Murder in Miami is a production of iHeartRadio. What follows is some bonus content from mister Happy Miles on is dealing with the DEA and others on the task force fighting the War on drugs in the nineteen seventies in Miami. Mister Miles says there was absolute overlap with law enforcement and the opposing side of the battle in terms of corruption, and that he had a front row seat to it during his pre smuggling days as the commodore of the Adventurers Club in Coconut Grove.
My want for people to realize that people in governments shouldn't be able to come in and destroy your livelihood, in your way of life without any recourse. It's just wrong. It's wrong. You're cooperating with them. And because Congress has in fit to grant them funding, they in turn have the right of seizure, and so they don't care if
you're doing anything wrong or not. They just want to seize whatever they can so they can get funding to put gas in the DEA vehicles, to have people come in that can put you out of business in our heartbeat, and do it with impunity. It's wrong. It's terribly wrong. I mean they can lie to you. They can do anything they want to in an interrogation to try and tick trick you into admitting something or saying something improper that can be used against you. And now that's okay.
People realize why I ever got into the business, and uh, it was because I was basically pushed into the business to survive. You know, it's like a sinking ship. You jump off of it, you get in a raft and hope she'll survive.
So you contend that until the DEA approached you, you were a legitimate businessman.
Exactly. I mean, it wasn't just DEA, it was it was FBI, it was DEA, it was I, R, S and H and the state police. I mean, it was the whole task force. And then they came in and said, hey, we might seize happ these airplanes, and we're putting you on notice, so if we do seize them, we can keep them.
But what do you think placed you on their radar? Was it Jack Devo?
Well? Yeah, I think that active vote was using my airplanes.
Did they claim that you knew what he was doing with your planes?
Well, they acted like I either knew or was part of.
It, and did you know? Were you part of Oh?
I wasn't part of it, and I didn't know.
But to save his planes from being repossessed by the bank, Happy says, he turned to smuggling.
Well, I didn't want to my company to go under and disappoint everybody who had given me money to have the right to sail and fly. I mean, you know, there's a little thing called honor, which very few of these guys have. I had enough fun afterwards, which I would have probably never had and never had that kind of money if I hadn't gotten into the business. So anyway I at all equals itself out.
Happy says. Once he retired from smuggling, he was asked to share his insight with law enforcement on how the war on drugs could be won.
I once gave a lecture to people from all over the country. There had to be forty five people in the room, and I told him how you shut this at least eighty percent of cocaine down? And when I got done, they all agreed that it would work what I told him. But like I was conducting an orchestra, four guys in different corners of the room stood up and they said, yeah, but what would we do for jobs? They didn't care about shutting it down. That was the mentality. They didn't want to stop it.
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