "The Pirate of Penance" |
https://www.createspace.com/4245678
by Mr. Edward Padilla with Mr. Paul Wood BUY: http://www.amazon.com/Lurigancho-Mr-Edward-Padilla/dp/0970620055 A sensational-and true-prison escape story in the tradition of Papillon and Midnight Express. Edward Padilla, an American, is the only living person ever to escape from the world's foulest prison-Lurigancho Prison in Peru. Here is the true story of his four-year ordeal and his miraculous flight to freedom. A founding member of the now notorious "hippie" church called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Ed is one of the few surviving core members of that group, the only one to come forward with brutal honesty in the telling of this story. "A wonderfully gritty story of transcendence of the physical and the spiritual. Serve time with Ed and discover hell and heaven. Unique and extraordinary." Jeremy Tarcher publisher, Tarcher Books and Seven Years in Tibet "A harrowing account of one of the most infamous hell-holes on earth, and a thrilling tale of betrayed ideals, adventure, escape and redemption." Nicholas Schou author of Kill the Messenger, Orange Sunshine, and The Weed Runners (forthcoming) "An astonishing true story that has every twist and turn you could imagine. Eddie's is a story that plunges to the bleakest depths and soars to the greatest heights. Guns, drugs, girls, South American hell-holes-it has it all...." Nick Green director of the National Geographic documentary "The Hippie Mafia" Publication Date:May 17 2013ISBN/EAN13:0970620055 / 9780970620057Page Count:410Binding Type:US Trade PaperTrim Size:5.5" x 8.5"Language:EnglishColor:Black and WhiteRelated Categories:Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs |
Eddie Padilla's Escape From Lurigancho
The onetime OC man is the only man still alive who escaped from Peru's most notorious prison
By Nick Schou Thursday, Jun 20 2013
http://www.ocweekly.com/2013-06-20/news/eddie-padilla-lurigancho-peru-brotherhood-of-eternal-love/
When Eddie Padilla first learned he was headed to Peru's San Juan de Lurigancho Prison, he was happy.
It was the winter of 1975, and he had just spent the past few weeks locked up in a closet in an ex-drug dealer's mansion in Peru's capital, Lima, a building that Peruvian Internal Police had seized and converted into a detention center and torture chamber. But the corrupt cops who had busted him and his friends for a cocaine-smuggling venture gone awry had a plan. In return for a large chunk of change, they'd fabricate a story that would clear the trio of the crime. All Padilla and his pals had to do was wait six months in Lurigancho. It would be easy, the cops said, a vacation. It wasn't so much a prison as a country club, with tennis courts and a swimming pool. . .
The onetime OC man is the only man still alive who escaped from Peru's most notorious prison
By Nick Schou Thursday, Jun 20 2013
http://www.ocweekly.com/2013-06-20/news/eddie-padilla-lurigancho-peru-brotherhood-of-eternal-love/
When Eddie Padilla first learned he was headed to Peru's San Juan de Lurigancho Prison, he was happy.
It was the winter of 1975, and he had just spent the past few weeks locked up in a closet in an ex-drug dealer's mansion in Peru's capital, Lima, a building that Peruvian Internal Police had seized and converted into a detention center and torture chamber. But the corrupt cops who had busted him and his friends for a cocaine-smuggling venture gone awry had a plan. In return for a large chunk of change, they'd fabricate a story that would clear the trio of the crime. All Padilla and his pals had to do was wait six months in Lurigancho. It would be easy, the cops said, a vacation. It wasn't so much a prison as a country club, with tennis courts and a swimming pool. . .
May 22, 2013; Don't miss Eddie Padilla's untold story on
Locked Up Abroad & His New BOOK on Amazon
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/locked-up-abroad/episodes/hippie-mafia/
Locked Up Abroad & His New BOOK on Amazon
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/locked-up-abroad/episodes/hippie-mafia/
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https://www.facebook.com/orangesunshinemovie/timeline
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by Joe Donnelly
“John was never anyone I would follow,” insists Edward Padilla, who also befriended Griggs in high school. “He was a sneaky, manipulative little bastard. He would usually pick a fight with someone bigger, and when the fight started, everyone would start coming out of the woodwork.” Padilla’s family moved to Orange County in the early 1950s from South Central Los Angeles. Although his mother was of German-Irish extraction, Padilla’s dad, a construction contractor, was half black and half Native American and commuted back to Los Angeles for work, because, as a nonwhite, he couldn’t get a single job in Orange County. “I had dark skin,” Padilla says. “Because I wasn’t Mexican or white, I wasn’t enough of any one color to be part of either crowd.”
When he turned sixteen, Padilla, like everyone else he knew, went to Disneyland to apply for a summer job. “I was the only one not to get hired,” he says. “Anaheim was a different world back then.”In school, Padilla established himself as the class troublemaker. One day his teacher told him to shut up and sit down. Padilla ignored him, so the teacher grabbed him by the throat and slammed him into his seat. Padilla kicked the teacher in the balls. The teacher went home for the day to nurse his wounds and Padilla ended up being expelled from Anaheim’s public education system.
He attended St. Boniface Parish School, a privately run Catholic institution, where he scraped with an older student who made the mistake of insulting Padilla’s mother. “What are you looking at?” the kid asked. “Fuck you,” Padilla answered. “I’ll fuck your mother,” the kid responded. Padilla punched him in the face until the kid was lying on the floor unconscious. “I broke his head open, so they sent me to juvenile hall.
”After he got out, Padilla attended Servite High School, an all-boys facility full of public school rejects taught by robe-wearing priests. “We were some rough guys,” recalls Padilla, who by now had bulked up into a muscular athlete. During his sophomore year, Padilla insulted one of his teachers, a former professional football player who promptly slapped him across the face. “You slap like a girl,” Padilla observed. The teacher slapped him again, hard enough to send Padilla reeling from his seat. He picked up his desk and swung it at the teacher.
That stunt sent Padilla to another private school in Downey, where he joined the football team and resumed fighting. When he attacked a fellow football player who wound up in the hospital with cracked cheekbones and his jaw wired together, Padilla found himself again expelled and sent back to Anaheim.At a sock hop during his first year back at Anaheim High School, Padilla danced with a girl who happened to be dating a friend of Griggs’s named Mike Bias.
The dance ended and Bias and about ten other angry-looking guys including John Griggs walked up to Padilla. “You fucked up,” Griggs announced. “You don’t mess with our girls. We’re going to kick your ass.” Padilla continued dancing with the girl. When the sock hop ended, he went outside, fists clenched, ready to rumble. Nobody was there. “I was glad,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong. Ten to one didn’t sound fun.” The next day, however, Griggs approached Padilla with an olive branch, telling him that the rest of his gang was planning to ambush him.
A few weeks later, Griggs told Padilla the fight would happen that evening in an orange grove outside of town. He drove Padilla to the location and pumped him with information about who was going to try to take him down. He warned Padilla to watch out for a sucker puncher named Franco who planned to wait until Padilla had been worn down fighting other contenders before he stepped in to finish him off.“I rode out to this grassy meadow in the middle of this orange grove in John’s 1938 Cadillac,” Padilla recalls. “There were probably fifty kids there, mostly guys, standing in a circle.”
Padilla cracked his knuckles and readied himself. Without warning, a couple of football players rushed him simultaneously. One of them charged into Padilla, sending him flying backward. He leaned over and sank his teeth into the guy’s back. As Padilla pushed him away, the next jock came flying forward. Suddenly, one of Griggs’s friends, who unbeknownst to Padilla had been appointed by Griggs to intervene, stepped forward to protect him. “Little by little, even though we had different agendas, I realized I was covered in a strange way,” Padilla says. “Johnny was always trying to have a gang of guys and that was the opposite of me. I was a loner, but John needed a lot of people to accomplish what he wanted. He was a masterful politician. He had a gift of gab, and people followed John.
”Padilla and Griggs were both fans of The Untouchables, a television show broadcast on ABC every Thursday night from 1959 to 1963. Based on the memoir by legendary G-man Eliot Ness, the show fictionalized his pursuit of the notorious Chicago mob boss Al Capone. To Padilla, it seemed to provide free lessons in how to operate a successful criminal enterprise. “Capone and his gang were so successful because they didn’t use violence to achieve their aims,” he says. “I watched that show religiously, every Thursday night,” Padilla says. “I wanted to be a successful criminal. My product was going to be pot and pills and I was going to run all of Orange County.” Inspired by the show’s character Arnold “Spatz” Vincent, Padilla went to a thrift store and bought a pair of spats and black and white wing-tipped shoes, slacks, a button-down vest, and a Gant shirt with a button-down collar.
Griggs and his crew were dressing up like their favorite gangsters as well. Griggs thought of himself as Capone, and his 1938 Cadillac testified to his admiration for the mob boss.Eddie Padilla’s dream of becoming Orange County’s biggest pot dealer was deferred by several jail stints, everything from indecent exposure to dealing drugs to assaulting a cop with a wrist pin, a steel bar that when gripped in a tight fist could land a deadly punch. His lawyer persuaded a judge to send him to Atascadero, a hospital for the criminally insane, where Padilla spent the next eighteen months. By now, he was eighteen years old and had knife scars up and down his arms and was missing several front teeth.
Padilla’s stint in the loony bin convinced him to leave street fighting behind him. He married his high school sweetheart and rented an apartment with the money he was making selling pot, cheap weed smuggled across the border from Mexico. In those days, marijuana was divided into “lids” which referred to a whole can of Prince Albert brand rolling tobacco, and “fingers,” which was a finger’s width of pot inside the can.Soon, Padilla wasn’t just dealing, he was supplying pot to other dealers, like Jack “Dark Cloud” Harrington, a street fighter from Westminster.
One night, Padilla went over to Harrington’s house to see if he needed any more pot to sell. Sitting in the living room was his old friend John Griggs, whom Padilla hadn’t seen since high school. Griggs was now married, working in the nearby oil fields of Yorba Linda and, like Padilla, dealing a lot of pot.“I became the biggest dealer in Anaheim, and maybe Garden Grove,” Padilla says. “I had a lot of customers and went around meticulously turning people on to pot. I believed in pot.”
One day, Padilla’s pot supplier introduced him to someone who was bringing kilograms of weed across the border every weekend. Now Padilla could sell half pounds and quarter pounds of marijuana at a pop. He went back to all the people he knew, turning them on to pot and looking for the next adventure. “I was twenty years old and figured I needed to go down to Mexico and do something worthy,” he says. “Being an adrenaline junkie, smuggling was appealing to me. I couldn’t wait.”
http://us.macmillan.com/BookCustomPage_New.aspx?isbn=9780312607173&isprint=true
“John was never anyone I would follow,” insists Edward Padilla, who also befriended Griggs in high school. “He was a sneaky, manipulative little bastard. He would usually pick a fight with someone bigger, and when the fight started, everyone would start coming out of the woodwork.” Padilla’s family moved to Orange County in the early 1950s from South Central Los Angeles. Although his mother was of German-Irish extraction, Padilla’s dad, a construction contractor, was half black and half Native American and commuted back to Los Angeles for work, because, as a nonwhite, he couldn’t get a single job in Orange County. “I had dark skin,” Padilla says. “Because I wasn’t Mexican or white, I wasn’t enough of any one color to be part of either crowd.”
When he turned sixteen, Padilla, like everyone else he knew, went to Disneyland to apply for a summer job. “I was the only one not to get hired,” he says. “Anaheim was a different world back then.”In school, Padilla established himself as the class troublemaker. One day his teacher told him to shut up and sit down. Padilla ignored him, so the teacher grabbed him by the throat and slammed him into his seat. Padilla kicked the teacher in the balls. The teacher went home for the day to nurse his wounds and Padilla ended up being expelled from Anaheim’s public education system.
He attended St. Boniface Parish School, a privately run Catholic institution, where he scraped with an older student who made the mistake of insulting Padilla’s mother. “What are you looking at?” the kid asked. “Fuck you,” Padilla answered. “I’ll fuck your mother,” the kid responded. Padilla punched him in the face until the kid was lying on the floor unconscious. “I broke his head open, so they sent me to juvenile hall.
”After he got out, Padilla attended Servite High School, an all-boys facility full of public school rejects taught by robe-wearing priests. “We were some rough guys,” recalls Padilla, who by now had bulked up into a muscular athlete. During his sophomore year, Padilla insulted one of his teachers, a former professional football player who promptly slapped him across the face. “You slap like a girl,” Padilla observed. The teacher slapped him again, hard enough to send Padilla reeling from his seat. He picked up his desk and swung it at the teacher.
That stunt sent Padilla to another private school in Downey, where he joined the football team and resumed fighting. When he attacked a fellow football player who wound up in the hospital with cracked cheekbones and his jaw wired together, Padilla found himself again expelled and sent back to Anaheim.At a sock hop during his first year back at Anaheim High School, Padilla danced with a girl who happened to be dating a friend of Griggs’s named Mike Bias.
The dance ended and Bias and about ten other angry-looking guys including John Griggs walked up to Padilla. “You fucked up,” Griggs announced. “You don’t mess with our girls. We’re going to kick your ass.” Padilla continued dancing with the girl. When the sock hop ended, he went outside, fists clenched, ready to rumble. Nobody was there. “I was glad,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong. Ten to one didn’t sound fun.” The next day, however, Griggs approached Padilla with an olive branch, telling him that the rest of his gang was planning to ambush him.
A few weeks later, Griggs told Padilla the fight would happen that evening in an orange grove outside of town. He drove Padilla to the location and pumped him with information about who was going to try to take him down. He warned Padilla to watch out for a sucker puncher named Franco who planned to wait until Padilla had been worn down fighting other contenders before he stepped in to finish him off.“I rode out to this grassy meadow in the middle of this orange grove in John’s 1938 Cadillac,” Padilla recalls. “There were probably fifty kids there, mostly guys, standing in a circle.”
Padilla cracked his knuckles and readied himself. Without warning, a couple of football players rushed him simultaneously. One of them charged into Padilla, sending him flying backward. He leaned over and sank his teeth into the guy’s back. As Padilla pushed him away, the next jock came flying forward. Suddenly, one of Griggs’s friends, who unbeknownst to Padilla had been appointed by Griggs to intervene, stepped forward to protect him. “Little by little, even though we had different agendas, I realized I was covered in a strange way,” Padilla says. “Johnny was always trying to have a gang of guys and that was the opposite of me. I was a loner, but John needed a lot of people to accomplish what he wanted. He was a masterful politician. He had a gift of gab, and people followed John.
”Padilla and Griggs were both fans of The Untouchables, a television show broadcast on ABC every Thursday night from 1959 to 1963. Based on the memoir by legendary G-man Eliot Ness, the show fictionalized his pursuit of the notorious Chicago mob boss Al Capone. To Padilla, it seemed to provide free lessons in how to operate a successful criminal enterprise. “Capone and his gang were so successful because they didn’t use violence to achieve their aims,” he says. “I watched that show religiously, every Thursday night,” Padilla says. “I wanted to be a successful criminal. My product was going to be pot and pills and I was going to run all of Orange County.” Inspired by the show’s character Arnold “Spatz” Vincent, Padilla went to a thrift store and bought a pair of spats and black and white wing-tipped shoes, slacks, a button-down vest, and a Gant shirt with a button-down collar.
Griggs and his crew were dressing up like their favorite gangsters as well. Griggs thought of himself as Capone, and his 1938 Cadillac testified to his admiration for the mob boss.Eddie Padilla’s dream of becoming Orange County’s biggest pot dealer was deferred by several jail stints, everything from indecent exposure to dealing drugs to assaulting a cop with a wrist pin, a steel bar that when gripped in a tight fist could land a deadly punch. His lawyer persuaded a judge to send him to Atascadero, a hospital for the criminally insane, where Padilla spent the next eighteen months. By now, he was eighteen years old and had knife scars up and down his arms and was missing several front teeth.
Padilla’s stint in the loony bin convinced him to leave street fighting behind him. He married his high school sweetheart and rented an apartment with the money he was making selling pot, cheap weed smuggled across the border from Mexico. In those days, marijuana was divided into “lids” which referred to a whole can of Prince Albert brand rolling tobacco, and “fingers,” which was a finger’s width of pot inside the can.Soon, Padilla wasn’t just dealing, he was supplying pot to other dealers, like Jack “Dark Cloud” Harrington, a street fighter from Westminster.
One night, Padilla went over to Harrington’s house to see if he needed any more pot to sell. Sitting in the living room was his old friend John Griggs, whom Padilla hadn’t seen since high school. Griggs was now married, working in the nearby oil fields of Yorba Linda and, like Padilla, dealing a lot of pot.“I became the biggest dealer in Anaheim, and maybe Garden Grove,” Padilla says. “I had a lot of customers and went around meticulously turning people on to pot. I believed in pot.”
One day, Padilla’s pot supplier introduced him to someone who was bringing kilograms of weed across the border every weekend. Now Padilla could sell half pounds and quarter pounds of marijuana at a pop. He went back to all the people he knew, turning them on to pot and looking for the next adventure. “I was twenty years old and figured I needed to go down to Mexico and do something worthy,” he says. “Being an adrenaline junkie, smuggling was appealing to me. I couldn’t wait.”
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Mystic Beginnings
When Lorey Smith was 12 years old, her father loaded her and her brother into his black 1965 Mustang and drove them down the Pacific Coast Highway to this cool little shop called Mystic Arts World. The store sold arts and crafts, organic food and clothing, books about Eastern philosophy, and other things, too. Lorey’s father knew some of the guys who ran Mystic Arts and he thought the outing would be a nice diversion for the kids. It was a short drive from Huntington Beach but an exotic destination, at least for the girl in the back seat.
The year was 1969, and Laguna Beach, once the sleepy refuge of surfers, artists, and bohemians of little consequence, was a center of counterculture foment after a band of outlaws and outcasts went up a mountain with LSD and came down as messengers of love, peace and the transformational qualities of acid and hash. They called themselves the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and Mystic Arts World was their public face, a hippie hangout where vegetarianism, Buddhism, meditation and all sorts of Aquarian ideals spread like gospel.
Lorey says she felt like Alice in Wonderland when she crossed the threshold and entered Mystic Arts. “It was like walking into a different world,” she tells me 40 years later. “Everything from what was on the walls to the way people were dressed gave off this feeling of love, and, like, freedom.”
Her father bought the kids some beads to keep them busy and Lorey fashioned a necklace. She walked up to a big, handsome guy with long hair and handed it to him.
“He opened up his hands, took the beads and had this big, beaming smile,” she recalls, “and I just felt like, love, and I thought, Someday I want to marry someone like that.”
Into the Gran Azul
Security guards armed with machine guns patrol the grounds of the Gran Azul resort in Lima, Peru. It’s the kind of place you have to know someone to even get close. But on an early winter day in 1975, Eddie Padilla, one of the founders of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, has no trouble booking a room. He is a familiar face on a familiar errand.
Checking in with Padilla are Richard Brewer, a Brother from way back, and their friend James Thomason. “I chose Richard because he’s a good guy,” Padilla remembers. “He’ll get your back. He’s not going to run away. That played out in a way that I never, ever expected.” Thomason is along for the ride—to party and taste some first-class Peruvian flake.
As the manager walks the men to their bungalow, he delivers a strange message. “Your friend is here,” he says.
“Friend?” Padilla asks. “What friend?”
As soon as the manager says the name Fastie, Padilla curses. He’s known the guy since high school where Fastie earned his nickname because he always knew the shortest distance to a quick buck. As far as Padilla is concerned, Fastie is a flashy, loud-mouthed whoremonger—the worst kind of smuggler. Padilla told him not to come to Lima while he was there. To make matters worse, Fastie’s girlfriend is with him, and she has a crush on Padilla. When they run into her, she complains that Fastie has been taking off and leaving her at the hotel.
“She knows he’s been going to see whores and coking out,” Padilla says. “We’re like, Oh, god.” Prostitutes and police are thick as thieves in places like Lima, Peru.
Still, there’s no reason to be paranoid. “All I have to do is spend the night, pick up the coke, give it to a few people, and peel out in 24 hours,” Padilla remembers thinking. Everything was set up ahead of time; the deal should be an in-and-out affair.
Though they had agreed to keep a low profile, Padilla, Brewer, and Thomason decide to go to the compound’s bar that night. It’s an upscale place and they get all dressed up. Fastie is there. Things are tense and Padilla knows better than to dance with Fastie’s girlfriend. But when she asks, something won’t let him say no. Maybe he just wants to rub Fastie’s face in it. Maybe he’s the guy who has to let everyone know he can have the girl. Whatever it is, when they get off the floor, Fastie isn’t amused.
“All of a sudden, in a jealous rage, he gets up, scrapes everyone’s drinks off the bar, and throws a drink on [his girlfriend],” Padilla says. “The bouncer, some Jamaican dude, kicks him out.”
Fastie returns to his room and tosses his girlfriend’s belongings out the window. She ends up spending the night in Padilla’s bungalow.
The next morning, the girlfriend leaves to retrieve her belongings. She never comes back. Fastie isn’t anywhere to be seen either.
If they’d been reading the signs, they might have waited until things settled down to pick up the coke. Instead, Padilla and Brewer stay on schedule and head to a nearby safe house for their load—25 kilos of cocaine worth nearly $200,000—and return to the bungalow without a hitch. Things seem to be back on track.
“It’s so fresh, it’s still damp,” Padilla says. “So I’ve got it on these big, silver serving trays, sitting on a table. James is making a paper of coke [think to-go cup]. Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks is playing. Richard’s doing something … I don’t know what. And I’m writing down numbers. All of the sudden, the door opens. I look and all I see is a chrome-plated .32. Oh, shit. I just thought, wow, my life just ended.”
The Making of Eddie Padilla
Thirty-four years later, Eddie Padilla emerges from Burbank’s Bob Hope Airport into a balmy Los Angeles autumn night. He has a well-groomed goatee, a shiny, bald dome, and a nose that clearly hasn’t dodged every punch. Wearing a black jacket and tidy slacks, Padilla is muscular and sturdy at 64. He walks like a slightly wounded panther and offers a knuckle-crushing handshake. “Hey, man, thanks for coming to get me,” he says with a lingering SoCal-hippie-surfer accent.
We grab a coffee. Padilla speaks softly, with an economy that could be taken for either circumspection or shyness. The circumspection would be mutual. I had been approached about Padilla through his literary agents; they’d been unsuccessfully shopping his memoir. Right away, I was skeptical. Padilla’s story was epic, harrowing, and hard to believe. Aggravating my suspicions was the memoir’s aggrandizing tone. Plus, I’m not a fan of hippies and their justifications for what often seems like plain irresponsibility or selfishness. Still, I have to admit, if even half of his story is true, Eddie Padilla would be the real-life Zelig of America’s late 20th-century drug history. And, as is apparent from his first handshake, he has Clint Eastwood charisma to go with his tale.
I drop Padilla off at one of those high-gloss condo complexes in Woodland Hills that seem designed especially for mid-level rappers, porn stars, and athletes. His son, Eric, manages the place. Though Padilla lives a short flight away in Northern California, he has never been here before. Tonight marks the first time in nine years that he will see his son. For 20 years now, Padilla has been literally and figuratively working on reclaiming his narrative. Reuniting with his son is part of that effort. I may be too, and I’m not sure how I feel about it.
As we approach, Padilla falls silent, unsure of what to expect. Eric is waiting outside the lobby when we pull up. He looks like a younger, slightly smaller version of Padilla. They greet each other with wide smiles and nervous hugs. I leave them to it.
I pick Padilla up the next morning to go surfing. He’s in good spirits. The reunion with his son went well. Plus, he hasn’t been in the water for a while and surfing is one of the few passions left from his earlier days.
Out at County Line, it’s a crystalline day with offshore winds and a decent swell kicking in. For Padilla, I’ve brought my spare board, a big, fancy log that would be cumbersome for most on a head-high day at County Line. Padilla inspects the long board like it’s a foreign object.
“I don’t know about this,” he says. “How about if I take your board and you use this one?” Worried about the danger I’d pose to others and myself, I refuse. “Okay, then,” he smiles, and we paddle out.
Padilla’s reservations disappear as soon as the first set rolls in. He digs for the first wave, a fat, beautifully shaped A-frame. He deftly drops in, stays high on the shoulder, slips into the pocket and makes his way down the line, chewing up every ounce of the wave. It’s one of the best rides I see all day. But he’s not done. Padilla catches wave after wave, surfing with a fluidity and grace that puts most of us out here to shame.
Exhausted after a couple hours, I get out of the water. When Padilla finally comes in, he is grinning ear to ear. “Who’d have thought I’d have to go from Santa Cruz to Los Angeles to find some good waves?” he jokes.
Buoyed by the return to his natural habitat, Padilla lets his guard down and begins to tell me about his life, over lunch at an upscale chain restaurant in Santa Monica. Though Padilla is forty years her senior, the attractive waitress is definitely flirting with him. Whatever it is that makes women melt, Padilla has it. He’s magnetic and likeable. As for his story, it could stand as a metaphor for the past few turbulent decades—the naïve idealism of flower power, the hedonism of the 1970s and ’80s, the psychosis and cynicism of the war on drugs, and the recovery culture of more recent times. It’s a story that’s hard to imagine beginning anywhere but in Southern California
Edward James Padilla was born in 1944 in the same Compton house where his father, Joe Padilla, was raised. Joe, a dashing Navy guy of Hispanic, Native American, and African-American ancestry, married Helen Ruth McClesky, a Scots-Irish beauty from a rough clan of Texas ranch hands who moved to Southern California, near Turlock, during the Dust Bowl.
Both family trees have their troubled histories. Joe’s mother killed herself when Joe was 12. The family broke apart after that and Joe had to fend for himself through the Depression. “He had no idea what it was even like to have a mother,” Padilla says.
Helen’s father turned to moonshining and bootlegging in California. Padilla recalls how his grandfather liked to show off the hole in his leg. As the story goes, Federal agents shot him during a car chase. Padilla raises his leg and imitates his grandfather’s crotchety voice: “That goddamn bullet went through this leg and into that one.”
When his grandfather finally ended up in prison, the family moved down to South Los Angeles where work could be found in the nearby shipyards. Padilla says his mother and father met in high school, “fell desperately in love,” and got married. This didn’t please the old man, who didn’t want his daughter mixing with “Mexicans and niggers.” Helen found both in one.
As the son of a mixed-race couple before such things were in vogue, Padilla got it from all sides. He wasn’t Mexican enough for the Mexicans, white enough for the whites, or black enough for the blacks. He was also a frail kid who spent nine months with polio in a children’s ward.
Padilla would get beaten up at school, and for consolation his father would make him put on boxing gloves and head out to the garage for lessons with dad, a Golden Glove boxer and light heavyweight in the Navy.
“If I turned my back, he’d kick me,” Padilla says about his father, who died in 2001. “He was trying to teach me how to fight the world. My dad was a different kind of guy.”
The family moved to Anaheim when Padilla was 12. There, he says, he became aware of the sort of prejudice that you can’t solve with fists, the sort that keeps a kid from getting a job at Disneyland like the rest of his friends.
“That’s when I started really getting ahold of the idea that, hey, I’m not being treated like everybody else. I’m sure I had a chip on my shoulder.”
Padilla got into a lot of fights, got kicked out of schools and wound up in juvenile hall where he received an education in selling speed, downers, and pot. By the time he was 17, Padilla was making enough as a dealer to afford his own apartment and car. But it wasn’t exactly the good life. He was doing a lot of speed, and one day he got arrested for what must have been an adolescent speed freak’s idea of seduction.
“I started taking handfuls of speed and I got so crazy. I mean, I got arrested for exposing myself to older women because just do that and we’ll have sex. That’s how psychotic I was.”
To make matters worse, he got in a fight with the arresting officer. The incident landed him 13 months at Atascadero State Hospital in San Luis Obispo. He came out feeling like he needed some stability in his life, or at least an 18-year-old’s version of it.
“I need to get married and settle down and be a pot dealer. I remember clearly thinking that. So, I married my friend, Eileen.”
Padilla and Eileen were 18 when they married on August 22, 1962. Marriage, though, didn’t solve certain problems—like how to get a job, which was now even tougher with a stint in a psych ward added to his résumé.
“It would have been really cool if I could walk in somewhere and get a job that actually paid enough to pay rent and live, but from where I was coming from, I’d be lucky to get a job sweeping floors,” he says. “I tried everything. So, it was easy to start selling pot.”
He turned out to be good at it.
Mountain High
Eddie Padilla turned 21 in 1965. Cultural historians wouldn’t declare the arrival of the Summer of Love for a couple of years, but for Padilla and a group of trailblazing friends, it was already in full swing.
He figures he was already the biggest pot dealer in Anaheim by this time. For a kid who grew up watching The Untouchables and dreaming of being a mobster, this might be considered an achievement. But something else was going on, too. The drugs he was selling were getting harder and his lifestyle coarser.
He started sleeping with several women from the apartment complex where he and his wife lived. He spent a lot of time in a notorious tough-guy bar called The Stables. “That’s where I started being comfortable,” Padilla says. “This is where I belonged. Social outcasts for sure.”
Eileen eventually had enough and took off for her mother’s. But it wasn’t just the philandering. Padilla also had an aura of escalating violence about him.
“I had a gun. I felt like I was going down the road to shooting someone, just like hitting someone is a big step for some people. So, that’s kind of insane. I was going to shoot someone just to get it over with. It doesn’t matter who, either.”
Then, early on the morning of his 21st birthday, one of his friends picked him up and drove him to the top of Mount Palomar. Joining them was John Griggs, a Laguna Beach pot dealer and the leader of a biker gang whose introduction to LSD had come when his gang raided a Hollywood producer’s party and took the acid. On the mountain with them were several others who would soon embark on one of the 1960s’ most influential and least understood counterculture experiments, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. They climbed to the mountaintop and dropped the acid. Padilla says he was changed immediately.
“I was completely convinced that I’d died on that mountain,” he remembers. “It was crystal-clear air, perfect for taking acid. I came down a different person. It was what’s called an ego death. I saw the light. I can’t ever explain it.”
A birthday party was already set with a lot of his old friends for later that night. Back home, in the middle of the celebration Padilla says he looked around at the guests, some of the hardest-partying, toughest folks around, and realized he didn’t ever want to see those people again. He took the velvet painting of the devil off his wall and threw it in the dumpster. He dumped the bowls of reds and bennies laid out like chips and salsa down the toilet. He kept his pot.
“I went up the mountain with no morals or scruples, a very dangerous and violent person,” he says, “and came down with morals and scruples.”
Airs May 22, 2013 - An American hippie turns cocaine smuggler to save his relationship and ends up in a Peruvian hell.
From that day on, a core group of hustlers, dealers, bikers, and surfers, who at best could be said to have lived on the margins of polite society, started convening to take acid together.
“Every time we’d go and take LSD out in nature or out in the desert or up on the mountain, it would be just this incredible wonderful day,” Padilla says. They were transformed, he claims, from tough cases, many of them doing hard drugs, to people with love in their hearts.
Things moved fast back then. The Vietnam War was raging; revolution was in the air, and the group that first started tripping on mountaintops wanted to be a part of it. Under the guidance of John Griggs, by most accounts the spiritual leader of the Brotherhood, they decided they needed to spread their acid-fueled revelations. In the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains, they took over a Modjeska Canyon house that used to be a church and started having meetings. Soon, they were talking about co-ops and organic living; they were worshipping nature and preaching the gospel of finding peace and love through LSD.
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love incorporated as a church in October 1966, ten days after California banned LSD. The Brothers petitioned the state for the legal use of pot, acid, psilocybin and mescaline as their sacraments. They started a vegan restaurant and gave away free meals. They opened Mystic Arts World, which quickly became the unofficial headquarters for the counterculture movement crystallizing among the surfers and artists of Laguna Beach.
The Brotherhood proved both industrious and ambitious. Soon, they were developing laboratories to cook up a new, better brand of LSD, and opening up unprecedented networks to smuggle tons of hash out of Afghanistan. They were also canny; they carved out the bellies of surfboards and loaded them with pot and hash. They made passport fraud an art form, and became adept at clearing border weigh stations loaded down with surf gear and other disposable weight, which they’d dump on the other side so they could return with the same weight in pot stuffed into hollowed-out VW panel trucks. In their own way, they were the underground rock stars of the psychedelic revolution.
Soon, their skills and chutzpah attracted the attention of another psychedelic revolutionary. By 1967, Timothy Leary was living up in the canyons around Laguna Beach carrying on a symbiotic, some would say parasitic, relationship with Griggs. Leary called Griggs “the holiest man in America,” And more than anyone else, the Brothers implemented Leary’s message to turn on, tune in, drop out.
“The Brotherhood were the folks who actually put that command into action and tried to carry it out,” says Nick Schou, author of Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World. “Their home-grown acid, Orange Sunshine, was about three times more powerful than anything the hippies were using. They were responsible for distributing more acid than anyone in America. In the beginning, at least, they had the best of intentions.”
The group, Schou says, was heavily influenced by the utopian ideals of Aldous Huxley’s Island.
“There was a definite plan to move to an island,” Padilla says. “We were going to grow pot on the island and we were going to import it. We need a yacht and we need to learn how to grow food and farm, and we need to learn how to deliver babies . . . We were just little kids from Anaheim. God, these were big thoughts, big thoughts.”
The End of Eternal Love
Around the time Leary was setting up camp in Laguna Beach, the island ideal took on a new urgency for Padilla. No longer just a local dealer, he’d made serious connections in Mexico and was moving large quantities around the region. In one deal, Padilla drove to San Francisco in dense fog with 500 pounds of Mexican weed. But something didn’t feel right. Padilla thought someone might have tipped off the cops. He was right: He was arrested the next day. It was the largest pot bust in San Francisco history to that point. In 1967, Padilla was sentenced to five to fifteen in San Quentin. With his son Eric on the way, Padilla was granted a 30-day stay of execution to get his affairs in order.
“On the thirtieth day, I just left and went to Mexico, went to work for some syndicate guys,” he says. “I bailed.”
Padilla’s flight was also precipitated by a schism within the Brotherhood that some trace to its ultimate demise. Acting on Leary’s advice, Griggs took the profits from a marijuana deal, funds that some Brothers thought should go toward the eventual island purchase, and bought a 400-acre ranch in Idyllwild near Palm Springs.
Padilla never cared much for Leary, nor for his influence over Griggs and the Brotherhood. “He was a glitter freak,” Padilla says. “A guy named Richard Alpert, who became Ram Das, told us, ‘You guys got a good thing going, don’t get mixed up with Leary.’ ”
Padilla saw the Idyllwild incident as a turning point for the Brotherhood. “This is betrayal. This is incredibly stupid. You’re going to move the Brotherhood to a ranch in Idyllwild? To me, it was like becoming a target.”
The Brotherhood split over it. Many of those facing federal indictments or arrest warrants took off for Hawaii. Others moved up to the ranch with Griggs and Leary. As the Brotherhood’s smuggling operations grew increasingly complex and international, revolution started looking increasingly like mercenary capitalism. Any chance the Brotherhood had to retain its cohesion and its gospel probably died in 1969 with John Griggs, who overdosed on psilocybin up at the Ranch.
“That was John,” Padilla says, smiling, “take more than anybody else.”
Not long after, Mystic Arts burned down under mysterious circumstances. It seemed to signal an end, though the Brotherhood would continue to leave its mark on the era. The group masterminded Timothy Leary’s escape from minimum-security Lompoc state prison following his arrest for possession of two kilos of hash and marijuana. Funded by the Brotherhood, the Weather Underground sprung Leary and spirited him and his wife off to Algeria with fake passports.
To facilitate his escape to Mexico, Padilla raised funds from various Brothers and other associates to gain entree with a Mexican pot syndicate run by a kingpin called Papa. His Mexican escapades—busting partners from jail and other adventures—could make their own movie.
One time he drove his truck to the hospital to visit his newborn son, Eric, who was sick with dysentery. On the way, he noticed a woman with a toddler by the side of the road. The kid was foaming at the mouth, the victim of a scorpion bite. Padilla says he threw the boy in the back of his truck and rushed him to the hospital. The doctors told him the kid would have died in another five minutes. They gave him an ambulance sticker for his efforts.
“I put it on my window,” he tells me. “I was driving thousands of pounds of marijuana around in that panel truck. When I’d come to an intersection there would be a cop directing traffic. He’d stop everybody—I’d have a thousand pounds of weed in the back and he’d wave me through because of that ambulance sticker.”
In Mexico, Padilla ran a hacienda for Papa, overseeing the processing and distribution of the pot brought in by local farmers. For more than a year, he skimmed off the best bud and seeds. Meanwhile, he kept alive his dream of sailing to an island.
The dream came true when he and a few associates from the Brotherhood bought a 70-foot yacht in St. Thomas called the Jafje. The Jafje met Padilla in the summer of 1970 in the busy port of Manzanillo. From there, it set sail for Maui.
“It was five guys who had never sailed in their lives,” says Padilla. On board was a ton of the Mexican weed.
The trip should have taken less than two weeks. A month into it, one of the guys onboard, a smuggler with Brotherhood roots named Joe Angeline, noticed the stars weren’t right.
“He said, ‘Eddie, Orion’s belt should be right over our heads.’ But Orion’s belt was way, way south of us. We could barely make it out.”
When confronted, the captain confessed he didn’t know where the hell they were, but had been afraid to tell them. “There’s a hoist that hoists you all the way up to the top of the main mast and we hauled him up there and made him sit there for a day,” says Padilla. “That was funny.”
Eventually, they flagged down a freighter and learned they were more than a 1000 miles off course, dangerously close to the Japanese current. The freighter gave them 300 gallons of fuel and put them back on track to Maui. He’d made it to his island with a load of the finest Mexican marijuana.
“The seeds of that,” Padilla says, “became Maui Wowie.”
Spiritual Warrior
Maui Wowie? The holy grail of my pot-smoking youth, one of the most famous strains of marijuana in history? When Padilla tells me he played a major role in its advent, my already-strained credulity nears the breaking point. I spend months looking into Padilla’s stories, tracking down survivors, digging up what corroborative evidence I can. And, well, he basically checks out. But there are his stories and there is his narrative—how an acid trip on Mount Palomar transformed a 21-year-old borderline sociopath into a man with a purpose, a messenger of peace and love.That one’s harder to swallow. While sitting over coffee at the dining room table in his son’s apartment, Padilla finally tells a couple stories that beg me to challenge him.
Back in the mid-‘60s, he and John Griggs make a deal to purchase a few kilos of pot from a source in Pacoima. They drive out in a station wagon with 18 grand to make the buy. But the sellers burn them and take off with their money in a black Cadillac. The next day, Padilla and spiritual leader Griggs go back armed with a .38 and a .32. Padilla goes into the apartment where the deal was supposed to go down and finds one of the men sleeping on the couch. The guy wakes up and makes for a Winchester rifle sitting near the sink. Padilla runs up behind him and sticks the barrel of his gun in the guy’s ear and says, “Dude, please don’t make me fucking shoot you.” Griggs and Padilla get their money back.
“So, that stuff went on. I’ve been shot at. People have tried to kill me. I’ve had bullets whizzing by my ear,” he says. “But I’ve never had to shoot anybody.”
Padilla tells me of similar episodes in Maui where the locals, understandably, see the influx of the hippie mafia as encroachment on their turf. They set about intimidating the haoles from Laguna, often violently. One newcomer is shot in the head while he sleeps next to his son.
At his house on the Haleakala Crater one night, Padilla opens the door to let in his barking puppy only to find “there’s a guy standing there with a pillow case over his head and holes cut out and the guy behind him was taller and had a pager bag with the holes cut out.”
One of the men has a handgun. Padilla manages to slam the gunman’s hand in the door and chase off the invaders. “I’m going to kill both of you,” he yells after them. “I’m going to find out who you are and kill you.”
Padilla discovers the men work for a hood he knew back in Huntington Beach called Fast Eddie. Like a scene out of a gangster movie, Padilla and Fast Eddie have a showdown when Fast Eddie, in a car full of local muscle, tries to run Padilla and his passenger off the road. They all end up in Lahaina, where Fast Eddie’s henchmen beat up Padilla pretty good before the cops break up the brawl.
“Hey, bra, you no run. Good man,” Padilla recalls the Hawaiians saying to him. When Fast Eddie emerges from the chaos, Padilla points at him and tells the Hawaiians, “I want him. Let me have him.
“I worked him real good and that was that. People robbing and intimidating was over.”
I tell him it doesn’t seem like his life had changed very much since that day on Mount Palomar.
“You know, don’t get the wrong idea,” he laughs. “I’m still who I am. We’re still kind of dangerous people. Just because we were hippies with long hair and preaching love and peace doesn’t mean we became wusses.”
“It doesn’t sound like you had a spiritual awakening to me,” I say.
“I was very spiritual,” he replies. “I thought I was making a life for myself.”
“As what?”
“A warrior. A spiritual warrior.”
“What was your spiritual warring doing? What were you fighting for?”
He falls silent. “I never thought about it before. . . . Remember, I grew up in South Central. I already had an attitude from a young age. So, by the time I got to Maui, it was like, here’s your job, dealing with these people.
“The warrior part was, like, we want to live in Hawaii. We’re not going to accept you guys running our lives. This is what we were trying to get away from. So, my job as a self-motivated warrior was pretty clear, but it’s really difficult to explain.”
“So, your job was protection?” I offer.
“I was never paid.”
It occurs to me that Padilla really wanted to live beyond rules, institutions, and hierarchy, like some romaticized ideal of a pirate. “So why,” I ask, “feel the need to color it with this patina of spirituality? Why not just call it what it was—living young and fast, making money, getting the girls, fucking off authority?”
“Uh, wow . . . I mean, you’re right; it was about all that. It was living fast and really enjoying the lifestyle to the max.”
“Why the need to justify it?”
“Well, it just seemed to me that was what was moving me.”
“It seems that way to you now?”
“Now, yeah now. But then, I felt more, and this sounds really self-righteous, that we were the people who should be in charge, not the ones who were beating people up and taking their stuff and shooting them. So, spiritual warrior, maybe it doesn’t look like that to anyone else, but it sure as hell looks like that to me now.” His voice is soft and intense. “I didn’t have a sign on my head that said spiritual warrior but I definitely felt that’s what was going on . . . . Nobody else was standing up to them. Nobody else would pick up a gun, but I sure as hell would.”
“You have a massive ego,” I suggest.
“Massive.”
“And that’s been your greatness and downfall all along?”
“Sure, yeah, I see that.”
I ask again, amid all the chaos, how his life had improved since his supposed awakening on Mount Palomar.
“My life was incredibly better. I was surfing, sailing, living life. All this other stuff was just, you know . . . I’m not in San Quentin,” he says. “That was the healthiest and clearest time of my life.”
Then, he met Diane Pinnix.
Pinnix was a tall, beautiful girl from Beach Haven, New Jersey, who came of age when Gidget sparked a national surf-culture craze. It’s not surprising that a headstrong girl from New Jersey would catch the bug, and she became one of the original East Coast surfer girls. Legend has it that when Pinnix decided she wanted to get away from New Jersey, she entered a beauty contest on a whim. First prize was a luggage set and a trip to Hawaii. Pinnix, then 18, won.
Pinnix’s mother, Lois, still lives in Beach Haven. When I call her, she has a simple explanation for her daughter’s flight to Hawaii, and her subsequent plight. “It was the times, it was the times. She wanted to spread her wings. Drugs were a part of the thing, but I was very naïve. I was a young mother and in the dark.”
Padilla first ran into Pinnix when he went with a friend looking to score some coke from a local kingpin. Pinnix was the kingpin’s girlfriend. “I looked at Diane and she looked at me and the attraction was so strong,” Padilla recalls. “That was it.”
He started making a point of showing up wherever Pinnix was.
“We’re traveling in the same pack and we started talking and flirting,” says Padilla. “It came to the point of ridiculousness . . . and my own friends were saying, ‘Why don’t you just fuck her and get it over with?’ But that wasn’t it, you know. I wanted her. It was an obsession. A massive ego trip, for sure, but at the same time there was an attraction unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.”
By all accounts, Diane Pinnix, a stunning surfer girl/gun moll, with a nice cutback and blond hair to her ass, was the sort of woman who could make a man do things he hadn’t bargained for.
“One day, we’re getting ready to paddle out, waxing our boards, and I say, ‘So, you want to be my old lady?’ And she says, ‘You have a wife and kids.’ And I say, ‘Okay.’ I was willing to let it go right there and I start to paddle out and she says, ‘But wait a minute.’ And that was it. It was all over. And that’s pretty much when I lost my mind.”
Pinnix was a committed party girl, and Padilla started doing coke and drinking excessively to keep up. After getting iced out of a big deal by a new crew on Maui who claimed Brotherhood status, Padilla decided to go out on his own. He made connections in Colombia and was on his way to becoming a coke smuggler.
“There was no more spiritual warrior,” he says. “This was a guy on his way to hell. I had gone against everything that was precious to me. I left my wife and kids. I wasn’t living the spiritual life I was back when we had the church and it was the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.”
“Why did you do it?” I ask.
“Money. For Diane and me. I probably knew deep inside that if I didn’t have enough money and coke, that she wouldn’t stay with me . . . whether that’s true or not, I’ll never know. The bottom line is I became a coke addict, plain and simple.”
Paradise Lost
A few days before he’s supposed to arrive at Peru’s Gran Azul with Richard Brewer and James Thomason, Eddie Padilla is thousands of miles away on a beach in Tahiti. He sits and looks out at the ocean, contemplating how far things have degenerated, both for him and for the Brotherhood. He thinks about the messages of love, the utopian ideals, and the notion that they could change the world. All that is gone. What is left are the 1970s in all their nihilistic glory. The drugs, money, women, and warring, spiritual or otherwise, are taking their toll, and damn if he isn’t feeling beat already at just 30.
In Tahiti, Padilla at last finds the island paradise that eluded him in Maui. And with Pinnix set up in style on the mainland, it’s a rare moment of peace in his increasingly out-of-control life. He wants more of that.
“It was incredible,” he says. “The best surfing and living, the best food on the planet. While I was in Tahiti, I really got sober and all of the sudden, I was looking at what I’d been doing and I didn’t want to go back.”
Smuggling coke isn’t about peace and love; it’s about money, greed, and power. He suddenly sees his life as a betrayal of his ideals, and he wants out. Feeling something like a premonition, Padilla decides that this next trip to Peru will be his last. Decades later, he remembers the conversation he had with a friend on that Tahitian beach.
“She says to me, ‘What are you doing, how did you get into coke?’ And I just look at her and say, ‘I don’t even know, but I know right now that I don’t want to go back there.” He’s trapped, though. Too much money has already been invested in the deal. “I’m totally responsible and there’s a whole bunch of people involved. But I’ll be back,’ I told her. That was the plan. ‘I’ll be back.’” He books a return flight to Tahiti. He never makes it.
Back at the Gran Azul, just hours before Padilla and his crew are scheduled to leave the country, quasi-military police agents storm the bungalow. One slams Padilla to the floor, another kicks Brewer in the stomach, and quickly Padilla, Brewer, and Thomason are all in cuffs.
“At least 10 or 12 of them come in through the door and they all have guns drawn. I didn’t have a chance,” says Padilla.
A man they will come to know as Sergeant Delgado takes a hollow-point bullet from his gun, starts tapping it against Thomason’s chest, and says, “Tell me everything.”
In some ways, Padilla is a victim of his own success. While he’s been hopping between Hawaii, Tahiti, Colombia, and Peru building his résumé as a coke-smuggling pirate, Richard Nixon has been marshaling his forces for the soon-to-be declared War on Drugs. It’s the beginning of the national hysteria that will see Nixon pronounce the fugitive Timothy Leary “the most dangerous man in America,” and today has more than 2.3 million Americans in prison, a vast majority of them for drug offenses.
Nixon’s strategy in the drug war is announced with his Reorganization Plan No. 2. It calls for the consolidation of the government’s various drug-fighting bureaucracies into the Drug Enforcement Agency. The DEA is formed, at least in part, to do something with Nixon’s boner for the Brotherhood’s members and associates, dubbed “the hippie mafia” in a 1972 Rolling Stone article. Congress holds months of hearings on the need for this new agency in the spring and summer of 1973. One is titled “Hashish Smuggling and Passport Fraud, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love.”
After the DEA starts putting too much heat on his Colombian connections, Padilla sets up shop in Peru. But the DEA’s budget shoots up from $75 to $141 million between 1973 and 1975, and Peru, the world’s largest cocaine-producing country at the time, quickly becomes a client state in the drug war. Some of that DEA money goes to fund and train the notorious Peruvian Investigative Police, or PIP (now called the Peruvian National Police). The PIP operates with near immunity and is expected to get results in the war on drugs.
Sergeant Delgado heads the force. A mean-spirited thug with dead, black eyes, he is one of the most powerful men in Peru. An Interpol agent known as Rubio is with Delgado.
Before the DEA put Peru in its crosshairs, Padilla would have been able to buy out of the arrest. Naturally, his first reaction is to offer up the $58,000 in cash he has with him.
“Don’t worry,” he remembers Rubio telling him. “Don’t say anything about this and when we get to the police station, we’ll work something out.”
The three Americans are taken to the notorious PIP headquarters, known as the Pink Panther, a pink mansion that the police confiscated (they are rumored to have executed the owners). With no tradition of case building, Peruvian detective work at the time pretty much consists of coerced confessions and snitching.
The PIP is famously brutal. During the two weeks the guys are held at Pink Panther, Padilla says they’re surrounded by the sounds of women being raped and men being tortured.
The country’s shaky institutions are rife with corruption, and there is little to no history in Peruvian jurisprudence of due process or jury trials. Prisoners wait for years to have their cases heard before a three-judge tribunal, only to see their fates determined in a matter of minutes. Their arrest immediately throws Padilla, Brewer and Thomason into this Kafkaesque quagmire.
In a 1982 Life magazine story that details the horrors of the Peruvian prison system, and two men who tried to escape it, a survivor tells of his time in the Pink Panther.
My god, I was in tears after they went at me,” Robert B. Holland, a Special Forces Vietnam vet recounts. “I did a couple things in ’Nam I might go to hell for. But Peru was a whole new day.”
When their escape attempt fails, the two primary subjects of the Life story commit suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. In a final letter to his wife, one of the men, David Treacly, writes, “I have no confidence in either their concept of justice, their methods of interrogation and inconceivable brutality, or in the bumbling incompetence and indifference of our embassy . . . . So, I’m going out tonight . . . . John not only accepts and understands, but has decided he wants to go with me . . . . Given the circumstances, I cannot think of anyone I’d rather go with.”
In this atmosphere of brutality and corruption, Padilla and his friends strike a deal with Delgado. The deal is Delgado will keep the money and the cocaine, probably to resell, and Padilla, Brewer and Thomason will say nothing to the DEA about the drugs or cash—it’s their only leverage. When they go to trial, Delgado is supposed to testify that he never saw the coke on display until he opened a black travel bag. The story will be that a jealous Fastie planted the bag as revenge for Padilla flirting with his girlfriend. With Delgado’s testimony, they are assured, they will be home in six months. In the meantime, though they will have to go to San Juan de Lurigancho prison.
“‘Don’t worry,’” Padilla remembers being told. “‘You’ll be out in four to six months. And the prison is nice. There’s basketball, soccer, a great pool.’”
La Casa Del Diablo
There are, of course, no pools or athletic facilities at Lurigancho. There aren’t even working toilets. Built in the 1960s to house 1,500 inmates, Lurigancho has more than 6,000 by the time Padilla is processed. (Today some estimates put the number of prisoners there at more than 10,000.) Going in, though, Padilla still has an outlaw’s cocky sense of exemption. Besides, he’s paid off his captors.
“It’s just like an adventure,” he remembers thinking. “I’d been in prison. I’d been in jails.”
That feeling doesn’t last long. Padilla says the conditions are “like a dog kennel.” Food is a bowl of rice a day—with beans on the lucky days. “People starved to death.”
The running water, when it runs, comes from a community pump, which the prison often shuts down to clean rats out of the pipes. The water is full of worms and bacteria. Everybody has dysentery.
“If you got the runs, you better find a plug, because everybody’s going to be real pissed if you shit in a cell,” he says. “I had dysentery every day.”
The toilet, a hole in the ground that prisoners line up to use, seems designed to make the most of this affliction. It constantly overflows with shit and piss so the prisoners resort to relieving themselves onto an ever-growing mound of feces.
“The whole place smells like shit,” says Padilla.
The American prisoners and some other expats live together in the same cellblock, a more modern facility built off the big hall, which is a real-world incarnation of Dante’s Inferno, where murderers, rapists and the destitute teem together in a bazaar of daily strife. There, Padilla says, you see people starving, drowning in tuberculosis, being beaten and stabbed to death.
Padilla’s description of the prison is in keeping with interviews that a former human rights activist, who is familiar with Lurigancho, has conducted for this story with past and present volunteers in Lima. All have requested anonymity.
One volunteer says the guards have surrendered the place to the prisoners. Everything from cots to a spot in a cell must be purchased. Those with no resources are left to wander the outskirts of the cellblocks, relying on handouts and picking through garbage like zombies.
Another volunteer, who worked at Lurigancho when Padilla was imprisoned there, says, “There were always ugly things . . . . We felt very powerless against the mistreatment.” She says there are constant fights between prison pavilions, wars between inmates and murders tacitly sanctioned by the guards, who are often paid off to look the other way.
As it becomes increasingly clear that his chances of getting out quickly are about as good as going for a swim in the pool, Padilla’s days are given over to survival, often in a haze of pasta, a particularly toxic paste form of cocaine smuggled into the prison and sold by well-connected inmates. Nights are filled with the sounds of screaming and snoring, and the insane beating of drums from the big hall.
Padilla doesn’t hesitate when asked to describe the worst thing he witnessed.
“Watching a whole cell block get killed,” he says. “Watching a .50 caliber machine gun, at least a dozen rifles and a half dozen pistols . . . until no one is moving. And then, they open up the door and storm it. They shoot everybody.”
The massacre comes, Padilla says, after a handful of prisoners take some guards hostage and demanded better conditions. The inmates release the guards when the prison warden agrees to their demands. The next day, the military comes in and shoots the place up. Padilla believes hundreds of inmates are killed in the attack.
On another occasion, Padilla says confused guards open fire on prisoners returning on a bus from court, killing dozens. “One of the [wounded] guys was in our cell block. He came up to the cell block just covered in blood.”
The prison’s atrocities mostly escape international attention until December 1983, when police shoot and kill a Chicago nun being held hostage by prisoners attempting to flee. Eight prisoners are also killed. Lurigancho gains further notoriety when, in July 1986, police kill anywhere from 124 to 280 (accounts vary) rioting members of the Sendero Luminosa, or Shining Path, Marxist guerillas incarcerated at Lurigancho.
Lurigancho’s tableau of evils, both epic and banal, earn the prison the name La Casa del Diablo, the house of the devil. It remains a hellish place; the Associated Press reports that two people a day still die in Lurigancho from violence or illness.
Despite being imprisoned in the midst of this, Padilla doesn’t slip into despair. Not immediately. It takes something more potent. It takes Diane Pinnix.
Femme Fatale
Quickly after the arrests, Diane Pinnix flies down to Lima, ostensibly to aid and abet Padilla’s release. Before long, though, Peru’s attractions prove irresistible and she starts partying. Padilla worries she’ll get in trouble, the last thing he needs. He decides he has to get out of Lurigancho fast. His chance comes with a Colombian coke dealer named Jimmy, another inmate who’s been supplying pasta for Padilla, Brewer, Thomason and other cellies to smoke.
ls the guys how he plans to escape Lurigancho. Jimmy’s lawyer will bribe clerks to get him called to court, but his name will be left off the judge’s docket. At the end of the day, in the chaos of transferring prisoners, Jimmy’s lawyers will hand the soldiers in charge counterfeit documents saying the judge has ordered his immediate release. If the plan works, it’s decided that Pinnix will give Jimmy what’s left of Padilla’s money to set up the same deal. But Jimmy takes Padilla’s money and never returns to Lurigancho. Nor does Pinnix. Word filters back through the prison grapevine that Diane has been seen on the streets of Lima holding hands and kissing someone who fits the description of Jimmy.
Padilla spirals into a rage. He thinks only of revenge. To exact it, he seeks out a violent man known as Pelone, the boss of a neighboring prison cell. Through Pelone, Padilla orders a hit on Jimmy, an expensive proposition for which he has no money. Padilla promises to pay up when Pelone’s pistolero cousin brings back Jimmy’s finger, the traditional token of a successful hit. Padilla knows that with no money, it might be his life he pays with, but he wants Jimmy dead. In the meantime, he needs pasta to numb his pain. Pelone is more than happy to supply on credit.
Months go by with no success in the hit and Padilla falls deeper into despair. In the back of his mind is an inescapable fact: the pain he is feeling is the same pain he caused his wife, Eileen, and his kids, when he walked out on them for Pinnix. His spirit breaks.
“I gave up because of Diane. Not just because of Diane, but because I was betrayed and that brought on all the betrayal I gave Eileen, my kids. My dedication to God, you know it was just gone. I turned my back and betrayed all of it. Betrayed my soul.”
Padilla rarely leaves his bunk. He interrupts his sleep and sobbing only to smoke pasta. When the pasta runs out, he turns to pills. In his bunk, he dreams of surfing, and of Tahiti and Maui. He gives up his battle with dysentery.
“That’s how I got. I became absolutely disgusting. I stunk. I reeked,” Padilla says.
“Richard and James are pretty sure I’m going to die.”
His death seems assured one night when Padilla turns over in his bunk and sees Pelone wearing a leather jacket zipped to the top. Padilla’s cellmates aren’t around and Pelone has seized the opportunity to come calling for his debts. Pelone pulls a long shank from under his jacket and comes at Padilla. Using his boxing skills, Padilla manages to dodge the first couple of stabs, but Pelone is skilled with a blade, and Padilla soon finds himself staring defenselessly at a shank aimed for his midsection. Just as Pelone is about to thrust, one of Padilla’s cellies miraculously appears, and grabs Pelone’s shoulder before he can stab. The opening gives Padilla enough time to throw a left cross into Pelone’s nose, breaking it, he says. They tumble to the floor and by then a group of Padilla’s cellmates storm in and disarm Pelone. The guy who has saved Padilla pays off the $400 debt to Pelone—a prison fortune—on the condition that Padilla gets his shit together.
In order to survive, Padilla realizes he needs to get back to some idea of God, to find a way to live beyond his fear. He quits doing drugs and starts meditating. He trains in boxing again. But his biggest challenge is still beyond him: the big hall. If he can master that, he thinks, he can master his fear. But he’s not ready. He needs something more than God to hold onto. For Padilla, that could only be a woman.
One day during visitation, a young, indigenous woman named Zoila catches Padilla’s eye. Padilla sees something in her that he hasn’t seen in what seems like forever.
“She was the purest, most wonderful thing that could happen to me,” he says. “She was like a gift from God.”
The note Padilla throws down to Zoila from his cellblock feels like a life preserver. When someone hands her the note and points to Padilla, she smiles and waves. After that, she becomes Padilla’s regular visitor and something like a love affair unfolds.
“She helped me heal so much in the prison. That was grace. I crack when I think about that experience.” And he actually does crack when he tells this story, reinforcing my suspicion that beneath the surface of every tough guy is a heartbroken mama’s boy.
With his dignity on the mend, Padilla knows there’s something he must still do to be worthy of Zoila. After jumping rope one day, he decides it’s time. He asks a prison guard to open the door protecting his cellblock from the big hall. The guard smiles contemptuously and opens the door.
Padilla walks through the maze. He sees men lifting a dead body out of the way. Blood from tuberculosis stains the floors like abstract art. His journey through the hall is quick, but he survives. Before long, he goes back again, this time under the guidance of a man named Chivo, a leader in this strange netherworld of Lurigancho. After a while, Padilla is allowed to pass the big hall with immunity. Something has changed.
Escape
More than three years after they were taken to Lurigancho, Padilla, Brewer, and Thomason finally have their day before the tribunal. As a matter of course, the Peruvian Supreme Court reviews cases after the tribunal renders its verdict—but guilty verdicts are rarely overturned. The tribunal will be the trio’s biggest test. They have a couple of things working for them. First is Zoila, who packs the courtroom with family and friends. They also manage to secure the services of a sympathetic translator, without which they wouldn’t stand a chance.
On the stand, all three stick to the story: Fastie planted the coke in their room and nobody saw it until Delgado opened the black travel bag. Thomason is just a friend who happened to be there. The key witness will be Delgado. Nobody knows whether he’ll keep his bargain to back up the tale.
When Delgado walks into the courtroom, eyes as black and dead as ever, a visceral terror shoots through Padilla’s body. But Delgado takes the stand and, to Padilla’s surprise, gives a brief statement corroborating their account of the arrest. The tribunal has little choice but to render absuelto in all three cases—absolved. It’s the first good news in years.
That evening, Padilla and Brewer are taken to a hotel while Thomason is held back at a holding pen in the Lima neighborhood of Pueblo Libre. He has draft-dodging issues. Jimmy Carter had pardoned all draft dodgers while the men were in prison, but that means little to the Peruvian authorities. There’s no telling how long or how much money it will take to sort this out. The longer it takes, the more likely it is that Padilla’s decade-old San Francisco conviction will turn up like an albatross around his neck.
There are other complications. Padilla and Brewer have recently been implicated in the arrest of a former associate who Jimmy and Pinnix tricked into doing a coke deal with them by saying the proceeds would go to help spring the guys. If that case makes it to court before they’re free, they are done for sure. Padilla and Brewer have to decide whether to make a break for it or wait for Thomason. They stay.
When Padilla and Brewer return to Pueblo Libre the next day, bad news awaits. The Supreme Court will be reviewing the case. Their lawyer mentions Padilla’s “FBI problems.” Freedom is near, they’re told, but it’ll take money. Padilla, Brewer and Thomason are put in a cell at the Pueblo Libre jail to await the Supreme Court’s review.
Facing more than 20 years each should their verdicts be overturned, Padilla and Brewer know a return to Lurigancho is certain death. They start working on an escape plan. Thomason, facing just three years, wants no part of it.
Months go by in Pueblo Libre while Padilla and Brewer prepare for a moment that might never come. They ask an Episcopalian reverend, an Englishman who has started visiting them in Lurigancho, to bring them towels, maps of the city and the Amazon wilderness beyond it. He also brings them money. They scope out the jail and determine they can get over a wall on the roof if given a chance. They make an effort to befriend their jailers, to show they pose no threat. Brewer swipes a serving spoon and hides it in his shoe.
In June of 1978, soccer-mad Peru makes an unlikely run through the first round of the World Cup being held in neighboring Argentina. During Peru’s match against Scotland to advance to the second round, the atmosphere in Lima is ecstatic, even in the jail. The guards bring in beer and booze and good food, which they share with the Americans. They leave the jail cell open believing the only way out is past them since the steel door leading to the roof is spring-locked.
The partying gets more intense as the game plays. The guards are rapt. Brewer wakes up Padilla, who is sleeping off some whiskey. It’s time to go, he says. Padilla says he’s ready if Brewer can spring the lock to the steel door. They are worried about the loud noise the lock makes when it releases. Then, something incredible happens just as Richards jams the spoon into the lock and springs the steel door open: Peru scores! It’s pandemonium in the jail. Nobody hears the door, or them as they scurry up the stairs and onto the roof.
On the roof, Padilla and Brewer scale the wall and look up at the barbed-wire-topped chain link fence. They throw towels over the barbs and hoist themselves up and over onto the freedom side of the two-story wall. They’ll have to jump down onto another rooftop, scramble to the jail’s outside wall and scale that to get to the street. Their plan is to split up and reconvene at the reverend’s church in Miraflores.
At the outside wall, Brewer urges Padilla to jump. Padilla hesitates and in a flash, Brewer is hurtling down into a patch of light, landing hard on the ground below. Brewer grabs a ladder propped against a shack and hauls it over to the outer wall. Padilla finally jumps into the dark and lands with a thud on a pile of lumber. Pain immediately shoots through his body. He tries to stand but crumples. His ankle swells up immediately. His heel is broken. Padilla crawls and hops to the ladder and pulls himself up, the lower half of his body dead weight. He makes it to the top of the second wall and lets himself fall to the ground.
Out in the street, Brewer tries desperately to hail a cab. Padilla calls to him. Seconds go by like hours. Finally, Brewer sees him and comes racing back, asking what the fuck happened; how did he get so dirty? Padilla tells him he can’t walk. Brewer races back and hoists Padilla over his shoulder, carrying him across the street into the shelter of an alley. He flags down a car and they make their way to the reverend’s church in Miraflores.
Thirty-one years later, the same reverend answers a call at his home in the English countryside. Retired for 20 years, he asks that his name not be disclosed while he recalls for me the night the two men he’d been visiting in prison for months showed up at his door.
“It was unexpected. One of them had broken a bone in his heel and was having a tough time getting around. I think there was a lot of adrenaline going,” the reverend says with typical English understatement. “We gave them some food and clothing and moved them onto a contact they had . . . . The police came around to find out what part I had in their escape and held my passport for awhile.”
Padilla and Brewer next enlist the cousin of an inmate Padilla befriended in Lurigancho. He is a travel guide with the Peruvian tourism industry with access to an underground network of friends and relatives. The guide’s family, like many others, has suffered at the hands of Delgado and the PIP as the war on drugs has conflated with political persecution and the other abuses you’d expect in a police state.
A domestic flight, arranged through a sympathetic airline worker, takes Padilla and Brewer to the Amazon River city of Iquitos. They stay for weeks at the lodge of a man who used be a PIP agent, but quit over the agency’s brutal practices. There, the natural beauty of the Amazon and their first taste of real freedom bring Padilla and Brewer to tears. The hum of jungle birds and the roar of big cats at night almost drown out the sounds of snoring, screaming and drumming at Lurigancho, still echoing in their heads. Padilla thinks of Zoila. He feels she’s out there in her village somewhere in the Amazon wilderness. It breaks his heart that he’ll never be able to thank her enough.
After a close call with PIP agents in Iquitos, Padilla and Brewer acquire forged documents identifying the two as Peruvians going to visit family in Colombia. They fly to the Colombian border town of Leticia and reach a hotel owned by an expat. Padilla calls his ex-wife Eileen and she sends money on the next flight in. They pay off the Colombian equivalent of the PIP to write a temporary visa that gives them 72 hours to get out of the country or be arrested.
During their brief stay at the hotel, Padilla and Brewer befriend a group of college kids. One of them is a Colombian girl who rooms with Caroline Kennedy at Radcliffe. The friendship pays off in Bogota, the girl’s hometown, when Padilla and Brewer can’t get a hotel room there because they have no passports. They’re terrified they’ve come all this way only to get picked up for being indigent. Then, Padilla remembers he has the girl’s phone number. Their last night in South America is spent at the penthouse home of Caroline Kennedy’s college roommate. The next day they get a flight to Mexico City and then it’s on to LAX.
Home.
As they exit the airport through a stream of people, Padilla puts his hand on Brewer’s shoulder and they stop for a minute. Padilla looks uncertainly at Brewer and his look is returned. Until now, they’ve known what they were running to. Now that they’re here, they both realize the hardest part comes next.
Epilogue
Twelve years after she entered Mystic Arts World, Lorey Smith has grown into a woman already disappointed by marriage. She is cautious and jaded. To help get her out of her funk, Smith’s sister suggests she come down to Corona del Mar for a party. A friend of her uncle’s is going to be there and he can show her a good time. She hesitates, but when her sister tells her that the guy used to be in the Brotherhood, she softens.
“I had this thought, okay, he’s not anybody’s who’s going to harm me,” Smith says. “I felt safe. So, I said, ‘I’ll come down.’”
The party is in full howl when Smith arrives. Every time she turns around, she bumps into her uncle’s friend. His name is Eddie.
“He was following me all over the house. I thought, ‘What is up with this guy?’ My sister would say, ‘Oh, he’s fine. He’s fine.’ I didn’t know everybody had been partying for the last three weeks. She left that part out.”
Little by little, Smith settles in. She and Eddie start talking. They dance, despite Eddie’s obvious limp. Two days turn into four. Smith is compelled by this guy, but unsure. He seems haunted, hunted even.
“I didn’t know he was blasted on coke and had drank who knows how much by the time I got there—I just knew something was wrong. But once we actually started talking, and it did take a couple of days, then, I was like, ‘Wow, what’s his story? All this pain.’”
At some point during the partying, Smith loses track of Eddie. “All of a sudden, I heard this noise, like moaning, like pain and moaning. And I opened the front door and he’s out on the lawn, by this bush…just in this really, really bad place.
“I tried to get him to talk a little bit about it, and he did, and he shared enough with me sitting on the grass that one particular night that I was just…fascinated that he was even sitting there having been through what he’d been through.”
Over time Eddie tells Smith more and more about what he’s been through, about Lurigancho, a prison in Peru known as La Casa del Diablo. About how he escaped with his life, but wasn’t sure about his soul.
“I was like, ‘Whoa, you’re kidding, you should write a book.’”
Smith tells this story at a small kitchen table in her small condo in Santa Rosa, California. It’s the middle of December and a relentless, cold rain has been pounding for days. Smith serves up some sandwiches as she talks. The oven is on for heat.
Padilla comes in from the living room when he hears us talking about how he and Lorey met in Corona del Mar. “I wasn’t fit for polite company,” he jokes. Lucky for him, Smith wasn’t too polite and they kept seeing each other. It didn’t take them long to figure out they’d met before, when a wide-eyed 12-year-old handed a handsome man a handmade necklace and that man accepted it with a smile.
Eddie Padilla and Lorey Smith have been together since 1981. It’s one of the few happy endings in this story.
Jimmy the dealer and Diane Pinnix stayed together until Jimmy beat her up badly, putting her in the hospital. Jimmy briefly went to to jail before he bailed out and fled to Columbia. He was eventually gunned down in the street.
Diane Pinnix died a junkie’s death seven years ago in Jamaica. “The unfortunate thing is she died alone,” says her mother. “She was beautiful when she was younger.”
Drugs and alcohol continued to dictate the life of James Thomason, the man Padilla says did his time with more courage and grace than anyone else. I visit Thomason at the Rescue Mission in Tustin. His shoulder bears a tattoo that reads Lurigancho 75-78. His hard life has punched in his face.
When I ask about his time in prison, he says. “I don’t know what hell is, but Lurigancho is as close as I can think of.”
Thomason tells me of the dysentery, the filth, the flies, people getting stabbed, and Padilla’s descent into despair after Pinnix betrayed him with Jimmy.
“That’s when he really lost it,” says James. “He was a lowly person in that Peruvian prison and nobody cared. He wasn’t Eddie Padilla anymore. He was a prisoner.”
When I ask about the massacre, Thomason’s eyes go distant and his galloping speech slows to a near-halt. “They came in with rifles and the machine gun,” he says.
These days Thomason dreams of being able to afford an apartment by the beach, watch TV, drink a few beers, and live out his days. Though he seems a poster boy for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, he admits to no lasting ill effects from his time in Lurigancho. It occurs to me that surviving Lurigancho is both the worst thing that ever happened to him and his greatest accomplishment.
Richard Brewer died a little more than two years ago. Upon his return from Peru, he quickly went back to his old ways. But he never lost his outlaw’s code of honor. At Brewer’s memorial, friends gathered to paddle his ashes out to sea. Afterward, they had a bonfire on the beach. Everybody had stories to tell, but Padilla had the story.
“I said, ‘You guys know the story . . . but what you guys probably don’t know is, he came back for me. We had agreed to go our different ways. He knew I wasn’t going to be able to walk, and he came back for me.”
We had just finished watching a documentary on Lurigancho and sifting through a kaleidoscope of memories—some better than others—when Padilla relates this. It’s late in a long day and he starts sobbing.
“All those guys called themselves the Brotherhood for so long, but you know what? Richard was a real brother. He came back for me. He carried me . . . I always thought that if anybody came back for anybody, it would be me coming back for them.”
As Padilla says this, embarrassed by his tears, it feels like a fresh revelation. In some ways, I think the simple fact that he wasn’t the rescuer but the one who was rescued may have turned out to be the god Eddie Padilla was looking for his entire life—the ego break that neither acid, the Brotherhood or his misguided idea of freedom could provide. Perhaps this newfound humility allowed him to admit, where others didn’t, that Lurigancho broke him. Maybe it gave him the strength to ask for help and to claw his way back after descending into a deadly alcoholism and drug addiction, fueled by his crippled leg and fractured psyche.
At death’s door, and living on the streets, Padilla finally made it into rehab and set about on the long road back to recovery. He went to AA meetings and therapy for years. He managed to earn a degree in drug and alcohol counseling, and has made a career of working with juveniles and cons. He hopes his memoir will be useful in his work, both as a cautionary tale and a story of redemption. In the end, he just might have earned the narrative he seeks.
“You know when they first started telling me about the Brotherhood, that seems like what it was all about—it was people helping people,” says Padilla’s brother Dennis, who was instrumental in helping Padilla stay sober in those first crucial years of recovery. “It wasn’t about money and things and I think that’s where he’s at today.”
Sergeant Delgado was killed in a shootout when a friend of one of the doomed guys in the Life article tried to bust them out. According to the report, it took 11 rounds to bring him down.
Smuggling in the Aafge
Wooden Ships on the Water
And now the twin masted schooner Aafje goes to the Brotherhood -
http://mikemcclaughry.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/the-history-of-the-schooner-aafje/
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love was formed within a week of MKULTRA LSD supplier Bear Owsley’s arrest – which made headlines back in the late 1960′s.
“Griggs” as he was most often called, had spent some time that summer with Timothy Leary, at the Hitchcock estate (Mellon financial mogul family). Timothy had suggested that he start his own religion, and incorporate as a Church.
That is precisely what Griggs did.
Their objective was, as stated in their incorporation papers:
“to bring to the world a greater awareness of God through the teachings of Jesus Christ, Buddha, Ramakrishna, Babaji, Paramahansa Yogananda, Mahatma Gandhi, and all true prophets and apostles of God, and to spread the love and wisdom of these great teachers to all men…. We believe this church to be the earthly instrument of God’s will. We believe in the sacred right of each individual to commune with God in spirit and in truth as it is empirically revealed to him.”
A self-styled “spiritual warrior” and Brotherhood man, Eddie Padilla would come to be the bridge between the last owner of the Aafje and… the Brotherhood, where she would be consigned, for a time, to that ignoble pursuit called drug-smuggling.
The new master of the Aafje -
Eddie was driving 500 pounds of marijuana to San Francisco one foggy night, when he had a premonition that “something wasn’t right”. It wasn’t – he was arrested the next day in what was the biggest pot bust in San Francisco’s history (at that time). In 1967, he was tried and convicted, and sentenced to five to fifteen in San Quentin. He was given 30 days to get his affairs into order. On the last day – he skipped out to Mexico, to “Papa” – Pedro Aviles Perez, the biggest drug lord in Mexico at that time.
Eddie had already come up with the idea to get a boat, his dream he called it, where he and other Brotherhood members could sail back and forth between Pakistan and the States bringing their form of “enlightenment” to the masses – LSD and HASHISH. To put it in the mildest terms, let’s just say that I do not find that believable as any kind of actual “enlightenment”, but I digress.
.
The Pirate of Penance originally published in Slake No. 1., Joe Donnelly, August 2, 2012
.
“On the thirtieth day, I just left and went to Mexico, went to work for some syndicate guys,” he says. “I bailed.”
Padilla’s flight was also precipitated by a schism within the Brotherhood that some trace to its ultimate demise. Acting on Leary’s advice, Griggs took the profits from a marijuana deal, funds that some Brothers thought should go toward the eventual island purchase, and bought a 400-acre ranch in Idyllwild near Palm Springs.
…To facilitate his escape to Mexico, Padilla raised funds from various Brothers and other associates to gain entree with a Mexican pot syndicate run by a kingpin called Papa. His Mexican escapades—busting partners from jail and other adventures—could make their own movie.
In Mexico, Padilla ran a hacienda for Papa, overseeing the processing and distribution of the pot brought in by local farmers. For more than a year, he skimmed off the best bud and seeds. Meanwhile, he kept alive his dream of sailing to an island.
By early 1970, Padilla and a few other Brotherhood associates had successfully brokered the purchase of the Aafje, and the Aafje arrived from St. Thomas to meet up with him at Manzanillo.
Jimmy Dale, Joe Angeline, and Malcolm – all Brotherhood men – were on board, and had anchored offshore outside the twelve mile limit.
Padilla had his “Papa” men bring the pot out to the boat, with motor launch after motor launch arriving and dropping off their valuable cargo.
“It was five guys who had never sailed in their lives,” said Padilla in an interview.
Now on board was 1500 kilograms of the Mexican weed, that would come to be known as “Maui Wowie”.
So, off they went – setting sail for Maui.
The trip should have taken less than two weeks. A month into it, one of the guys onboard, a smuggler with Brotherhood roots named Joe Angeline, noticed the stars weren’t right. – The Pirate of Penance was originally published in Slake No. 1., Joe Donnelly, August 2, 2012
As you might have noticed, the length of this schooner is constantly being named wrong, anywhere from 25 feet to 96 feet, and there are somewhat conflicting reports of this particular meet-up.
Seven members instead of five, 96 foot yacht, standing off “Zapategas” which I couldn’t even find what the heck that is referring to…
Book, Brotherhood of Eternal Love, 1984
“Seven of the Brothers were to be found crewing a 96-foot yacht off of the western coast of Mexico in 1970. Most had previously got no nearer the sea than the surf at Laguna, but they had successfully brought their vessel out of Maui in Hawaii, across the Pacific to stand off Zapategas outside the twelve-mile limit.
This was no pleasure cruise, as the yacht lay anchored a convoy of small launches put out from the shore, roaring across the open sea and tossing in the swell. The Brothers lined the rails as the first of the launches cut its engine, bobbing gently. Tied alongside the yacht, Mexicans on board the launch began to pass up bales. The yacht took on board 1,500 kilos of best Mexican marijuana before hauling up anchor and turning westwards back to Maui. The yacht was only one way of moving marijuana in bulk without meeting the pribnlems and risks of overland travel. There were plans to use a couple of battered DC3s to move it up from Mexico and South America. Perhaps one day the same could be done for cargoes from Afghanistan or the Middle East, where the Brothers had discovered the potential of Lebanon.”
25 foot yacht…(which is just wrong)
Nick Schou weekly – this particular entry contradicts his later book even!
…several of Griggs’ foot soldiers had just escaped to Maui from the increasing heat in Dodge City on a 25-foot yacht loaded with 6,000 pounds of Mexican pot the cultivars of which would become the legendary “Maui Wowie”and arrived in the tropics like conquering warriors in a royal canoe.
Griggs and the rest of his crew were psychedelic warriors who had turned on with acid and tuned in to a newfound sense of spiritual purpose. Instead of dropping out of society, they created their own version of it, one that they hoped to single-handedly spread through their entire generation. Their goal: turn on the entire world. First the police and later Rolling Stone magazine would brand them the “Hippie Mafia.”
See what I mean?
Travis Ashbrook, another brotherhood member, had been waiting for them in Maui for two weeks. A trip that should have taken a month was now much longer, and he was worried. Malcolm, had messed up the navigation and they had ended up hundreds of miles off course. The other Brotherhood members were pissed, and tied him up in the crows nest for a while because of it! They eventually got it figured out, and arrived in Hana, Maui, in approximately late April/May.
Only a couple months or so later, Jimi Hendrix showed up to give a free concert on July 30, 1970 – supporting the Brotherhood lifestyle and agenda, and their “Rainbow Boards”. Which, by the way, were carefully constructed by Brotherhood member Hynson to have secret hiding places for smuggling hashish into the U.S. in.
The company’s logo features Maui, the Brotherhood’s hideout; the Buddhist symbol for Om; and even a tiny raft symbolizing the Brotherhood’s pot-laden yacht.
The Hendrix concert was on the slopes of the Haleakala Volcano near Makawao, “immortalized in what many consider to be the most spectacularly bizarre film of the countercultural era, the 1972 film Rainbow Bridge.”
Later that same year, (1970) on a 3-day riotous and apacolyptic celebration of Jesus Christ’s Birthday (Christmas) back in the U.S. – the Brotherhood had a plane drop a full cargo of their product, a super-LSD called Orange Sunshine over a crowd of 25,000 concertgoers in Laguna Canyon, just up the hill from Dodge City. – Nick Schou weekly
I mention this because the Church of Scientology’s Guardian Office, it’s Intelligence Division (Bureau 4), announced in a lengthy “wins” report just a few days later to their boss L. Ron Hubbard, how they had helped bust the Brotherhood the previous year….
Doesn’t look they are busted to me – does it to you?
Right. That’s because the Church was lying, in fact, this was Terry Milner who was not only the executive over the entire U.S. Intelligence arm of the Church, he was also directly involved with people that were smuggling drugs with the Brotherhood – he was helping, not stopping it.
Welcome to the REAL Scientology.
One other thing – the only mention I could find of the later fate of the Aafje, is a much later reference to that the Brotherhood’s lawyer, George Chula, (apparently a “gangsta” type) was given the boat in payment for his services some time after 1980 – but it’s not totally clear, and not named.
Here’s the ref:
Joe Eszterhas, The Strange Case of the Hippie Mafia
“Now information comes from Ramsey about George Chula, the Brotherhood attorney. Ramsey made special note of the fact that while he was in Chula’s office to meet a Brotherhood member, the secretaries in the office did not recognize the member by name. Ramsey overheard them conversing, and one of the secretaries mentioned to the other that had Ramsey referred to the member as Number Four, she would have known what he was talking about. The indication was that members of the Brotherhood were listed by numerical files rather than by names in Chula’s office and that when they contacted Chula, all they had to do was give him a number and Chula would know who he was talking to.
- note that Brotherhood members are numbered – like a code
Ramsey described Chula as “a gangster type.”"Ramsey said that Chula was on large permanent retainer from the Brotherhood and that he obtained a boat that was given to him by the Brotherhood, a large sailboat in payment for past services.
And there you have it – the first written history of the Schooner – the Aafje.
http://mikemcclaughry.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/the-history-of-the-schooner-aafje/
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love was formed within a week of MKULTRA LSD supplier Bear Owsley’s arrest – which made headlines back in the late 1960′s.
“Griggs” as he was most often called, had spent some time that summer with Timothy Leary, at the Hitchcock estate (Mellon financial mogul family). Timothy had suggested that he start his own religion, and incorporate as a Church.
That is precisely what Griggs did.
Their objective was, as stated in their incorporation papers:
“to bring to the world a greater awareness of God through the teachings of Jesus Christ, Buddha, Ramakrishna, Babaji, Paramahansa Yogananda, Mahatma Gandhi, and all true prophets and apostles of God, and to spread the love and wisdom of these great teachers to all men…. We believe this church to be the earthly instrument of God’s will. We believe in the sacred right of each individual to commune with God in spirit and in truth as it is empirically revealed to him.”
A self-styled “spiritual warrior” and Brotherhood man, Eddie Padilla would come to be the bridge between the last owner of the Aafje and… the Brotherhood, where she would be consigned, for a time, to that ignoble pursuit called drug-smuggling.
The new master of the Aafje -
Eddie was driving 500 pounds of marijuana to San Francisco one foggy night, when he had a premonition that “something wasn’t right”. It wasn’t – he was arrested the next day in what was the biggest pot bust in San Francisco’s history (at that time). In 1967, he was tried and convicted, and sentenced to five to fifteen in San Quentin. He was given 30 days to get his affairs into order. On the last day – he skipped out to Mexico, to “Papa” – Pedro Aviles Perez, the biggest drug lord in Mexico at that time.
Eddie had already come up with the idea to get a boat, his dream he called it, where he and other Brotherhood members could sail back and forth between Pakistan and the States bringing their form of “enlightenment” to the masses – LSD and HASHISH. To put it in the mildest terms, let’s just say that I do not find that believable as any kind of actual “enlightenment”, but I digress.
.
The Pirate of Penance originally published in Slake No. 1., Joe Donnelly, August 2, 2012
.
“On the thirtieth day, I just left and went to Mexico, went to work for some syndicate guys,” he says. “I bailed.”
Padilla’s flight was also precipitated by a schism within the Brotherhood that some trace to its ultimate demise. Acting on Leary’s advice, Griggs took the profits from a marijuana deal, funds that some Brothers thought should go toward the eventual island purchase, and bought a 400-acre ranch in Idyllwild near Palm Springs.
…To facilitate his escape to Mexico, Padilla raised funds from various Brothers and other associates to gain entree with a Mexican pot syndicate run by a kingpin called Papa. His Mexican escapades—busting partners from jail and other adventures—could make their own movie.
In Mexico, Padilla ran a hacienda for Papa, overseeing the processing and distribution of the pot brought in by local farmers. For more than a year, he skimmed off the best bud and seeds. Meanwhile, he kept alive his dream of sailing to an island.
By early 1970, Padilla and a few other Brotherhood associates had successfully brokered the purchase of the Aafje, and the Aafje arrived from St. Thomas to meet up with him at Manzanillo.
Jimmy Dale, Joe Angeline, and Malcolm – all Brotherhood men – were on board, and had anchored offshore outside the twelve mile limit.
Padilla had his “Papa” men bring the pot out to the boat, with motor launch after motor launch arriving and dropping off their valuable cargo.
“It was five guys who had never sailed in their lives,” said Padilla in an interview.
Now on board was 1500 kilograms of the Mexican weed, that would come to be known as “Maui Wowie”.
So, off they went – setting sail for Maui.
The trip should have taken less than two weeks. A month into it, one of the guys onboard, a smuggler with Brotherhood roots named Joe Angeline, noticed the stars weren’t right. – The Pirate of Penance was originally published in Slake No. 1., Joe Donnelly, August 2, 2012
As you might have noticed, the length of this schooner is constantly being named wrong, anywhere from 25 feet to 96 feet, and there are somewhat conflicting reports of this particular meet-up.
Seven members instead of five, 96 foot yacht, standing off “Zapategas” which I couldn’t even find what the heck that is referring to…
Book, Brotherhood of Eternal Love, 1984
“Seven of the Brothers were to be found crewing a 96-foot yacht off of the western coast of Mexico in 1970. Most had previously got no nearer the sea than the surf at Laguna, but they had successfully brought their vessel out of Maui in Hawaii, across the Pacific to stand off Zapategas outside the twelve-mile limit.
This was no pleasure cruise, as the yacht lay anchored a convoy of small launches put out from the shore, roaring across the open sea and tossing in the swell. The Brothers lined the rails as the first of the launches cut its engine, bobbing gently. Tied alongside the yacht, Mexicans on board the launch began to pass up bales. The yacht took on board 1,500 kilos of best Mexican marijuana before hauling up anchor and turning westwards back to Maui. The yacht was only one way of moving marijuana in bulk without meeting the pribnlems and risks of overland travel. There were plans to use a couple of battered DC3s to move it up from Mexico and South America. Perhaps one day the same could be done for cargoes from Afghanistan or the Middle East, where the Brothers had discovered the potential of Lebanon.”
25 foot yacht…(which is just wrong)
Nick Schou weekly – this particular entry contradicts his later book even!
…several of Griggs’ foot soldiers had just escaped to Maui from the increasing heat in Dodge City on a 25-foot yacht loaded with 6,000 pounds of Mexican pot the cultivars of which would become the legendary “Maui Wowie”and arrived in the tropics like conquering warriors in a royal canoe.
Griggs and the rest of his crew were psychedelic warriors who had turned on with acid and tuned in to a newfound sense of spiritual purpose. Instead of dropping out of society, they created their own version of it, one that they hoped to single-handedly spread through their entire generation. Their goal: turn on the entire world. First the police and later Rolling Stone magazine would brand them the “Hippie Mafia.”
See what I mean?
Travis Ashbrook, another brotherhood member, had been waiting for them in Maui for two weeks. A trip that should have taken a month was now much longer, and he was worried. Malcolm, had messed up the navigation and they had ended up hundreds of miles off course. The other Brotherhood members were pissed, and tied him up in the crows nest for a while because of it! They eventually got it figured out, and arrived in Hana, Maui, in approximately late April/May.
Only a couple months or so later, Jimi Hendrix showed up to give a free concert on July 30, 1970 – supporting the Brotherhood lifestyle and agenda, and their “Rainbow Boards”. Which, by the way, were carefully constructed by Brotherhood member Hynson to have secret hiding places for smuggling hashish into the U.S. in.
The company’s logo features Maui, the Brotherhood’s hideout; the Buddhist symbol for Om; and even a tiny raft symbolizing the Brotherhood’s pot-laden yacht.
The Hendrix concert was on the slopes of the Haleakala Volcano near Makawao, “immortalized in what many consider to be the most spectacularly bizarre film of the countercultural era, the 1972 film Rainbow Bridge.”
Later that same year, (1970) on a 3-day riotous and apacolyptic celebration of Jesus Christ’s Birthday (Christmas) back in the U.S. – the Brotherhood had a plane drop a full cargo of their product, a super-LSD called Orange Sunshine over a crowd of 25,000 concertgoers in Laguna Canyon, just up the hill from Dodge City. – Nick Schou weekly
I mention this because the Church of Scientology’s Guardian Office, it’s Intelligence Division (Bureau 4), announced in a lengthy “wins” report just a few days later to their boss L. Ron Hubbard, how they had helped bust the Brotherhood the previous year….
Doesn’t look they are busted to me – does it to you?
Right. That’s because the Church was lying, in fact, this was Terry Milner who was not only the executive over the entire U.S. Intelligence arm of the Church, he was also directly involved with people that were smuggling drugs with the Brotherhood – he was helping, not stopping it.
Welcome to the REAL Scientology.
One other thing – the only mention I could find of the later fate of the Aafje, is a much later reference to that the Brotherhood’s lawyer, George Chula, (apparently a “gangsta” type) was given the boat in payment for his services some time after 1980 – but it’s not totally clear, and not named.
Here’s the ref:
Joe Eszterhas, The Strange Case of the Hippie Mafia
“Now information comes from Ramsey about George Chula, the Brotherhood attorney. Ramsey made special note of the fact that while he was in Chula’s office to meet a Brotherhood member, the secretaries in the office did not recognize the member by name. Ramsey overheard them conversing, and one of the secretaries mentioned to the other that had Ramsey referred to the member as Number Four, she would have known what he was talking about. The indication was that members of the Brotherhood were listed by numerical files rather than by names in Chula’s office and that when they contacted Chula, all they had to do was give him a number and Chula would know who he was talking to.
- note that Brotherhood members are numbered – like a code
Ramsey described Chula as “a gangster type.”"Ramsey said that Chula was on large permanent retainer from the Brotherhood and that he obtained a boat that was given to him by the Brotherhood, a large sailboat in payment for past services.
And there you have it – the first written history of the Schooner – the Aafje.
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love was an informal organization of psychedelic drug enthusiasts and dealers that operated in the late 1960s. The group was founded in Laguna Beach, California. The group was headquartered in the Mystic Arts bookstore on Pacific Coast Highway. At that time, Laguna Beach was a common stopping point for those traveling south from Haight-Ashbury to Mexico. Timothy Leary, the excommunicated Harvard psychology professor and devotee of free love and author of "turn on, tune in and drop out," became the godfather of the group.
One contributor writes that the group was composed of local surfers, drug users and rich kids from Orange County, Los Angeles and the Pasadena area. This is contested by another contributor, who points out that the genesis of the Brotherhood was a rag-tag crew of very young street toughs in Compton, California - in a poor neighborhood - who in the course of smoking multiple kinds of vegetation and swallowing random available pills for recreational purposes, accidentally encountered LSD. At least a half-dozen of them found their lives transformed by that experience and, in due time, moved south to modest bungalows in the little-known town of Laguna Beach. They tended to wear simple cotton garments, sometimes robes. Most were vegetarians, and they daily spent considerable time in prayer and simply doing good deeds. Many of them continued to practice their own version of Christianity while opening research into Hinduism, Vajrayana Buddhism, and indigenous and Eastern religions as Brotherhood members happened to find them.
For several years, their psychedelic activities were underwritten by selling high-quality marijuana. As business expanded, they decided to see if they could build a national distribution network. Farmer John and Chuck Scott bought a new station wagon, loaded it up with kilo bricks of marijuana and drove from Laguna Beach to the Holland Tunnel. They took almost six weeks to move the load because New York's hippie market for marijuana at the time of their arrival was small and informal. Distribution of the Brotherhood's first wholesale load began the creation of an entirely new market and sales pyramid.
After sales prospered, the Brotherhood began to send researchers around the world to look into purchasing opportunities. Red Lebanese and black Afghan hashish were favored because of their strength, perfumes, and popularity among buyers in the USA. Other varieties of hashish were also purchased and imported in volume. At a certain point, the cash flow was more than sufficient for them to set up their own laboratory in which to manufacture LSD. The elder chemist was the bright and quirky Owsley Stanley, nicknamed Bear, who favored "cocktails", mixtures of LSD and small amounts of amphetamine, though there was no amphetamine in Owsley's acid. It was pure, and much of it was actually made by Nick Sand.
By the late 1960s, what had begun as a brotherhood of idealistic young pacifists had been infiltrated and corrupted by cynical outsiders, some of them armed. The brotherhood of love was gone; the informal organization's name was arrogated by punks and crooks who soon became notorious and widely detested.
The Brotherhood operated originally as a psychedelics distribution network throughout the United States, most notably in California where the organization received large shipments of hashish from Pakistan and Afghanistan, helped by Welshman Howard Marks, now a prominent figure in the cannabis culture. Some of the best Hashish that was imported were the half circle 'Elephant Ears' in the early 1970s .With funds from their hashish smuggling, the organization produced and distributed large amounts of the legendary "Orange Sunshine" LSD. The organization was headquartered on a ranch in Garner Valley, near Idyllwild. Members paid the Weather Underground to break Timothy Leary out of prison.[1] The organization may have been inspired by, but did not evolve from, Timothy Leary's League for Spiritual Discovery or the International Foundation for Internal Freedom. Many of its members were interested in peace and in ending the Vietnam war. A 1972 Rolling Stone article dubbed them the "Hippie Mafia."
The Brotherhood also had a small vegetarian restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway, two blocks north of Mystic Arts, named "Love Animals, Don't eat them". This restaurant operated with volunteers, with much of the food donated. Menu items did not have a price and patrons left donations for the food ordered.
Members of the Brotherhood felt that the Vietnam War was not only illegal but that President Richard Nixon was using drug laws to imprison political opponents. Members Johnny Gail and Victor Forsythe advocated putting LSD in Nixon's punch. Grace Slick was recruited for that effort but the mission was not successful. Victor Forsythe was entrapped into sales of Brotherhood hashish in 1972 and after a year long trial, which resulted in a hung jury, he jumped bail and fled to Ecuador in 1973. In late 1974, Victor was arrested by US drug agents, and after three months of fighting extradition, was returned to the United States where he pleaded guilty in a plea bargain arrangement with the Orange County prosecutor. His book, Birth of an Angel, describes details of his arrest. During his imprisonment in Orange Country jail Victor was assaulted by a white supremacist prison gang and almost killed. After recuperating in the hospital, Victor completed the rest of his sentence in solitary confinement.
Timothy Leary had this to say about the Brotherhood: "The whole concept of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love is like a bogeyman invented by the narcs. The brotherhood was about eight surfer kids from Southern California, Laguna Beach, who took the LSD, and they practiced the religion of the worship of nature, and they'd go into the mountains. But they were not bigshots at all. None of them ever drove anything better than a VW bus. They were just kind of in it for the spiritual thrill."[2]
I did a lot of research into the origins of Haze, and none of the stories ring all that true, too many contradictions and discrepancies.
Let's quickly recap Sam's story:
Haze was created by a pair of growers in Corralitos, near Santa Cruz in the years 71-73, starting with Mexican and Colombian seeds they crossed those the first year then the second year grew out their Mexican x Colombian hybrid. In the next two years they added pollen from Thai and South Indian genes. Sam lived next door to one of the Haze Bros and received seeds from them which he worked to try to preserve the Haze genetics. He took them to Holland and gave Haze genes to Neville, Neville made hybrids and sold them, Sam got pissed off and the rest is history. Sam says all modern Haze genes stem from him as per this story.
Neville's story of how he got his Haze is quite simple:
He went to the US collecting genes in the early 80s (same trip(s) that turned up Northern Lights, G13 etc) and while in NYC was given some Haze beans that he was told were from 1969 Haze Bros stock.
Now, obviously these two stories don't fit, according to Sam, Haze as a four-way hybrid of Mexican, Colombian, Thai and Indian genes didn't even exist until the end of the 1973 growing season in California so Neville's story of Haze seeds from 1969 is totally at odds with Sam's version of events.
Now, the most important thing to bear in mind when discussing the origins of Haze is this - we only have the words of two people, Sam and Neville, and both of those people had a large financial interest in selling seeds of Haze at one time or other. I mean, to say that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniack cooked up the first Apple in their garage isn't really how Apple Computers Inc was born, many others played a role, but for the purposes of Steve Job's ego and his commercial, financial interests, it's become the accepted history.
Haze the weed was almost definitely around before Sam claims, 1973 is way too late, old heads in Cali recall Haze was around in the 1960s, but due to the nature of the scene, being underground and illegal and downright criminal, there are no written records. Haze in the 60s was sold by the BOEL, it was grown in Hawaii and shipped into the west coast in vacuum sealed packages, this was a huge operation using the best packaging technology at the time as this Haze was the very finest weed available and commanded the highest prices. (Sam mentions 500 dollars an ounce in the early 70s, and I don't doubt it). These packages contained sinsemilla, occasionally there may have been one or two seeds in a package, but that was it. The BOEL's major market for weed for a time was NYC, so a lot of those Haze packages would have been shipped across country to NYC and it is pretty likely that the very few seeds that turned up from those packages were saved.
At the same time as the BOEL were shipping Haze from Hawaii, there were a whole host of communes in the Bay Area growing weed and from those communes came two strains that were known as Skunk and Haze. Whether their Haze was grown from BOEL seeds from Hawaii or was a hybrid made in the Bay Area I don't know. The first modern strains were bred in this region and southern Oregon, Jerry Biesler created California Orange from seeds he collected in Afghanistan in this period, for example. Sacred Seeds was said to be a group of six people in the Bay Area and they are now either dead or have moved on. Mendocino Joe, the creator of Romulan went up to Vancouver and stayed there. He is said to be the key individual behind the creation of the Bay Area/Sacred Seeds Skunk,the one that really stank like RKS.
It is said that the BOEL only gave Haze seeds to one other group and that was a group of Brits running a legal cannabis farm in Afghanistan producing cannabis for pharmaceutical companies, they gave them Haze seeds in exchange for seeds of their best indica hashplants.
So, I think the story of the BOEL and the Haze from Hawaii is true, with some research, I could probably prove it, I have the full text of the Senate Hearings into the BOEL and some other documents I need to read. The Neville story about getting seeds in NYC I am also pretty sure is true, and it could well be that those seeds are from BOEL shipments in the late 60s, specifically, 1969. I mean, the BOEL probably imported tons upon tons of weed into NYC in 1969, they were a huge smuggling operation, it is not stretching the bounds of probability to believe that Neville met someone in NYC who had handled hundreds if not thousands of packages of BOEL weed, splitting them down into nickels and dimes and elbows and that person had collected and saved the seeds that fell out and a decade and a half later gave or sold them to Neville who was in town looking for genetics.
OT1, well he may well have been involved in that legal farm in Afghanistan and gotten hold of his Haze genes that way. I think he said he travelled in the USA in the 60s/70s so he could have picked up seeds there, there would have been plenty of weed on the west coast called Haze, just as now there is a lot of weed called Kush. How many OG Kushes are there? How many Hazes do you think there were in Cali back then? Remember, you could get 500 dollars an ounce for Haze so I expect every enterprising outdoor growers of fine sativa weed tacked the name Haze onto his product at one time or another.
Eddie Padilla's Escape From Lurigancho
The onetime OC man is the only man still alive who escaped from Peru's most notorious prison
By NICK SCHOU Thursday, Jun 20 2013
Jillian Seaman When Eddie Padilla first learned he was headed to Peru's San Juan de Lurigancho Prison, he was happy.
It was the winter of 1975, and he had just spent the past few weeks locked up in a closet in an ex-drug dealer's mansion in Peru's capital, Lima, a building that Peruvian Internal Police had seized and converted into a detention center and torture chamber. But the corrupt cops who had busted him and his friends for a cocaine-smuggling venture gone awry had a plan. In return for a large chunk of change, they'd fabricate a story that would clear the trio of the crime. All Padilla and his pals had to do was wait six months in Lurigancho. It would be easy, the cops said, a vacation. It wasn't so much a prison as a country club, with tennis courts and a swimming pool.
The trip to the prison, located in the desert outside Lima, was nightmarish. Padilla, his two friends and fellow Orange County smugglers, Richard Brewer and James Thomason, were packed on a school bus with more than 120 other men. His left hand had been handcuffed to the right hand of the man sitting to his right, and his right hand was similarly cuffed to the man to his left—Padilla had to place his head between his knees so he would not lose circulation in his wrists.
"The first time I lifted my head was when we were going through a sally port into the yard of the prison," Padilla says. "We could see there were no fucking tennis courts. We went into the administration area, and a soldier came in, a lieutenant, and he started telling us, 'This is a prison. The rules are strict. If you try to escape, we will kill you.'"
While that warning resonated in Padilla's head, a leader of the inmates' welcoming committee approached the new group of prisoners. His face, neck and arms were covered with tattoos; his eyes betrayed no glimpse of a human soul. He had only one message, one simple piece of advice that he wished to share with Padilla and the others.
"You need to get a shank," the man advised, "if you want to stay a man."
* * *
Eddie Padilla's journey to the Peruvian equivalent of hell on earth began in another hard-luck locale: in South Central Los Angeles, just across the railroad tracks from Watts. He was born on Oct. 31, 1944, to a mixed-race couple: a German-Irish mother and a half-black, half-Native American dad. In the early 1950s, the family moved to Anaheim, where Padilla was just about the only non-white, non-Mexican kid he knew.
"I was the darkest kid around forever," Padilla says. By the time Padilla had enrolled in Anaheim High School, he had a chip on his shoulder. "Everyone went to Disneyland to get a job for the summer and hang out on 15th Street Beach in Newport. I went to apply to Disneyland and was the only one to not get hired."
Padilla began regularly fighting with his mostly white classmates. After being expelled from the city's public-education system, he briefly attended St. Boniface Catholic Church's school, but he was kicked out after cracking open a classmate's skull. Following a stretch in juvenile hall, Padilla wound up at Servite High School, where he promptly swung a chair at a teacher who had slapped his face. Next followed a football-playing stint at a school in Downey, more fighting and a full-circle transfer back to Anaheim High.
It was in his junior and senior years at the school that Padilla fell in with a group of other troubled, drug-addled, violence-prone teenagers with nicknames such as Mad Dog, Black Bart and Dark Cloud, dead-end suburban street fighters who would become his close friends and compatriots. Some of them were surfers, some dealt pot, some were members of a car club called the Street Sweepers. The most charismatic of them was a young trouble-maker named John "the Farmer" Griggs, a varsity wrestler who made up for his short stature with an epic temper.
Making new friends didn't keep Padilla out of trouble. He became a speed addict, his bizarre behavior leading to repeated arrests for everything from indecent exposure to assaulting a police officer, a depraved spree that only ended when a judge sentenced him to 18 months of mental-health detention at Atascadero State Hospital in central California. Upon his release, Padilla married his high-school sweetheart and took lackluster steps toward finding work. Easier money was to be made peddling marijuana, however, and he set about trying to become a significant player in the pot trade.
Padilla would eventually accomplish that goal, but not before a mind-altering substance, LSD, set him on a course that would come to define him—and would lead him to Lurigancho. It was on his 21st birthday that Padilla took a ride into the hills east of Anaheim and dropped a hit of acid that gave him his first "ego-death" experience, in which he "saw god" and decided to ditch every other drug except marijuana. In 1966, just before California became the first state to outlaw LSD, Padilla, together with Griggs and a few dozen other Anaheim High alums, helped to form a church called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which aimed to turn on the world to the drug, and eventually lured Timothy Leary, the psychedelic prophet and defrocked Harvard professor, to Orange County to assist them in achieving that purpose.
The group began with communal acid-dropping sessions at Griggs' house in Modjeska Canyon, but by 1967, it had moved to Laguna Beach; its new headquarters was Mystic Arts World, a head shop, art gallery and retail boutique on Pacific Coast Highway. Inside the store, Padilla managed a small bead shop; other members sold everything from incense and candles to esoteric literature and copies of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi, and Leary and Ralph Metzner's The Psychedelic Experience.
Every weekend, groups would head off to local beaches, hot springs and mountains to drop acid. Meanwhile, trips to Mexico to haul back blankets, ponchos and other indigenous handicrafts doubled as pot-smuggling ventures. Padilla's first stint as a smuggler was also almost his last. He and a trio of Brotherhood members took a truck to Mexico and camped out on the beach near Mazatlán. While one of their friends traveled to Oaxaca to purchase some native crafts, Padilla and two of his partners purchased 200 kilos of weed and waited on the beach for the friend to return.
The cops arrived first and lengthily questioned the Americans, but they failed to discover the pot that Padilla had hastily buried in the sand. Once his friend returned from Oaxaca—and before the Mexicans were the wiser—Padilla stashed the marijuana in the truck's side panels; the group drove across the border without a hitch. "People started bringing loads in from all over the place," Padilla says, "smuggling like crazy and getting really sophisticated at it, too."
Soon, Padilla and his friends had become such reliable marketers of marijuana that they had their own in-house attorney: George Chula, the Saul Goodman of his day, whose investigator, Michael Marvich, an ex-con, would often alert Padilla or another Brotherhood member when and where to pick up a car full of pot that had just arrived from Mexico. But Padilla was ambitious. In 1967, he and a brother filled every available panel of a double-cab Volkswagen bus with 500 pounds of Mexican weed and proceeded to drive it to San Francisco, where they hoped to unload enough of it to keep the city's Summer of Love going through winter.
Instead, the cops almost immediately busted Padilla. An FBI agent arrived at the jail to interrogate him.
"They knew about the shop, the Brotherhood, everything about me," Padilla says. "They wanted me to rat on the Mexicans. I said, 'Give me one month. Let me out of jail, and I'll call you in a month and try to set something up for you.'" The agent didn't find that funny. Thanks to the Brotherhood's attorney, Padilla quickly made bail. He bounced back and forth to court for the next two years, as did many of his friends, before realizing that if he remained in California, he'd be headed to prison for a longer time than he could afford to spare.
Meanwhile, time was running out for the Brotherhood. While single members of the group took over a neighborhood they called "Dodge City" on Woodland Drive in Laguna Beach, Leary had joined many married members of the Brotherhood at a ranch in Idyllwild, in the mountains above Palm Springs, where he lived in a Native American teepee and hatched a campaign to run for governor of California on a platform to legalize marijuana, outlaw football and return the state to a pre-capitalist barter economy. But a series of mishaps drove the Brotherhood from its commune. First, a member who'd just returned from Afghanistan with a surfboard full of hash was busted driving up to the ranch. The 17-year-old girlfriend of another Brotherhood member drowned in a swimming hole while tripping on acid, leading to Leary's arrest for criminal negligence in the incident. Griggs' untimely death in August 1969 from what appears to be the only known case of overdosing on synthetic psilocybin sealed the group's fractious fate, with members evading police in Mexico, Central and South America, and Maui.
Maui was a natural choice for Padilla, who'd always hoped that the Brotherhood's illicit smuggling activities could somehow finance the purchase of a tropical island where the group could pursue the hippie ideal of dropping out of society and living in harmony with nature. At the time, the island had yet to be overrun with tourism, and the Brotherhood easily blended in with the thousands of hippies who arrived each year and formed a natural customer base for the group's drug enterprise.
As I recounted in my 2010 book, Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love and Acid to the World, Padilla arrived on the island in May 1970 by the most arduous route imaginable. Along with a handful of friends, almost none of whom had any sailing experience, he sailed to Maui on the Aafje, a 70-foot yacht the Brotherhood had loaded with a ton of high-quality Mexican marijuana it dubbed "Lightning Bolt," the clones of which, when planted on Maui, became the legendary "Maui Wowie" strain. Because the boat had no functioning navigational equipment, the Aafje strayed off course by hundreds of miles, surviving several tropical storms in the process; the trip was saved when a sympathetic Norwegian ship captain gave them fuel and food to complete their voyage.
Padilla spent the next three years on Maui. He was there when Jimi Hendrix played what amounted to a private show for the Brotherhood and their friends thousands of feet above sea level on the slope of the Haleakala volcano, an event immortalized in the eminently unwatchable 1972 film Rainbow Bridge. Before long, though, cocaine moved in—as well as the ego, greed and paranoia that came along with it. Padilla abandoned his wife and young kids in Kihei and retreated to a house in Makawao, spending more time getting high and chasing younger women than surfing. "I had a total fucking relapse," Padilla recalls. "It was like I had never taken acid."
In August 1972, a multi-agency task force busted the Brotherhood, raiding stash houses and hash-oil operations from Laguna Beach to Oregon to Hawaii. Although many of his friends were caught in the arrests that took place that month, most spent only a few months or a year in jail before going back into smuggling. Padilla managed to evade arrest and fled to Costa Rica, where he stayed until the heat had passed. He then began traveling again under an assumed name.
"I had the genius to think I could smuggle coke," he says. Padilla hollowed out the neck and body of a Fender electric guitar so he could fill it with 1,800 grams of cocaine. "I found somebody who had a connection and went to Cali [Colombia] and started running coke from Cali, flying from Bogota right to LA."
When the police busted the Colombian network, Padilla turned to Peru. He made seven successful coke runs from Lima to LA before a friend invited him to sail from Tahiti to Hawaii to supervise a load of "Thai Stick." Before he could take up the offer, though, Padilla had one last deal he had to finish in Peru. "I was burned out," he says. "I made up my mind that this trip was going to be the proverbial last time."
* * *
When the Peruvian police busted into Padilla's room, his world blacked out, and all he could see was the barrel of the gun pointed at his face.
Padilla had arrived in Peru the previous day and was staying at a high-end resort outside Lima with his friends Richard Brewer and James Thomason—both of them fellow Orange County-bred smugglers. They were posing as a trio of jet-setting tourists on a surfing safari, but in reality, they were about to fly back north with as much Peruvian flake as they could carry.
The man pointing the pistol at Padilla's skull was named Delgado. He had dark skin, jet-black hair and a body built like a tank. "That guy was the evilest fucking guy I met in my life," Padilla recalls. "He reeked of murder and mayhem. Every word had a threat in it; it seemed like there was no hesitation that he would kill you."
It didn't help things that Delgado and his Peruvian Internal Police (PIP) cohorts had followed Padilla's in-country coke contacts for days before he landed at the airport. Or that there were 20 kilos of cocaine in his hotel room. The only thing in Padilla's favor was that he'd hired a San Clemente machinist to craft a diving tank with a hollow bottom, which was now filled with $58,000 in cash and sitting next to the coke. "They came in the door, started kicking us around, slapping us around," Padilla says. "That's when I got Delgado to get that bag of money."
As Padilla would only later discover, Delgado and his PIP henchmen were elite anti-narcotics officers with license to murder drug traffickers. They were backed by the newly created U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), whose birth in 1973 was a consequence of the rapid rise in drug smuggling fueled by groups such as the Brotherhood.
The PIP, or at least Delgado, was also corrupt to the core. As soon as Padilla offered him $58,000 as a down payment to drop the charges, Delgado appeared willing to sabotage his own case against the three American smugglers. Ostensibly to keep them isolated from the DEA agents who were eager to interrogate them until he could come up with a cover story that would exculpate them, Delgado took Padilla and his pals to the PIP's infamous Pink Panther villa, which the agency had seized from a recently deceased cartel figure.
"It was a two-story, pink mansion," Padilla says. "They took the whole bottom floor and made it a jail, put metal doors on closets and dining rooms. The cell we were in was literally a walk-in closet, with a metal door and framing. It was pitch dark, and I was handcuffed for two days. You could hear people screaming and women being raped."
Padilla began to lose hope. He apologized to his friends for luring them to Peru on such a stupid mission. "I broke inside that closet," he recalls. "I fucking broke down crying."
* * *
About six months into his incarceration at Lurigancho, Padilla began to realize he wasn't going home any time soon. Although the Brotherhood's attorney, Chula, had flown to Peru to help facilitate his defense—even smuggling a ball of hash to Padilla—the Peruvian justice system was proving difficult to thwart. Delgado had testified in court that there were no drugs in Padilla's room until after Padilla had been handcuffed, meaning that someone had set him up, and if anything, Padilla should only face possession charges. The judge had pronounced Padilla and his friends abseulto—absolved—of the crime. But now they needed to wait for the Peruvian Supreme Court to sign off on the ruling, and the judges seemed to be in no particular hurry to do so.
Padilla began to lose track of time, as the horrors of Lurigancho caused one day to bleed into the next. Although the prison was heavily guarded from the outside, few guards ventured inside the facility, and inmates were free to roam wherever they wanted during daylight hours. Although Padilla and other foreigners were lucky to have their own tier, which afforded them the slightest protection and privacy from other inmates, the floor of most wards of the prison were typically covered in piss, shit and human vomit. "People were murdering people, stabbing them," Padilla says. "People were turning white, and people were stepping over bodies."
Food was hard to come by, and while drugs were easily obtainable, they came at a price. Padilla's dealer, a thug named Pelón, demanded Padilla carry out a hit on another man, and when Padilla failed to do so, Pelón attacked him with a knife. An older inmate who took pity on Padilla helped disarm Pelón and even paid him money to leave Padilla alone. In return, he demanded Padilla forsake all drugs except marijuana, and Padilla once again cleaned up his act.
As more inmates began pouring into Lurigancho in the late 1970s, conditions in the prison continued to deteriorate. The daily battle for food was so intense that the least-favored inmates were starved—in at least one case, fatally—by fellow prisoners. Inevitably, the inmates began to demand better treatment. Some of them managed to take a guard hostage. "Three Peruvians in the nastiest cell block that no guard would go inside had stabbed a guard," Padilla says. "The animals had cut him up; you could see the blood running."
The prisoners released the guard in exchange for a promise for better treatment. Everything was calm at Lurigancho until three days later; Padilla looked out his cell window and saw a group of soldiers lining up on a hillside overlooking the prison. They positioned a 50-caliber machine gun on a tripod; an officer shouted, "Fuego" and blew his whistle, and bullets flew into the mutinous ward for the next five minutes.
"The amount of ammunition that went into that building was incredible," Padilla says. "Then they shot tear gas, and the soldiers went in with gas masks, shooting anyone in sight with pistols. That was the first time I experienced tear gas, and it rolled into our block. The guards unlocked our cell and let us lay down in the hallway. They killed something like 100 or 170 guys, piled out dead in the main hallway. The next day, in the paper, it said it was an attempted escape."
In early 1979, the Peruvian Supreme Court finally granted Padilla, Brewer and Thomason a hearing to determine if they would be absolved of their cocaine-trafficking charges. While they waited for the ruling, they were removed from Lurigancho to a jail near the courthouse in downtown Lima. But on a Friday evening in July, after six months at the jail and four years in Lurigancho, their lawyer announced the court had refused to grant the trio their freedom. Padilla and his friends now faced the prospect of returning to Lurigancho to finish out their 20-year sentences.
To Padilla, the news felt like a death sentence. "If you do 15 or 20 years in Lurigancho, there is a good chance you will not make it," he explains. Although Thomason, who had his own attorney, said he was willing to try to escape, he didn't seem sure of the plan. Padilla and Brewer made a pact: No matter what happened, they were not going back to the prison. "It was do or die," he says. "We were serious as a heart attack. There was no going back."
Padilla and Brewer knew the location of a church in Lima where a friendly minister who often visited the prison might shelter them until they could figure out a way to reach the Brazilian border. They hoped to find transport to the Urubamba River and float their way to freedom. Once in Brazil, they could walk into a police station and claim to be tourists who had been robbed and lost their passports. They'd even used toothpaste to create a rudimentary map of their escape route on the wall of their jail cell, telling the guards the map showed their future travel plans once they were released.
After six months at the jail, Padilla had won over the guards, who seemed convinced the Americans really were just harmless surfers who, if released, had no plans to even leave Peru, but rather pick up where they left off four years ago and find some waves. The following night, a Saturday, Padilla bribed the guards, who brought beer and whisky into their cell. "I took a sip of beer and a sip of Johnnie Walker," he recalls, "but James [Thomason] drank almost half a fifth and was sick, barfing."
The guards unlocked the cell door while Thomason puked his guts out in the latrine across the hallway. When they weren't looking, Padilla and Brewer crept out of their cell. Using a metal spoon's handle, they pried open a locked door at the end of the hall, climbed a 20-foot wall topped with a 5-foot-high chain-link fence strung with three strands of barbed wire. Although it was completely dark, Padilla and Brewer knew that they were about to jump into an abandoned lot half-filled with lumber, the other side of which, beyond a short wall, was a busy Lima thoroughfare.
Brewer jumped first and landed safely in the grass. Padilla took a deep breath and flung himself after his friend. One foot reached the grass. The other came up short, crunching stiffly into a stack of wood, and Padilla collapsed in a heap. "The plan was completely over because I could not walk," Padilla says. "My foot was the size of a cantaloupe." Padilla would later discover he had broken several bones in his foot and the fall had sheared his Achilles tendon.
Because their plan was to separate and meet up at the church, Brewer had already vaulted the second wall and was hailing passersby in an attempt to get a ride. Somehow, Padilla managed to drag himself to the wall, where Brewer had left a wooden ladder that had been discarded in the lot. He pulled himself over, and Brewer helped carry him 20 feet down the street. Seconds later, a car stopped; Padilla and Brewer disappeared into downtown Lima.
* * *
I first met Eddie Padilla in 2009 at his then-home in Santa Rosa, where he was living with his wife of 32 years, Lorey. I was researching Orange Sunshine; her uncle was a fellow Brotherhood member, Brenice Smith, whose decades-long run from the law ended in 2009 when he returned to California from Nepal and spent a few months at the Orange County Jail (see "Distant Karma," Dec. 10, 2009). It wasn't an easy interview to get. When I emailed Padilla, asking if he'd share his tales from the days of the Brotherhood, he seemed cautious to the point of paranoia. He asked several questions regarding my intentions as a reporter, and when I responded that I wanted to meet with him in person and tape record an interview, he didn't reply for a few days. When he finally did answer, it was to tell me to get lost. "May all your days be six feet and glassy," he'd said, which seemed to be surfer lingo for goodbye and good luck.
Eventually, though, Padilla changed his mind, and over the course of two days, he shared his story with me—so much of it that the single-spaced transcript of my interview with him stretches more than 50 pages. He became a central character in my book, which also features a photograph of him taken on Maui in the early 2000s, when Padilla returned to the island as a drug counselor who had been sober for 17 years. In the shot, the shirtless, muscular, 60-something Padilla is grinning like a conquering warrior.
The only thing Padilla refused to share with me at the time was the story of his experience in Lurigancho. He was saving that for an article called the "Pirate of Penance" by former LA Weekly deputy editor Joe Donnelly that crowned the inaugural issue of the literary journal Slake in August 2010. "It's easy to see why Eddie Padilla was such a central figure in this entire drama," says Donnelly. "He's charismatic, egotistical, curious, and while he's a generous and kind person, he still has a bit of an edge to him. I should add, too, that the man can surf."
Padilla is now the only person alive who is known to have escaped from Lurigancho. Thomason, who wasn't included in the escape plan, served six months at the prison before being pardoned. Like Padilla, he struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction; he is now supposedly living on a friend's property in a rural area of Hawaii. Brewer passed away in Dana Point on June 2, 2008. Two weeks later, Padilla and other friends held a paddle-out memorial service for him at Old Man's Beach.
For the rest of Padilla's amazing story, you'll have to read his newly published book, Lurigancho (Flying Rabbit Press, 2013), which he coauthored with the Maui-based scribe Paul Wood. He covers the depths of despair he reached inside that hellhole—not to mention the amazing escape from Peru that followed his foot-fracturing leap. But what he experienced in Lurigancho has made him such an effective addiction counselor that he hasn't been out of work since he went back to school in the mid-1980s following a near-death experience that led to his own recovery. "I think he's doing exactly what he's supposed to be doing," Lorey says. "He knows just how far down you can go and what it takes to get out of that."
You can also get the abridged version of Padilla's escape from Lurigancho in the recent episode of the National Geographic Channel's Locked Up Abroad, which features interviews with Padilla that the British film crew had to fly to the Bay Area to film because Interpol still has a warrant out for Padilla's arrest on the Peruvian coke charges. To film the re-enactment scenes, the show's producer found what he called a "disgusting" prison in Ecuador that seemed to fit the part.
"I hope it does Lurigancho justice," the producer told Padilla.
“I looked at it,” Padilla recalls, “and thought, 'This place looks nice.'”
The onetime OC man is the only man still alive who escaped from Peru's most notorious prison
By NICK SCHOU Thursday, Jun 20 2013
Jillian Seaman When Eddie Padilla first learned he was headed to Peru's San Juan de Lurigancho Prison, he was happy.
It was the winter of 1975, and he had just spent the past few weeks locked up in a closet in an ex-drug dealer's mansion in Peru's capital, Lima, a building that Peruvian Internal Police had seized and converted into a detention center and torture chamber. But the corrupt cops who had busted him and his friends for a cocaine-smuggling venture gone awry had a plan. In return for a large chunk of change, they'd fabricate a story that would clear the trio of the crime. All Padilla and his pals had to do was wait six months in Lurigancho. It would be easy, the cops said, a vacation. It wasn't so much a prison as a country club, with tennis courts and a swimming pool.
The trip to the prison, located in the desert outside Lima, was nightmarish. Padilla, his two friends and fellow Orange County smugglers, Richard Brewer and James Thomason, were packed on a school bus with more than 120 other men. His left hand had been handcuffed to the right hand of the man sitting to his right, and his right hand was similarly cuffed to the man to his left—Padilla had to place his head between his knees so he would not lose circulation in his wrists.
"The first time I lifted my head was when we were going through a sally port into the yard of the prison," Padilla says. "We could see there were no fucking tennis courts. We went into the administration area, and a soldier came in, a lieutenant, and he started telling us, 'This is a prison. The rules are strict. If you try to escape, we will kill you.'"
While that warning resonated in Padilla's head, a leader of the inmates' welcoming committee approached the new group of prisoners. His face, neck and arms were covered with tattoos; his eyes betrayed no glimpse of a human soul. He had only one message, one simple piece of advice that he wished to share with Padilla and the others.
"You need to get a shank," the man advised, "if you want to stay a man."
* * *
Eddie Padilla's journey to the Peruvian equivalent of hell on earth began in another hard-luck locale: in South Central Los Angeles, just across the railroad tracks from Watts. He was born on Oct. 31, 1944, to a mixed-race couple: a German-Irish mother and a half-black, half-Native American dad. In the early 1950s, the family moved to Anaheim, where Padilla was just about the only non-white, non-Mexican kid he knew.
"I was the darkest kid around forever," Padilla says. By the time Padilla had enrolled in Anaheim High School, he had a chip on his shoulder. "Everyone went to Disneyland to get a job for the summer and hang out on 15th Street Beach in Newport. I went to apply to Disneyland and was the only one to not get hired."
Padilla began regularly fighting with his mostly white classmates. After being expelled from the city's public-education system, he briefly attended St. Boniface Catholic Church's school, but he was kicked out after cracking open a classmate's skull. Following a stretch in juvenile hall, Padilla wound up at Servite High School, where he promptly swung a chair at a teacher who had slapped his face. Next followed a football-playing stint at a school in Downey, more fighting and a full-circle transfer back to Anaheim High.
It was in his junior and senior years at the school that Padilla fell in with a group of other troubled, drug-addled, violence-prone teenagers with nicknames such as Mad Dog, Black Bart and Dark Cloud, dead-end suburban street fighters who would become his close friends and compatriots. Some of them were surfers, some dealt pot, some were members of a car club called the Street Sweepers. The most charismatic of them was a young trouble-maker named John "the Farmer" Griggs, a varsity wrestler who made up for his short stature with an epic temper.
Making new friends didn't keep Padilla out of trouble. He became a speed addict, his bizarre behavior leading to repeated arrests for everything from indecent exposure to assaulting a police officer, a depraved spree that only ended when a judge sentenced him to 18 months of mental-health detention at Atascadero State Hospital in central California. Upon his release, Padilla married his high-school sweetheart and took lackluster steps toward finding work. Easier money was to be made peddling marijuana, however, and he set about trying to become a significant player in the pot trade.
Padilla would eventually accomplish that goal, but not before a mind-altering substance, LSD, set him on a course that would come to define him—and would lead him to Lurigancho. It was on his 21st birthday that Padilla took a ride into the hills east of Anaheim and dropped a hit of acid that gave him his first "ego-death" experience, in which he "saw god" and decided to ditch every other drug except marijuana. In 1966, just before California became the first state to outlaw LSD, Padilla, together with Griggs and a few dozen other Anaheim High alums, helped to form a church called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which aimed to turn on the world to the drug, and eventually lured Timothy Leary, the psychedelic prophet and defrocked Harvard professor, to Orange County to assist them in achieving that purpose.
The group began with communal acid-dropping sessions at Griggs' house in Modjeska Canyon, but by 1967, it had moved to Laguna Beach; its new headquarters was Mystic Arts World, a head shop, art gallery and retail boutique on Pacific Coast Highway. Inside the store, Padilla managed a small bead shop; other members sold everything from incense and candles to esoteric literature and copies of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi, and Leary and Ralph Metzner's The Psychedelic Experience.
Every weekend, groups would head off to local beaches, hot springs and mountains to drop acid. Meanwhile, trips to Mexico to haul back blankets, ponchos and other indigenous handicrafts doubled as pot-smuggling ventures. Padilla's first stint as a smuggler was also almost his last. He and a trio of Brotherhood members took a truck to Mexico and camped out on the beach near Mazatlán. While one of their friends traveled to Oaxaca to purchase some native crafts, Padilla and two of his partners purchased 200 kilos of weed and waited on the beach for the friend to return.
The cops arrived first and lengthily questioned the Americans, but they failed to discover the pot that Padilla had hastily buried in the sand. Once his friend returned from Oaxaca—and before the Mexicans were the wiser—Padilla stashed the marijuana in the truck's side panels; the group drove across the border without a hitch. "People started bringing loads in from all over the place," Padilla says, "smuggling like crazy and getting really sophisticated at it, too."
Soon, Padilla and his friends had become such reliable marketers of marijuana that they had their own in-house attorney: George Chula, the Saul Goodman of his day, whose investigator, Michael Marvich, an ex-con, would often alert Padilla or another Brotherhood member when and where to pick up a car full of pot that had just arrived from Mexico. But Padilla was ambitious. In 1967, he and a brother filled every available panel of a double-cab Volkswagen bus with 500 pounds of Mexican weed and proceeded to drive it to San Francisco, where they hoped to unload enough of it to keep the city's Summer of Love going through winter.
Instead, the cops almost immediately busted Padilla. An FBI agent arrived at the jail to interrogate him.
"They knew about the shop, the Brotherhood, everything about me," Padilla says. "They wanted me to rat on the Mexicans. I said, 'Give me one month. Let me out of jail, and I'll call you in a month and try to set something up for you.'" The agent didn't find that funny. Thanks to the Brotherhood's attorney, Padilla quickly made bail. He bounced back and forth to court for the next two years, as did many of his friends, before realizing that if he remained in California, he'd be headed to prison for a longer time than he could afford to spare.
Meanwhile, time was running out for the Brotherhood. While single members of the group took over a neighborhood they called "Dodge City" on Woodland Drive in Laguna Beach, Leary had joined many married members of the Brotherhood at a ranch in Idyllwild, in the mountains above Palm Springs, where he lived in a Native American teepee and hatched a campaign to run for governor of California on a platform to legalize marijuana, outlaw football and return the state to a pre-capitalist barter economy. But a series of mishaps drove the Brotherhood from its commune. First, a member who'd just returned from Afghanistan with a surfboard full of hash was busted driving up to the ranch. The 17-year-old girlfriend of another Brotherhood member drowned in a swimming hole while tripping on acid, leading to Leary's arrest for criminal negligence in the incident. Griggs' untimely death in August 1969 from what appears to be the only known case of overdosing on synthetic psilocybin sealed the group's fractious fate, with members evading police in Mexico, Central and South America, and Maui.
Maui was a natural choice for Padilla, who'd always hoped that the Brotherhood's illicit smuggling activities could somehow finance the purchase of a tropical island where the group could pursue the hippie ideal of dropping out of society and living in harmony with nature. At the time, the island had yet to be overrun with tourism, and the Brotherhood easily blended in with the thousands of hippies who arrived each year and formed a natural customer base for the group's drug enterprise.
As I recounted in my 2010 book, Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love and Acid to the World, Padilla arrived on the island in May 1970 by the most arduous route imaginable. Along with a handful of friends, almost none of whom had any sailing experience, he sailed to Maui on the Aafje, a 70-foot yacht the Brotherhood had loaded with a ton of high-quality Mexican marijuana it dubbed "Lightning Bolt," the clones of which, when planted on Maui, became the legendary "Maui Wowie" strain. Because the boat had no functioning navigational equipment, the Aafje strayed off course by hundreds of miles, surviving several tropical storms in the process; the trip was saved when a sympathetic Norwegian ship captain gave them fuel and food to complete their voyage.
Padilla spent the next three years on Maui. He was there when Jimi Hendrix played what amounted to a private show for the Brotherhood and their friends thousands of feet above sea level on the slope of the Haleakala volcano, an event immortalized in the eminently unwatchable 1972 film Rainbow Bridge. Before long, though, cocaine moved in—as well as the ego, greed and paranoia that came along with it. Padilla abandoned his wife and young kids in Kihei and retreated to a house in Makawao, spending more time getting high and chasing younger women than surfing. "I had a total fucking relapse," Padilla recalls. "It was like I had never taken acid."
In August 1972, a multi-agency task force busted the Brotherhood, raiding stash houses and hash-oil operations from Laguna Beach to Oregon to Hawaii. Although many of his friends were caught in the arrests that took place that month, most spent only a few months or a year in jail before going back into smuggling. Padilla managed to evade arrest and fled to Costa Rica, where he stayed until the heat had passed. He then began traveling again under an assumed name.
"I had the genius to think I could smuggle coke," he says. Padilla hollowed out the neck and body of a Fender electric guitar so he could fill it with 1,800 grams of cocaine. "I found somebody who had a connection and went to Cali [Colombia] and started running coke from Cali, flying from Bogota right to LA."
When the police busted the Colombian network, Padilla turned to Peru. He made seven successful coke runs from Lima to LA before a friend invited him to sail from Tahiti to Hawaii to supervise a load of "Thai Stick." Before he could take up the offer, though, Padilla had one last deal he had to finish in Peru. "I was burned out," he says. "I made up my mind that this trip was going to be the proverbial last time."
* * *
When the Peruvian police busted into Padilla's room, his world blacked out, and all he could see was the barrel of the gun pointed at his face.
Padilla had arrived in Peru the previous day and was staying at a high-end resort outside Lima with his friends Richard Brewer and James Thomason—both of them fellow Orange County-bred smugglers. They were posing as a trio of jet-setting tourists on a surfing safari, but in reality, they were about to fly back north with as much Peruvian flake as they could carry.
The man pointing the pistol at Padilla's skull was named Delgado. He had dark skin, jet-black hair and a body built like a tank. "That guy was the evilest fucking guy I met in my life," Padilla recalls. "He reeked of murder and mayhem. Every word had a threat in it; it seemed like there was no hesitation that he would kill you."
It didn't help things that Delgado and his Peruvian Internal Police (PIP) cohorts had followed Padilla's in-country coke contacts for days before he landed at the airport. Or that there were 20 kilos of cocaine in his hotel room. The only thing in Padilla's favor was that he'd hired a San Clemente machinist to craft a diving tank with a hollow bottom, which was now filled with $58,000 in cash and sitting next to the coke. "They came in the door, started kicking us around, slapping us around," Padilla says. "That's when I got Delgado to get that bag of money."
As Padilla would only later discover, Delgado and his PIP henchmen were elite anti-narcotics officers with license to murder drug traffickers. They were backed by the newly created U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), whose birth in 1973 was a consequence of the rapid rise in drug smuggling fueled by groups such as the Brotherhood.
The PIP, or at least Delgado, was also corrupt to the core. As soon as Padilla offered him $58,000 as a down payment to drop the charges, Delgado appeared willing to sabotage his own case against the three American smugglers. Ostensibly to keep them isolated from the DEA agents who were eager to interrogate them until he could come up with a cover story that would exculpate them, Delgado took Padilla and his pals to the PIP's infamous Pink Panther villa, which the agency had seized from a recently deceased cartel figure.
"It was a two-story, pink mansion," Padilla says. "They took the whole bottom floor and made it a jail, put metal doors on closets and dining rooms. The cell we were in was literally a walk-in closet, with a metal door and framing. It was pitch dark, and I was handcuffed for two days. You could hear people screaming and women being raped."
Padilla began to lose hope. He apologized to his friends for luring them to Peru on such a stupid mission. "I broke inside that closet," he recalls. "I fucking broke down crying."
* * *
About six months into his incarceration at Lurigancho, Padilla began to realize he wasn't going home any time soon. Although the Brotherhood's attorney, Chula, had flown to Peru to help facilitate his defense—even smuggling a ball of hash to Padilla—the Peruvian justice system was proving difficult to thwart. Delgado had testified in court that there were no drugs in Padilla's room until after Padilla had been handcuffed, meaning that someone had set him up, and if anything, Padilla should only face possession charges. The judge had pronounced Padilla and his friends abseulto—absolved—of the crime. But now they needed to wait for the Peruvian Supreme Court to sign off on the ruling, and the judges seemed to be in no particular hurry to do so.
Padilla began to lose track of time, as the horrors of Lurigancho caused one day to bleed into the next. Although the prison was heavily guarded from the outside, few guards ventured inside the facility, and inmates were free to roam wherever they wanted during daylight hours. Although Padilla and other foreigners were lucky to have their own tier, which afforded them the slightest protection and privacy from other inmates, the floor of most wards of the prison were typically covered in piss, shit and human vomit. "People were murdering people, stabbing them," Padilla says. "People were turning white, and people were stepping over bodies."
Food was hard to come by, and while drugs were easily obtainable, they came at a price. Padilla's dealer, a thug named Pelón, demanded Padilla carry out a hit on another man, and when Padilla failed to do so, Pelón attacked him with a knife. An older inmate who took pity on Padilla helped disarm Pelón and even paid him money to leave Padilla alone. In return, he demanded Padilla forsake all drugs except marijuana, and Padilla once again cleaned up his act.
As more inmates began pouring into Lurigancho in the late 1970s, conditions in the prison continued to deteriorate. The daily battle for food was so intense that the least-favored inmates were starved—in at least one case, fatally—by fellow prisoners. Inevitably, the inmates began to demand better treatment. Some of them managed to take a guard hostage. "Three Peruvians in the nastiest cell block that no guard would go inside had stabbed a guard," Padilla says. "The animals had cut him up; you could see the blood running."
The prisoners released the guard in exchange for a promise for better treatment. Everything was calm at Lurigancho until three days later; Padilla looked out his cell window and saw a group of soldiers lining up on a hillside overlooking the prison. They positioned a 50-caliber machine gun on a tripod; an officer shouted, "Fuego" and blew his whistle, and bullets flew into the mutinous ward for the next five minutes.
"The amount of ammunition that went into that building was incredible," Padilla says. "Then they shot tear gas, and the soldiers went in with gas masks, shooting anyone in sight with pistols. That was the first time I experienced tear gas, and it rolled into our block. The guards unlocked our cell and let us lay down in the hallway. They killed something like 100 or 170 guys, piled out dead in the main hallway. The next day, in the paper, it said it was an attempted escape."
In early 1979, the Peruvian Supreme Court finally granted Padilla, Brewer and Thomason a hearing to determine if they would be absolved of their cocaine-trafficking charges. While they waited for the ruling, they were removed from Lurigancho to a jail near the courthouse in downtown Lima. But on a Friday evening in July, after six months at the jail and four years in Lurigancho, their lawyer announced the court had refused to grant the trio their freedom. Padilla and his friends now faced the prospect of returning to Lurigancho to finish out their 20-year sentences.
To Padilla, the news felt like a death sentence. "If you do 15 or 20 years in Lurigancho, there is a good chance you will not make it," he explains. Although Thomason, who had his own attorney, said he was willing to try to escape, he didn't seem sure of the plan. Padilla and Brewer made a pact: No matter what happened, they were not going back to the prison. "It was do or die," he says. "We were serious as a heart attack. There was no going back."
Padilla and Brewer knew the location of a church in Lima where a friendly minister who often visited the prison might shelter them until they could figure out a way to reach the Brazilian border. They hoped to find transport to the Urubamba River and float their way to freedom. Once in Brazil, they could walk into a police station and claim to be tourists who had been robbed and lost their passports. They'd even used toothpaste to create a rudimentary map of their escape route on the wall of their jail cell, telling the guards the map showed their future travel plans once they were released.
After six months at the jail, Padilla had won over the guards, who seemed convinced the Americans really were just harmless surfers who, if released, had no plans to even leave Peru, but rather pick up where they left off four years ago and find some waves. The following night, a Saturday, Padilla bribed the guards, who brought beer and whisky into their cell. "I took a sip of beer and a sip of Johnnie Walker," he recalls, "but James [Thomason] drank almost half a fifth and was sick, barfing."
The guards unlocked the cell door while Thomason puked his guts out in the latrine across the hallway. When they weren't looking, Padilla and Brewer crept out of their cell. Using a metal spoon's handle, they pried open a locked door at the end of the hall, climbed a 20-foot wall topped with a 5-foot-high chain-link fence strung with three strands of barbed wire. Although it was completely dark, Padilla and Brewer knew that they were about to jump into an abandoned lot half-filled with lumber, the other side of which, beyond a short wall, was a busy Lima thoroughfare.
Brewer jumped first and landed safely in the grass. Padilla took a deep breath and flung himself after his friend. One foot reached the grass. The other came up short, crunching stiffly into a stack of wood, and Padilla collapsed in a heap. "The plan was completely over because I could not walk," Padilla says. "My foot was the size of a cantaloupe." Padilla would later discover he had broken several bones in his foot and the fall had sheared his Achilles tendon.
Because their plan was to separate and meet up at the church, Brewer had already vaulted the second wall and was hailing passersby in an attempt to get a ride. Somehow, Padilla managed to drag himself to the wall, where Brewer had left a wooden ladder that had been discarded in the lot. He pulled himself over, and Brewer helped carry him 20 feet down the street. Seconds later, a car stopped; Padilla and Brewer disappeared into downtown Lima.
* * *
I first met Eddie Padilla in 2009 at his then-home in Santa Rosa, where he was living with his wife of 32 years, Lorey. I was researching Orange Sunshine; her uncle was a fellow Brotherhood member, Brenice Smith, whose decades-long run from the law ended in 2009 when he returned to California from Nepal and spent a few months at the Orange County Jail (see "Distant Karma," Dec. 10, 2009). It wasn't an easy interview to get. When I emailed Padilla, asking if he'd share his tales from the days of the Brotherhood, he seemed cautious to the point of paranoia. He asked several questions regarding my intentions as a reporter, and when I responded that I wanted to meet with him in person and tape record an interview, he didn't reply for a few days. When he finally did answer, it was to tell me to get lost. "May all your days be six feet and glassy," he'd said, which seemed to be surfer lingo for goodbye and good luck.
Eventually, though, Padilla changed his mind, and over the course of two days, he shared his story with me—so much of it that the single-spaced transcript of my interview with him stretches more than 50 pages. He became a central character in my book, which also features a photograph of him taken on Maui in the early 2000s, when Padilla returned to the island as a drug counselor who had been sober for 17 years. In the shot, the shirtless, muscular, 60-something Padilla is grinning like a conquering warrior.
The only thing Padilla refused to share with me at the time was the story of his experience in Lurigancho. He was saving that for an article called the "Pirate of Penance" by former LA Weekly deputy editor Joe Donnelly that crowned the inaugural issue of the literary journal Slake in August 2010. "It's easy to see why Eddie Padilla was such a central figure in this entire drama," says Donnelly. "He's charismatic, egotistical, curious, and while he's a generous and kind person, he still has a bit of an edge to him. I should add, too, that the man can surf."
Padilla is now the only person alive who is known to have escaped from Lurigancho. Thomason, who wasn't included in the escape plan, served six months at the prison before being pardoned. Like Padilla, he struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction; he is now supposedly living on a friend's property in a rural area of Hawaii. Brewer passed away in Dana Point on June 2, 2008. Two weeks later, Padilla and other friends held a paddle-out memorial service for him at Old Man's Beach.
For the rest of Padilla's amazing story, you'll have to read his newly published book, Lurigancho (Flying Rabbit Press, 2013), which he coauthored with the Maui-based scribe Paul Wood. He covers the depths of despair he reached inside that hellhole—not to mention the amazing escape from Peru that followed his foot-fracturing leap. But what he experienced in Lurigancho has made him such an effective addiction counselor that he hasn't been out of work since he went back to school in the mid-1980s following a near-death experience that led to his own recovery. "I think he's doing exactly what he's supposed to be doing," Lorey says. "He knows just how far down you can go and what it takes to get out of that."
You can also get the abridged version of Padilla's escape from Lurigancho in the recent episode of the National Geographic Channel's Locked Up Abroad, which features interviews with Padilla that the British film crew had to fly to the Bay Area to film because Interpol still has a warrant out for Padilla's arrest on the Peruvian coke charges. To film the re-enactment scenes, the show's producer found what he called a "disgusting" prison in Ecuador that seemed to fit the part.
"I hope it does Lurigancho justice," the producer told Padilla.
“I looked at it,” Padilla recalls, “and thought, 'This place looks nice.'”
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"Official" History Site
Peace * Love * Groovy
(c)2015, Aquarian Temple BEL, BrotherhoodofEternal Love.org
This site does not advocate or encourage any illegal activity.
"Official" History Site
Peace * Love * Groovy
