THE SURFER INTERVIEW

Did this part of the dream ever happen?

No! That's the sad part. I mean, aside from finding a few spots in Morocco and in the Caribbean. I definitely wasn't the first guy in Morocco but I surfed it more than anyone else at the time. But the point is my greed got the better of me and I missed out on that Golden Era.

"Betraying the faith" as you say in Captain Zero.

Exactly. Meanwhile my cohorts from the East Coast like Ricky Rasmussen and Tony Caramanico were exploring Indo with Lopez and that gang. There will never be another time like that.

The fact that you were bringing in huge loads bring any consolation?

Well, yeah, maybe at the time, but certainly not looking back on it now. We started out making some smaller scores with some scms in Morocco, and we'd make about $50,000. So then Christopher and I had planned to buy a boat and sail it back with a million bucks worth of hash. So we nabbed the boat down in Florida and got distracted by the scene there, y'know running bales from the Bahamas. Anyway, the point being, Columbia was a lot closer than Morocco. We'd run into guys like us all over the Caribbean and because we had a boat, pretty soon we had our own Colombian connection. So that quickly led to the episode in the book called The Fucking Boat, where we brought in 20,000 pounds and basically made a million dollars. We owed a lot because we were fronted everything. But after paying our Colombian connection, our crew, the off loaders, we had a million between us.

This was the boat you described as a complete piece of crap, but you somehow managed to get it all the way from Columbia to New York.

Yup, it was a total miracle that The Fucking Boat made it. The thing was a complete piece of shit. None of the navigation equipment or radios worked. It was like "Laurel and Hardy Go Smuggling." Yet somehow we brought in the load. That should have been the key, after how close we were to getting busted on that one we should have just said enough and walked away, but we didn't.

You tried to double down.

Exactly. Suddenly the idea of retiring to surf paradise took a back seat to getting really rich. We were making money by the suitcase. We'd just weigh the things because it would take way too long to count. So here we were a couple of surfers in the late 70s with a million bucks, you'd think that would've been enough for us to go surfing on but looking back, we'd been seriously betraying the faith, and we weren't seeing straight. We wanted to make 10 million. We were buying boats, flying Lear jets. We'd forget to load our boards on the plane sometimes, spending months out of the water. That's betraying the faith.

And the dream died soon after?

It sure did. The great irony is we had the most modrn piece of equipment we could get our hands on loaded up with 100,000 pounds of pot and we managed to sink that boat in a storm. We basically had our entire nut invested in that load, so we lost everything. We tried to make it up with another one, but the Coast Guard tailed us through the Mona Passage for two days and we had to scuttle the ship with an entire load in the belly.

But even though you were criminals, you claim you had a moral code, of sorts.

Yeah, keep in mind smuggling in those days wasn't the great evil it is today*

How do you figure?

Look, the 70's was a different era. There was almost an innocence to what we were doing because the only thing we were smuggling was pot. That's it. Anyone who wants to tell me pot is an evil drug compared to alcohol or even cigarettes, well...they have their head up their ass. I'd much rather run into a guy in a dark alley who's smoked a joint than some drunk. Back then, the whole smuggling thing was just a bunch of long hairs, mostly surfers, throwing bales to their buddies and it was sort of fun...Jimmy Buffet was singing about us so we thought we were pretty cool. A 20 something guy flying around in a Lear jets with a surfboards in the back? C'mon, It was cool. But we did have a moral code, and some people may think that's bullshit, but it's true. We had the choice of running guns and cocaine and we never did.

So it was a moral choice to get out or were you forced to go legit?

Well, after we lost the load scuttling the ship I told Christopher I was done. Unfortunately he stayed in. But that's when it finally hit me: we were supposed to be surfers. Also, one of the main reasons I got out was because around 1980 the pot lords on the North Coast of Columbia were giving way to cocaine guys, and I could see that the new guys were different. I mean, it's not like the pot lords were mellow guys. They were fucking crazy. They would kill. But the pot lords weren't terrorists, which is what the coke guys are.

From the junles of Columbia to Hollywood and Vine. What a long, strange trip it's been.

Yeah, well, my resume was kinda loose, so I don't know what else I could have done (laughs). I mean what could I say, "I ran a company with lots of employees and yachts and airplanes, but my resume is sort of informal." But yeah...I wanted to be a writer and that was something that was in my head. I called a producer buddy of mine and asked him what I had to do to be a screenwriter. He said, "Write the best screenplay ever," and hung up on me. That was his way of being funny. So six weeks later I came to his house in Bel Aire with a script. He let me in, read it, and he optioned it the next day. Within two months Michael Mann, the producer of Miami Vice, optioned it from him. The movie never got made, but I got hired to work on his show.

Miami Vice? Jeez man, could you have found a better home after what you'd been doing?

I don't think so (laughing.) The show was just starting up and when I told Michael Mann I'd just gotten out of smuggling and he was like, "What? You did?" In Hollywood nobody lives through what they're writing about. And keep in mind, it sounded horrible to me...the idea of it...and the name, Miami Vice? How stupid is that? (Laughs) But the pilot turned out to be great. Pretty soon I was on staff writing episodes and the show was becoming a phenom.

So much for the tough world of Hollywood.

Yeah, no shit. From international criminal to Hollywood success in a couple of weeks. I was living in Beverly Hills going, "That was easy. Why are all these people complaining?" (Laughs) Granted, there were much tougher times ahead. The phone stopped ringing a few years in. I moved back to Montauk. Things got rough. I wrote my first book Cosmic Banditos, which did O.K. In fact, John Cusack has the option on that one, but things were pretty much going south. So that's when I decided to go look for my old buddy Christopher, and ended up writing Searching for Captain Zero. I'm still blown aay it all worked out. By the time I left I was in my late 40s, on the road in Central America and broke...This is not easy. I remember wondering, "Well what if things don't work out? What am I going to be?" But luckily they did.

What concerns do you have with Zero adapting to the screen?

Well, as you know there's a lot of internal stuff going on in the book, so the hard part for me is to adapt that to a screenplay that can somehow carry that, plus have some action, without departing too far from the feel of the book.

Are you fairly confident it will get made?

Well, anything can happen in Hollywood, but having Sean Penn signed on as a producer gives me a lot of faith that it will. He's a stickler for a good script too, which I like.

So in the final cut, you didn't net a dime smuggling, but you have done O.K. for yourself as a writer.

Luckily yes. Because everyone I know who stayed in the smuggling business was either dead or in jail within two years. My Colombian connection, Fredi, was murdered. Christopher ended up in jail in the Cayman Islands. I was extremely lucky to get out when I did. Today, I'm living pretty simply down here off the books and movie deals.

But now that your search for Captain Zero is over, what is it you're looking for?

I wanted to get back to that...that enclave in the middle of nowhere. And the way to do that is to find a remote place and feel like your part of something unique. In some ways it's an illusion, I mean you've seen how crowded it can get, with technology and virtual buoys--that I've never even heard of (laughs). But it's a tight-knit group here and in an abstract way it feels like the North Shore did, just without the revolution. You feel like you're at the end of the road. I've got my dogs, my hammocks, the occasional girl or Montauk buddy stops by now and again. And then, best of all, there's some good waves. When all is said and done, that's the key to staying involved, just putting yourself where the waves are.