The Tusker

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You know, there's a big dichotomy in Mount Desert Island between year-round people and summer people.

The Rockefellers owned, I think, most of the island at some point in time.

They're still there.

I've met several of them.

And then there's the Astors,

J.P.

Morgan's descendants, and Martha Stewart, who I've seen several times.

This is Audrey Ryan.

She grew up on Mount Desert Island in Maine.

It's home to Acadia National Park.

She says she and her family were year-round people.

For a while, her parents lived in a cottage with no heating, just a wood stove.

It was built to be a summer house.

Her father sold his car to move them into another house.

It didn't have indoor plumbing at first.

Her father installed it himself.

The house I remember was like kind of falling apart, and he was trying to like fix it up as he went.

Although it was very beautiful, you could like, we weren't on the ocean, but you could smell it and you could kind of see it through the trees.

We were always really close to the ocean, but really I think most of the ocean access in Mount Desert Island is

it's basically for the people that can afford it.

Audrey's father worked as a fisherman.

He fished for scallops on a boat called Joshua's Delight.

That kind of fishing, you know, you go out for days sometimes.

It's not just like a nine to five.

Sometimes you're gone for like a couple days.

Sometimes he was gone for a week if like they went further away.

You know, and they sleep on the boat.

Audrey remembers that once he brought home giant snails he'd caught and another time a lobster that was too big to sell.

In the offseason, her father worked a second job as a carpenter.

And then when Audrey was 19, she learned about her father's third job.

She was working as a waitress.

Her parents were getting divorced, and she was living with her boyfriend.

I started dating this prep cook, and he was basically a pot dealer.

And some customer came in and was like trying to buy, I don't know, a dime bag or, you know, some sort of weed from him.

And she was telling this story about, oh, well, my regular dealer, you know, he's unavailable right now.

Audrey overheard the customer mention that her dealer was getting a divorce.

And then she heard her mention he was arguing with his wife about what to do with their dog.

It sounded exactly like a fight her mother and father had just had.

The light bulb went off, and I was like, oh my god, that's my dad.

Audrey says her father never really wanted to talk about dealing drugs.

But several years later, he told her about the day he found about 20 pounds of hash in a scallop net.

I'm Phoebe Judge.

This is Criminal.

Audrey Ryan's father, Frank Ryan, told her that for years there were rumors going around that there was hash at the bottom of the ocean.

Hash is a concentrated kind of marijuana.

It's usually dried to make a kind of resin.

One day in 1983, he was out fishing for scallops using a drag net.

They basically drag, they dredge pretty much the ocean floor because scallop beds lay on the ocean floor.

When they brought the net up, they found scallops and something else.

There were chunks of something brown and sticky tangled in the net.

My dad said it just smelled really potent and skunky and stinky.

Everyone said you could smell it the minute it came on board.

So that's how they knew they had it.

It didn't smell like your normal seafood.

The hash was like bricks.

It was literally almost as hard as a brick.

And so they said it looked like the sole of a shoe, but thicker.

But it was basically a brick of hash, probably, I don't know, maybe 10 inches long and four inches wide.

But the edges had been rounded off, maybe from the ocean floor rubbing against things.

They found a few of them.

Audrey's father thought they might have about 20 pounds total.

He and the crew decided to bring it back and see if they could sell it.

But there were narcotics officers waiting on the dogs.

They were planning to search all the scallop boats coming in that night.

They had a drug-sniffing dog and my dad's boat came in first.

So once they saw the dog and the police coming, they kind of, my dad.

freaked out and quickly put the hash in a basically in a scallop bag and then popped a hole in the bag and like they threw it overboard.

It sunk right there.

When police boarded the boat, they opened up any bins they could find.

Next, they searched below deck in the crew's quarters.

When the dog came on board and started sniffing, I mean, he smelled something for sure, but they didn't find any,

they didn't find enough or any evidence to bust them.

The police let them go.

Audrey says that after her father father told her about that night, she had a lot of questions.

I was like, why are there drugs in the bottom of the ocean?

It just seems like a really bizarre

thing to stumble upon.

She started asking her father's friends and other fishermen from the island whether they knew anything.

Not everyone wanted to talk to her about it.

But about two dozen people told her they'd also found hash in the ocean.

Sometimes they found the bricks, and sometimes they would find it stuffed in a metal canister.

A canister was worth a lot of money, you know,

maybe $100,000 or more.

So if they got a canister, it was a huge score.

But a lot of it was these pieces.

And so they would just put it in a bucket

on board.

A lot of the scallopers had a bucket just for the hash, and then they'd bring it home.

They'd clean it up.

Sometimes they'd freeze it or dry it, and then they'd smoke it or sell it.

And for the men who were selling it, were they making a lot of money?

Where are they selling it?

I think that it didn't have as much value in the island just because there was so much of it.

But, you know, they get $400 a pound.

So if you have, you know, 50 pounds, that's a lot of money.

That's $20,000.

But I think there was a lot more money to be made out of state.

I think once they cleaned it up, if they could get it out of state, they could make a lot of money.

So

I heard numbers of $300,000 to $1,000 a pound that the fishermen were getting for it, depending on where they were selling it.

There was so much of it that people in the area knew that if they wanted to buy hash, they should ask a fisherman.

Audrey says most of the fishermen didn't get rich.

They told her that it was more like a bonus.

You know, there was a lot of rumors about what people had done with the money.

I think there were definitely some new trucks, maybe some new boats.

But the one that I kept hearing was about this guy who had bought a house with the money in Bar Harbor.

And at the time, you know, a house in Bar Harbor wasn't that much money.

I think he bought it for like $8,000 of hash money.

But now that house is worth probably a couple million, you know, because it's in downtown Bar Harbor.

He wouldn't speak with me.

He was one of the fishermen who definitely iced me out because I think he knew, you know, what I was going to ask him.

But that rumor was.

confirmed by several people.

And what did the fishermen know about where this had come from?

They just knew that it had come on a boat and drug smugglers had thrown it overboard.

That's pretty much what they knew.

They knew the name of the boat.

A lot of them did.

They would say, oh, it came on the Tusca.

But I kept saying, how do you spell it?

And they'd be like,

I don't know, T-U-S-C-A, T-U-S-K-A.

And I kept Googling.

And, you know, this was also not super recently.

I started researching this like over 10 years ago.

So I'm like looking for

something online and I couldn't find anything.

And I'm and I started going to the library and you know, getting in touch with the local paper, there was nothing.

And I was like, this doesn't make any sense.

And then I got in touch with a like a historian archivist at the Bangor Daily News, and she boom sends me back all these articles with the Tusker, and it's E-R.

It's T-U-S

K-E-R.

We'll be right back.

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Audrey Ryan learned that Petusker was a boat owned by something called the Coronado Company.

It was started by a man named Lance Weber.

He tinkered with cars and liked to smoke pot.

He joined the Navy after graduating high school, but once his service was up, he came back home to Coronado, California, just a few miles outside San Diego, and less than 20 miles from the border to Mexico.

And one summer, Lance Weber got an idea.

He would go to Mexico and buy his own marijuana for cheaper.

He'd keep some for himself and sell the rest.

And instead of driving back, he would swim.

On his first trip, he brought back 25 pounds of marijuana.

Then Lance asked some friends to swim with him and bring back more pot.

He was swimming it up the coast a couple miles in trash bags or whatever and selling it to their buddies.

What do you mean, swimming it up?

If you look at a map, like it's not that far from the Mexican border up to Coronado.

So they literally swim back with the drugs.

So when they were swimming with it, they

like attach it to themselves in waterproof, like in a garbage bag?

Pretty much.

Lance and the friends he recruited had gone to the same high school.

Some of them had been on the swim team.

They were like a brotherhood.

They were friends and they got into the pot business.

It was definitely more of a peace and love hippie kind of thing, and they were good at it.

And I think they were smart.

And they could have done a lot of different things with their lives, but they decided to get into the pot business and they thrived.

They made about $5,000,

about $45,000 today, on every trip.

They would go out at night in waters where jellyfish and sharks were often seen.

The waves were huge.

Then they got the idea to use a rubber inflatable boat like the kind used by the Navy and Marines.

They could carry around 100 pounds of marijuana at a time.

Lance Weber and the Coronado Company were smuggling marijuana in the 1970s.

At a time when both the United States and Mexico began making it harder to bring marijuana across the border,

President Nixon had decided to start the war on drugs after learning from a congressional report that half the troops that served in Vietnam used marijuana.

He called drugs public enemy number one.

The State Department helped the Mexican government fly planes to look for marijuana crops and spray them with herbicide.

It didn't stop growers.

They would often harvest the plants anyway.

The Coronado Company asked their old high school Spanish teacher to translate negotiations with their suppliers in Mexico.

His name was Lou Velar.

He also used to coach the swim team.

They paid him $50 on his first job, then $10,000 on the second job.

And that Spanish teacher ended up being the ringleader of the whole cartel and building it into this pretty massive outfit.

They kept using inflatable boats, and eventually they bought a duck, an amphibious vehicle that the U.S.

military used to carry troops on land and water.

They started buying marijuana from Thailand.

It was supposed to be stronger than what they could get in Mexico, and they could sell it for more money.

One time, they used the duck to smuggle in a delivery of marijuana from Thailand that was worth $8 million.

And they weren't just in the San Diego area.

They were also in Malibu.

And

they were basically up and down the coast for

years until they got indicted.

In 1973, when the DEA first opened an office in San Diego, agents got a tip that there was a drug smuggling operation in Coronado.

Soon, a police officer told them that a former high school teacher was in charge.

Then they heard about a boat being sighted off the coast of Coronado in the middle of the night.

The DEA agents staked out the beach, but they didn't find anyone.

And then in 1974, the Coronado Company kicked a man named Paul Acrey out of the operation.

His friends suspected he'd gotten addicted to heroin and cocaine and couldn't be trusted anymore.

Paul Acre decided to talk to the DEA.

He told them how much marijuana the Coronado Company was bringing in and how they were conducting their operations.

Based on Paul Acrey's information, the DEA started to build a case against the Coronado Company.

In late 1977, a grand jury indicted 26 members of the Coronado Company for conspiracy to commit drug trafficking.

But the DEA couldn't arrest them.

They didn't know where any of them actually were.

The company's lawyer told Lou Villar that he should let some of the indicted turn themselves in, and that higher-ups like Lou should stay on the run.

And they stayed in business.

A DEA agent later said, quote, they operated almost like a military unit.

They used answering services to leave each other coded messages.

They only used payphones.

Everyone kept a bag of quarters with them.

They were running multiple operations on the West Coast in San Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle.

And when the company heard there was demand on the East Coast, they started a new operation in Maine.

In 2015, Audrey got a phone number for someone who had worked for the Coronado Company.

So it took me a few years, but I finally tracked one down and he told me what had really happened.

Hey, Audrey.

How are you doing?

I'm doing okay.

So I just like have like 10 or 20 questions for you.

It might be easier to just fire questions at you.

Yeah.

This is from an interview Audrey recorded with a man named Lee Strimple.

When she spoke to him, he was in Texas working as a ranch manager.

Lee told Audrey he started working for the Coronado Company in 1973.

Lee Strimple was the operations manager of

a lot of their deals.

And when they got on the East Coast, Lee was huge in that role and he lived in Maine for like, you know, a year or two.

Lee Strimple told Audrey that the Coronado Company bought a house in a town called Cutler, about 85 miles north of Mount Desert Island.

I had never heard of Cutler before this.

It's a kind It's not much of a town.

I mean, there is definitely a harbor of sorts and there's some fishermen, but I don't, I doubt there's a thousand people that live there.

It's remote.

One of the reasons they chose it, besides it being remote, is it's kind of in a little cove, like a U-shaped cove, so it has some privacy.

But in front of it are, they call it the black ledges, and it's just some rocks sticking out of the ocean, but it's like a landmark.

So if you were in a boat, you could find it.

It would be enough of a landmark because the coast is, you know, the main coast is 3,500 miles.

So it would be very easy, especially with navigation stuff back then, you know, in the late 70s, to get lost.

The thing about the house that's weird, though, is that it's up high.

Like there's the beach in the house, there's like maybe 50 feet.

And they had to basically build ramps to go from the beach up to the house.

That part is a little mysterious to me why they chose it because it is a lot of work.

But I actually think the Coronado Company liked the challenge of it.

Audrey asked Lee Strimple how the Coronado Company smuggled drugs to Cutler.

He told her the first time they did it, they bought a ship and hired a crew to pick them up from Thailand.

It took over a month for the ship to make it back to Maine.

Once it arrived, Lee and a small crew took a custom-made inflatable raft out to meet the boat in the water.

They brought the drugs back to shore.

And then they used logging equipment to bring the load up the cliffs to the house in cutler

lee strimple was in charge of the operation

but when he had to be away he asked a man named ron weber to stay there here's lee uh ron weber

he and his wife were my lifelong friends and they were just hired on as caretakers of the house

the company smuggled drugs into maine twice in 1977

And then, in 1978, they bought the Tusker for a third operation.

They planned to pick up six tons of hash from Pakistan and drop it in Cutler that December.

But before the boat was supposed to arrive, Ron Webert and his wife told Lee that they were worried about a car they'd seen around.

They kept seeing a Chevy Blazer, like a red Chevy Blazer.

And Lee saw that same car at what he called the cop shop, shop, which is the police station.

And you know, that's how we found that we were under surveillance and they were watching the house.

We'll be right back.

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When Lee Strimple learned about the Chevy Blazer that seemed to be watching them, them, he tried to warn the crew of the Tusker.

They were due back soon from Pakistan with the hash.

But no one had had any radio contact with the crew in weeks.

Others in the Coronado Company tried to find the boat before it got to Maine.

They hired a charter plane to see if they could spot it from the air, but they couldn't find it.

On December 12th, just before it was due to arrive, Lee Strimple and Ron Weber decided to go out themselves to meet the Tusker before it got close to the coast.

They pushed off from shore about 10 miles south of Cutler.

They were trying to make sure they weren't followed.

They brought a radio with them.

They thought they could warn the crew to stay away.

But once they got into the water, they saw something large in the distance.

They were too late.

The Tusker had already arrived.

People in town had seen it, and they were wondering what it was was doing there.

Why is there a 137-foot tugboat in the middle of nowhere, you know, when it should be in the Bering Sea, you know?

And so they called the cops.

Police had suspected there was a drug smuggling operation in the area.

First, they'd gotten a tip about the house in Cutler.

A neighbor said he'd noticed a lot of people he didn't recognize.

When police checked on who owned the house, they learned the title belonged to a man in Boston.

But but the address was a P.O.

box, and the phone number went to an answering service.

The police were part of a task force looking for drug smugglers called Operation Atlantis.

They were working with the DEA, Coast Guard, State Police, and IRS.

They all shared information with each other.

They had created a list of signs of drug smuggling.

They asked real estate agents to look for out-of-towners buying land off-season, especially if it was somewhere a bigger boat could dock.

Someone building a new pier could also be a sign of smuggling.

People buying a portable conveyor belt was another sign.

That night, around 9 p.m., someone called the Coast Guard to tell them about the Tusker.

When Coast Guard officers boarded the boat and performed a search, they believed they were looking for marijuana.

They were looking for, you know, they knew what marijuana bales look like, which look a lot different than metal canisters of hash.

So they searched the boat and they didn't find anything because they didn't know what they were looking for.

But anyway, the Coast Guard looked around and they said, well, there's no drugs.

We don't see anything.

So they actually wrote them up for the only thing they could to keep them, which is that they had no lights at night because it was like 10 o'clock at night.

So they said, no, we're going to bring you in for that.

The Coast Guard towed them in to the station.

And while they did that, they weren't able to see a whole side of the Tusker, and it was a big boat.

And in that, you know, five minutes, 10 minutes, the crew threw 300 canisters of hash overboard, and it plummeted to the ocean floor.

And where was Lee Strimple in all of this?

He was freaked out.

He was on a Zodiac, which is those little inflatable boats, basically with an outboard motor.

So they booked it and they took the Zodiac back towards the Cutler house, but then they heard all the authorities there that were like, there they are, we got them, we got them.

So once they realized that they were going to get busted, they made a run for it.

Lee Strimple and Ron Weber went east until they found a cove.

They beached the boat, and then they started running up the beach into the woods.

And Lee is a smart guy.

He's also really athletic and strong.

And I think if he had been in his own, I actually think that he probably would have made it.

I think he probably would have been able to get far enough away and pretend to be a civilian that he might have managed to not get busted.

But he was with this other guy.

And the other guy was a smoker.

And he had night blindness.

So as soon as they were in the woods trying to make a run for it,

this partner of his was basically like, I can't do this.

It's also freezing cold.

It's December.

It was really chilly.

And so, you know, his partner basically like quit on him and said, I can't can't do this until there's daylight.

And I think Lee was completely, you know, shattered because I think he knew that the end was was coming.

You know, the guy he was with, Ron Weber, knew all their secrets.

So,

and it was an old friend of his.

They'd known each other for like 15 years, you know, so he didn't want to just ditch his friend in the cold woods.

So he stayed there with him and, you know.

And then the cops busted them at like three in the morning.

They found him in the woods.

DEA agents brought Lee Strimple and Ron Weber to a local jail where the crew of the Tusker was also being held.

And he overheard the crew, the captain saying, I don't know why they brought us in here.

So he actually knew that that comment was directed to him and that basically they had scuttled the evidence.

Here's Lee.

He was talking to me at the other end of the building.

I'm going, what?

The boys have managed to chuck that stuff all off the boat.

And so he had a moment of relief of like, well, they have us here in jail, but they really don't have any evidence against us.

But then, canisters started washing up on shore.

Over the next week, divers brought up over 600 pounds of the hash.

There were still hundreds of pounds of hash at the bottom of the ocean that the police hadn't found.

Lee said that at one point he thought the Coronado Company might be able to find the drugs and sell them.

But eventually he realized that wouldn't be possible but he claims and he could just be humoring me but he claims that he thought of the scallop fisherman and that he actually thought well the locals will have a heyday with this you know he just dropped 60 million dollars worth of drugs on the you know the ocean floor

so all of that hash that had been dropped in cutler which it's kind of a distance from where your father was.

I mean, what it was just kind of swept swept with tides along the bottom?

Or were people fishing up there and they bring it back into the harbor?

I had the same question.

It turns out scallop fishermen travel far distances.

Like they go to the scallop beds.

And this is also like a huge coincidence because those drugs could have been dropped anywhere, but they happened to be dropped on what my dad described as the best scallop beds he'd ever seen.

So that was not just a heyday because they were making money off of hash.

It was also a heyday because they were dragging up like a thousand pounds of scallops a day.

And at the time, scallops were worth $7 a pound.

So they were making $7,000 in a day.

This is in like early 80s, off of scallops, and also have a cash bonus of a bunch of hash.

So

it was just

pure coincidence and a total bonanza for the fishing community.

And my dad said that the second second year that he started finding it in his nets, there were like 80 boats all of a sudden.

Ron Weber was sentenced to two years in prison for drug smuggling.

Lee Strimple was convicted of conspiracy to import $1.5 million worth of hash into Maine.

He served two years in prison and five years on probation.

Where is Lee now?

So Lee's moved around a bit.

Lee, because he's a felon, he hasn't really been able to like get ahead much.

When I met him, he was living in Texas, in Harper, Texas, and he was a manager of a ranch.

And, you know, he's really good at that kind of thing because he has all this operational experience.

Lee told Audrey that now that marijuana is legal, he's thought about applying for a pardon.

By 1984, six years after the Tusker dumped its cargo, 57 57 people associated with the Coronado Company had been convicted in Maine, California, and Washington state.

27 people were also indicted by the federal government for drug trafficking.

Lou Villar, the man in charge of the Coronado Company, made a deal with the U.S.

Attorney's Office.

In exchange for information about who was in the company and who they worked with, Lou received a sentence of time served and was released.

As part of his deal, he also had to go on the radio to warn people against getting into drugs.

For years after the Tusker, people went looking for the hash.

They would use dragnets or go diving for it.

One police chief said, that place is busier than the mole at Christmas time.

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