“The young policeman walked me to the edge of the bush and he was soon through and returned to the car and began to empty the trash. “They (the police) were decent enough, stopped and bought me a meat pie and a drink at a roadhouse,” he writes. On that journey, Reaves said he was presented with his first opportunity to escape, just like he had in Spain and Germany earlier in his career. He also details how after a calamitous final journey to the WA coast, he and his accomplices scuttled their boat The White Dove, then ferried almost a tonne of cocaine ashore on dinghies before being arrested at gunpoint and driven to Geraldton by police. In Reaves’ book Smuggler he describes how he personally earned $US7 million in just months at the height of the trade and was so influential that Escobar built him a 1000ft (304m) runway in the South American jungle to pick up tonnes of cocaine. He also describes how he met and later hired pilot Barry Seal to fly tonnes of cocaine around the world, landing at a small airfield in Mena, Arkansas, where a politician called Bill Clinton was the state’s governor.Īfter Seal was arrested, tried and convicted, he became an informant for US authorities until his murder by Colombian assassins in 1986.Ī Hollywood film of Seal’s life is in production with Tom Cruise in the lead role. That business flew hundreds of massive stashes of marijuana, hashish and cocaine into the US and sailed 20-tonne shipments from Pakistan to Thailand. Reaves reveals how he was closely associated in the 1980s with the Medellin cartel led by notorious Colombian drug lords Ochoa and Escobar. In 2002, Reaves was sentenced to a minimum of 14 years after pleading guilty, but that was increased to a minimum of 18 years on appeal - a big portion of which has been spent writing a memoir, which is now on sale. The plan was to offload the cocaine before hauling it in a caravan to Sydney.īut Federal agents and customs officers had been monitoring the boat as it sailed into Australian waters and pounced. Reaves was one of the people behind what remains one of Australia’s biggest drug seizures when in July 2001, the massive shipment of cocaine - valued at $400 million and twice as big as Australia's previous biggest seizure - was brought ashore on the isolated beach near Steep Point. But he still says he does not consider himself much of a criminal.
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