Pushkin. Previously on deep cover, Ned Timmins was finally getting somewhere. His big breakthrough came in the spring of nineteen eighty five, when Clinton shined Anderson flipped. Shine was in charge of vetting everyone in this smuggling network. I know it was a massive operation, and I knew that we had the key to the safety deposit box to open it all up. Shine pointed Ned to a spot on the North Carolina coast where he said his bosses had smuggled marijuana into
the country. So Ned picked up the phone and called the FBI down in Wilmington, North Carolina, asked them if they have any intel on drug smugglers who were using shrimp boats. They tell them, yeah, actually we had this one case in particular involving an abandoned drug boat, a ghost ship. Ned quickly begins to realize that so many of the answers he's seeking about the ghost ship, the smugglers, their system are right in Beaufort, North Carolina, perfectly camouflaged
in the underbrush. Well, we're heading out of Beaufort right now. We're actually going Highway seventy east. It's about a twenty minute ride to Back Creek, twenty minute ride, so yeah, you'll get to see a little bit of the country. That's Carl Cannon Jr. He's a big, strapping guy with this epic beard. The word swashbuckling suits him well. Carl's a local guy, born in Bred and Beaufort. He's showing
me around the area. Now, if you can picture a map in the United States, We're on this little marshy spit of land that sticks out from North Carolina into the Atlantic Ocean. This whole area is just a tangle of overlapping inlets and waterways, a giant aquatic maze. Really, this is where Ned and Shine came back in the nineteen eighties. It was just one of many trips they took together across the country to gather evidence. I went down to Beaufort to retrace their steps. So as you
can tell, like I say, the stuff's getting dense. You see all these little canals that come up in these little areas. This is North River to our right. We're headed to Back Creek, to the very spot where the ghost ship was supposed to unload its cargo if everything had gone according to plan. You know, as you can see now, the trees are starting to thick end, which is pretty typical for most of our country roads and areas,
you know, in land and coastal. You're basically going to cross several places that are basically wide open either swamps or wooded swamps, much like you have in Everglades. The little road that we're driving on, it eventually ends at the water's edge. I take this a baby eagle. It sounds like it. Carl and I get out and walk along the shore for a bit. The vegetation is dense, insanely thick. Carl starts pointing down the shore at what
looks like just another clump of overgrown bushes. They would have come up through the canal, which is the darker set of trees. You can't see the entrance because it kind of disappears. I can't. I can't see it at all from here. No, it's just I can tell by the line of the woods where it's at, where the opening is. But you can if you kind of see a drop and then another drop, that drop is where that creak is. As they looked out on this vast,
watery expanse, I started to get it, started to see it. Here. You had a spot with enough boat traffic that a decent sized ship would not attract attention. But then you also had a maze of coves and inlets where that same boat could suddenly disappear. It was perfectly concealed, invisible. Really clearly someone knew what they were doing. I'm Jake Albert and this is Deep Cover, Episode four, The Gentleman Smuggler. There are a few things to know about my local
guide Carl. First off, he has a not so secret identity. We name be Captain Carl Cannon Junior, I portrayed Blackbeard. Yep, Carl is a pirate reinactor. Fiddler's Green is a please I've heard too well. Pirus good when they don't go to hell with the girls who are all pretty, and the beer is all free and there's bottles over him hanging from every tree. Wrap me up in the Carl volunteers at the local museum. He became Blackbeard because he had the one major job requirement. His beard he was
born kind of dangling down his chest. He was already braiding it too. People would tell him, hey, you look like Blackbeard. And then came the job opening. Because the former black Beard kind of might have a fall from grace, so to speak, and he was dismissed by the museum fall from grace. What do you mean he was doing some things that wasn't thought to be quite family friendly appropriate. You might say that he was had a side job that he was performing as Blackbeard and a funny kind
of you adult manner. He was doing adult parties. Carl is kind of the mascot at Beaufort, North Carolina, because the place now sells itself as Pirate Town, USA, and every other storefront you'll see a skull and crossbones the Jolly Roger flag. But Carl is not just some random reenactor.
His family has lived here for generations, and he says that the ghost ship wound up here precisely because of this pirate legacy, and these pirates they tended to come and go depending on the boom and bus cycle of a local fishing economy. Carl remembers how after a few bad shrimp seasons, some fresh faces showed up in town.
Some of the drug cartel folks came in and just gently started asking questions around some of the fish market and boat owners, and then encouraged them to get their friends to come together and basically they'd presented to them around town. They had secret meetings. It was all word of mouth. My dad was made an offer the same way. One of his friends came to him and he said,
I've got a deal for you. Dad had bought a boat in seventy four, had mostly paid it off, but as all commercial fishermen find out, hards a couple of hard seasons, you need a new engine, or something happens. They offered my dad if he would come make a certain amount of runs for him, run out and meet a mothership, come back and go up into the base and unload away from pride and eyes. Carl says his dad.
He never went to any of these meetings, never took the offer, but a lot of people that Carl knew, did, So, you know, the temptation was there, and they knew, and they knew the temptation was there that they could offer to pay someone's boat off. You know, when three much your boats paid for and you'll never see us again. So this is pirate Town, USA, a place where pirates and smugglers had been plying their trade for well centuries.
And this only made me wonder more what exactly went wrong with the ghost ship if these smugglers were such probs and this setting was so perfect, what the hell happened? Why was the ship abandoned the twenty nine thousand pounds of drugs in the hold? To find out, I visited Doug McCullough, who at the time was the first assistant US Attorney in the Eastern District of North Carolina. He still lives in Beaufort. We met down at the harbor just as the storm was coming in. Some wind up here.
It looks like there's some weather coming in here. So where are we? We're standing in Beaufort, downtown Beaufort. Doug points out to the spot where the ghost ship first appeared on the horizon as it was coming in from sea, and there was another boat with it too, a small skiff, almost like a guide boat, leading it in. They came through this narrow passageway known as Beaufort Inlet, and Doug kind of points it out to me in the distance. And there's something else that Doug wants to show me.
As you and I look out, there's an island right in front of us. And then over the top of that island you can see a big flagpole with the American flag and that's at the US Coastguard station. That station was here back in eighty two. In fact, that night, two coastguardmen known as coasts noticed the shrimper and the little guideboat coming in through the inlet, and both vessels appeared to be drifting out of the channel. They were just a bit off course, so the coasts went out
to investigate. First, they pull up alongside the little guide boat and in it they see someone who is clearly not a fisherman. He was dressed for a disco. This is the eighties member Saturday Night fever, flared pants. He had a shirt that was a silk and it was open to his sternham. He had gold chains, he had the stacked heel shoes, and all these items you don't wear on an open boat in carter At County. The coasties knew something wasn't right. Eventually they decided they want
to check out the shrimp boat too. It had since pulled up alongside and nearby fuel dock. So one of the coast's boards of the shrimp boat and makes a move to go down below deck. He said he was going to inspect the hold, and that's when heard a shotgun rack around makes a very distinctive chunk sound, and anybody's ever been around a gun has heard that sound would recognize it immediately the coast. He's back away and go to get help. A short while later, the police
show up. The shrimp boat's still there, but its crew has fled. From the outside it was it had its nets, and it had the boom and the other accouterments that you would expect on a shrimper. It's only when you got inside that you saw things that didn't match. All that remained was the cargo twenty nine thousand pounds of pot. They had a few early leads names that turned out to be bogus, all dead ends. The story made headlines in part because the FEDS had almost nothing on the
ship except that it was there. What was like a ghost was the fact that we didn't get any people at that time. You know, everybody got away. It was a very frustrating investigation because case just sat on the shelf for almost three years. All the law enforcement agencies just kind of moved on, and we were all just in a state of waiting until Ned Timmans contacted the nearest FBI office to Wilmington, and he says, I've got the witness you're going to need, and that witness was Shine.
If we had to turn one person, this is the guy we wanted. So after Ned calls down to the Wilmington office, Ned and Shine make their trip down to North Carolina. They meet with Doug McCullough. But that's not all. Shine also take Ned on a little swamp tour to a hidden cabin that the smugglers used. They just laughed at They all still mattresses all over and coffee and stale food, and they just got the hell out of there.
And whoever owned the cabin never came back either. So far Shine's story was checking out, and Ned was slowly building his case. We're out in the swamp, were identifying where they stayed, where they rented cars, the hotels, they stayed in, motels, any tracks that we can establish evidence that these specific people were there. Shine explains that everything, every last detail was orchestrated by the syndicates. Master smuggler,
a guy who went by the name Skip. He says, this Skip character, he was so sure of himself that just six months after the ghost ship was captured, he tried it again. Dare to pull off the exact same operation, same route, same offloading site, used another shrimp boat, only bigger this time, and it worked basically. Shine explains, while you guys were scratching your heads over the mystery of the ghost ship, we doubled down and slipped another shipment
right under your noses. Skip was so confident of his system, of the camouflage that he had created, that he was unfazed by the loss of a single ship. So not a fiasco, but a tiny glitch in the system. They'd steered a bad course into the harbor and had led a guy on board who shouldn't have been there. Remember the guy in the disco outfit. Yeah, him. It's a mistake they wouldn't make again, because Skip, he was a perfectionist. Coming up after the break, I tracked down the legendary's Skip.
Turns out his real name is Stephen Kalish, and he lives in a beautiful mansion in Hawaii. So I'm in my rental car heading out to the house of Stephen Kaylish, who, back in the eighties was a master smuggler, the guy sneaking in tons and tons of marijuana into the US. Looking for a big house with a red roof. Oh wow, that's gotta be it. That's beautiful. That is a big house with a red roof. Eventually, I pull into this big gate, you know, one of those imposing things with
a keypad on the side. So I punch in the code that Stephen texted me and there goes Kate is opening. Okay, the Kingdom has opened. I pull up to the house. It's this mansion with a perfect view of the Pacific. I mean, imagine the last scene in the Hollywood movie where the hero lands. Well, very well, this is the place.
So get out of the car and I see him skip aka Stephen kaylish him to see you, and I gotta tell you at sixty seven, he's this really handsome guy with a perfect tan and a ponytail and a trim muscular physique. And almost right away he takes me to the stables on his estate because well he's got to feed his horses. RB nice. Stephen starts preparing their meal, which starts off simply enough, so let's just facene for
their coach. Now. I don't know if you've ever seen someone feed horses, but I can promise you that's not what's going on here. I see Stephen mix at least half a dozen different pretty obscure seeming ingredients with such precision. It's like I'm watching a world class pharmacist prepare a highly complicated drug. And then this is organic sea kelp, which has minerals in it. This is bokashi. It's organic, it's made here on the island. It's like a probiotic.
They get this in the morning, in the evening. I feed them about seven fifteen in the morning, in about four thirty and one alfternoon. And just watching you feed your horses gives me a little bit of sense of your organizational nature. I like things to be in their place. It makes life easier. Did you have some version of that philosophy when you're running your your smuggling business hundred percent?
And it's all about being organized and having plants in place and backup plans in got plans always, always, always. As we walk through the stables, Stephen explains to me that there is a very deliberate feeding sequence based on where the horses are in the pecking order Archie's number one, Danish number two, Sonoma's number three, Sky Guy our quarter horses number four. How do you see that pecking order
like they figure it out. Do you think that's true of people too to some extent er, Well, yeah, there is. I mean some people are natural born leaders and some people are or not. By was a natural By was a born leader. Growing up. By was always the leader, but the neighborhood kids. I had a paper out from the time I was twelve years old to about fifteen,
and I had the neighborhood kids working for me. Later, when he was in high school, he made headlines when he organized a protest in front of the state capitol in Austin his cause marijuana. In a newspaper article that I found, Stephen is identified as the leader of the quote beautiful People's Republic, and he makes the case for a decriminalization. Meanwhile, back at home, his father, an arch conservative, wasn't too happy. His dad was a heavy drinker who
sometimes beat him. Stephen ran away to California for a time, taking and selling LSD, but he eventually came back to Texas and re enrolled in high school. He lived with some friends to support himself. He started selling pot and found out he was good at it, and he was even better at teaching others how to follow his lead. Basically, I started buying a few pounds a pot and breaking it up and then letting my friends sell it to
their friends. So, while still in high school, he created his own multi level marketing scheme the way Avon sells perfume, only it's weed. Eventually, the market grew and Harve's buying more pot, Dan shoving more pot. I finished my junior year at Beller High School, and by that time I was making a couple of thousand dollars a month. Stephen eventually expands his efforts begins smuggling larger quantities of weed in from Mexico across the Rio Grande, and then he
ups his game again. He teams up with some Columbians and starts using shrimp boats to bring in even bigger loads to a small marina in Texas. At this point, he's in his late twenties, and then in nineteen seventy nine, a guy at the marina they were using turned out to be an informant, so Stephen gets indicted and is facing a four year sentence. He was out on a federal appeal bond when he made the biggest decision of
his life. Bye got them fake ID together. I got a birth certificate of a deceased person, got a passport in the name of Thomas Franklin, and flew Downder the Cayman Islets, and he just pretty much vanished, making himself a fugitive. In the coming years, law enforcement occasionally got wind of this guy who went by so many different names, mister Franklin, Frank William Brown, Stephen Sloane, and simply Skip.
And this Skip character. He flickered on and off the radar of law enforcement like a UFO, and with time he became kind of a legend. People called him the gentleman smuggler. Roy Fuget, the detective down in Louisiana who had investigated one of Skip ships. He heard about him. They said he never wore gone, that he was not violent, that he was really smart, really organized, very intelligent, good with the ladies. If he had been in the military,
he'd probably be a general, I mean good organizer. He had a really professional army of drug smugglers that he was supervising. And as it turns out, around this time the FBI was also getting interested in this Skip character. We heard this name Skip, and apparently we realized that Skip was a pretty pretty much a shaker and a mover in the organization. That's Stan Jacobson, an FBI agent down in Tampa who'd been on Skip's trail for some time.
Skip's name kept coming up in various drug investigations, but he was a master at eluding the authorities, beginning with that nickname. It's very frustrating because you know, you go to have a major player, and I'm sure there are a lot of people named Skip in the country, so you know, trying to find out who that was. Because he maintained a pretty low profile. I mean, this guy, he wasn't out there like, you know, like a mafia done who sometimes liked to like the sound of their
own press. He may have kept a low profile, been anonymous, but they knew that he was no ordinary smuggler. We weren't dealing with someone that robbed the bank and you know, with a note, we were dealing with a major operator. If he had been in a major US corporation, he'd have probably been a CEO. Stephen Keelis should become almost invisible, which was basically his entire business model, staying under the radar,
making sure everything was unseen. He didn't hire speedboats to make deliveries or get planes to drop bails from the sky. For a fishing village like Beaufort, North Carolina, he leased shrip trawlers and just motored right up to the offload site. He had his own crew, but he also used locals, the folks that felt most at home there and had the right vibe. Guys like Bobby Webb, a local Vietnam vat who was looking for work Vietnam did something to me.
You know, we got adrenaline, and you know, you live one adrenaline and it kind of chad changes you. It makes you take chances that you wouldn't take before. Bobby was a gunner in Vietnam on a small fifty foot aluminum vessel known as a swift boat. We're in at twenty four hours a day, twelve hours on, twelve hours off, and by the time that skipped met him, he was still jones in for that adrenaline. Oh yet excitement, because
you know you're on that boat. We had two fifty calibra machine guns, a fifty calibual on this side, at fifty calor on this side, and sometimes at M sixty in the wheelhouse, and we always had two in fourteens shooting news guns, you know, and one of us had to run the boat or the others shoot the damn guns. Shooting this side and run of that side. What's that feel like? Oh? Doesn't like it when you're doing it?
Doesn't like it. Bobby was the perfect guy for the job, a gutsy dude with the resume of a modern day pirate. It makes sense why Steven would want guys like this. I mean, why not go right to the folks who'd hunted and fish this land for generations, the guys who may have been the very descendants of Blackbeard's own men. Bobby remembers being approached by a guy who worked for Skip. Skip had an army of advanced men. He used them kind of like a movie director would use a location scout.
They traveled the country looking for possible sights. One of them reached out to Bobby. He called me up, just to shoot the boom, he said. Bobby united place. Some of us boards unled some pop, I says, oh yeah. Once Stephen committed to a given location, he began managing every aspect of the operation and Beaufort. He began by studying road maps and topographical maps. His guys measured the depths of the water along the inlet. He moved his security team down to the area months before a load
would come in just to do reconnaissance. He set up a safe house just for him in the top brass in the organization. He had his guy's tail. The local police study the patterns of where they patrolled and when they monitored parking lots which might serve as staging grounds for large scale police raids, and he listened to everything. We would monitor all the police frequencies, coach guard frequencies. We would by a variety of speedboats depending on the
area we were operating in. We would have boats that we could use to evacuate crew members or off float personnel in case of an emergency. Over the next couple of years, it got to be very precision and very military four innit. Eventually Stephens started using airplanes. He had Assessna two ten lookout plane, which he used to make sure that his boats weren't being tailed by a coastguard cutter or a navy boat. And as for his own
smuggling ship, he customized it. I mean I outfitted the boat so it wouldn't be detected from there Coastguard over flights that they were making at this point using it for red technology to detect heat signatures in the holds of shrimp boats. So to avoid that, we installed refrigeration units on our shrimp boat. One thing that Stephen says he didn't do is arm himself. Said he was a pacifist at heart, and that usually neither he nor his
men carried guns. It's a little hard to imagine, right, I mean, all these guys, all this marijuana, and no one is armed. For Stephen, the no guns thing, it was all part of his philosophy, you know, being the gentleman smuggler, a consummate profession. He even took all of his employees and their significant others on accompany cruise as
if everything he was up to was totally legit. By July nineteen eighty four, Stephen was poised to pull off his biggest feet yet he'd smuggle one million pounds of marijuana in a single load. There was just one problem. More on that. When we come back after the break, I'm surrounded by fat and they say, Stephen paylicks, you're under arrest. Just to give you a sense of how much one million pounds of weed is in Colorado, where weed is now totally legal, that's more than they sell
in an entire year. Stephen Kaylish planned to smuggle it right up the Mississippi River and unloaded at an old turkey farm in Missouri. He'd have twenty five tractor trailers on standby twenty five and unloaded quickly. Stephen would have to invent a new machine. He actually had a conveyor system custom made that he paid three hundred thousand dollars for.
Oh yeah, it was my pride and joy. Stephen gave the operation a special code name, Operation America's Heartland, because we were bringing the barts up through the Port of New Orleans, up the Mississippi River all the way up to Saint Louis, headed east in the Missouri River into America's Heartland in the middle of Missouri in a thousand acre turkey farm that I at least America's Hartland. I thought it was a perfect name for my last stop, his last op. But isn't that they always say, yeah,
his last op. He could quit any time he wanted. But if he did quit this time, he'd retire a very wealthy man. There'd be about one hundred and sixty million dollars in profits. But he knew that the Feds were snooping around. He'd been tipped off one of his planes, a lear Jet. He heard it was being watched, so he told his guys, put it away, hide it in
a hangar. We can't even risk going near it. Stephen was used to living like this, He'd been a fugitive for years, but he was worried, so worried, in fact, that he'd begun to move all of his assets to a secret location in another country where he had a home and a whole nother life lined up. He was ready to leave the US for good. There was just one last thing he had to do. I had to go to Tampa to get my files and my documents
out of my Tampa house and close it down. That was his safe house, and his documents were still there, his address book and some floppy disks and those discs. They contained a lot of logistical information about America's heartland, including names and job assignments of folks involved. Stephen was
nervous not having all of this with him. It was a loose end, and Stephen he didn't like loose ends, so he flew to Florida to go to his safe house, and when Stephen landed, it's about one thirty in the morning. He looks out the window and he freaked because there on the tarmac was his lear jet just sitting there. I'm still pissed off. I mean, it was like totally unnecessary. There was no reason to pull that jet out of the hangar because we knew there was heat on it,
you know, we just knew there was heat somewhere. But he sees that no one's there. The coast is clear, so he grabs a car and heads to the safe house to close it down. The next day, he drives back to the airport in his Bronco with two of his guys and drops them off with instructions tell the pilots to fly all of the jets out of Tampa right away, because if the jets are hot, you know, he doesn't want them anywhere near him. The logic here is kind of kooky because by going back to the airport,
he's right there alongside the jets. But you gotta remember, Stephen has a lot on his plate at this moment, and he likes to micromanage everything. We barked about a mile away or a half mile away, and I wait in the bronco. So I'm sitting out in the bronco. After about twenty minutes, just enough time that Stephen's spidy senses start tingling, and then he knows time to go. He's got to just slip away. So he gets out of the bronco. Go and I'll start walking away, knowing
something's up. And I get about, but I don't know a quarter mill away, not even that, and I'm surrounded by fete and they say, Stephen, kayleish're under arrest. And I said who. I said, My name's Frank Brown. I said, dare. Here's my driver's license. They go, no, when we know who you are? And I go nope. They go, well, you're under arrest. They said, okay, five. Well they arrest me and they take me to their headquarters. He's taken
to the FBI offices in Tampa. As Stephen walks into a room, he can see up on a big board the names of various suspects and their connections. He takes one look at the board and he realizes this investigation it's made very little progress. They don't know anything about our smuggling operation, and they're trying to figure out who's who. Stephen searched the board for his own name. He didn't
see Stephen Kaylish up there. What he does see his Skip, and he realized these guys they haven't put two and two together. They don't know that he is Skip. All they seem to know is that they've arrested some fugitive named Stephen Kaylish who's skipped town a few years ago in Texas. They don't seem to get that they had the master smuggler right there. So he tells the cops, I have nothing to say to you. Guys, take me to jail. So they take me to Hillsboro County. Joel,
what is your emotion that first night or two in jail? Well, partially relief. Relief because Stephen Kaylish, the small time drug dealer, was happy to take the rap in order to protect Skip, the global smuggling entrepreneur. And was there a chance that you would talk at that point? No, no, there was. The story was way too big for the Feds. I mean literally, it was this is something you know, the guys on the task force just these guys couldn't even
comprehend the story. And so Stephen goes to jail, starts serving those four years for the charges in Texas, the ones he's skipped out on. He ends up in a medium security prison in Texas, and he's prepared to do his time operation America's heartland. It's on ice for now. Unbeknownst to Stephen, another story was unfolding up in Michigan. Clinton Shine Anderson had become the FBI's star informant. He was talking revealing all the details of who Stephen Klish
really was and how he operated. So this would mean trouble for Stephen. Meanwhile, Stephen starts hearing chatter that the FEDS are making progress in their case against him. He'd been hoping to get released to a low security camp outside the prison, but now the Fed said no. They were apparently worried that he might run for it, and they were right to worry, because Stephen he was a planner, and long ago he had anticipated being in this exact situation. I had a serious escape plan. Oh, I had one
before I ever got arrested. So a friend of mine and brother had ran a special forces team. I put him on one hundred thousand dollars retainer to come and rescue me no matter where I was. So after I got arrested and I was in text or cannon, I had his brother come visit me, and I said, okay, I think it's time that we need to look at how we're going to get me out of here. So they did a recon of the prison facility and his brother came back to visit me and said, okay, we're ready.
They can get you out. They were coming in with a helicopter to pick me up off the wreck yard. But there's only one catch. Problem was their guard towers with guards with rifles in them. They couldn't guarantee that one of the guards wouldn't be killed if they opened fire on the helicopter. They can't guarantee there won't be any loss of life. And this leaves Stephen Kaylish, the gentleman smuggler and devowed pacifist, in a bit of a quandary. Freedom is within his grasp as long as he doesn't
mind getting some blood on his hands. Kaylish has arrest is a massive setback for the smugglers, but it's not a death blow. And this is essentially what Ned learns. There's someone else at the top of the syndicate, a kingpin, a long time money wanderer, a guy with deep ties to the suppliers in Columbia. And this guy, he's safe living down in the Cayman Islands, untouchable. Next time, a deep Cover Ned travels down to the Caymans and finds
the kingpin. The stress is unbelievable, the mental stress. You don't sleep, You're worried about your door getting kicked in any minute. You have no weapons down there, you have no backup. You're not gonna be able to hit the radio and call nine on one. You're you're not gonna be able to call for help because nobody's coming. Deep Cover is produced by Jacob Smith and edited by Karen Shakerji.
Our story editor is Jack hit. Original music and our theme was composed by Louise Gara and Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Mia Lobell is Pushkin's executive producer. Ned's novel is read by Walton Goggins. Special thanks to Julia Barton had their Fame, Carly mcgliori, Lee Tall, Mullatt, Maya Caning, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Kadija Holland, Zoe Gwenn and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries. Special thanks
also to Jeff Singer at Stowaway Entertainment. Additional thanks to Terry Peters and to Doug McCullough, author of Ce of Greed, which tells the story of his investigation in North Carolina. I'm Jake Calbern.