His perspective on drug smuggling was unique; he thought he was selling an ordinary commodity, like potatoes, he would say,  and that nobody should be uptight about the stress of the business. I have to give him credit for audacity; In his prime, he was Miami's biggest cocaine smuggler.

A Parisian who, along with his sister, was orphaned by the Holocaust, he had lived for a time in Vancouver, where he formed a nautical company known as Boats from Asia-to-America. The firm imported Chinese junks from Taiwan, which came across the Pacific, dismasted on the decks of large freighters . These junks, whilst transiting the Panama Canal on their long journey, picked up some additional cargo not exactly on the manifest; cocaine. After clearing customs in Miami, the new owners acquired a bit more than a new ship from the Orient. The were end recipients of hundreds of kilograms of a very valuable commodity.

George was nothing if not bold; soon I was forming charter company after charter company in Anguilla for him and his partners, and registering vessels in Cardiff (but through British Dependent Territories), all designed to disguise the true nature of his business. By the time the paperwork reached the UK, the vessel had already be used for a criminal adventure, and was either abandoned, or re-registered in another jurisdiction. 

His narcoprofits came to me for laundering. Each Thursday, I would dress up like a tourist, complete with Hawaiian print shirt, and purchase a ticket, for cash , shortly before the Miami-St. Maarten flight left at 1745. With hundreds of thousands of dollars on my person, or dispersed amongst my carry-on bag clothing, I would stroll through the metal detector, and onto the Caribbean-bound aircraft with all the other gamblers and honeymooners.

For a long time, I was a regular weekly passenger aboard the water taxi from Marigot, in French St. Martin, to the jetty in Blowing Point, Anguilla. US Dollars would be exchanged there for New York drafts, cheques drawn upon the Anguilla bank's New York correspondent account. George would have those instruments couriered to a bearer-share corporate account in Panama City. Later, the money would travel to the Republic of China and France.

In this business, all good things must come to an end, eventually. in George's case it was the seizure of a boat in the Miami River. After Customs had bored through to a hidden compartment, its agents found $12m worth of cocaine on board.

The captain, Pierre, also a client of mine, was granted immunity from prosecution to testify against George. Obviously, I could not allow that to happen, so I objected unless he also received immunity from the french government. This is a legal impossibility, but neither the US prosecutors nor the judge knew this at the time. We took the opportunity of a 12-hour court recess to allow Pierre to quietly leave the country  to get out of the reach of US courts. It was to be my only experience in escaping law enforcement surveillance by existing the courthouse via the basement judges' parking area, so that I could slip out of the country on other laundering business. As I boarded the daily flight to St. Maarten, I saw Pierre, out of the corner of my eye, boarding the evening flight to Panama City.


George fled to China, just ahead of an indictment for cocaine trafficking. Several members of his organisation were not so lucky, and they were taken into custody by the authorities. George later smartly moved to Europe, knowing that the French government generally declines to extradite its own nationals, and that he was safe so long as he stayed in France.

One client of mine, who owed George a large sum of money, delivered $ 50,000 to me, as a payment on account. A neighbor of George's, who had been arrested in the Bahamas on a drug charge, was cooperating with the DEA. He contacted me and asked me to deliver the funds, so that they could be transferred to George overseas. Fortunately, there was a delay, and I returned the funds before he could pick them up. I later heard all this on tape, as I was clearly the target of a sting, and would have been arrested the moment I turned over the cash. 

Several months later, George made the fatal mistake of crossing over the French border, into the Northern Italian city of Genoa, where he was summarily arrested by INTERPOL. I was to visit him in an Italian prison more than 13 times during the next year, and to travel on to Paris each time to brief the family on the status of the Miami case.

The other members of the gang were tried in Miami, but the case ended in a mistrial when the daughter of one of the defendants was paralyzed in an accident. This gave the lawyers representing George a close look at the evidence. It was to make a critical difference when the case was tried again.

Ultimately, George was extradited to Miami for trial, and his counsel began to prepare.  A guilty verdict would most likely bring a long term of imprisonment.

NEXT WEEK:  Can the lawyers obtain a verdict of not guilty with 600 kilos of cocaine on the table, and if not, where does that leave me ?