It’s the run to the line. Works off the track. He’s got all four Michelin over the white line. He’s defending. All right, Mike. We are back and I am stoked about this episode today. I understand that this is our uh the first guest challenge that we actually had somebody answer the call. Yeah, that’s actually very very true. So, get this. drug runner turned race car driver turned DEA informant. I don’t think anybody’s turning off this episode. We got a a we got a show for for just about everybody. So, let’s jump right into it.
Our guest today isn’t just a race car driver. He he was also one of South Florida’s biggest drug runners in the 1980s. He spent his weekends on the racetrack and his weekdays moving tons of marijuana and cocaine. And he wasn’t alone. Back then, IMSA and tracks like Road Atlanta and Mid Ohio were filled with racers bankrolled by drug smuggling money. This sounds like a Hollywood show, right? His name is Ken Bear and he’s here to share the untold story of how fast cars and drug money built an entire era of American motorport.
Welcome to the show, Ken. Thanks for having me, guys. Thanks for having me. Jeez, that sounds horrible. Oh, it’s going to get worse. And you know this. I don’t think we’ve ever gotten any further off the racing line than this. Yeah, I was thinking about the title. We are off the racing line. Yes. Like you are the perfect guest. First off, um I read the book. Thank you. Your book. Thank you. Um one step over the line. It was an It was actually a very good read. Uh it was a lot of um I think a roller coaster as far as emotions. you really did a great job in putting the uh the reader into certain aspects of the stuff that you’ve lived and uh and I appreciate that. Thanks for saying that. It was a seven-year project. So, really, yeah, it’s not easy to write a book. It’s it’s easy to write a book. It’s hard to finish a book. So, that was the trick finally saying, “Okay, I’m done. Let’s do it.” So, yeah. Yeah. No, I I enjoyed it a lot. So, let’s jump into it. Um, you weren’t some smalltime dealer. You, um, you moved like literally tons of of marijuana uh, and cocaine. Tons cocaine. I moved I wouldn’t say tons, but over hundreds of pounds. I’d say over probably over five or 700 kilos, you know, at least over a,000 pounds. That’s already 1,000 pounds more than Carlos or I have I have ever seen. Well, it turns out when you’re partying at your house and you have 10 kilos in the bedroom, you never run out. Just you never run out. All right. So, you got to have You got to know how to say no.
Can you take us uh into one of those runs? Uh the makeshift runways, the glow stick drops in the ocean. What was that actually like? So as a what we would do is obviously you have to make a if you’re going to build you’re going to land a load of drugs you either have to do it in a commercial airport which in the very beginning people might get away with but in the end you couldn’t. So you’d either have to build a runway, a clandestinant runway with lights and everything in the middle of a dark, you know, desolate area or in the beginning what what they used to do is they would fly in with the bales and put calium glow sticks on them. Uh strap those to the to the bales then throw them out in the ocean and then people would come up with boats and pick them up and bring them in through the Fort Lauderdale cut or Miami cut. And that’s why when I was a kid, it was not unusual to find bales of marijuana on the beach or kilos. It’s happening again now with coke. There’s a lot of coke smuggling, but yeah, you would actually find floaters or square groupers. Yes, I was just going to say hence square grouper. And I actually had a guy that was a a fisherman that would go sports fishing. He was a charter boat captain and first me and when they found a a floater or a square grouper, they’d bring it to me and I would clean it up and sell it. So, yeah. Nice. So, I’ll tell you, I’ll give you an example of one night what we did. So, we had a a road in the middle of nowhere in Florida. And there’s a lot of roads in the middle of nowhere in Florida. And there’s a lot of flat land in Florida. So, you can really land anywhere. We’re also the closest land from Colombia. It’s 1500 miles from Colombia to Florida and it’s about 600 miles from Jamaica to Florida. So, that’s why Colombia and became the big way point, right? The original smugglers smuggled stuff in from Mexico, weed from Mexico, and they would either drive through the border or come through the Rio Grand, but Mexican marijuana wasn’t very good. And so, somebody got, you know, actually one of my other friends, Tommy Powell, started smuggling weed out of Columbia in the early 70s. And so, this one night, what we did was we had a load of 300 kilos of cocaine coming in. One of my friends was bringing in. He asked me if I would help him do the offload. And I normally didn’t like doing that stuff because you don’t have control of your your future.
That’s a 15-year minimum mandatory sentence. But I was racing cars and I could make 20 grand for one night and a good weekend of racing was six grand and if I didn’t wreck the car, right? So, you know, you know, you’re talking about expensive formula cars and you know, so and flying there and transport the car and all that. So, and I raced in the Midwest. I didn’t race in Florida for some reason that we won’t get into. I just that’s where I landed. So I was Road America, Mid Ohio, Watkins, Glenn, you know, and so I had to fly to every track and the car was brought there. So anyhow, that night we um he was coming in from Colombia. We set up in the in the dark of some ever rode in the Everglades. When we heard the plane was coming, we had radios and stuff and we all had M16s, hand grenades. We had a friend of ours that was an army special ranger, you know. So, and so he tra my friends traded cocaine for lost rockets, hand grenades, and cocaine to the they mailed it. One of my friends got busted with a bunch of the stuff in his house. But anyway, we were fully armed, the planes coming in and once we heard the you know, click click click uh you know, and then over the radio. Yeah. of our radios. Click click click click. We had a code to let all the guys, you know, we were stationed around this, you know, couple thousand ft area where the plane would land. We ran out. We took Calium glow sticks again. I had them on fishing lines. We broke them. We, me and my two, my other friend, we ran to the middle of the road, dropped the glow sticks, and then on the sides of the road, we put these things called Fireflies, which are on 9volt batteries, super bright. This is in the 80s, so these things were probably, you know, the technologies, you know, not that advanced today, but back then they were. And basically, by the time I turned around, we had a runway. As a matter of fact, the pilot told turned to the co-pilot. He told me after the fact and said, “Look, it’s MIA, which is Miami International, and I and I know f in customs.” And we land the plane. I put the I I ran up, grabbed the load car, backed it up. We threw the 300 kilos in the car there. We have always have two cars. One that’s a ramming car in case somebody tries to pull the other guy over and we just blasted out of there. And then we we made the pilot, the co-pilot and the ground crew wait until we got out of the area because you can’t take off a twin engine plane in the middle of the night and people don’t hear it.
Right. Right. Espec you know. So uh that was one you know and that so people understand that just takes minutes like we can one another time a friend of mine decided that we were going to bring in 1,100 lb and they decided to bring it into St. Pete airport which I thought was crazy. I was telling guys you know but that was their deal. I said all right I’ll help you with the offload and transportation and sale of the product. So they bring it in to St. Pete airport and I’m sitting in a hotel room with a pair of binoculars and a walkie-talkie and I’m you know the birds coming in. We get confirmation from the pilot. You know all the ground crew starts getting the radios that the and then I get the DEA follow and customs followed the plane in the guys had unloaded the plane in less than sobb and I’m not the only guy that’ll say this. You talk to any smuggler, you can unload 1,100 lb in about 3 minutes or 4 minutes. Your adrenaline, they’re 50 to let’s say they’re those were Jamaican bales, so they’d be a little smart. Colombian bales are 50 lbs a piece, usually 45 to 50. When that’s happening, you’re you’re throwing those things. I remember throwing one so hard, like a 300lb guy, he goes, “Oh.” I look over, I see him laying on the ground holding the bail. I mean, you’re just jacked. And so they unloaded the plane in like three or four minutes. The cops came in. They jumped in a 240 Volvo. The pilot’s car, a Volvo 240 that doesn’t do over 80 miles an hour, right? Remember, and goes blasting down the front of the same of the air of the road there. And I’m looking through the window and I see the Volvo coming and every time it hits a cross section, it goes airborne, right? And then five cop cars are just going up in the air. And so you and sparks are flying. I look down through the window of the hotel and I see my friend Lee trying to get out of the passenger door as the cops are, you know, and I go, I’m thinking, don’t do that, buddy. Yeah, that’s not going to end well. And uh literally that night, they chased the car. Lee did get out of the passenger car and they chased the passenger car. The pilot, who was my best friend’s uncle, he’s a 65 year old guy. So I’m 68. So think about it. Uncle Ralph just flew almost 24 hours. He flew from St. Pete down to like Haiti, get fuel, come from Haiti, go to Jamaica. From Jamaica, fly back. Ballsy guy. Never did a drug run in his life. Yeah. Yeah. This is a funny story. So, they had the pickup truck with the weed in it. All the cops chased the Volvo. Uncle Ralph sitting there going, “Well, I got no way to get out of here.” Didn’t really know any better. So, he jumped in the pickup truck and left. So, when we get we had another hotel outside of town where the crew you know we had guys we all met there we get a phone call it’s Uncle Ralph come get the weed I got away so that’s a story in my book but it’s a little more complex but uh yeah those are two trips that and I was so I want to clarify I was a drug runner I was I more moved once people brought it into America I was the guy that was going to sell it I was a guy that was going to move it across the country if you brought in a load of £40,000 pounds, I’d be one of the people you were going to call. I didn’t really love smuggling because I I could make a lot of money doing what I was doing. And smuggling, you can make millions and millions of dollars, but you don’t have control of your you know, anything can happen, right? Uncle Ralph has customs. Having said that, I did I added it up.
I’ve done I’ve been involved in 12 smuggling trips. So, for a guy that didn’t like smuggling, somehow I got into it. When I was a kid, I worked for one of the biggest smuggling organizations in the world in in Florida, but he was he’s been Time magazine. There have been books written about him. And my job was to take the some money and fly it to the Cayman Islands. I was like 18, 19 years old, and they would give me a couple million dollars, a suitcase, and a Lar Jet, and go, “Kid, take this to the Cayman Islands.” That’s nuts, right? And one time we get in, it’s me and my girlfriend, and the guy, this is a funny story, breaks out a bottle of Don Perry. It’s like 8:30 9:00 and I’ve driven by 19 I dri I drank a lot of Dom right but um like I’m a kid I go do you have any chocolate chip cookies and milk like you know I don’t you know and when you said you actually flew the plane no the pilot okay I was going to say we used to use a guy named Harvey Hop he was the most experienced larjet pilot in the world he helped uh he was a fighter pilot he was a um he helped test pilot the larjets he flew the astronauts he flew Reagan He flew the Rat Pack, you know, Frank Sinatra and he flew us in the money. And you know what? We used to pay him in cash. And I remember saying to my boss one time when we were all together, I go, “Where’s he going?” He goes, “To the bank to put the money in the bank. Harvey’s not declaring this money.” So, uh, everybody, you have to understand when people look at me now and they look at the world around us. I moved to Florida in 1973 to get, my mother moved us from New Orleans to get away from the drugs, right? How’d that work out? you know, it’s like I was like, you know, PaloAlto would have been better. I’d be like Bill Gates right now, you know. But yeah. So, I read that part in your book and I I found it ironic that in order for your your mom to get you out of, you know, the drugs in New Orleans, she actually landed you in the epicenter of the drug world. She didn’t do very much research. No, she didn’t read the newspaper. No. Well, she was from New York. My family had business in New Orleans that my father my father had passed away when I was 13, which is another reason why these things happen. Lack of guidance. Right. Right. And like I said to you earlier, I failed first grade, so I had trouble in school. You know, that’s how kids get sidetracked. But in South Florida, it was everywhere. I mean everywhere. I have two friends that met on Hollywood Beach with their mother’s tea strainers because a bale bales had exploded on the beach. So they were pulling buds out of the beach and that’s how they met each other because a lot of times we would throw the bales out because you’re being chased by the police. So some bales are meant to fly out of the plane. Some were never planned. So when it hit the ground they just explode, you know, and not patch it that way. Um you remarked in the book uh that you did a 300 kilo cocaine offload. That was the one I talked about. Yeah. Not necessarily for the money, but for the adrenaline rush. You know, it was Yeah, because I I had money. I I just said, you know, all my friends were doing it, you know. So, you go, “Oh, you know, yeah, Bill and Bob are doing it. I should, too.” But it was for the adrenaline. It was for the a lot I’ve talked to a lot of smugglers. You know, I have a lot of friends that are, you know, old-time smugglers. And a lot of it was just for the lifetime and for the excitement. Yeah. You know, I have a confession to make.
When I was a teenager, I used to I used to do some stupid stuff. And when I read that part in your book, it reminded me of some of the stupid stuff that I did as a teenager. We used to like my friends and I used to break into cars. I came from a good family. I didn’t need I didn’t need anything in that car. It was the rush of like possibly getting caught of getting chased. Like it was such a rush. That’s what most shoplifting is. People don’t need the product. They’re just I mean unless you’re a professional shoplifter, it’s for the rush. Yeah. Want to drive on a real racetrack but don’t have a car? Velocity Track Experience offers track ready car rentals for HPDE and racing. Whether you’re flying in from out of state, out of the country, or you want full track support without worrying about prep, maintenance, or transport, this is your arrive and drive solution. From an agile Mazda MX5 to a fully prepped BMW race car, Velocity provides everything you need to hit the track with confidence, including expert support and optional coaching. Just book your favorite track car, show up and drive. Go to velocity trackperience.com and start your track adventure today. So that brings us into the world of racing. Yeah. Right. I love racing. So um racing and the money behind it. Um while this was all happening, you were also racing cars. Y spending tens of thousands of dollars a weekend. And this is back in the 80s. You’re talking about $6,000 to $10,000. It’s probably, I don’t know, 20 $30,000 in today’s money. Exactly. Um, this is all fun in cash. Yeah. I mean, stacks of cash. Yeah. Tell us about that side of the of that life. Uh, what were you driving? How did the money flow from one world to the other? So, here’s the funny thing. I went to Skip Barber and I didn’t know any better. I broke my leg on my jet ski. I sat in the couch for six months, you know, like I what I like to call as a pot and co and and opiate to do, you know, I was taking pills because the doctor prescribed I have a broken leg and and I I kept reading car magazine. When I get out of this, I’m going to go to Skip Barber and I paid for it in cash. I walked up. It was $2,200, I think, and or $2,400. And I just walked up, I was at Sebring, and I handed them the cash. And then when I started racing bigger and faster cars, I was renting the renting the rides cuz I didn’t have my own, you know, I bought my own race car at one point, but and I just walk up and go, “Here guys, what ow you for the week?” And I go, “$5,500 bucks. Here’s 5,500 bucks.” And like you said, to put things in perspective, that’s like $15,000 today, you know, or more. And what people say is they’ll ask me, “How much money did you make selling drugs?” And I always say is don’t I if I told you you know I wasn’t you know making hundreds of millions but if pretend like you’re a really highric doctor or a really really highric lawyer. I was making that kind of money in cash and I wasn’t doing that kind of work you know. So right you know you’re a 20some year old kid. You’re riding jet skis going snowk skiing going racing. It’s not going in the bank. No. I one time my girlfriend called me up and she was pissed cuz she got in she got into the house and I left $80,000 in cash in a Publix bag. I forgot about it. Another time somebody went we needed a light bulb and he goes I go the light bulbs around the cabinet right there. He pulls out $10,000. I go a [ __ ] Yeah. More than I care to mention how many times I found 10,000 in some place I forgot about, you know. So plenty of money. In the book, you implicated several big names in association with drug smugglers of that era. Uh, including, and I don’t know, you probably don’t know this, it blew my mind when I read this part, including IMSA, um, Rhode Atlanta and a few others. Um, what was the ongoing joke about what IMSA really stood for? So supposedly Richard Petty I said this IMSA was the International Motorsports Association was really coined the term the International Marijuana Smuggling Association. It was that bad. It was everywhere. Um Marty Hines, Randy Laneir, um the Whittingtons, John Paul Jr., John Paul senior. Um, so if you don’t these are I mean Randy Laneir had owned Road Atlanta I think sort of the Wittingtons they were like partners in it and what they did was you could land a plane on the backstretch so they just used it as part of their you know if you could now you had enough extra fuel to get to Atlanta but um I know so many people that race cars would there what about not NASCAR Gary Belaloo there was he was into racing um those are guys you may not know the name of but there was so many guys that it It was the same mentality.
You know, you you you’re adrenaline junkie. You know, when I was a kid, I wanted to do three things. I didn’t want to be a fireman. I didn’t want to be a policeman. I was 5 years old. I wanted to be a cowboy cuz I grew up on a farm and those days of, you know, old westerns. I wanted to be a secret agent like James Bond who had a tux a wet suit that turned into a tuxedo. And I wanted to race cars. And I got to do all three kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s that’s actually kind of cool. Um, you didn’t, one of the funny things that I I read in the book, again, um, and I’m going to keep referring to the book. Um, you didn’t even try to hide it, which is one of the the hilarious parts of it. His, uh, his bells bond was one of my sponsors, one of the sponsor on the car. Yeah. And it was me and a friend of mine. And my friend’s another friend of mine, his his dad was a smuggler. And, uh, the kid was not and he was like a little upset about it. What the hell? You know, and right um yeah, he was on my car. So, I’ll tell the story. One time we’re doing a practice day at uh Mid Ohio. Yeah, mid Ohio. And I’m in a little Formula Ford red Formula Ford skip barber car that was in the beginning. And Mario and Dreddy’s behind me in his red, you know, um Lola sp um Beatress Foods Lola on the pit road and we’re both, you know, w and I’m not. He is, you know, and Smuggler’s Blues is playing on the loudspeak. Yes, I remember that in the book. And one of the guys sticks his head in the car and he goes, “Kenny, you were really fast out there today.” And he goes, “Uh, but then all you guys from Florida are fast.” And that’s when I realized I was fooling nobody. You know, I’m paying in cash. But you’re not you weren’t the only one though. No, obviously not. I mean, uh, you know, Randy Laneir was racing indie cars and was the 1984 I think it was IMSA champion and he beat Porsche, Jaguar, Ferrari, and Por they’re trying to say he had more money than them. Yeah. He didn’t have more money. He didn’t have more money, but he had hundreds of millions of dollars in that in those days. Yeah. You know, so uh and he was quick. He had him and uh I think Bill Whittington in the car if anybody know remembers IMSA back in 1984. He won the IMSA championship in a march with Chevy Power and literally there were little warehouses in Hollywood that had like the body work. I mean it wasn’t like a factory deal, you know. He was but he hired the good people and yeah he was a Ry’s a fast driver you know did 27 years in jail you know but and from what I read in your book you were also not too bad yourself. No I did all right you know I wish I had more time seat time but I did good. I won a couple races. I kept up with the guys once you climb the ladder and you’re in I was I was racing with Tony George. You’re doing open wheel. Yeah I did all open wheel. Well, I did I did Sports 2000, which is kind of like a Can-Am car with a smaller engine. Okay. As a matter of fact, there were guys that took the Sports 2000 chassis, just put a V8 in it, but I raced out small. Um, but I was racing with Tony George whose family owns the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Colin Truman whose father owned the all the red roofs in America mid Ohio racetrack and Bobby Ray Hall’s winning indie car at that time. So when your godfather is AJ Foy which Tony George’s godfather and your driving instructor is Bobby Ray Hall and your dad owns the racetrack you’re racing at, you’re competing with the guys that grew up in it, right? Um Todd Brightton, Scott Brightton’s brother, I bought a car from him. Scott Brayton had the Indie 500 track record. He died at Indie in a bad accident. Um, Benton House was with us for a minute. Uh, John Cox, I used to race with Gordon John Cox’s, you know, he won Indie twice, his nephew. So, these the Midwest, that’s why I went there. That’s where all the talent was. Um, uh, John, what’s his last name? I can’t think. He won the GTU championship. There was a lot of great drivers, so I I I wanted to keep up with them, but they were generational drivers, right? Right. It’s kind of hard when your dad’s showing you the ropes and you were you just showed up and here I am with a lot of cash, of course.
Right. That didn’t Well, he did have Skip Barber under his belt. Yeah. Yeah, I did. Right. Right. Two days to Skip Barber and I went I raced I went through two days to Skip Barber. I went to the advanced class. I did the Skip Barber pro uh racing series. Uh they called the Pro Series which I raced at Miami Grand Prix the second year they had it. We were we were backup series. Then I went to Formula Ford regional. Then I went to Formula Ford, what they call Pro, which was national. Then I did the Sports 2000 Pro Series, which you know, again, was the top series for Pro. How long How long did you race for? About five years, I bet it was. Yeah. About five years. Sounds like you crammed a lot into those five years. Yeah. Cramed a lot into your life. Exactly. And this and this was happening concurrently uh to you spending time in the Everglades. Yeah. Yeah. unloading boats. You know, I remember one time we had we had a a boat in Lantana and the guy called us up and goes, “Look, I need you guys to offload it for us. It’s at a dock.” So, me and my friend Big Jeff, big 300lb guy, you know, good guy to bring along. And I guess they stalled it one night. So, we we went out that night and we ordered went to a restaurant. We ordered every every appetizer on the menu. Cuz when you’re a drug smuggler, drug runner, you don’t give a [ __ ] I mean, you’re just spending money. What would you like, sir? Give me the chatau bion for two and every appetizer on the menu. I didn’t care. And we slept in. So, we got to the offload a little late and we get to the marina and the boats sitting inside like this. The marina’s not there anymore. Like in an area where they had boats on um on, you know, on dry land and me and Jeff now it’s broad [ __ ] daylight. Sorry. And we’re unloading the boat and a guy’s driving by in the car and his kids and you know they’re walking along and he sees us and he kind of pulls the kid away. Yeah. And we go to pull out with the pickup truck and this chase car and the guy that owned the marina was talking to customs. Customs had come on the property and the guy knew we were offloading the boat because he was part of the the deal. Yeah. So he stalled them when we drive by and we’re kind of like and then we loaded that into my my house and here’s a funny story. So we had that for, you know, in the house and I’m driving down Griffin Road and I see an old girl I know from high school that I dated. This is how lax it was back then. So I pick her up. I go, “Hey, what are you doing?” “Hey, you want to go have a beer and smoke some joints?” She goes, “Sure.” So we I take her back to the house, right? I want to try rekindle something. Yeah. Yeah. And she walks in the house and there’s the bales piled up in the living room and she goes, “Oh, you guys got a lot of bales here tonight.” I go, “Yeah.” And my friend Big Jeff, “What are you doing?” Ah, she’s a local chick. She’s cool. It was It was that prominent. Yeah. I mean, she just looked at it. We went in the bedroom and Crazy. You know, didn’t I didn’t get lucky that night, but uh that’s unfort Yeah. You know, so that’s a couple stories of how prevalent it was. Um, back to the racing world. How was it like then compared to now? Well, I don’t know that much now because I think now one of the things that we have in the racing world is what you guys do with people can come with their street cars and take them out on a racetrack, put somebody like you or you or me in the car next to them and say, “Hey, you know, break car, turn left, and the other and we can teach someone how to drive a race car. Um, but they’re in their street car.” And I don’t want to piss anybody off, but I don’t give a crap. Race cars don’t have fenders. No, I’m just kidding. That’s an argument me and Renie always have. But, you know, when you drive a purposebuilt formula car and then even if you get in a Porsche or something, and they’re incredible cars today, they really are, you know, you know, but the feel in a formula car, purpose-built race car, you know, when you’re going into an apex and you want to hit that apex just right and you can watch that tire just touch the inside of the apex, it’s a lot easier. not easier, but it’s a lot, you know, it’s a lot more visceral. It’s a lot more uh input. And then when you’re coming, I remember going driving on street courses like Miami Grand Prix and just going flat out through one of the turns and then just feeding the car out and it’s you’re watching that tire just cross the white line but miss the concrete barrier and every time you’re doing it, you’re like, “Okay, come in.” You know, I don’t have to tell when you’re driving. It’s such people think it looks easy on TV. Yeah. But it’s, you know, I don’t have to tell you if you’ve ever been in a race car. It takes a certain talent. And there’s a white knuckle turns, right? Road America, the kink. Yeah. You’re going into the kink, you’re just like, you know, you go through the carousel, the car is up in the air. It’s it’s, you know, it’s it’s doing its rotation. You’re flat out through the carousel. You get to the kink. If you lift, you’re going to be slow all the way down the straightaway. So, you just got to just bam. And but the advantage to people learning today is telemetry. I didn’t have the computers. If I would have had the computers and be able to sit back and and go over the data and telling somebody where you break the little soft or where you can I think I would have been so much farther along. Yeah. that would have got me over the hump of not having the experience that people like Tony George and all the guys that own their own racetracks had and had uncles that are AJ Foy and you know so I I do think it’s great for the average person today to go out on a racetrack with their street car and they know their street car right they’re in their car all day long it gives a lot of help there and if you can get the telemetry in there you can really learn so much faster I think really and truly I wish I had it yeah absolutely um so You lived on adrenaline for decades. Yeah. Uh flying, racing, uh running, risking everything. Yeah. Um what happens when that suddenly stops? Was it hard to come down from that pace? Well, the first time I got busted in 1988, we had had 40,000 lbs stuck in Canada that we were trying to smuggle back into America. So, we had used a sea plane. We smuggled it in on lakes and um I got busted. I ended up in one of the worst prisons in America for a couple weeks and then I was actually had to keep running drugs to pay for the lawyers. So you kind of it never shut off while you were in jail. While I when I was on on pro on bond, right? I was literally at point some points my other friend had smuggled in a bunch of coke and had it in DC.
I was literally going in my suit that I was wearing to court, which by the way, the first time I got busted, I didn’t know how to make a tie. Like, I didn’t I wasn’t part of the working world. I was 30 something years old. I never made a tie. So, um so I kept going. So, I didn’t let go. Even after getting busted, I kept going for the adrenaline, the money, the, you know, the second time I got busted. I’d had just gotten married four weeks earlier. I had a one and a halfyear-old daughter. And man, the world came to an end. it stopped and everything just slowed down for but by that time I’d already stopped racing a couple years earlier and I think you just get to a point where you’re just burned out you know everybody wanted to quit my partner in Ohio wanted to quit who used to race cars with me for a while we just after 20 years that’s that’s a a a tough pace to keep up for that long not just the racing but the smuggling and being, you know, chased literally by the DEA. Yeah. You’re constantly looking out the window. You don’t, you know, there’s It’s It’s funny. Nobody ever asked me that question. And going back that time, I was in such And by the way, so right after we right after I got busted and the racing had stopped just a couple years earlier and then I had to go work for the DEA. So, I really never I was two more years into such a high pressure cooker because now I’m looking at 25 years, you know, and you’ll see people will say, “Oh, he’s a snitch. He’s a rat.” And I get it because it’s but you don’t understand till you’re wearing my moccasins and you’re looking at 25 years and you have a newborn baby and a wife. But it’s beyond that. I realized that it’s somewhat when you’re a kid and if you if you knock down the vase and you and your brother or your sister go, “Don’t tell mom.” Or you’re in I remember being in like fifth grade and got in trouble with a kid and we go to the principal’s office and we agree not to tell at all just to keep our mouth shut. Then all of a sudden the kid starts ratting me out and lying. So I understand how people feel, you know, and you see the movies on TV, you know, the rats get stitch, you know, snitches get stitches, but that’s not the reality. The reality is by the time I got busted the the second time the world had changed. Yeah. And a guy pulled me aside and said, “Listen, in jail, he goes, I just did 15 years in jail. I have not seen my daughter in 15 years. My daughter was your daughter’s age.” He goes, “The morals and values you’re clinging to died a lifetime ago. You better make a deal.” And lawyers all told me to make a deal, so I made a deal. You also grew up without your dad. Yeah. So, I’m sure that that was crossing your mind as well. Oh, you didn’t want to see your kid grow up without you. Yeah. And I didn’t want to do 25 years. That too. And and but my daughter and my and my wife at the time, my first wife was not stable. I didn’t, you know, it just I didn’t have that support either to say, “Don’t worry, I’ll be a lot of times. What happens is, and I’ve seen it happen over and over, when the cocaine, the limos, the private planes, and the parties are going, and the jet skis, and the everything’s good, but when the [ __ ] hits the fan, no woman’s going to wait for you, you know, 20 years, and your friends turn your I have an expression. I say, when you when you dance, you dance at the party. But when you walk, you walk alone. Nobody calls you. Nobody takes your calls. more likely you’re gonna hit it with get hit in the head with a shoe on the way out the door. Everybody turns their back on you. Not in my case, a couple one or two friends stayed with me. But um when you’re al I mean but the life of being in the DEA and being undercover is man it’s really intense because you have the sword of Damocles hanging over your head. If you don’t produce you’re going to get out. You’re not going to be in the program. They’re going they know. Think about it. you get away with it forever and ever and ever. But when the government gets their hands on you, now you’re in their ballpark. You’re on their racetrack and they know what to do to manipulate you and control you. But I’ll say this, I never was asked to or would have ratted out any of my own friends. I did not. I mean, I I did one or two people that I indirectly knew and most of it was them putting me into cases like we want you to go into here, do this, do that, which I would do. They asked me to profer myself at one point, which was to put all every profer means you’re going to write down everything you ever did with everybody you ever did. And if you leave something out, everything can be used against you in a court of law. But if you don’t leave anything out, nothing can be used against you in a court of law. Of course, you’ll never remember everything. And then you’ll have to testify or turn in anybody on that sheet. And I just said, I ain’t doing that. I told my DEA handler, I said, listen, I grew up in this town, Hollywood, Fort Lauder. I go, every one of my friends, I’m not going to go to jail. leave my wife and my daughter alone and turn in my friends from high school. I’m just not doing it right. And he was like such a cool guy. He goes, “Care for a steak?” I go, “Yeah.” Come on. So, we go across the street to Chuck Steakhouse on 17th Street Causeway. This is how intense this is. And he goes, “We’re going to sit at this table right here.” I remember he pulled out the pen and paper. He goes in the hotel room. He goes, “My bosses want you to profit yourself.” And I just said, “I didn’t.” And he goes, he I knew he hated paperwork. So he puts the pen down, I guess. So we’re sitting in the steak restaurant. He goes, “You sit here.” “Okay, I’ll sit here.” And we’re eating dinner. I said, “DA bought me a steak.” Yeah. He goes, and he’s a big guy. He goes, “Look over my uh my shoulder.” I said, “Yeah.” He goes, “See the guy at the bar in the black leather jacket?” I go, “Yeah.” He goes, and he has this deep voice. He goes, “I’m going to walk out of here and once I clear the door, you’re going to walk up to him and talk drug deal and see what you can do. Tell him Captain Bobby sent you.” And that was his undercover name, Captain Bobby. I go, “You want me to get up and walk over and talk to some stranger drug deal?” When I leave, you see me go through the door. I want you to get up. So, I did. I sat down with the guy. I said, “Hey, Captain Bobby sent me.” And we started talking and I’m looking around the room for see if he’s got any backup. He’s wearing a leather jacket. something and at, you know, and he’s talking drug deal with me and smuggling and I I start thinking to myself, you know what? I bet this guy’s wired. I bet you this guy’s working for the customs or something like that because why is he wearing a leather jacket, you know, right? You know, I mean, it’s Florida, you know? He looked good. He looked like something out of actually looked like something out of a Martin Scorsesei movie like black hair, red shirt. I mean, it was like, you know, out of New York City or something. But that’s the kind of intensity like you know. Yeah. I was like [ __ ] And then every time we busted somebody I have to de be de debriefed. And so I’ll give you an example of what something would look like for them real quick. You would have a tape I had a sent me out to buy a tape recorder. Had the little tape recorder you could ever buy a mic and let’s say I had somebody I was trying to work. I would go to a pay phone because that’s what we did back then. you know, we had pay phones with a bag of quarters, call somebody, and then I would say um before the person picks up the phone, say, “All right, I’m calling um Bill so and so about doing a 300 pound, you know, deal or smuggling trip, and I have to say it’s Tuesday, December 4th, 1992 at 3:35. I’m calling from pay phone number blah blah blah. Call starts at 252. Then I make the phone call. Then we talk. I record everything. Then I when a guy hangs up I go phone call over time you know you know two you know 350 you have to do that because they prove that the tape wasn’t manipulated and those are the kind of things you have to save all the tapes. I actually have the DEA cassettes still because then I have to take the MIDI cassettes transfer to the normal cassettes and then m you know mail them up to the DEA or give them to my handler. Why did you keep those? They’re blank. Well, I saved everything. I I save everything. And I I tell you what, I think one of the reasons I save everything is I think when you have your life upended by losing your my house my grandfather died at 12 who was so close to me. My dad died at 13. My house burned down at like 15 14. I didn’t have a car yet. 14 in New Orleans. Moved to Florida, you know.
So I have a tend I think you’re hang I’m hanging on to everything, right? Right. And that’s why I actually saved a lot of the stuff from all those days. That makes sense. Yeah. Um, in the book you mention your wife and kids a couple several times. Um, what was it like for them um through this this phase, you know, when you’re still working, I guess, through with the DEA? The DEA. And what was it like afterwards, you know, them learning like what it is that that does or did? So, my first wife, um, we had while I was out on bond, she got pregnant again. So, now I’m looking at jail time and I have a one and a halfyear-old and a a son being born. So, the pressure to working for the DEA and it destroyed our marriage. I mean, we’ve been married four weeks when I got busted. Literally, I went on my honeymoon, came back from my honeymoon, I got married July 18th. I said to my wife, I just spent $40,000 on a wedding, a honeymoon, you know, I had, you know, that, you know, that’s a lot of money. It’s like those days like hundred and something grand. So, baby, I got to go back to work. And she said to me, she came from simple, she was, you know, a poor girl growing up. She goes, “Listen, we’re married. We have a daughter. Please don’t go. You’ll get a job. I’ll get a job. We’ll eat peanut butter and and, you know, sandwiches. Don’t go.” And I just looked at her, I said, “Nah, I got to go. I got to make another run.” And at that time, we had slowed down. We weren’t moving thousands of pounds anymore. We were moving higher grade weeds, slower, you know, but we’re still making a good living doing it. Wasn’t the go- go days. Um, and I went and I got busted and it just destroyed my marriage. I mean, we stayed married for another 10 years, but it was a it was a mess after that. Yeah. And then what happened was my ex-wife got a bunch of surgeries. I was working selling cars. I was working. So then I got became a car salesman because who else would hire a convicted felon? And I worked 10 hours. I just had to prove to myself and the world that I could do it legitimately, right? And I had two two kids and a wife to pay for. And I worked my ass off night and day to become the number one salesman in the store. I was the top salesman at the store for eight years in a row. I mean, which if you look back says Kenny, you never should have sold drugs. You could have done it legitimately, but I had to be the best at, you know, and and and and everything just destroyed. And finally, she got hooked on oxycottton. Remember when all those pill mills? She got hooked on that and left me to raise my two kids at 8 and 12. So I funny I always say that learning to multitask to raise two kids by yourself which is two different breakfast getting two kids to two different breakfastes two different lunches in two different schools before 8:00 in the morning I used to be up at 5 in the morning I would you know I and uh to get you know laundry done and I think that running drugs gave me the the the wherewith you know the multitasking like when you’re running drugs and you got five cars on the road and phone calls and people and landings in this and that. You learn to multitask. So, I think that helped me in that respect. Well, I think also kind of bringing it back to, you know, racing and driving on the track, you’re used to seeing things so quickly come at you so quickly that when you go on the street on 95, everything just slows down. Oh, it’s You ever leave the racetrack and you got some old lady in a car and you you dive in and you cut her off and you’re under you go underneath her, you know, like I’m like, “Oh my god, what am I doing?” You know, it’s like, right, you leave the track and No, Ken, I have never done that. Oh, stop. Yeah, you leave the track and you’re just like, “Oh, [ __ ] What am Pardon me. Oh, you know, what am I doing?” You know, I’m diving into turn one here and I just drove somebody’s, you know. Well, I mean, we we talked about the the whole adrenaline rush, right? And for me, speaking personally, one of the things that I get so much enjoyment out of going to the racetrack is that I get that adrenaline rush. Yeah. and and I get it out of my system that that that sort of sense that I’m I I could be in danger.
Yeah. And it wakes me up. So when I go back on on the street on 95 and I’m going back home and I’m, you know, towing my car, I’m I’m one of the slowest ones on the street. You got So I’ll tell you a story. The other day me and Renie, we played bar trivia every Tuesday night, right, in Bokeh. And so I come down the turnpike and I got one of my BMWs. I got like five cars, of course, because I’m I’m a car guy. So, I have five old cars that are missing something in every car, you know, like the front seat. My wife goes, “When are you going to put the passenger seat back in your BMW?” She doesn’t know it’s an M3 convertible with a six-speed, you know. Yeah. But, uh, yeah, I put the passenger seat back in. We can go for it. Been like that for two years, but you can put a tire in the front seat. Yes, of course. You got your priorities straight, right? Go to go to go to a tire rack and pick up a tire, just throw it right in the passenger area. So, um, um, this is not last Tuesday, this Tuesday, but the Tuesday before, and I was just had a lot in my mind, and I’m like, I have a BMW E90, which, you know, was the last I I have an E46 M3. I have an an 01 540 M Sport, and I have a Mazda RX7 Gen 3. So, I’ve got that. I’ve got an E30 with an S52 M3 engine that my son and I own, and it’s full. Renie does all this. Renie. Renie at Redline BMW. You know, PMPO Beach, Florida. My bestie. So, this is what I’m getting at. So, I’m leaving and I got to drive from Glades Road to 595. And I’m rap. And the car, the one I’m driving is a diesel and it’s modified. It’s got over 500 horsepower to the rear wheel torque. The engine’s like 370, 340. And I’m just raping this car. I’m just raping it. I’m paddles. Bam, bam, bam. And I’ve got my adrenaline going. And I’m just like, I need this. Yeah, I need this. I need to throw this car through turns. I need to And when I 10 minutes later, whatever it was, when I got off 595, you know, the big sweeper is coming down. And when I get to my neighborhood, I kind of look in the rearview mirror. See, nobody’s following me. Yeah. Get that guy. And I pull in and the car is just crying, you know, smoking, you know. And I was like, yeah, man. So, you you do need that. Yeah. if you’ve had it, you know, if you’ve had it, you need it. You know, you do. I get it. Um, we’re very close to running out of time and I knew this was going to happen and I have more pages to go through. So, I think this is going to be a multi-art with you if you’re um, you know, open to coming back. One of the things that I do want to mention real quick, um, since we’re talking about adrenaline and things like that, just I wanted to ask you, and again, we have to like wrap it up quickly. Um the when you smell the the race fuel does it does it bring back you know those memories of you know back in the 80s you racing. There was a particular uh moment in the book you mentioned this is when I believe you got into a big accident. I think it might have been mid Ohio where you were airlifted. Yeah. You were airlifted. I was ambulance not airline but it was it was in by right around the corner from Indianapolis Motor Speed. So, there’s a part in the book where you talked about you you’re doing everything right and I think you were getting you were in first place. Yeah, I was going for the poll. Yeah, you were in first place. I had the poll and he he smelled the the smell of of grass. Grass. Fresh cut. Fresh cut grass. Oh, I mean you would just assume the other type of grass based on previous conversation. The kind I have to clarify. Yes. Grass, you know, lawn. Just smelled it. Fresh cut grass. Comes around the corner. there’s a car stalled and you t-bone him. When I read that, it it reminded me that our our senses when we’re when we’re driving on the racetrack, when we’re racing, our senses are so heightened that I remember going through u what six and be between six and seven at Sebring and there was I smelled the fresh cut grass. I remember just vividly I’m like just everything is so you’re you’re it’s like a high such a high. Um Danny Sullivan once said when he’s going around Indie, he can smell the cook the the uh fried chicken. He can smell the fried chicken. And uh it’s so that’s the thing that you can’t explain to people that stick in ball sports you’ll never understand, you know? I mean, if you hit a baseball and you get a home run, that adrenaline’s there for a couple seconds, but but it’s not the same adrenaline as being in a race car. every part of your body. I mean, like I said, when you’re going through the kink or you’re going through a a white knuckle turn, every track has one, you know, and you’re just like, you know, I remember one time a guy going on to the racetrack. We were Skip Barber had, you know, different classes and he goes, I’m going to win this race or die trying. And we’re all like, no wait, right? Don’t be But that’s what your mindset is, you know? You just got to go out there. You cannot go out there and think you got to you’re going to win. You’re going to push to the car to the ultimate limit. You want to be the fastest person at the track and your senses are so heightened like you said like you smell I remember going through that turn it was a blind right-hander and I go smell and you’re you know your mind’s in split second you know it’s not happening in 3 seconds it’s happened in 1/100th of a second and you’re like that reminds me of Sunday afternoon my and you know I never put there’s the card went off why it smells like that would have been better right oh it smells like grass I wonder why oh it’s probably because there’s grass in the air because but I’m also going for the pole and I was going against the the factory team Cley team from they had flown the driver in and the car from Ireland or wherever they build it and it was me and him and I’m like I’m not going to and I had the swift DB1 which was the premier car the first one it was Michael Andred no um what’s his son Jeff Andredy had owned it RK Smith had owned it who was a f but Andredddy owned it and I got it from Brighton so it came from you know I it was a badass car. It was sorted out and uh I wanted to I wanted the pole and I wasn’t going to lose to a factory test driver from flowing in from the guy was the test driver. Yeah, that story was fantastic.
Again, just to plug your book uh one step over the line, the uh you know what I’ll have to autograph it for you. Yes, absolutely. Or check if you have a blank. So, more valuable. The book will be fine. So, we’re going to uh jump into segment our last segment, which is the rapid fire question segment. We have under 10 minutes. So, these are going to have to be really quick and snappy. Are you ready? Y. Here we go. What gave you a bigger rush? Crossing the finish line or crossing the Gulf with 600 lb of weed? Oh, the finish line. Really? It meant more to me. Okay. Yes, that makes sense. All right. Number two. What happens faster? Ah, that’s that’s a tough one. Go ahead. That’s a tough one. Uh, what’s scarier, turn 11 at Road Atlanta or landing a plane on a dirt strip in the dark? So, I’ve never raced at Road Atlanta. I’ve been there. But uh uh they’re both scared. Any white knuckle turn, you know that turn like you’re talking about the downhill. Yeah. And uh and uh that’s a tough one. I think you’re you’re both at the heightened the couple. The difference between landing a plane is you’re done in about five minutes in a race car that’s coming back in about two minutes. You do it over and over. Do it again and again and again. So I’d say that white knuckle turns are always uh you know they’re really important. Yeah. They keep you going. All right. Number three. If adrenaline was a drug, how would you rate racing versus smuggling on a scale from 1 to 10? Oh, man. They’re both a 10. Really? Oh, hell yeah. Oh, hell yeah. You’re just an adrenaline junkie. Yeah, man. All right, number four. Uh, what burned more cash, racing tires or cocaine habits? Cocaine habit. Not even close, I imagine. But I didn’t have to pay for my cocaine. That was the thing. I I actually owned it. So, it was just lost opportunity. Yeah. Lost profit. There you go. And when you have 10 kilos of Coke, like I said, you don’t run out. Uh, number five. Did you ever consider naming your race team Blow Racing, or was that too on the nose? Yeah. No, that wasn’t a good idea. Yeah. Sounds like having your bail bondsman as your sponsor is probably pushing it about as much as you want to do. All right, number six. Um, how much of the paddock do you think was financed by the drug trade? This is back in the 80s. 10% 50%? Um I would say um depending on what series, you know, like Indie Car probably not, but IMSA was probably 20 30%. Absolutely. Because in Yeah, it was everybody was running drugs. I know I can bring in three other guys here that were drug runners in South Florida that I know personally. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And were and were any of them that I know are short on time. Uh any experience with power boat racing because I know that it was prevalent the drugs was prevalent in the power boat racing. So, uh, Randy Laneir, who was, you know, one of the fastest, best race car drivers at in Florida. I mean, he came in rookie of the year at Indie, 10th at Indie, won the IMSA championship. His partner was Ben Kramer, and Ben Kramer ran the Apache Power Boats. Yeah. And so, yeah, there was big tie. I think that those two worlds kind of go hang. There was other guys. Um, I can’t think of their names right now, but it’s a complete, you know, intertwined. Yeah. All right. Number seven. Did you ever feel like the good guy in your own movie? Yeah. Yeah. I didn’t think I was the bad guy. As a matter of fact, in the book I say that when I I then if I went to the dark side and became a DE agent and my you know, my older brother who’s very straight says, “You realize you were on the dark side when you were selling drugs.” You were never the good guy. Yeah. You know, right? I was never the good guy. But I think turning my life around and getting out of the you know, I’m still friends with the arresting officer and my DEA handler and we’re still friends today. So I I proved I used to call him every year and tell them during Christmas, I’m doing the right thing. I’m working hard. I’m staying straight. I would imagine not a lot of uh guys that went in with you know through your life or similar like come out you know like you did. I know actually a lot of the guy well a lot of we all came from good families. We all came from middle class families. I think that helps. Yeah. You know I mean you know I have friends whose dads were police officers, mailmen. You know, we weren’t the inner city kids, but it’s just when you I say if you raise somebody right, they might go right. If you raise a kid right and teach them values, they might go right, they might go left, but eventually they’ll find center. And I’ve seen a lot of guys do that and become very successful. So, all right. Number eight. Uh, looking back, what do you think you were really chasing? Money, adrenaline, or meaning? So, when you start selling drugs in high school, you’re the cool guy, right? And we were making money. Yeah. But money was always the the driver, you know.
I wanted to also climb the the ladder. I mean, I was raised with, you know, good hardworking German immigrant work ethic of work hard, do good, become successful. So, I was just trying to be the best drug person I could be. I was going to be a hero. I wanted to climb the drug dealing ladder, the drug smuggling ladder and be, you know, the biggest, you know, but money was the ultimate goal. And excitement, adrenal, adrenaline, excitement, and money. Gotcha. All right. Uh, number nine. Do you believe the war on drugs made things better or worse? Thousand% worse. Yeah. Thousand%. You noted that in the book. Yeah. Listen, the the mob would never be owned Vegas and be what they are today if it wasn’t prohibition, right? Us little young kids in South Florida that could have been doctors, lawyers, politician, you know, whatever. We gotten hooked up on drugs because the more you crush drugs, when you take something that people want and you take it away from them, you’re just raising the value, right? You’re not going to stop people. They’re blowing blow up every boat you want in, you know, in in the Caribbean right now and all that. There’s another guy going to get on the boat. They’re just going to keep coming because they don’t believe it’s Here’s the other thing about real quick. Racing and drug smuggling and drug running have the same one thing. It’s never going to happen to me. When you see a guy and you’re driving next to him and his car catches on fire, that’s not going to happen to me. When some guy dies in a plane crash in Colombia or gets murdered in a drug deal in New York or gets busted with 10,000 pounds, it’s not going to happen to me. Yeah. And that’s the way you justify that. All right. Last question. If you could go back and give 18-year-old Ken one sentence of advice, what would it be? Don’t do this. Sounds like it was already too late at 18. Maybe at 14, you had to have that conversation with with little Ken, right? Maybe 10. But then I wouldn’t have raced. No, I I really, you know, 13 is when I smoked my first joint. And and again, if in back in those days, if you smoked a joint, sold a joint, and gave a joint away, and you couldn’t get a joint without buying it illegally. So, you created the the, you know, the business, right? If they would have said it’s all legal, you know, I mean, there’s so much marijuana moving around right now and it’s all legal. So, it it you know, it’s I just think if you if you put up a wall and you say don’t do it. If you tell a kid, don’t do it, he’s going to do it. What’s the best way? If you tell some girl, don’t go out with that guy. He’s a jerk. Right? You see her at the football game with the guy the next weekend, right? Don’t Yeah, I that’s my thinking, you know. All right, Ken. Listen, we are out of time. It’s been fantastic having you. This is definitely going to be part one of probably a multi-part series. Uh definitely pick up Ken’s book, One Step Over the Line. It was a fantastic read. Are you Are you open to coming back? Yeah. We’d love We’d love to continue this conversation with you. We’re talking racing. We’re talking adrenaline. I’m coming. Hell yeah. All right. So, we’re going to skip uh the guest challenge this time around. We’re going to leave it for the next time. All right. Okay. And remember, everything interesting happens off the racing line. See you guys next time. Thank you, guys. Everything interesting happens off the racing line. I took the hard road. I burn these stripes. The road from dreamer to driver ain’t always straight. K my head down down fueled by faith. I lost some time but found my name. Pressure made a diamond out of me and I se my truth between stars and peace. This ain’t love this. [Music]
