America’s most unlikely drug kingpin: From college kid to cannabis tycoon

RICHARD Stratton went from college kid to international drug kingpin. And it’s a story with a perfect Hollywood ending.

Richard Stratton has led a remarkable life at the cutting edge of the cannabis smuggling industry.

RICHARD Stratton was a middle-class college kid from one of the best educated towns in the United States.

Yet he became the kingpin at the centre of the “hippie mafia” that controlled the country’s marijuana trade, pulling off risky multimillion-dollar deals with law enforcement breathing down his neck.

Now a top TV producer, the 70-year-old has made a living out of his colourful stories of trafficking cannabis and hashish from Mexico, the Caribbean and war-ravaged Lebanon into the US.

He started writing Smuggler, released next month in Australia, while serving eight years in federal prison under the so-called “kingpin statute”. Upon his release, he consulted on HBO prison drama Oz and Emmy-winning documentary Thug Life, and created his own show, Street Time.

“One of my favourite stories is where I was arrested in 1978 for picking up a load of hashish,” he tells news.com.au. “We stole it back from the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] and the judge threw it out.”

The anti-authoritarian writer says the best moments of his wild past are those where “you get it over on law enforcement”.

“If it hadn’t been illegal, I wouldn’t have become a criminal,” he says.

COMING OF AGE

Stratton first smoked weed in 1964 in his senior year in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and — as for many young people at the time — it opened up a whole new world for him.

“We’d heard all the propaganda, but we smoked weed now and saw the effects. It didn’t make us want to go out and rape people or take heroin.

“It caused a lot of Americans to question things the government were telling them, about Kennedy, Vietnam ... Marijuana caused people to question authority and the authorities saw that as the most dangerous thing.”

But Stratton went leagues further than most. His first cross-border drug deal came at 19, after he moved to Arizona on a wrestling scholarship and brought three kilos from Mexico to Boston in a deal worth $2000.

He dropped out of school and began travelling the world with false-bottomed suitcases to smuggle hash back to the US.

“I’m what you call an adrenaline junkie,” he says. “Wrestling is one of the most nerve-racking sports, you get addicted to that. Getting in a big load, getting one over on law enforcement, the rush from that. I became addicted to that rush.”

His is a story of weed, wealth, international adventure and jail, with the perfect Hollywood ending.

THE LEBANON CONNECTION

Stratton was soon at the centre of the California-based Brotherhood of Eternal Love, pulling off daring operations worth $4m to $7m several times a year.

The cannabis kingpin loved the high life his criminal lifestyle afforded him, buying properties all over the world, holding lavish parties with cocaine and strippers and stashing money in the Cayman Islands.

But he loved the cat-and-mouse game with the authorities perhaps even more.

An agent named Bernard Wolfstein was assigned to track Stratton, and their relationship became one of both combat and mutual admiration.

“He was an intellectual, a concert pianist,” says Stratton. “That intrigued me, that whole battle of wits.

“Overall I felt they were fighting a ridiculous war, a war on plants, as I called it. The millions of dollars, the flak suits, guns ... it was ridiculous to me and others in the marijuana subculture.”

But Stratton never dealt harder drugs, for “hippy-dippy” reasons, as he puts it.

“The hippie mafia was made up largely of middle-class, college-educated kids who were the backbone of the industry,” he says. “We believed in karma. If you go into hard drugs like heroin or cocaine, if you kill people, it will come back on you.

“People I knew who got involved in hard drugs went down a dark, dark path, Many ended up killed. But it was more money, and it was easier to smuggle.”

The college-educated marijuana mogul at work. Picture: Supplied

THE BIG MISTAKE

It was the day Stratton involved a cocaine-dealing associate, Fearless Fred, that he calls “the beginning of my downfall.”

He was in Maine in April 1980 with a “freight full of pot” from Colombia and desperately needed somewhere to stash the 30 to 40 tonnes, with a hit out on him. “I liked this guy but I knew he was a user and dealing cocaine,” he says. “I was going against my own beliefs. Sure enough, he was under surveillance.”

When Stratton unknowingly helped a DEA agent get his car back on the road after it slid on ice, the cop recognised him and contacted headquarters.

He was ordered to give up his close friend, the famous writer Norman Mailer, but he refused and fled to Lebanon, where he used an elaborate cover as a date buyer to smuggle 6.8 tonnes of hash into the States in the early eighties.

The drug smuggler spent almost a year in Beirut during the civil war trying to pull off the audacious $20 million deal, a time he describes as one of the most frightening of his life.

“The war was just brutal,” he says. “We couldn’t leave our apartment for days or weeks. I was obsessed with getting the hash purchase.

“One night we went to the movies, The Shining, we sneaked across the green line, our building got hit with a rocket. We would have been killed. My girlfriend at the time left the next day. I stayed another week to get the load out.”

That load almost spelled the end for Stratton, when his contacts failed to hide the hash properly among the dates and he was almost caught. He pulled it off, but the authorities were now just one step behind him.

Stratton spent his time in jail writing his memoir. Picture: Supplied

JAIL TIME

Stratton hid out in Maui for a while, buying the locals’ silence, but when he returned to Los Angeles to carry out a revenge deal for the Lebanese, he was held up at the airport hotel.

When he continually refused to give up Mailer, he was sentenced to first 15 and then 25 years in jail. He served eight of them, but says even that time was valuable.

The drug lord has said in the past he feels terrible guilt for the damage he did to people’s lives, but now claims his only real regret is “a lot of wasted time ... It’s the nature of the business. You’re stuck in a hotel for weeks waiting for a load that never arrives.”

He is most proud of the fact he never gave up his friend, despite the “enormous pressure” from the law. After eight years, he was released, and after a successful career in TV and activism, he’s now completing a trilogy of memoirs, of which Smuggler is the first.

Gulag America, about his prison years, comes out later this year, with In The World, the final part about life after jail, due in two years’ time.

Stratton now lives in a different world, where his actions have contributed to the legalisation of cannabis in 20 states, a pattern he expects to continue. “I don’t think what I did was particularly harmful,” he says. “A lot of things are destructive. Marijuana is one of the least harmful, the most forgiving, it resists habituation more than any other drug.

“Alcohol is a huge problem, but would you make it illegal? No. When you make things illegal you create a powerful underground.”

He says Hollywood is the most “cutthroat” of all the dangerous places he’s been, but as with the drug industry, his unique talents have served him well.

“I was a Swamp Yankee,” he says. “An old school New Englander who questions everything. I would fight every step of the way. It’s my nature.

“Swamp Yankees are very distrustful of outside people. I get a lot of it from my grandmother. You do your best job no matter what, even if everyone around you is screwing up.

“It was my upbringing.”

Richard Stratton’s book, Smuggler, is published in July. Find out more it here.

Originally published as America’s most unlikely drug kingpin: From college kid to cannabis tycoon