I was in the process of getting a divorce, and moved out of my apartment on Miami's Brickell Avenue to another one down the street. My new roommates were two girls I had met at a nearby club; they needed someone to share expenses, I needed a place to live until I sorted out my options.

But this was not your typical American city. Miami in 1979 was awash in a cocaine-driven economic frenzy, a never-ending story for me of nightclubs, disco, drugs, and copious consumption of alcoholic beverages ,and the town was about to experience two destabilising events:

• The Mariel Boat-lift, which brought 125,000 Cuban refugees headlong into a Miami ill-equipped to handle the flow, resulting in a crime wave the likes of which the city had never seen.
  

• The Liberty City riots, with 18 fatalities and 850 arrests, and which caused millions of dollars of property damage.
  

 In essence, a city in crisis, where law enforcement was totally unable to cope with an exploding drugs trade, complete with obscene profits looking for a safe harbour. I didn't know it yet, but I was soon to run headfirst into Miami's newest growth industry , the cocaine cowboys.

Fork in the road.
So there I was, at a turning point in my life, coming out of a stormy marriage, headed straight for an unknown future. Then, one of the young ladies who was my roommate took part in a major motorcycle race in Ohio, and ended up in a crash at high speed. After hospital, she called me from a friend's house in Miami's quiet Shenandoah district, advising that she was recuperating there in a spare bedroom, and would I please come over for a visit ? And that's how it all began.

William Baker, who let me in when I arrived at the house, was my exact age. also a Vietnam veteran, and had a great sense of humour. We hit it off immediately. His father was a minister at a church in suburban Miami, and Bill said he was a Spanish tutor. Curiously, I didn't saw him practise his profession.

 The house was a step backwards in time to an older Miami, complete with hardwood floors, a vestigial fireplace, many tropical accents, and ceiling fans slowly paddling away.  Colourful souvenirs of trips to exotic Caribbean and Latin American locales were hung everywhere. 

 I began to spend a considerable amount of time with Bill, his home, at clubs in Miami where reggae music was offered, in restaurants and bars, and we became close friends. He didn't seem to work much, but he lived a low-profile existence, more in line with small-town Florida than Miami Modern. His friends were a mixed bag of Americans, Cubans and Colombians, who all loved a good party, and not much else. Or so I thought.

The adventure begins.
A few months later, I was splitting up with a girlfriend of the moment, and needed a place to crash. Bill's spare bedroom was available; it was offered to me, and I accepted. What I was to learn later was that Bill was a broker, a point of contact between international smugglers and domestic distributors of cocaine and marijuana. His bicultural life and Cuban-accented Spanish, which came from living many years in eastern Cuba as a child, made this "gringo"  safe for  the scores of individuals who chose to deal forbidden fruit throughout the US and Canada, and needed a source for drugs.

On the other hand, Colombian suppliers known to Bill, who was himself no stranger to Colombia, found him to be honest, fair and patient, the qualities which most of the denizens of the drug trade singularly lack. His early successes generated a loyal clientele from Canada to California, people who would blow into town after dark, slip in the back door, examine kilograms of cocaine or samples of marijuana, and after negotiating and making their illicit purchases, covertly melt away faster than they arrived.

I honestly didn't understand Bill's true occupation when I moved in. Sure, there was plenty of mystery about his circle of friends, and visitors tended to regularly arrive from all parts of the US, but the picture began to emerge from what I was able to piece together. But it didn't bother me.

Miami madness.
At any time earlier in my structured life as a bank lawyer, I certainly would have quickly withdrawn from any association with participants in the drugs trade, but popular opposition to the draconian laws against possession and use of marijuana and powder was at an all-time high, a legacy of the 1960s. I was one of those who felt that these so-called "victimless" crimes were a needless governmental intrusion into personal privacy. Remember, this was just before the advent of "crack" cocaine, which has destroyed countless families, and was in large part responsible for the surge in the US prison population in the 1980s and 1990s.

The alienation that I and most of the Vietnam generation felt with what we regarded as a government more interested in protecting big business than individual rights also contributed to my participation in what was by then an obvious criminal subculture. Young Vietnam veterans often seemed to be on the fringes of society, even when they were gainfully employed, and the country still hadn't fully recovered from the effects of the fifteen-year Indochina War.

The first client.
Living with ongoing narcotics trafficking in progress all around me,  it was probably inevitable that some of the people involved would turn to me for advice. The initial client, Mark Blacker was a colorful type; son of a Hollywood producer, he dropped out of secondary school during the early Sixties to see the world, and ended up as the manager of the legendary New York nightclub, the Electric Circus. 

After spending some time in Morocco, Blacker became a licensed ship's captain, plying the triangle route between Miami, Cap Haitian and Grand Turk. Along the way, he  lived for a time in Bogota and picked up a Colombian wife and fluency in the Spanish language. In his travels, he saw many mariners had become millionaires through the modern day piracy of drug trafficking, and he was jealous of their wealth and exploits.

When I met Mark, he was a yacht captain on a research vessel owned by a wealthy American businessman who had been US Ambassador to Jamaica under President Ford. His successful importation of high-octane  Jamaican marijuana whilst on a trip inspired him to become a full-time smuggler of what fisherman called " square grouper, " or marijuana.

Borrowing $5000 from one friend, and a small sailboat from another, he and a crew handpicked from among Fort Lauderdale's sailors for hire, he smuggled premium marijuana into South Florida. That was the start of a $ 200m narcotics trafficking enterprise which would not be taken down by US law enforcement for eight years.

Why did these clients come to me for advice in the first place ? It so happened that I had hands-on experience in the tax havens of the Caribbean. In part 3, we explore that tale.