[SPEAKER_01]: previously on cocaine air.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, on his dying bed, he said, son promised me one thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, sure dad, he said, finished a project.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I said, I promise you I'll finish the project.
[SPEAKER_02]: And TJ Dominguez tries, and tries, and tries to finish the project.
[SPEAKER_02]: To get that sugar mill in Haiti off the ground, to know a veil.
[SPEAKER_01]: which is tired of being used and kicked of the curb.
[SPEAKER_01]: I really was.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's when I decided, what's right, what's wrong?
[SPEAKER_01]: It seems to me, what's right is whatever it works for you and you can get away with.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm not gonna let anybody push me anymore.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everything that they do, I'm gonna do better.
[SPEAKER_02]: After getting scammed twice by a couple of low-life bankers, he said, look, kid, you're green behind your ears.
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to the real world, this ain't Miami.
[SPEAKER_01]: You got nothing without me.
[SPEAKER_01]: You got a pipe dream without me.
[SPEAKER_02]: As a last resort, TJ Deminguez decides to become a drug smuggler, because he needs $14 million fast to keep a promise he made to his father.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had to talk with my dad, my dad, my dad, my dad, father, and I said to my father, you're not going to approve of what I'm going to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not asking for your permission, but I'm going to get this sugar mill done, but I'm going to do it my way.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm tired of asking people from money.
[SPEAKER_02]: So TJ gets a boat and heads for the Bahamas.
[SPEAKER_02]: Looking at buying off weed to fill Willie Nelson's tour bus.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think I'm ready to go and go to the Bahamas, where I figured that's where all this pot comes from.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't even know where the Bahamas was at.
[SPEAKER_01]: Never been to the Bahamas.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm gonna do this.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm geared.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm determined to do this.
[SPEAKER_01]: As you don't know where the Bahamas are at.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm Jonathan Walton.
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is Cocaine Air, the TJ Dominguez story.
[SPEAKER_02]: Episode 2, not my day to die.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me see your identification.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't need to see his identification.
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't need to see his identification.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's 1977 now, and Star Wars is the number one movie in the country.
[SPEAKER_02]: TJ Dominguez is 25 years old at this point, but unlike Luke Skywalker, he doesn't have a Obi-Wan Kenobi to teach him how to become a drug smuggling Jedi.
[SPEAKER_02]: His Millennium Falcon is the new speedboat he just bought.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the only Han Solo he can find is far from Harrison Ford.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I go meet this old Cuban fisherman and he says, so what do you want to do kid?
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, don't want to go to a Bahamas.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, okay, what are you going to do in the Bahamas?
[SPEAKER_01]: And he said, don't want to bring in some pot.
[SPEAKER_01]: You want to go with me?
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you crazy?
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm too old to go to jail.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I don't want to go with you.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, but I tell you how to find the Bahamas.
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, okay, fine.
[SPEAKER_01]: He said, we're going to boat you got.
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, I've got a race boat, man.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've got a scare up, you know, close cabin for 54 over 1,000 horses.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's doing 100 miles.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, no, you don't need to go to a magical 20 30 miles.
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, okay, I said, so how do I find the Bahamas?
[SPEAKER_01]: He says,
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, whoa, I don't even know what you're talking about, it's turnin' about.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've thrown, throw the boat back at the boat.
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, what are you gonna be coming out of?
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, I'm gonna probably come out of hall over.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hall over is actually a nude beach about 20 miles south of Fort Lauderdale.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a great spot to launch a secret mission from, because if you think about it, with hundreds of naked, oiled up bodies lying around, who's gonna notice anything else?
[SPEAKER_01]: So he said, listen, here's what you do.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the ass and all the boat against the sand, and be pointing east, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Now hit the throttle.
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't need to go on your mouth for hours.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, hit the throttle, maybe two or three thousand our PMs, you're going east.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, you're leaving a night time with daytime.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's not gonna leave a night time.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's just okay, fine.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when you don't see any more lights from your United States,
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, now look at your watch.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, and look forward to the left to the right.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, within an hour, you'll see lights glowing.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, when you see these lights glowing, head toward those lights.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the first island in the Bahamas.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's called Bimini.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's two of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a North Island and it's some island.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, now mine you, you've got to go in between, but don't go in the middle, because if you go in the middle of the two islands, and it's low tide, you're going to bottom out your boat,
[SPEAKER_01]: and you're gonna drown out there.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, so don't do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you gotta go all the way to the South Island, aim toward the beach, hang a quick lift, parallel the sand to shore, and you're gonna slide right in between both islands.
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, okay, I got that, I said.
[SPEAKER_01]: But listen, what if I don't find the islands within one hour?
[SPEAKER_01]: He's a shit, he's a turn around, you're lost.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's just going back, he's don't keep going forward.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a big ocean out there and I'm gonna find and he's gonna run out of gas.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's just going back to the United States and go back.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's just don't be afraid, the United States of big country.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're gonna hit, he was Georgia, you're gonna hit some land.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just don't keep going easy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Turn around and come back west.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's how I found the Bahamas.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you weren't scared, just heading out on a boat.
[SPEAKER_01]: My heart was pounding like there's no tomorrow.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I was scared.
[SPEAKER_01]: If I told you anything different, I'd be a liar.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you did it anyway.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had no choice.
[SPEAKER_02]: I became a smuggler.
[SPEAKER_02]: And keep in mind here, the Bahamas of 1977 is not the Bahamas of today.
[SPEAKER_01]: The South Island is like, it was the time
[SPEAKER_01]: There's nothing happening there.
[SPEAKER_01]: People then even live their sort of speak, just a few homes.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the North Island was like Las Vegas.
[SPEAKER_01]: Glitter lights everywhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember it was, I was so nervous and so adrenaline flowing through my vein that everything just glittered.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I didn't know what to talk either, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It was like all of me.
[SPEAKER_01]: So one sign stood out and it said, big game, the big game hotel.
[SPEAKER_01]: and I said shit, that's it I'm playing and because we gave him my life, that's what I'm gonna do.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I pull him in there.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's where TJ meets that behameian guy, who mistakenly thinks that he's there to buy gas.
[SPEAKER_02]: But after TJ tells him, he actually wants to buy marijuana.
[SPEAKER_02]: I got to get the likey.
[SPEAKER_02]: Bales and Bales of marijuana.
[SPEAKER_02]: The guy offers to take TJ to see his uncle.
[SPEAKER_02]: who it appears is a big-time drug dealer.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was about 11 o'clock, it was nighttime.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he said, I get off in an hour, check into the hotel, and I'll take you to see my uncle.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I didn't want to check into no hotel or anything like that and had a much money left.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had like $25,000 in the rooms where it were expensive and I didn't go to the Resitoris.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just wanted to buy wheat.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I waited and I didn't know what to do because I had the hundreds in a bag.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't want to take them with me and I didn't want to leave it in the boat.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I got a beer and just set on the boat.
[SPEAKER_01]: and wait for this guy to get off work.
[SPEAKER_01]: When you got off work, we went down the ways a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: The island's only seven miles long, half of my whites.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you don't really go far there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we walked over to where his uncle was at.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he introduced me to the uncle and told him that I wanted to buy weight bales.
[SPEAKER_01]: At the time again, all kinds of things are going through my head because I have to tell you the only industry at the time in the Bahamas other than tourism and it really wasn't all that This piracy
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, the islands were built on piracy, so it does exist even to today.
[SPEAKER_01]: You got to be careful out there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I mean, no pull up to your boat to ask him for help when they rob you.
[SPEAKER_01]: So all these things are going through my head, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: And the guy goes, how much weight you want to buy?
[SPEAKER_01]: How much money you got?
[SPEAKER_01]: I just got by all the part you got.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, just like, I don't know, I don't even know, probably they're even asking for a price, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: At 25,000, that's all I got, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: So the guy goes, all right, all right, we're gonna do the exchange in the middle of the ocean.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he said, why the middle of the ocean?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because that's where I feel comfortable.
[SPEAKER_01]: He said, all right, so I'm thinking, I'm gonna get robbed, I'm gonna steal my boats, steal my money, throw me in the water, get eaten up by a shark.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I have to go, I have no choice, not my data die.
[SPEAKER_01]: So sure enough, I see the light, I pull up to it with my speedboat by myself.
[SPEAKER_01]: We tie up next to each other and there's two guys on their boat, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And one guy's an older guy's got his arms crossed.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's leaning against the cabin and then the other guy is up up against the rail.
[SPEAKER_01]: As we tie up the boat, the guy says, let me see the money.
[SPEAKER_01]: I said to him, let me see the pot.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he says, let me see the money, how much money you got.
[SPEAKER_01]: I said how much weight you got.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you got a couple hundred pounds.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wanted to make sure there was part of not a ray on all that I was buying.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because the Bahamas and the Tori is for that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I got a died knife strapped on my leg.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't have a gun with me.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I got thrown a knife pretty good.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm pretty good about back in my karate days, it pretty much all kinds of weapon.
[SPEAKER_02]: So at this point, TJ doesn't know if he's going to be robbed and killed and fed to the sharks.
[SPEAKER_02]: Meanwhile, all he's got to defend himself is a knife to throw, like he's John Wick or something.
[SPEAKER_02]: If it was me, I'd be on my knees, say in my Hail Mary's.
[SPEAKER_02]: But TJ doesn't back down.
[SPEAKER_02]: And all of a sudden, the drug dealers show TJ what they have.
[SPEAKER_01]: The guy throws two bales.
[SPEAKER_01]: I take my knife out and I cut a window into the bail.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right now I open it up.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to make sure it's part.
[SPEAKER_01]: I sticked in my deep inside this thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was hard back.
[SPEAKER_01]: 100 pounds each.
[SPEAKER_01]: Couple hundred pounds of a part.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they were floating in the middle of the ocean out there two o'clock in the morning, one o'clock in the morning, no lights, back and forth.
[SPEAKER_01]: And guys, it's okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: You satisfied?
[SPEAKER_01]: Sarah, I take some duct tape.
[SPEAKER_01]: I tape up the pot again.
[SPEAKER_01]: throw it on the on the floor of the boat.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the guy says, let me see the money.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I take my money and I give it to him.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's how much is there?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it 25,000?
[SPEAKER_01]: He says 30,000.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've 5,000 lot of short.
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, well, that's what I got.
[SPEAKER_01]: Guy says to me, hey man, there's no credit here.
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, let me ask you for a credit line.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just asking for a little bit of trust.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to give you 25,000.
[SPEAKER_01]: He goes, there's no credit here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you hear me?
[SPEAKER_01]: It starts getting a little boisterous with me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I say, hey, here you man, I said, what are we gonna do?
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you here by $5,000?
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, you don't have it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, hey, man, there ain't no credit in this business.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the other guy in the back starts, you know, making a little bit of noise.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't wanna tell you this, I don't wanna tell you this.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was the next thing I know.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, give the kid to part.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think he'll come back.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I say to them, listen man, if I don't come back, I'm either dead or I'm in jail, but I'll come back.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the guy repeated your own, in this business, there's no credit.
[SPEAKER_01]: I say, I will bring you your 5,000 back and promise you.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I take off that same night, I bring it back to the United States.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, it's funny because in the middle of the ocean is okay, you're out there, you're hearing all kinds of different noises.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're looking at stars, you think they're airplane blanking and coming after you.
[SPEAKER_01]: You start hallucinating really.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really amazing to be out in the middle of the ocean on small speedboat, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: And that part is not really scary at all because you're just out there with the elements.
[SPEAKER_01]: The scary part comes when you can see the shore.
[SPEAKER_01]: When you come to the shore and now I throttle back and you take a deep breath.
[SPEAKER_01]: And now it's all hell gonna break loose balls to the wall, you know, this is it.
[SPEAKER_01]: You swim so far to die on the shore.
[SPEAKER_01]: The scariest part is the last mile.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what it's all gonna get, man.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or you gotta be, you know, you're gonna come out of winter.
[SPEAKER_02]: What can happen in the last mile?
[SPEAKER_02]: Get popped.
[SPEAKER_02]: Get ya.
[SPEAKER_02]: Which means what?
[SPEAKER_01]: Guns.
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, jail.
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, embarrassment for your family had no knowledge what I was doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't like lying or deceiving anybody.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just took in everything that I was raised to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I had no choice, but to forcefully lie to the people that I loved and the people that I cared for.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because first of all, that would have never tolerated, and never would have agreed to what I was doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the first thing from Jump Street.
[SPEAKER_01]: Second, I would have involved them indirectly in my world, which means that
[SPEAKER_01]: If things ever blew up, the feds, they round up everybody, including the dog and the cat.
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't leave anybody standing and they will sort them out later.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what you meant now, I would have put my mom, my wife, my family at risk.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everything that's negative, just lose everything, lose the money, lose the boat.
[SPEAKER_01]: devastation, lose it all.
[SPEAKER_01]: You swim so far to die on the shore.
[SPEAKER_01]: And which branch of law enforcement were you scared of?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, for example, Indian Creek.
[SPEAKER_01]: Indian Creek is a very high end neighborhood here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Probably some of the most expensive real estate in the United States, small little island.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have Indian Creek police boat that patrols her on the little island.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have to have to go buy them.
[SPEAKER_01]: People don't realize coming into the States.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not just open-season everywhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're government cuts.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're maybe 100 foot wide, 200 foot wide, and these little openings are like highways cutting to slivers.
[SPEAKER_01]: And right in the front is where all of them sit.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have their local police.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have Marine Patrol.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have Coast Guard.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have customs, you have DEA, there's five of them off the top of my head, they're in front of that little opening that port hall opening and that's what you have to thread that needle.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to hope that you can go through all of those guys without getting popped and you did.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh yeah, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many times.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what's the secret to that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well the secret to that is you're really rolling the dice.
[SPEAKER_01]: at that point, it's in the hands of God.
[SPEAKER_02]: TJ's first trip is a success.
[SPEAKER_02]: Then he soon proves extremely adept at the crap scheme of marijuana smuggling.
[SPEAKER_02]: In no time, TJ's bringing in hundreds of pounds of marijuana from the Bahamas, regularly.
[SPEAKER_02]: and making hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not the 14 million he needs to get the sugar mill off the ground and keep that promising made to his dad, but it's definitely a good start.
[SPEAKER_02]: And TJ always seems to have Lady Luck on his side.
[SPEAKER_01]: But later on, I'm taking the element of luck out of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm becoming a professional and we're a lot of people they made their money and they go over a bottle of champagne.
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought things out and how can I improve on this situation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me give you one scenario.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm driving a car with 200, 200 pounds from my one in the back of the car.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was stopping go traffic on 95.
[SPEAKER_01]: I get hit by a lady.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some nice old lady hits me in the back, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: What she pulls over is stopping the traffic.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have to pull over, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So when I pull over, I get out of the car.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my God, I hate you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, man, nothing happened here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Look, does not even stretch on the car.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh no, no, my husband says we got to call the police.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have 200 pounds of wheat in the trunk.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to call the police, man.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't care if you came in my car.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're not calling the cops.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, this woman is doing what her husband told her to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: Call the police.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's so I'm arguing with her.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not going to file a police report.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why go through all the trouble?
[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing happened here.
[SPEAKER_01]: What did you go your way and I'll go my way?
[SPEAKER_01]: No, because my husband said, Well, you know, 20 minutes later I convinced his lady not to call the cops.
[SPEAKER_01]: I jumped in my car.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is I'm driving away?
[SPEAKER_01]: He said, How the hell can I prevent that from happening again?
[SPEAKER_01]: Then I came up with the idea of having a chase car.
[SPEAKER_01]: I put another car behind me.
[SPEAKER_01]: The other car behind me, we would be Tethered FM, so we're talking on the radio.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, and here's what I did.
[SPEAKER_01]: The car behind me is more of a high-end looking type of car for that Ferrari, wherever I go he goes.
[SPEAKER_01]: If I go left he goes left, if I go right he goes right, here's what happens.
[SPEAKER_01]: If a policeman tries to pull me over, his job is to hit the policeman on the right rear
[SPEAKER_01]: You spin them around, you throw your door open, you throw a bottle of boots on the ground.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're gonna maybe have your ass kicked, maybe by the cop, you're gonna be a little pissed off, and you hit his car, you got boots on the ground.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're gonna make you blow, walk straight line.
[SPEAKER_01]: You wanna keep him there as long as possible while I get away.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now here's what happens.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've got great lawyers that I pay a lot of money to.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then when he says to you, blow your refuse, your refuse, your refuse.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I'm going to give me that damn thing, I'll blow.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no alcohol.
[SPEAKER_01]: Worst case scenario, you have foot slipped off the brake, you hit the gas, lost control, you know, take it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're gonna pay somebody for that thing to go away.
[SPEAKER_01]: You want to blend in, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, traffic, for example, when I moved my drugs, I moved them from 9 to 5, and heavy traffic.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now you're increasing your ads or ads of a rival.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're the only car in, you know, at nighttime out there, you're more apt to be pulled over.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you like the traffic.
[SPEAKER_01]: I like the traffic.
[SPEAKER_01]: I do it between business hours, otherwise I'm on that beacon standing out there.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I did the same thing with boats.
[SPEAKER_02]: And TJ starts studying and strategizing and learning from other smugglers mistakes.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like an NFL quarterback watching old game footage of a competing team, TJ starts perfecting the art of smuggling.
[SPEAKER_01]: I read the newspapers to see so-and-so-go-pop.
[SPEAKER_01]: How did he get pop?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, he did this and this and this wrong.
[SPEAKER_01]: For example, when you're going out there and you're coming back and you're coming back and not in a speedboat, when you're coming back on sport fishing vessel, which is, you know, three, four, five million out of boat with a fighting chair in the back, you're not really going fishing.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you gotta have fish on the boat if you say you're going fishing.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I know these guys have brought frozen fish.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, well they're coming back and fish didn't fall out.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you're telling the Coast Guard that you were fishing in the guys says, well, we're going to catch these frozen fish at.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the ice world glossy.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you know, you're like, now I'm going to drill your boat and I'm going to check to see what you've got.
[SPEAKER_01]: So everything has to match.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just story has to blend in.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, that's why I stress to my guys.
[SPEAKER_01]: When they're in that type of vessel,
[SPEAKER_01]: I made them with white uniform white shoes, gold bars, you got to fit the part.
[SPEAKER_01]: Otherwise, you got a guy with scruffy outfit, blue jeans with holes, and a 5 million lot of boat.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something there doesn't look right.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's all about the details.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then on the speedboat,
[SPEAKER_01]: What I did later on to, you know, increase my odds of coming in, what I did was I put spotter boats.
[SPEAKER_01]: I hired a guy to hire a bunch of little boats.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, that's my security morale system.
[SPEAKER_01]: With the purpose of these little boats were, they would go up and down the coast.
[SPEAKER_01]: As I'm coming in,
[SPEAKER_02]: TJ's got all these boats dancing together, choreographed like an aquatic ballet, and he's actually bought a house now on the water to unload the hundreds of pounds of marijuana he's smuggling.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if I'm coming in with my speedboat, with my shadowboat behind me or side by side, we tie up, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Now we're maybe five miles out, three miles out.
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll tie it up, we got no lights running lights on the boat, we'll shut down.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now I get on my radio and I radio my top security guy.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know what I say?
[SPEAKER_02]: How does a driveway look?
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he'll answer back.
[SPEAKER_02]: Mother lost in the driveway.
[SPEAKER_01]: What that means is that the little spider boat you're going up and down and say you're on a boat, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So they're like, hey man, I dropped my ladder in the water.
[SPEAKER_01]: Can I get a light?
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're gonna come up to you and see if you're fishing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's no fishing gear and there's two, three guys and blue jeans.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is chances are this is the heat, this is the police, this is the EA, this is custom.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's a problem.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what their job was.
[SPEAKER_01]: He just going interview people on their boats, talk to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hey, are they biting?
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're not fishing that kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then they report to my main head guy.
[SPEAKER_02]: Mother once in the driveway, sit tight, how far are you?
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm five minutes out.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, she's moving, get it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So now I send the lead boat, the shadow boat goes out first and I stand back and look at the shadow boat.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no movement, nobody's following the shadow boat, I go behind them.
[SPEAKER_01]: because you opened up, you place the trail.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we pull up behind the house where I have a crew in the house of maybe three, four guys and they come out and then pick up the duffel bags.
[SPEAKER_01]: I jump off the boat and you never keep these high-speed boats in the back of the house because you bring heat to the house.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what happens is I come off the boat.
[SPEAKER_01]: My crew comes off the boat.
[SPEAKER_01]: Another crew gets on the boat.
[SPEAKER_01]: Guys, pick up the Duffel bag, bring in inside that house, which is on the ocean, another captain jumps on that boat, takes that boat to a marina, which is on by a friend of mine, the boats sits in the marina.
[SPEAKER_01]: The next day that boat's gonna come out of the water, go on a trailer and go into a warehouse.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're gonna clean the boat out, clean it, wax it, get it ready again to go next week.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that boat is there.
[SPEAKER_02]: And all these boats that TJ starts acquiring for his smuggling operation are very understated, very plain.
[SPEAKER_02]: on a crowded dock or marina with hundreds of other boats around, competing for attention with flashy paint jobs and clever names like Finn and Tonic, the cod father, or Cerosis of the river.
[SPEAKER_02]: TJ's boats are lying low, not getting noticed at all, and that's just how he wants it.
[SPEAKER_01]: A smuggler's boat is either white, black, dark blue, no graphics.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why?
[SPEAKER_01]: You want to keep it simple again, you want to blend in, here's what happened.
[SPEAKER_01]: The government would fly their airplane with a stroke camera and take pictures of you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Burr, yeah, thousand pictures in a minute.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, they can't arrest you, obviously, but here's what they do.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you've got one of a kind of boat, what graphics are easily identified, what do they do?
[SPEAKER_01]: They print this out, they post this out, they start looking for that boat.
[SPEAKER_01]: Here is the boat that we saw with drugs.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, you just heat it up your boat.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now that you're gonna put a transponder in your boat to track your a bug.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or they're gonna keep a profile on your boat.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this year all these little detail things
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like a game of chess in the water.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to try to outthink the guy that's trying to outthink you.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's really all mental.
[SPEAKER_01]: Before it all happens, you have to put pieces in front of you and be ahead of the curb before you turn that corner.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you know what's on the other side of that fence.
[SPEAKER_01]: And how do I do that by putting players, putting pieces, putting pawns?
[SPEAKER_01]: And these pawns and these pieces, they don't know me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Psalm buffered by one guy.
[SPEAKER_01]: They never meet me.
[SPEAKER_01]: They know there's a guy out there that's doing something, but they don't know who that guy is.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the event that they get in trouble, it does some ripple back to me.
[SPEAKER_02]: And for the more than three years, TJ's smuggling pot from the Bahamas, his chess pieces are doing their job, and authorities are never quite able to checkmate King TJ.
[SPEAKER_02]: You've heard that expression fortune favors the bold,
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, they got it wrong.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fortune actually seems to favor TJ Dominguez.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's not to say he isn't almost killed a thousand different times.
[SPEAKER_02]: How many times have you cheated death?
[SPEAKER_02]: I couldn't come.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the ones that stands out the most in my mind, being on a speedboat, doing close to 100 miles per hour, side by side to my other speedboat, and back, the Hamian American Task Force, a Huey helicopter with a 50 caliber machine gun, mountain on the door, shooting at us, trying to take our load.
[SPEAKER_01]: These guys who are serious about bringing us down and have tracer bullets, they wrote us for what appeared to be an eternity and you're looking at the bullets coming at you as the boat jumping up in the wave.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you're now aiming at the helicopter, the helicopter is not one of these fancy American helicopters.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is from Vietnam War, a relic.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you got the guy sitting in the door and you see these bullets coming off the cannon.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're going right over the boat.
[SPEAKER_01]: The boat's jumping up on the way, coming back down, the water's flashing everybody's screaming.
[SPEAKER_01]: I got gas tanks that run on the rail of the boat that are carrying 400 gallons of fuel.
[SPEAKER_01]: and we're gone, we're like a full bomb.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I hear my guys screaming.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're going to blow up, we're going to die, we're going to die, I'm screaming back on the FM Transmitter.
[SPEAKER_02]: We got them and jump then, jump, we're not stopping, we got them both, we're not stopping, we're not stopping, we're not stopping.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we're screaming back and falling, it's chaos, it's breaking all out.
[SPEAKER_01]: That went on for a long, bit of time until I finally said, well, you know, we're just going to die here.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, and at that point, we slowed the boats down, I said, slow it down, slow it down.
[SPEAKER_01]: And three guys on both, three guys on the shadow boat.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was part at the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there was no hiding it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was right in the open.
[SPEAKER_01]: So they knew where the drugs were at.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were bales.
[SPEAKER_01]: And one guy jumped to the shadow boat.
[SPEAKER_01]: The other guy jumped to the shadow boat.
[SPEAKER_01]: I jumped to the shadow boat.
[SPEAKER_01]: I let the boat go in maybe three, four miles per hour.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what they did was they peeled off.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then they went after the boat.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was now going three, four miles per hour.
[SPEAKER_02]: God, I feel like I need a cigarette or something after that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Back in those days, I don't want to say that there's corruption because I don't want to.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's not a government thing individual things.
[SPEAKER_01]: People make choices.
[SPEAKER_01]: People make good choices.
[SPEAKER_01]: People make bad choices.
[SPEAKER_02]: But that was a calculated move to like, let me, let me abandon the drug boat and send it in a different direction.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thinking they might fall.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thinking there is a million dollars in that boat that you made.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe show an interest.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I saved your life and saved my life from the life
[SPEAKER_02]: And by the early 1980s, TJ's marijuana business is humming along.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's captaining a bunch of boats and smuggling bales and bales of weed into South Florida.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he's making a lot of money doing it.
[SPEAKER_02]: but he's also losing a lot of money too.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, abandoning all that marijuana and the boat it was on when authorities were shooting item may have saved TJ's life, but it cost him a million dollars at least.
[SPEAKER_02]: TJ's trying to clear $14 million to get that sugar mill in Haiti off the ground, so he can quit drug smuggling altogether and earn his living legitimately.
[SPEAKER_02]: To further that end, he starts multiple other businesses, real businesses.
[SPEAKER_02]: I owned a cell phone company.
[SPEAKER_01]: And at the time, the phone people didn't even know how to spell.
[SPEAKER_01]: They didn't know what the hell cell phone was.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, no sense explaining it to phones for $5,000.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want the people to reach it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it gave me an edge because it allowed me to do business, be efficient, and be connected.
[SPEAKER_02]: TJ also opens a car dealership, more on that later.
[SPEAKER_02]: He breaks ground on a housing development, and now he needs an infusion of cash to keep everything running, and to circle back and get the sugar mill in Haiti going.
[SPEAKER_01]: I started doing the math on that and I said, why can't I get done on this thing?
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm gonna be five years ago to go buy it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I need to bring in at least a ton of marijuana.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something's, you know, that would actually speed this whole process up.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because again, I didn't know how long I was gonna last, because every time I left the house, the authorities stacked against me.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I knew one day would come that would bring the house down.
[SPEAKER_02]: At this point, it's 1981, and the weed supply in the Bahamas is extremely unreliable.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm doing the marijuana truce back and forth from the Bahamas, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm buying marijuana from the government that they're seized, trips that they see, so there's just a burn to weed, but they're not really burning.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I told one of the officers over there, yeah, we'll burn it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I got people that are burning in Miami when they roll it and do a joint.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's gonna get burnt sooner or later.
[SPEAKER_01]: To me time, I could take in cash, everything you got here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now what happens is they're not busting enough of these loads because there's no part growing in the Bahamas.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's just a place that hit or miss.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't have contacts in South America.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not in the drug business.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not a pot going guy.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm depending on these people that I knew
[SPEAKER_01]: to provide me with marijuana.
[SPEAKER_01]: How was that working out?
[SPEAKER_01]: 200 pounds, 400 pounds, 500 pounds, maybe 800 pounds, back to 200 pounds.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, doing 200 pounds so we'd at a time, I wasn't really sitting the world on fire.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what's happening is I need $14 million to complete the sugar milk project.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is going to take forever.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm doing the math on this thing and I'm like, I got my arms crossed down when I see that I've got, let's say $300,000 and I got $300,000 a pod and I'm sitting around waiting for more pod.
[SPEAKER_01]: I got more money than I can buy one pod.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, how do you solve that situation?
[SPEAKER_01]: I've got to go with a pod growth.
[SPEAKER_01]: What is a pod growth?
[SPEAKER_01]: Columbia.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't take people down to Columbia.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, how do I get to Columbia?
[SPEAKER_01]: I need an airplane.
[SPEAKER_02]: To see some incredible photographs documenting TJ's life, go to cocaineair.com.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you're enjoying Cocaine Air, please hit that share button and text it to your friends and family right now.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you feel comfortable, leave us a five-star review.
[SPEAKER_02]: Reviews really help other listeners find us.
[SPEAKER_02]: Cocaine Air was created, written, and executive produced by me, Jonathan Walton, for Jonathan Walton Media.
[SPEAKER_02]: Executive producers, Evan Goldstein, and the inimitable T.J. Dominguez.
[SPEAKER_02]: audio engineering by me, Jonathan Walton.
[SPEAKER_02]: All sound design and editing was done by the super talented who meets Shanoi from podcast fundits.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the cocaine air cover art is by Bobby Animation.
[SPEAKER_02]: We've got a lot of fascinating untold stories like Cocaine Air coming down the pike at Jonathan Walton Media, so subscribe and keep an ear out.