Roger Reaves Flew Cocaine for Escobar. He Says the Money Was Never Worth It

Lex Fridman opens with a guest unlike the scientists and engineers who usually sit across from him. Roger Reaves is, in the eyes of the law, a criminal: one of the most prolific drug smugglers in history, a pilot who worked for Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa of the Medellín Cartel and who employed Barry Seal, the smuggler later played by Tom Cruise in *American Made*. Reaves never took part in the violence. His crime was transport. Fridman lays out the scale of the American war on drugs since 1971: about $1 trillion spent, 500,000 people in prison on drug charges, 1.1 million on probation or parole, and a marijuana-legalization dividend he puts at $13.7 billion a year, enough to send more than 650,000 students to public universities.

Sitting across from Reaves, Fridman says he saw a complicated man with kindness in his heart, a love of money and adventure, and a disdain for violence. He cannot shake the thought that society wants to label this man a criminal while worse men get a pass, even power, even political office. He compares his own role as interviewer to Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin: a person who looks for the good in people, gets hurt by it, and may be destroyed by it. He is not naive, he says, but he is optimistic, and he wants listeners to understand that he comes from a place of love.

Asked what motivated him — money, power, the thrill, or something else — Reaves answers with one word: money. Fridman presses. Was there a point at which he had more than he could spend? Reaves compares it to a Las Vegas slot machine dumping gold coins while you sweep them into bags. When would you let go? He admits there was a lot of thrill, sometimes too much. The money bought seven farms, an option on the land where Moreno Valley, California now sits, the most expensive coin in the world, yachts, ships, and airplanes. It did not bring happiness. "I think I'm happier now. I know I'm happier now."

Would he do it the same way again, even for the thrill? "No way." It was not worth 33 years in prison away from his family. The power of being chased by governments and police while doing whatever he wanted came with a cost he does not romanticize. He had to look over his shoulder everywhere he went, and he would not talk on a phone until he was sure he was safe — he jokes you had to be naked in the ocean first. That, he says, is rather uncomfortable.

Meeting Pablo Escobar, Reaves says, felt like sitting with a gentleman. He had already flown one load for another man; the recipient was shot, the plane was shorted on kilos, and the money was slow, so he refused to work with that contact again. He was introduced instead to Jorge Ochoa. In Envigado a gate opened onto a yard with about fifty men working a hitching rail at an old house. A striking woman made coffee, and Reaves was ushered in to Ochoa, who spoke English, shook hands, and was friendly. On the desk sat twelve telephones, each a different color. Each one, Ochoa said, represented a city in the United States. This is Chicago. This is New York. When a phone rang, he knew who was calling.

Ochoa asked about airplanes and border experience, then called the woman back. Pablo Escobar came in from next door and asked the same questions. Reaves asked what they paid. Five thousand dollars a kilo to haul it. How much on the plane? Three hundred to five hundred kilos. That is $1.5 million to $2.5 million for an eight-hour trip. "Sounded pretty good to me." Fridman asks the obvious next question: was he scared? These were some of the most dangerous men in the world. Reaves says not at all. He knew he would do exactly what he said he would do. Marie and the children were in a five-star hotel, treated royally, held as security to confirm he was not a DEA agent. He calls them hostages only in the insurance sense. They were never mistreated.

The money, he says, was ironed, banded, and never once short. Fridman wants to know why people at that level did not shave the top, lie, and inject chaos. Reaves's answer is that certain people at the top of the food chain do not need to. If they are honest, they do not have to remember the lie they told. They were already making as much as he was. Honesty, in that world, was cheaper than memory.

Reaves's account of how the Medellín Cartel formed is the episode's clearest piece of business analysis. He says about 10,000 people were killed every year in Medellín before the organization existed. The problem was not a lack of product. It was a lack of structure. A man with ten kilos who wanted them in New York would ask a friend; the friend would promise a pilot; the load would vanish in a New Jersey bust; and the friend would say he was sorry. Then, bang bang, the friend was dead. Jorge Ochoa, his brothers, Escobar, and Gacha decided they would run an insurance company. The fee was $10,000 a kilo to take the load to a Miami contact. If it was lost anywhere between the handoff in Colombia and delivery to the buyer's man, they would replace it in Colombia. Nobody had to lose.

He says he heard they piled up 100 tons under that program, and he was there the first day, so he never lacked work. He would land and ask when they wanted him back. "We waiting on you, señor." Fridman asks how Reaves sees Escobar: brutal murderer or Robin Hood who helped the poor. Both, Reaves says. He thinks Escobar started out wanting to help the poor. Then the country split roughly three ways among the military, the FARC guerrillas, and the right-wing landowners Reaves was dealing with, and the killings became reciprocal. When he later heard Escobar had blown up an airliner and killed women and children, he was sorry he had ever shaken his hand. That, he says, is brutal murder. Looking back, Escobar was not a good man at all.

Could he be a bad man and a man you can trust? Absolutely, Reaves says. In business he was reliable, honest, and made Reaves feel safe. They flew to Escobar's ranch, rode motorcycles — Reaves dropped a front wheel in a ditch Escobar already knew was there and slid twenty feet while Escobar nearly fell off his bike laughing — then rode horses and pretended to round up cows. Escobar hung a Mac-10 over Reaves's shoulder and asked if he knew how to use it. Reaves's private thought: you have ten bodyguards, what do you need me for? They laughed, talked, and drove cows over stumps. The afternoon and the airliner lived in the same man.

Ochoa, in Reaves's telling, was the brains and a gentleman who had run a restaurant. Duffel bags of cocaine came marked with three horns, a rattlesnake, or four X's so the owners could be sorted on arrival. Fridman cannot quite accept the lack of betrayal in a violent, greedy business. Reaves says he saw none. The math made betrayal pointless. Five hundred kilos at a $50,000 wholesale price, $5,000 to ship, another $5,000 for the organizers who never touched the load: untold millions, no reason to steal from one another. Carlos Lehder, running a Bahamas route Reaves declined, talked too much and was disliked. Greed was not absent. At the top, it was already satisfied.

Colombia was ultra-violent. How did he survive? He says he was treated as a hero and an honored guest. He would come over El Banco, pick up a radio station he remembers as 720 AM at the forks of the Magdalena, fly in at 10,000 feet, spot a Cessna below, wiggle his wings, and follow it a hundred or two hundred miles to a jungle strip or banana plantation. They fueled him, fed him steaks, and let him leave in the morning whenever he wanted. It was nothing like the movie version with a gun to the head and a bet over sunglasses. Once he complained to Aurelio Ochoa that a runway was too short. He went back a week later and it looked like Los Angeles International: bulldozers, 5,000 feet, jungle gone, clay down and drying. He was not afraid there. He was afraid when he landed in the United States.

The first load was marijuana in a Cessna 182, flown to Jalapa, Veracruz. The town looked like Bible times to him: women washing clothes in stone basins in a stream. He walked into a Catholic church with carved Stations of the Cross, came home, and told Marie about it until he almost cried. At 3 a.m. a guard stopped him on the taxiway; Reaves, then a firefighter in Redondo Beach, California, showed his department badge, got a handshake, and loaded about 400 pounds. On the way north he had the only case of vertigo in his flying life, the mountains at 30 or 40 degrees and the Milky Way overhead, and he wanted the airplane level with the stars. Headwinds kept him from a dry-lake fuel cache. He landed on a tiny strip, hid the load in a caved-in house with a boy named Lazarus herding goats, flew to town for fuel, and came back with lunch. He still wonders where the boy is.

The amateur mistake, he says, is not stopping at the Mexican border for a six-month permit. With the paper you are welcome in fishing villages and little towns; without it you go straight to jail. For years he crossed near Mexicali by faking a landing at Calexico after dark, dropping to about 170 feet below sea level over the Salton Sea, and caching the load under a Joshua tree at 29 Palms. When Operation Starlight started catching pilots, he switched to Beech 18s, refueled at Mulegé, and used a goat ranch twenty miles from the nearest road, where a man named Juan hid marijuana under the trees. Then he would fly 200 miles off Guadalupe Island, another 300 over the Pacific, and come in low behind the Santa Barbara Islands. The hardest part was not the flying. It was getting good marijuana, and landing on strips that were unworthy of an airplane.

He landed on highways most of his working life. At Pichilingue a 900-foot sand strip in a river bend was too short to take off loaded, so a young man named Pedro, maybe 120 pounds, would ride with him to a highway. A two-ton truck with a machine gun would block the road, another a mile away, and a bucket brigade would load the plane while cars stacked up — once including a highway patrol car with its lights off. In Louisiana, a unfinished Mississippi River bridge had left a detour with flashing red lights and swamp on both sides. Twenty-foot trees grew in the middle. To Reaves it was an international runway. He landed there again and again, using the red lights as end-of-runway markers, and in the morning they would scrub his tire marks off the highway before daylight.

Reaves met Barry Seal by accident. The family had been looking at a ranch in Honduras as a halfway place in Central America. Their clothes were at the cleaners in San Pedro Sula and were not ready; Reaves sent Marie and the children to the airport on standby and went back for the laundry. He arrived to see a new 727 taxiing out, waved, saw Marie's face in the cockpit, and watched the pilot drop the nose, laugh, and extend the stairs — then pull them back like a hitchhiker teasing a pickup. The cabin clapped when he boarded with a pile of clothes. The plane was full. Their daughter Miriam, about nine, sat in the middle seat. By the window was a stranger with clear blue eyes. After the autopilot clicked on at 5,000 feet, the man asked if Reaves flew these things, introduced himself as Barry Seal, and reached across Miriam to shake hands. Reaves thought he looked like CIA or FBI and did not believe a word until they deplaned in New Orleans and an old mother, a wife, and little children hung on Seal, crying. Then Reaves handed him a scrap of paper with their address. He might have some work.

Seal had just gotten out of prison that morning after a year for 100 kilos of cocaine, caught in Honduras, probably refueling. He had been a TWA pilot, had done time earlier for flying explosives to anti-Castro Cubans, and had lost his airline job. Reaves later learned he was ex-CIA, a protégé of George H. W. Bush, with a thousand parachute jumps. Seal flew to Santa Barbara, stayed at their house, and Reaves offered him an almost-new Aero Commander 690B. He regrets the invitation. At 10,000 feet Seal wrung the airplane out like a Blue Angels pilot, then cut the engines and did a falling leaf, the only other time Reaves had seen that maneuver from Bob Hoover at an air show. Reaves's knuckles were white on the seat. He was not a wild man, Reaves says. He was skilled. He knew what he was doing.

Reaves needed 2,500 miles of range for Colombia-to-Louisiana work. Seal said he knew someone in Mena, Arkansas who would tank the plane and keep their mouth shut. The conversion, from firewall back, with Q-tip four-blade propellers, was a CIA design from Southeast Asia for flying behind the lines — which is how Seal knew it. Reaves hired him at $2,000 a kilo, about a million dollars a trip, paid before Seal would go again, while Reaves himself waited two or three weeks for money to come back from Chicago and New York. A million in hundred-dollar bills, Reaves says, weighs 22 pounds, ten kilos, and fits in a large briefcase; in ones it is a ton, and they would not take ones. He estimates Seal flew about 30 loads for him. They were close enough to share a hotel room in Coral Gables, Seal in striped undershorts feeding baby Rick a bottle on his belly. Reaves calls him a wonderful man, a Southern gentleman everyone loved, always with a little smile.

Seal refused to land at Reaves's paid-off Louisiana strip. He said he could not get caught in Mena, Arkansas, and it would cost $50,000 every time the wheels touched the ground. He claimed he was hooked up to the very top and that he was having dinner with the governor that night: Bill Clinton. Fridman pushes back. Conspiracy theories stick whether or not they are true, and worry about a theory is not proof. Reaves says he never paid Clinton any money. He did pay $1.5 million for Seal to land at Mena, which is why he believed the place was safe. "I can't get caught in Colombia. We can't get caught in Nicaragua. I guess we got license." After Reaves was arrested and sentenced to 35 years, Seal kept flying because he knew the unloaders. Reaves says Seal collected money owed, gave it to Marie, and sent in Albert Krieger, then head of the national defense team.

Not long after Reaves got out of prison, Ronald Reagan appeared on television at breakfast: absolute proof, the president said, that the Sandinista government was in the cocaine business. On screen was a fat-bellied C-123 on a runway. Reaves recognized Seal's plane. Northbound flights had been refueling at a Nicaraguan military strip used by crop dusters, a shortcut Escobar and Ochoa had arranged. If that aircraft was on American television, Seal was feeding the DEA. The phone rang. Seal, silent for a couple of years, said he was coming to Santa Barbara that night. Reaves met him in a French restaurant full of women in plastic and leather skirts. He asked if Seal was wired. Seal said no, then added that everyone in the room was DEA. Reaves sat down in jeans and told him to talk.

Seal, in Reaves's reconstruction, had been left holding the bag. CIA friends had been pretending to supply the Contras; the return flights could bring cocaine by the ton. Oliver North was in the mix. When it blew, Reaves says, those friends fled. Seal had belly-landed with a ton and a half on a Nicaraguan runway under cameras, flown back to Homestead with an agent, and gone to Attorney General Edwin Meese with proof that cocaine was coming into the United States by the ton. Meese paired him with an agent. Tears ran between Seal's fingers. He said he could not do three life sentences, so he had told Congress everything, including Reaves — who was "under my umbrella" and would have to testify to a Miami grand jury. The alternative, a DEA agent said, was first class with Marie tomorrow, or chains. If he did not testify, the only place he would see his family again was a federal visiting room.

Reaves's guts felt like ice water. He could not testify against people who had been honest with him. A top Miami lawyer told him being a snitch is like being pregnant: you are or you are not. The lawyer did not represent snitches, but would fight the case for $600,000. If Reaves signed and did not tell everything, they would convict him of everything he had ever done. He did not tell Seal he would refuse. He warned him they would kill him, hugged him, and took Marie and the children to Brazil. He did not call the cartel. It was understood. All eleven of his own friends later testified against him on a continuing-criminal-enterprise charge that carried life. He still would not do it. From Brazil he called about $3.5 million he was owed. A week later the voice on the phone had great news: Barry Seal had been killed. Reaves went back to the hotel and cried with Marie and Miriam.

He knew the killer. On his first cocaine load, on a muddy banana-plantation strip, they had put 300 kilos on the plane and then put in the ugliest man Reaves had ever seen, a man named Ronaldo with a Mac-10, to make sure the load reached Louisiana. Mud packed the wheel wells; the gear would not retract; speed fell from 300 to 200. Reaves said they had to land in Belize for fuel. Ronaldo put the gun on him. Reaves told him to go ahead: he would die too. That man, Reaves says, later killed Seal and is doing life in Louisiana. He has heard the younger Ochoa brother, Fabio, ordered the hit. As for *American Made*, Reaves calls it disgustingly wrong: a rocking-chair fantasy of a baby-bashing dealer, written by people who never met Seal and who missed that the work was a business, good people, good airplanes, a watch that just clicked. *Blow*, about George Jung, who was flying marijuana out of Manhattan Beach while Reaves was on the fire department ten miles away, he thought captured it. Jung, he notes, was not shot down twice, did not escape five prisons, and was not tortured nearly to death.

The torture story starts at a hotel pool. A man shook Reaves's hand and put handcuffs on him. A pilot had come to see him in Hermosillo, landed on the international runway by mistake, and been caught with Reaves's phony name in his pocket. The first cell held about 18 people in a 12-foot square with an overflowing bucket. After three days they moved him to a box maybe five feet square and twelve feet high, at the end of June, in Mexican heat. They ducked his head in water with seltzer or something like it; one whiff and three or four men could not hold him. He learned to tear loose just before he had to breathe. Then they beat him with blackjacks and rubber hoses until he was black, blue, and yellow from the soles of his feet to his head.

They were not asking him to snitch. They wanted him to sign a confession that he was a drug smuggler. Sign, and it would all be over — and he knew the signature meant six years. He would not sign. They stripped him, bent him with chains, put butter on him, and packed in hot chili peppers. He says it was red hot and awful. His calculation was grim and stubborn: if you hurt badly enough you pass out, and he did not pass out, so he was all right. He adds that if he had known they meant to kill him, he might not have held. They had not told him that.

The last trick was a corpse. The man was frozen, wrapped in half-inch newspaper strips like a mummy, and hung on the wall with a meat hook. "You next, son of a bitch." As the body thawed it looked as if it were crying, then urinating; the paper unraveled; formaldehyde puddled on the floor. The smell was rotten insides and formalin. There was a gap less than half an inch under the door. Reaves lay on the filthy floor, cheek down, lips at the crack, sucking air from the corridor, and eventually slept. He saw pink-white pigs with wings. When he woke he could not tell the nightmare from the cell. Fridman asks how he stayed mentally strong. Reaves is not sure he did. He was stubborn. He figured they would not keep him there forever — into the general prison or out — but if he signed the paper he was going nowhere. He wanted to go home.

A few weeks before the torture he had been shot out of the sky at Pichilingue, a poor village of starving donkeys and a 900-foot strip. He had been paying $17,000 a load and flying one a day for thirteen days. On the thirteenth morning a warning went off in his stomach. Joaquin told him the federales were paid off. He slept in a hammock, walked to the plane at first light with ten or twelve men, and Pedro climbed in. He brushed his teeth in a foot-deep stream, fired the engine, and heard bangs he took for a blown tire. Pedro was yelling *policía*. Reaves firewalled the throttle with half the strip already behind him, rotated at about 50 miles an hour with flaps down, and as the wheels left the ground machine guns opened from both sides. The windshield came out. Gasoline poured in and the world turned yellow. A round hit the strut by his head and peppered him with fragments. He thought he had been hit three times. He was nicked: toenail, scalp, kneecap, and a slug that stayed in his foot.

He thought the elevator cable had been shot away; the airplane was stalled and the stick was flapping. He cut mags, mixture, everything, and aimed at a river of table-sized rocks leading to a waterfall. The first impact took the wings off. The second drove the nose under. Pedro shook him conscious. Four federales were still shooting. Reaves ripped a 9mm Browning Hi-Power off the top of the radio, where he kept it taped, fired a few rounds, and the police took cover in the rocks. Pedro's ankle was blown through and barely bleeding from shock. They ran uphill through cactus, found a swaybacked village donkey Pedro knew, and rode it seven miles with no bridle or saddle to a man plowing with a horse and an ox. The wife and daughter packed the wounds and poured diesel on them to keep the flies off. After dark, fifteen or twenty horses arrived with a Red Cross doctor who gave morphine and tetanus shots and said Pedro would die without a hospital. They were looking for a shot-down American pilot they believed was already dead; there had been too much blood in the plane. Reaves rode in a corn truck, buried in ears of corn that covered his face on every bump, then south in a Mazatlán taxi to Guadalajara, propped on sheets and given large white pain pills. He says he was quite content.

Colombia was a different shoot-down. He was in a DC-3 that carried three tons. They arrived too early; guerrillas screamed at them to leave; they retreated, refueled, and waited for dusk so military aircraft could not see the strip. Reaves was in a hammock when two jets climbed vertically, dived the field, and tore up the DC-3 with .50-caliber fire. He had just handed a man $80,000. That man ran for a truck. Reaves ran for the airplane. Copilot Al and two men in back got in with drums of fuel. He took off so fast he left the gear pins in, big flags on the struts, so the wheels would not retract. The jets boxed him and gestured a heading. He held up a peace sign. He did not think they would shoot; nobody had. They started putting 20mm under him, tracers seeming to curve up. He pushed the nose over so they could not get below him. Later he heard they thought he had tried to ram them.

One jet left to refuel. The other shot up the left wingtip and the tail. He landed in a rough pasture, jumped out, pulled the pins, and took off again. During the 1980 World Series, he later heard, a broadcast said an American DC-3 had been shot down in Reagan's new war on drugs — then that it was up and away. He climbed a thunderstorm to 20,000 feet, icing up, and every time he popped out the jet was waiting on radar. He kicked the DC-3 into a spin, came out at 2,000 feet, and flew the Guaviare River twenty feet above the water. He beat down three- and four-foot grass with several passes, then landed a 30,000-pound airplane on the fifth run. It broke through the crust, stood on its nose at 90 degrees, and poured fuel on hot engines. There was no fire. He stepped out the top hatch with his suitcase. The two in back had to shimmy down on tied fuel hoses; one had a broken thumb. He walked eleven days through jungle rather than take the road to prison, asking Indigenous people *dónde está avión*, hoping to steal a plane. He came out at what looked like Honolulu in World War II: Missionary Aviation Fellowship's Amazon headquarters. He had learned to fly wanting to be one of those pilots. They flew him out.

Reaves escaped prison five times. The spectacular one was in Spain. Handcuffed, he ran across a third-floor courtroom, kicked out a window, looked down past palm trees for a power line, found none, and jumped 31 feet onto a station wagon. The car exploded in the street; the windshield went over three or four cars like snow. He says he looked like Donald Duck, still cuffed, and ran until a policeman hit him in the back with a shotgun. He still has a dead spot there. Marie was in the courtroom. People told her her husband was crazy. The miraculous one, he says, was Lübeck, a German maximum-security prison, on the eve of extradition to the United States and 25 years of special parole. Cleaning a lawyer's visiting room, he had twenty minutes and a rope from a boat-making inmate. Decorative bars like piano notes had a little extra gap. He twisted them together with a cut-off broom handle, climbed scaffolding on a window renovation to the fourth floor, lost his shirt and most of his skin going through, and lay on the roof with asthma and no inhaler, bleeding.

They were extending the outer wall and had taken the wire off a sally port. A guard dome stuck out of the brick, manned by someone trained to kill him. In pouring rain he watched the guard's wife and small son come under a double umbrella. He knew her. When she started back he dropped onto the tower roof with both feet, then jumped another three floors into a cone of excavated sand and sank to his knees without falling. He ran toward her so the guard could not shoot, then downhill through bushes as shots started. The woman chased him in a car, knocking down parking meters, tearing a fender, screaming with what he calls a terrible face. He went over a wall topped with embedded glass, cut his hands and arms, and landed in farm muck that took his shoes — and the $200 Marie had smuggled in, which he had kept in those shoes. He made it to Holland.

American prisons, he says, are awful, evil places, especially on the West Coast, with hatred in the guards and very stupid people hired. He speaks Spanish; the Spanish TV room told him he could not come in. The Black section told the white boy to get out. The white section wanted paperwork and barred snitches and gay men. Fridman hears the loss of basic humanity. Reaves agrees, completely, including in the guards. One yelled for him, then stuck out a chin and told him to get out of his face, as if inviting a broken jaw. It did not break Reaves's joyful nature. He tried to enjoy each day wherever he was: ran to "help me suffer these fools," played chess, read two books a week, and told stories and poems until men asked for ones he had not told. He agrees with the *Shawshank Redemption* line about walls. He could not even see them except when he was planning to leave.

Australia was the exception and, for a year, the low point. In a Silent-of-the-Lambs-style isolation unit, five or six guards watched him through one-way glass. He had a life sentence and more time waiting in Germany. That is when he thought he might never get out. A computer in the cell had no programs on it. He wrote his life, more than a million words, under their eyes. After a year they moved him to Self Care, a lifers' area of 268 men: four apartments to a building, six men to a unit, their own door and key, kitchen, freezer, $360 a week for groceries. He cooked for about 16 years. It was more like living with men than like prison. Coming home to Los Angeles, three marshals slammed him into a wall, cinched cuffs until they cut, and put him in isolation for more than six months over a 1977 marijuana parole matter. A man in a suit opened the Judas window, said he had seen Reaves on National Geographic, and that keeping him in isolation gave him pleasure. A $7,500 lawyer never called. After a missed hearing and a Con Air transfer in a black box, a case manager emailed a request and parole came the next day. His last year, during COVID, with eight dead in his unit, he would not come out to shower. He says he was treated worse that year in America than in the whole twenty in Australia. He was released in April 2020.

Fridman reads from Reaves's memoir: he does not consider himself much of a criminal. He does not lie, cheat, or steal; he takes up for the underdog; violence makes him sick; and he knows he is an outlaw who must be punished. What does he say to people who see him as a man who increased the world's suffering? That they have been indoctrinated by news and politicians. Put the truth beside the falsehood, he says, and it is staggering. He was a tobacco farmer. Tobacco, he says, kills 500,000 people a year in America and leaves 6 million with debilitating disease. All drugs combined, in his figures, kill 10,000 to 15,000 a year by overdose, 60 percent of them pharmaceutical. "Come sit on the front pew, Mr. Reeves. You are a gentleman. You just joined the Masonic Lodge, and you joined our church." Grow two marijuana plants: get out, you scumbag. Marijuana, he says, does not hurt anybody. That is the truth of it as he sees it.

He walked near violence and says he did not even see it in the smuggling years. In prison he did. Inmates called him Doc; he sewed people with dental floss. He fired at the federales to keep them from killing him, not to kill them. In isolation, three men stabbed another until blood ran under the door; Reaves yelled that they were going to kill him and dragged the man where guards could see. Some people, he believes, are born evil. He is not of that nature. Fridman says the disappearance of basic humanity in American prisons is heartbreaking, because that humanity is the light at the end of the tunnel. Reaves's reform picture is specific. Prisons are filled with people who have some degree of mental trouble. A DEA agent who wants a name gets one of them to sell two grams of meth to another; a young prosecutor wants to become a judge; a judge talks about a million years. Fools in charge fill prisons with pitiful humanity.

Drugs, he argues, should be a health issue. You cannot police them enough. The overdoses that kill are opioids, and he puts the cost of a worst-case addict's daily dose at about a dollar — but the system prefers methadone from a pharmaceutical company, which he calls just as bad. Portugal and England, he says, showed that when people can get clean supply, stolen-car numbers fall. Who wants to keep the farce going? Every little police department getting armor and machine guns. He is not sure all drugs should be legalized. He is sure they should be controlled. An addict should be able to go somewhere, get a fix, a clean needle, and a glass of orange juice. It is cheaper than prison, cheaper than stolen cars, cheaper than a woman having to go to work as a prostitute. He finds that sad.

Young people ask how to live. If he had it over, he would have paid attention in school and gone as far as he could. He wanted to be a doctor and lacked stickability, and nobody told him to go do that. Learn a trade young, anything, and do it well: there is great demand. For prisons, take a young thief and send him to carpentry, plumbing, electrical work; when he has an A+ and can make $30 or $50 an hour, send him home. He can waste ten years or finish in two. For a life: find somebody and be true to them. Be honest. He notes 500,000 children in American foster care, and that his daughter, a doctor, delivered a baby from a ten-year-old while four generations sat in the waiting room on welfare. It reminds him of Elvis's "In the Ghetto." Learn a trade. Find someone to love who loves you. Have a family and stick with it. Get angry, get disappointed, and make up before you sleep. Fridman laughs: he has done half of that, and is working on the second half.

Marie joins late. In the 1960s her parents summered at Turkey Point on Lake Erie. She was on a pier in a bathing suit when a figure walked up in black trousers, white shirt, tie, and a straw Panama hat. She invited him to sit. They talked for a long time, then moved to the beach. The next time she saw him he was talking to another girl, and she thought, next. Six months later a letter arrived. They wrote everything, as people did then. The following summer he was on his way to Alaska and asked to stop. He reached for her hand. She reached back. "Love at first touch." A silence; they did not even look at each other. She had not wanted to marry, not for a long time, and had not wanted children. She wanted to see the world first. That was it.

How did the smuggling change the love? It remained steadfast, she says, and endured. Since he has been home they have rekindled what they had when they met. She credits faith, letters — he never complained — and a life in which he never mistreated her. She missed him physically. They were strong in spirit and could talk. When he walked out a free man he cried for three days. She had cooked on the old oak table he had refinished, same chairs, green placemats, same china and silver, same paintings. After 35 years she had his clothes cleaned and his shoes shined. He put the shoes on, walked out, and the soles came off. The shirts still fit. Then the photographs: her 50th, 60th, 70th birthdays, and he was not there. On the third day he told himself to quit with the tears. Does he regret the smuggling that took him from her? "One hundred percent." He did it for money, and he had everything in the world he wanted before he started.

The first load paid $10,000, about two years' take-home on the fire department. He brought it home; she put her hand over her mouth. They went to their usual little restaurant and he told her not to look at the right-hand side of the menu. They were giddy. She thought she was bulletproof. If they did not catch you, especially in the air, you were all right. She did not know that a friend telling on you five years later would still send you to prison. She asked him to walk away. He said he could not, not just now. Then came the people he supported, the gifts, the deals, and the problem of what to do with money that everyone recognized. You try to clean it or put it in a business, and they know the source and take it. Every one of them. Before he started he had asked a lawyer, $100 on the table, what would happen if he were caught with no record, not even a ticket, and a fire-department job. Probation, the lawyer said; worst case a year, maybe four months raking leaves on a military base. He told his mother. She asked if he needed a co-pilot.

What makes a relationship last? Marie says the first igniting is the love fire, and you cannot put it out, but it gets difficult. She endured the prison years through faith in God, friends who still loved her, and children who gave her a purpose. Reaves says you have to work on it. They fight. They do not let it last overnight. They are the same and very different. She was his anchor, and he was always coming home. She was afraid for his life, and she had faith in him as a pilot. "If the ship's going down, I'm jumping in the lifeboat with you, because I know we're going to get to shore." Fridman notes the other occupants of that sea: Pablo Escobar and the U.S. government. She thinks the government was worse. She likes him better now, calmer, content in a condominium. She used to call him her homing pigeon. She had to let him fly. He always came home.

Marie has a heart-valve replacement in seven days, a serious operation she might not survive, and she lost her brother unexpectedly about ten days earlier. She thinks about death. She is somewhat afraid and somewhat not. "I want to live, Lex. I want to live. This life is fun." Reaves answers with visions he says are as clear as the room they are sitting in. One is a porch he takes to be in Central America: an old man in khaki pants and a white shirt, a chair with wide straight arms, beams above, bougainvillea. He also describes out-of-body experiences, floating into a veil and a mist, and he talks about them in a past tense that Marie has to correct: these are things he has seen, which he treats as things that will happen. He mentions Robert Monroe's book on leaving the body, and Paulo Coelho. He does not know what is going on in the universe. He is sure the phenomenon happened.

Meaning is not a sentence he can finish. Even as a child he felt different: his brother with clean hands and shined shoes, himself barefoot catching a wild hog. Fridman has seen a photo of him climbing a tree right after prison. In a knife fight, rough men go white; Reaves almost smiles, unless they come at him. Prison did not bother him. Fridman offers that the point of a life might be to let that uniqueness flourish, like a garden of different flowers. Reaves knows people make decisions. He also knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we are spirits living in flesh. Walk out of your body once, he says, and you know the body is a temporary shell, no beginning and no end. The *why* is beyond him, someone greater. It is awesome. Scripture, as he recalls it: now we see through a glass darkly; later, face to face. Until then, enjoy this beautiful life. His gift, he says, was that he loved everybody and everything. He is sorry if he put a stumbling block in anyone's way.

Then he turns to hypocrisy. Almost anyone listening will say he is a drug dealer, and most of them, he says, have committed adultery, a cardinal sin, and still throw rocks at a man for moving marijuana or cocaine across a road. Put the two next to each other and the difference is terrible, but we are conditioned by a mad society. In Lompoc, doing 11 years of a parole violation for 1977 marijuana possession — he says it should have been six months, and they gave him 11 years on a "silent beef" — he received a letter from Miriam titled "Daddy's Poem." He reads it. She thanks him for a life of farms and Jim Reeves songs, airplanes without extra chairs, Key Biscayne roses, Amsterdam's luggage carousel, glaciers in Argentina, dirt roads in Brazil, hot dogs in Paraguay, and a European jaunt that could be a book. She would do it all again. She loves him with his wrongs and his rights. She would want him as captain on any sinking ship. And as he told her many times: life is an incredible journey.

Fridman is honored they came to Texas. He thanks them. Marie says it was their pleasure. He leaves listeners with a line from Pablo Escobar: all empires are created of blood and fire. The sentence sits under the whole conversation. The insurance company that paid $5,000 a kilo in ironed bills, never short, sat on a mountain of corpses, a bombed airliner, and a middle-aged pilot murdered in a car. Reaves never joined that violence, and he still lost 33 years. His own last accounting is almost light. He did it for money, and he already had everything. He loved the people in front of him, and he is sorry for the stumbling blocks.