Who Killed the Fudge King?

Who Killed the Fudge King?

How I (possibly) solved a cold case on my summer vacation.

The Atavist Magazine, No. 143


Tom Donaghy writes for theater, television, and film. His plays have been produced by the Atlantic Theater Company and Playwrights Horizons, among others. He created the ABC drama The Whole Truth and cocreated, with Lee Daniels, the Fox musical drama Star.

Editors: Jonah Ogles and Seyward Darby
Art Director: Ed Johnson
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Kyla Jones
Illustrator: Nate Sweitzer

Published in September 2023.


The fudge sold at Copper Kettle was so creamy, so sweet, so beyond compare, that many candy shops on the Ocean City boardwalk didn’t even sell fudge, because there was no point. During summer vacations to the Jersey Shore in the 1970s, my father would take my brother and me as a treat, when we behaved. A pretty girl in a pinafore would greet us outside with a tray of free shavings. We’d load up on them until her smile strained, then proceed inside. Once we popped actual cubes of the magic stuff into our tiny mouths, we were as high as kids are allowed to be.

For decades, Copper Kettle lived in my head as a kind of childhood memory-scape: the salt air coming off the ocean, the shiny vats of molten fudge, the too much sugar all at once. Then, during the pandemic, my family decided to return to the Jersey Shore for my mother’s birthday, so everyone could gather outside. I told my brother we should make our way back to Copper Kettle, and he informed me that it had long since gone out of business. He had some more information too: about what had become of Harry Anglemyer, the man behind the fudge.

In the early 1960s, Harry had a string of Copper Kettle Fudge shops up and down the Shore. So revered were his stores that Harry was known far and wide as the Fudge King. He was even in talks to build a fudge factory—something that would’ve taken his Willy Wonka–ness to the next level—when he was savagely beaten to death on Labor Day 1964. His body was stuffed under the dashboard of his Lincoln Continental, parked at an after-hours nightclub called the Dunes. The case was never solved.

I spent the next two years sorting through a trove of whispers and accusations around the murder. At first I was just curious, but the more I learned about Harry—a figure beloved by friends and strangers alike—the more intent I was to identify his killer.

I scoured blogs, Facebook groups, newspaper archives, and thinly veiled fictional accounts of the crime. As one local put it, over the years a veritable “Jersey Shore QAnon” had blossomed around the murder, raising questions of culture, class, sexuality, and hierarches of power. I discovered a plausible myth, a trove of red herrings, and, finally, what appeared to be the truth.

Almost six decades on, I wasn’t sure anyone wanted to hear it. When I visited Ocean City while reporting this story, a shop owner I engaged about Harry Anglemyer lowered her voice and said, “You know he was murdered, don’t you?”

I admitted that I did.

She responded, by way of warning: “You sneeze in this town and everyone hears it.”

The Fudge King became one of the richest men for miles, with no qualms about flashing his wealth.

Harry Anglemyer, a stocky charmer out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was born in 1927. His high school summers were spent in Wildwood, New Jersey, where he apprenticed at Laura’s Fudge Shop. He was told that this was a little sissy. He didn’t care.

He left high school to join the Navy, served two years at the end of World War II, then returned to the Shore to open his own fudge shop in 1947. In those days, Ocean City seemed postcard perfect. Ten blocks at its widest, situated on a barrier island about 11 miles south of Atlantic City, it was lined with boarding houses, deep porches with rattan rockers, and striped canvas awnings that softened the summer sun. It called itself—and still does—America’s Greatest Family Resort.

The author Gay Talese, who grew up there, once described Ocean City as “founded in 1879 by Methodist ministers and other Prohibitionists who wished to establish an island of abstinence and propriety.” Prohibitionists remain. To this day, you can’t buy booze within city limits. Or have a cocktail at a restaurant. Or go to a bar, since there are none. If you want to bend an elbow, you must belong to one of the few private clubs that allow it. You can also import your own adult beverages, stopping at the Circle Liquor Store in Somers Point before entering town across the Ninth Street Bridge.

You would think that such a gauntlet might encourage at least a semblance of abstinence and propriety, but a 2017 USA Today article deemed Ocean City the drunkest city in New Jersey. It was and is a place of contradictions.

Just like Harry Anglemyer was a man of contradictions. He donated generously to civic causes and charities, including religious ones. He sat on the city’s planning board at the behest of the mayor. He joined the Masons and the chamber of commerce. He befriended prominent men and their wives, whom he squired to social functions when their husbands were busy. He hobnobbed with local luminaries, including the Kelly family of Philadelphia, who kept a summer cottage in Ocean City that Grace Kelly visited—first as a child, then as a movie star, then as a princess. Harry was so well regarded that 1,500 people showed up at the Godfrey-Smith Funeral Home in September 1964 to view his body. Businesspeople, politicians, and socialites came to pay their respects, packing the place with flowers.

Many of them also knew of Harry’s other, less civic-minded side. When he wasn’t delighting families with his fudge or charming the local elite, he liked to go out. He shut down bars. He was a fixture at Atlantic City’s racetrack, where he played the horses. He spent time at the nearby Air National Guard base. During the summer of 1964, he seemed to have acquired boyfriends from both locations.

Harry was, in fact, a little sissy.

Which everyone kind of knew. He was 37 and handsome, he’d never married, and he dressed fastidiously. He had a small dog, acquired on a trip to Fort Lauderdale—which, he confided to a friend, was perhaps “too obvious.” He once had a girlfriend who wondered why they weren’t having sex. She seems to have been the only one in the dark. Men both known and strange came and went from his large suite of breezy, ocean-view rooms above Copper Kettle, right on the boardwalk, where he lived in the summer.

Harry took no pains to hide any of this, an astonishing fact given the pre-Stonewall, postwar pinko-homo panic. In the early 1960s, and especially in small towns like Ocean City, which had a population of about 7,500 during the off-season, men were expected to find a girl and put a ring on her. Especially handsome men with killer smiles, fitted jackets, and penny loafers that shined like onyx.

But something saved Harry from too much scrutiny—for a time, anyway. He was an entrepreneur, and he elevated the boardwalk’s game. He saw the future, which might have been his shield. Other local business owners looked past his sexuality. They wanted even a little piece of his magic.

Harry placed gleaming copper kettles in the windows of his boardwalk shop, poured in liquid fudge, and positioned above them teenage boys with bronzed skin and sparkling white teeth, gripping big wooden paddles, churning and churning. Outside on the boardwalk, children panted as they watched, their faces cracked from too much sun, their bare feet sandy, their eyes wet and hungry. They wanted that fudge so bad. At night, after the last box was sold and the shop had closed, the kettles remained pin-spotted from above like Ziegfeld girls.

Money surged in like the tide. Soon Harry had shops in Atlantic City, Sea Isle City, and Stone Harbor as well. The Fudge King became one of the richest men for miles, with no qualms about flashing his wealth. He purchased a two-story colonial in the Gardens, Ocean City’s fanciest neighborhood, where he lived in the off-season, and kept two cars: the Lincoln Continental where his body would later be found, and a Chrysler Imperial purchased just months before his death.

Most spectacularly, he acquired a blinding ring: five emerald-cut diamonds, approximately eight carats total, set in a band of white gold. It was valued at about $10,000, almost $100,000 in today’s dollars. Harry wore it everywhere. Which was quite a big deal. With the exception of a few families, including the famous Kellys, whose fortune came from brickmaking, Ocean City was for the most part a resort of the working class. Its tourists and year-round residents had likely never seen such jewels except on television, worn by the likes of Zsa Zsa Gabor. Or Liberace.

Harry’s success made him an object of allure and envy, though by all accounts he shared his fortune with others. He frequently bought dinners for his staff. He gave loans to friends and told them to take their time paying him back. (After his death, his family found a drawer full of IOUs.) He even had a brand-new clothes dryer delivered to a young mother burdened by a bad marriage. She wept knowing there was at least one good man in the world.

That’s what most people said about Harry: how good he was, generous and kind, fun-loving and curious. But in the summer of 1964, they noticed something else about him. The Fudge King was uncharacteristically on edge.

Harry was up against the upright citizens of America’s Greatest Family Resort who feared it would become another Atlantic City, that den of iniquity next door that was fast sinking into squalor and corruption.

Of course, the whole country was on edge. JFK had just been assassinated. Vietnam was heating up, and the draft was coming for young American men, including those stirring that fudge in Copper Kettle’s windows. The Civil Rights Act was signed into law on July 2, and now Ocean City could no longer confine people of color to the Fifth Street beach. (Before that, according to one resident, if Black beachgoers breeched the jetty that separated their beach from the other beaches, they were greeted immediately by a chorus of “Go back!”)

Meanwhile, the Mad Men era of whiskey sours and steak Diane was giving way to the Beatles, beads, and flower power. On August 30, the week before Harry’s murder, the Fab Four themselves came through Atlantic City on their first North American tour, and the young people of the state lost their minds.

The youthquake was on the horizon. The Greatest Generation was holding its breath. If Ocean City wasn’t immune from time’s great march, what was?

Certainly not Harry, who saw himself out in front of that particular parade, a fact he’d made clear two years prior by challenging Ocean City’s so-called blue laws. For decades the blue laws had handed over the seventh day almost entirely to the Lord. Most business was prohibited, unless it was church business. You attended service, then went home and kept quiet.

Abstinence and propriety were enforced, as merchants who occasionally tested the laws learned. Two arcade owners were fined for opening their doors; a grocer was arrested for selling a cantaloupe. But generally the boardwalk, both its amusements and its stores, remained shuttered. An ordinance forbade Harry from even making fudge on Sunday.

All this seemed ridiculous to him. How could a resort community be closed for business for an entire day every weekend? The weekends were the moneymakers! If it rained on Saturday, keeping beachgoers at home, it was a total bust. Harry had come to believe that “puritanical restrictions” were holding Ocean City back.

Some in town were inclined to agree. Those who owned businesses, specifically. They appointed Harry head of both the Ocean City Civic Betterment Association and the Ocean City Boardwalk Association. Harry seized the moment, gathering friends and colleagues, telling them that while it was fine for shops to be closed on Sunday mornings for church, they should be allowed to open for the remainder of the day. He further informed them that he would state his case privately to D. Allen Stretch, Ocean City’s director of public safety and the custodian of the blue laws.

Stretch did not agree with Harry. Even a little. He wasn’t about to have the so-called Fudge King tell him what to do, no matter how many business owners Harry had at his back.

Emboldened, affronted, or perhaps not quite reading the room, Harry refused to stand down. During a meeting at city hall, he decided to say aloud to everyone in town what he’d said to Stretch. All hell broke loose as an opposing faction coalesced—one that wanted to keep the laws in place. Harry was up against the upright citizens of America’s Greatest Family Resort who feared it would become another Atlantic City, that den of iniquity next door that was fast sinking into squalor and corruption.

Ocean City’s commissioners, wringing their hands, decided to put the matter of the blue laws to a referendum. When voting day arrived in May 1963, enough locals sided with Harry that the laws were relaxed, allowing certain shops to open their doors on Sunday for the first time. Newspapers reported Harry’s triumph over the pious prohibitionists, who were none too pleased.

This is where things get weird.

Three weeks after the referendum, Harry was arrested on three counts of carnal indecency, or what the press described as “homosexual behavior.” He was fingerprinted and booked at the Cape May County Courthouse. The thing that everyone had pretended to overlook was now being used to indict him. This was no misdemeanor. Sodomy laws were still on the books in New Jersey, punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Interestingly, the accusers were all public employees: Thomas Sullivan, a bridgetender for the state highway department; James Luddy, who worked in the office of the city engineer; and a local detective, sergeant Dominick Longo, who claimed that “an incident” had occurred in Harry’s apartment above the fudge shop. An explanation for why Longo was up there in the first place came from none other than D. Allen Stretch, who announced that he had instructed Longo, an ambitious cop looking to advance his career, to “get the goods” on Harry because of complaints his office had received, although Stretch did not specify what those complaints were.

According to Longo’s New Jersey Superior Court indictment, Harry Anglemyer “unlawfully, malicious, lewdly and indecently did take the private parts of him the said Dominick Longo in the mouth.” Stretch insisted to the Philadelphia Inquirer that if Longo had permitted Harry’s “unnatural attentions,” it was only because he was “doing his duty.” (The other two alleged incidents came to light soon after Longo made his accusation—apparently, they’d gone unreported for years.)

Harry was furious. He vowed to the Philadelphia Inquirer that he would continue his campaign against the blue laws “despite this legal action which has been brought against me personally.” He then promptly filed his own complaint against Longo. He didn’t deny that there had been what the press called an “incident.” Rather he claimed that it was Longo who’d tried to force Harry into giving him a blow job.

None of this was a good look for America’s Greatest Family Resort. Yet however much the thought of homosexuality disgusted many people, some residents quietly agreed with their beloved Harry that Stretch and Longo were retaliating for his campaign against the blue laws. A grand jury, however, upheld the charges against Harry while dismissing those against Longo.

The first case—the one regarding Sullivan, the bridgetender—went to trial in early April 1964. Harry was acquitted in 18 minutes. The jury, it turned out, felt that something was amiss. Harry took the news in stride, telling a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer that he was a “sitting duck for all the nuts around here until I beat the rest of these charges.” He then vowed to permanently dismantle Ocean City’s blue laws, come hell or high water.

The town roiled, people chose sides, and a trial was scheduled to litigate the remaining charges against Harry—the ones involving Longo—two weeks after Labor Day.

This is when friends noticed Harry’s fastidious presentation begin to fray. Trouble seemed to follow him. He was the victim of several robbery attempts. Some he reported, others he only discussed with friends. Investigators would later learn that he was rolled for money by two young punks, one of whom dragged him from his car at a stoplight and gave him a black eye in the middle of the intersection.

In the weeks leading up to his death, Harry sported not one but two black eyes. He laughed them off as injuries from clumsy falls or from dancing too hard and running into a wall. Maybe he didn’t want people to be more worried about him than they already were. One of his fudge cutters suggested that he hire a bodyguard. Harry said no thanks, he could take care of himself.

Later, people would speculate that he was meeting Longo, that the latter had suggested a late-night rendezvous to lure the Fudge King to his death.

Harry loved the Dunes, an after-hours nightclub just over the bridge from Ocean City, parked on a sandbar at the edge of Egg Harbor Township, an unincorporated no-man’s land. “Dunes to dawn!” patrons liked to say. Harry said it a lot that summer. He was well-known at the Dunes, to staff and patrons alike. Some even suggested it was where he’d met Longo the night “the incident” took place.

The music at the Dunes was loud, the beer plentiful, the air sweaty. On the night Harry walked through the door for the last time, 2,500 people were crammed inside, dancing to house bands the Rooftoppers and the Carroll Brothers.

Harry had been on a bit of a bar crawl that night. First he went to the Bala Inn to arrange for Copper Kettle’s annual employees’ dinner the following night—he told proprietor Engelbert Bruenig to expect at least 80 people. Then he was off to the Jolly Roger Cocktail Lounge, before heading to Steel’s Ship Bar for some live music. Next up was Bay Shores, followed by Tony Marts, where Bill Haley and His Comets sometimes jammed. Here, Harry invited two women to come with him to the Dunes, but it was 2 a.m., too late for their blood.

He tried again at O’Byrne’s—this time inviting a former Copper Kettle worker and his girlfriend. They too said no. On the way out, Harry asked Mrs. O’Byrne herself if she wanted to come with him. She declined.  

Harry continued on to the Dunes. He had to meet someone there. He seemed ambivalent about the mysterious rendezvous, but also determined to go. He mentioned this to a couple of people that night, in one of the many places where he was allegedly seen. Over the years Harry, like Elvis, was reported to have been seen in more places the night he died than would have been humanly possible.

Later, people would speculate that he was meeting Longo, that the latter had suggested a late-night rendezvous to lure the Fudge King to his death. If Longo could get Harry out of the picture, people theorized, there wouldn’t be a trial in September and Longo could get back to his ambition. (He would become Ocean City’s chief of police in 1975, and remain in that position for 20 years.) But considering the two men’s legal tango, it didn’t make sense for Longo to have initiated the encounter, much less at a place where they’d both be recognized. And even if Longo had made such a request, surely Harry wouldn’t have fallen for it.

Who, then, was Harry meeting?

Sometime between 3:30 and 4 a.m., his maroon-colored Lincoln, its whitewall tires dusted with sand, pulled up to the Dunes. The parking lot was so full, Harry had to circle the building, and two doormen would later recall him searching for a spot. He eventually found one on Ocean Drive.

Once parked, he proceeded in the side door, box of fudge in hand. (He’d brought every proprietor he saw that night their favorite kind, as an end-of-summer gift.) He settled in at the bar, where owner John McCann—a former bootlegger—bought him a drink. They shared some laughs, including one at Harry’s expense: When a man on the prowl for a date wandered over, McCann pointed to Harry and said, “Why do you need a girl when Harry’s right here?”

Harry laughed the loudest, bought people drinks, then fought off sleep while waiting for whomever he was supposed to meet. At about 5 a.m., he left.

Six hours later, as the tide went out and the mud hens squawked, one of Harry’s delivery men, making a fudge run to Atlantic City, observed his boss’s Lincoln still in the parking lot. Peering through the window, he saw Harry’s body wedged on the floor of the passenger side. Conspicuously absent was his spectacular diamond ring.

He was 37 years old.

The news hit the papers that afternoon. People in town were horrified to read that Harry had been found with “severe head injuries,” his skull fractured in at least two places. Though some were quoted as saying that Harry “practically asked for it,” or that he’d made “too many important enemies.” In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Stretch and Longo expressed their regret that the criminal charges brought against Harry never resulted in his “being ordered to accept psychiatric treatment which he badly needed.”

The rumor mill roared to life. Was this a revenge killing? A robbery gone wrong? A crime of passion? Because it wasn’t immediately clear who had killed the Fudge King or why, a fog of dread set in. The Dunes was padlocked. The grocer who’d been fined for selling the Sunday cantaloupe claimed that he’d received an anonymous phone call warning him not to drive by the Dunes ever again—as he did every day on the way to market in Atlantic City—or he too might meet his end.

The investigation ran into an immediate snag: The crime had occurred on the busiest day of the year for New Jersey state police. Potential witnesses had already scattered to the winds. With the summer season coming to a close, some 150,000 people took to the New Jersey Turnpike, migrating back to their suburban lives in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. To make matters worse, there were no fingerprints in Harry’s car, the result of what police described as a “film of dust which adhered to the dampness of the dew from the previous night.”

But within 48 hours, investigators caught a break. They identified two witnesses to the murder: a young couple, Joyce Lickfeld and Kenneth McGinley, who were sitting in a red convertible parked two car lengths behind Harry’s Lincoln. The couple reported that when Harry approached his car after leaving the Dunes, he was with another man. Lickfeld and McGinley weren’t locals, so they didn’t recognize Harry or who he was with. The two men slipped into Harry’s car, and all was quiet for several minutes.

Then Lickfeld and McGinley heard someone shout, “Get out of here, you creep!” Harry and the man burst from the car and brawled onto Ocean Drive, tangling viciously. Soon after, the couple heard a loud crack as Harry’s head hit the pavement.

According to Lickfeld and McGinley, the man told Harry to get up, but Harry lay motionless, facing up toward the crescent moon. Cars began to honk; one, parked across Ocean Drive, seemed to do so with particular urgency. Suddenly, two men appeared out of the darkness, running toward Harry. They grabbed him under each arm and dragged him, penny loafers scraping the pavement, to his car. They told the couple that they had matters in hand. The couple, shaken, went inside the Dunes.

Lickfeld and McGinley helped police make a sketch of the killer. If anyone else saw what happened, they never came forward.

Months went by. The Dunes remained padlocked. Harry’s sister, Elaine, took over the fudge shops. Then months became years. Finally, in 1967, authorities announced that they had indicted someone, but not anyone who’d been whispered about by locals. Instead, it was a man named Christopher Brendan Hughes, 27, who was in a federal prison for his part in an extortion ring that targeted gay men. But while the Kansas City Star reported that “shaking down homosexuals had been Hughes’s major source of income for several years,” he insisted to the paper that he was no killer and pleaded not guilty to murdering Harry. Still, the authorities felt sure that they had their man—not least because Hughes had been in possession of Harry’s ring.

Harry’s sister told reporters that her family was glad to see a suspect in custody, and many Shore locals agreed that Hughes must have been the culprit. Three years after the crime, they were hungry for a trial, for answers. Meanwhile, Joyce Lickfeld did her best to keep her head down. She was told she would be the prosecution’s most important witness—she, not McGinley, had gotten a look at the killer’s face.

In September 1969, the case finally went to trial. This was just two months after the Stonewall riots, and the culture was shifting. Gay people were suddenly willing to fight their oppressors. Some were beginning to think of them as a protected class. In this climate, the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office might have felt a keener pressure to convict the killer of a well-known gay man.

Harry’s bloody penny loafers, slacks, Ban-Lon polo, and pinstriped jacket were entered into evidence. Scores of witnesses were called. Expectations ran high that there would finally be justice. But the whole thing sank like a stone. A onetime cellmate of Hughes’s named Ronnie Lee Murray, who had an uncanny ability to break out of jail—he’d managed three escapes in his career, and was even caught trying to flee his cell in the weeks just before the trial—refused to repeat under oath what he’d apparently told police during the investigation: that Hughes had confessed to the murder. Even being charged with obstruction of justice didn’t loosen Murray’s tongue. When the judge asked why he’d changed his mind, he replied, “I don’t want to get into it.”

A conviction would have to rely entirely on Lickfeld’s testimony. She took the stand and was asked to describe what she’d seen at the Dunes, and then to point out who in the courtroom resembled the man who killed Harry. Lickfeld fretted and fumbled and looked right past Hughes, who was sitting a few feet away from her. Instead, she pointed to a very surprised sheriff standing in the back. The courtroom erupted.

Hughes’s attorney, Leland Stanford III, called no witnesses. Hughes was acquitted in under an hour. His wife and sister leapt from their seats and cried, “My God!” The Ocean City Sentinel-Ledger reported that unless new suspects appeared, “law enforcement officials regard the murder case as closed.”

No suspects ever did.

The trial had been a horrible show, nothing more, she told me. She was glad someone “on the outside” was finally looking into the story.

For a long time, for a lot of people, this is how the story ended: abruptly, unceremoniously, with what seemed like more questions than answers. But a cohort of Ocean City residents insisted that the answers were right there for anyone who bothered to look. They believed that a toxic brew of prejudice, rage, and power had doomed the Fudge King.

I agreed, and thought that the story might make a great screenplay—a kind of South Jersey noir or David Lynch fantasia, where the flowers are pretty above the surface but gnarly worms lurk just below. Yet, soon I was hooked more deeply by the story of a fellow gay man living a relatively out life in the town where my family had spent our summer vacations. Someone whose reward for trying to yank Ocean City into the future was to become a target of hate and hypocrisy.

I started my research by reaching out to William Kelly, a journalist, local historian, and blogger who had written about the case on the ground in South Jersey. Initially we talked on the phone. His voice was reedy, phlegmy—I imagined him with a white beard and a fisherman’s cap. He assured me that the case could be solved entirely by the evidence from the investigation. But law enforcement didn’t have that evidence, he told me, because it had been destroyed. Which was convenient, he claimed, since law enforcement itself was involved in the crime. Ocean City power players at the highest levels.

There was someone he wanted me to talk to immediately: the young mother in a bad marriage to whom Harry had gifted that new clothes dryer. Now in her eighties, she remained angry about Harry’s murder, adamant that he’d been crushed by a cabal of powerful locals—and certain she knew who’d killed him. The trial had been a horrible show, nothing more, she told me. She was glad someone “on the outside” was finally looking into the story. She felt that it was time for “the truth to be known.” And while she insisted on remaining anonymous, she did have some information for me.

She was at the Dunes the night Harry was killed, she told me. Her father was a manager there. She saw Harry leave, and whom he left with. “Everyone knows who got away with murder,” she told me.

The killer, she claimed, was a ne’er-do-well from a prominent family. He was still very much alive, in Florida, to which he’d relocated soon after the crime. Where exactly in Florida she didn’t know. But she promised to engage his family in Ocean City, with whom she socialized on occasion. Perhaps they would tell her where he was.

For a while it seemed like this would happen, but then the balking began. “Maybe this whole thing wasn’t such a good idea,” she said. Then: “You have to promise me you won’t tell anyone.” Then: “Oh, I won’t see his family for a while.…”

When I expressed my frustration to Kelly, he advised me to forget about her, but to follow up on what she’d told me. What I needed, he said, was to get my hands on a certain affidavit that would prove her allegations. The document in question, which Kelly claimed to have seen, was dictated by a milkman named Lou Esposito who’d been out making deliveries the morning Harry’s body was found. Esposito told Kelly that he’d driven by the Dunes, seen state police examining the scene, and pulled off the road to learn what he could. At that point, he claimed, he’d heard voices behind him in the marsh. “He didn’t have to die,” one of them supposedly said. Esposito then turned around and recognized three local men, including the one the young mother told me she’d seen leave the Dunes with Harry. He was throwing a bloody shirt into the water. Esposito then sped off, believing he’d gone undetected. That night, however, he got a call demanding his silence or else. Soon after, Esposito purported, he was awarded a long sought-after job with the fire department—a reward, he believed, for keeping his mouth shut.

At the end of his life, Esposito wanted to unburden himself, so he dictated all this to his lawyer. He then gave a copy of the affidavit to Kelly, who promptly made copies for several of his friends for safekeeping. Kelly had since misplaced his copy, and most of the people he’d given the others to had died—as had Esposito and his lawyer. The only person who might still have one, Kelly said, was a local architect named Jack Snyder. But Snyder didn’t return any of my calls. Or emails. Or letters. Because he had recently died.

I felt more than a bit of skepticism about the affidavit. But at this point, I was in thrall to the local myth, however unbelievable it sounded. I was also struck by an anonymous comment in one of Kelly’s blogs that said of this story, “I believe the delivery man you refer to was my dad. He told me many of the details you mentioned [before] he died in 2003.”

If this was Esposito’s son, perhaps he would know where the affidavit was. Kelly told me that the son had the same name as his father and was “listed in the phone book.” So I called him. Lou Junior picked up on the first ring, listened to my spiel about the affidavit, and paused before responding.

It was a dirty bit of business, he finally said—a broad cover-up, he agreed. Harry was a great guy who did a lot for Ocean City, and law enforcement had most definitely been involved in his death. Lou had been ten years old when Harry was murdered, and even then he knew that Harry was gay. Everybody did. But he couldn’t help me with the affidavit, because, he told me, I was talking to the wrong Lou Esposito. See, there had been two Lou Espositos in town, and I was talking to the son of the other one.

His father had known the Lou Esposito who supposedly gave the affidavit, because they used to get each other’s mail. His father had even made payments on the other man’s car loan before the mistake was discovered. The correct Lou Esposito had some daughters, he told me. Maybe they would have their father’s affidavit? They were still around, but he didn’t know their names: “They got married and stuff,” he said.

I longed to set sail from the land of dead architects and lost affidavits. I wanted concrete information. Preferably a gun that smoked.

I decided to return to Ocean City, declare myself a child of its summers, and talk to locals and the law enforcement agencies that had handled the initial investigation. Maybe doors would open, and documents—if any were left—would be coughed up. At the very least I could hear for myself that they no longer existed.

I flew from Los Angeles to Philadelphia in May 2022, picked up my brother and our mother—who asked, “Is it wrong to be excited about a murder?”—and headed down the Shore.

The three of us stood at 11th Street and the Boardwalk, where Harry’s flagship store had been. The shop was no longer the gleaming showstopper I remembered, and it now had the affrontery to sell someone else’s fudge. Above it was the suite of rooms where Harry had lived, where Longo went “to get the goods.” Its many windows were flung open, and inside a cleaning crew busied about, readying the place for summer.

Standing in the shade of the old Copper Kettle, the full force of what I experienced as a child suddenly returned. Something had never felt quite right about Ocean City: I could never really be a part of it, however much I wanted to. There was nowhere for someone like me, with my queer desires, to go in America’s Greatest Family Resort, except under or out.

Which made me wonder: Why had Harry stayed? Why didn’t he park his talents elsewhere? In the 1960s, large communities of gay people were establishing themselves in his hometown of Philadelphia and in New York. Harry had to know about them. Why would such a charming and innovative businessman remain in Ocean City?

Just then my phone flashed: “Cape May County Prosecutor’s Office.” The very office where Harry had been booked on lewdness charges. Before my flight, I’d left a message with Lieutenant Joe Landis, its LGBTQ liaison, thinking I’d have a sympathetic ear.

Landis told me that he was not in his office, that he was still working remotely because of the pandemic, and that the records on the lewdness charges against Harry were probably long gone. He suggested I call Captain Pat Snyder at the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office, which might have records on Harry’s murder.

I left Captain Snyder a message, then followed my mother into a bookstore, where she asked a clerk if they had any books on Copper Kettle. This was the clerk who lowered her voice and said, “You sneeze in this town and everybody hears it.” Realizing that I had a live one, I pushed the issue of Harry’s death, asking if she had any idea who might have been involved. She paused, then wrote a name on a piece of scratch paper and passed it to me.

“Longo.”

She then insinuated that Harry and Longo had been having an affair. My mother looked at me, her eyes big behind her glasses. On the same piece of paper, I wrote another name—the one given to me by the young mother in a bad marriage. The man she said had left the Dunes with Harry, the same man Lou Esposito allegedly swore was one of the men he saw in the marsh after the killing. I passed it back to the clerk.

She glanced at it. Yeah, he was involved, too.

Could she tell me more? She exchanged looks with another clerk behind her. No, she said, that’s all she had. Could she think of anyone who might tell me more? She suggested a local author who had written a book that included a chapter about Harry’s murder, albeit in fictionalized form. But the book was out of print. And its title escaped her.

I asked if I could have the author’s name so I could search for the book online. She exchanged another look with her fellow clerk. No, I could not have his name—he was a local who wrote under a pseudonym “because he knew too much.”

But he came into the store all the time, she added. I left my contact for her to convey when she saw him next. She promised she’d pass it along, to which I responded, trying to break the accumulating tension, “I’m just in it for the fudge.”

The two clerks chuckled, then fell silent as we left.

I decided to call the young mother in a bad marriage, to tell her that I was in town and that someone had just confirmed the name she’d given to me. She seemed startled that I was in Ocean City, claimed she was under the weather, and said she’d call back. I never heard from her.

Bells were ringing, locals were ghosting, and there was, I have to admit, something delectable in the Nancy Drewness of it all.

“Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office” flashed on my phone. Captain Snyder himself was now calling, intrigued by the message I’d left. His voice was serious, full, resonant. I launched into my spiel about the Fudge King’s unsolved murder.

“Was that the case where the victim was gay and romantically involved with a cop?” he asked.

He told me that he would ask around for any materials that might still exist, although after all these years it was probably a long shot.

I hung up and googled Captain Snyder. He was one of the top detectives in Atlantic County and a graduate of the FBI Academy. Not a bad person to have taken me seriously. Better still, from his online photo he looked to be somewhere in his forties—which meant that he was one or two generations away from anyone still spooked by the crime. Also, he didn’t stumble on the word “gay” like several locals had up to this point.

I circled back to William Kelly, the blogger. Could he meet? He suggested the Anchorage, one of the bars where Harry was allegedly seen the last night he was alive. I left my mother and brother on the boardwalk and drove our Kia rental to Somers Point, where the Anchorage, a candy-colored Victorian tavern, sits just a few yards from Great Egg Harbor Bay.

I immediately spotted Kelly at the bar—a big man in his seventies, ruddy, with watery eyes, his breathing loud and labored. He was sitting with his girlfriend, a Kewpie-ish redhead somewhere in her sixties, and a male friend, around Kelly’s age but smaller, taut, watchful.

Kelly told me that he’d just had a blood transfusion and wasn’t sure how long he’d last with his health problems. Every man is remembered for one thing he did on this earth, he said. Solving the Fudge King’s murder would not be his. He implied that he had bigger fish to fry, glancing around. His friends were silent.

I wondered if we shouldn’t move to a quiet corner. We were in full view of the other patrons. But he said that he wasn’t scared to discuss the crime out in the open, or to have written repeatedly about it over the decades, naming names and pointing fingers at people he’d known his entire life.

“What could they do,” he said, “kill me?”

Kelly told me not to put too much stock in Captain Snyder’s promise to help. “He had to say that,” he said. He offered more names of people who might have intel on Harry’s murder. A well-connected local who had mob connections. Another milkman who’s now a real estate agent. His friend suggested that I talk to a UPS guy who parked himself on a barstool at Gregory’s at 5 p.m. every day.

I felt myself once again drifting from the facts.

In the small talk gluing it all together, we got onto the topic of the Warren Commission. Kelly looked at me incredulously and said, “You don’t actually believe one gunman killed JFK, do you?”

I slumped, dejected and day drunk, into the parking lot—just as Captain Snyder called back. He had found something, he said, sounding a little amazed. Materials pertaining to the investigation.

What materials? I asked, astonished.

He was not permitted to say, he replied.

I said I’d be right over. He said no, I would need to file a public records request. The entire process would take some weeks, and he couldn’t guarantee that what had been found would be made available to me.

OK, I said, could he at least tell me the nature of what he’d found?

No, he could not.

Because the windshield of their convertible was covered with dew, she couldn’t see what was going on, so she peeked over it. That’s when she witnessed Harry being assaulted.

Back home in Los Angeles, I called a lawyer friend to ask her about submitting an Open Public Records application. She offered to be the Harper Lee to my Truman Capote, holding my hand as I drafted the request. She cautioned me not to get my hopes up: “Records in these cases could mean cops’ coffee receipts.” I worked with my Harper, lit votives, burned sage, sent my request, and was rewarded two weeks later with a terse email that read, “The agency possesses no responsive records.”

I called Captain Snyder with more than a little bass in my voice and said, “What gives?” He paused, reiterated that some materials had been found, and instructed me to file again—this time to a certain person’s attention. I refiled, cc’ing the good captain to let him know I meant business.

Two weeks later I received in my inbox 168 pages of investigative material pertaining to Harry Anglemyer’s murder: from the initial investigation by the New Jersey State Police, through the handoff to the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office some years later, and up to but not including the trial. The courtroom records, I learned after filing another request, had been destroyed, which was standard procedure at the time for any trial resulting in an acquittal.

Captain Snyder had been slyly schooling me about how to get what I wanted, and now it was pouring out of my printer. Scores of typewritten interviews and reports, much of it reprinted from old-timey carbon copies, then mimeographed, then digitized into PDFs. There were redactions everywhere, and big chunks of it were out of order, as if everything had been thrown loosely together and shoved in a filing cabinet.

I stayed up all night reading, ruining my eyes. The pages filled out gaps in the news reports from the day, revealing much that had been hidden from the public. I’d expected Mayberry-level ineptitude, but this was a comprehensive investigation with almost 100 witnesses, handled by the New Jersey State Police, law enforcement agencies in several other states, and the FBI.

According to news reports, they began by looking for anyone with damaged fists, as the assault had been so brutal. Meanwhile, they talked to people who’d seen Harry in the 24 hours prior to his death: His secretary, Daniel LeRoy. His sister Elaine, who also had an apartment above the fudge shop. Dunes staff who remained local when the summer ended. All of them were eliminated as suspects. Many couldn’t recall seeing Harry at all that night, nor could two Egg Harbor Township patrolmen assigned to the area—although one had noticed Harry’s distinctive car gleaming under the parking lot’s lights.

Two bartenders who’d been swigging champagne in the parking lot said that they’d seen Harry in the hours before his death with his head on the bar. Standing next to him was a man in his late twenties, taller than Harry, who had long dark hair and was wearing a dark suit; he was “possibly Italian.” The bartenders asked the man if Harry was “bothering” him. The man said no. They asked Harry if he needed help to his car. He said what he always said, that he could take care of himself.

The police interviewed Copper Kettle staff, including a former fudge cutter who’d apparently vowed to “get Anglemyer’s ring by Labor Day.” They also spoke to a local with a “Beatles haircut” who turned out to be one of the punks behind Harry’s black eyes. The young man claimed that Harry had grabbed him “by the privates,” then admitted to being after Harry’s ring too. Both the fudge cutter and the punk had criminal records. But when they took polygraphs, they registered no reaction when questioned about the killing. Police ruled them out as suspects.

Investigators soon located Joyce Lickfeld and Kenneth McGinley, who were in their twenties and had broken up earlier in the summer, only to run into each other that fateful night at the Dunes. They weren’t up to no good, as some newspapers implied—they were discussing what had torpedoed their relationship. (Eventually, the intensity of the investigation and their role in it would bring them closer, and they would marry.)

Police asked them to recount what they’d witnessed that night. Lickfeld said that they were sitting in the car when “two fellows” approached from the rear. One of the men, presumably Harry, was “walking like a girl.” The two men entered the car in front of Lickfeld, then, after a few minutes, exited and began arguing. Because the windshield of their convertible was covered with dew, she couldn’t see what was going on, so she peeked over it. That’s when she witnessed Harry being assaulted. McGinley intervened, offering his help. Harry’s assailant replied, “That’s OK, buddy,” as if he and Harry were just a couple of drunk friends having a bad night.

Lickfeld told police that she got a good look at the killer because she was sitting against the convertible’s passenger-side door, facing the Dunes, when Harry and the man walked by. She said that the man was in his late twenties, white but with a dark complexion, and sported slicked-back hair. He was “maybe of Italian extraction,” medium build, taller than average, wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and black tie. This sounded to me a lot like the man the two drunk bouncers saw Harry talking to at the bar.

When the sketch of the killer was published in newspapers, people called investigators in droves.

It looked like a cook in a Wildwood restaurant who “beats up women and queers.”

Someone’s daughter’s piano teacher.

“That manager of Aunt Jemima Restaurant.”

“An usher at the General Motors exhibit” at the New York World’s Fair.

A man who “acted like a homosexual, spoke of hairdressing, and made remarks of being in Harry’s pad.”

People inserted themselves everywhere, throwing enemies under the bus, suggesting people who bore no resemblance whatsoever to the sketch, and offering up their opinions as they pretended to be Harry’s best friend—or distanced themselves from him when questioned about being seen with him that summer.

At one point, investigators wondered if Harry’s nephew Charles, who worked at Copper Kettle, was involved in the killing, but Charles denied it. He said that he’d always worried about his uncle. When Harry “talked openly about his homosexual problems,” Charles counseled him to “do it elsewhere,” so as not to get in trouble in Ocean City. Yes, he’d sometimes followed his uncle, but only to make sure he was safe.

Some of the more promising information came from Catherine Lee Gordon, Harry’s maid. Gordon had seen quite a bit while keeping house for Harry that summer. Men came and went via the apartment’s three entrances. Investigators asked her to provide names of everyone who’d visited the apartment that summer, especially anyone she thought was close to him. Straight away she mentioned jockey Howard Grant, whom Harry had picked up at the Atlantic City racetrack. Grant had moved into the apartment in July, bringing with him his mother and one of her girlfriends.

Gordon also told police about airman Thomas Campbell, who’d come into the picture even before Grant moved out. Gordon found him more agreeable than the jockey. Campbell liked to play the piano, so a besotted Harry had one delivered to the apartment. Next came Campbell’s friends for raucous parties; they liked to sing into the wee hours, full of whiskey. This was the kind of party that took place the weekend before Harry’s death, Gordon said. It started with dinner, after which a man who resembled the sketch stopped by. Harry showed him around the apartment, but Catherine didn’t get the man’s name.

All these tips were dead ends. There is no record of Grant ever being questioned by police, and case files show Campbell learning about Harry’s death from a mutual friend on the beach, then flying to Germany a few days later to fulfill his Air Force duties.

Longo’s name comes up three times in the entire 168 pages. The first is with regard to an anonymous letter that arrived at the offices of the state police. “Why don’t you ask Longo what happened?” it read. “A couple of the ones involved in those ‘morals charges’ would love to have Harry out of the way.” Later, a caller told police that the sketch of the suspect looked like Longo, then hung up after refusing to give her name. The third reference to Longo came courtesy of the man himself: He contacted an investigator to say that the sketch resembled a “drifter from Longport whose father has an Esso gas station.” Longo knew this man to play the horses and hang out at the Dunes, and Ocean City police had a warrant out on him for writing bad checks.

Stretch’s name appears once in the files. An anonymous caller claimed, “Stretch is the guy who put the money up to have Anglemyer killed, and three henchmen did the job.” The tipster promised to call back the following week with more information but never did.

If police followed up on these tips—including Longo’s drifter—there’s no record of it in the files made available to me. Nor is there any documentation of Longo or Stretch being questioned about Harry’s death or providing alibis for the night of the murder. Though parts of the file were redacted, nothing I read suggested that law enforcement considered either man a suspect. Lickfeld and McGinley don’t seem to have been shown their photos either. I couldn’t ask Longo, who died in 2006, or Stretch, who died in 1985.

As I was coming to the end of the files, I found something that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up: a formal mention of the 1963 lewdness charges against Harry in a two-page memo issued by an Atlantic County detective. Dated the day after the murder, it lists his three accusers: bridgetender Thomas Sullivan, engineer James Luddy—but not Longo. Instead, the memo gives the third man as someone named Bill Blevin.

That was the name of the man the young mother in a bad marriage told me she saw leaving the Dunes with Harry. One of the names supposedly in Lou Esposito’s missing affidavit. The person the bookstore clerk believed was involved in the killing.

But how had Blevin’s name wound up replacing Longo’s in the memo? It appears nowhere else in the investigation files I received. And no one else I spoke to could connect Harry to Blevin.

I attempted to locate Blevin, turning up an address at a Fort Lauderdale strip mall and one on the Gulf Coast. Letters sent to both were returned. I reached out to his cousin Robert—who as it happened had worked with Longo on the local force before succeeding him as chief of police—and also to a surviving Blevin sibling, without success.

Then I got a tip. A friend of Blevin’s had heard that I was asking around, and he was willing to talk.

I was skeptical. The friend had been described to me by one local as someone who was less than trustworthy. Maybe so, but information he gave me checked out. He knew all the places Blevin had lived since leaving Ocean City when no one else did. And he provided me with Blevin’s obituary from 2002, printed by a newspaper in Knoxville, Tennessee, establishing that he was not alive and well in Florida.

And the story he told me was this: For reasons that are unclear, Blevin had become a target of Longo’s ire and, knowing Longo’s expanding sphere of influence, set sail from the Shore forever.

This at least had a ring of truth. Longo, according to some of my local sources, had a history of personal retaliation. People started calling him King Dominick at a certain point because of the power he wielded around town. Still, this was just one man’s version of the past.

With Blevin’s obituary in hand, I was able to locate two of his children: Beth Blevin and Teri Gagliardi. My heart about stopped when they described their father as “Italian looking”—just like Lickfeld, McGinley, and the Dunes bouncers had characterized the man last seen with Harry. But the Blevin daughters also described their father as scrawny, which didn’t square with the description of the suspected killer. And neither Beth nor Teri had any recollection of the names Harry Anglemyer or Dominick Longo.

I was no closer to determining how Blevin’s name wound up in the memo instead of Longo’s. It certainly seemed odd, because everyone in town knew that it was Longo, not Blevin, who’d accused Harry of lewdness. (And Blevin’s name appears nowhere else in the investigation files.) Could Longo have replaced his own name with Blevin’s as part of his grudge against the man?

Maybe, so many years after the fact, no one could provide the answer. But I did begin to wonder if the erroneous memo naming Blevin, along with the references—or lack thereof—to Stretch and Longo in the case files, were the seeds from which a legend grew. Perhaps these mysteries made their way into Ocean City’s water, reaching people like William Kelly and the young mother in a bad marriage and the bookstore clerk—people perhaps inclined to believe that the grassy knoll was lousy with gunmen.

Just as bootlegging arose from Prohibition, so did the extortion of gay men arise from laws criminalizing queer behavior.

Over the course of the investigation, New Jersey law enforcement ruled out suspect after suspect until only Christopher Brendan Hughes’s name remained. He was the father of two small children with a common-law wife in Pennsylvania whom he hardly saw because he was busy extorting money from gay men from Baltimore to Chicago. His name was given to New Jersey state police by the FBI, after the bureau interviewed an associate of his named Thomas Rochford, aka Tommy Ryan.

The extortion ring Hughes and Rochford were in was known to police as the Chickens and the Bulls. The group’s MO was what law enforcement used to refer to as “fairy shaking,” where they would target a gay mark, then send in a “chicken” to lure the target to a hotel room. Soon after, a “bull” would bust into the room, flashing a badge and handcuffs, pretending to be a vice cop, and demand money. If the mark didn’t comply, the bull would threaten arrest, which carried the risk of being named a homosexual in the press.

The Chickens and the Bulls were an insidious success, managing to snare thousands of targets, from congressmen to military brass. It was rumored that they almost brought down Liberace, but Mr. Showmanship could afford to pay them off. Other men weren’t so lucky. They went bankrupt, got divorced, lost jobs—one Navy admiral even killed himself.

Law enforcement had long overlooked crimes against gay men, and even tacitly encouraged them. Just as bootlegging arose from Prohibition, so did the extortion of gay men arise from laws criminalizing queer behavior. But around the mid-1960s, law enforcement became interested in prosecuting the Chickens and the Bulls, in no small part because cops didn’t appreciate being impersonated by criminals. So began what the FBI referred to as Operation Homex, a coordinated effort to take down the Chickens and the Bulls.

Hughes was netted in the operation. He was a chicken—and an effective one. He was young. He was smart. He was pretty. And according to FBI files, Hughes took Harry’s ring to Chicago to fence it. The ring was later stripped of its stones. One became part of an engagement band given to the fiancée of one of the Bulls; another was placed in a tie pin for which a dirty cop held the pawn ticket.

Prosecutors couldn’t lean on other members of the Chickens and the Bulls to place Hughes at the Dunes the night of Harry’s death. Rochford was institutionalized—his lawyer said that his memory was “wiped from shock treatments.” The boss of the whole ring, Sherman Kaminsky, was in the wind. (The FBI didn’t catch him until 1978, when he was living in Denver under an assumed name and overseeing a business breeding rabbits.) Law enforcement interviewed some of Hughes’s associates from Marcus Hook, the hardscrabble Pennsylvania town where he grew up, but none of them were called to testify at trial. Instead the prosecution relied on Ronnie Lee Murray, Hughes’s old cellmate. But he ultimately refused to take the stand.

And then there was Joyce Lickfeld. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Hughes looked “a good deal like the police sketch drawn of him,” the one Lickfeld made possible. But that wasn’t true. He had fair hair, blue eyes, and a slight build. “Slender and stoop-shouldered,” the Ocean City Sentinel-Ledger wrote, “looking more like a high school teacher than a brawler.” It’s no wonder that when Lickfeld looked around the courtroom for Harry’s killer, she didn’t finger Hughes.

But then hadn’t the prosecution showed Lickfeld photos of Hughes during the investigation? Only one person could tell me for sure.

Joyce was afraid because the case remained unsolved. She was worried that people might come for her.

Joyce is now divorced from Kenneth and remarried, with a different last name. She’s in her eighties and lives in a ranch-style home in a small central New Jersey town. Inside, on practically every surface, are seashells.

“I just love the seashore,” she said.

It hadn’t been easy to find Joyce, and at first she wasn’t sure she wanted to talk. Eventually she said yes, and we scheduled a visit via text, which included a lot of emojis on her end. Now we sat at her dining table having coffee. She’d put out an array of muffins. With her were her sister and her son with Kenneth.

Joyce had startling blue eyes, almost turquoise, and she wore a blouse of the same color. Her hair was chestnut red. Her manner was shy, and there was something about her that felt like it needed protecting. Which is perhaps why her son and sister were there.

She told me that for years she kept a scrapbook of news clippings about the murder. She wasn’t eager to bring it out. I proceeded gingerly. Joyce was afraid because the case remained unsolved. She was worried that people might come for her. She also felt partly responsible for the mysteries that had accumulated over the previous 60 years, and also guilty that she couldn’t help Harry’s family find closure. Even though she knew none of it was really her fault. Still, “witness trouble” was what law enforcement officials had blamed the collapse of the case on, and she was keenly aware that she’d been the prosecution’s sole eyewitness.

Her recall was quite good, and the account she gave me of the murder matched the one she’d given the police, including the sound of Harry’s head hitting the road, that crack so sickening she can still hear it today.

She did add one thing that she hadn’t mentioned to investigators: As Harry walked past the convertible where she was sitting with Kenneth, he was holding hands with the other man. Why hadn’t she mentioned this to investigators? I asked. Because, she said, such things weren’t discussed back then. Instead she told police what I had read in the files, that Harry “walked like a girl.” This was, she said to me, the best she could do in 1964.

As for Christopher Brendan Hughes, yes, Joyce had seen mug shots of him in 1967, when he was indicted. And back then she thought, sure, this could be the man from the Dunes. But she never saw Hughes in person until the trial, because he’d been in prison. When she finally did, it seemed to her that he could only be the killer if he’d lost a lot of weight and dyed his hair. Ultimately, she didn’t believe he was the man she saw that night. So she pointed to the surprised sheriff in the back, who had dark skin and hair, because of all the men in the room he looked the most like the culprit.

“Would you like to see the scrapbook?” Joyce finally asked.

She picked it up off a credenza behind her and placed it between us. In it were not only newspaper clippings about the murder, but also souvenirs from her life: coasters from the bar where Kenneth proposed, postcards, dried flowers. There wasn’t one section for the murder and one for mementos—it was all mixed together, showing her life, the good and the terrible, as it happened.

Was there anything else she wanted me to know? Only that she’d met Harry’s mother and sister at the courthouse right after the trial, and they told her she could have a job at Copper Kettle if she wanted. That meant a lot to Joyce.

After our visit, I went to Harry’s grave at Northwood Cemetery in Philadelphia. He’s buried in a mausoleum along with his mother, though it wasn’t his initial resting place. Mrs. Anglemyer had her son disinterred at some point and commissioned the much grander resting monument for the two of them. From it you can see the house they lived in when Harry was a child.

The cemetery was ancient, in disrepair. A groundskeeper led me to the plot, explaining that Harry’s mother had paid for “perpetual care.” The mausoleum gleamed, and the grass around it was mowed, while the rest of the cemetery was gray-brown.

Tucked in the iron grate of the mausoleum’s door, through which I could see Harry’s name and that of his mother on the crypt, was a small American flag—the kind you’d wave in a parade—and a nosegay of fresh flowers. Two striking flashes of color in an otherwise monochromatic landscape.

I remarked to the groundskeeper that the flowers and the flag must have been part of “perpetual care.” But he said no. He had no idea who’d put those there.

“Are you sure they’re all dead?” Joyce had asked me about the suspects. It was a hard question to answer—the uncertainty shot through the whole story meant that there were surely names of suspects I didn’t know about. But there were plenty I did know about, based on my interviews and the investigation files. Some of them had been ruled out by law enforcement, but I wasn’t convinced—the files weren’t thorough enough for that. I started making a list: men of interest.

Longo and Stretch were on it. So were Kaminsky and Rochford. Bill Blevin, though I had serious doubts. The fudge cutter who claimed he “would get Anglemyer’s ring by Labor Day.” Arthur Marshall Brown, aka Arthur Kebabs, and Frank Ozio—the punks who rolled Harry a few weeks before he died. A Dunes bouncer named Saba “Buddy” Taweel, who looked like the sketch of the suspect and whom Lou Esposito allegedly named in his affidavit as one of the men in the marsh near the scene of the killing. Frank “Birdman” Phelan, who’d gunned down a couple in the basement of a Philadelphia restaurant. John “Chickie” Binder, a diamond-obsessed burglar who, according to an informant, had spotted Harry at the Dunes that summer and knew him to be “an important queer” he might roll. Another Dunes bouncer. A Dunes doorman. Christopher Brendan Hughes’s associates from Marcus Hook, who had rap sheets and, in interviews with police, placed themselves at the Shore the night of Harry’s death.

I couldn’t ask the Atlantic County prosecutor who worked the case—the aptly named Solomon Forman—for his opinion on any of these names. He was long dead. I assumed other key figures from the 1969 trial were gone, too. But maybe not Hughes’s attorney, whose job it had been to at least consider alternate theories of the crime. Hughes was a small-time crook who, despite his success in the Chickens and the Bulls, surely didn’t have the money for a private attorney. Which meant that he would have had a public defender. Perhaps someone precocious, eager to make a name for himself. Someone at the start of his career. Someone in his twenties in 1969 who might still be alive.

After Joyce couldn’t identify Stanford’s client in court, the only thing Atlantic County had on Hughes was Anglemyer’s ring.

“My client was innocent,” Leland Stanford III told me. Hughes was only put on trial “because of all the public pressure, because of Harry Anglemyer being so popular and well-known.”

Stanford, like Joyce, is in his eighties. Retired now, he left the Jersey Shore over a decade ago and today lives in a beach community farther down the coast. He had more to say than anyone I’d talked to, and not only about Hughes, his former client. His memory of the trial was astonishing. He attributed this to it being an indelible moment in his life, his first high-profile case, an extremely heady time.

Stanford had never seen the case files—the process of discovery back then was much more selective—so I told him what I knew. And he told me what he knew. He said that the sheriff standing in the back of the courtroom, the one Joyce had pointed to, was a buddy of his, a man named Samuel Shamy who was, incredibly, the first cousin of Dunes bouncer Saba “Buddy” Taweel. Was I once again in the land of local conspiracy? Stanford said no, Taweel’s alibi was airtight. That his cousin was in the courtroom had been merely a small-town coincidence.

What Stanford did think significant was that Shamy and his cousin were of Lebanese descent, with dark skin and hair, as Joyce and Kenneth had described the killer having. Further, both men had a unibrow, as did the suspect in the artist’s sketch. This was the first I’d heard about this detail. But when I looked closely at the sketch, I could see what Stanford was talking about: a dusting of hair above the bridge of the nose. No descriptions of Hughes mention it.

Stanford had no knowledge of the Longo and Stretch theory, nor of the name Bill Blevin. He told me to be wary of narratives built up over time. His only concern was clearing his client based on what he knew from his own pretrial investigation. And he felt certain that Hughes had not committed the crime. “The first words out of his mouth were ‘I’m innocent,’ ” he said. Hughes was a career criminal, I pointed out, and one who extorted gay men. But Hughes told Stanford that he never would have gone after Harry, that he only targeted men who didn’t want the world to know they were gay. Stanford was saying that Harry was basically too out of the closet to be extorted.

He had a point. In fact, when Harry was accused of lewd acts by Longo and the other men, he didn’t deny being gay—he only denied the specific charges against him. He didn’t have a wife to worry about, or a boss who might fire him if the truth came out. He wasn’t the kind of target the Chickens and the Bulls preferred.

Also, after Joyce couldn’t identify Stanford’s client in court, the only thing Atlantic County had on Hughes was Anglemyer’s ring. “He looked nothing like the drawing, and there was no direct evidence of any kind identifying him,” Stanford said. It wasn’t enough to prove murder. Which Stanford didn’t believe Hughes was capable of, physically or otherwise.

Did Stanford have any idea who had killed Harry Anglemyer?

He said that he did.

Could he tell me?

No, he could not.

Why?

Because the person might still be alive.

Was he afraid that this person would come after him?

No, he said. They’d be very old at this point. And the case could hardly be retried after all this time, so he wasn’t being professionally cautious.

I changed tack: Why was he convinced of the real killer’s identity?

Finally, he said: “Because of some things Christopher Hughes told me.”

When other bars closed, Hughes and his friends proceeded to the Dunes. Inside was Harry Anglemyer, diamond ring blazing.

Suspicious of lawyers, Hughes initially represented himself. Eventually Stanford came on board, and midway through the trial, Hughes trusted him enough to take him into his confidence. He admitted to Stanford that he was indeed at the Shore the night of the crime, partying with some of his boys from Marcus Hook. When other bars closed, Hughes and his friends proceeded to the Dunes. Inside was Harry Anglemyer, diamond ring blazing.

According to Hughes, it was one of the other guys from Marcus Hook who targeted Harry—a guy who looked Italian. He wasn’t known to be a member of the Chickens and the Bulls, but was extremely close to Hughes—at the very least familiar with Hughes’s line of work.

Hughes, then, may have been one of the men who came running when Harry hit the pavement, who helped the real killer stuff him in the car. Hughes admitted to Stanford that he eventually absconded with Harry’s ring, which explained why he was able to transport it to Chicago.

Hughes’s version of the story describes a crime of opportunity that happened to involve a member of the Chickens and the Bulls. While I still didn’t have the real killer’s name, I was inching closer to the truth. But one thing still rankled me: Harry had told various people that he was going to the Dunes to meet someone. Perhaps the whole thing, I pondered, was more planned than Hughes admitted to Stanford. Maybe Hughes or one of his associates identified Harry over the summer from all the press they’d been reading in connection with the lewdness charges brought by Dominick Longo, with D. Allen Stretch’s support. Maybe they arranged to meet Harry that night for what they hoped would be an easy grab-and-go robbery, only to have it end in murder.

I ran all this past Stanford, who, ever the lawyer, refused to speculate. I asked him if he’d encountered the man Hughes had identified as Harry’s killer before.

He said that he had. Several times. The man actually attended Hughes’s trial on and off—though presumably not the day Joyce testified, lest she identify him. He also showed up, unannounced, in Stanford’s office during that time. Stanford didn’t know why and sent him packing. “I wanted nothing to do with him,” he said.

Which makes it all the more notable that the day after the acquittal, Stanford received a call from this man. “He sounded like he was partying,” Stanford told me. “He just wanted to make sure, in my opinion, that he could not be charged with the murder now. I told him no, it didn’t appear he could be. He would have been charged by then if prosecutors felt they had something. The fact is, they had stopped investigating.”

Did you ever give his name to anyone else? I asked Stanford.

He said that he had. To none other than Solomon Forman, shortly after the Hughes trial.

Forman, then in his sixties, never learned how to drive, so he often got a ride to the courthouse with Stanford. It was during one of these drives that Stanford told him that they’d picked the wrong suspect to prosecute, then offered the name Hughes had provided as the real killer of Harry Anglemyer

On hearing it, Stanford said, Forman became quiet. He then admitted that he’d thought the county’s case against Hughes was lousy, and agreed that the wrong person had been tried. Furthermore, he said that he’d been assigned to the case—he was Atlantic County’s best trial attorney at the time, and after five years of the Fudge King’s murder remaining unsolved, there was considerable pressure to put the damn thing to bed.

About the name Hughes had given Stanford, Forman didn’t disagree. “You are probably correct,” he said.

But if the wrong person was indicted, I asked, why hadn’t authorities retried the case with a new suspect? Because there wasn’t enough evidence, Stanford explained. Nothing physical certainly. And because no one wanted to touch the matter at that point. Prosecutors had spent five days putting witnesses on the stand, only to end up with a drubbing acquittal in under an hour. They had lost all credibility. Without an utterly airtight case, they weren’t going to charge anyone else with Harry’s murder.

I understood that to get the suspected killer’s name from Stanford, I would need to prove that he was dead. Immediately after our call, I snail-mailed him the obituaries I’d assembled of everyone I considered to be a suspect. I would have sent them via email, but for some reason Stanford never received the other messages I sent that way. He never called me either, so after I knew the obituaries had arrived, I called him. Repeatedly. Comcast kept telling me that his cell phone was offline for “service interruptions.”

When I got through, an excruciating week later, I asked him if he was satisfied that the person he believed had killed Harry was well and truly dead.

He was, yes.

Was he now prepared to tell me his name?

He was. And he did.

The name made immediate sense. Investigators had tried to reach him as they looked into Harry’s murder, but were unable to locate him.

It was Kevin Hughes, Christopher Brendan Hughes’s younger brother.

Kevin had a longer—and more violent—rap sheet than Christopher, including a string of burglaries, two years on the lam, armed robbery, and assault and battery of a police officer. Witnesses told investigators that he was a “cop hater.” And he looked much more like the artist’s sketch of the killer than his brother did. He was taller, dark, muscled. According to Stanford, “It was like they had different parents or something.”

Although Kevin’s photograph was requested by police, there is no information that it was ever received, let alone shown to Joyce and Kenneth, or that he was ever considered a suspect. His brother was the more obvious culprit, said Stanford—the guy fencing Harry’s ring and extorting rich gay men. Kevin Hughes would live out his life without ever being implicated in the murder. He died in 2004 at Shore Memorial Hospital, the same hospital where Harry’s autopsy took place.

As I researched the Hughes brothers, a few things pulled me shockingly close to them. Things I couldn’t have imagined when my brother first told me about the Fudge King’s murder. They grew up in the same county I did—Delaware, aka Delco. They went to the same Catholic high school I briefly attended, where I, like Harry Anglemyer, was called a sissy and smacked around by tough boys like the Hugheses.

I searched my school’s online archives and found their names and class—but no photos. Some kids couldn’t afford to have their pictures taken back then. Or didn’t bother to. Or they dropped out before graduation. Kevin and Christopher Brendan Hughes’s names were accompanied by blank squares.

It’s a long shot, but maybe someday soon there will be a measure of justice for the Fudge King after all.

In the spring of 2023, I was in Philadelphia visiting my mother when I noticed a brass plaque on an old brownstone near Rittenhouse Square. It read “The Vidocq Society.” I knew this to be a consortium of private investigators, largely former law enforcement, who had banded together to help solve cold cases—most recently, Philly’s infamous “Boy in the Box” case from the 1950s. My mother, still excited by murder, wondered if we shouldn’t go in. We did, and there we met with director William Fleisher in his mahogany-paneled office, the walls filled with degrees and citations. He listened patiently to everything I’d uncovered about the death of the Fudge King.

What I told him was, of course, only a theory—hard to prove without, say, forensics. Harry’s bloody clothes or shoes, for instance. He nodded, then said he couldn’t help me. The Vidocq Society only works with police agencies, not private citizens. But he suggested I contact someone with the recently formed New Jersey State Police Cold Case Task Force. He then handed my mother his card with his cell number, in case she ever got “in trouble in the neighborhood.”

I called the task force and connected with detective Taylor Bonner. He was reluctant to look at the case, as he didn’t have any files on it, or even a file number. I had all that, of course, but after I presented it to him, there was still a bit of hesitation on his part. It was Atlantic County that had tried the case, and Bonner felt it was theirs to reopen or not. I offered Captain Snyder’s name immediately—with more than a little ta-da—and Bonner said he’d get back to me.

It took him some weeks, but he did. He had spoken with Pat Snyder—Snyder has since been promoted to chief—and after some back and forth they wanted me to know that they would work together to re-review the case. Currently, there is an Atlantic County detective assigned to it and one other high-profile cold-case murder. It’s a long shot, but maybe someday soon there will be a measure of justice for the Fudge King after all.

If this new theory turns out to be true, it will complicate the local myth surrounding Harry’s death, the one whispered and blogged about and alluded to in a hastily scribbled note from a bookstore clerk. Blogger Kelly says he’s fine with that—and continues to offer the names of people who might know more.

But Leland Stanford III, for all his help, has been impossible to reach recently, either by phone or registered mail. I even sent him a box of assorted fudge but received no reply. I can only hope that he stopped talking to me because he’s now talking to the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office as it reinvestigates the case.

Whatever comes of the theory that Kevin Hughes was Harry’s killer, I’m not keen to let Longo and Stretch off the hook. Their fear and loathing of Harry—businessman, dandy, Good Samaritan, and the thing that dare not speak its name—may have set in motion a string of events that culminated in his death. Their open bigotry and defamation of Harry, both during his lifetime and after his murder, mark them as villains in my book.

It’s gratifying to feel that I may have moved the needle on an unsolved murder. Especially the murder of Harry Anglemyer, a man I came to see more vividly as time went on, as if he were emerging from a fog, bringing the past back to life—both his and mine. I am not a great believer in ghosts, but I can say that on more than one occasion these past two years I have felt his nudge. Sometimes quite forcefully. As if Harry wanted this solved, the truth finally revealed.

Harry, like all of us, was caught in the grip of time. Of the world changing, as it insists on doing, and too fast for some people’s liking. In Harry’s case, he found himself caught between midcentury notions and a more tolerant era approaching, firmly believing—perhaps naively so—that he could ride the seismic cultural shifts coalescing around him to wealth and happiness.

But history’s rhythms can be maddening. Advance, retreat. Waves against the shore. Ocean City was recently in the news for replacing several members of its school board with those endorsed by Moms for Liberty, a right-wing nonprofit that advocates for “parental rights” with regard to shaping what kids are taught about, among other things, LGBTQI issues. The featured speaker at one of its campaign rallies was pastor Gregory Quinlan, who believes Christ “defined sex.”

What would Harry make of this? I imagine he would have looked to the horizon while savoring everything as much as he could. Which is what he did in the summer of 1964, even with so much on his mind. He was by all accounts a good and charming and, yes, horny man who believed that in the end, if we’d only live and let live, have more sex, cheer on more jockeys, sing more songs while someone tickles the ivories, and buy fudge on Sundays, the future might be a much more delicious place.


© 2023 The Atavist Magazine. Proudly powered by Newspack by Automattic. Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice for California Users.

Dead Reckoning

Dead Reckoning

Fourteen U.S. destroyers barreled down the California coast in a dense fog—until a wrong turn led to the largest peacetime disaster in American naval history.

The Atavist Magazine, No. 142


Robert Kolker is the author of the New York Times best-selling Lost Girls and Hidden Valley Road. He is a National Magazine Award finalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Wired, Bloomberg Businessweek, and New York magazine, and through the Marshall Project.

Editor: Jonah Ogles
Art Director: Ed Johnson
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Darya Marchenkova
Illustrator: Harry Tennant

Published in August 2023.


1.

There is a noise that, for a Navy captain, may well be the worst sound imaginable—worse than the boom of cannon fire, the whistle of a missile, or the whoosh of a torpedo. That noise is the long, piercing scrape of metal against rock. It’s the sound, quite simply, of everything going wrong.

Edward Howe Watson heard that noise on September 8, 1923, at 9:05 p.m., while sitting in his ship’s quarters, directly beneath the bridge of the United States Navy destroyer Delphy. Watson was a 49-year-old naval commander—a privileged and pedigreed, blue-blooded son of an admiral, Kentucky born and Annapolis trained. A year earlier, he’d taken command of the Delphy’s entire squadron of 19 destroyers. This had been a promotion, a welcome sign of forward momentum in a long and varied Navy career. Privately, Watson told his wife that he’d have preferred a battleship. But he seemed just one promotion away from getting that too, and after that perhaps an admiralty, like his father before him.

The Delphy had left San Francisco that morning and spent the day speeding south along the coast of California. Thirteen more ships in Watson’s squadron trailed behind. The destination was their home port in San Diego. This was a training exercise—a speed trial, the sort of thing the Navy, under considerable budget pressures, hadn’t tried since the war. All day the destroyers maintained top speeds in challenging conditions: bad weather, massive waves, a civilian vessel requiring rescue. By late afternoon, no one on any of the ships could make out the coastline through the haze. Watson wasn’t concerned; he had one of the Navy’s best navigators for the Delphy’s skipper, and he was using dead reckoning—the time-tested technique of calculating location from a ship’s compass direction, estimated speed, and the amount of time traveled—to ensure that they were where they needed to be. Best of all, a rival squadron of destroyers, part of the same training exercise, were making worse time. Watson was winning the race.

By nightfall, the Delphy was coming close to the Santa Barbara Channel, with San Diego in reach by dawn. A few minutes before 9 p.m., Watson ordered a turn east toward the coast for the final approach into the channel. The entrance was a risky place for a squadron traveling at 20 knots—littered with rocks, reefs, and shipwrecks just beneath the water’s surface—but it was the shortest route, and using it all but guaranteed that Watson would win. The other ships would follow, and they’d all be home in record time.

That was when Watson heard the noise—first the scrape, and then a thunderous boom. In that flash of a moment, Watson knew. They were running aground. Careers would be destroyed, reputations and legacies wiped away—and, worst of all, lives could be lost. But he could not have known that what happened next would become the greatest peacetime disaster in the history of the U.S. Navy. That it would prompt a court-martial of 11 officers, also the largest of its kind in history. And that, in the aftermath, he would be forced to rethink everything he believed about the price of honor and the true meaning of leadership.

And that, even now, 100 years later, there would be no end to the arguments over who exactly was to blame.


The destroyers under Watson’s command were known as four-stackers, marked by a quartet of tall, identical cylinders arrayed neatly in a line down the ship’s center, like the bristles of a toothbrush. Each ship was 314 feet long and 32 feet wide, nimble and powerful enough to target German submarines during the First World War. But by the time Watson took command of Squadron 11 in 1922, the war was over, fuel was being rationed, and military funding had been slashed across the board. While four-stackers could carry as many as 131 men, budget cuts reduced the number on board to roughly 100. It was an unfortunate time to be rising in the Navy. America may have just won a war, but the nation’s reputation was fragile. Washington was a hotbed of corruption; President Warren Harding’s Teapot Dome bribery scandal had implicated naval secretary Edwin Denby. Now more than ever, the Navy needed a demonstration of confidence, of authority. And Watson needed the Navy, too, in his own way.

Watson had grown up amid privilege, his only care, perhaps, the burden of expectation. He was the eldest son of a powerful Kentucky family, a member of America’s brand of aristocracy. One of his great-grandfathers had served as governor, was a five-term U.S. senator, and advised two presidents. The family superstar was his father, John Crittenden Watson, who earned his place in history as a Union Navy lieutenant during the Civil War battle of Mobile Bay. In 1864, Captain James Farragut of the battleship Hartford led a squadron of ships into Confederate waters and shocked everyone around him when he ordered his fleet into a mine-strewn waterway, crying out, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” Watson’s father was Farragut’s faithful aide-de-camp. He’d heard the captain say it, and quoted him for years afterward, codifying the legend.

Watson grew up with that story, which was also becoming the Navy’s story—the daring squadron commander defying all odds, cheating death, seizing his place in the world. He entered the Navy in his father’s shadow: The elder Watson went on to be an admiral, and often told the tale of how he’d been the one to lash Farragut to the Hartford’s rigging, so his body would be found if the ship went down. Between the younger Watson’s many postings—on the Amphitrite, the Maine, the Brooklyn, the Baltimore, the Richmond, the Prairie, the West Virginia, the Detroit, the Iris—his father would step in and offer plum assignments; Watson even went along as his father’s aide to the coronation of King Edward in London. He married well—a St. Louis socialite named Hermine Gratz, whose sister married a Rockefeller—and a life of ease awaited once his time in the Navy ended. But during the Great War, Watson only managed to take command of a battleship late in the effort, and he never saw combat. So when the destroyers of his squadron were given a chance to prove their worth, the opportunity couldn’t have come soon enough.

On Friday, September 7, 1923, Watson summoned Squadron 11’s commanders to a meeting. The ships were docked in San Francisco, where the crews were on shore leave. Watson announced that he’d lead them to their home port in San Diego on a training exercise, coupled with gunnery and tactical drills. Their orders, Watson said, were to travel at 20 knots, faster than any ship had been permitted in years.

For the first time since the war, these destroyers would do what they’d been built to do, although it would come with some risk. There was no telling what toll such an extreme pace would take on the ships’ turbines when sustained for 453 nautical miles. Watson shrugged off such concerns; that was what the exercise was for. Besides, Squadron 11 wouldn’t be the only fleet of destroyers bound for San Diego that day. Squadron 12 was going, too. This would be a race, and Watson intended to win it.

William L. Calhoun was ten years younger than Watson, in his late thirties, and a touch portly, with thinning blond hair. Like Watson, he had something of a pedigree: His great-grandfather was John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina senator who served as vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. But unlike Watson, no one seemed to expect great things from Calhoun. He grew up in Palatka, Florida, and went to public school before scoring a spot at the Naval Academy. Calhoun once said that on his way out of town, a schoolteacher told him he wouldn’t amount to anything.

Calhoun proved that teacher wrong, working his way up from ensign to gunnery officer to chief engineer before switching to submarines, commanding a division of them during the war. He came home highly decorated in 1918, but endured several more humdrum postings before, in 1923, he was given command of a ship—a destroyer in Watson’s Squadron 11.

If the new job intimidated Calhoun, he didn’t show it. Aboard the ship, the young commander was something of a breath of fresh air, at least compared with his predecessor, whom many had found brusque. As a leader, Calhoun cultivated a mix of relentlessly demanding and personally appealing. The crew liked him straight away. They wanted to impress him.

Then, in September, came the orders from Watson. After paying his dues and biding his time, Calhoun was facing his first trial as the skipper of his own ship.


Eugene Dooman was in the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco when he spotted his old friend Edward Watson. It was September 7, the same day Watson had given his squadron their orders. Dooman was a 32-year-old career diplomat who’d been stationed at the American embassy in Tokyo for a decade. He’d met Watson during the three years the captain lived there after the war, serving as a naval attaché. Watson and Dooman shared a love of Japanese culture and a fascination with the country’s history and the traditions of its royal family. Now Dooman was at the start of a long leave back in America and glad for this chance meeting, because he was in a jam.

Dooman had brought something bulky and valuable with him from Japan—a heavy leather valise containing $3,000 in silver coins. This, oddly enough, would be his travel budget during his time away from Japan. Instead of paper money or a letter of credit, his bank in Tokyo persuaded him to accept silver; the bank would need to back up any large withdrawal with silver anyway, and if Dooman took it to America with him he’d save the bank freight and insurance. For his trouble, the bank gave him an extra $400.

Dooman hadn’t counted on the bank being closed when he reached San Francisco. Worse yet, it was a Friday. Dooman would be stuck with a burdensome valise filled with silver until Monday, and he was scheduled to leave on Saturday for his next stop, Los Angeles. But now, in the hotel lobby with Watson, a solution presented itself.

Watson told Dooman that he was taking his squadron to San Diego early the next morning, and he invited him along. It would require a little domestic diplomacy on Watson’s part: His wife, Hermine, had asked him to bring their nine-year-old daughter, Clifford, on the Delphy, while she accompanied some friends on a road trip to San Diego. But Watson never warmed to the thought of having along a young girl on a destroyer. With just one available cabin on the ship, Dooman was a convenient excuse for Watson to change the plan.

The diplomat said yes right away. The invitation neatly solved his problem. It would be easy enough to get a train to Los Angeles from the squadron’s destination of San Diego, and Dooman’s silver would be well protected during the journey. Watson cleared his guest through official channels, and Dooman arranged for a trunk with the rest of his belongings to be sent ahead to his hotel in Los Angeles.

The next morning at 7 a.m., Dooman, valise in hand, arrived at the San Francisco Navy pier. The diplomat was ushered aboard the Delphy and into the guest cabin, where he changed into a heavy tweed suit to block the wind while on deck. He intended to enjoy the trip.

Watson was coming up on 50 years old. This was a chance, maybe his last, to prove himself at sea.

For Watson, it was no small thing to run into a friend from Tokyo. Japan was Watson’s last posting before taking command of Squadron 11. His time there may have been the most successful of his career. Decades later, a colleague called Watson “one of the most likable and dynamic, intelligent and alert naval attachés we have had in any country.”

Watson arrived in Tokyo in 1919 with orders to monitor the country’s designs on expansion. Japan had been making strides toward imperialism, and Washington was determined to maintain U.S. influence around the world after the war. Watson’s predecessor left him with very little in the way of intel, forcing him to start with next to nothing. But after hosting parties for his Japanese counterparts, Watson discovered that he had a knack for eliciting information. His technique, as later described by an underling, was “telling them too much so that they could learn too little.” Japanese officers found Watson’s chattiness mystifying, and disarming. He produced memos full of policy insights—many of which proved especially useful leading up to an international disarmament conference Japanese officials attended in Washington in late 1921. And he exposed attempts by the Japanese to bribe Navy officers for information.

Watson was making a name for himself for the first time, excelling at a game his father, the illustrious Civil War hero, had never played—a modern, 20th-century pastime, built for an age of global politics. Beyond his canny way with people, Watson also had a knack for seeing around corners. He insisted that the U.S. counter Japan’s efforts to control the Pacific, and when Washington failed to follow some of his recommendations, he issued a dire prophecy. “If we know the minute details of Japanese plans for aggression,” Watson said in 1922, “we are in a position to thwart them while they are still in the planning stage… Otherwise we shall one day be confronted with a surprise that will hit us right between the eyes.”

Watson seemed well positioned for the life of a diplomat, proto-spy, and statesman. All that ended abruptly when he received a promotion to command a squadron of destroyers. His career lurched back onto a familiar track—his father’s trajectory, the family business. Not without some regret, he returned home. Watson was coming up on 50 years old. This was a chance, maybe his last, to prove himself at sea.

Now Watson’s two paths were converging, or at least bumping up against each other for a day. At the very moment he was called upon to show his stuff as a naval commander, he also had the chance to catch up with a trusted colleague from his time in the Far East. The timing was even more welcome given how, just a week earlier, Japan had experienced a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe. The great Kanto earthquake—even today the most lethal natural disaster by far in the nation’s history—had laid waste to much of Yokohama and Tokyo, followed by typhoon-fueled fires and powerful tsunamis. More than 100,000 deaths were estimated, and Tokyo was under martial law. Many around the world, Watson included, were anxious to hear what had been destroyed, how many lives lost. On the water, he and Dooman would have time to talk about it all.

2.

Patches of sun broke through the San Francisco fog on the morning of Saturday, September 8, as Watson’s ships set off down the coast. Fourteen of the squadron’s destroyers would take part in the exercise, divided into three divisions, with Watson aboard the Delphy in front. The Delphy would handle navigation for all the ships. The others would follow the leader, just like many great Navy squadrons before them, including Farragut’s in Mobile Bay.

They hit a wall of haze at 8 a.m., but the gunnery exercises took place as scheduled. At 11:30 a.m., the crew of the Delphy spotted a lighthouse at Pigeon Point, one of several shore locations ships used for a visual fix. All seemed well. But this would be the last time that day anyone would be able to see land.

The weather was changing—first fog, then more haze. For the rest of the afternoon, the Delphy’s crew used dead reckoning to estimate its position. Lieutenant Commander Donald T. Hunter, the Delphy’s skipper, had taught navigation for two years at the Naval Academy. The California shoreline did not present much of a challenge. Based on the ship’s estimated speed of 20 knots and the typical currents, Hunter, working alongside the ship’s navigator, Lieutenant Laurence Blodgett, calculated their location and continued hurtling down the coast.

But a few hours passed and still no visibility. The Delphy had one more tool to assist with navigation: a radio device that allowed ships to request compass bearings from shore stations. Radio direction finding, or RDF, was still in its infancy—it would be the precursor to radar, which wouldn’t come to ships for more than a decade—but the technology had been a great help during the war, detecting the location of German submarines when they surfaced to send wireless transmissions. After the war, RDF had been slow to catch on. While a number of lighthouses up and down the East and West Coast were equipped with it, ships like the Delphy had only a clunky-looking circular antenna on board. Upon request, a lighthouse worker would use an RDF device to send a signal to the ship’s antenna, then contact the ship by traditional radio to provide a compass reading. If a lighthouse was, say, due east from a ship, a navigator could use that reading to calculate the ship’s position. The system was far from ideal. There was, in fact, no way to tell which side of the looped antenna the station had detected, which meant that every reading came with an opposite possible “reciprocal” bearing. A bearing of due east sometimes really meant due west; it was up to the navigator to discern which was most likely correct.

To many seasoned Navy officers, RDF seemed almost foolish. What navigator worth his salt would trust dubious readings from a lighthouse jockey and a loop of wire over his own calculations? Hunter, who’d once famously made his way into an Alaskan port through a blinding fog, usually had little use for RDF. But three hours was a long time to go without seeing anything, so at 2:15 p.m. Hunter had his crew contact the only RDF-equipped station along the route—the lighthouse at Point Arguello, at the edge of the rugged coast that jutted out 80 miles northwest of Santa Barbara.

A radioman at the lighthouse sent back a compass reading: 167 degrees. This suggested that the ship had already passed Point Arguello, which was obviously wrong; they hadn’t been on the water nearly long enough. Hunter asked for a repeat bearing and got a similar reading. Meanwhile, the crew still weren’t able to see anything on the shore to confirm their position. When Blodgett, Hunter’s second-in-command, suggested moving closer to the coast to improve visibility, Hunter said no—that would force them to slow down and scuttle the squadron’s speed exercise. Instead, Hunter questioned the lighthouse radioman, radioing back that they were north of Point Arguello. The radioman supplied the reciprocal reading. That seemed to produce reasonable verification that they were where they thought they were.

For consequential calls like this one, Hunter turned to Watson, his commander, for approval. For much of the day, Watson had stayed off the bridge; by at least one account, he’d spent that time in his quarters, in conversation with Dooman, stepping out every hour or so to sign off on Hunter’s decisions. Watson agreed with his captain that they were where dead reckoning placed them—that the RDF had to be wrong. They continued on, the Delphy in front, 13 destroyers following. But their location on the route was hardly a trivial concern. Point Arguello marked the spot where Watson’s ships needed to turn left into the Santa Barbara Channel. If they turned too soon, they risked running headlong into Honda Point.

Everyone on the ships knew about Honda Point—a hook of land jutting out from the coast a few miles north of the entrance of the Santa Barbara Channel. The shore along Honda Point is made up of sharp igneous rock and steep bluffs with few beaches. The waves are relentless, and boulders and reefs lurk below the waterline like booby traps. Its original name, Point Pedernales, was from the Spanish como un pedernal, or “like flint.” Some referred to it as the Devil’s Jaw.

Then, as if to demonstrate the hazards ahead of them, news came of a crisis in the channel. Another vessel—not a Navy ship, but a steamer called the Cuba—had run aground that morning in the fog along the rocky shore of San Miguel Island, at the channel’s southern boundary. The Cuba had been full of passengers; a hundred people were floating in lifeboats or had already made it to shore. One of Watson’s division commanders, Walter G. Roper, aboard the destroyer Kennedy, asked to join the relief efforts.

Watson refused. The squadron had its orders, and another ship had already been sent to the Cuba’s aid. Watson thought it best to stay out of the way of the rescue operation, along with the rocks where the Cuba ran aground. He and Roper argued about it over the squadron’s party line—which meant that other crew members on Roper’s ship heard the exchange—and finally Roper relented.

For generations, the Navy had allowed its commanders extraordinary leeway in decision-making. It was standard procedure not to second-guess the man in charge. This was the ethos Watson grew up with, his father’s credo. He believed that his squadron needed him to lead, especially as the weather got worse—fog, rain, buckling waves, and the coast nowhere in sight.

One of Watson’s ships, the John Francis Burnes, had dropped out of the exercise with a boiler problem. That was unfortunate, but for Hunter and Watson it was no reason for the rest of the squadron to slow down. At 4:27 p.m., with the fog even thicker, Watson ordered the remaining destroyers to assume a column formation, each boat following the one in front by sight, with just a few dozen yards between them.

At 5 p.m. the sun came out briefly, but Hunter still couldn’t make out the horizon through the haze. Watson’s column of ships continued on for three more hours, unable to tell exactly where they were, yet confident they were far enough south of Honda Point.

The clock was ticking: To wait any longer would risk the ship hitting the far side of the channel.

At 8:35 p.m., the Delphy received another compass reading from the Point Arguello lighthouse. This time it placed them well north of the channel entrance. Watson, summoned to the bridge after dining with Dooman, couldn’t believe it. How could they have traveled all day and still be so far from the channel?

The more Watson thought it over, the less he trusted RDF. They were again faced with a choice: trust the new technology, or trust dead reckoning. And once again, they had a solution available to them that made sense of the confusing information they’d received: the reciprocal compass reading. When they flipped the RDF compass point, yet again the Delphy was where dead reckoning placed it. Problem solved, it seemed.

The Delphy’s navigator, Blodgett, knew that there was another tool they could use to make sure the ship had reached the channel: a fathometer, which measures depth. A shallow reading would mean the Delphy was too close to the coast to safely turn. Blodgett wanted to do a depth sounding. Hunter said it wasn’t necessary. And of course, to do a sounding they’d have to slow down.

Watson affirmed Hunter’s conclusion. He agreed that they had passed Point Arguello. This meant that the clock was ticking: To wait any longer would risk the ship hitting the far side of the channel, repeating the Cuba’s mistake. And so at 8:45 p.m., the Delphy laid plans for a 55-degree course change to port—a left turn, straight into the channel. Watson returned to his quarters.

From the bridge, Hunter could see the lights of ten or more ships behind him in the dark. Maybe visibility wasn’t so bad after all? But then, just after the turn, the Delphy plunged once again into a thick fog bank. The men on board couldn’t see a thing.

Two boats behind the Delphy on the Young, William Calhoun still couldn’t make out the lights from Point Arguello. Perhaps the fog was too thick, or the Young too far from shore? But he did see the lights of the Delphy and the S.P. Lee, just ahead, and some of the other ships behind. So he continued to follow the leader.

Then came a jolt to the ship—not so much heard as felt, a slight trembling in the hull. At once, Calhoun thought they’d been rammed, but by what? He rushed to the bridge just in time for a second jolt. There was nothing slight about this one. The Young’s navigator had lurched out of the formation—technically the correct reaction for a ship running aground—only to slam into something harder.

Right away the Young started to list, its engine room filling with water through a gash in the hull. It took just seconds for the entire destroyer to lean about 30 degrees. Then the power went out. Between the darkness and the fog, no one could see a thing. By the time Calhoun ordered his executive officer, Lieutenant Eugene Herzinger, to pass the word to stand by to abandon ship, the ship was listing nearly 45 degrees. This meant that the lifeboats were no longer an option—they were completely submerged.

Calhoun was left with one narrow hope: that the Young could somehow settle against whatever it was they’d rammed into and avoid sinking entirely.

He crawled up to the ship’s port side, which had now risen out of the water. The hull was coated in oil, and so slick that the crew that made it up there before him now had nothing to hang on to. Some had fallen into the water, and there seemed to be no way of helping them. To follow them in would doom them all.

And so Calhoun retracted his own order to stand by to abandon ship and told everyone around him to spread the word to gather on the port side, and above all not to jump into the water. “Don’t leave her—she is on the rocks!” Calhoun cried. “She can’t sink. Stick and you’ll be saved!”


On the Delphy, Dooman was with Watson in the captain’s quarters when a noise came from beneath the ship. That scrape of metal against rock was unmistakable. Even he, a civilian, knew that they had hit bottom.

Then came the crash. The ship lurched, sending both Dooman and Watson toppling and shattering the glass of the portholes. Dooman was thrown against the window at his back. Drawers jumped out of cabinets, papers flew, everything not nailed down was suddenly somewhere else. Without a word Watson dashed to the bridge, leaving Dooman alone.

The bridge was in chaos. As far as Watson and Hunter were concerned, there was only one possibility: They’d gone too far ahead, hitting the same spot that claimed the Cuba, San Miguel Island. They’d soon learn how wrong they were. But in that moment, Watson ordered two radio messages to the other ships: “keep clear to the westward” and “nine turn”—turn to port, where he thought the others could still get to the channel.

The collision with the rocks had sent the bow of the Delphy high into the air. Waves swung the ship around so that it was now astride the beach, braced against a series of rock outcroppings. Each new surge sent the vessel into spasms, quickly rupturing the hull. Down-the-line ships had followed the Delphy’s lead. The S.P. Lee swung around to the side of the shore and halted. The Young was next, lurching sideways and sinking; it smashed into the shore just moments before the Delphy and was almost gone. Watson could only guess what was in store for the other ships—maybe the rocky shore would claim them all.

There was a more immediate concern, however. The waves slamming the Delphy repeatedly into the rocks had caused the fuel tanks to rupture. Hunter knew that the oil burners were still operational, making a boiler explosion all but imminent. He shut the master fuel valve from the bridge and ordered all crew in the engine room and the steaming fire rooms to lift the safety valves before coming up. By then the ship was pounding the rocks so violently that Hunter knew it was only a matter of time before it broke up and sank.

That was when Hunter asked Watson for permission to give the abandon ship order. Watson was quick to agree. But abandon for what? Oil from the Delphy was gushing into the surrounding water. The sea was a thick stew, with a five-inch slick on the surface, making swimming near impossible.

The men on the top deck with Hunter were desperate to get off the ship.

Back in Watson’s quarters, Dooman could hear the ship’s siren. He ran out on deck in time to see the Delphy’s searchlight beaming the water. He saw another ship crash, then another. He heard sirens and saw searchlights from those, too—ship after ship—and knew there had to be more behind them.

With men rushing everywhere and sirens wailing, a thought gripped Dooman: the silver. He stopped an officer, who told him that the lower part of the Delphy had flooded; this included the guest cabin where Dooman was staying. In any case, the silver was too heavy to carry if he needed to swim to safety. Dooman hurried back to Watson’s cabin. He sat down and waited, unsure of what to do next, or if he’d been forgotten completely.

The men on the top deck with Hunter were desperate to get off the ship. Some of the crew had braved the sludgy water and made it to an outcropping about 15 feet from shore; others became mired in the water, only to be pulled back onto the Delphy. Blodgett worked to set up a rope the men could use as a guide to the outcropping. Not everyone made it: Fireman Third Class James W. H. Conway and Cabin Cook Sofronio Dalida both died in the water.

Worst of all was the slow-motion tragedy of Fireman J. T. Pearson, who leapt overboard to help save three men in the water, shattered his glasses, and was blinded by the shards. Pearson cried for help and was pulled back aboard the Delphy. He was hysterical with pain and panic, and had taken in so much seawater and fuel that he fell to the deck. Blodgett held a flashlight as a pharmacist’s mate worked to remove the glass from Pearson’s eyes, to no avail. The ship was slick with oil, and equipment was flying everywhere, making it impossible to get Pearson onto a raft without endangering more lives.

Left with no other choice, Blodgett ordered a radioman to lash Pearson to the Delphy’s searchlight tower—what appeared to be a safe place amidships, forward of where the waves were breaking over the hull. They used a signal line that was tight enough to secure him, but not so tight that he couldn’t free himself if he regained his faculties.

The plan was to come back and evacuate him; that never happened. The waves raged into the night as, from the shore, the men of the Delphy could hear his repeated screams.


Calhoun didn’t know how long he had before the Young would sink. The ship had tilted fully onto its side in practically no time at all; Calhoun later put it at just 90 seconds from the moment they ran aground. Now his ship was sliced open on the starboard side, with just two feet of the port side still above the surface of the water.

With the port side now the Young’s deck, some 80 men gripped the smashed portholes of the ship’s hull. Many were barefoot and wore what they’d gone to sleep in; some were tied to one another with lines. They waited for rescue as the waves crashed against the ship.

Calhoun knew that he hadn’t time for his men to put on life preservers and file into lifeboats: Like Hunter on the Delphy, he was aware that the active burners could explode the boiler, igniting the oil in the water around them. He asked for a volunteer to extinguish the burners. Fireman I.T. Scott came forward, then rushed below.

Minutes passed and Scott didn’t return. Had he cut the boiler? Did he escape the ship? Calhoun had no way to know for sure.

Calhoun’s executive officer, Gene Herzinger, and Chief Boatswain’s Mate Arthur Peterson climbed up and out from a bridge window. Peterson found an axe and smashed the portholes, providing the crew with handholds as the sea inundated the deck. They were 100 yards from shore, too far to risk swimming amid the oily waves and jagged rocks.

Or was it? Peterson wanted to try. He grabbed a life preserver and some rope and volunteered to swim for a large rock nearby. If he could reach that spot with the line, the other men could use it to get there, too, and they’d be that much closer to shore.

They were working through a plan when the Chauncey came into view. Calhoun nearly panicked. All it would take was one strong wake to shove the Young off its perch on the rock. The Chauncey got close enough to hear the Young’s crew—Calhoun loudest of them all—shouting not to collide with their sinking ship.

The ship slammed into the tiny craft, threatening to crash on top of them.

The Delphy’s lights went out. Alone in Watson’s quarters, Dooman couldn’t see a thing. He’d have no choice but to abandon the valise. Dooman returned to the deck, frightened but also appalled to have been forgotten.

The ship was low in the sea, and water swamped the deck. Dooman saw some of the crew at the stern, which appeared to be angled higher than the rest of the ship. Higher seemed safer, so he made his way in that direction, pulling himself along by the torpedo rails as waves smashed the deck. When Dooman arrived at the back of the Delphy, he saw that the men had run a line between the ship and a large rock 40 feet from shore. He also saw how dangerous it was—some who’d attempted the crossing had been flung into the water—and he was afraid to risk his life.

Dooman decided to run back to the front of the ship, until an officer shined a flashlight in his face. “You’re the passenger,” the officer said. It seemed that Dooman hadn’t been forgotten after all. He asked the man for help, and with the help of another sailor they found a raft stored on deck. They threw it over the side and jumped in, only to realize that it remained lashed to the Delphy. They were stuck. The ship slammed into the tiny craft, threatening to crash on top of them.

Dooman had a small penknife attached to his watch chain. He handed it to the sailor, who hacked through the line. With some effort, the raft made it over the waves to the rock. From there they were able to walk to land when the tide receded. One by one, Dooman and the others reached safety.

Watson finally made it across the line at 11 p.m. With one exception—Lieutenant Pearson, blinded and lashed to the rigging of a capsized, disintegrating vessel—the captain was the last to leave his ship.


The Chauncey threw all its power into reverse, but it was stuck with competing mandates—to avoid a collision with the Young, and to avoid the cliffs of Honda Point. In the end it hit the Young: The undertow hurled the Chauncey’s stern up against the destroyer’s port propeller blades, which ripped into the Chauncey’s starboard hull.

Water gushed into the engine room, the ship lost power, and, in a final insult, a wave slammed the Chauncey onto a reef. Lieutenant Commander Richard H. Booth sent down an order to stand by to abandon ship and, like Hunter and Calhoun before him, began weighing strategies to get his crew to shore alive. Perversely, the collision was good news for the Young. Once the Chauncey was firmly stuck on the same reef, it shielded Calhoun’s ship from some of the most turbulent waves.

Better still, the Chauncey was fairly close to shore—about 25 yards—and was no longer at risk of sinking. Now all the crew of the Young needed to do was get to the Chauncey, which was about 75 yards away. Members of the Chauncey’s crew succeeded in dragging a pair of lines ashore and setting up as many rafts to ferry the men through the oily waves.

Once ashore, the survivors climbed a steep cliff to reach the mainland. A radioman on the Chauncey named Frederick Fish later remembered finding an unconscious crew member of the Young in the water and bringing him to land. Men from the Delphy were there as well, Fish recalled—“walking about in a dreamlike daze, stumbling and falling, cutting their hands and bare feet on the jagged edges of the cliff.”

Looking out at the water, Fish could see the Delphy smashed against a rock and observed its crew shuttle as many men to shore as possible. Before long, Fish heard “the cries for help of an injured man who was lashed there.” That was Pearson. Blodgett from the Delphy was on shore, and he told Fish what had happened—how Pearson was blinded and strapped to the hull of the Delphy. “His calls kept up through the night, and they still ring in my brain,” Fish recalled. “To hear a fellow creature calling for help and not be able to relieve him is the crudest torture possible to man.”

“Had he lost his hold,” Calhoun recalled, “he would have been in fuel oil and an angry sea, and would undoubtedly have lost his life.”

On the Young, holding fast to its sinking hull, all the remaining men could do was look on as the crew of the Chauncey worked to save themselves before setting up a line for the other ship. Finally, someone decided not to wait any longer. Peterson, the chief boatswain’s mate, had planned to swim for the rock between the Young and the shore before the Chauncey arrived. Now he was ready to swim to the Chauncey.

Peterson took three lengths of line totaling more than 100 yards, found a doughnut-shaped buoy, fastened the line to it, and slipped the buoy over his head. On Calhoun’s order, he dove into the frigid water and made it to the Chauncey in a matter of minutes. A crew member recalled hearing Calhoun shout that a swimmer was coming their way. Once Peterson had been lifted aboard the Chauncey, Herzinger followed using Peterson’s line. “Had he lost his hold,” Calhoun recalled, “he would have been in fuel oil and an angry sea, and would undoubtedly have lost his life.”

After Herzinger made it across, the Chauncey sent back a seven-man raft. Evacuations commenced—four men on the first raft, eight on the second, ten on the others. It took 11 crossings to get everyone who could be found off the Young. Calhoun made one last inspection before boarding the final raft. “I want to state that Providence put the Chauncey ashore in that place,” Calhoun later said. “It is absolutely certain in my mind that the loss of the Chauncey saved half of the crew of my ship or more.”

There was one additional consolation: Fireman Scott, who had volunteered to shut down the Young’s boiler, finally reappeared at about 10:30 p.m., when the lighthouse keepers on shore heard cries for help from the bottom of the bluffs—five surviving sailors, including Scott. He’d made it off the Young and into the water but was unconscious, and when he awoke he clung to a piece of flotsam; he’d floated for an hour before being hauled aboard a raft.

Calhoun knew that not everyone from his ship had made it. He wondered how many still flailed in the oil-coated water. And the engine- and fire-room crews deep inside the ship: had they been trapped down below, or were they pulled out by the undertow as the ship rolled? Those men—his men—had been 150 yards from shore with no way out of the ship.

On shore, when Herzinger mentioned to Calhoun that the losses were great, as many as 20 or 30 sailors, the young captain’s response was grave: “My God, I know—but we will not discuss it now.”


The rescue efforts were just getting underway as the remaining ships neared Honda Point, still following the leader. For some it was too late to change course. One after another, they smashed into the shore—a seven-ship pileup on the California coast—hitting rocks, reefs, and, in some cases, one another.

The officers of the Woodbury saw lights ahead of the other ships and assumed a man was overboard. They reversed engines, but not soon enough to avoid ramming a large boulder.

The Nicholas struck a reef, and the pounding surf spun the boat until it pointed out to sea. The oil, the rocks, and the darkness made lowering rafts impossible; the men had to wait all night for a lifeline from shore.

Then came the Farragut, named for the great Civil War hero. Lieutenant Commander J. F. McClain ordered a full stop, but reversing the engines doused the ship’s lights. Suddenly, it was dark again, and the Fuller, next in the squadron line, collided with the Farragut before hitting a pinnacle rock—the same one that had claimed the Woodbury.

The ships at the back of Watson’s column, the Percival and the Somers, had time and space enough to change course. The last division—the Paul Hamilton, the Stoddert, and the Thompson—never took the turn into the channel.


Along the shore, an entire community was mobilizing to help rescue the sailors still in the water. The ships’ sirens had woken nearby residents, who loaded their cars with blankets, hot coffee, and food, and rushed to the steep bluff. A fishing captain, Giacomo Noceti, bravely ferried his boat to the edge of the rocks and retrieved some 150 men with lines. A nearby rail station became a headquarters for relief workers, who brought aid in and shipped rescued sailors out. A passing train took the injured to Santa Barbara hospitals, and later that day another transported 38 officers and 517 enlisted men to the naval base in San Diego.

The Delphy snapped in two just five minutes after everyone except Pearson had evacuated. The ship’s searchlight tower leaned farther over with each barrage of waves, until it dragged the rest of the ship over and down. The section of the deck where Pearson had been tied up was pulled into the ocean. He was one of the Delphy’s three casualties that night.

How many were lost from the rest of the fleet wouldn’t be known for hours. Through it all, Watson checked on the injured, organized search parties, tallied his men, and reported back to naval headquarters. By morning, he was preparing to send salvage parties back to the ships and arranging for the care of survivors. Even Calhoun, grappling with unspeakable losses, would later praise the commander, stating, “I only hope that if ever I am faced with the tragedy that faced him that night, I’ll be half the man that he was: cool, calm, courageous, and thoughtful; never missing an opportunity to aid.” But in idle moments, alone with his thoughts, Watson seemed to Dooman years older.

When a search party returned with the body of Fireman Conway, who had fallen from a rescue line into the water, Watson approached the stretcher. He raised the blanket and looked down on Conway for a long moment. Then, silently, the captain unbuckled the sword he wore and laid it beside the body.

Was he thinking about all the men—some 300 or so, as he estimated early on—who might be dead because of the decision he’d signed off on?

Was he thinking about his friend Dooman, there only because of his invitation? Or his daughter, who’d been promised a spot, and how lucky it was she hadn’t been aboard?

Was he thinking about his wider family? His father and the legacy of the Watsons, that night on the Hartford in 1864 and Captain Farragut’s cry of “Damn the torpedoes!”? Did he sense any connection between that historic moment and his decision to push forward at all costs?

There would be time for him to mull these questions—to sift through everything that had happened—later on that night, in the weeks and months to come, and for the rest of his life.

3.

In the space of just ten minutes, the Navy lost more ships than it had during all of World War I. Seven destroyers ran aground, one after another, each with more than 100 men aboard. Some of them split in two on the rocks. They collided with one another. They hemorrhaged oil—some 300,000 gallons covering 800 acres.

Twenty-three sailors lost their lives: three on the Delphy, twenty on the Young. A miracle by some measures, a debacle by others. Of the men trapped inside the Young, most probably fought through smoke and gas, darkness and freezing water. None made it to shore. Those who didn’t drown immediately were caught in the ebbing tide and sucked out to sea.

The disaster was front-page news around the country. Some 10,000 people turned up for a memorial service in San Diego. A week later, hundreds of visitors from Santa Maria, Santa Barbara, and other nearby towns flocked to the cliffs above Honda Point to view the wreckage. Demand to visit the scene was so high that a special train was provided on Sunday. Many packed a lunch and remained on the bluffs all day.

The day after the disaster, Navy secretary Edwin Denby seized on the great Kanto earthquake as the explanation. It was because of the quake, he suggested—an act of God, with unthinkable ramifications an ocean away—that nothing went as planned on the water that day. It explained why the ships never really reached 20 knots. Usually, the current pushed ships south; on that day it pushed them north. “One of the destroyers was broken in two, and it seems as if she was carried bodily up and dropped,” Denby marveled.

Others blamed technology: that infuriating RDF, sending good sailors astray, undermining their expertise. “The theory was advanced by mariners,” The Washington Post reported, “that the compass bearings taken from a nearby shore station as guidance through the fog, had been transmitted erroneously.”

Yet to some the weather and the obscure compass readings only explained so much. The Navy scheduled an inquiry for Monday, September 17. Depending on the outcome, the next step could involve court-martials. That left a week for the press to point fingers. “There has been a peculiar reluctance on the part of officers responsible for full and prompt reports of what happened,” a New York Times editorial declared. “For the honor of the United States Navy and for the good of the service those who were responsible should be made to suffer for it.”

Among those who might bear responsibility, Watson was an ideal target. Not only had he been the one in charge, but he offered a newspaper-ready narrative: an admiral’s son, wealthy and connected, now facing utter disgrace. Watson and the ship commanders hunkered in San Diego, awaiting the inquiry in silence. Those close to Watson encouraged him to try and stop what was coming. His brother Loyall urged him to stand firm and defend himself. His brother-in-law, Clifford Gratz, wanted to leverage his family’s relationship with the Rockefellers to spare Watson and help stave off any embarrassment to the family. Naval Academy friends worked back channels, pleading for leniency. 

But there was one person whose opinion mattered more than any other. On September 16, retired rear admiral John Crittenden Watson, then 80 and in fragile health, wrote to his son from his home in Washington, D.C. “I knew the saving of all the lives possible would be the greatest comfort to you and our dear Hermine,” the elder Watson wrote. “Like both of you, our thought is that you were able to save not only your own life but to assist others.”

With its measured tone, the admiral’s letter spoke volumes. There was no assurance of his son’s guiltlessness—no proclamation that, faced with the day’s beguiling circumstances, he would have acted the same. The message was clear: A man’s fate mattered less than his reputation. The family’s honor rested with Watson now.

This was a search for scapegoats—but should the ships’ commanders have expected anything different?

Typically, Navy inquiries are confidential, as with a grand jury in a criminal case. But the press demanded that they be allowed to watch, and Denby relented. As the inquiry got underway, its public nature seemed more than anything to dictate what would become of Watson and his commanders. No one wished to give any impression that mercy would be shown to the men behind the worst peacetime disaster in Navy history.

Watson and his commanders wouldn’t be allowed to testify; as they were possible defendants in court-martial proceedings, anything they said could expose them to prosecution. Only one senior crew member of the Delphy was called to testify: Laurence Blodgett, Hunter’s second-in-command. “We were satisfied that the Arguello radio station was wrong,” Blodgett explained from the stand. “They kept giving our position north and to the west of Point Arguello, and when we could not make this check with our figures, we finally took the reciprocal of their bearings, which would show us already in the Santa Barbara Channel.” As soon as he finished, the prosecutor asked to add Blodgett to the defendant list too. His role in making navigation decisions transformed him, in the eyes of the court, from a bystander to a suspect. Off the stand he went; the defense never had a chance to cross-examine him.

This was a search for scapegoats—but should the ships’ commanders have expected anything different? Watson at least was desperate to have his say. Just days after the worst possible thing that could have happened on his watch came to pass, he was staring down what he considered another disaster. The men under his command—the ones who’d followed his lead—were about to lose their reputations and livelihoods. This could be why, on the inquiry’s second day, Watson made his first public comments about Honda Point. “The responsibility for the course of the destroyer squadron was mine, a responsibility which I fully realized,” he told a reporter for a news service, whose story would appear in papers around the country in the days to come. “But that decision was based upon 33 years of experience in the Navy, and made after due consideration of reports of our position from the Point Arguello radio station, which were confusing.”

It was part mea culpa, part dogged display. Watson continued on like this, switching from accepting blame to explaining why, given the weather and the cryptic RDF readings, anyone in his position would have done the same thing. “The condition of visibility, remember, was such that we were unable to get our true position from the stars. We were compelled to rely upon the radio station. I asked for our bearings repeatedly. From about 6:30 until 8 o’clock p.m., that most vital period in our lives, we were unable to get radio bearings from the station. I accept that responsibility. I made a naval officer’s decision. I was content the radio station was wrong. And that is why I gave the order.”

On September 22, Watson issued a similar statement to the court of inquiry and to the press: “The Squadron Commander hopes the responsibility for this disaster, which he considers entirely his own, may not descend upon the able and loyal subordinates who supported him on all occasions.” Watson was sacrificing himself, throwing himself into the prosecution’s line of fire. He also asked the court to waive its rule barring potential defendants from testifying—in effect, making himself more vulnerable to court-martial so that he could have his say now.

The court granted Watson’s request, and he was permitted to take the stand on September 24. “The responsibility was mine,” he said. “I was convinced that the station was wrong. But they were right.”

The court of inquiry’s president, Rear Admiral William V. Pratt, attempted to pick apart this blanket admission. “Do you feel,” he asked Watson, “that you can assume all of the responsibility that at times must fall on the shoulders of your division commanders?”

“I have no desire to assume their responsibilities,” Watson replied. “I simply want to make clear that I assume all of my own.”

Edward Howe Watson

Watson braced himself for a public flogging. So perhaps he was as surprised as anyone when the opposite occurred. Almost overnight, the squadron commander transformed—in the eyes of the public, at least—from the incompetent scion of a naval legend to a paragon of selflessness and sacrifice. More than one newspaper editorial used the word “manliness” to describe what he’d done.

“Capt. Watson has given a splendid example of the finest attributes of character overcoming the elemental instinct of self-preservation,” the Army and Navy Journal declared, while the San Diego Sun waxed on about Watson’s “heroic” soul. “He waits for no court martial. He relies not on lawyers. He seeks no avenue of evasion. He resorts to no subterfuge. Lest the blame rest on some innocent man, he takes upon himself full responsibility for his actions.”

Others around the country joined the chorus, taking Watson’s testimony as their cue to examine what true leadership really meant. “The heroism of captain Watson is of a different type,” declared the Santa Monica Evening Gazette. “It manifests itself after deliberation; after the weighing of consequences.” And this from the San Francisco Chronicle: “From the moment the ship struck, his bearing and speech have been that of a most remarkable example of real manliness under the most distressing conditions which an officer in his position can ever meet.”

The goodwill seemed to play a part in Watson persuading the other officers named as defendants to join him in testifying, so that they also would have the chance to recount what had happened that night. This was no small thing: By opening themselves to prosecution, these officers had to have faith that Watson’s contrition would reflect well on them. Admiral Pratt called their decision to testify “worthy of the best traditions of the Navy.” 

When the Delphy’s skipper, Hunter, testified, he also made sure to blame the technology, as Watson had. “I’ll have to admit that it was an error in judgment,” he testified. “But as contributing causes I believe … the fact that a bilateral radio compass is used there were partly responsible.” Hunter also floated the “possibility” that “abnormal currents caused by the Japanese earthquake” contributed to the problem. In response, the lieutenant commander in charge of the Point Arguello lighthouse took the stand, defending his compass bearings that night. In fact, the readings had been within a few degrees of accuracy the whole time, even if one of them had required a reciprocal adjustment.

Many of Watson’s other commanders said that they weren’t responsible for what had happened because they’d been duty-bound to follow the Delphy’s lead. The Navy’s sacred adherence to chain of command suddenly was on trial, too. Robert Morris, the commander of the division of ships immediately astern of the Delphy, said that they “could not possibly be held culpable in carrying out the destroyer doctrine of following their leader.” Rear Admiral Pratt asked Morris, “Does seniority take the place of common sense?” Morris replied, “They are supposed to be synonymous.”

Not every skipper had hewed so tightly to that edict. Thomas A. Symington of the Thompson, the last ship in line, said that once he’d noticed the confusion of lights and sirens ahead, he slowed down to take soundings. Leslie Bratton of the Stoddert said that he’d opted to violate the no-navigation order and asked the lighthouse for radio bearings himself, then steered his ship away in time to avoid disaster. Hardy B. Page, navigator of the Hamilton, said that he’d suspected there was a problem ahead and advised his commanding officer to get word to the division commander—a decision that helped the division’s three ships escape intact.

Finally, the board heard from Walter Roper—the division commander who a few hours before the disaster had jousted with Watson by radio about helping the Cuba. Roper was as flinty on the stand as he’d been that night on the water. “I’m not a desk man. My experience comes from hard knocks,” he said, a jab at Watson’s lack of experience and Hunter’s academy training. “There are too many book-learned and not enough practical men running the Navy.” In Roper’s view, those on the Delphy should never have assumed that the ship really was going 20 knots in such choppy water. The error, he said, was in putting “too much reliance on computation of speed by propeller revolutions.” In his experience, he said, he’d seen propellers indicate 20 knots when the ship was in fact going only 12.

Roper made a point of saying that he would have heeded the lighthouse. “I have gone into the most dangerous harbors in the world through impenetrable fogs, guided almost wholly by radio compass,” he said. His division had never turned left, he testified, because he never came close to trusting the Delphy. “I was positive we had not passed Point Arguello. I did not know the forward ships were turning. Could I have seen them, I would not have followed, but instead would have tried to stop them. My motto is ‘Never try to turn a corner until you have passed.’ ”

Rear Admiral Pratt asked Roper if he would have turned left had he been on the ship behind the Delphy. “Of course I would not,” Roper said. “ ‘Follow the leader’ is all right, but it should be tempered with common sense. When I was a boy, our leader once jumped off a barn. I stayed put—and walked down to pick him up. He had a broken leg.” The room erupted with laughter.

But the fact remained that Roper failed to speak up against Watson at the time. Had he been stinging from their quarrel over the Cuba? If he’d said something—one of many ifs that night—might the entire disaster have been avoided, and 23 lives spared?

“I am ready and anxious to take my medicine,” Watson said. “I don’t want an acquittal.”

On October 12, the court of inquiry made its determination. Never mind the weather and the radio; the Honda Point disaster, the court ruled, was the result of “bad errors and faulty navigation.” Faced with so much uncertainty, the ships should have slowed down to take depth soundings. Following the leader may have been a Navy tradition, but it shouldn’t trump reason.

Eleven officers were recommended for court-martial. Watson, Hunter, and Blodgett were charged with “culpable inefficiency and negligence,” and eight others with simple negligence. But the court seemed gripped by contradictory impulses. It issued a letter to Calhoun, the Young’s commander, commending him “for coolness, intelligence, and seamanlike ability,” and to Walter D. Seed, of the Fuller, for “great bravery in swimming … about seventy five yards, through a rough and turbulent sea … for the salvage of the crew.” Yet both also faced charges of negligence.

The court-martial proceedings took place in rapid succession during the month of November. All eyes remained on Watson. Would his penitence spare the others? On November 7, Watson doubled down with another public statement. “I am ready and anxious to take my medicine. I don’t want an acquittal. For me to be acquitted by this court would be bad for the naval service, to which both my father and myself have devoted our lives.”

Calhoun, at his trial, went out of his way to commend Watson. He testified that in his opinion no power on earth could have saved the Young and the other ships after the Delphy ran aground. Calhoun insisted that he had no reason to suspect the Delphy of any errors, and testified that he and the Young’s crew would not have done anything differently had they been at the front of the line—except perhaps take soundings.

Watson reciprocated as a witness at Calhoun’s trial. “Every man of the crew of the Young owes his life solely and entirely to Commander Calhoun,” he testified.

In his summation speech in Watson’s trial, Watson’s lawyer, Thomas T. Craven, noted how, at Honda Point, “fate was indeed stern upon this occasion.” If the Delphy had continued south for just a few more minutes before turning, the entire column of ships would have cleared the rocks. If they’d turned a few minutes sooner, the coast would have been more forgiving, resulting in less damage and fewer lives lost. How many Navy men, Craven asked, had made similarly small missteps and escaped the hand of fate? Watson, he suggested, was a victim of bad luck.

Calhoun was acquitted after 40 minutes of deliberation. Blodgett, the Delphy’s navigator, was also acquitted, as were seven other defendants. There were just two convictions: Edward Howe Watson and Donald T. Hunter would not escape official blame for what happened that night. But considering the scale of the catastrophe, their sentences were lighter than expected. Both Watson and Hunter were allowed to continue their military careers, but with lower ranking numbers, which virtually eliminated the possibility of promotion. Neither would command a ship again, but they would retain their ranks. And the careers of the other men would be saved.

“It is a very proper sentence,” Watson told reporters. “It is a fitting punishment. The loss of a few numbers could not be a sufficient punishment for an error as great as mine was. I am glad that the sentence is as severe as it is. It puts me very near the bottom of the list of captains, I guess. Needless to say, it does not make me happy.”

Watson had transformed from a villain to a hero with his admission in September. Now, in December, with his career intact, things changed again. Back Watson went, from hero to goat. Yet, by taking the blame, had Watson—no matter how gallant the gesture—simply given the Navy a smooth path toward putting the embarrassing episode behind it? And was the Navy now rewarding Watson for his contrition? After the loss of seven ships and 23 lives, how was it exactly that not one member of the Navy had lost their job?

“Just learned court-martial has been very lenient with everybody,” President Calvin Coolidge said. Navy Secretary Denby also made sure to grumble publicly that the “sentence in [Watson’s] case is inadequate.”

On December 29, the Army and Navy Journal reported, “The light sentence created almost as great a sensation at Washington as the disaster.”


Eugene Dooman’s escape from the scene at Honda Point occurred just before dawn after the wrecks, when a train to Los Angeles approached the local station where the relief efforts were headquartered. Watson told Dooman and a few others to board it. Hundreds of other men would be taking the San Diego train a few hours later. Dooman, like many in the squadron, was covered from head to foot with oil, so a conductor placed some newspapers on the seat, and off they went. In Los Angeles, Dooman was on his own again, delivered from the tragedy—and from the official narrative.

The available record from the court of inquiry and Watson’s court-martial includes just one mention of a civilian on the Delphy, but Dooman’s name never appears. In the years to come, as military and civilian historians researched the Honda Point disaster, the idea of a not-spoken-for witness to the disaster proved tantalizing. He was called the “mystery guest,” the “civilian,” the “phantom passenger.” Rumors circulated that he and Watson had been drinking that day (Watson and others denied this), or that Watson subsequently swore him to silence about what really went wrong that night. But while Dooman’s identity was never well publicized, it was never really secret either. In January 1924, he gave a long interview to an English-language paper in Japan, complimenting Watson’s performance on the night of the wreck and relating the tale of his own escape. Had the historians and writers seen that article, the mystery would have been solved.

After 30 years as a diplomat in Tokyo, Dooman came home to America after Pearl Harbor, retiring just a few years later, in 1945. It took until the 1960s for him to be located and asked about Honda Point. “I am not competent” to pass judgment on Watson’s decisions that day, he wrote one interlocutor in 1966. “That is to say, I cannot weigh the extenuating circumstances, but a disaster did occur and the man who made the decision had to assume responsibility.”

Dooman was asked why he was never called to testify in the inquiry, and what happened to the $3,000 in silver he’d brought on board. The answers, it turned out, were linked. The silver was sacrificed, Dooman wrote, in the name of discretion. The money had been found in the wreckage, he wrote, “but could not be claimed without the probability of being called as a witness in the court-martial, and Watson and his defense officer were afraid that my testimony might prove harmful to Watson, since I was with him when the ship struck.” By today’s standards, these actions would have constituted a cover-up. But every answer Dooman gave seemed to prompt more questions. Why had the Navy not asked him to testify? Did his job in the State Department play a part in that decision? Or was the Navy afraid that additional testimony from a civilian passenger would add yet more unwelcome intrigue to a debacle it wished would just go away?

Dooman wouldn’t say. But he and Watson remained friends for years. A few days after the disaster, Dooman explained, with the inquiry not yet begun, he’d paid a visit to Watson and his wife at their home in San Diego. (Some armchair historians, parsing the disaster’s themes of negligence and culpability, have gone so far as to wonder if the captain reimbursed Dooman his lost $3,000 in return for his discretion. If such a thing occurred, Dooman never mentioned it.) The Watsons would later visit Japan, in 1937, and dine with Dooman there. He curtly alluded to the price Watson paid for the tragedy, the toll it took on him. “After the disaster,” Dooman wrote, “he lost his zest for living and became very despondent.”

Just after the court-martial, Dooman wrote a letter to Watson, one of dozens sent by friends and well-wishers hoping to soften the blow. “Do you know what a splendid impression you have made on everybody,” the diplomat wrote from Washington, “not only those high in the Navy but the man in the street? I dined with Admiral Knight who said splendid things about you. I think you will appreciate even more, though, what I overheard in the cars the other day—‘Well,’ said one, ‘I don’t get this stuff about the compass, but as long as we have fellows in the Navy like this guy who took the blame we shouldn’t worry.’ ”

“There was nothing the fleet wanted that Uncle Bill wouldn’t get,” one commander would say.

William Calhoun was cleared of any blame for the Young’s tragedy; he was even commended for his cool demeanor during the rescue. But the loss of 20 men weighed heavily on him, and for a time it seemed foolish to assume that Calhoun would command a ship again. Eventually, however, his career righted itself. After serving on several ships, further instruction at the Naval War College, and a stint as an instructor at the Naval Academy, Calhoun returned to sea as commanding officer of the USS Rochester, and later the USS California. In 1938, he was promoted to rear admiral. The next year, he became commander of the Navy’s Pacific base in Honolulu and remained in that position through World War II. “There was nothing the fleet wanted that Uncle Bill wouldn’t get,” one commander would say.

Calhoun retired in 1946 a four-star admiral, after 44 years of active service. There was just one thing missing from his time at sea: He never saw battle. For that he’d be granted some satisfaction from the author James A. Michener, who’d been a lieutenant commander under Calhoun during the war. “Those of us who worked for Uncle Billy believed that he had played a major role in smothering the Japanese with matériel,” Michener wrote in his memoirs, “and the fighting admirals agreed.” In Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific—the Pulitzer Prize–winning basis for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical—Calhoun is said to be the model for Millard Kester, a grounded admiral who finally gets to do battle at sea, leading an entire invasion force. And winning.

Calhoun died in 1963; he had married and was a grandfather many times over. In 1984, some 61 years after the disaster, a scuba diver and amateur treasure hunter exploring the California coast noticed something shiny on the ocean floor, churned up by a recent storm: a class ring from the Naval Academy. It didn’t take long to connect the ring to its deceased owner. The diver had hoped to make some money for a discovery from the site of the disaster. One collector offered him $1,500. Then a fellow diver let him know that Calhoun’s widow, Rosalie, was alive and living in Coronado, near San Diego. Her phone number was listed. He agreed to sell the ring to her for $400—the cost of the dive, he said.

Rosalie had never remarried. The ring, when the diver handed it over, stirred something in her. “It’s like part of him was brought back,” she said, filled with emotion for her lost husband.


On December 14, 1923, six days after Edward Howe Watson’s conviction in a Navy court-martial, his father, retired admiral John Crittenden Watson, died at 81. A fellow retired admiral, Colby M. Chester, wrote to the younger Watson that same day: “Your name was the last one uttered by your father, and I know how happy the Honda affair made him.” Happy that his son’s career was intact, perhaps. Or that the family name had, despite everything, retained some of its dignity. 

On January 10, 1924, Watson along with his wife and daughter moved to Honolulu, where he was stationed until his retirement five years later. In the 1930s, the Watsons lived in New York and then in Jamestown, Rhode Island, visiting Japan several times. In the years before World War II, Watson indulged his fascination with Japan, writing poems about historic Japanese figures. That other existence he might have led before Honda Point—the life of a sly and insightful Navy attaché, drawing out spies and supplying Washington with essential information about a potentially lethal foe—seemed to loom large for him.

In the late 1930s, Watson drafted a long policy memo about Japan to a friend at the Naval War College, still hoping someone would heed his warnings—“stuff that I have worked up during the past 5 years, since my retirement,” as he described it. “Perhaps it will help to save many hours to some fellow who is doing a bit of research work on the subject. Dispose of it as your judgment dictates. Either in the files or by burning.”

Watson died of heart disease in a Navy hospital on January 7, 1942, a month to the day after Pearl Harbor proved his point. His family later said that they thought the attack had hastened his death. Honda Point was not mentioned in any of his published obituaries.

Watson had pursued a life of significance, of honor. At Honda Point, the son emulated the father, following the traditions of leadership codified by an entire generation—and those same traditions contributed to the disaster. But after the worst happened, and the nation had judged him, he chose to preserve his character. In doing so, he acquired a different kind of significance, one he hadn’t expected.

In his papers, there is a letter from Watson’s father written on October 1, 1923, just after Watson had publicly accepted responsibility for the error that cost the Navy seven ships and 23 lives. In its tone, the letter was far warmer and more effusive than the one that had preceded it. “I cannot express in any words how proud we are of you and of your devoted wife,” the father wrote.

In the letter, Watson’s father offered his son a gift. He said that a relative of the late Admiral David Farragut had written to him “to express his confidence in you,” and sent along a precious keepsake: a makeshift tourniquet the elder Watson had made aboard the Hartford during the Civil War, “just as we were about to pass up the Mississippi by the Confederate batteries.”

Farragut had given this rag—a relic of John Crittenden’s most glorious moment in the Navy—to his own son “to use in case of a wound.” Now it seemed that someone else had a better use for it. “When I wrote him I know you would love to have it, he sent it to me,” Watson’s father wrote. “I will hold it for you until you come East. All of us join in ever much love to all three of you.”

And so Edward Howe Watson was offered a tourniquet—a message from father to son. His son was wounded and needed care. His son was worthy of greatness. His son was a Watson. And in court his son had not shirked from his duty to do what the father never had to do: go down with his ship.


© 2023 The Atavist Magazine. Proudly powered by Newspack by Automattic. Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice for California Users.

The Titanic of the Pacific

The Titanic of
the Pacific

A tale of disaster, survival, and ghosts.
By Tyler Hooper

The Atavist Magazine, No. 138


Tyler Hooper is a journalist who resides in Victoria, British Columbia. His writing has appeared in CBC, Vice, and the Vancouver Sun, among other publications. He is the host and producer of the podcasts The Missing and Unexplained and True to the Story

Editor: Jonah Ogles
Art Director: Ed Johnson
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Kyla Jones
Illustrator: Yiran Jia

Published in April 2023.


ONE

It was a warm winter’s day in San Francisco, and the city’s main port, the Embarcadero, bustled with activity. Men dressed in waistcoats, blazers, and homburg and bowler hats smoked their pipes and fidgeted with their mustaches. Women in elegant blouses and skirts so long they touched the ground sheltered from the sun under broad-brimmed hats trimmed with feathers, ribbons, and flowers. Children clung to their mothers and watched wide-eyed as crewmen hauled more than 1,400 tons of cargo and freight—canned goods, fresh fruit and vegetables, crates of wine—into the forward hatch of the steamship Valencia, soon to depart for Seattle.

Frank Bunker and his family stood in the crowd waiting to board the ship. Today, January 20, 1906, marked the beginning of a new chapter in Bunker’s life. In his late thirties, with dark, neatly parted hair and a clean-shaven face, Bunker had recently accepted a prestigious job as assistant superintendent of the Seattle school district. He had built his reputation as a bright young teacher and administrator in San Francisco—one newspaper touted him as being among “the best educators in the state.” Seattle presented an exciting new opportunity. It was one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, with a population that had exploded from 3,553 people in 1880 to more than 80,000 by 1900. Bunker hoped to leave his mark on the city’s school system.

Seattle was thriving for one reason: gold. With the discovery of bullion in the Yukon and Alaska in the late 1800s, Seattle became known as the “gateway to gold” among prospectors looking to head north and make it rich. In a few short years, the frenzy had transformed Seattle from a frontier town into a metropolitan hub. Real estate, shipbuilding, and other economic sectors were booming.  

Industry was why F. J. Campbell, his wife, and their 16-year-old daughter were traveling to Seattle on the Valencia. Campbell was of average build, with a finely groomed mustache. He had been employed as an agent by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in Alameda, just across the bay from San Francisco, until he struck up a friendship with an employee of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, who convinced him that they could start their own machine business in Seattle. Eager to chase his fortune, Campbell quit his job, packed up his family, and secured passage north.

The Bunkers and Campbells were among the roughly 100 passengers booked on the January 20 journey. Originally, a ship called City of Puebla was scheduled to carry them to Seattle, but the vessel’s tail shaft had snapped on a recent voyage, so the Pacific Coast Steamship Company commissioned the Valencia in its place. The iron-hulled ship boasted three decks, a single smokestack, and two masts, as well as a 1,000-horsepower engine that allowed it to reach a cruising speed of 11 knots. The ship looked sleek, with a bow stretching 100 feet long. Because the Valencia was designed to run the warm Atlantic waters between New York and Venezuela, however, it could be challenging to guide through the notoriously volatile seas of the Pacific Northwest, where it had been sailing for the past several years.

Tasked with getting the Valencia safely to port was a crew of more than 60, led by Captain Oscar Marcus Johnson. A man of slender, rigid frame, Johnson came from a family of mariners. Born in Norway, he had traveled to America as a teenager. He started as a common seaman and worked his way up. Now 40, Marcus had been married to his wife, Mary, for five years. The couple resided with their three-year-old daughter on Powell Street, which connected San Francisco’s main fishing wharf to Market Street. Mary worried about her husband when he went to sea; she looked forward to the moment when she could wave to him from their front window upon his return. 

Mary wasn’t the only woman on Powell Street anxious for her husband’s well-being. Among the Johnsons’ neighbors were the Valencia’s fourth officer, Herman Aberg, and his wife. According to Mrs. Aberg, not long before Herman departed on the trip to Seattle, a fortune-teller arrived at their doorstep, knelt, and laid out what the Seattle Daily Times later called “ancient grease-covered cards.” The fortune-teller predicted that Herman would soon be shipwrecked, leaving Mrs. Aberg a widow. Herman laughed. Mrs. Aberg begged him not to go on the journey, but Herman went anyway.

Mrs. Aberg would describe the unheeded premonition later, when Herman did not return to Powell Street, meeting his end in the cold, cruel ocean hundreds of miles from home. It would prove just one haunting detail in a story full of them.

The fortune-teller predicted that Herman would soon be shipwrecked, leaving Mrs. Aberg a widow. Herman laughed. Mrs. Aberg begged him not to go on the journey.

A person prone to superstition might be forgiven for thinking that the Valencia was cursed. Built in 1882, the ship was fired upon the following year near the island of Curaçao, and again four years later, this time by a Spanish warship just off the Cuban coast. During the Spanish-American War, it was leased to the U.S. Army and used to transport troops to the Philippines as part of an unofficial effort to aid rebels who, like their Cuban counterparts, were vying for independence from Spain. When the conflict ended, the Valencia’s owners put it to work transporting gold-crazed passengers to and from Alaska and the Yukon, but the ship’s luck didn’t change in the new environment.  In March 1898, during its maiden voyage to Alaska’s Copper River, rough seas and poor food quality almost led to a mutiny. In February 1903, another steamship rammed into the Valencia a quarter-mile from Seattle’s harbor, nearly wrecking it. And in 1905, Captain Johnson ran it aground just outside St. Michael, Alaska; the crew had to move 75 tons of cargo onto another vessel before they could free the Valencia.

It is impossible to know if this legacy was on Captain Johnson’s mind after passengers finished boarding the Valencia and the ship sailed away from the Embarcadero, past Yerba Buena Island, and through the Golden Gate to the open ocean. Though Johnson occasionally commanded the Valencia, taking the ship up north during the summer months, he had only taken the route to Seattle as captain of a different steamship, called Queen. The trip required sailing through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, part of the stretch of ocean between southern Oregon and the northern tip of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, where hundreds if not thousands of ships had wrecked by the early 20th century, earning it an ominous moniker: Graveyard of the Pacific.

The region’s unpredictable weather and ocean currents often pushed ships toward the wet, rugged, foggy coastline, creating a navigational nightmare. The farther north a ship traveled, the worse the conditions tended to get, particularly in winter. Unlike the Atlantic coast, which had numerous harbors where ships could shelter during storms, the shore of the Pacific provided little refuge. Between San Francisco and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a distance of approximately 660 nautical miles, there were maybe ten harbors that could be used by ships the size of the Valencia, if conditions were favorable. If a vessel was in distress, running aground on a sandy beach was rarely an option, as there were few such beaches to speak of. Meanwhile, of the 279 U.S. coastal lifesaving stations, only a handful were on the Pacific.  

Johnson and his crew planned to keep the ship between five and twenty miles of the coastline for the duration of the voyage. They hoped to reach the Cape Flattery lighthouse on Tatoosh Island, marking the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, within 48 hours. They hoped, too, for calm seas. In November 1875, the steamship Pacific sank 80 miles south of Cape Flattery in under an hour, taking as many as 300 souls to their deaths.

The first day of the Valencia’s voyage was uneventful; the ship steamed smoothly into the starry night. By roughly 5:15 a.m. on Sunday, it had traveled 190 miles and passed the lighthouse at Cape Mendocino, the westernmost point in California. It was the last time the people aboard would have a clear view of the shore until they reached Washington State. Upon passing Cape Mendocino, it was typical for a ship’s captain to chart a course to the Umatilla lightship, 477 miles north. The lightship was at a critical junction in the voyage to Seattle, a beacon signaling that Cape Flattery, and a ship’s necessary turn eastward, was just 14 miles away. 

As the Valencia steamed up the coast, the weather worsened. On Sunday afternoon, the wind shifted from a northerly breeze to southeastern gusts. Gray clouds gathered over the ocean, and as the sky became hazy, the seas grew heavy.

At 5:30 p.m., Johnson noted in the Valencia’s logbook that the ship, then ten miles offshore, had passed Cape Blanco on the Oregon coast, meaning that it had traveled 335 miles from San Francisco. However, second officer Peter E. Peterson would later say that no one on the ship’s bridge could see the Cape Blanco lighthouse, perched atop 200-foot chalky-white cliffs.

The sun briefly appeared on Monday morning, but conditions declined as the day went on. Peterson later said that visibility reduced to the point that he could see only a couple of miles into the distance. It was evident that Captain Johnson was starting to feel anxious. That evening, around 8 p.m., he asked Peterson, “When do you think we are going to make Umatilla lightship?” 

Peterson was an experienced seaman who had worked for the Pacific Coast Steamship Company for nearly a decade. He had started as a sailor on the ship Pomona, where he lost a finger. By 1906, Peterson knew the route from San Francisco to Seattle well, having traveled it more than 100 times, including on the City of Puebla as second mate.

Now Peterson studied the Valencia’s log, an instrument trailing behind the ship to help estimate its speed, and concluded that they had traveled 307 miles beyond Cape Blanco. In theory that meant the ship was only 13 miles away from the Umatilla lightship and should pass it sometime around 9:30 p.m. However, Johnson and first officer W. Holmes believed that the Valencia’s log was overrunning by approximately 6 percent—in other words, they thought that the ship was traveling slower than the log showed. It’s not clear why Johnson and Holmes held that belief, though Johnson’s previous experience in the area may have held a clue. He had commanded ships in the area during spring and summer, when northerly winds prevailed. In winter the opposite was true; winds from the south propelled ships up the Pacific coast at higher speeds.

Peterson told the captain that he trusted the log, given the weather conditions and his knowledge of the ocean at this time of year. If anything, he suspected that the log was underrunning. But he did not press the point. This was Peterson’s first trip on the Valencia; he had joined the ship’s crew at the last minute, to replace an officer who had been transferred to another vessel. Peterson knew virtually none of the men on board, save for a few servers, two cooks, and a fireman. He had never worked with any of the other officers, and it was a violation of the accepted order on any ship to defy the captain. Later Peterson would say that he took no part in the calculations required to plot the Valencia’s course—that was Johnson’s and Holmes’s responsibility. 

By 9 p.m. on Monday, the Valencia’s log showed that the ship had traveled 652 miles, which would have put it very close to the Umatilla lightship. However, Johnson was adamant that the lighthouse was still some 40 miles away. Privately, Peterson believed that the Valencia was likely past the lightship, nearing the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Around this time, Johnson ordered a course change that would bring the ship closer to the coastline. He also told the crew to gauge the depth of the ocean beneath the ship every half-hour by taking sounding measurements. To do this, the men dropped an 1,800-foot cable into the water until it hit bottom. At 9:30 p.m., the crew detected a sounding of 480 feet. An hour later, they measured 360 feet. The shallower water likely meant that the ship was getting closer to land.

By 11 p.m., the ship was moving dead slow, just four or five miles per hour. Johnson was sure the Valencia was approaching Cape Flattery. The captain stood on the bridge, waiting to hear a fog signal bellow from shore. No sound came.

Peterson later claimed that Johnson and Holmes had discussed taking the vessel west and waiting in the open ocean until daylight to figure out their exact location, but Johnson never gave that order. Instead, the Valencia continued chugging east. The sounding measurement at 11:15 p.m. was 240 feet. At 11:35 it was 180. Ten minutes later, the ocean’s depth was just over 140 feet. 

These were not the expected readings for the area where Johnson thought the ship was—the water was getting too shallow too quickly. Panicked, he changed course again, plotting a northwest route. Soon after, Peterson spied a dark object on the ship’s starboard side. He ran across the bridge and pointed it out to the captain.

When Johnson saw the dark silhouette, he cried out, “In the name of God, where are we?” He ordered Peterson to direct the crew to turn the ship “hard to starboard.” Peterson sprinted to the telegraph to issue the instruction.

The ship turned sharply, but it was too late. Just a few minutes before midnight, the Valencia collided with a rocky reef. 

TWO

Frank Bunker could not sleep. That evening on the saloon deck, he had seen the ship’s crew conducting depth measurements. After Bunker retired to his quarters, he could still hear the deep whir of the sounding cable being lowered into the sea every half-hour, then every 15 minutes or so. The noise kept him and his wife, Isabel, awake in stateroom number 26. As midnight neared, Bunker noticed that the intervals of sound were getting shorter—he remarked to Isabel that the Valencia must be entering shallower waters.  

Just as Bunker finally began to doze off, the room shook violently. The commotion startled Isabel and woke their two children. Bunker jumped out of bed and put on his coat and trousers. As he rushed for the door to inquire what had happened, another tremor tossed his wife and children to the floor.

Half dressed, Bunker stepped onto the deck. The dull glow of the ship’s lights illuminated the scene before him. Crewmen ran frantically from the vessel’s bowels to the bridge, while various passengers in their nightclothes looked on in either bemusement or concern. Bunker asked a group of people what was happening. They said that the ship had struck something but didn’t think it was too serious.

By then, Johnson had ordered the crew to investigate whether any water was leaking into the cargo hold, which would mean that the ship’s hull had been breached by the reef. Initially the crew found only a few feet of water midship. But soon the ship’s carpenter reported seven feet in the hold as well as in the crew’s mess room.

The Valencia’s fate was sealed: It was sinking, and there would be no saving it. If the ship drifted out to deeper waters, the hold would fill in a matter of minutes, and everyone aboard would surely perish. Johnson looked at Peterson. “I am going to beach her,” the captain said. He wanted to lodge the ship firmly amid the rocks to buy time.

Johnson ordered the crew to put the ship in reverse at full power. The Valencia’s propeller sliced through the frigid 43-degree ocean water. As the ship’s stern slammed into the reef, the bow became submerged in the sea. One after another, waves cresting at ten feet crashed over the vessel.

In the darkness, the captain and crew could not see land, but they knew it must be close. Reaching it was now a matter of survival. The Valencia carried six lifeboats; two of them were wooden, while the rest were made of metal. The ship also had a workboat and three rafts—one made of wood, and two made of tule, a buoyant reed material. Taken together, there was enough space to transport everyone on board to the invisible shore.

Johnson ordered all crew on deck to prepare the lifeboats for launch. Peterson turned to run to his station, but when he reached a set of stairs he slipped and slammed his head against the deck.

The Valencia’s fate was sealed: It was sinking, and there would be no saving it.

Anxious voices outside his cabin roused F. J. Campbell from sleep. Half awake and half naked, Campbell slipped out of bed to see what the fuss was about. Outside, people rushed to put on life preservers while the crew lashed lifeboats to deck railings. Campbell ran back to his cabin, got dressed, and hurried to his wife and daughter’s quarters, where he helped them put on their life preservers before shepherding them to the deck.

Frank Bunker and his family were already there. “Take on the boats!” Bunker heard a crew member yell. The passengers did not know what to do. There had been no lifeboat drill since leaving San Francisco. People shoved one another as the crowd heaved toward the lifeboats.

Just then, the water pouring into the ship shorted out the electrical system, plunging everything into darkness. It was impossible to differentiate crew from passenger. Adding to the pandemonium were the rain and wind, which made it difficult to hear instructions.

When Frank Richley, the firemen’s mess boy, reached the lifeboats, he found a distraught cluster of passengers, including the Campbell family. Richley took Mrs. Campbell’s hand and helped her into the boat. The Campbells’ daughter was hysterical and sobbing; Richley picked her up and handed her to her mother. Mr. Campbell followed his wife and daughter, fighting other men for space in the boat. If he’d had a gun, Campbell thought, he would have waved it around to stop people from crowding one another.

Fifteen people climbed into the Campbells’ lifeboat, which was near capacity. As it was lowered down the ship’s side, foam-capped breakers slammed it against the Valencia’s hull, forcing Campbell and the other men to push the oars against the ship to avoid the small boat being smashed to pieces. Eventually, they reached the ocean’s surface, and the men managed to free the boat from its rigging.

Johnson, observing from the bridge, ordered a searchlight aimed at the lifeboat. Frank Richley watched as the light pierced the cloak of night. Men struggled with the oars, battling to keep control of the boat as waves sucked them away from the ship. 

On the Valencia’s deck, Frank Bunker heard a crew member cry: “For God’s sake, give the women and children some chance!” The man then picked up one of Bunker’s children and motioned for the family to follow him. They crossed to the ship’s starboard side, where a lifeboat was hanging from its davits.

The Bunkers piled into the boat with other passengers, as well as Richley. As it descended toward the sea, the boat swung wildly. Bunker thought they might all be tossed into the freezing water. The ordeal was so terrifying that a man and a woman on board decided to get back onto the Valencia. The woman jumped from the lifeboat and clung to a ship’s railing before being pulled onto the deck; the man managed to grab a pulley and haul himself up.

Once the lifeboat reached the water, Bunker placed his two-year-old son, his namesake, under a seat so the oars would not strike him. Then he and the other men aboard worked to free the boat from the Valencia’s keel. Richley, the only crew member on the boat, paddled frantically. “Let’s get her out to sea!” he yelled.

Some distance away, Campbell caught a glimpse of the second lifeboat clearing the Valencia. He and the other men on his boat could not get the tholepins, used to secure the oars to the sides of the craft, to lock into place. Left to the mercy of the waves, the boat moved in fits and starts toward what appeared to be a rocky shoreline, slowly emerging from the darkness.

Alongside the Campbell family was passenger Albert Willis, a 17-year-old Navy seaman. Willis had just completed his training in Pensacola, Florida, and had been assigned to the USS Philadelphia, anchored in Bremerton, Washington. Though he appeared young, with blond hair and boyish features, his experience at sea made him an asset. As Willis watched the other men struggle with the oars and tholepins, he noticed a small object bobbing in the water on the boat’s floor. It was the plug for the drain hole in the bottom of the boat. Without it in place, the boat would soon sink.

Willis grabbed the plug and jammed it into place, but he could not stop water from coming in. He tried to make a seal around the plug with his fingers, but the effort was futile. Before long a shadowy breaker threw the boat against a rock, and the passengers spilled into the frigid sea.

Campbell tried to hold on to an oar, but another passenger grabbed his leg, pulling him underwater. The two men struggled with each other and the undertow. Finally, Campbell felt the man’s grasp break. The stranger washed away in the icy water.

Still wearing his life vest, Campbell managed to kick his way to the surface. He let each wave push him closer to shore, clinging tightly to one rock and then another whenever the water receded. Campbell was exhausted and fighting for his life. It had not yet dawned on him that he had seen neither his wife nor his daughter since capsizing.

Unlike the men in Campbell’s lifeboat, Bunker and his fellow passengers managed to secure their oars. They pulled hard, trying to position the boat so it would ride the waves and not be rolled by them. Just as they seemed to gain control, Bunker looked over his shoulder and saw a large swell headed straight for them. It collided with the lifeboat, tossing the occupants into the sea. 

When Bunker surfaced, he swam toward the white hull of the overturned lifeboat. He could not find anything to grab onto, so he jammed his freezing fingers into a tiny crack in the wood. Soon another wave struck the lifeboat, righting it. Bunker managed to pull himself in; there was so much water in the boat that it was only inches from sinking. He was shocked to find his wife sitting exactly where she had been before the boat flipped. Either Isabel’s life preserver had gotten caught on the bench, keeping her in place as the boat rolled, or she had climbed back into the boat before her husband.

Isabel told Bunker to search for their children. He frantically scanned the nearly submerged boat. He plunged his hands into the water, trawling along the floor until he felt a life preserver. He pulled hard and found that the vest was still attached to his son. The boy was not moving and did not look to be breathing. Bunker laid him across his lap and started chest compressions to get the water out of his lungs. Suddenly, the boy coughed and cried. It was a moment of relief, cut short by the fact that Bunker’s daughter was nowhere to be found.

Isabel turned to her husband and said that she was so cold—she was not sure how long she could hold on. A dark shape jutted into the sky ahead of the boat’s bow. “There is land,” Bunker said to his wife. “If you can hold on a few moments longer, perhaps we will be on the beach.”

As Bunker consoled her, he heard a cry for help from the side of the boat—it was Frank Richley, still in the water. Bunker pulled him into the boat. The four survivors huddled together as the sea pushed them toward the looming bluff. Bunker tightened his grip around his wife and son, bracing for impact when they reached the shore. They hit rocks and the boat stayed upright, but only for a moment. Another wave slammed into the craft, plunging the occupants into the ocean once again.

Bunker was dragged out to sea by the undertow, then hurled against the rocks by the incoming waves, a pendulum of movement that was sure to kill him if he did not get to land. He managed to grab hold of one a rock and inch his way up the surface on his belly. He grasped for sand, dirt, land. He tried to stand, but his life preserver felt as heavy as a block of concrete—it was waterlogged.

Bunker mustered the strength to break the strings of his vest, then crawled forward on his hands and knees. He had made it to a beach. It was pitch dark. Then he heard someone call out.

Campbell had reached the beach, too, and pried himself out of his life jacket. Once free he stared out at the Valencia. It was only a few hundred feet from shore. The proximity was jarring. So too was the fact that Campbell had no idea where he stood. He could only assume he was on the coastline of Washington State. But where exactly? How far from civilization, from help?

Campbell was one of seven men to survive the first lifeboat’s capsizing. The others were George Billikos, a fireman on the Valencia, who lost his shoes in the water; Albert Willis, the Navy seaman, whose pants snagged on a rock when the boat rolled; and Yosuki Hosoda, Mike Stone, Tony Brown, and Charles Samuels, all passengers. Only Bunker and Richley survived from the second boat. All the women and children in both vessels were lost.

The nine men cried out in the dark and followed one another’s voices. They converged at the base of an 80-foot cliff, the silhouette of which Bunker had seen just before he lost his wife and son. Rain pelted the men, all of whom were hypothermic. They packed together to keep warm. The roar of the ocean was incessant.

At one point, Bunker staggered away from the group toward one of the lifeboats, which had reached the shore and sat overturned. An inkling of hope spurred him to search it. He crawled underneath, but no one was there. What he did find was a can of oil. He brought it back to the group and poured the contents over a lifejacket. Someone produced a match, but it was wet. The men gave up on the idea of a fire.

In the distance, above the ocean, a red bolt shot through the sky. The streak was followed by a loud bang. Sparks arced toward the heavens, illuminating the Valencia, stuck in the rocks below. The waves were pounding the vessel, flooding it, breaking it apart. The men realized that the Valencia’s demise would not be quick.

In the light of the distress flare fired from the ship, the survivors on shore could just make out the contours of the ghostlike figures on board waving their arms. Before the men could wave back, the sky went black.



When Peter Peterson recovered from his fall, the Valencia was in chaos. The ship’s remaining lifeboats launched one after another to catastrophic failure. A panicked passenger cut the aft tackle of one of them. “Like a shot the stern of the boat fell to the water’s edge, leaving the bow hanging in the air,” Frank Lehm, the Valencia’s freight clerk, later wrote of the scene. “The occupants were spilled out like pebbles from a glass and fell with shrieks and groans into the boiling surf…. The next wave swept them away, and where the glare of the searchlight played on the water we could see the white, terrified faces of the drowning people flash by with the look of deathly fear such as is seldom seen.”

Peterson made his way to his lifeboat station, where he and other crew members helped eight men and three women into a boat. Peterson jumped into the vessel to steady it at the same moment someone shouted to lower it down. Off-kilter, Peterson clung to some mesh wire on the edge of the ship. Just as he thought he might lose his grip, a fellow sailor grabbed him and pulled him to safety on the Valencia. The lifeboat was lowered into darkness, only to be overtaken by the sea.

All told, as many as 60 people died in attempts to get the lifeboats off the Valencia. By Tuesday morning, several hours after it hit the reef, only two rafts and one lifeboat remained on the ship, along with roughly 60 passengers. For now, the crew ceased trying to launch the remaining vessels. Everyone was cold, tired, and hungry. They needed rest. They would try again at first light.

According to one account, some passengers grew desperate and leapt overboard; whether they had been hopeful or suicidal, none survived. Children cried out for parents they could not find. Eventually, amid howling wind and biting rain, survivors seeking refuge from the elements assembled in the dining saloon, where kitchen staff prepared sandwiches. Many people went without food, however, as most of the ship’s provisions sat submerged in the rising water belowdecks. 

On the bridge, Captain Johnson tried to keep his composure. He still did not know where the Valencia was. He could not surmise if either of the first two lifeboats had made it to shore. He watched as relentless breakers engulfed the forward components of the ship: the pilot house, the chart house, and, soon enough, parts of the bridge.

Johnson and the crew decided to set off emergency flares, hoping someone, anyone, might come to their aid. One of the flares misfired, mangling Johnson’s hand. Another shot into the black sky, revealing a cliff. There was land, and not far. Some of the Valencia’s passengers thought they saw figures on the beach and frantically waved.

THREE

Early on Tuesday, January 23, with the faint gray hue of daylight creeping over the horizon, Frank Bunker and the other eight men on the beach decided to move. They could not stay where they were without food and water, and they needed to determine their location.

Bunker tried to find a path leading away from the beach, to no avail. The only way out would be to scale the steep bluff. Bunker found a promising stretch of rock, dotted with roots and ferns he could grip while climbing. He began to ascend and made it far enough up that he decided the route was safe, then went back down to inform the other men.

They waited until the sun rose to climb. Bunker led the way, showing the group where to place their hands and feet. He positioned himself at one particularly difficult spot to assist each man as he passed. The last to take Bunker’s hand said that there was a tenth survivor on the beach, one who must have escaped the Valencia on another lifeboat. He appeared to have gone insane and refused to climb the bluff. Bunker told the others to wait for him at the top while he investigated.

He descended to the beach and scanned until he found the man. His face looked like he had been raked against the rocks as he washed to shore. He was delirious; there was no way he could climb. Bunker laid out two life jackets, eased the man onto them, and left him there, then ascended the bluff.

Bunker described what the men saw at the top as “terrible brush, a frightful place.” The ground was laden with mud, rocks, and roots, and thick with salal bushes. In a surreal moment, fueled by hunger, exhaustion, and hypothermia, one of the men thought he saw pieces of paper on the ground. Bunker told the men that if this was so, they must be “near civilization.” When they finally reached down and picked up the paper, they discovered that it was chunks of snow.

In time the men spotted a telegraph cable and a corresponding trail running along the coastline. Now they faced a choice: They could follow the crude path and seek help, or remain near the beach in the hope that the Valencia’s remaining crew could get a line to shore, which the men might need to secure for the people stranded on the ship to be towed to safety.

A debate ensued. Bunker was adamant that the men go find help; he was not convinced that the Valencia could get a line to shore. Frank Richley disagreed. “Let’s stay by here and see what we can do for the ship,” he said. George Billikos, the fireman, also wanted to stay on the bluff. According to Billikos, Bunker said that no one had to follow him, but that he had lost his wife and children, and now he was going to save himself.

All the men except Billikos followed Bunker into the brush. Even Richley went. Billikos stayed behind at first, but alone, freezing, and without shoes, he quickly changed his mind. He would take his chances with the others. He hurried to catch up.

Bunker tried to find a path leading away from the beach, to no avail. The only way out would be to scale the steep bluff.

For the people on the Valencia, dawn finally brought the shoreline into focus. The sight of land, however, offered little reprieve. They could make out no features to help them identify their location, and no signs of life—no structures, paths, or people. They saw only ridges, trees, and shrubs. “Taken as a whole, it would be hard to find a place so comparatively near to civilization yet practically so inaccessible and isolated as the place where the Valencia went ashore,” a report later stated.

Swimming to shore was all but suicide, a fact made clear by the bobbing corpses of passengers who had fallen or leapt into the sea. “The bodies of the drowned, which by that time, must have numbered full sixty, were seen floating around the beach and dashing up against the iron-bound cliff, which loomed so close to us,” freight clerk Frank Lehm wrote. “The bodies were caught by the waves, thrown against the rocks, and then caught by the undertow and drawn back.”

It seemed that the only hope for those still aboard lay in the remaining lifeboat and two small rafts. Around 8 a.m., boatswain Tim McCarthy approached Captain Johnson and said that the ship would not last much longer—the ocean was simultaneously devouring it and taking it apart at the seams. Johnson ordered McCarthy to gather volunteers to take the last lifeboat to shore, where the Valencia’s crew would aim a Lyle gun, a short-barreled cannon that fired a projectile with a rope attached to it. Once the volunteers on the shore had secured the rope, passengers and crew would evacuate the ship—they would slip one by one into a harness known as a breeches buoy and be pulled ashore.  

This was McCarthy’s second outing on the Valencia, but he had more than 15 years of experience at sea. He grew up fishing off Gloucester, Massachusetts, and had “sailed in steamboats and steamers and everything that has floated,” according to later testimony. McCarthy was not a physically imposing figure—he was wiry and of average height—but he was confident and commanded respect from the crew. 

When McCarthy asked for volunteers to join him on the lifeboat, one of the first to raise his hand was Charles Brown, who since 1891 had worked on English sailing ships and American coasting vessels. McCarthy asked sailor John Marks if he would come, too. Marks replied, “I’ll go anywhere.” In all, six men set off on the mission.

The sea had become even heavier throughout the morning, and it would require finesse to get the small vessel into the open water without capsizing. The men took their places and locked in their oars. McCarthy sat in the back, ready to steer, and studied the waves. They would need to break away just as a swell passed the ship.

One wave rolled by, then another, then another. On McCarthy’s command, the men oared the boat away from the Valencia’s hull. A wave caught them, and while they managed to keep the boat from tipping over, one of the oars snapped in two. McCarthy urged the men to row hard, and when they cleared the Valencia’s bow, they let out a yell of triumph. McCarthy quickly silenced the elation—they still had to get to shore. “Go to it for all you are worth!” he cried, and the men leaned into their oars.

On the Valencia, Peterson and other crewmen moved the Lyle gun to the aft of the ship, which offered the best position for getting a line to shore. The crew tied a rope to the projectile, primed the cannon, angled its barrel, and ignited the fuse. The first attempt failed, as the line chafed against the box and broke. A second line was prepared, and a loud boom echoed through the ship as the projectile launched into the air, arcing over the beach. It landed on top of the bluff. There it would wait for McCarthy and his crew.

Not everyone was confident that the men would succeed in reaching land, much less in securing the line. Fireman John Segalos (or Joe Cigalos, according to some reports), a Greek immigrant who had come to America to make money to support his aging mother, looked at the roiling sea and convinced himself that he could swim to the beach with a rope line and secure it from there. He took off his coat and vest. In his pocket was a small knife; he would need to cut the line he was carrying if it snagged on debris or, worse, a corpse. “I have to die sometime,” he said. “I might be dead, or I might do something.” Then Segalos looked to the sky. “God help us!”

He tied an end of the line around his waist and told one of the ship’s engineers to pull on the rope if he disappeared beneath the waves. When he saw his chance between swells, Segalos dove. The shock of the freezing water sent the air rushing from his lungs. He flailed his arms, surfaced, and swam, dodging rocks and logs.

People gathered at the Valencia’s railing and watched as Segalos struggled to get to shore. He did not make it far: The line around his waist became entangled, so he cut it. Segalos then turned and tried to make his way back to the ship, but a large log slammed into his head. Someone threw him a buoy, and passengers pulled him aboard.

Segalos was rushed to one of the few dry bunks left on the ship and given whiskey and fresh clothes. “It seemed to suck the life out of me,” he said of his experience in the sea, “and time after time, as I tried to make the shore, I found myself getting weaker and weaker.”

Another crew member also tried to make it to the beach, but he too had to be rescued. Now all the survivors could do was wait and see if McCarthy and the other men in the lifeboat could make landfall and find the line shot from the Lyle gun. But hope was fading fast: The boat was no longer in sight.  

“The bodies of the drowned, which by that time, must have numbered full sixty, were seen floating around the beach and dashing up against the iron-bound cliff,” freight clerk Frank Lehm wrote.

The lifeboat did not capsize. Rather, it traveled several miles north as the men aboard fought with the ocean to make a safe landing on shore, away from crashing breakers and jagged rocks. McCarthy and his crew still believed that they were somewhere along the coast of Washington State, and they kept heading north in the hope of finding the Cape Flattery lighthouse. After several hours, they were soaked, tired, and breaking or losing oars one after another—still there was no sign of the lighthouse.

Eventually, they spied a beach that looked suitable for landing. The men angled the boat toward shore and peeled off their heavy life jackets. “If we should happen to hit the beach,” McCarthy said, “be ready to jump before the boat turns over and kills us.” For once there was good luck: The men paddled in unison, crested a wave, and slid onto shore. McCarthy looked at his watch, which miraculously was still ticking. It was five minutes after one on Tuesday afternoon.

The men knew they needed to head south if they were to get to the Valencia and secure a line for the survivors. They began to walk, sticking to the coastline at first, but a large waterfall and cliff soon hindered that plan. They turned inland and tried to carve a path through thick bramble but gave up after about 100 yards. Back on the beach, they decided to go north, clambering over driftwood and rocks, only to encounter a fast-moving river. When McCarthy waded into the water, his foot got stuck in the mud, and the group thought better about trying to cross. Back to the lifeboat they went.

Then through the fog one of the men spotted a telegraph line at the beach’s edge. They followed it until they came to a cabin—a decrepit shack, really. As the men examined the structure and its surroundings, one of them called out, “I think there is a trail here!” They followed the path, bushwhacking their way through overgrowth. After a few minutes they came across a white signpost nailed to a tree. “Three miles to Cape Beale,” it read in big black letters. The men looked at one another, confused.

They were not in Washington. The Valencia had traveled farther north than Captain Johnson believed—the reef it struck was just off the southwestern coast of Vancouver Island. McCarthy’s party had made landfall at a place called Pachena Bay, and Cape Beale was the lighthouse closest to the wreck. There, perhaps, the men could find help. They set out northward, using the telegraph line as their guide.



In 1889, the Canadian government began installing more than 100 miles of telegraph wire from the city of Victoria up to Cape Beale. Before then lighthouse keepers and people living in small villages along the coast had no easy way to communicate with the rest of the world; local First Nations communities were still using dugout canoes to get from place to place with whatever information needed to be shared. No one had any way of calling for help in an emergency, including a ship in distress.

The telegraph wire was strung between trees, and a telephone line was added in 1899, when the technology was still in its infancy. Linemen were hired to maintain it. Each lineman was responsible for a 25- or 30-mile stretch of wire. The job was arduous: Linemen were tasked with navigating the rough trail that followed the wire and repairing sections downed by storms or fallen tree. They waded through waist-high rivers, crawled through steep gorges and ravines, used homemade ladders to reach high portions of line, and avoided bears, wolves, and cougars as best they could. When necessary they took refuge in huts built along the trail.

As McCarthy’s group set off, they had no idea that Bunker, Campbell, and other survivors from the Valencia were following the telegraph line, too, several miles to the south. That party’s progress was slow. At least two of the men had no shoes. One had a badly sprained ankle. Albert Willis was nursing an injured finger and what he thought might be several broken ribs. Meanwhile, the trail was hazardous, littered with rocks and logs slick from the winter rain. Thick brambles and dense underbrush snaked through the woods. To the west was a steep drop to the sea that a man could easily tumble off if he tripped or was pushed by the wind. The constant sound of waves crashing into the jagged rocks was a stark reminder that death could be imminent.

After crossing four gullies, early Tuesday afternoon the Bunker party descended a steep part of the trail that led to an expansive beach. They were grateful to be walking on flat ground. Eventually, they came to the Darling River, swollen with winter runoff. On the opposite side they saw a cabin. The telegraph wire ran straight through it.

After surveying their options, the men realized that there was no easy way to cross the river—they would have to swim against the current. One man would go first with a rope and secure it on the far bank so the others could use it for support as they crossed. Bunker volunteered. He tied a rope around his waist and dove into the raging river. The men on the shore watched, praying that the torrent wouldn’t carry him away. Bunker made it across and secured the rope, and soon the others joined him.

Together the men staggered toward the cabin. They burst through the door and were elated at what they found: a stove, benches, rolled-up blankets stored in the rafters, a couple of coats, a can of moldy beans, some bacon, lard, an axe. And a receiver, designed for both telephony and telegraphy. Bunker rushed to the receiver, hoping that the device worked and that someone was on the other end.

FOUR

Around 2 p.m. on January 23, David Logan received a message at his home in the remote settlement of Clo-oose. Logan was one of Vancouver Island’s first telegraph linemen. The message he received was a plea for assistance. The sender relayed that a ship had wrecked traveling from San Francisco to the Puget Sound, that 50 people had drowned, and that perhaps 100 people remained on board. The sender also indicated that a band of survivors were sheltering in a cabin.

Logan called the Carmanah Point lighthouse telegraph office, located four miles south of Clo-oose. He told the lighthouse keeper about the message, and the keeper agreed to send his son, Phil Daykin, and another man north to meet Logan so they could form a search party and find the shipwreck.

Meanwhile, at the Cape Beale lighthouse, the keeper’s wife, Minnie Paterson, also received Bunker’s message, though she struggled to understand it, perhaps due to damage in the transmission line. Not long after, Paterson heard her large Scotch collie bark, followed by the scurry of her children’s footsteps as they ran for the yard. Paterson, who was eight months pregnant, got up to see what was causing the commotion. Through a window, she saw six weary figures approaching the lighthouse. It was McCarthy and his men.

Paterson made her way to the door as her children sprinted toward them.

“You are the shipwrecked crew,” Paterson said in greeting. “I was so sorry we could not connect with you.” 

McCarthy appeared baffled. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“Were you not trying to talk to us from further along the line?”

McCarthy realized that if Paterson had received a message, there must be other survivors. Perhaps passengers and crew on the first two lifeboats had made it to shore. “We are off the Pacific Coast Company’s boat Valencia that was wrecked along here. I don’t know exactly how many miles it is,” McCarthy told Paterson. “I want you to telegraph to Victoria or Seattle to get assistance.” 

Paterson escorted the men into the lighthouse. She fiddled with the receiver, trying to reach the men in the Darling River cabin, and finally established a connection. On the other end was Bunker. He relayed that he had lost his wife and children and that there were nine men in his party—seven passengers and two crew. He said they were in bad shape.

Paterson assured McCarthy and the other men at the lighthouse that their fellow survivors would be rescued. Then she turned back to the receiver and started wiring another message. This one would let the world know about the disaster unfolding off the coast of Vancouver Island.

McCarthy realized that if Paterson had received a message, there must be other survivors. Perhaps passengers and crew on the first two lifeboats made it to shore.

At around 3:30 p.m., Captain James Gaudin, a marine agent for the Canadian Federal Department of Marine and Fisheries, was at his desk in Victoria, preparing to go home early, when he received a telegram from Cape Beale that made him jolt from his seat. “A steamer has been wrecked,” it read. “About one hundred drowned. Nine have reached the telegraph hut. Will wire particulars later.” 

Gaudin knew the schedules of the ships passing through the area, and he knew that the Valencia was late to reach its destination. This wasn’t necessarily an anomaly—ships ran behind all the time. Now Gaudin wondered if something disastrous had happened.

A second message confirmed his fears. “Steamer Valencia ashore in [a] bad place,” it read. “About 110 people on board. Rush assistance. Six men have just reached here. Between 50-60 drowned.”

Gaudin picked up his telephone. He would not be going home anytime soon.

As word of the wreck spread, three ships set out to reach the Valencia: Czar, a tug boat; Queen, the steamship sometimes commanded by Captain Johnson; and Salvor, a wrecker helmed by H. F. Bullen. Bullen assumed that the Valencia’s remaining passengers and crew had already abandoned the ship, and that the Salvor would do what it was built to do: gather valuables and usable materials from the wreckage.

All three vessels were en route by Tuesday evening, traveling west through the Strait of Juan de Fuca. They would need most of the night to reach the Valencia, but as the ships got closer to the open ocean, they were battered by strong winds and seas. The crews decided to wait until dawn before forging ahead. The next morning, the three vessels convened at the Carmanah Point lighthouse, where they were informed that the wreck was roughly 11 miles northwest, near Seabird Rocks. The Salvor, Czar, and Queen continued up the coast.

Just after 8:30 a.m., Herbert Beecher, a local mariner who had volunteered to be on the Queen that day, placed a spyglass to his eye and squinted down the barrel. He scanned the fuzzy horizon until his eyes made out the Valencia, lodged fast on a shallow reef. The bow faced the ocean, and the stern was pointed toward the nearby shore. Breakers crashed over the decks. Survivors had lashed blankets in the rigging for shelter and confined themselves to the last bit of the hurricane deck not yet submerged in the ocean. Plumes of smoke appeared. Beecher was ecstatic: People were alive and needed rescuing.

The Queen was too big to get close to the wreck, so it drifted a couple of miles offshore as the Czar slowly maneuvered through shallower waters to assess the situation. The Czar’s crew reported back to the other vessels that they saw no signs of life. The Queen’s captain, N. E. Cousins, later claimed that he tried to dispute this report, describing what Beecher had seen through the spyglass. But there was either a miscommunication or a misunderstanding, because at 10:15 a.m. the Czar and the Salvor both vacated the area.

The Queen remained where it was, and the mariners aboard began discussing rescue options. They could deploy the ship’s lifeboats, but Cousins worried that the vessels would not make it through the mist, wind, and ten-to-fifteen-foot seas. As the weather worsened, Cousins went to his quarters to put on his oilskin coat. Someone came to the door and told him they had spotted another ship: City of Topeka, a larger vessel in the same fleet as the Queen and the Valencia, had steamed through the night from Seattle to reach the scene.

Cousins made his way to the bridge just as the City of Topeka pulled alongside his ship. Cousins shared what he knew with J. E. Pharo, the assistant manager of the ships’ parent company who was aboard the City of Topeka, and Pharo told him to return to Victoria. Pharo may not have wanted another vessel out of commission, since that would cost his company money. The Queen was instructed to load passengers and embark on a scheduled trip to San Francisco.

Cousins did as Pharo told him. Meanwhile, the City of Topeka steamed toward shore, looking for the Valencia. With scarcely any visibility, the ship went up and down the coast, even reaching as far as Cape Beale, until finally someone spotted a dot floating in the sea.

Plumes of smoke appeared. Beecher was ecstatic: People were alive and needed rescuing.

The ocean had consumed most of the Valencia’s cabins. The last of the food was gone. During the night, some passengers stripped off their clothing to make a torch, a tremendous sacrifice considering the cold. They dipped the garments in kerosene and set them ablaze, hoping to attract attention. No one came.

Sometime Wednesday morning, the foremast rigging gave way, plunging 20 to 30 people into the icy water. A few were lucky enough to be pulled back on board. A slew of bodies were swept away from the ship and crushed against the rocks close to shore.

Then, around 9 a.m., a familiar shape was spotted, the contour of a ship in the distance. A wild cheer broke out. Two smaller vessels soon appeared, coming nearer the wreck than the first. None of the vessels got close enough to establish contact. Passengers waved blankets from the rigging. Some suggested setting off the Lyle gun to attract attention. The fuse sparked, the gun went off, and smoke poured from the barrel.

Captain Johnson stood on deck and watched the three ships sit idle in the rain and fog. He instructed the remaining crew to take the two rafts still on board and load as many people as possible into them. Johnson would not be going anywhere. He knew that his responsibility was to stay aboard the Valencia until the very end, whatever that entailed.

Those onboard were stunned when none of the surviving women would get in the rafts. They believed that with ships in sight, rescue might be imminent. If it wasn’t, the women had little reason for hope. Many had watched their husbands and children die. They preferred to stay where they were. Some began to sing “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” a hymn that in just a few years would become famous for reportedly being the last song sung aboard the Titanic.

Men readied the rafts. The first group to leave consisted mainly of crew members, including chief cook Samuel Hancock. After clearing the ship around 10 a.m., the men rowed toward the distant vessel—only one seemed to remain—but then lost sight of it. Hancock knew there was a northerly current and told the men to keep the shoreline in sight.

Peter Peterson stood on the Valencia’s deck, watching as the topmast came crashing down and the hurricane deck finally caved in. It was now or never—the last raft needed to leave the ship. Captain Johnson tried to change the women’s minds. “This is the last chance,” he said. One replied, “We might just as well die on the ship as die on the raft.”

Approximately 20 male passengers and crew, including John Segalos, who had tried to swim a line to shore, squeezed into the raft. Johnson told Peterson to go, too. Once in the water, the men used large pieces of wood to paddle.

The men aimed for shore, until a mess boy cried out. He could see smoke in the other direction. Soon they spotted a large black hull cutting through the water, then two large masts. They heard three loud whistles pierce the air. It was the City of Topeka.

The captain of the City of Topeka sent a lifeboat out to meet the men in the raft. The survivors were in a ghastly state, their skin purple and numb. A crewman tossed a line to Segalos. Peterson began to lose consciousness as the lifeboat towed the raft toward the ship. He could barely keep his head above the waves washing over the raft. The last thing he remembered before blacking out was pulling alongside the City of Topeka.

The survivors were rushed to the ship’s doctor. After being examined, they were given whiskey, dry clothes, and warm blankets. “If we had been an hour longer on that raft, I believe every man would have gone insane,” Joseph McCaffrey, a passenger on the Valencia who was picked up by the City of Topeka later said to a newspaper reporter. “One could tell by the looks in the eyes of his companions that reason was fast departing. Just touch one of the men and he would growl like a trapped animal.”

During the night, some passengers stripped off their clothing to make a torch, a tremendous sacrifice considering the cold. They dipped the garments in kerosene and set them ablaze, hoping to attract attention. No one came.

The raft carrying Hancock and a handful of other men drifted north, farther than intended. It passed Cape Beale and entered a bay dotted with islands. Everyone aboard was hungry, injured, and exhausted. One man died, likely from exposure; the others threw his body overboard. Two men, perhaps driven mad, jumped into the sea. When the survivors finally beached on Turret Island around midnight, one man attacked Hancock and attempted to eat him. The others subdued the man, who curled up on the ground and never got up. The next morning, a survivor named Frank Connors seemed to go insane, according to Hancock, and ran off into the trees in search of a lighthouse he believed he saw.

In total, only four men who washed up on Turret Island survived. Hancock and firemen Max Stensler and George Long would be rescued from the island on January 25. The following day, Connors would be found wandering nearby.

Down south, the survivors resting with Minnie Paterson at the Cape Beale lighthouse waited to be rescued, as did the Bunker party, huddled in the cabin on the Darling River. Meanwhile, the search party consisting of David Logan, Phil Daykin, and Joe Martin was approaching the Valencia’s location. The trio had hiked several miles, sleeping on the ground overnight and using a damaged canoe to cross a swift-moving river. At a rocky outcrop, they spied a line of rope suspended in the trees and, suspecting it had been fired from a Lyle gun, followed it to the edge of a cliff. Down below, just offshore, was the Valencia.

The scene was brutal. Bodies of the dead littered the shore. People still clung to the ship’s wreckage, flinching when icy ocean spray hit them. When the survivors spied the three men on the cliff, they cheered and hollered. But the search party was ill-equipped to help. The line from the Lyle gun had snapped. The men could not find a path down to the beach. There seemed to be no way to reach the ship.

Just after noon, the ocean swallowed the Valencia. A massive wave swept over the ship, and Logan, Daykin, and Martin watched as dozens of people fell into the sea. Some of them, hugging pieces of debris, were swept into the abyss, while others were caught in the waves and dashed against the rocks. Two clung to the aft mast, the only part of the ship still visible, until they could no more. Logan, Daykin, and Martin stood by, helpless. “The end of the Valencia,” Canadian author Richard Belyk would later write, “was a theatre of horror.”

Eventually Logan, Daykin, and Martin left the cliff and hiked three miles to the Bunker party’s cabin. When Logan spotted one of the survivors, who had emerged from the hut to greet them, he shouted over the rushing of the Darling River. The men needed to use the telegraph to send a message to Cape Beale: The Valencia was gone.

FIVE

In the days following the sinking of the Valencia, debris kept washing to shore. So did corpses. All told, an estimated 126 crew and passengers died in the wreck, including every woman and child on board. David Logan, First Nations communities, and the crew of a ship called Grant scoured Vancouver Island’s beaches at low tide, collecting waterlogged bodies and preparing them to be shipped to Victoria and Seattle.

While other survivors journeyed home, Frank Bunker stayed behind to help with the search. His wife and children were never found. Nor were F. J. Campbell’s wife and daughter. Captain Johnson’s body was lost, too. Fourth officer Aberg, whose wife had believed a fortune-teller’s claim that her husband would perish at sea, was among the dead who were found. He wore a blue sweater and a monogrammed ring, and he was identified by survivors.

When possible the dead were sent home by ship to loved ones. Some were left where they were found because the terrain made retrieval too difficult. Others were in such an advanced state of decomposition that they were impossible to move. Among the bodies recovered, many could not be identified because of bloating, or because waves and rocks had smashed their features. A coroner’s description of one reads, “Height 5 feet 11 inches. Weight 200 pounds or more. Reddish moustache. Laced shoe, No. 10. Striped shirt, blue and white. Dark vest, with Union label. Black tie. Black socks; Flesh coloured underwear. Grey and black trousers. Long hands. Dark Hair. Features unrecognizable. Taken to Hanna’s, Undertaker. Coffin marked ‘XIII’ at foot and on lid.” 

The unidentified were buried along the coast in unmarked graves. At one site, on a beach near Tofino, large crosses marked their final resting places. Eventually, a funeral service would be held at the Grand Opera House in Seattle for some of the dead. A 50-piece band played “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” a senator delivered remarks, and a poet recited original verse. Then a procession of more than 300 people followed a funeral car drawn by six white horses to Mount Pleasant Cemetery, where more than a dozen unidentified bodies from the Valencia were laid to rest beneath a shared monument.

The tragic news of the Valencia’s demise raced across the continent. It made the front pages of newspapers in Canada and the United States. The horrific details fueled public outcry. Families and friends of those who had perished wanted answers: How could so many people die so close to shore? Soon politicians in Ottawa and Washington, D.C., were being grilled.

Both governments commissioned reports to determine what had gone wrong and what could be done to prevent future tragedies. The Canadian inquiry was headed by marine agent James Gaudin, who had received a telegram about the wreck from Minnie Paterson at Cape Beale. By March 20, 1906, the probe had reached its conclusion. Ultimately, the commission blamed Captain Johnson, who was found to have “made a grave error of judgment in attempting to make the entrance to the Strait in such weather as prevailing at the time without exhausting every means of ascertaining his position.”

The American inquiry also found that, given Johnson’s uncertainty about the Valencia’s position, he should have taken the ship out to the open sea until he could safely chart a course to Seattle. “Such action Captain Johnson failed to take,” the report stated, “and upon his improper navigation in this respect must rest the primary responsibility for the disaster.” (Johnson was not the only person whose reputation was sullied by the wreck. J. E. Pharo, assistant manager of the Pacific Coast Steamship Company, submitted his resignation even before the U.S. report found it inexcusable that he had ordered the steamship Queen to leave the scene of the wreck, where it might have participated in a rescue operation.)

Both government reports made recommendations to improve maritime safety, including better lights and foghorns at key points along the West Coast. “If such a terrible disaster must occur, it must be regarded primarily in the nature of a lesson for the future—a lesson not to be disregarded,” the U.S. report stated, “and if the government, acting upon this lesson, shall make all reasonable provisions within its power for the safeguarding of this coast, the victims of Valencia will not have perished in vain.” The Canadian government urged that new vessels built to travel the region include watertight compartments belowdecks. It also called for building more lighthouses on Vancouver Island, equipping them with rescue boats, and clearing a lifesaving trail along the coast so shipwrecked survivors could reach shelter and assistance.

Before those changes could be made, Minnie Paterson became famous when another ship, a 168-foot sailing vessel called Coloma, foundered just off Cape Beale. With the telegraph line down, Paterson set out on her own in rain and wind, hiking several miles through marshes, streams, and vegetation, to find help. The Canadian government awarded her a silver plate for her efforts. She died of tuberculosis five years later.

John Segalos, the fireman who tried to swim to shore and was later picked up by the City of Topeka, was awarded multiple medals for his bravery on the Valencia, including one from the Seattle chamber of commerce. In time, though, his life fell into disarray. In 1928, after relocating to the East Coast, he was robbed and assaulted, and his cherished medals were stolen. He died, almost destitute, at the age of 76. For his part, Frank Campbell shared his witness account of the tragedy, then disappeared from the historical record, his fate lost to time.

When Frank Bunker finished looking for bodies from the Valencia, he continued on to Seattle to begin his job with the city’s public schools. He did not stay long—Bunker returned to California and served as superintendent of schools in Berkeley until he lost a bitter school board election. He then headed east, became a professor of school administration in New York, and published several books. He later opened one of the first junior high schools in America.

Bunker remarried in New York, but he never had more children. The specter of his son and daughter, lost in the Pacific, must have been ever present as he devoted his life to education. “I have no children now,” he said many years after the wreck, “but I know nothing as dear as a little child.” Bunker died in 1944.

Over time the wreck of the Valencia became more than a cautionary tale. To locals on Vancouver Island, it evolved into a ghost story. As early as 1906, witnesses reported strange occurrences near the reef where the ship sank. A local Nuu-chah-nulth man, Clanewah Tom, claimed he saw a boat full of skeletons in a coastal cave a few hundred yards from the wreck. Mariners described glimpsing a phantom ship with wraithlike figures clinging to its sides floating just offshore.

In 1933, captain George Alexander MacFarlane found the lifeboat Tim McCarthy and a few other men used to get to shore in a farmer’s field in the Alberni Valley of Vancouver Island. MacFarlane removed the nameplate with an axe and kept it in his home. In 1956, it was donated to the Maritime Museum of British Columbia, where it remains today, along with other remnants from the wreck. 

Most of the Valencia, however, still sits where it sank. The reef and rocks that doomed the ship can be seen from the West Coast Trail, the name given to the 75-kilometer path that the Canadian government carved along the shore to improve rescue operations in the wake of the Valencia disaster. The trail, now primarily used for hiking, traces the old telegraph line that Bunker, Campbell, and other survivors followed to find refuge.

The wreck occurred near kilometer 18 of the path. On the bluff overlooking the sea, which Bunker and other survivors scaled, there are two red Adirondack chairs. For the unknowing it is a peaceful spot, a place to rest and watch the waves crash against the rocks below. But reminders of the past lurk just below the breakers: plates from the ship’s hull, a section of the engine, a propeller and its shaft. Under the weight of the ocean, pieces of the Valencia rest in their shallow grave.  

More from The Atavist Magazine


© 2023 The Atavist Magazine. Proudly powered by Newspack by Automattic. Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice for California Users.

The Desperado

The Desperado

In April 2018, a blind man with one foot robbed a bank in Austin, Texas. This is a heist story—but unlike any you’ve ever read.

By Ciara O’Rourke

The Atavist Magazine, No. 87


Ciara O’Rourke is a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. Her work has appeared in The AtlanticSeattle Met, and Portland Monthly, among other publications. 

Editor: Jonah Ogles
Designer: Jefferson Rabb
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Adam Przybyl
Illustrator: Matt Huynh

Published in January 2020. Design updated in 2021.

One

Edward Averill finished off the last slices of Genoa salami and sopressata from the deli packages in his mini-fridge, rolling them into tubes and eating them with his fingers. Between bites he drank a Modelo Especial. It was his favorite beer, and that night, April 5, 2018, he savored every sip. He didn’t expect to have another one anytime soon.

The 58-year-old computer engineer climbed into bed around 10 p.m. and lay staring at the ceiling for hours before drifting off to sleep. He jerked awake without an alarm at 8:30 the next morning. After turning on his laptop and scrubbing it clean of files and software, he wiped his external hard drive and reformatted it—twice. Satisfied, he powered down the computer and began tidying his room.

There wasn’t much there. He rented it from a woman named Anne Toney, who owned the house it was in. The rest of Toney’s home was cluttered—chairs, gnome figurines, even an old, empty candy machine. Averill liked to joke that people had vanished there amid all the bric-a-brac. But he took pride in his space, which was big enough for a double bed, the magnet-covered fridge, and a media cabinet he used as a pantry. He set drinks on coasters so they wouldn’t leave rings on his computer desk, which is where he ate most of his meals.

Over the previous week, he’d thrown away many of his belongings, including five USB sticks, a Swiffer, and an extra computer monitor. On the morning of April 6, he tossed the magnets and coasters, too. All that was left, aside from the furniture, were some clothes in the closet, a couple of cold beers, and a blue expandable plastic folder where he stored sensitive paperwork like his birth certificate and Social Security card. Old tax forms were in one sleeve; his diploma from Oakton High School in Vienna, Virginia, was in another.

Averill picked up the folder, stuck a bottle of Tums in his pocket, and grabbed the cane he used to help him walk. His left foot had been amputated—a complication of type 2 diabetes—and the cane kept him steady on his prosthetic foot. It was time for him to go. He left his keys on the laptop, closed the door behind him, and stepped carefully down the short flight of stairs to the living room. Toney was watching Matlock with the drapes drawn. Averill didn’t pause to say goodbye. He opened the front door, headed down the walk, and stopped at a sidewalk trash can to drop his blue folder inside, disposing of every paper record of his history and identity.

He turned right on the sidewalk and walked ten minutes uphill to the bus stop. He waited, squinting in the Austin, Texas, sun as the temperature crept into the high seventies. The 325 bus appeared. Averill boarded and then bumped along until the vehicle groaned to a stop near a Walmart. He got off and waited again. Then he took the 3 to the Austin Diner.

When the server came to his table, Averill asked for grits, eggs, toast, a double order of bacon, and lots of coffee. Paying for his breakfast would require the last of the cash in his wallet. After that, he had only $1.75 left in a Prosperity Bank checking account, which he’d opened roughly eight years earlier. But Averill wasn’t worried about money. The bank was less than a block away, and when he finished eating he was going to rob it.

He’d been researching how to pull off the heist for weeks. Averill had read online that bank tellers were encouraged to remain calm during a robbery—the money was insured, so they shouldn’t risk their lives. The employees at Prosperity seemed well trained, and armed guards weren’t posted by the door, unlike a branch of Wells Fargo that Averill had cased.

Around 12:45, he finished his coffee, took a deep breath, and left the diner. Averill walked to a traffic light and crossed the street, leaning on his cane with each step toward the bank. He hadn’t been nervous when he woke up, but as he approached the building he couldn’t help but worry. What if something bad happens? he thought. What if the teller has a gun and decides to be a hero?

Averill was at the door now. He pulled it open and limped inside. He was a longtime customer, but he didn’t recognize any of the employees, and they didn’t appear to recognize him. That was for the best. Averill felt himself calming down. When he got to the counter, he ignored the teller’s greeting and passed the man a note instead. “This is a robbery,” it read, “hand over all your 50’s and 100’s, thanks.”

He hoped the “thanks” would reassure the teller.

Averill waited as the man opened his drawer and handed over $2,900 in a loose stack of bills about two inches thick. No one else in the bank seemed to realize what was happening.

Money in hand, Averill hobbled back toward the entrance, then stopped halfway across the room. “Hey,” he said, waving the wad of bills in the air to draw attention. “I just robbed you. Please call the police.”

The next day, the Austin American-Statesman published a story about the crime. “A man was arrested on Friday after he robbed a North Austin bank and waited outside for police,” the newspaper reported, citing an affidavit. “Edward Austin Averill III, 58, was booked into the Travis County Jail on Friday on a charge of robbery, a second-degree felony punishable [by] up to 20 years in prison.”

In his mug shot, Averill stares to the right of the camera, his clean-shaven chin tilted upward. His white hair is feathered back from his face and reaches his shoulders. On top of his head, where his hairline has receded, several strands curl into the air like cotton candy. He looks placid, even pleased.

I wrote Averill an email through the jail’s website a few days later, asking if he would be willing to tell me more about his unusual crime. I included my email address and phone number, which he called after a correctional officer delivered my message—printed out—and Averill borrowed another inmate’s phone card. His last name is pronounced “aye-vrill,” I learned when he introduced himself. He was surprised that I was interested in him. He was nobody special, he said. Still, he was happy to meet. We scheduled a visit.

I arrived at the jail and waited among the small crowd of people who’d made the same trip to visit boyfriends, husbands, dads, and sons. The guard called out a list of inmates’ names, followed by the booth number that each visitor should use, but she never said Averill. “Not here,” she told me when I asked where he was.

I drove home and checked the jail roster; he was still in custody. I scheduled another visit for later that week and sent him an email to let him know. When I went back to the jail, again he didn’t show. I scheduled a third meeting, went, and waited.

“Ah…,” the correctional officer hesitated as she directed visitors to their booths. “Ah-vrill?

I walked to my assigned spot and sat down. The chair on the other side of the plexiglass was empty. When Averill appeared, he was in a wheelchair pushed by a guard. A white beard had grown shaggy around his jaw since his mug shot was taken. His gaze was unfocused. The guard picked up the phone, punched in a number, and gestured for me to lift the receiver on my end. He handed the phone to Averill and walked away.

We exchanged formalities and talked a little. Averill apologized for missing our other meetings; he’d had an appointment with a doctor that he couldn’t miss. He was all but blind, Averill explained, which had everything to do with why he’d robbed Prosperity Bank.

A recorded voice interrupted our conversation—the line would disconnect in 60 seconds. Our time was up. I asked Averill if I could come back to hear the rest of the story.

“That would be fine,” he said.

I watched as he reached forward, hooking the air with the phone as he tried to locate the cradle. Giving up, he gently set the handset on the counter in front of him. He turned his head and looked in the direction he’d come from. He said something, but I couldn’t hear what. Other visitors filed past me, and a woman looked through the window at Averill. She suggested that I tell an officer that he was stranded. The blind bank robber needed help.

Two

Averill was born in Titusville, Florida, in 1959. It was the first of many places he’d call home as his parents moved around the country and the world. His father, Edward Austin Averill, Jr., was a smart, handsome computer engineer who relocated his young family to such places as Taiwan and the Bahamas, where Tres—that’s what his parents called Averill, “three” in Spanish—learned to snorkel.

When Tres was a toddler, they moved to Texas, where his mother, Sylvia, had been a switchboard operator before she married. They lived in Plano, north of Dallas, but Tres’s father still traveled a lot. “Basically, I was raised by my mom,” Averill told me in one of the many conversations we had after that first jail visit.

Sylvia taught Tres to play the organ and to read. He devoured science-fiction novels and an Edgar Allan Poe anthology she gave him. Sylvia liked to see her son tucked into a book—she wanted him to be well educated. She was less concerned about his social life. “My parents didn’t like most people to come over,” Averill said. His orbit consisted of his mom, his dad, and a few relatives. About once a month, Edward and Sylvia left him with his aunt Shirley so that they could spend the weekend without their son, who, they revealed when he was still a kid, they hadn’t planned on having. “It’s not an uplifting thing to be told,” Averill said. “They tried their best to provide for me. I got a lot of material things. I didn’t get a lot of hugs.”

He had few friends, although when he was in elementary school, a boy in the apartment next door had permission to bring his Legos over to play. They built spaceships and crashed their Hot Wheels cars into them. In junior high, Averill slunk between his classes and his locker, sometimes hiding out in the library to avoid contact with the other students.

During his teenage years, the family moved to Otsego, Michigan, where his father had gone to high school, then to Virginia, where Tres began to notice girls. “I started talking to people a little bit more,” he said. He played linebacker for the practice football team, but it was when he took a computer-science class that he finally found his people. “I joined the geek gang,” Averill said. Soon he was hanging out with theater kids, artists, and musicians, too. During his junior year, he spent two months clearing a neighbor’s land to earn the $200 he needed to buy a Fender Telecaster knockoff. When he brought it home, his mother worried that the guitar would ruin his grades. She discouraged him from playing. “Cut that damn noise out,” she’d say.

Sylvia kept a close eye on her son as he got older. She didn’t approve of his high school girlfriend and tried to impose a nine o’clock curfew and stricter rules. They argued. It felt to Tres like his mom was trying to control his life, which she’d never intended for him to have in the first place.

After he graduated from high school in 1978, he got a job programming computers and drove himself to work in a Mustang that his dad helped him fix up. When his parents announced that they were moving back to Plano, they assumed that Tres, who still lived with them, would come along. But the 19-year-old had work and a girlfriend, who suggested that they get an apartment together. Sylvia was horrified. “You can’t move in with a woman,” she said. She’d become increasingly religious over the years. “You’ll be living in sin!” Sylvia cried.

“I could feel the apron strings around my neck very tightly,” Averill told me.

His dad was supportive, even if Ed Jr. couldn’t say so in front of his wife. “Don’t listen to your mom,” he told his son in private. “Just do what you need to.” He helped Tres pack up his things before he and Sylvia returned to Texas. Over the next several years, Ed Jr. visited his son, but Sylvia never did. She called from time to time, then stopped until the mid-1980s, when Averill and his girlfriend broke up. After that, every Sunday, Averill’s phone would ring at 9 a.m. “Why aren’t you in church?” Sylvia would ask when he answered. “Is there a woman in the house with you?”

Usually, there wasn’t. Averill dated, but he preferred being alone in front of his computer. A coding colleague did her best to lure him away from his screen by inviting him to parties at her house. Averill was reluctant at first, but finally he relented and was surprised at how much he enjoyed himself. The people—scientists and technology professionals—were interesting. Free beer didn’t hurt.

At one party, where Averill arrived carrying meatballs for the snack table, his colleague introduced him to Roan Dantzler. She worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on climatic models and liquid dynamics. He tried to listen carefully, but most of what she said was over his head. Then Dantzler pulled up her shirt and flashed him.

“Why did you do that?” he asked.

“You looked like you were bored,” she told him.

After the party, the pair started spending time together. Averill liked having someone he could share the world with. Dantzler’s personality sparkled—she was exciting. And her eyes didn’t glaze over when he talked about work or video games or music. She was a musician, too, and a redhead. Averill loved redheads. A few months after the party, they moved in together.

When they decided to get married and told Averill’s parents, his mother was furious. A letter arrived a few days later with a one-way ticket to Texas. “We’ll pick you up,” the note said.

Averill upgraded the ticket to round-trip and bought another one for Dantzler. When they arrived together, his mother erupted. Sylvia and her son spent the weeklong trip fighting. When Averill and Dantzler returned to their home in Rockville, Maryland, they called their friends and her relatives, bought rings, and convened at the courthouse to become husband and wife. Two weeks later, they boarded a southbound train to Disney World for their honeymoon.

When Averill called his mother to deliver the news, he warned her that if she gave him trouble, he wouldn’t talk to her again. A few days later, Sylvia called and said he should reconsider the marriage. After they hung up, Averill kept his word. His father visited a few more times, but eventually Averill stopped communicating with him, too. He never spoke to them again. When his parents died in the early 2000s, none of Averill’s extended family knew how to reach him.

For 15 years, Averill and Dantzler lived together companionably. They moved to Sunnyvale, California, and she joined him on hikes in Muir Woods, exploring the redwood groves along the Pacific Coast. They played video games together. But eventually, they started fighting. Sometimes their disagreements were small; they bickered over the grocery list. Other times they screamed at each other. Averill felt like Dantzler was trying to micromanage his life. He would hike without her sometimes, and on one trek he fell and hit his head. The injury caused him to permanently lose vision in his right eye.

He moved out in the early 2000s, living in his car in the parking lot of IBM, where he worked at the time. In 2003, Averill and Dantzler filed for divorce. As the split was being finalized, Averill met Sabine Sklar at a video-game conference in Silicon Valley. She was 38, a little younger than Averill, now well into his forties, and lived in Sunnyvale, though she was originally from Vancouver, British Columbia. She worked in human resources at a video-game company and spoke English, German, and Dutch. Averill thought she was beautiful—she was a redhead—and brilliant. They both played guitar; Averill liked ambient music, and she plucked out folk songs. They had the same sarcastic humor. Sklar made Averill feel good, happy. If he was in a bad mood, she perked him up.

Soon into their friendship, Averill told her he was in love with her. Sklar said she really liked him but added, “I’m just not ready to fall in love yet.”

That was OK with him, as long as he could be around her. He liked to help her. Sklar had type 1 diabetes and problems with her endocrine system. A cold could knock her out for a week. When it did, Averill would pick up chicken noodle soup and take it to her apartment. “It’s what friends do,” Averill said. When the company Sklar worked for closed her office, she took a job as an exotic dancer, and Averill visited her at the strip club. Other times they’d go to Murphy’s, an Irish bar that served great bangers and mash.

One night, in October 2003, Averill was supposed to meet Sklar at a bar called Hiphugger, but she never showed up. He went to her apartment and knocked. Nothing. He knocked again and pressed his ear to the door. It was quiet, but that wasn’t unusual. Sklar often shut herself in her bedroom to sleep when she didn’t feel well. Averill went home and fell asleep, too.

Sklar’s friend Trish called Averill from the strip club early the next morning. “Come down to the club,” she said. “Drop everything. I need to talk to you.” When he got there, Trish and several more of Sklar’s friends were in tears. Averill sat down warily.

“What happened?” he asked. Sklar had gone into a diabetic coma during the night, Trish said. She was dead.

Sklar asked Averill what he’d do when she wasn’t around anymore. “Find the tallest building in San Francisco,” he joked.

Averill imagined Sklar inside her apartment, dying as he knocked on the door. He blamed himself. Why hadn’t he tried harder to reach her?

When she was alive, Sklar would ask Averill what he’d do when she wasn’t around anymore. “Find the tallest building in San Francisco,” he’d joke. Now that she was really gone, Averill was despondent: crying, often drunk, inconsolable. He once took a razor blade into the bathroom, but one of Sklar’s friends, who had a copy of his key, happened to stop by and prevented him from cutting his wrists. She and other friends organized a watch rotation to make sure he didn’t hurt himself. When he went to Sklar’s wake at a British pub, he thought he’d be strong. Instead, he burst into tears as soon as he walked in. After the memorial, he didn’t get out of bed for two days.

Averill never wanted to feel that bad again. He needed to protect himself, he decided. So he vowed  to never again care about someone as much as he’d cared about Sklar.

He declined invitations to go out with friends. “I’m really busy,” he’d say. After a few weeks, his friends stopped trying. Averill had long frequented internet chat rooms and forums, and he knew some of the other users well. “I shoved those guys off,” Averill said, “changed my email address, changed my online persona.”

Step by step, he severed ties with everyone he knew. When a woman wrote him in 2004 and introduced herself as the half sister he didn’t know he had—from his father’s first marriage, which was also news to Averill—even she failed to get any traction. Averill didn’t have the energy to forge a new relationship, not after what had happened with Sklar. Soon, he told me, “there was nobody around anymore.”

Three

Averill relocated to Austin around 2010, and eventually moved in with Anne Toney, whom he’d met in an online forum for hobbyists who like making 3-D models on their computers. Toney had inherited her house from her father and rented out the two spare bedrooms to a string of tenants. Sometimes she even offered up the couch to homeless men and women who slept on nearby streets. Averill paid $400 in rent, plus utilities. Sometimes he helped with the yard work or took out the garbage. He and Toney liked to sit around together and dream up inventions, like a doorbell that opened the refrigerator so a visitor could grab a beer on the way into the house. “He could be funny,” Toney said, laughing at her memories of Averill. “But he didn’t have any friends, not with what I would call real people.”

Averill secured contract work as a software engineer. On payday, Toney said, he went out drinking. He liked to go to the Yellow Rose, a strip club in North Austin. “They’d send him home in a limo,” Toney recalled. The women who worked there were nice to Averill and seemed to like him. He tried to be polite and respectful, and to tip appropriately.

Other than visits to the club, Averill spent nearly all his time in his room on his computer. He composed his ambient music. He self-published a book of poems. In one of his online profiles, on Medium, he described himself as a “software engineer, musician and all-around annoyance dabbling in too many things to even keep track of.” On AuthorsDen.com, he called himself a “poet,” “prose writer,” and “introverted intuitive.” He spent money on computer and music equipment, slowly building a studio in his room. He bought a real Fender—a Modern Player Telecaster Plus. He named it Christine. “Texas blues, here I come!” he wrote on Facebook.

As he turned inward emotionally, it became harder to do things physically. Before Averill moved to Texas, a doctor in California had noticed that his blood sugar was high when he came in with strep throat. She prescribed medication, but Averill never took it—he didn’t really understand what it was for. It wasn’t until he stepped on a piece of broken glass in Texas that a nurse again checked his blood-glucose level in the emergency room. By then, he had type 2 diabetes.

Averill described himself as “an all-around annoyance dabbling in too many things to even keep track of.”

He tried to cut back on carbs but often ate hunkered down in front of his computer, hewing to what he called a “programmer’s diet”—pizza for breakfast, hot dogs and popcorn for lunch and dinner. He weaned himself off soda, but it wasn’t enough. In 2016, he had to have his foot amputated. He struggled to adjust. It disturbed him to look down at the stump at the end of his right leg when he didn’t have his prosthetic attached. The music he made got a little darker.

Soon it became hard to play music at all. He had a tingling sensation in his fingertips. He couldn’t hold a pick or feel the strings on his guitar. After his amputated leg got infected, he slipped deeper into isolation, rebuffing even Toney’s offers of food or conversation. Between work contracts, Averill would drink, polishing off a bottle of vodka and several beers a week. When the anniversary of Sklar’s death rolled around, he’d drink even more heavily. Toney always knew when it was that time of year again, because “Ed was on a spree,” she said.

In November 2017, Averill’s latest contract expired. He wasn’t worried at first; he managed his money carefully, keeping a cushion for the inevitable breaks between engineering and coding gigs. He knew he could always get another job developing video games.

Then, in early December, Averill woke up with what looked like blood clouding the vision in his good eye. He didn’t have insurance anymore—that had ended with the work contract—but he went to a doctor, who ordered an MRI. He had diabetic retinopathy, meaning his retina had detached from the back of his eye, causing capillaries to break and bleed. More worryingly, it looked like he had suffered an unrelated stroke about a month earlier.

The doctor prescribed hypertension medication, and Averill paid for eye surgery. An ophthalmologist used a laser to repair the detachment and put silicone oil in his eye to keep the retina in place while it healed. The oil, though, meant that he could barely see afterward. He needed glasses to decipher words on paper, and reading a computer screen was even more challenging. When Toney walked by his room, she’d sometimes see Averill wearing two pairs of glasses and holding a magnifying glass up to his monitor. Work became impossible.

He was paying for his appointments and prescriptions out of pocket, spending down his savings. He didn’t know what else to do. Help seemed out of reach, even in the era of the Affordable Care Act. If he’d lived in a state with expanded Medicaid eligibility, for people with chronic health conditions and low income or no job, he likely would have qualified for federal insurance. But in 2012, Texas’s then governor Rick Perry had declined to expand the program. It’s uncommon for a single Texan to qualify unless they’re over 65 and receive Social Security income. Averill wasn’t even 60 yet.

When the ankle above Averill’s amputation began to swell, it affected how his prosthetic fit. The device pushed against his skin, rubbing it raw. He needed to have it adjusted at a clinic, but he was running out of money and couldn’t pay for a more permanent fix. Toney noticed that he was eating cold hot dogs wrapped in tortillas. “Every time I tried to help, he’d say, ‘I’m a grown man, and I’ve been taking care of myself for 58 years. I don’t need your help or anyone else’s,’” Toney recalled.

He was her longest-ever tenant, and reliable, but in January 2018, he was late paying rent. Toney told him she couldn’t let him stay if he didn’t pay. She had to cover the mortgage and the utilities. On February 1, he gave her $400 and notice. “I will be gone by the end of March,” he said. But March came and went, and he was still there. He now owed her $800. “I can’t keep this up,” Toney told him. Somebody else was interested in taking the room.

He was trying, Averill told her: “I can only leave so fast.” He’d spent weeks in front of his computer trying to discern the text of search results and figure out what to do about his eye, his foot, his diabetes, his stroke. He looked into the possibility of getting some kind of private insurance. That was a dead end. The companies wanted a lot of money—the premiums he saw quoted were several hundred dollars each month, which he didn’t have. He looked into whether he might qualify for government disability or Social Security benefits but realized that, even if he did, the process could take months.

Well, he thought, I’m screwed.

Then he found a decades-old article about a homeless man who robbed a bank because he had health problems and couldn’t get insurance or a job. In prison, the article said, the man was getting decent care.

What the hell? Averill thought. Then again, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea: commit a crime, get free medical assistance.

If it had worked for the homeless guy, maybe it would work for Averill. He could plead guilty and get shipped off to federal prison. The food would probably suck, he thought, but at least he could see a doctor regularly. It wasn’t like he had anyone counting on him for anything. Who would miss him in prison?

When he told Toney that he was finally moving out, she asked him what he was going to do. “I’m going to rob a bank,” he said. She waved him off.

Four

Averill shook as he sat on the curb outside Prosperity Bank, under the shade of an oak tree. His mind raced as he thought about the ways the robbery could have gone wrong. Somebody could have shot him. He could have tripped on his way out and hurt himself. But the crime had gone exactly as he’d planned.

A bank employee followed Averill and, recording the moment on his cell phone, asked why he did it. Averill explained that he needed to go to prison to get medical care. When the employee asked if he was armed, Averill pulled out a bottle of Tums, shaking it in the air. “Just antacid,” he said.

After a few minutes, a police van pulled into the bank’s drive-through lane. Two officers got out and asked the teller at the window what had happened.

“We just got robbed,” the teller said.

“Where did he go?” one of the officers asked.

The man pointed. The cops looked toward the curb and Averill as if they couldn’t believe what the teller was saying.

The officers eased Averill into the back of their van and turned up the air-conditioning. Then they drove downtown to the headquarters of the Austin Police Department. There, detective Christopher Brewer peered through his glasses as he watched Averill on a video monitor outside the room where the suspect awaited questioning. Averill was perched on the front of his chair, leaning forward, “like he was eager for something,” Brewer said. When the detective and his partner walked into the room, Brewer’s suspicions were confirmed: Averill wanted to talk. “He was genuinely trying to help us with our investigation,” Brewer said. “I was kind of taken aback by it.”

It wasn’t unheard of for people to commit crimes to get health care—a North Carolina man with arthritis and slipped discs robbed a bank of $1 in 2011, and two years later an Oregon man did the same thing for the same amount. Still, Brewer didn’t think anyone had ever done it in Austin. He asked if Averill was having a mental health crisis. “Nope,” Averill said. “I know exactly what I’m doing.” He described the robbery in meticulous detail. He said he wanted to be found guilty and go to prison as soon as possible.

When Brewer walked out of the room, he turned to his partner. “This is not one I’m going to brag about,” he said.

Brewer went to the municipal court to get a magistrate judge’s signature on Averill’s arrest affidavit. Judge Stephen Vigorito stared at Brewer after he read the document. “Are you kidding me?” Vigorito asked. After several minutes, the judge set a bond of $10,000, the lowest Brewer had ever seen for this particular crime—bonds in bank-robbery cases are usually several times that.

As the detective walked down the courthouse hallway to file the paperwork with the county clerk, he heard Vigorito running behind him. “Give it back, give it back,” the judge said, reaching for the affidavit when he caught up to Brewer. Vigorito wrote a new bond amount— $7,500—pressing hard with his pen so the numbers would be legible over the original figure.

After a brief stint in the downtown jail, including a trip to the ER because he hadn’t taken his hypertension pills and his blood pressure was dangerously high, Averill was booked at the Travis County Correctional Complex, a large detention facility just outside Austin. His bunkmates couldn’t believe what he’d done. “Damn, dude!” one of them said when Averill told him about the robbery. None of the other men in his cell—three in all—had committed such a serious crime. One was caught selling pot; another was busted for possession.

Averill felt relief. For the first time in months, he didn’t have to worry about where he was going to live, what he was going to eat, or how he was going to get medication. He was treated well, too. He was too weak to walk far, so guards wheeled him to the cafeteria to eat cream of wheat and fruit, cheese sandwiches, and chicken quesadillas. “I’ve had worse food in nicer places,” he told me on my second visit to see him. He squeezed his eyes shut describing a good meal, savoring the memory of it.

He’d been sitting in the booth when I arrived that day, but he couldn’t work the phone and waited while I found a correctional officer to ask for help. A nurse appeared on Averill’s side of the glass and handed the receiver to him, then left to get a code that would connect our phones. Averill couldn’t quite see me, but he knew I was there. He spun his finger by his ear to signal “crazy” and then shook his fist in feigned exasperation until the nurse returned and dialed the number that allowed us to talk.

By then the county had paid for his second eye surgery, just as Averill had hoped. The bad news, Averill explained, was that during the procedure, the doctor had discovered cataracts. So while the retinal damage was somewhat improved, his vision was still poor. The doctor had told him a third surgery would help.

But what if the justice system gave him a break that he didn’t want? Averill wasn’t a seasoned criminal knocking off banks across Texas. He was a blind bandit without an arrest record. The FBI had no interest in pursuing his case, which meant that he wouldn’t wind up in federal detention or get the health benefits he’d read about online. Cheryl Hindera, the attorney appointed to defend him, suggested that he might not even go to state prison. She was working with the prosecutor on a plea deal.

Averill wasn’t sure how to feel about freedom. He told me that he’d rob a jewelry store if he wound up back where he’d started, with no income or insurance.

While the lawyers worked toward an agreement, Averill was released from custody on his own recognizance, allowing him to go free without putting up any money for bail. In June 2018, nearly three months since Averill’s arrest, a correctional officer returned his few belongings—his clothes, the Tums—and he stepped out the door of the facility. Maybe, Averill thought, he shouldn’t have thrown away his Social Security card and the other documents in the blue folder.

The county sheriff’s office had him dropped off on the corner of East Seventh and Neches Streets, at the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless. The building had beds where more than 200 homeless men could spend the night and a free clinic where they could receive care. A line of weary, ragged people stood slumped against the building or were curled up on the sidewalk when Averill arrived. Some appeared to be smoking synthetic marijuana. It looked to Averill like there were drug dealers in the mix, too.

Once Averill was inside, a staffer told him he couldn’t see a doctor for at least ten days. Not going to work for me, he thought. This was exactly what he’d feared before robbing the bank, that he would wind up on the streets and die. He’d rather be in jail, so he decided to get arrested again.

Averill walked to a window and whacked it with his cane. “You can’t do that!” the receptionist said. She went to get a police officer, who told Averill, “We’re not throwing you back in jail.”

Averill gestured to another employee. “How about I just assault him?”

Five

I learned all this when Averill called to let me know where he was. I’d been worried about him. I knew he’d been released from custody, because a visit I’d scheduled at the county detention center had been canceled, but I didn’t know where he was. A few weeks had passed by the time he called from the Guy Herman Center for Mental Health Crisis Care. That’s where he’d been taken after he threatened assault—not to jail, but to a place that assists people with mental illness, substance abuse, and developmental disabilities.

Averill’s arrival at the Herman Center had been tough. He was depressed. He was broke. His vision was getting worse. The cataracts made everything blurry, and his damaged retina blacked out the top and bottom of his vision, which made it seem as if he was always looking through blinds. He scheduled an appointment with his doctor, but told me that the staff member at the Herman Center who was supposed to take him overslept. The next available appointment wasn’t for a couple of weeks.

As we talked, Averill described avoiding the other residents; there was no one he wanted to have a conversation with. He sat by himself during meals and was curt with other people when they spoke to him. But then one afternoon, that changed.

A patient named Danielle Morris sat down and persisted through Averill’s short temper. The 41-year-old was petite, with a “sparky personality,” Averill said. She wanted to know about his life. As she probed deeper into Averill’s history, she learned about the bank robbery and how desperate he’d been before he was arrested.

She knew what it was like to feel helpless. Morris told Averill that she’d been waiting for Social Security disability benefits for more than a year. After moving from Illinois to Texas, she struggled to get the services she needed—she’d been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, bipolar disorder, and PTSD. Eventually, she tried to overdose on Xanax. “I didn’t know what else to do,” she said. “Since then I’ve found that the system is pretty broken.” Waiting lists for low-income housing in Austin were typically two or three years long. If your application paperwork wasn’t perfect, it could gum up the process. Facilities meant to help the needy or mentally ill were overcrowded and case managers overworked.

Averill and Morris bonded over their shared frustrations. “We kind of clicked,” Morris told me. Averill reminded her of Alan Alda with a Santa Claus beard. (Averill was desperate to shave, but it was too hard for him without an electric razor.) His humor was dry, which she liked. They’d started to linger after meals with another resident, Arron Herrera, at a table in the dull gray dining room. They talked about old relationships, their health, the future.

This guy is way interesting, Herrera thought of Averill, who spoke with his face as much as his mouth, scrunching up his nose or rolling his eyes or dropping his jaw when he heard something stunning. Even after what Averill had been through, he struck Herrera as graceful, eloquent, and humble. “He has one of the sweetest souls ever,” Herrera said. “He permeates very positive energy.”

Averill sounded excited and happy during our phone calls, which happened every week or two. “The most terrifying thing is she is a redhead,” he said of Morris during one conversation. “I have apparently some kind of fatal attraction to redheads.” He called Herrera and Morris his little brother and sister, but he considered them friends. “You know,” he said, “I hate to admit it, but I might as well tell the truth. I kind of missed hanging out with people.”

Still, he struggled to understand why they wanted to hang out with him. He worried that he was weighing them down. He was roughly 20 years older. “They don’t need an old man bothering them,” he told me. It sounded like Averill was instinctively looking for ways to push other people away.

A few days after Herrera left the center—generally, patients can stay for only a couple of weeks—he returned with a bag of shirts, pants, and socks, because he knew Averill had only a single outfit: the one he’d worn to rob the bank. Averill was shocked. He gave Herrera a hug. When Herrera visited again the next week, he brought Averill two bacon cheeseburgers and coffee, because Averill had bemoaned the brown liquid they served at the center. As they ate together, Herrera said that when Averill got out, they’d go to Barton Springs and look at women in bikinis.

“Dude, I’m too old,” Averill said.

“Shut up,” Herrera replied.

Morris left the center, too, but she visited Averill nearly every day. She kept coming after he was transferred to another facility. She knew that Averill didn’t have a support network, and she wanted to be that for him—“to try to keep his mind off what’s going on,” she told me, “or talk him through it.” Which of those Averill preferred depended on the day, and his mood.

By August, Averill was living in a respite and recovery center. He shared a room on the second floor. He woke up each morning when sunlight came through the window and slowly made his way downstairs to eat.

Before it got too hot, he tried to make a visit to a blue bench surrounded by palm trees where he fed bread to the grackles, tossing chunks toward the birds’ outlines, which was as much he could see. Inside, people tried to talk to him. Here he could watch shadows flutter in the trees.

Sometimes he was optimistic about the future. He was learning that, even if he didn’t go to prison, there were agencies in Austin to assist people like him, people in crisis. Maybe, he told me, he didn’t need to be a criminal. “You live, you learn,” he said.

The staff had helped him apply for Social Security benefits for people with disabilities and Supplemental Security Income, a government allotment based on financial need. How much disability a person received depended on how much they’d paid into the system, and Averill didn’t know how much he might get. He hoped it would be enough to pay for health insurance and still have some left over to cover living expenses. In the meantime, the center’s staff scheduled doctor appointments for him, and he was able to get his prosthesis fixed. They also wrote my phone number on a piece of paper in large print so he could read it. Usually, though, they dialed my number for him when he wanted to talk.

When we spoke, he almost always sounded cheerful, and he made self-deprecating jokes. Yet he worried that he might never be able to work or make music again. He grew insecure about his new friendships whenever Morris or Herrera didn’t show up for a few days to see him.

Maybe, Averill told me, he didn’t need to be a criminal. “You live, you learn,” he said.

He was unfailingly polite when we met—he almost always had an extra Styrofoam cup of water waiting for me. I took the lead from his friends and started to bring Averill a large drip coffee. “Bless you,” he’d say. Still, Averill sometimes seemed like he was tired of talking. I’d ask him questions about Sklar and other parts of his life that he’d tried to forget, and the next time we spoke he’d grumble about having replayed the conversation in his mind for the rest of the day. Yet he always agreed to another interview. One morning as he shook my hand, standing uncertainly without his prosthetic foot, he said, “You know more about me than anyone.”

At the beginning of another visit, he said, “I have a plan.” We were sitting at a round table in the main room of the center, where the residents ate their meals. The sun streamed in through the windows, and several people in scattered chairs stared up at a TV that was turned up too loud.

“What’s your plan?” I asked. Averill warned me that I wouldn’t like it.

He had an eye appointment coming up, and if he got bad news from the doctor, he was going to either stop eating or drink so much sugary soda that his body went into shock. He gestured toward the vending machine behind me. He couldn’t bear to spend the rest of his life handicapped. Averill was contemplating killing himself.

I froze, not sure how to respond. He told me that he’d listed me as someone the center could disclose his personal information to if he died. He told me I was a priority, that he didn’t want all the hours I’d spent talking to him to go to waste. He still hoped that the story I was writing would help someone else.

Six

I left that day feeling afraid about what Averill would do and wondering what my responsibility was—whether I should talk to a staff member at the recovery center or maybe his lawyer. I was relieved when Averill called a couple of days later with good news: The doctor had told him that the odds of improving his vision were high. He might even be able to take care of himself again.

In late August, Averill received a letter from the Social Security Administration informing him that he would receive $750 a month. More good news arrived in the mail the next day: He qualified for Medicaid. Then, a few days later, Averill received another letter from Social Security. He’d been approved for retirement, allowing him to collect what he’d invested in the system. In lieu of that $750 disability check, he would receive $2,851 every month.

When he woke up the next morning, he still couldn’t believe it was true. He asked someone at the front desk to read him the letter again, just to be sure. He would have enough money to take care of himself even if he couldn’t get a job. He could afford a new laptop to make music again. A charger for his phone. A cellular plan. He started saying good morning to people passing through reception. “Did they up your meds?” someone asked him.

“It’s really strange,” Averill said when I visited him. We were sitting in the courtyard; he sipped his coffee, and I swatted mosquitoes. He had shaved most of his face, but the hair along his chin, which was hard for him to trim, curled into a long, bushy beard. “There’s an old me and a slightly different, new me,” he continued.

Then he coughed forcefully and hit his stomach. His digestive tract was irritated, Averill said, and the gas made him cough. But he assured me that he’d had a colonoscopy once and the doctors had told him that gas wouldn’t kill him. “I can’t think of a more boring way to die,” he said. “Imagine that on a tombstone: ‘Died of indigestion.’ Honestly, let’s try for something a little different.”

By September, a case manager had scheduled eye surgery. The cataracts were so bad—“the size of an elephant,” Averill said—that a laser wouldn’t work; doctors would have to surgically remove them. He was used to life looking like the film noirs he once watched while eating burgers at a restaurant in downtown Austin, everything in hazy black and white. The doctors told him that the surgery wouldn’t completely repair his eyesight but should improve it. For starters, he’d likely get his color vision back.

It seemed certain now that he wouldn’t have to go to prison to get the care he needed. Once he entered the mental health system, he had access to the appropriate resources. Still, his legal case was pending.  

I woke up on the morning of October 2 to meet Averill at the Blackwell-Thurman Criminal Justice Center, where his presentencing hearing was set for 9 a.m. The judge wasn’t there when I arrived, and the prosecutor in Averill’s case, Jeremy Sylestine, had taken a seat in one of the juror’s chairs.

I found Averill sitting in the back corner of the room and bent down to let him know I was there, since he likely couldn’t see me; his eye surgery had been postponed. He said he was doing well but wanted some coffee. His lawyer, Cheryl Hindera, bustled around the bench. She moved so fast at times that her feet wobbled slightly in her black patent-leather heels. She finally sat next to Averill, who rested his hands gently on his cane with a calm expression on his face. “It doesn’t look like any courtroom I’ve ever seen, so that’s kind of depressing,” he said. He’d been expecting a Judge Judy scene, with people yelling and drama.

Before Judge Cliff Brown heard Averill’s case, Hindera needed her client to complete some paperwork. But because Averill couldn’t see, Hindera had to fill it out for him. “Are you currently in a gang?” she asked.

“Hardly,” he said.

Judge Brown called Averill’s case a few minutes before 10 a.m. and explained what pleading guilty would mean: Averill would waive his Miranda rights and wouldn’t be allowed near a Prosperity Bank branch ever again. The state was recommending a sentence of three years deferred adjudication with treatment or counseling.

“How do you plead?” Brown asked.

“Guilty,” Averill said. He was glad to say it.

Formal sentencing was set for November 13. Before that, Brown explained, probation services would conduct an investigation to determine whether it could support the plea agreement. Katie Cullather, a social worker assigned to his case, gave Averill her wrist, and the three of us started a slow march to an office five blocks away. We paused at one point so Averill could hike up his pants—he’d removed his belt before passing through the courthouse’s metal detector and hadn’t tightened it properly afterward. “Do you want to fix it?” Cullather asked.

“Out here?” he said. “Oh, God no, because next thing you know, they’ll say he’s exposing himself, and I’ll be right back in there.”

Cullather guided him down the street, pointing out gravel and dips and cracks in the concrete. By the time we reached the office, she wondered if he’d be able to find his way back without her. Averill told her not to worry. Next time he visited, he said, his friend Danielle Morris would accompany him.

A woman opened the door to a small office and called his name. “Yes, hold on a second,” he replied, gesturing in my and Cullather’s direction. “It takes this many people to keep an eye on me.”

Inside the office, the woman told him that he needed to come back in about three weeks and bring $43 for the assessment fee unless he wanted to add it to his court costs. No problem, Averill said. He’d received his first Social Security payment that morning.

Later that day, we went to a Starbucks so that Averill could have the coffee he’d been craving. He said that after everything—jail, the homeless shelter, the mental health facilities, contemplating suicide—he was grateful for two things: Social Security and friends. “And the friends,” he said, “may be on top.”

Averill felt so good that he started to think about getting into activism, to aid people who felt as desperate as he once had. If only they knew that they weren’t alone, he thought, maybe they’d reach out, find people who could help them access the services they needed. Maybe his story could become a rallying point. “If somebody doesn’t start it,” he said, meaning a movement to help the sick and isolated, “it’s not going to happen.”

Of course, there are many activists and organizations dedicated to improving the lives of vulnerable people in America. It’s easy to imagine Averill’s story becoming an anecdote in their literature or in a politician’s stump speech. The man who robbed a bank to get health care! Another example of how our system is broken. Sympathetic voters might nod their heads in favor of health care for all. Then they’d probably forget all about Averill. Perhaps, like he once had, they wouldn’t think too hard about what it means to be alone and needy—unless they actually were. Even then, they might not be willing to ask for help outright.

Averill told me that he wanted to start a Facebook group to advocate for streamlining systems that help connect the sick, poor, and unemployed with services. He recognized that sometimes people need a push, and he was ready to push. “You can’t help people from a position of weakness,” he said. “You have to help people from a position of strength.”

Seven

When I visited Averill in December at his new home, an apartment he shared with Morris, he’d hung a plastic shopping bag on the doorknob so that I’d know which place was his. He showed me the patio where he liked to sit and watch the trees sway in the wind and the bees buzz around the flowering ivy—at least he thought it was flowering ivy. He couldn’t really see it. He had an appointment with an ophthalmologist at the end of January. After that, he hoped, he would finally have surgery.

“This is pretty much a very high-class, very fancy prison cell,” he said of his home. “I can’t go anywhere. I can’t go outside without falling over things. I can’t drive a car and get anything. I cannot rely on the bus, because I can’t tell you which bus I’m going to be getting on, and I couldn’t see to get on the bus anyway.”

I couldn’t tell how happy—or unhappy—Averill was with the arrangement. There was an edge to his voice. Yet he was making plans. His bedroom had only a floor lamp and mattress then, and he wanted to show me where he would put things once he bought them. “Here is going to go my writing station,” he said, pointing to one wall, “either a folding table or a desk. My laptop will go here. I’m going to put a big ol’ monitor behind it. Here on the other side of the table is going to be a Keurig machine or an electric kettle. Then I’m going to have possibly a slow-brew, slow-pour coffee maker—pour by hand—and flowering tea.”

He turned to another wall. “This area here is set aside for musical instruments. Guitar will probably go over there, and then put a bass over here, and maybe a second guitar here, and all my studio gear will go right here in front of this window.”

He showed me the spice carousel in the kitchen, the knife block, the microwave, and the panini press. The dining table was covered in Morris’s crafts—she was going to make ornaments for the artificial Christmas tree in the living room. A new Swiffer leaned in a corner. “She cleans everything up even though I say, ‘You don’t need to clean everything up!’” he said.

Averill covered the rent, and Morris paid for utilities, internet, phone, cable, and half the groceries. She’d helped him pick out a 68-inch television, so that he could see what’s happening on the screen. She did the cooking and had helped Averill sign up for Ambetter, one of the options available in Texas through the federal government’s health care marketplace, after his higher income disqualified him for Medicaid. She drove him on errands and had called a cab to get them to his first meeting with his probation officer. Averill worried that he was burdening Morris. But he cared about her. He liked her company. And, he admitted, it was nice to have someone around in case something happened to him.

I walked to my car feeling glad that Averill had a safe and comfortable place to live. He’d found not only housing but also a community, even if it was a small one.

About a week later, Averill called. It was a Tuesday. On the previous Friday, he said, Morris had vanished. By Saturday morning he was worried, for his friend and for himself. He couldn’t sleep. He was chugging coffee and plowing through hundreds of Tums. “I was stuck here without a caregiver, with no way to get medicine,” he said. Morris had all his health-insurance information, which he wouldn’t be able to read even if he had it. “I was up the proverbial creek,” he said.

Unlike his circumstances just a year earlier, this time he asked for help. He called Katie Cullather, the social worker, and she connected him with an agency that sent a caretaker to his home. That woman renewed his prescriptions, helped him make his first health-insurance payment, bought food, and cleaned up the apartment. Averill arranged to pay for her to continue to help him twice a week. He felt like he’d dodged a bullet. But he was still distraught: Where was Morris?

Averill called me again later that evening and left a voice mail. Morris was back, he said. She’d stayed at the hospital for a few nights and thought that someone had told Averill that she wouldn’t be home. But no one had. Averill sounded angry. “I’m not sure what the hell’s going on,” he said when I called him back the next morning. “She opens the door and walks in like nothing has happened and just says, ‘Hi.’”

What he feared most had transpired: He’d let himself feel vulnerable, and now he was hurt. “I’m not willing to risk myself ever again,” he said. “I’m not going down that path ever again for anybody for any reason.”

What he feared most had transpired: He’d let himself feel vulnerable, and now he was hurt.

I asked if he thought Morris’s disappearance might just be a misunderstanding. Maybe, he said. But it didn’t matter. He’d lost sleep over the ordeal. Was life with friends, people you counted on, really so much better than life without them? “I can create my art, I can work on my music, I can have casual interactions with people online and not tear my soul apart,” he told me.

Then he said what I was worried he would say: “I’m going back into isolation.”

I made the case that Averill shouldn’t give up. Maybe, I said, Herrera and Morris and the counselors he’d talked to at the Herman Center were like a lily pad—“or a life raft!” I said hopefully. Somewhere to land as he emerged from the remote world he’d occupied for so long, before he took another step, and met another person and then another, and finally found his way.

“Possibly,” Averill said.

He wasn’t sure he was ready to find out. He needed time. Then he would reassess. In that moment, he didn’t think that he mattered. Someday soon, I hoped he’d realize that he did.

Coronado High

Coronado High

How a group of high school kids from a sleepy beach town in California became criminal masterminds.

By Joshua Bearman

The Atavist Magazine, No. 27


Joshuah Bearman has written for Rolling Stone, Harper’s, Wired, McSweeney’s, Playboy, GQ, and The New York Times Magazine, and he is a contributor to This American Life. He is currently working on his first book, St. Croix, a memoir.


Editor: Charles Homans
Producers: Olivia Koski, Gray Beltran
Animation: Colleen Cox
Web Design: Alex Fringes
Music: “Life’s a Gas,” written by Marc Bolan, copyright 1971 TRO/Essex Music International, Inc., performed by Islands
Animation Soundtrack: Jefferson Rabb
Research and Production: Vonecia Carswell, Lila Selim, Chris Osborn, and Nadia Wilson
Cover Photo: Courtesy of Gary Kidd
Audiobook Narrator: Brett Gelman
Fact Checker: Riley Blanton

Published in July 2013. Design updated 2021.

The Lost Coast

1976

There, on the horizon: a ship.

Dave Strather* could see it through binoculars, the sails ghostly against the water. He was sitting on an exposed cliff overlooking the Pacific. It was dark, and the beach was deserted for fifty miles in both directions. This was the Lost Coast, a vast swath of rugged, uninhabited, magnificently forested Northern California, the kind of place that made you understand why people have always been drawn to the Golden State. Dave chose the spot for landfall precisely because it was so empty. He and his team needed secrecy.

The sailboat was laden with contraband: 4,000 pounds of Thai stick pot, the latest in marijuana commerce, a product as potent as it was valuable, which Dave and his crew—a team of smugglers called the Coronado Company—would unload and sell for millions of dollars. Once Dave made visual contact, his team got on the radios: “Offshore vessel, please identify.”

“This is Red Robin.”

Finally. Smuggling always involves waiting, but Red Robin—the code name for a ship called the Pai Nui—was months overdue, and Dave’s nerves were frayed. The Company, as its members called it, was already a successful and sophisticated operation, importing Mexican pot by the ton, hugging the coast in fishing boats from as far south as Sinaloa. But this was a new type of gig, crossing the Pacific in a double-masted ketch. There were more variables, more opportunities for error. The Pai Nui had run out of gas before it even reached the International Date Line. Then, under sail, she was becalmed in the Doldrums. And then she disappeared.

“Red Robin, come in,” Dave had said into his radio a thousand times, in a daily attempt to reach the boat. He set up a radio watch, 500 feet above the ocean, for a better line of sight. The beauty of single sideband radio was that you could communicate halfway around the world, coordinating, as the Company liked to do, with your fleet at designated hours on Zulu time. The problem with single sideband—besides that it wasn’t secure, and anyone could listen—was that there wasn’t much bandwidth. Dave and the others would eavesdrop on conversations in dozens of languages, hoping to hear the captain of the Pai Nui. Back in September, it was pleasant to be perched on a palisade covered in redwoods, taking in the panoramic view, drinking a beer, tweaking the dial, watching the ocean go from silver to teal to green to blue in the late afternoon. By late December, however, everyone was cold and jumpy. But now, just before Christmas, their ship had finally come in.

Dave and his team snapped into action. Everyone was practiced and drilled—that was the Company’s style. They were a tight, coordinated unit, most of them friends who grew up together in Coronado, a secluded little beach town on a peninsula off the coast of San Diego. A decade earlier, they had been classmates at Coronado High. Some of them were surfers and would bring small bales of pot across the border after surfing trips to Mexico. A half-decade later, the Coronado Company was the largest smuggling outfit on the West Coast, on its way to becoming a $100 million empire, one the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration would later call the most sophisticated operation of its kind. “These kids were the best in the business,” James Conklin, a retired DEA special agent, says about the group he tracked for years. “They were ahead of their time. They operated almost like a military unit.”

The crux of the business was the off-load; the battle was won—or lost—on the beach. Everyone had their role. Dave ran field strategy. Harlan Fincher, who had a knack for equipment, was the logistics manager. Al Sweeney, a hobbyist photographer and silk-screener in high school, was the crack forger. Grease monkey Don Kidd was the chief mechanic. Allan Logie, a onetime motorcycle racer, was the flamboyant wheelman. Ed Otero, a great swimmer and athlete, provided muscle. Bob Lahodny, a handsome charmer whose 22-karat Baht chain signaled some mystical time spent in Thailand, had made the Company’s Asian supply connection. Lance Weber, who started the whole thing, was a fearless nut whom everyone called the Wizard on account of his thaumaturgical ways with engineering, especially the boat motors he rigged to run at smuggler speeds.

At the center of it all was Lou Villar. A former Spanish teacher, Lou had taught some of the guys back at Coronado High. Lance originally brought Lou along for his language abilities; it helped that he was a smooth talker. But when he got a look at all that money, Lou discovered an instinct for business. He organized the Company into a visionary outfit, with himself as the kingpin.

It was Lance’s idea to buy the DUKW, a 31-foot, six-wheeled, World War II–era amphibious landing craft that served as the audacious centerpiece of the operation, allowing the Company to drive right into the water and dock at sea with the sailboat. Lou had thought this was crazy—Oh sure, why not use zeppelins?—but after some research, Dave convinced Lou to approve the purchase of the 7.5-ton vehicle, which the crew had stashed in a barn near the tiny delta of Juan Creek.

Dave directed the boat south of the creek, where the beach, as expected, was deserted. (On the occasions when civilians wandered too close, they were intercepted by Dave, dressed as a park ranger, who told them that the area was the site of a wilderness-reclamation project and off-limits to civilians.) Lance went down the coast to Fort Bragg, 20 miles to the south, to get eyes on the local Coast Guard station. Company lookouts—code-named Nova for north and Saturn for south—took position out on the Pacific Coast Highway. At midnight everyone radioed in with a round of affirmatives. The coast, as they say, was clear. “Let’s get the Duck rolling,” Dave said over the comm.

With Ed and Don in the cockpit, the Duck pulled out of the barn, drove down the Pacific Coast Highway to the beach, and nosed into the water. They’d welded an additional wave shield to the bow so the Duck could break through the heavy California surf. Their compass turned out to be useless. But Ed, undaunted, plowed through the murky night—“nine feet up a black cat’s ass,” as Don put it—to meet the waiting ketch. They tied up, quickly transferred the load, and found their way back by aligning two lights Dave had set up onshore marking a safe passage. “Heading back,” he radioed Dave, who looked at his watch: So far, so good.

It was a funny thing to see the Duck rise from the darkness, shedding seawater like a real-life Nautilus—until it stopped rising. By now the tide had gone out, and the Duck, weighted down with Thai product, sank in the soft sand. The tide wouldn’t lift the vehicle for another six hours. By that time it would be broad daylight, and the Duck would be as conspicuous as a relic on Omaha Beach.

“Fuck,” Dave said over the radio. “We’re stuck.”

Ed hit the throttle and spun the wheels, sinking the Duck deeper into the sand. “Kill the engine!” someone yelled. Don got out, looked at the tires, and stood back. “Don’t panic,” he said. “I know exactly what to do.”

Don told Allan, who was on the beach, to get a couple of pickup trucks and a lot of rope. Like everyone else, he called the hirsute Allan “Fuzzy.” The two men were close, both a little wild, a couple of pranksters who got under Dave’s skin. But by God, they knew how machines worked. Now they assembled an elaborate pulley system connecting the pickups to the Duck’s winch. “Are you sure this is gonna work?” Dave asked.

Don didn’t flinch when the motors fired, and sure enough his ad hoc Archimedean apparatus enabled the Duck to lift itself out of the sand and back up to the road. It was a goddamn glorious sight. Cheers went up on the beach. Safely back in the barn, the Company hands unloaded the Duck’s fragrant cargo. It was a sweet reward to sample the supply; Don thought the faintly purple buds were thick and beautiful, the finest he’d ever smoked.

The cache was processed at the old general store next to the barn. It was the Company’s biggest haul to date: $8 million (about $33 million today). The Company had stepped up its game, bringing in better product with more sophisticated technique. The distributors would be pleased. By now they had been waiting a long time, too. Back in his cabana at the Beverly Hills Hotel—as the ringleader, he rarely set foot near the beach himself—Lou had had a hell of a time keeping them calm. He was worried that the Company’s reputation would be ruined if the supply didn’t show. It was a relief to call the dealers and announce, “The Eagle has landed.”

The exchange with the dealers always happened fast. Like in the movies, the money would come in Halliburton briefcases. Unlike in the movies, the Company usually waited to count it. And count it. And count it. And count it. It took so long to count that much cash, they got bored. When all was said and done, the partners each made half a million off the operation. For his rescue of the Duck, Don got the MVP award, a new Company institution, which came with a $25,000 bonus. Everyone else got their wad and scattered to the winds—the sweet scent of their trade wafting from their clothes.

It was exhilarating, the money and the camaraderie. Company members saw themselves as hippie outlaws. There was no violence—they didn’t even carry guns—just the threat of the law, which bound them together. They were criminals, but they were also a family.

Afterward, Lou and Dave sat in Lou’s cabana, going through receipts, looking at ledgers, accounting for a very good year. Later, they burned the receipts and went out to a Beverly Hills restaurant to celebrate. “Here’s to everyone’s efforts,” Lou said as they hoisted champagne flutes. “Let’s do it again soon.”

*Not his real name.

From The Beachcomber, the Coronado High School yearbook, 1972.

The Teacher

1964

Lou knew he wouldn’t stop until he reached the Pacific. He had left New York in his convertible on that modern-day westward migration, a midcentury Manifest Destiny, with the top down and the red metal-flake lacquer on his Corvette flashing in the sun. On the radio were Dick Dale and the Beach Boys, songs about girls, woodies, surfing. That’s where he was headed. He was 25 and looking to change his life.

Lou was born in Havana, Cuba, to a family of small-business owners. His mother brought him to New York City as a teenager, in 1954, and he liked it: the hustle, the gritty determination required to get ahead. Lou was smart-mouthed and got into more fights than he should have for a guy his size. Despite being small, however, he was a great athlete, and he held his own in the rough-and-tumble of Flatbush, Brooklyn.

After college, Lou studied law at Syracuse, but it was the early 1960s, and the California lifestyle was just dawning on America. Syracuse was awfully far from the beach, and when he heard about a job teaching Spanish at a high school in Coronado, he packed his bags.

Coronado was all Lou had hoped for, an easygoing beach town of 18,000 people, known for its handsome Victorian hotel, Navy base, and isolation. It was a funny mix, a sort of military Mayberry. Coronado was connected to the mainland by an isthmus, but it took so long to drive around that it might as well have been an island out in San Diego Bay. Lou loved the nonchalance that came with the geography. Everyone called it the Rock, or, playfully, Idiot Island: a place where people did their own thing.

At Coronado High, Lou quickly developed a strong rapport with the students. He was handsome and charming and cultivated a cool image. In addition to teaching Spanish, he coached swimming, water polo, and basketball. Lou liked to shoot hoops with his students after school; he was the kind of coach kids confided in. A lot of his students were Navy brats, raised in strict military families just as Vietnam was escalating. Lou had an ear for what the kids wanted to talk about. He was not much older than them, and he understood.

Lou’s father died when he was three, and his own high school basketball coach had helped fill the role; he knew everything that a coach could be. My boys, he called his players. But when the whistle blew, they knew it was time to work. Lou was a demanding coach, and his players loved him for it.

Among Lou’s Spanish students was Bob Lahodny, a popular kid with an easy smile, president of the class of ’68 two years in a row. Bob, a swim-team star, was a close friend of Ed Otero’s, class of ’72, another strong swimmer on the team. Ed’s nickname was Eddie the Otter, or sometimes just Otter. He was short and stocky, powerfully built, but he didn’t like practice and was difficult to control. Lou liked Ed and thought he could have been a great competitive swimmer, but he had no discipline.

Discipline was something you needed if you swam or played ball for Lou. He could be unforgiving even with his favorite players, like Harlan Fincher*, the star center of the basketball team. Harlan was tall and friendly—he’d been named Best Personality and Best Sense of Humor in his senior year—and he liked Lou’s coaching. Lou thought the same of Harlan’s playing, until the day Harlan snuck off with some friends and a bottle of Chivas after school and showed up dead drunk for the last game of the season. Furious, Lou took Harlan off the floor. “When you play for me,” Lou told him, “you give me everything.” He didn’t speak to Harlan again for the rest of his time at Coronado High.


The social scene in Coronado in those days was typical of its time: greasers, lettermen, and—by the time Gidget was on television—surfers. The greasers wore black Converse, the lettermen wore white tennis shoes, and the surfers tended toward blue Top-Siders. Over time there were more and more Top-Siders as surfing took hold. Not far behind Gidget was the rest of the ’60s: hair, rock and roll, and drugs. Coronado was fertile ground for the changing times, full of military kids eager to rebel.

Alarmed by the influx of drugs, the city government set up a pilot project at the high school to keep students on the straight and narrow. It was called the “no-bust policy,” and one of its counselors was Lou Villar. His approach was simpatico; he’d spent plenty of evenings in his kids’ homes, watching disciplinarian fathers fume and military wives crawl on the floor after three martinis, and he sensed the hypocrisy. He knew the kids were just looking for an outlet and suggested alternatives. “Why smoke a joint,” he’d ask, “when there are so many other ways to have fun in life?” It was persuasion over punishment, and Lou was nothing if not persuasive—until he stopped believing the message.

Lou had always been the bohemian teacher, the one who pulled into the faculty lot in a red Corvette and shades. When the school banned sunglasses, he wore his prescription Ray-Bans in class anyhow. For the students of Coronado High, this was a sign of solidarity: Lou was going through the same changes they were, reflecting a culture that was advancing at a frantic pace. Imagine starting high school in 1964, how fast it was all moving between freshman and senior year: from the Gulf of Tonkin to the Tet Offensive, from the Voting Rights Act to the Watts Riots, from Help! to “The White Album.”

Like his students, Lou started growing his hair and learned to surf. It was humbling at first, eating saltwater a thousand times before he managed to get up on the board. But once Lou could feel the ocean lift him up and bring him to shore, he was hooked; there was energy in that ride. He started inviting “his boys,” and some girls, over for dinner. Together they all smoked their first joints. Everyone was scared, convinced they’d go crazy. Instead, smiles gradually spread around the room. They talked waves while the hi-fi played the Doors, whose front man, Jim Morrison, had lived in Coronado.

Soon, Lou was counseling his kids against following in their parents’ footsteps. “That’s not a career,” he would say, pointing at the ships moored off the Navy Yard. “That’s a war machine.” Lou thought it was pretty cool that one of his favorite Spanish students, Dave Strather, a talented musician, wanted to become a rock and roller. Lou started dating Kathy, a beautiful former cheerleader—voted Most Popular the same year she was in the homecoming court—who had graduated from Coronado High a couple of years earlier. She was seven years younger than Lou, but Lou himself was not yet 30. We’re just kids, he thought, and the kids are finally in charge.

It was just a matter of time before he quit teaching. Nobody wanted to be in the establishment anymore. In the summer of 1969, the summer of Woodstock, he traded his Corvette for a VW bus. During his last week in class, Lou brought in his turntable, wore his shades, and listened to Jethro Tull with his students. 

The bridge was going up that summer. You could see the caissons rising out of the bay, spelling the end of the Rock as a de facto island. In August it opened to traffic. The two-mile feat of box-girder engineering arced gracefully across the bay, connecting Coronado to the rest of the world. The locals gathered on the Coronado side, waiting to watch those first cars roll across, knowing things would never be the same. 

Lance Weber (Photo: Courtesy of Rex Gammon)
Lance Weber (Photo: Courtesy of Rex Gammon)

The Boys

1969

Lance Weber was never cut out for the Navy. He had joined after graduating from Coronado High mostly so he wouldn’t get shot at in Vietnam. His father, a Navy captain, wanted him to be an officer, but when Lance’s service was up, his parents had to accept that he was just another washed-out swabbie loafing around back on the Rock.

One thing the Navy did do for Lance, however, was teach him how to turn a wrench. After his stint as an engineer on a submarine, he could make anything work. Back in Coronado, he tricked out a VW microbus with a Porsche engine and built the island’s first low-rider bicycle by hand. “Here comes the Wizard,” people would say, watching Lance cruise the beach on his tuned-up rig, barefoot, shirtless, his long blond hair flowing behind him and a stoned smile on his face. Easy Rider had just come out, and leaning back on two wheels was maybe the coolest thing you could do. When people said Lance was a space cadet, that meant they thought he was a rad fucking guy.

That summer marked the first great marijuana supply shock in the United States, the consequence of booming stateside demand and a drought in Mexico. Prices spiked, encouraging creativity. There were mules caravanning the desert, planes flying low over the Arizona mountains, tires stuffed with green at the border. It was the dream of every pot smoker to get a “block,” or a kilo, keeping some and selling the rest. And for the stoned surfers on the beach in Coronado, there was an enormous arbitrage opportunity just a few miles south. The trick was figuring out how to get the stuff home.

It was Lance who came up with the idea of taking to the water. At the Long Bar in Tijuana, he got his hands on 25 pounds of pot and swam it north from the beach by the bullring of the Plaza Monumental de Tijuana. He washed up on the U.S. side, on a beach with no name, no facilities, not even a parking lot—a perfect terminus for illegal night swims. He did it again, and again. It was dangerous, being in the water at night with only the blinking radio-tower lights for guidance, but it was worth it: Each delivery netted five grand.

Soon, Lance had a little team of marijuana marines working with him, swimming as many bundles as they could get their hands on. They were misfits, guys who couldn’t get girlfriends in high school before Lance put pot and money in their hands, and now they looked to Lance as their eccentric leader. He got busted in 1971, but the few months he served in Lompoc made him Coronado’s first hippie outlaw hero, a local legend.

When Lance got back, Paul Acree, one of Lance’s misfits, introduced him to a new connection, and they strapped on their fins again. A few bales later, however, they came up with a better idea: a Zodiac, similar to the inflatable rubber crafts used by Navy SEALs. One run in the Zodiac was good for 100 pounds of grass. It was easy money.

Looking to expand the little operation, Paul brought in Ed Otero. Ed was the archetypal California boy: blond, square face, cleft chin, like a letterman who had traded his varsity jacket for the waves. He was a former lifeguard, strong on land—he was known around town for tearing phone books in half—and in the surf. They would call him the Otter for his facility in the water, his ability to break through nasty surf with bales in hand.

A division of labor emerged: Paul arranged supply, Lance piloted the Zodiac, and Otter swam. The only thing holding them back was the connection, their guy in Tijuana. They called him Joe the Mexican, and since none of them had taken Lou’s class, they couldn’t understand a word Joe said.


Lou was in dungarees, standing on a ladder with paintbrush in hand, when Lance rolled up on his low-rider bike.

“You speak Spanish, right?”

“Sí,” Lou said. “Naturalmente.” It was a rhetorical question.

“Then come down here,” Lance said. “I got an idea.”

“I don’t have time,” Lou said. “I have to finish painting this house.”

“I’ll make it worth your time,” Lance said. He would pay Lou fifty bucks, he explained, to go with him to Tijuana for dinner.

Fifty bucks sounded good to Lou. He was painting houses for money, living in a little cottage. Since quitting Coronado High, he had become a bona fide beachside Buddhist, surfing, reading Carlos Castaneda, pondering the evils of materialism, making candles, and meditating with a local guru named Bula. He’d run into his old student, Bob Lahodny, among Bula’s disciples. He had also reconnected with Dave Strather,  who had recently returned to Coronado after spending a few years as a studio musician in San Francisco.

Life was simple, and Lou and Kathy were having a great time—until free love got the best of them. After four years together they had split up, driven apart by jealousy. There was nothing wrong with their relationship other than timing; 1971 was a bad time to be young, good-looking, stoned, and married. Now Lou spent his days painting houses and his free time at the beach. That was where he met Lance, out on a jetty where people went to watch the sunset.

Lance had gone to Coronado High but graduated before Lou’s time. They started hanging out around the Rock and roasted some pigs together. (Luaus were the thing then.) Lou loved that life. But he didn’t love being so broke. Traveling down to Tijuana and translating for Lance was the easiest fifty bucks he ever made—until Lance offered him a hundred the next week to do it again.

During the second meeting, Lou sensed an opportunity for his friends and negotiated a larger load for a better price from Joe the Mexican. Impressed, Lance offered Lou a cut of the next shipment.

When it was time for the pickup, Lou helped Lance, Paul, and Ed inflate the Zodiac and load it offshore by the little salt-eaten Rosarito beach shack where Joe the Mexican delivered the goods. Once they got it across the border, Lou’s share was $10,000. It was more money than he had earned in the past several years. He gave away his painting equipment and never looked back. Like everyone else, Lou had been smoking pot for giggles, but then came a moment of clarity, when he took that joint from behind his ear, sparked it up, and saw the future. 

The Gig

1972

Gigs, they called them. Or scams. Or barbecues, since they would plan them while throwing steaks on the grill at sundown. Everyone would get the call—“Do you want to go to a barbecue?”—when it was time to mobilize. The missions were simple at first, with just the 12-foot Zodiac running a couple hundred pounds at a time from Rosarito to the Silver Strand beach on Coronado’s tiny isthmus. But the loads were getting bigger, and even Eddie the Otter had trouble hauling 50-pound bags through head-high waves. And everyone knew it was unwise seafaring, to say the least, to negotiate the coast in that little raft with no lights and no navigation.

Still, Lance was an adventurer; he would have made a great swashbuckler, Lou always thought, or a test pilot. When Lance reached the Silver Strand, he’d signal with a flashlight and run the Zodiac right up onto the sand—Burn up the motor, he’d say, well buy a new one. They would off-load the bags, deflate the boat, and pack it all into the van. It would be over in five minutes, the most exciting five minutes they’d ever experienced: everyone holding their breath until the van was on the road, knowing as they drove away that they each had just made twice their parents’ annual salary.

At first there was one gig a month. Then it was one a week. Within a year, the crew was scaling up from the Zodiacs to a clandestine armada of speedboats, fishing boats, even a 40-foot cabin cruiser. Some of the money they made went back into the business. Lance bought a Chris-Craft called the Lee Max II and rebuilt the engine so he could carry serious weight at top speeds. They hired beach crews to expedite the off-load.

It was risky, bringing more people into the operation, but it was Coronado, and everyone knew each other. “If we take care of them,” Lance said, “they’ll take care of us.” And the partners could afford to be generous. Still in their twenties, they were walking around with $50,000 in their pockets, then $100,000, then a quarter of a million dollars. “Don’t you love it,” Lance once remarked, “when life goes from black and white to Technicolor?”

Lou walked into a bank, asked for the balance of his mother’s house, and paid it off in cash. Once, when he was buying first-class tickets to Hawaii for himself and his girlfriend, it dawned on him that he had enough money to hang out there and surf for the rest of his life. And he might have, had Ed and Lance not flown over personally to retrieve their partner. “Come on, Señor Villar!” Ed said. “There’s more money to be made!”

It got to be like clockwork, enough so that sometimes Lance’s and Lou’s girlfriends would tag along on the supply runs to Tijuana. It was about this time that Lance started calling Lou “Pops,” a nickname that caught on. “What do you think, Pops?” Lance asked one evening, drinking Coronas on the beach in Baja.

“I think we got a good thing going here,” Lou said. “Let’s not fuck it up.” 

Lance Weber, top right, and friends from Coronado pose with the Coronado Company’s DUKW amphibious landing craft. (Photo: Courtesy of Gary Kidd)

The Agency

1973

When the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration opened its office in the San Diego suburb of National City in 1973, it had just six field agents. The DEA was a brand-new agency, assembled from various other departments, including the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), a tautologically titled bureaucratic relic that was poorly equipped to fight the war on drugs that President Richard Nixon had declared in 1971.

The impetus for the drug war was a congressional report issued the same year stating that as much as 15 percent of U.S. soldiers serving in Vietnam—a conflict that put hundreds of thousands of Americans in close proximity to the Golden Triangle—had come back hooked on heroin. The same report said that half of the service smoked pot. Alongside other law-enforcement agencies like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the FBI, the DEA was tasked with fighting what Nixon called “the new menace.”

Bobby Dunne was one of the first agents working out of the new office. He’d started his law-enforcement career in National City a dozen years earlier, as an animal-control officer. After working his way up through the ranks of the local police department, he’d become a federal narcotics agent in 1968 and spent several years working in Guadalajara, Mexico. Dunne was excited to be abroad but quickly realized that corruption in Mexico made his job nearly impossible. When he came back to the States, he asked to join the DEA’s San Diego office, because “the action,” as they called it, was at the border.

The new agency needed all the local savvy it could get. San Diego was a world apart from drug interdiction on the East Coast, where well-understood organized-crime syndicates brought heroin in through the ports. California was a new front, the Wild West. Newly arrived agents couldn’t believe it: In one 12-hour shift at San Ysidro, you’d get three or four hauls of 100 kilos. Dunne was the first officer to pull a full ton of pot out of a truck heading north.

Dunne was a field agent, and in San Diego the work lived up to the title. In other DEA offices, you went to work in a suit and tie and spent a lot of time at your desk. In San Diego, the agents were veterans of border details and dressed like vaqueros: boots, jeans, guayaberas, cowboy hats. They spoke Spanish, wore beards and mustaches, and spent the nights in Tijuana bars with informants and local cops. To get anywhere, you had to roll up your sleeves and go drinking down in Revolución, getting to know the people on both sides of the border trade.

None of that shoe-leather work, however, clued the DEA into the new homegrown smuggling organization right under their noses, on the other side of San Diego Bay. The DEA’s first tip about the Company came from a Coronado police officer who had heard through the grapevine about some local guys and a former teacher running bales of pot up the coast. The beach runs weren’t in Coronado proper and were beyond police jurisdiction, so the officer called the feds.

Dunne was intrigued. He was assigned to a special unit that worked closely with local police and other law enforcement, and he debriefed the Coronado officer. He arranged for the Coast Guard to run some exercises with Zodiacs and realized that the small crafts could cruise the coast without showing up on radar. Very clever, he thought. Then the DEA got wind of a boat called the Lee Max II, owned by a local kid named Lance Weber who had done time in Lompoc a couple years before for smuggling. There were reports of the Lee Max II on the water at 3 a.m., and Dunne doubted they were out fishing.

Once, following a late-night sighting of Lance’s boat, the DEA posted agents at regular intervals along the coast, hoping to catch the smugglers in action. They saw the boat motoring away from a lonely stretch of beach in Carlsbad, north of San Diego. Dunne and the other agents rushed to the scene and scoured the beach, but it was too late. All they found were footprints going up the dunes to a house overlooking the ocean. 

Professionals

1974

Lately, Lou had been spending more time in North County. There was money up there, in Carlsbad, where he rented a house, and new hot spots like Del Mar and La Costa. One night, Lou met the owner of the Albatross, a nice seafood restaurant housed in an old church in Del Mar. He thought the place was groovy: good food, drinks, and music, and well attended by rich dopers. The owner of the restaurant was a big-time distributor himself.

Lou had come to recognize that smuggling was as much about personality as it was about know-how. To climb the ladder, you had to play it cool. Which is what he and the restaurant owner did, warily revealing their mutual interest, pulling their cards away from their vests to talk about how they might fit into each other’s business models.

“How much can you handle?” Lou asked.

“How much can you bring?” the owner replied.

The Albatross crowd offered Lou entrée to a new class of distributors, the kind of dealers who dressed well and belonged to racquet clubs. Lou began joining them for dinner, talking books, travel, and wine. They turned Lou on to a wine importer up in San Francisco, and he started ordering Bordeaux and white Burgundies. Refinement suited him. By now he had cut his hair and traded his hippie beads for silk shirts. When Lou suggested bringing in a ton, and the dealers said they’d pay cash on the barrelhead, he saw the horizon expanding before his eyes.


 Lance delighted in the prospect of expanding their little navy. But carrying more weight meant more people on the beach—five, ten guys running bags up and down the sand—and they needed to tighten the screws on the organization. Lou started strategizing. He turned to his good friend and former student Dave Strather.

Dave’s band was still playing around town, and he had recently married a tall, good-looking hippie girl named Linda. But Lou knew he was struggling financially. “Are you interested in some profitable moonlighting?” Lou asked him one day.

Dave, a solid bodysurfer, handled himself well in the waves and started as a loader. But he was a gifted planner, and it wasn’t long before Lou gave him more managerial duties. Lou wanted a right-hand man, and Dave was a natural. He was a drummer, after all, used to keeping time, being the backbone. Even in his hippie days he was fastidious, shampooing his long hair every day (and belying his nickname, Dirty Dave). That hair was gone once Dave started running around with a clipboard and checklists, buying and storing equipment, running smuggling gigs like a stevedore superintendent.

That put Dave at odds with Ed, whose run-and-gun style had been central to the early days of the operation but was fast becoming obsolete. Ed was a beloved figure around Coronado, a fun guy, the life of every party. But he was impulsive. When Ed was a lifeguard, he liked to drive his truck down the sand at full speed—and that’s how he’d flipped it right into the water. Dave bristled when he would show up at a gig at the last minute and start bossing people around, imperiling Dave’s meticulous plans. Dave would appeal to Lou, who tried to promote Ed out of Dave’s hair. “You don’t want to be a grunt on the beach,” he told him. “You’re in management. Let Dave roll up his sleeves.”

That mostly worked, at least at the smuggling sites. Off the beach was another matter. Ed was young, wild, and flush—a dangerous combination in a small town. Here he was, no known job, celebrating one of the organization’s first big paydays at the Chart House down on the Embarcadero, cozying up to some girl with his hands full of cash. “Look what I got, baby,” Ed told her, laying out ten grand in bills. Lou would’ve jumped on the table to cover it up, but the whole place had seen it already. We need to cut these shenanigans, Lou told his colleagues. We’re gonna bring heat on ourselves.

What he didn’t know was that they already had. The DEA was onto Lance, watching him run the Lee Max II like a daredevil, at full speed on autopilot, ripping through the swells like a lunatic. And Lance was as flamboyant on land as he was cavalier in the cockpit. He knew he was known to the authorities, and he loved pushing his luck. “I like making the cops look bad,” he’d say. “It’s fun.”

Not to Lou, it wasn’t. One night after a gig in Carlsbad, they’d planned to meet at a coffee shop near Oceanside Harbor after the beach crew unloaded the shipment. Lou was sitting in his booth with a fork in a slice of cherry pie when he looked up and saw Lance drive past in his truck, pulling the Lee Max II on its trailer, two squad cars in tow. The cops tore the boat apart, right in front of the coffee shop, but found nothing. Lance relished his little victory—and then walked in to meet Lou. “Don’t even talk to me,” Lou said, jumping up to leave. “Just keep walking.”

It was the same night Special Agent Dunne  found footsteps on the beach near Lou’s house. The DEA agents had followed Lance in his boat to the marina, but when the boat came out clean, the district attorney refused the DEA a search warrant for the house.

It was a close call. Lou didn’t realize how close when he moved to Solana Beach and relocated the entire smuggling outfit out of Coronado. It was the first time some of its members had lived anywhere besides the Rock. By then, everyone on the island knew what they were up to. They even had a name for their hometown smugglers: the Coronado Company.

The name stuck; Lou had misgivings about it, but it suited the group’s professional aspirations. By now they were evolving quickly. Lou turned out to be not just a natural leader, but also an organizational genius. The one-time anti-materialist candlemaker became a business visionary, laying out plans for the Company to dominate its market niche. As he had when he was a coach, Lou knew how to motivate people, establish mutual trust, and make the members of his squad believe in their abilities. Pops was now a father figure to a new kind of team. It was fun in those early days, he told his boys in the Company, but amateur hour is over.


The new organization left little room for Paul Acree. Paul was always his own worst enemy. He was cold and had a nasty gift of gab. He could be funny, but always at the expense of others. Paul had found the crew’s original line of supply in Tijuana, but Lou knew he wasn’t the right guy to make the bigger connections the operation needed to grow. You couldn’t look like a hood at the next level. His idea of business—give me the money, you get the pot—was oafish. Where was the salesmanship in that? Where was the finesse?

And lately, Paul had started sniffling and rubbing his nose. Nobody knew when exactly he had become an addict. Maybe it was when everyone got rich and he could suddenly get as much heroin and coke as he wanted. Once driven, he was coasting now, showing up at meetings with watery eyes. He looked terrible. He was Lance’s friend, but even Lance knew that you couldn’t trust a junkie. When the Company convened to vote Paul out, it was unanimous.

One of the Company’s Mexican contacts, known as Pepe de Mexicali, had told Lou about the time he had to get rid of an associate who had been caught with his fingers in the jar by taking him on a “one-way plane ride.” The Coronado Company’s style was more genteel than that; if you got fired, they just stopped calling you. With Paul, the partners decided, they would simply move away. They left him with $10,000. It wasn’t much in the way of hush money, especially for a guy who was speedballing, but that was the offer.

With Paul gone, Lou took on an even larger role within the Company, and he started to act the part. He conducted business from his new house in Solana Beach, on a cliff overlooking the ocean, with his malamute, Prince, at his feet. There he’d preside with his girlfriend, Kerrie Kavanaugh, a waitress he’d met at another tony spot in nearby Cardiff-by-the-Sea. Lou had left her a $100 tip one night, followed the next day by 20-dozen roses, along with a card bearing a poem he wrote. Kerrie thought the roses were a bit tacky—a nice little bouquet of handpicked wildflowers would have better suited a girl like her—but the poem was nice. She showed up at Lou’s house, where she found him sunbathing on the deck.

Lou had spent a few years floating between girls, but he saw immediately that Kerrie had a spark. She was smart, with a bright smile and an eager outlook on the world. Lou was older, wealthier, and more worldly than the boys who hit on her on the beach. He doted on her, gave her gifts and several cars, paid for her dance classes. Soon she moved from her beach trailer into Lou’s place. They would entertain the rest of the Company guys and their girlfriends there, drinking greyhounds until dinner and then smoking and doing lines while dancing to the Average White Band until three in the morning. The next day, they’d wake up and start all over again.

Lou initially told Kerrie he was an interior decorator, but she didn’t believe it for long; his place was well decorated, but she never saw a single catalog or bolt of fabric around. It wasn’t a surprise when Lou finally confessed that he was a drug kingpin, nor did it change how she felt about him. Kerrie was the kind of girl who watched the Watergate hearings from beginning to end. With her anti-establishment sympathies, Lou’s profession had a renegade appeal.

For his part, Lou saw himself as a new kind of CEO. He just wanted to excel at what he did. He was already a multimillionaire, as were his partners. They thought that was all the money in the world. They were wrong. 

Kerrie Kavanaugh and Lou Villar shortly after they first met, in the mid-’70s.
Kerrie Kavanaugh and Lou Villar shortly after they first met, in the mid-’70s.

The Don

1975

Lou and  Dave were south of the border, in a Tijuana flophouse near the racetrack, surrounded by a dozen men with machine guns. They were drug-lord foot soldiers; you could tell from the chrome-plated pistols in their belts. No one moved. Dave and Lou waited. The seconds felt like hours.

They had gotten themselves into this situation on purpose, after deciding that the Company should do some supply-chain outreach. Dave had run across a guy they called Rick Pick who said he knew Roberto Beltrán. The Don. The head of the Sinaloa-based trafficking syndicate, one of the biggest drug dealers in the world. Lou and Rick met and sized each other up. Once they decided that they trusted each other, Lou said, “Introduce me to the Don.”

Thus began a series of false starts and frustrations. Late at night, Lou and Dave would get a call and rush to the appointed meeting place under the San Diego side of the Coronado Bridge, only to find nobody there. Finally, when the real call came to meet in Tijuana, Lou arrived two hours late on purpose. That’s the Mexican style of business, he thought. Mañana! Keeping them waiting, Lou reasoned, would show that they were equals.

But now, trapped deep inside the syndicate’s flophouse, they knew they were not equals. And Beltrán’s guys didn’t look happy. Dave was terrified. But Lou kept his game face. He was still wondering if the meeting was for real. “Are we going to see the Don?” he asked. Finally, the Don’s bodyguard, who went by the name El Guapo, led them into a small room. There, reclining on a king-size bed, was Beltrán.

Dave and Lou were surprised to see that the Don looked like a maharishi, or maybe a bum: scraggly hair, jeans, unshaven. When they walked in, he didn’t get up. It was a weird scene, standing at the foot of the bed, unsure of what to do. Dave thought they were dead. Especially when Lou decided to take a pillow and lay down on the bed, right next to Beltrán. Dave silently said a prayer.

One of the things Dave liked about Lou was his finesse. Dave’s own father was the executive officer of the Navy base on Coronado, a tyrant whose explosive temper kept him from ever becoming an admiral. He had trouble forming real relationships with anyone, including his son. Dave hated his father, and he admired Lou for being the opposite in every way. Dave thought he had an aristocratic bearing, an elegance that could charm people in any situation. But this situation was different. This was Roberto Beltrán. And he wasn’t smiling.

Lou and the Don were chatting softly, faces inches apart. Within a few minutes, Beltrán was grinning, then laughing. Lou’s instinct was right; the Don respected the wildly daring initiative of showing up like this, offering a new service to the syndicate. No one from the States had ever approached him. “What do you have to lose?” Lou told him.

Lou knew the Mexicans were sending half-tons north every way they could think of and losing a lot of it at the border. It was a model that made money—the supply that got through paid for the rest—but still, there was a lot of smuggler’s shrinkage. This is what Lou told Beltrán, in so many words: The Coronado Company can reduce your shrinkage. “Let’s do business,” the Don said.


The days of cabin cruisers were over.  Lance hired a commercial fishing vessel and a sailor of fortune who went by the name Charlie Tuna. The boat arrived for pickup at an isolated beach on the Sea of Cortez. Beltrán’s bodyguard drove Dave and Lou; they were rumbling along the barely paved highway in the shadow of the Sierra Madre Occidental when they saw roadblocks flanked by soldiers on the road. The jig is up, Dave thought, but their caravan was waved right through. The men were from the Don’s security team, part of his service package as a supplier. Federales on the Don’s payroll guarded the beach operation.

Out on the water, Charlie Tuna maneuvered his boat through the beach mud, getting as close to shore as possible. The boat was loaded with hundreds of bales, passed from sand to canoe to Zodiac to deck, along with some cases of beer for the crew’s return trip. “See you in Malibu,” Charlie said over the radio.

Onshore, Lou shook hands with the Don. The whole deal was on credit. And now the Company owed the Sinaloa suppliers $3 million. It had never occurred to Lou what might happen if something went wrong. “Good luck!” Beltrán told Lou. “You’ve got some real cojones, you know?”


Fifteen tons, Dave thought, right on the goddamned beach? The Mexican job was an enormously challenging off-load, an order of magnitude bigger than their usual runs. Dave bought more sophisticated equipment and procured several houses to use as staging sites and covert entrepôts, including a rental right off the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu.

That was where the team assembled. The company had added some new recruits, including Allan “Fuzzy” Logie, a surfer turned motorcycle racer. Fuzzy was amazed at the scale of the Company’s operation and quickly took a liking to Don Kidd, another trafficking tenderfoot recruited by Lance. Don hailed from Coronado—Lou had taught his brother Spanish—and he would have been class of ’69 if he had graduated instead of going to Vietnam. The Company had brought Don on as a gofer, but he quickly distinguished himself as a talented mechanic whose expertise would eventually elevate him to chief engineer.

The midnight chaos reminded Don of Vietnam, exciting but perilous. They were in plain view of the neighbors, whose lights were on. And they were out there on the water for hours, buzzing around in the Zodiacs, carrying everything by hand.

Luckily, it was overcast, and the reflected glow of the city gave them extra light. They got the job done, but it took forever. Fuzzy ran for eight hours straight. In the end, they managed to fit all 15 tons in three rented Ryder trucks. The next stop was the processing site. As the convoy pulled away from the beach, they drove right past a highway patrol cruiser on the shoulder with lights flashing. Fuzzy smiled as they passed; the officer was writing some poor bastard a speeding ticket while a truck packed with thousands of pounds of pot sailed by at 60 miles an hour.

At the warehouse, where Dave had organized an assembly-line-style repackaging system—every brick was weighed to the gram, bagged, marked with a sticker, and recorded—Lou showed up to inspect the wares. It was a job well done. When everyone got their cut, Fuzzy asked if he could get paid in weed. He had to settle for cash instead. “Well,” he told the others, “I hope I get invited to another barbecue.”

Lou, intent on impressing the Don, decided to deliver his money immediately, in person, without being asked. When Lou and Dave flew to Culiacán, Sinaloa, and, once again surrounded by machine guns, handed over duffel bags containing $3 million in cash—they had carried them on the plane and snuck through customs with swiped inspection tags—the Don smiled. “We owe you a party,” he said. That night, he feted them at a restaurant in Culiacán, where he and Lou arranged the next consignment: another 20 tons.

When they got the shipment into the safety of a warehouse in Santa Cruz, the load was ten feet high.  Ed pulled out some blocks and arranged them into a chair, and they all took turns sitting on the throne of hard-packed kilos. The Coronado Company were now the biggest pot smugglers on the West Coast. What they had done, at their age—Lou, the oldest among them, was just 34, and most of the rest were in their mid-twenties—was without precedent. They were a bunch of young hippies sitting atop an empire. 

Company members pose on top of a shipment of marijuana. (Photo: Courtesy of Gary Kidd)
Company members pose on top of a shipment of marijuana. (Photo: Courtesy of Gary Kidd)

The Insider

1976

People around Coronado told different stories about how exactly it was that Paul wound up talking to the DEA. Some said he just wanted to get back at the Company. Others said he was arrested trying to steal some navigation gear and, jonesing in jail, made a deal. Whichever it was, the moment Paul started talking was the moment that Dunne and the other agents discovered just what they were up against.

They were shocked at the Company’s scale. As far as they knew, smuggling on the West Coast was a haphazard business. And here was Paul telling them how the Company was landing thousands of kilos on a beach with SEAL-like precision not three miles from their office. They were operating at a level far beyond the DEA itself; the agency’s National City office, only a few years old, barely had the budget and personnel to cover San Diego County, much less go toe-to-toe with an organization like the Company.

Paul, meanwhile, had nothing to lose. His money was gone, but his drug habit wasn’t. All he had left was information. Paul might have been excommunicated from the Company, but he was still connected to Lance. Although Lance had moved away from Coronado with the rest of the partners, his girlfriend, Celeste, still lived on the Rock. When he was in town, he hung around with the old crowd, even Paul. Sensing opportunity, Dunne let Paul go, sending him out to gather more information.

Coronado was a natural rumor mill, and word got around quickly that Paul was snitching. But Lance was a chatterbox, and he couldn’t help himself from filling in Paul on the Company’s latest exploits anyway. Back in the DEA office, a picture began to come together. The agents heard about the organization’s humble beginnings, the deal with Roberto Beltrán that pushed the Company into the big time, and, the following year, a trip to Morocco.

That gig started with a meeting at a Black Angus Steakhouse in La Mesa and took them to the Canary Islands, Casablanca, and Tangiers. The idea had come from the younger brother of Lou’s ex-wife, Kathy. He had done some frontier surfing on the edge of the Sahara, the scene of some legendary perfect right breaks, and came back talking about hashish, the potent black tar of the Berbers. The Company found a new captain—Charlie Tuna’s friend, who (no joke) went by the name Danny Tuna—and a new ship, a 70-footer rigged for albacore fishing called the Finback. There were bumps along the way, like Danny running out of money and trying to sell his equipment to confused dockside Canary Islanders. Lance and Ed flew to Tenerife, where they found Danny, drunk, lost, and carousing with British girls on holiday. They got the Finback to Algeciras, at the Strait of Gibraltar, resupplied, and then steamed back in rough weather across the Atlantic and Caribbean.

It turned out that the Finback’s cargo wasn’t actually hash but rather kief, a less valuable precursor product. But the DEA agents understood the operational significance of the mission. These guys had crossed oceans and solved major logistical problems on the fly. No one in the office had ever seen anything like it.

It had been years since Lou had seen Bob Lahodny. Since the two crossed paths as earnest disciples of the meditation guru Bula on the beach in Coronado, the onetime class president and swim champ had gone abroad. He’d bought the Pai Nui, a handsome, teak-decked sailboat, and sailed around the South Pacific. He was in Bali when he fell in with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Like-minded expatriates from Southern California, the Laguna Beach–based group was known for proselytizing about the benefits of LSD—they were close associates of Timothy Leary and had once worked with the Weather Underground to help him flee the United States. They also ran a vast drug-smuggling network, manufacturing and distributing acid in the United States and running hashish from Kandahar, Afghanistan. The Brotherhood had connections in Thailand, too, and Bob brought them back to Coronado. “You guys can make the same money from two tons of Thai stick as 20 tons of Mexican pot,” Bob told his old pal Ed when he reappeared in the States.

Thai stick had enjoyed an aura of mystique ever since U.S. soldiers started coming back from Vietnam tours with batches of the extremely powerful varietal knotted around bamboo skewers. It had developed a reputation as the new marijuana gold standard; One Hit Shit, they called it. The DEA at the time believed it to be among the most profitable commodities in existence: a ton bought in Bangkok for $100,000 went for $3.5 million stateside. The hard part was getting it there. Unlike drugs flowing north from Latin America, Thai stick had to come in by boat. And boats happened to be the Company’s specialty.


Bob came on as a partner, bringing in his connections but steering clear of the operation. He was, in Lou’s words, a “good-time Charlie rather than a brass-tacks guy.” Still, the first shipment he brought back aboard that Pai Nui was a multimillion-dollar proof of concept of how Thai stick would revolutionize the Company. When Dave did the math, his eyes widened. The Company could earn more—far more—while being more discreet. It was a smuggler’s dream.

By now, the Company had earned a begrudging respect from its pursuers; the DEA agents in National City regarded Lou and his crew as smart businessmen and tactical geniuses. But Dunne had an idea about how to tighten the screws on their investigation. A veteran agent, he was one of the few people in his office who knew how to write up a conspiracy case. The tactic was mostly unknown in the DEA at the time, but it was a legal tool that would allow for deeper investigative powers and bigger indictments.

Once Dunne and the other agents learned the full magnitude of the Company’s activities, they started laying the groundwork for the case. Using the information that Paul had fed them, the agents began piecing together the facts of a conspiracy. By the spring of 1976, as the Company was contemplating its leap into the Thai trade, Dunne had enough to convince the U.S. attorney in San Diego to convene a grand jury.

Now the DEA’s investigation had a name. Operation CorCo was in full swing.

Freeway All the Way

1977

“You nearly clipped Bambi!”

 Fuzzy pulled up alongside Dave in fourth gear. They were straddling a pair of enduros, off-road motorcycles they’d brought up to the redwoods, where Fuzzy was teaching Dave how to ride. Dave was getting the hang of it, opening up the throttle on the open forest roads, taking in the hum and rattle and the prismatic sun filtering through the canopy. He hadn’t noticed a spotted fawn grazing on the shoulder. Fuzzy saw Dave’s tire brush its bushy white tail. “You’re lucky to be alive!” he said, grinning.

The two had been up there for weeks, cruising the backcountry of the Lost Coast, looking for even more remote loading sites after the success of the Pai Nui. Finding the right spot was an art. Dave constantly studied maps, scoping out prospective landing sites as far north as Alaska. But the empty beaches of the Lost Coast, many of them accessible only by old unpaved logging trails, had the advantage of being conveniently close to San Francisco.

The nimble, long-range enduros, their reach extended by gas cans stashed in the woods, were the best way to negotiate the difficult terrain of one of the country’s most beautiful landscapes. The whole territory was a refuge of dropouts and outlaws: Hells Angels, ex-cons, hippie communes. But the forest was vast enough to swallow all of them, and Dave and Fuzzy would be alone with the trees for hours.

One day, they bumped their way down a road that followed the coastal bluffs of the Sinkyone Wilderness to a small cove. They stopped their bikes, scanning the terrain from above. The cove faced south and kept the roiling Pacific at bay. There was a nice break, but Fuzzy knew there’d be no time for surfing. Dave looked at the map. The cove was marked as Bear Harbor. In the late 19th century it had been used for loading lumber onto ships, but the wharf was long gone. “This is just what we’re looking for,” Dave said.


Sometimes Lou’s story was that he was a trust-funder. Sometimes he was the son of a Texas wildcatter. Once he was mistaken for a member of Kiss, and he let that story linger. Whoever he was, Lou owned it. “I’m in oil,” he’d say. “And if you ask any more questions, I’ll ask you to leave.”

If you wore money well, Lou thought, you could be whoever you wanted. You could live for months at a time at the Beverly Hills Hotel or the Waldorf Astoria in New York, paying $1,500 a night in cash. Maybe you were a movie producer or a chief surgeon somewhere. No one asked questions; the money made you invisible.

Lou made the drug business look like any other business. He would rendezvous with his distributors on tennis courts in Palm Springs, meet in the open, change from a coat and tie into tennis whites, let the other guy win the set, shake hands, and make the deal. There were no rough edges. Nobody in the Company wanted to be a gangster. They wanted to fit in, to live the good life.

Lou had long since traded his VW bus for a Ferrari. In the trunk, he carried a valise full of “fun tickets,” $100 bills to satisfy any whim. He and Ed and Bob bought palatial homes, acquired a taste for antiques. Bob and Ed, who had climbed Machu Picchu together, added Mesoamerican touches to their Asian aesthetic. Lou’s tastes ran toward the eclectic; among other things, he had bought a carved opium bed from China. He would jet to Paris on the Concorde and spend the weekend buying $5,000 worth of shoes. He spent $15,000 on a fake passport under the name Peter Grant, bought a Mercedes as James Benson, shopped at Wilkes Bashford as Richard Malone. This was the name Lou was known by in La Costa and in Lake Tahoe, where the Company liked to vacation. One day, Lou surprised Kerrie with tickets to Jamaica, where they lived for a month on a remote lagoon, disconnected from everything, just snorkeling and reading. It was there, at Dragon Bay, that Kerrie discovered that she was falling in love with him.

In 1976, Lou had bought a place in Tahoe for himself and Kerrie. Dave and Linda moved there as well, to a condo nearby. Dave felt like he was coming into his own in the Company. Lou trusted Dave’s judgment without question, and Dave respected the vision that had gotten them this far. He treated Lou like an adoptive father, and Lou, who had no kids of his own, treated Dave like a favored son. Dave still wasn’t a partner, but he had moved beyond beach master to something like a general manager, with final word on operational decisions.

Tahoe became a refuge for the Company, a place where the couples hung out together and received a steady stream of guests. Lou bought a beautiful vintage Chris-Craft boat called the Rich and Dirty for waterskiing, and he’d spend all day blasting Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours on the eight-track while Kerrie carved a slalom wake behind him. At night, Kerrie would fish for deepwater mackinaw trout and stuff it whole for dinner. Kerrie had grown close to Bob and loved how Ed lived big and laughed all the time. The same style that had caused problems on the beach made Ed the life of the party, the kind of guy who’d walk into a room bellowing, clapping along as Dave and Bob played stoned duets on the piano.

Sometimes they’d invite their investors to the lake, guys Lou brought in to spread the risk. Lou was good at intuiting potential partners. Some of them were already trade insiders, but others were straight: bond brokers and lawyers and other pedigreed people who couldn’t resist the 2- or sometimes 3-to-1 return Lou was offering. The Company had its own accountant, buying properties on its behalf, creating shell companies with names like Mo Ching Trading Co., Tow Tow Ltd., and Ku Won Investment Co., Ltd.

Another frequent guest in Lake Tahoe was Phil DeMassa, a San Diego area criminal defense attorney. Lou had met DeMassa a few years earlier, at one of the birthday bashes Ed liked to throw for himself. DeMassa was known in the drug trade as a high-priced but effective attorney. He was a litigator who liked the fight, worked long hours, and was successful at keeping the government at bay. Lou wanted that kind of firepower and gave DeMassa $300,000 in cash to come aboard. Just don’t deal in anything white, DeMassa advised Lou, and he’d take care of the rest.

There, above the electric blue lake, a thought dawned on Lou: Money is energy. A frictionless medium for amplifying your will. Once, Lou asked Kerrie to come and stand with him in front of $2 million that he had arranged in $10,000 stacks. “Can’t you feel it?” he said, looking at the bundles. With the cash it had on hand, the Company could do whatever its principals dreamt up—“buy the road,” as Ed liked to put it.

On a practical level, that was Ed’s job. His rough style turned out to be good for the dirty work required to run a multinational criminal enterprise: paying off local officials, buying boats in seedy foreign ports, vetting sellers abroad. Others thought those assignments were dangerous, but Ed saw them as adventures. His passport—under the name Kenneth Eugene Cook, Jr.—filled with stamps from India, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Senegal, the Seychelles, and the Panama Canal Zone.

Expansion plans were under way closer to home, too. Word from buyers was that the East Coast was dying for smoke. Switching geography, the Company figured, would help throw off the heat, too. Dave had studied his maps and praised the gods of fractal geometry for giving distant Maine as many miles of coast as California. He purchased a beach house on Dennison Point in Cutler, overlooking Little Machias Bay; an equipment house outside the small town of Freedom; and a communication house near Skowhegan. Across the globe, Ed attended to the maritime details: cargo-ship certifications, port clearances, tonnage certificates. Soon the shipment, seven tons of Thai stick, was on the move.

By now the Company had perfected a cell structure, flexible but tightly organized, bonded by friendship and mutual trust. Company guys lived around the country, under assumed names, and communicated by 800 numbers with answering services, where they’d leave coded messages with callback numbers to pay phones. Everyone always had a bag of quarters. Dave was an early adopter of beepers and used techniques from a class at the Bornstein School of Memory Training to encrypt key numbers onto a chart that crew members could stick to the backs of their watches. You’d get a message—“Burma Christmas”—and know who to call back. With this system the Company could disappear for months at a time and then reemerge at the ready.

Heading up the Maine operation with Dave was Harlan Fincher, the Coronado High basketball team’s former center. Harlan had gone off to school on an athletic scholarship and then returned to Coronado to work as a printer. Since his drunken appearance at the last game of his varsity career, Harlan hadn’t heard from Lou—until, one day at work, he received a call out of the blue. “Hi, Harlan,” a familiar voice said, “long time.”

It was Harlan’s job to transform into reality the elaborate schemes that Dave had dreamed up for the Maine operation. The project had many technical hurdles. The house on Dennison Point sat near the edge of a cliff, looking out over the waters where the first naval battle of the American Revolution was fought. The beach below the cliff was a serious bone patch—rocks everywhere, some the size of VWs—and the tides were huge and fast-changing. This wasn’t like back home in Coronado, with 300 yards of flat sand.

It was Don who came up with the solution: installing a yarder, a five-ton piece of industrial logging equipment, in the house’s garage. The yarder would lower trucks by cable straight down the face of the cliff so they could negotiate the rocks out to the dock the Company had built at the water’s edge. The trucks would be loaded and driven back to the palisade, then winched back up the cliff face and into the garage. It was outrageous but clever, an improvised mechanical marvel.

The rest of the gear was stored in a 19th-century barn, beneath a giant sleigh of similar vintage hanging in the rafters. For months the team worked there, tending to mission preparations. Fuzzy tested the outboards and doused the spark-plug cylinders in starting fluid. (You didn’t want to be out there in the dark pulling cords.) He altered the gravity feeds Dave had bought to move the bales, using his arc welder to make them adjustable.

Elsewhere in the barn were the new Maravias, 35-foot-long Kevlar barges they had bought for towing the pot back from the mothership. Dave had them custom-made; he told the Maravia sales agent that they would be used to transport cattle across the Rhine. Where Dave came up with that, he didn’t know. It was the kind of cover story that just rolled off his tongue by now, the instinctive cloak-and-dagger of a life built on anonymous P.O. boxes and money orders and answering services and forged identities.

The fake IDs were Al Sweeney’s department. Dave brought him in because he remembered from high school that Al could point a camera and print well. Al was the science-club type: quiet, smart, focused. He’d meet with Company guys at the San Francisco Hyatt, carrying a turquoise garment bag that doubled as the backdrop for the California ID photo, which he could reproduce within 48 hours. Even after the DMV instituted a new band of invisible ink, a supposedly unbreakable security measure, Al figured out how to duplicate it.

In addition to being the Company’s master forger, Al had been a ham-radio hobbyist in high school, and with Company money he created a totally secure communications system, installing military-grade crystals in their radios so they could transmit on protected channels. In Maine, he was stationed at the communication house, 110 miles from Machias in Skowhegan, to operate the 60-foot antenna they’d installed to stay in touch with the ship. A lot of juice ran to that 5,000-watt tower; when you turned it on, the lights would dim, the room would hum, and you’d get warm standing next to it, waiting for word to come that the mother ship, code-named Cowboy, was nearing Little Machias Bay.

Cowboy finally arrived in October, negotiating Maine’s difficult inlets at night, guided by the two main towers of the Navy’s submarine communications center, just across Little Machias Bay. The crew motored the Zodiacs out to meet the ship in smuggler’s blackout, beneath a moonless sky.

They dropped chem lights in milk bottles as buoys to mark the way back. The man in the bow of each Zodiac held up a piece of aluminum so the mother ship could pick them up on radar. The crews wore thick black wetsuits; the Zodiac pilots had hockey helmets rigged with radio headsets. They looked ridiculous with six-inch antennae sticking up from their heads, but that’s what Harlan improvised so they could work hands-free. From the beach, Dave monitored their progress with a Starlight night-vision scope he’d seen in the pages of Soldier of Fortune.

The operation went off without a hitch: After traveling 10,000 miles, the Thai stick breezed through the final stretch, from the boat to the beach and up the cliff. It was another flawless operation. And it felt great. While the load was being sorted in the equipment house, Ed brought the investors in for inspection. The equipment was packed and stored, and the stash was loaded into a Dodge van. A Company detachment, all of them dressed in deliverymen’s Dickies, drove down the Eastern Seaboard, the van and a chase car a mile apart, dropping off boxes marked “Generators” in the wee hours. It was $20 million worth of product in all. It seemed just right when Steve Miller came on the van’s radio one night, singing “Take the Money and Run.”

In a suite at the Waldorf Astoria, the partners divided the spoils. One of the investors, Bruce Tanaka, had a lead on some Mercedes 450 SEL 6.9s, which were semi-street-legal and had to be imported from Europe via an underground dealer. Tanaka was taking orders. As a reward for a job well done, Lou and Ed each bought one of the luxury sedans, in complementary colors.

The victory celebration, as usual, was epic. In an age of excess—the idealism of the ’60s had long since given way to the indulgence of the ’70s—the Company could afford to be more excessive than most. “Why settle for a glass of champagne,” Lou would say, “when you can have a magnum?” It was vivid living, surrounded by friends, seeing your champagne flute filled as soon as it was empty, unless you followed Pops’s lead, draining your glass and throwing it into the fireplace. Toasting big, stumbling out to the limos at dawn with a girl on your arm—it felt like you were going to live forever. It’s what Ed meant when he and Al stood looking out at the ocean one day, toward ports east, and he said, “You know what? It’s just freeway all the way.”

Heat

1978

Lou was on the slopes in Vail, Colorado, when he learned about the indictment: eight counts in San Diego’s district court, naming him, Ed, Lance, Bob, and 22 others. The DEA’s Operation CorCo had convinced the grand jury. The indictment hadn’t been unsealed yet, but Phil DeMassa’s office had gotten wind of it early. “The bloom is off the rose,” DeMassa said, after a call came in from his office. Lou frowned, planted his poles, and kept skiing.

Lou figured that if the authorities knew where they were, they’d have been arrested already. He was right—the DEA had no leads on Company members’ whereabouts, and the agents in San Diego lacked the resources to go after fugitives, especially if those fugitives had deep pockets. The agency could gin up indictments, but it lacked what agents called “habeas grabus,” the capacity to make big arrests.

Lou and Dave arranged to meet DeMassa at the Mark Hopkins hotel in San Francisco. As DeMassa walked down Sutter Street, they watched from the eighth floor through binoculars to make sure he wasn’t being followed, then led him through a back entrance into the hotel. “As your attorney, I advise you to turn yourself in,” DeMassa said once they were safely in the room. Then he grinned. “Now, with that out of the way, let’s get down to business.”

Using carefully worded hypotheticals, DeMassa briefed the Company on how to survive as fugitives. He told them to protect their cash and documents in sealed envelopes addressed to him, so they would be shielded by attorney-client privilege and could be opened only with a warrant. He parsed the charges, the felonies and misdemeanors. The three of them agreed that the principals should stay on the run and that some others might surrender and strategically cooperate so as to get light sentences but not give up the goods.

This was a new idea, doing time for the Company. But things were different now, more complicated. Lou would have to turn on the coach charm and tell his team that sacrifice was necessary. The rest of the indictees would show up in court, en masse, on the day the indictment was unsealed. “We can get slaps on the wrist for the underlings,” DeMassa promised. Then he told Lou that he’d spent his latest $300,000 payment already. Lou sent him on his way with another fifty grand in cash.


Hiding in plain sight, the Company’s principals went further upscale, relocating to Santa Barbara. Bob, who was already hanging out with his Brotherhood of Eternal Love friends up there, moved into a huge Spanish-style hacienda. Out back was a tennis court, where he and Lou would have fierce five-hour matches. Ed bought a house near Bob, and both of them took up polo, stabling 20 ponies apiece at the Santa Barbara Polo & Racquet Club. Ed wasn’t great at the game—still the bull in the china shop—but Bob had real finesse. Lou thought he looked beautiful in the saddle.

Bob’s friends called him “Light Show” Lahodny on account of his love of the glamorous life, and he was living up to his nickname in Santa Barbara. People took notice of his good looks and smile; he was Kennedy-esque, they thought, like a ’70s-style, feel-good Bobby. Maybe that was what the members of the local Chamber of Commerce were thinking when they asked him to run for a newly opened state Assembly seat. He politely declined—a wise decision for a drug smuggler living under a false name.

On his visits to Santa Barbara, DeMassa protested half-heartedly about all the public revelry. But the truth was that he was fond of Bob and Ed and liked going to those parties, too. All of them did. Still, it was a dangerous game, being that high profile. Ed was probably the most conspicuous. He couldn’t reinvent himself as a patrician the way Bob and Lou had. The more money he had, the more he looked like a criminal. It was a matter of style: The Company guys all called Ed “the Kid,” because he called everyone else “kid,” as in, “Hey, kid, how about some more wine over here?”—the kind of demeanor that got plenty of second looks at the Polo Club. In many ways, Ed was in fact a big kid, always looking for fun and excitement, and when Lou gave him a Ferrari one Christmas, surprising Ed by leading him, eyes closed, to a baby blue convertible with a big red bow on it, Ed smiled and said: “Damn, kid! You shouldn’t have.” Now Lou agreed that he probably shouldn’t have, watching Ed clock 100 miles per hour down Shoreline Drive or pull drunk donuts in the parking lot of Santa Barbara’s ritziest joint, appropriately called Talk of the Town.

But Ed earned his keep. He ran point on the Thai supply chain, which Lou considered a lion’s den. It was Ed who traveled overseas, connecting with growers, cutting out the middlemen and increasing the Company’s profits—the kind of profits that made it possible to throw money at DeMassa, hold the feds at bay, and keep the Company machine running smoothly, moving product, while the partners played with their ponies. The bigger problem for the Company partners was not in Santa Barbara at all.


Lance claimed that it was his decision to leave the Company. The other partners were under the impression that they’d fired him. He had become too much of a liability, they thought; his showboating had gotten out of control. He may have cut his hair short, but he was still the same old Lance, standing out rather than blending in, opening suitcases full of money wherever he went. Lance’s other nickname was Ensign Hero: the Navy washout who thought he was invincible. In Tahoe, after the indictment came down and they were all on the lam, Lance would be out on the lake, testing the high-powered cigarette boats he’d built, getting yelled at over a police helicopter loudspeaker for speeding.

The real trouble with Lance was his leaking. “We know you’re talking to Paul Acree,” Ed told Lance one day. Lou remembered the day Lance showed up on his bike, like some kind of stoned angel, asking him to get off the ladder and go to Mexico. There would be no Company if not for Lance, he knew. But now he and Bob and Ed had no choice but to buy him out.

They eventually settled on an “exit package” of $400,000. In the spring of 1978, DeMassa met Lance in the parking structure of the Orange County Courthouse, where they chatted briefly. “Stay out of trouble,” DeMassa told him. As he was leaving, he pointed to a briefcase he’d set between them. “Oh,” he said, “I think this is yours.” When he opened the briefcase, Lance felt jilted. It contained $180,000: half the agreed amount, less DeMassa’s “transaction fee.”

Part of the reason everyone moved to Santa Barbara was to ditch Lance. But Lance wouldn’t go away that easily. He had more to lose than Paul. He was named in the indictment along with everyone else. He was a fugitive like them, but he was on his own. Out in the cold, his only value to anyone was what he knew.

Lost At Sea

1978

Success,  Dave knew, was a fragile thing. So many parts of a smuggling operation could go wrong, it was necessary to have not just a Plan B but also a Plan C and a Plan D. Still, even the best risk manager could never make the risk go away entirely.

The first sign of trouble with the latest gig occurred right at the beginning, when Danny Tuna, after being contracted by the Company to bring five tons of hash back from Pakistan, vanished. Danny was a drinker, and he’d gone on a bender and disappeared. Enter Plan B:  Ed flew to Singapore, bought a 130-foot boat called the Tusker, under the auspices of a shell company called Ocean Survey and Studies, Limited (based, naturally, in Beverly Hills), and hired a new captain, Jerry Samsel. The Company had never worked with Samsel before. None of the members of his crew were regulars. And not long after the Tusker left Pakistan bound for Maine, they stopped hearing from him.

Back in Maine,  Al Sweeney listened for the Tusker during their radio appointments but heard nothing but static. Dave was confused. He had supplied the Tusker’s crew with the usual coded Mylar charts to give encrypted positions and provided them with several radio systems: single sideband, VHF, UHF, and CB. What Dave didn’t know was that Samsel had turned paranoid and ordered a total radio blackout. This was in September. The Tusker wasn’t due for 10 weeks. All the Company could do was wait.

Tensions were high.  Fuzzy and Harlan were at each other’s throats. Dave was so frantic one night that Fuzzy slipped opium into his joint to calm him down. And quiet, shy Al was coming undone, getting edgier each day and claiming that he could hear messages from the missing ship coming through the static. Then, one day in October, the feds appeared.

Dave saw them first. Andy, a new hired hand, had picked him up at the airport in Bangor, Maine, and they were driving to the house atop the cliff in Machias when a man sitting in a car by the side of the road did a double take, flipped a U-turn, and started following them. One of the neighbors, it turned out, was a retired cop, and he had grown suspicious about the house’s occupants. He reported the address to the police, who suspected smuggling and contacted the DEA. A title check revealed a mysterious buyer whose only listed address was a P.O. box in Boston. The DEA didn’t know they had stumbled on the Coronado Company fugitives from California. But local agents had been mobilized, and now they were behind Dave and Andy. Dave took a deep breath and stepped on the gas.

The truck Dave was driving happened to be one that Fuzzy had enhanced with lift kits for ground clearance and a “down and dirty” switch that turned off the brake lights and head- and taillights—a feature that came in handy for evasive driving in the backwoods of Maine. At one hairpin turn, Dave slowed, told Andy to take the wheel, jumped out of the truck, and rolled into the woods. The agents sped past. Dave hiked for nine miles to a pay phone, where he called for Fuzzy to pick him up.

Andy was arrested, the Company’s first casualty in action. Dave made it back to the equipment house near Freedom, which remained safe. But the Tusker’s silence had now become a much more serious problem. The Company house was made—and the boat, oblivious and somewhere out on the ocean, was headed right for it.

“Listen, listen,” Al kept saying, handing Dave the radio headset. “They’re talking to us.” Dave heard only squelching, but Al was writing down positions. Fuzzy thought he was going batty. Yet Al was so convinced that sometimes Dave thought he could hear voices, too, off in the distance. Someone was saying something, but you couldn’t understand what. It was spooky, watching Al every night, listening intently, eyes closed, recording the advance of a ghost ship.

Al’s wireless séances didn’t convince Ed, who decided on a daring Plan C: He would go find the Tusker himself, from the sky. He traveled to South Africa, chartered a plane, and began flying a grid pattern over the Atlantic to intercept the Tusker before she steamed into a trap. He spent hours over the ocean, passing back and forth and scanning the surface, ready with a series of messages he’d drop to the ship if he spotted her. It was a desperate measure, but if he could direct the Tusker to an alternate site, disaster would be averted.

The plane never spotted the Tusker, because the boat was already north of Ed’s search area. The miscalculation was not Ed’s fault. Dave had told the ship’s captain he should under no circumstances arrive before Christmas, but Samsel had ignored him and was, in fact, making great time. The Tusker appeared in Little Machias Bay two weeks early, anchored in the private cove by the house, and sent a party ashore. Samsel had left his antenna up in the weather and it had frozen off; now that he wanted to break radio silence, he couldn’t. Two crew members knocked on the Company house door and were confused when no one answered.

The feds were on alert when Dave mobilized Harlan and another hired hand, nicknamed Rabbit, for Plan D: an amphibious intercept. Harlan and Rabbit fired up a Zodiac and approached the cove from the sea. There was the Tusker: a sitting duck, just 50 yards offshore. Harlan radioed an emergency call to Dave, boarded the Tusker, and told the captain to make a break for it. As he and Rabbit sped away in the Zodiac, Harlan could see the blue lights of the Coast Guard boats behind them.

Harlan beached the Zodiac, and he and Rabbit scrambled ashore. They grabbed their emergency kits, which were issued to every Company employee: backpacks stocked with a compass, rations, matches, gloves, some Pemmican beef jerky, and other supplies. What they needed now were the burlap leggings. They had been furnished at the suggestion of a wilderness expert and tracker who worked for the Company out west. If there’s a manhunt, he’d said, the police will have dogs, and burlap on your legs will hide the scent. Harlan sat down on the beach, pulled on two burlap sacks, and ran into the forest.

When Dave stopped hearing from Harlan, he radioed the equipment house, where Fuzzy answered. Dave then sent Fuzzy and another scout to the house—a classic tactical mistake in the fog of war. On their second visit to the house, Fuzzy was pulled over. As the police approached the car, he tore up his fake ID and slipped the pieces into the driver’s-side door panel.

The Tusker didn’t get far before it was boarded by the Coast Guard. At first glance, the guardsmen found nothing. The hash was in a cargo hold only accessible from the exterior of the ship; it was December in the North Atlantic, and the Tusker was so thickly iced over that they missed the hatch cover. The guardsmen instructed the Tusker to follow them into port, then pulled away in their own vessel. En route, the Tusker’s crew axed off the ice, opened the hatch, and started throwing the cargo of sealed cylindrical containers overboard. Arriving at port ahead of the Tusker, the guardsmen were confronted by irate DEA agents and, realizing their mistake, raced back to the Tusker in time to see the crew on the deck pitching the hash into the sea.

The entire crew was taken into custody, as were Rabbit and Harlan, whose burlap leggings did not save them. They all called DeMassa, who called Lou, who authorized $50,000 in defense and hush money for everyone: five grand apiece. Dave avoided capture, left Maine, and reconvened with Lou. Together they worked damage control. It was a heavy blow to the Company, but not a fatal one. The DEA had only arrested the help. They didn’t realize Harlan had a supervisory role, but even if they had, Harlan would never have talked. Five arrests and no one had a thing on them but some sextants, a matchbook from the Ambassador Hotel in Singapore, and Dave’s mysterious little Bornstein School charts. But the fishermen of Little Machias Bay were pulling high-quality hash from their nets for days.

DEA special agent James Conklin, left. (Photo: Courtesy of James Conklin)
DEA special agent James Conklin, left. (Photo: Courtesy of James Conklin)

Fugitives

1978

The code of silence stuck. Fuzzy and Harlan took the fall, pleading guilty to small counts in the indictment. Still, the Company was less than happy. Several million dollars’ worth of product had been tossed from the Tusker. While no one had rolled over on the Company, the seams of the operation had been exposed. And for the first time in its decade of operation, the Company found itself with a management-labor divide.

It hadn’t gone unnoticed that since the indictment had come down, the Company partners had been riding polo ponies and sauntering around Santa Barbara in white V-neck sweaters while their employees went underground. When the Tusker operation fell apart, the partners were a thousand miles away. Lou was safely ensconced at the house he’d bought in Hilton Head, South Carolina, at the Palmetto Dunes Oceanfront Resort. Now that it was all over, even Dave was having doubts. For God’s sake, he thought, I jumped from a car at 20 miles per hour. I watched my friends get arrested.

“Listen, Lou,” Dave said one night over dinner. “It might be time for me to quit. I can’t do this anymore.” The desperado life was starting to wear on him, he said. They’d been fugitives for more than a year. It was enough to make Dave paranoid, always looking in rearview mirrors and store-window reflections. He was gone more than he was home and often couldn’t call his wife, Linda, for weeks at a time. After the indictment came down, the couple had moved to Denver—a city they’d chosen at random—and now Linda was lonesome. She couldn’t see her family. To call his own mother, Dave had to use codes and pay phones. Relations with his sister were even more difficult: She was an assistant district attorney in San Diego, and Dave had to hide his whole life from her.

“I hear you, Dave,” Lou said. “I feel it myself.” Kerrie, too, had become frustrated with their lives, he said, especially once she and Lou moved to Hilton Head. But “the Company needs you,” Lou went on. “I need you. Without you, the Company is nothing.”

So Dave stayed. The money was too good, the work still thrilled, and Dave still wanted to make Pops proud. He liked excelling at something. In spite of everything, he still thought of himself as a Company man.


Intercepting the Tusker had been a lucky break for the DEA. The agency didn’t even realize that they’d stumbled across the same smugglers named in an existing indictment on the West Coast. It was hard for the agency to coordinate nationally, and the CorCo case had lost its office champion when Bobby Dune transferred from San Diego to Boise, Idaho.

Then a special agent named James Conklin picked up the case. Like Lou, Conklin had come west for his own piece of the good life under the sun. The Detroit-raised son of an FBI agent, Conklin had earned a philosophy degree from St. Bonaventure University in upstate New York and then gone to Vietnam, where he served two tours as a Marine Corps captain. The America he came home to in 1969 wasn’t the same one he’d left four years earlier. He worked a couple of regular jobs, but after being in a war zone, the deskbound life felt limp. He sat there thinking: Is this as good as it gets?

As Nixon’s war on drugs escalated it grew less metaphorical, and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs was actively recruiting military officers fresh from Vietnam. In 1973, when the agency was absorbed into the new DEA, there was a need for staff in San Diego, the new epicenter of border trafficking. Conklin, recently married, was tired of living in New York—the weather, the cost, the chaos. The following year, he and his wife loaded their things into a U-Haul.

By the time Conklin came across the Operation CorCo file in 1978, the case was cold. Despite Dunne’s work and the resulting indictment, the DEA brass had taken little interest in the Coronado Company. They wanted heroin busts. Or maybe coke, which was just starting to make a beachhead. Pot was small potatoes: “Kiddie dope,” they called it. Hell, Conklin figured, half the prosecutors smoked it themselves.

Reviewing the dormant CorCo file, Conklin realized that the sheer scale of the Coronado Company put it in the top tier of smuggling operations. He told his bosses about the tonnage, the tens of millions the smugglers had made. That got the pencil pushers interested, and the San Diego office authorized Conklin to go after the Company partners.

Conklin knew what he was up against. The Company’s leaders were smart, the DEA had run out of leads, and the agency was still poorly funded, working out of derelict federal buildings and borrowing boats from the Coast Guard for naval busts. When Conklin started, his unit had just four cars: two American Motors Javelins, a seized purple Plymouth convertible, and a seized Riviera with bullet holes in it. New agents got guns but no holsters; they wrapped their .38 Specials in rubber bands so they wouldn’t slip out of their waistbands. As late as 1979, when the Company was landing $7 million shipments of Thai stick, there wasn’t a single DEA interdiction agent north of Los Angeles on the West Coast.

But the DEA crew was finding its legs, slowly but surely. The agents were dedicated—married to the job, their ex-wives would say—and they were used to being in the trenches. And the government, Conklin knew, had time on its side. A trafficker, after all, was really just another kind of addict. They couldn’t stop. They loved the rush. The great smugglers could change the odds for a time, but like a blackjack player in a casino, their long-term prospects were dim. The only way to beat the house was by taking your winnings out the door—but smugglers left their chips on the felt. And even the best operation had a lowest common denominator. Somewhere, someone was eventually bound to do something stupid.


 Lance tried to go legit. After parting ways with the Company, he hung around Lake Tahoe, working on developing the ultrafast cigarette boats he hoped to sell. He claimed to have serious interest from the military and potential clients in the Persian Gulf. But his boats—long, thin hydroplanes tricked out with such powerful engines, you could see daylight beneath the hull at top speed—were too fast to be good for anything: fishing, waterskiing, even smuggling. The only buyer for Lance’s boat would have been James Bond, and even Bond wouldn’t want a 30-foot rooster tail flying out the back. He told Fuzzy, with whom he was living at the time, that he was thinking about going to Switzerland. He could hide his money there, hit the autobahn, chase blondes.

Lance felt himself inching further and further out on a limb. Though he remembered Lou’s story, the one from Pepe de Mexicali about pushing troublesome associates out of a plane, he knew that the Company wasn’t his real problem—prison was. He had a bad time in Lompoc after his 1969 bust, being a small, pretty blond and all. He vowed he was never going back there.

The Gamble

1980

 Dave was at 5,000 feet, riding shotgun in a Cessna four-seater, looking down at the vast green wilderness of the Olympic Peninsula, near Seattle. At the controls sat Hugo Butz, a Vietnam chopper pilot turned bush flier who was game for smuggling sorties and aerial surveillance. He had connected Dave with two pals, a pilot and a mechanic with the Air National Guard at nearby Fort Lewis for the Company’s most audacious plan yet: off-loading 10 tons of Thai stick in one of the U.S. military’s own helicopters.

The John L. Winter was another fishing boat the Company contracted for a trans-Pacific smuggling run. The guardsmen were going to “borrow” one of Fort Lewis’s double-rotor Chinooks to lift the load off the deck of the ship in one swift action. There’d be no beach exposure at all. The whole operation would take only a few minutes. Then the ship would be gone, the stash would be deposited in the woods at a secluded clearing, and the Chinook would return to base.

That’s what they were reconnoitering in Butz’s plane now, a nice spot where the Chinook could set down its cargo not far from protected waters. They were all the way at the tip of the peninsula, over the Makah Indian reservation, a nearly unpopulated landscape of forest and salmon streams. From the air, they picked out a cove near Neah Bay: totally isolated, the last stop on the peninsula, and a mile from a flat patch of land clear-cut by loggers. They had found their landing zone.


Lou and Kerrie were spending most of their time in Hilton Head, tanning and playing tennis on the custom clay court at Lou’s beachfront estate. But the game was getting old for her, as was the isolated luxury of Hilton Head. She didn’t want to live like a rich retiree on the lam. It got to you after a while, serving guests with a smile while calling yourself by a fake name. After years living double lives, their only real friends were other people in the Company. In Tahoe or Santa Barbara, at least everyone was together and you could be yourself.

But Lou thought the Company social scene was dangerous. He was in Hilton Head to lay low, away from the conspicuous frolicking in Santa Barbara. He wasn’t exactly out of sight, either, ensconced in a mansion and all, but at least he was keeping quiet. Kerrie had gotten heavy into coke. Ed and Bob were partying hard, too. They were bored with their polo ponies; powder was the only thing that approximated the rush of smuggling.

Lou would indulge a few lines socially, or stick a hot knife into a ball of opium he kept around, inhaling the smoke off the blade to mellow out after a bad day. But he wasn’t the addictive type, and he thought the danger with drugs was getting caught up in the lifestyle. You wound up hanging out with weirdos. And that was how you brought attention to yourself.

For Kerrie, the luster of living with Lou was gone. She felt the years going by; nearing 30, she was thinking about children, a family, a career. In Hilton Head, it hit her hard: This would never be a normal life. Lou was more anxious now, more absorbed in the business. He kept more secrets, and Kerrie started catching him in lies. Maybe they were small ones, but they told a larger story: Once you leave the truth behind, it’s hard to find it again.

When the end came, they didn’t talk much about it. One day, she just packed her things and told him she was going back to La Costa to work as an aerobics instructor.

It was a surprise and yet not surprising. Lou was, in fact, making plans to get out of the business altogether, hiding away money and planning a move to the Bahamas. The islands were beautiful and ran on a dollar economy—a safe haven for illicit cash. They could live like they had in Jamaica. But that feeling had faded, he knew. Five years together and the two of them had never bickered or argued or said an unkind thing to one another. When she left, Kerrie looked back at that beautiful palmetto-ringed house, the only one on that stretch of beach, and knew she’d never see it again.


Lou was too busy to be heartbroken—or at least that was what he told himself. Between the Company’s ongoing legal mess, managing personnel, and planning for the next operation, there was plenty to do. It was getting expensive, keeping the Company together. DeMassa kept asking for more and more money—fifty grand here, forty-five there. It was some consolation that at least Dave could still be counted on.

“Helicopters?” Lou asked, going through the plans for the Neah Bay gig.

“It’s a great idea,” Dave replied. “If it works.”

But Dave was more paranoid than ever. He was having trouble keeping track of the double, triple, quadruple life he was living. Sometimes when he was asked for his name at a sales counter, he would forget who he was supposed to be. Lou tried to talk Dave through it, but he, too, had close calls. On one trip to San Francisco, he left his clutch full of fake IDs in a hotel lobby. When he was summoned by security, he pretended to be a businessman on a gay tryst to explain it.

On top of it all, Dave now had a family to look after; it was a hassle to arrange for his daughter to share his real name instead of his fugitive alias. Dave was torn between his loyalty to the Company and to his family. He felt like the little Dutch boy, plugging holes in the dike. How do you hold back the sea, he wondered, when you run out of fingers? 

Back in Hilton Head, Lou worried, too. He drank his Bordeaux, looking out at the ocean that, every so often, rose up in a storm and took everything with it. Lou recalled how it was when they started back in Coronado. We were all just normal people, he thought. Friends on the Rock, their lives unwritten. He could remember that feeling of promise, when they were young and there wasn’t yet time for tragedy.

Lou Villar’s house at the Palmetto Dunes Oceanfront Resort in Hilton Head, South Carolina. (Photo: Courtesy of Lou Villar)
Lou Villar’s house at the Palmetto Dunes Oceanfront Resort in Hilton Head, South Carolina. (Photo: Courtesy of Lou Villar)

Lucky Break

1980

When  Conklin’s DEA task force busted the low-level street dealer, they quickly realized they had a guy who didn’t want to go to prison. While in custody, the dealer happened to mention crossing paths with “a big-timer up in Santa Barbara.” That big-timer was Ed Otero.

The dealer was reluctant to talk, and Conklin worked him gently. Conklin was as straight as they come—he had never even tried marijuana—but he didn’t judge people. Plenty of his friends smoked pot, and when he went to parties they’d joke with him, call him “the narc.” He had no interest in locking up every street dealer. It made him an outlier in the take-no-prisoners milieu of the DEA, but it also made him good at cultivating informants. “This is a way out for you,” Conklin told the dealer. “You can go back to a regular life and never worry about seeing me again.”

In exchange for leniency, the dealer provided an address. It was the first concrete lead the DEA had gotten on the Company members’ whereabouts. When Conklin’s team checked out the place, it was empty, but a visit to the local post office showed that the mail was forwarded to someone named Bambi Merryweather—Bob’s girlfriend and Lou’s secretary, although Conklin didn’t know it. Conklin ran her name through the DEA’s database and got a hit out of an agency office in Virginia. The local office, Conklin discovered, was already working some information on a suspected drug dealer in Hilton Head, and Bambi Merryweather was mentioned in the file as well. Two building contractors in Hilton Head, Mike and Jerry Agnor, had reported that a man whose mansion they were renovating was a drug smuggler. They didn’t know his real name, but they called him Mr. Thai Pot and mentioned that he had a secretary named Bambi. The name was too unusual to be a coincidence.

Conklin flew the Agnor brothers to San Diego. He had been assembling a book of the entire Thai smuggling scene, from suppliers to traffickers to distributors, and filling it with pictures of the insular, elusive network. He asked the Agnors to flip through it. They immediately picked out Lou Villar.


At Neah Bay, the receiving crew was in place, stashing 500-gallon tanks of aviation fuel at the LZ for the helo, setting up Dave’s custom cargo cage, and bringing in a semi-trailer truck to move the pot. By now more of the regulars were gone. Don had left by mutual agreement; he had managed to save up some money from the gigs to invest in his VW shop in Oregon. The crew was full of new faces: locals, friends of friends. It made Dave nervous, what with all the heat on the Company.

After losing Al Sweeney, Dave hired a guy Harlan knew who worked for a contractor that made surveillance equipment for the CIA. Dave’s paranoia had led to all kinds of purchases, like a voice stress analyzer and audio scramblers, the latter of which became standard issue for Company partners. But now he requested something new: a bug.

One of the new guys on the crew was disappearing alone, every night, at the same time. One night Dave followed him; he was going to a pay phone. Dave planted the bug in the booth’s mouthpiece and began listening in. The mysterious transmissions, he discovered, were just sweet nothings to the guy’s girlfriend.

Dave was relieved, but the bug was still a nifty toy, and he thought he’d have a little fun with it. He planted it under the kitchen table at the Company’s equipment house. Over several days, he listened to the crew chatting, and then casually surprised people in conversation by mentioning bits of what he’d heard. One night Dave came into the kitchen where everyone was assembled, wearing headphones and a big grin. “Gotcha!” Dave said, reaching under the table and pulling out the bug. “Cute, right?”

Harlan didn’t think so. The Company was built on trust, and the very idea of eavesdropping was a slippery slope. He didn’t see Dave’s stunt as a practical joke. What he saw was a bad omen.


No one likes digging through the trash, but you’d be surprised what people throw away. In addition to naming Lou, the Agnor brothers had helped Conklin connect the Company to a San Diego accountant named Andy Willis. Conklin got a search warrant and began accompanying the local garbage crew to Willis’s office, getting up early, riding the side of the truck, and dabbling in waste management.

Willis, it turned out, would’ve benefited from a paper shredder. In his garbage, Conklin found an epistolary trail connecting Willis to Lou, mostly operating under aliases. Soon Conklin had uncovered a whole network of pseudonymous assets, like Bob’s partnership in an oil well in Arcadia Parish, Louisiana, and the bank accounts of the Mo Ching Trading Co., which happened to own coastal properties in sparsely populated areas. “We got gold,” Conklin told his partner Larry McKinney.

As the CorCo case grew more complicated, more agents were brought in to help follow the money, including an expert on loan from the Internal Revenue Service. Thus was formed the financial-asset removal team—acronym: FART—which Conklin hoped would pick up the income trail and fill in the blanks. They began to piece together the Company’s financials, assembling the asset case by showing unclaimed income through expenditure on houses, cars, and other luxury line items. The last time Lou filed a tax return, he was a teacher in Coronado making $7,000 a year. Bob was still filing, as a drywall installer with a $10,000 annual income. He had spent nearly three times that much on tack for his polo ponies in one year alone.

But Conklin couldn’t just start arresting people. Even when he presented his superiors with documentation supporting his estimate that Lou, based on the value of his houses alone, was worth $6 million, it wasn’t enough. The Justice Department wanted more evidence. Conklin was miffed but patient. He and his team had been on Operation CorCo for years now, and, truth be told, they were having a blast. Conklin liked matching wits with the Company. They were worthy adversaries, guys who’d be good at anything, he thought. It just so happened they were really good crooks. 

Code Red

1980

The Company had timed its Neah Bay gig for late summer, when the Pacific Northwest’s legendary gloom usually breaks. But when the John L. Winter arrived on August 23, the coast of the Olympic Peninsula was still shrouded in dense fog. Helicopters couldn’t fly in those conditions at night, and waiting for the fog to lift was a problem. The ship’s captain came onshore; he and his crew didn’t want to wait around out there to get plucked by the Coast Guard. The pilot pointed out that joyriding a military helicopter was tough to reschedule. Dave was pissed—at them, at himself, at the weather. His supremely elegant plan had been spoiled by an unseasonable dew point.

So for the first time in years, Lou showed up on-site. He met the chopper crew at the Tumwater Inn south of Olympia, turned on the charm, and managed to convince the pilot to attempt an even riskier daytime operation. It helped that Lou sweetened the deal, and noted that the pilots were already implicated. If one of them went down, they all went down.

On the day the weather finally turned perfect, however, the Chinook was a no-show. Another helicopter at Fort Lewis had been damaged on takeoff that morning, and the rest were grounded. Or at least that was what the pilot said; Dave suspected he just chickened out. He cursed the smuggling gods and went back to the drawing board.

The Company fetched its classic beach equipment—the Zodiacs, barges, gravity feeds, 4×4 pickups—and hired some locals from the Makah reservation to assist with their fishing boats. By now tempers were short. Offshore, the John L. Winter’s crew was jittery. As the days passed at Neah Bay, there was plenty of time for anxious speculation. Bringing in the Indians at the last minute was a risky move. They were charging $150,000, an exorbitant fee—the kind of deal you strike only in an emergency—and were wild at the wheel, unable or unwilling to get their ships into proper position. On the night the off-load finally commenced, Fuzzy could hear everyone arguing on the radio, blabbering back and forth for hours. It was the opposite of the streamlined command structure the Company was known for.

It was a bad start, hours late, already past midnight. Earlier on the beach, Fuzzy watched tiny waves lap at his feet, but his surfer’s instinct told him—from the mist, the sense of the atmosphere—that these waters would rise. By the time they started work, eight-footers were crashing on the rocks. Fuzzy fought his way out with a Zodiac and one of the Maravia barges, and docked at sea with the John L. Winter. The Indians met him there in their boats. It was raining, and the swells made work difficult, but together they managed to transfer six tons of Thai stick off the ship and onto the barge. Luckily, the high tide allowed a small vessel to shoot the mouth of the tiny Soo River, which emptied into the ocean near Neah Bay, so the Indians started ferrying the stash, 500 pounds at a time, into the shelter of the river.

Dave was positioned on a hill, watching through his night scope as a collection of green figures ran back and forth on the beach, battling the sea. It was a battle the Company was losing. The tide was going out. The boats were scraping the shallows. The hastily hired help was not following orders. When Turk Markishtum, one of the fishermen from the reservation, knocked his hull on a rock, he refused to continue. “I’m worried about my boat,” he said.

“How much does your boat cost?” Dave asked over the radio.

“$125,000,” Markishtum said.

“We’ll buy you two goddamn boats if you keep going,” Dave said. “Just bring the shit in!”

But now the tide was almost all the way out. No boat with a keel could get into the mouth of the river, and there was $10 million worth of Thai stick still sitting out there on the barge. The local fishermen took off. On the horizon, the black of night was giving way to the first pale hint of tomorrow.

“I’m getting that barge!” Fuzzy yelled into the radio. With the scope, Dave watched him break a Zodiac through the pounding surf and race out to sea. He tied the barge to the Zodiac. The Maravia was 35 feet long but flat-bottomed, and even with the bales stacked several feet high on its deck, Fuzzy figured he could tow it into the Soo.

“Go for it, man!” Dave yelled through the radio, watching Fuzzy make for shore with daylight emerging behind him. “Gun it!” Fuzzy couldn’t hear Dave over the whine of the outboard, and could barely see through the ocean spray, but he got the barge close. And then, just as he entered the mouth of the river, Fuzzy felt himself rising.

Dave watched as the monster wave curled up and lifted Fuzzy, his Zodiac, the barge, and the Thai stick 10 feet above the beach. Fuzzy managed to surf the tethered inflatables on the wave momentarily, until the crest toppled. He felt the weight of the barge land on top of the Zodiac, pinning him to the rubber floor—a potentially lethal position, trapped under several tons of cargo, with a million pounds of water behind it. A fatalist, Fuzzy was stoic. The party was over when it was over. And how ironic, he thought, to be killed by my own stash.

The wave started to swamp the Zodiac, and Fuzzy realized that his hand was still on the throttle. He instinctively gave the little motor all the gas, and when the wave shifted, the Zodiac broke free and shot down its face. Seconds later the towline broke and the barge swamped, dumping some of its load into the water. After tumbling through the foam, it came to rest on the beach. The beach crew unloaded what remained on deck and collected the rest of the bales from the river. Dave had come down from the hill and welcomed Fuzzy back onto the beach. “You barely got out of there with your life!” Dave said.

“It’s like I always say,” Fuzzy responded. “When in doubt—punch it!”

Dave and the beach crew scrambled to get the load into a U-Haul truck. First light was upon them. There was only one way in and out of the heavily forested area, the stash house was 10 miles away, and time was running out.

The road out of the forest was slick and canted, and the truck didn’t get very far before it slid off the asphalt. Dave’s nightmare was coming to pass: Everything was going wrong at once. “Leave the truck,” Dave said, now officially panicking. “Transfer the stash to the pickups.” That’s when Fuzzy discovered that the U-Haul’s rear door was jammed. The truck’s whole frame box was warped and wouldn’t open. “Get an axe!” Dave yelled. But there were no axes.

Dave looked around. The crew was losing faith. Birds were singing, announcing the morning. The scale of the disaster was dawning on everyone. “All right, everybody,” Dave said wearily over the radio. “This is a code red.” He had never said those words before. He couldn’t believe he had to give the order to abort. The Tusker was a lot of bad luck, but this was defeat. They had failed.

They had 60 bales in the pickups—a small fraction of the load. The rest they left on the beach, along with the boats and motors, the conveyor belts and generators. Dave instructed everyone to get their emergency kits, which contained oiled rags for clearing fingerprints. “Wipe it all down, boys,” he said. Fleeing the scene in the bed of one of the Company’s pickup trucks, Dave wondered what he would say to Lou.

The recovered bales went to pay back the investors. The rest was a loss. And the Company was already feeling the pinch. Smuggling is speculative and expensive: It had cost a lot to stage this fiasco, a million bucks spent to lose twenty. Dave, ever faithful and feeling guilty, bought Lou a gold Patek Philippe as an apology, even though everyone knew it wasn’t really his fault. At least no one was arrested on his watch, Dave thought. Hours later, Walter Cronkite was reporting on the CBS Evening News about the mysterious drug-trafficking incident on the Olympic Peninsula. The police discovered the entire smuggling operation in situ—the bales in the water, the truck, and all the gear—but they didn’t find a single fingerprint. 

One Last Score

1981

Lou moved back to Santa Barbara, against his better judgment. Spooked by Neah Bay, the Company partners had decided to mount a final mission and then disband. Lou saw his psychic, a common form of business guidance in California at the time—who warned him, “I see bad things on the horizon.” Lou took note but didn’t listen. He and the rest of the Company partners wanted to retire big. The proverbial temptation of the last big score was too great.

Lou took up with a local artist and, somehow, her sister at the same time; they lived together in a house situated on a 100-acre orchid farm. There, the Company organized its final gig: four tons of Thai stick delivered to Bear Harbor, the kind of operation they’d pulled off without incident many times.  Danny Tuna was back in the employ of the Company after promising to clean up his act. He had a new boat, the Robert Wayne, and promoted his first mate, John Engle, to captain it back from Thailand. The idea was to keep it small, easy, and lucrative.

Things seemed to be going fine until, a few months later, a ham-radio operator in the Philippines picked up a distress call from the western Pacific. It was the Robert Wayne; the vessel had been hit by a rogue wave, Engle said. It smashed the windows and swamped the gear, including the radio. Engle had managed to get out an SOS by splicing the CB to a high-gain antenna.

A few days later, the Robert Wayne’s propeller shaft broke. The ship was drifting now, a few hundred miles off the coast of Japan. As the hold was full of drugs, Engle couldn’t exactly call the Coast Guard. Fortuitously for the boat’s crew, it turned out that Danny’s sister was an escort at a Tokyo bar called Maggie’s Revenge, where she was popular with some yakuza men. (Danny’s sister was an exotic girl for a Japanese gangster to have on his arm—six feet tall, blonde, congenitally blind, and, according to Conklin, who later interviewed her, “a total knockout.”) Danny managed to arrange an intervention from the yakuza, who agreed to tow the boat to Yokohama and oversee repairs.

The yakuza wanted $300,000 for their services, on top of $250,000 for the Robert Wayne’s repairs. Ed negotiated a loan from a Company investor and brought the down payment to Chichi-Jima, a tiny island in the Pacific, in a suitcase. As insurance, the yakuza kept Danny Tuna with them “as a guest” until the mission was complete and the rest of the money was delivered.

Incredibly, the Company’s crisis management came through. The Robert Wayne made it to California and the off-load went smoothly. Some of the cargo was converted to cash, and the rest was transported back to Santa Barbara, to be sold in a few days. Lou agreed to store some of the pot and cash at his house—a breach in his usual security protocol, but he figured they’d get it to distributors in a few days. In the meantime, the Company threw a classic victory party at Bob’s place. This score would put everyone over the top, they thought, a couple million each for the partners. It felt good to be together again, everyone smiling, laughing, raising a toast to a clean getaway.


Conklin looked at his watch. It was 11 a.m. on November 5, 1981. He and his team were in position around Santa Barbara, waiting. Then another agent called in an approaching silver four-door Mercedes, license plate 1ATM158. The car turned west on Alston Road and then south on Cima Linda Lane, where other surveillance units made the driver: Ed Morgan, a.k.a. Kenneth Eugene Cook, Jr., a.k.a. Edward Otero.

It was early November, and the DEA had been sitting on the houses of Ed, Bob, and Lou for months now. Lou had no idea his Hilton Head contractors had led the heat to his doorstep on the opposite coast. The Agnors had told the feds that they’d been burned by Lou, stiffed $50,000 for services rendered. (Lou would claim that the money discrepancy was actually their lost investment in Company commerce.) Now Conklin had teams in place. “Let’s do it,” he said.

Ed saw the tail and tried to run, but he didn’t get far. The DEA boxed him in at the wheel of the car he loved so much, less than a mile from his house. Shortly thereafter, DEA agents saw Lou driving his matching Mercedes 6.9 and started following him.

Lou was by himself, heading for Bob’s house. It was a beautiful day, and Lou had just had lunch with the girls at home. He was feeling good, thinking about the pot in his basement and how much it was worth. When he saw that he was being tailed, he turned down the radio. He changed course, but the car followed. After a half-dozen turns, Lou found himself in a cul-de-sac. The cops didn’t even need to flash the lights.

“Keep your hands on the wheel,” Lou heard. Before the feds got a chance to yank him from the leather-lined interior, Lou recalls, one of the agents had pulled his .45 and stuck it in Lou’s mouth. The agent’s hand was shaking, as if he was overwhelmed by finally seeing the man he and his colleagues had been chasing for years. “You will never forget this day,” the agent said. “And your life will never be the same.” Lou knew he was right.

The DEA had caught up with Bob and Dave, too. They happened to be riding in Ed’s car when he was caught. For all his investigative efforts, Conklin didn’t realize who Dave was or the important role he played in the organization. But in Ed’s car, along with $20,000 in cash, the agents found Dave’s valise, which contained two fake IDs, an airline ticket, and several notebooks—all detailed accounting ledgers. It was a phenomenal bit of luck; the DEA had caught the Company principals en route to an accounting meeting.

By the end of the day they were arrested, and Bob’s house was surrounded with yellow tape, its contents tagged as evidence: three safe-deposit keys, photos of landing sites, and records showing payments to ship captains. At Lou’s house, Conklin found $557,829 and 892 pounds of product from the latest shipment, worth about $3 million. In Lou’s enormous safe were envelopes, each containing $25,000 and labeled “Johnny,” “Terry,” and “Fred”—pay for the crew. Lou had never before accepted delivery of pot on the premises. Now, handcuffed in his own living room, he could hear the agents in the basement taking down the secret panels that hid the stash. “Holy fuck,” one of them shouted. “We hit the fucking jackpot!”

It was quite a haul—for Conklin, too. He’d worked for years, with inferior equipment and funding, to put cuffs on these guys. His resources were so thin, in fact, that his agents had nearly run out of gas on the way to Santa Barbara; they were over their fuel budget and had to refill out of pocket to catch their targets. But now the Company’s leadership was all in a cell together, and the DEA had confiscated $12 million in cash, contraband, vehicles, and property from the organization. (To Conklin’s chagrin, he never did find the Duck.) When the news broke, McKinney told reporters that the Company had grossed $96 million over the past decade. At a minimum, Lou thought in his cell.

Private detectives Sanda Sutherland and Jack Palladino, 1979. (Photo: Corbis Images)
Private detectives Sanda Sutherland and Jack Palladino, 1979. (Photo: Corbis Images)

Cat and Mouse

1981

 Fuzzy heard about the arrests on the news. Drug lords busted in upscale Santa Barbara. Sounds familiar, he thought. Then the phone rang. “Hey, Fuzzy, it’s been a while.” Fuzzy would’ve recognized that goofy nasal voice anywhere. “I’m sure you know why I’m calling,” Lance went on. “I got you into this. And now I’m going to get you out.”

Lance had already arranged for Fuzzy to sit down with the DEA. Fuzzy was conflicted, but as he considered the cards he had been dealt, he realized that he had only one to play. “It’s every man for himself,” Lance said.

The DEA loved Lance and Fuzzy from the moment they walked in the door. “You guys were the A-team,”  Conklin said when Fuzzy and Lance sat down in the San Diego DEA offices, a tape recorder in between them. “Light years ahead of everyone else. We want to know how you did it.”

Fuzzy recognized one of the agents who had been on hand when he was arrested in Maine. Another agent, Fuzzy noticed, had pulled into the parking lot in one of Ed’s Corvettes. Fuzzy looked at the DEA team assembled around him, everyone with their notepads and Hawaii 5-0 suits. He rationalized that he would just confirm what they already knew. Besides, he had taken a fall once, and become a convicted felon, in the service of the Company. This time the feds were threatening 30 years. That was a long time away from his motorcycle. So Fuzzy gave them a tape he’d already recorded, describing the information he knew that would be valuable to the DEA. “Hi,” the tape began. “My name is Fuzzy, and I’m going to tell you a story about the Coronado Company.”


At the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego, where the Company members were housed, the higher-ups were still sticking together. Lou was running damage control, even managing collections from jail. At their individual arraignments, the partners gave DeMassa instructions to collect money from distributors, through their attorneys, whom they’d fronted. Some of it DeMassa used to pay the beach crew from the last operation, some he kept, and some he gave to the partners’ girlfriends.

“I need information,” DeMassa told Jack Palladino one night over lobster bisque at the Stanford Court Hotel. Palladino was DeMassa’s trusted private detective, one-half of the husband-and-wife detective agency Palladino & Sutherland; together they’d worked with DeMassa on other major criminal-defense efforts, defending the Hells Angels against the government’s RICO investigation. Jack and Sandra’s job was to gather as much information as possible about the DEA’s case against the Company and how the agents had gotten their evidence; maybe it was coerced or otherwise tainted. Find out what people know, DeMassa told Jack, and how they know it.

But the DEA already had a strong case. With the testimony of Fuzzy and Lance—now known as Confidential Informants SR2820012 and SR2820013, respectively—Conklin was able to issue a second round of indictments with wider scope and more detail, the kind that comes from inside information. DeMassa wanted Jack and Sandra to figure out who’d flipped.

There was no shortage of suspects. Coronado was full of people the Company left behind who had nursed resentments for years. “They burned a lot of bridges,” one early beach-team member told Jack. Any number of disgruntled ex-employees could have dropped a dime. During grand jury testimony, Jack sat in a white van with painted-over windows in front of the courthouse where the jury convened, taking pictures of everyone who walked in, but found no familiar faces.

Having mostly worked in criminal defense, Jack and Sandra had a philosophical opposition to informants. In her office, Sandra kept an original World War II–vintage poster that warned: “Loose Lips Sink Ships.” Their odds-on favorite, of course, was Lance, but nobody had any proof. Meanwhile, Lance was playing his own game. More than once as Sandra traveled around the country talking to Company associates, she found that Lance had gotten to them first, fishing for intel he could use as a bargaining chip with the DEA.

The private detectives met with Lance over a few dinners and meetings, each side hoping the other would slip up. At first everyone involved played coy, pretending they were on the same team. “Who do you think is talking?” Sandra would ask.

“Who do you think is talking?” Lance would reply.

The encounters settled into a routine of I-know-that-you-know-that-I-know-that-you-know-what-you-don’t-know gamesmanship. Jack and Sandra saw these meetings as opportunities to allow Lance, who always talked too much, to impugn his own credibility. They wore wires, hoping he’d put his foot in it. Extortion, for instance, would count him out as a government witness, and Lance had intimated that money might make him “go away.” 

Lance knew they were taping him, and he tried to get around it. At one meeting, at a hotel in Reno, Jack bugged the room. Lance switched rooms at the last minute. He figured (correctly) that Jack was miked anyhow, and to be safe, he walked in with a note announcing that the entire meeting would be conducted on Magic Slates, the children’s writing pads where you pulled up the cellophane flap to make the words disappear. There they were, two private detectives and a drug smuggler, sitting in silence, negotiating on a kid’s toy. Nothing was said or written, and there was no record of their meeting, which Jack thought was very clever.

Lance didn’t like turning on his friends, but all’s fair in love and war, he thought. He felt bad threatening Ed, Bob, Dave, and Lou—they all still had affection for one another—but the Company had screwed him over. Now it was their turn to get screwed.


For months, Lou sat in the San Diego Metropolitan Correctional Center, still waving his scepter against Company foes. With money there was yet power. According to DeMassa, Lou wanted to bribe his way out. Judge, jury members, maybe a congressman if he had to. Ed, Bob, and Dave were all on different floors of the jail. They never talked directly, coordinating instead through DeMassa. Harlan and Dave both started teaching themselves law, to get into the statutes themselves.

Dave faced an “848,” the federal government’s continuing criminal enterprise statute—it was the trafficking equivalent of RICO, dubbed the drug kingpin law, carrying the prospect of decades in prison. Dave wasn’t a kingpin, but a heavy charge was how the government put on the squeeze, looking for cracks in the foundation. The Company felt abused by the inflated charges, but from the DEA’s perspective, it was the sole means of pressing an advantage. When a crew was as successful and as tight as the Company was, the DEA had to find leverage where it could. So the feds wheeled out the 848s, investigated friends and families, and, for good measure, indicted all the Company girlfriends.

Jack and Sandra tried to trace the DEA’s footsteps, looking for evidence that the agents overstepped their bounds. Sandra went around reminding everyone not to talk without a lawyer present and offering protection to people like Ed’s father, a Navy janitor, whose pension the DEA had threatened. At one point, Jack discovered that he was under surveillance himself. A well-known rock photographer let the DEA use his apartment, across the street from the Palladino & Sutherland offices, to spy on them.

There was more than enough resentment to go around. The DEA hated DeMassa; he was, according to Conklin, a “shyster attorney” who used “crooked detectives” to get criminals off. Jack and Sandra thought the DEA took it personally that anyone would dare stand up to the agency. “It wasn’t common to do that,” Jack recalled later. “And we were good at it.”

But the DEA was chipping away at the Company. DeMassa was on the defensive; he knew that the agency was gunning for him as well. Bob eventually chose to go to trial, but DeMassa encouraged Ed and everyone else to plead out. Lou arranged a plea bargain before he could be charged with an 848. The kingpin never faced the kingpin law, but he got 10 years anyway. So did Ed, who struck the same deal. During Lou’s sentencing, he looked up at the judge and told himself that he would never again lose his freedom. When he got out, he vowed, he would change his life, again. Freedom wasn’t worth all that money. But what was it worth?


In 1982, Lou was transferred to the Federal Correctional Institution on Terminal Island, just off Los Angeles Harbor, to “do his dime,” as it was called in the yard. He looked around and thought: I can’t spend 10 years here. In the MCC library, he had met a prisoner who traded homespun legal advice to his fellow inmates for cookies. “Want my advice?” he told Lou. “Get yourself out of here. That’s what all these other motherfuckers are trying to do. And they’re actually supposed to be in here.”

The jailhouse lawyer knew a former U.S. attorney named Kevin McInerny, who talked Lou through becoming an informant. Conklin was shocked when he got the call from McInerny: “Lou Villar wants to talk.” 

The Deal

1982

It was controversial within the DEA whether or not to let Lou turn. He was too high up in the Company, some said—what was the point of rolling up the organization if you were going to let the kingpin walk? But Lou could provide detail on financing, suppliers, and dealers—the entire Thai network that Conklin had in his sights. Conklin had been able to indict a lot of those people based on Lance’s and Fizzy’s testimony, but for convictions he needed someone to take the stand. He also had his eye on a target closer to home. He wanted to go after DeMassa.

Lou already felt cheated by DeMassa. The Company had paid him half a million in fees, and in Lou’s mind all he did with it was negotiate some rather unfavorable plea bargains. Lou asked McInerny to reach out to Dave. Lou knew Dave could get out if he wanted to. So far he’d held firm, even though DEA agents had visited him in prison, stalked his wife, and harassed his sister, the prosecutor. Dave’s family had pleaded with him to turn on the Company. Finally, Conklin came to him and told him he had one last chance. He showed Dave the 848 paperwork with his name on it. “There’s a train leaving the station,” the agent told him. “Do you want to be on it or under it?”

Conklin felt like he was doing Dave and the others a service. In a way, he thought, the Company guys were lucky to get caught now: The days of fun-loving hippie smugglers were giving way to the violence and gangsterism of cocaine culture. Arrest was a way out, informing a path to redemption. “You have a chance to be a regular guy again,” Conklin told Dave. Dave waited until he thought everyone who had worked for him had been dispositioned, so his testimony wouldn’t affect his employees. And then he switched sides.


In his cell at the MCC,  Harlan was still fighting the prosecutors, poring over court documents. He’d been imagining that Pops and the Company might still mount a cavalry charge. Instead, his boss and friends would testify against him.

It was understandable that Lance would turn state’s evidence; he’d been shafted. Maybe Fuzzy, too; he was an outsider, never one of the Coronado boys. But Lou? Lou had been at the center of everything. It was as if the Godfather broke omertà. And that broke Harlan’s heart.

He remembered when he did his first piece in jail, how Lou took him aside and coached him on doing his time. Now it was Lou’s turn, and Lou was skipping out. We were a fucking championship lineup, Harlan thought. And Lou was the coach. Harlan sometimes still felt an echo of remorse from 14 years earlier, when he disappointed Lou on the basketball court. He never imagined then that Lou would disappoint him in return. “We loved him,” Harlan would later tell the journalist Mike Wallace. “And he rolled right over on us.”

On one of Harlan’s trips to the courtroom, he was being led into the elevator when he ran into Lou, accompanied by prosecutors, on his way to testify. Harlan was dressed in corrections orange. Lou was in his civilian clothes, looking sharp as always, with a big smile on his face. “How are you doing?” Lou said. He looked Harlan in the eye and shook his hand. “Don’t worry, kid,” he said, just like in his coaching and Company days. “Hang in there.”

They got off on different floors. Harlan spent six more months on the ninth floor of the MCC and was then transferred to Terminal Island for the rest of his sentence. Lou walked out of the building and into the California sunshine.


The fallout from Lou and the other informants’ testimony was widespread. Many Company members and their associates did time. The Fort Lewis helicopter pilots were court-martialed. The Indians from Neah Bay were arrested. A third indictment came down in 1984, naming more suppliers and distributors; Conklin was disabling the Thai network, just as he had hoped. Eventually, more than one hundred people were indicted. Lou gave up many of them himself, even Kerrie’s brother Kent, who had worked with the Company on the beach. Some people, like Kent, spent just a few months in prison, others years.

The DEA raided DeMassa’s office, taking all his files, and eventually arrested him, charging him with harboring Bob Lahodny as a fugitive and 16 counts as a co-conspirator in the Company case. He went to trial in 1985. Facing 20 years, DeMassa pled guilty to three felonies and served six months in a halfway house.

Bob Lahodny went to trial in 1985. After 10 days—during which Lou, Dave, and Fuzzy all testified—Bob changed his plea to guilty and was sentenced to five years. He got out in 1989 but was arrested again that year, along with Ed Otero, after the two attempted another smuggling gig in Northern California.

Ed was serving his second sentence when he saved the life of a prison guard who was being held hostage by two armed prisoners, and was released early. Seven years in prison was enough to straighten him out. He moved to Palm Springs, started a legitimate—and successful—air-conditioning business, and bought himself a boat with his own hard-earned money.

Dave was released in 1983. He was relieved that he could see his family, but he knew he couldn’t go back to Coronado. He moved away and got into real estate. The first time Dave saw Lou after being arrested was on a plane to Maine, where they had both been subpoenaed to testify in a case related to the Little Machias Bay bust. Dave was still angry at Lou for informing on him before he turned state’s evidence himself. By the end of the flight, however, the two men were cracking tiny bottles of booze and rekindling their friendship. Other relationships, however, couldn’t be recovered. Lou never again saw Bob, Ed, Lance—or Kerrie. “What really hurt,” Kerrie says, “is that Lou never apologized.”

2013

The man who walked into the pizza place was barely recognizable as the tanned playboy I’d seen in pictures and newspaper articles. At age 76, he looked like a retiree, with white hair and a warm smile. “No one else besides the people who lived it has ever heard this story,” Lou Villar said.

Arranging the first meeting had been complicated, requiring the kind of cloak-and-dagger planning that Lou knew from the days of the Coronado Company. I showed up at the restaurant, waited, and was finally approached by Lou after I “checked out.” He was spry, fit, and still sharp as he jumped into a story that hadn’t been told in thirty years.

As I spent time with Lou, I could see the charming and charismatic man who had drawn so many people into his orbit at the Company. But I also saw the tragedy of his story. By the time we met, I had spoken with many who still felt the sting of his betrayal.

Lou himself served nearly two years in prison. After he was released, he was resentenced to a year of unsupervised probation. He managed to hold on to a bit of money, some of his furnishings from Hilton Head, and his wine collection.

Did Lou have regrets? He did. He’d testified against people he cared about. It was an agonizing decision, one he couldn’t rationalize away: “I told my story in exchange for freedom, and I’ll always have to live with that.” He hadn’t spoken to a reporter since 1985, shortly after he got out of prison. At the time, he said he regretted his Company days; they’d affected his family and destroyed most of his friendships. But things looked different to him now, with nearly three decades of perspective. “Those were lessons that had to be learned,” he told me.

He understood why his friends were angry. Still, he told himself, some of them could have taken a deal like he had. They had chosen to stick with honor among thieves, but Lou thought that was just a hollow criminal piety. Maybe that, in turn, was a hollow informant’s piety. But Lou now says that for him, time behind bars was an opportunity to accept defeat and learn how to live a legitimate life again. In his forties, he changed his name and started over. He was successful in his new career, he told me, but it wasn’t the same as the Coronado Company. “Then again,” he says, “what could be?”

When Lou and Dave spend time together now, their wives have forbidden them from talking about the halcyon days of the Company, because it can go on for hours. No matter how nostalgic he gets, Dave says he wouldn’t do it again. Lou says he would. The highs, the lows, the hard lessons—“those are the things,” he says, “that made my life.”

Lou Villar (Photo: Courtesy of Lou Villar)
Lou Villar (Photo: Courtesy of Lou Villar)

Epilogue

2013

 Ed Otero died in January 2013 of a heart attack while fishing for tuna off the coast of Mexico. “Ed rode the wave of life through the ’70s and early ’80s,” his obituary noted, “which included many adventures.”

 Dave Strather divorced, remarried, and raised his daughter. He still has one of the Company’s voice scramblers and can reproduce the Bornstein chart from memory.

 Bob Lahodny moved back to the San Diego area after his second prison term, got married, became a stockbroker, and lived, according to friends, “a festive and happy life” with his wife until they divorced. After that, Bob struggled to find his footing again. He died in 2010, from complications from hepatitis C, which he contracted while traveling in Asia.

 Lance Weber never got his performance-speedboat business off the ground. He moved back to Coronado and met a new girl, Deanna, whom he married a few years later. He invited Jim Conklin and other DEA agents to his wedding, where Conklin presented him with a pair of handcuffs in a shadowbox with an engraved plate reading, “Congratulations on Your Life Sentence!” Lance and Deanna had two children. He died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2000.

 Allan “Fuzzy” Logie made it through 10 years of probation without incident. He still rides motorcycles but had to stop surfing after he crashed his bike and injured his back. He remembers every mechanical upgrade he ever made to a vehicle.

 Al Sweeney received five years of probation and moved back to Coronado. He died of a brain hemorrhage in 1985.

 Don Kidd still runs his garage in Oregon, where he still specializes in the impossible. “It gets annoying,” he says. “People always bring me the shit they can’t fix.” He and Harlan Fincher have stayed friends, visiting each other every few years.

Harlan Fincher served four years in prison. When he returned to civilian life, he owed the government tens of thousands of dollars he didn’t have, on account of the IRS asset case against him, which made it hard for him to recover financially. Between that and his felony record, he had difficulty finding work that made use of his many talents. He married in 2006 and manages a ranch.

 Paul Acree disappeared before the initial Coronado Company arrests in 1981. None of the other Company veterans know where he is or if he is still alive.

 Phil DeMassa returned to law after his conviction; the California Bar Association did not pull his license, on the grounds that his crimes did not “involve moral turpitude.” Still, his practice never quite recovered. He died in a scuba-diving accident in 2012.

 James Conklin spent 26 years with the DEA and still admires the ingenuity of the Company. After finishing the CorCo case, he was given a plum assignment in Thailand, where he was tasked with taking on the Company’s supply at the source. He spent four years there, essentially eradicating the entire Thai stick trade. He retired in 2004 and moved to Las Vegas, where he started a private-investigation firm with his son.

 Jack Palladino and Sandra Sutherland are still private investigators and have worked on behalf of many high-profile clients since the Coronado affair, including John DeLorean, the auto executive charged with smuggling cocaine in 1982, Bill and Hillary Clinton during the 1992 presidential campaign, and Jeffrey Wigand, the tobacco-industry whistle-blower portrayed in the film The Insider. They now live and work in San Francisco’s Upper Haight neighborhood and are aided in their investigative efforts by their cat, Tipsy, who likes to sit on the files.

 Kerrie Kavanaugh took a few years to move beyond what she now calls “the follies of the early ’80s” and eventually went back to school to pursue her culinary interests. She worked as a chef on private yachts, where she met her husband, a ship’s captain. They moved to the Pacific Northwest and had a daughter.

Lou Villar hasn’t talked to Kerrie in 35 years, but he kept a copy of the poem he wrote her.