The Smugglers Book

The Black Book

It was 1981 and I was just a toddler when my parents left me on the top of Bennett avenue in Black Hawk Colorado. They gave me a $50.00 bill and told me to go find my Uncle Zeke at the local bar. I remember my mom telling me, "give him the money and tell him we will be back in two weeks, HB." This was the first of many adventures I can remember having in this small mining town over the next 40 years. You see, my father was a drug dealer, my mother was a hippy. These circumstances made for a very colorful childhood. I was not like the other kids; I knew way more of the world than most my age.

Black Hawk holds many of my memories, but the tale really starts back in the Florida Keys on a fishing boat. This specific boat doubled as a smuggling boat in the off season, bringing in hundreds of pounds of marijuana, cocaine, guns and occasionally rare gems. My father would orchestrate many of these trips, as he had many connections in Columbia, Cuba, Jamaica, Costa Rica. Different groups of smugglers were utilizing his and his friends boats to bring illegal items into the US during the height of the war on drugs.

One of my first childhood memories is coming home late at night and hearing 20 shot guns load at the same time- inside my house. I still hear those guns in my dreams. It was in 1983 that my father was busted by the FBI at our ranch in the Colorado mountains. In an instant, we lost everything. The house, the car, money, etc.…. My mother was free, with no charges or jail time, as she denied knowing anything, my father corroborated her story. Now on our own to survive without the luxury of drug money, we moved to a small-town, way down south in New Mexico, where no one knew our names.

As a child, I never thought about how we paid for anything because I always had what I needed. School time came and I would have new clothes. Similarly, for Christmas, presents were always under the tree. My father had long since disappeared, going on the run rather than doing jail time. An outlaw in every sense of the word. I don’t know if I will ever know what happened to him. I often wonder if he is dead or alive. Many years later my mother would tell me it was my uncle who helped support me. This led me back to that small little mining town as a teenager, on a quest to find answers that nobody wanted to speak about.

Quickly after deciding I needed to see my uncle I showed up, penniless. I arrived hoping to find out anything I could about the years between then and now. Zeke was not thrilled to see me, and he spent as little time as possible answering my juvenile questions. Despite this, he allowed me to live in the unfinished portion of his old apartment building, only until I could find something else. The reason for his, “yes”, was based solely on the fact that my father was part owner of this building. His hesitance to talk was always a mystery, although I would later learn that he was still under investigation with the FBI and ATF, for business he may or may not have conducted with my father. Paranoia was likely high on the list of why not to talk to a teenager about her father and his business dealings. I had no idea what my uncle did, or how he and my family were connected- as I would come to find out, he was not actually my uncle.

Twenty years would go by before I would get the answers, I had sought in my youth. I was always so busy, but after my restaurant sold, I had nothing but time on my hands. I used this as an opportunity to go up and visit my uncle, with the intention of clearing out any belongings my father had left in the building years ago. I was surprised my uncle still lived in the half-finished apartment building on main street. When I arrived, it was with a warmer welcome that I had received decades ago. Sadly, time had not been kind to him. I was unprepared for how I would find him, although it was worse than I could have imagined. He was on oxygen and riddled with the cancer. Disease tends to remind people of their mortality and he was now at a place in his life where he wanted to unburden his soul.

I brought my whole life on this visit. I stayed upstairs in one of the apartment rooms with my 4 kids, husband and dogs. Zeke tried awfully hard to make us comfortable. He offered for us to stay as long as we needed in order to go through things and talk. I would spend the days going through old boxes and papers while he would chat about when and how he met my parents and the things he did. It was during these great talks I discovered he was not actually my uncle but the smuggling partner of my father. They were a tight team and worked closely together for decades. He explained the fall my father’s empire and how it stemmed from doing business with a politician. This politician known only as PP, would be the man who set my father up. He sold him out in order to be freed of some trouble he had got himself into. I also learned that my dad took the rap by himself, in order to keep everyone else involved out of jail. My dad hoped this would allow Zeke and some others to eventually go back to the hustle. Although, the purity of the cocaine was so great the ATF was always going to keep them on the radar, in hopes of being connected to my dad’s dealers in Columbia. It turns out Zeke was in secret contact with my dad for many years when I was young. I also learned he was in contact with my mother and would send her money when I was growing up. Despite the strong friendship, sometime in the late 90’s, Zeke said he had stopped hearing from my father. This was around the time I had come up looking for answers so many years ago.

I asked him why he was still here. It turns out, Zeke never left that mountain again for fear of drug lords looking for him, trying to find my father. For decades he has just been, “laying low”, as he calls it. Nothing but memories left. When you smuggle for a living you don’t get social security benefits, retirement, or any post-job security once you can’t smuggle anymore. So, he lives off the generosity of the church and has a few tenants from time to time. Far removed from the once wild stories of his yesteryears.

My family and I continued to visit for quite some time, until he passed away. His amazing stories and deep kindness brought us back almost once a month religiously. Although he was in bad shape, I was still shocked when he had passed. I was also shocked to learn that I was named the only living heir to his estate. He left me his crumbling apartment building and its contents of memories. I began going through mountain of things. I threw more garbage away then I care to recall. Dusty old worthless items that had taken up valuable space for decades. Although, these piles did have some hidden treasure. But the most interesting things were the things directly left to me in the Will.

The first on the “list” was an old beat-up red trunk. Inside were some classic items, such as a roach clip from my childhood, that he and my dad used all the time. There was no shortage of nostalgia in this chest. It also contained some rare photo albums filled with ghosts of my past, keys to doors I may never find, old pictures of the town before gambling changed it all, an old ledger he kept with my father that contained all their drug numbers and accounts, and at the bottom, under an old shirt of my dad’s, was a little black book. It appeared to be a journal. At first, I had just skimmed it over, but curiosity got the best of me and I ended up reading some of the most incredible tales in its pages. I was about to put it down when I noticed it had a little strap in the back. I turned it over and opened it up to find $20, 000.00 in cash, tucked under the elastic with a note from my father telling me he loved me, and he hoped this would help raise his 4 beautiful grand kids.