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"FacebookPinterest\n\n1976\n\n There, on the horizon: a ship.\n\nDave Strather  This name has been changed. saw it through binoculars, the white sails ghostly against the water, the hull full of precious cargo. He was sitting on an exposed cliff, overlooking the Pacific. It was dark, and the beach was deserted for fifty miles in both directions; this was the Lost Coast, a vast stretch of uninhabited, magnificently forested Northern California, the kind of place that makes you understand why they called it the Golden State. Dave chose this spot for landfall precisely because it was empty. He and his team needed secrecy. The sailboat was laden with contraband: four thousand pounds of Thai-stick pot, the latest in marijuana commerce, a product as potent as it was valuable, which Dave and his crew\u2014a team of smugglers called the Coronado Company\u2014would unload and sell for millions of dollars.\n\nOnce Dave made visual contact, his crew got on the radios: \"Offshore vessel, please identify.\"\n\n\"This is Red Robin.\"\n\nSmuggling means waiting, of course, but Red Robin\u2014a code name for the ship\u2014was months overdue, and Dave's nerves were frayed. Importing pot from Mexico had become routine for the Company, but this was a new type of gig, crossing the Pacific in a double-masted ketch. There were more variables, more opportunity for error. The Red Robin had run out of fuel before it even reached the international date line. Once under sail, she was becalmed in the Doldrums. Then she disappeared.\n\nWith the ship lost, Dave set up a radio watch on a palisade covered in redwoods. \"Red Robin, come in,\" he had said into his radio a thousand times in a daily attempt to reach the boat. Back in September, it was pleasant on his perch, taking in the panoramic view, drinking a beer, tweaking the dial. But by December, everyone was cold and jumpy. Now, just before Christmas, their ship was finally coming in.\n\nDave and his team snapped into action. That was the Company's signature; they were a tight, coordinated unit\u2014Dave and Lance, Otter and Don. Almost the entire group had grown up together in Coronado, a secluded little beach town on a peninsula off the coast of San Diego. In the 1960s, they had been classmates at Coronado High. They were surfers. Some would head to Mexico for the breaks\u2014and bring back small bales of pot. Then they brought in their former Spanish teacher, Lou Villar, for his language abilities, and the operation exploded. Within a few years, the Coronado Company was the largest smuggling outfit on the West Coast. Over ten years, they would assemble a $100 million empire, importing more than ninety tons of product from Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, and Thailand in what the DEA would call the most sophisticated operation of its kind.\n\n\"Let's get the Duck rolling,\" Dave said over the comm.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nThe bridge that brought the world to Coronado in '69.\n\nThe crux of the business was the off-load. The battle was fought and won\u2014or lost\u2014on the beach. And for this massive operation, the Company had brought in an audacious centerpiece: the Duck, or DUKW, a thirty-one-foot, six-wheeled World War II&amp;amp;#x2013;era amphibious landing craft that allowed the Company to drive right into the water and dock alongside the Red Robin. Initially Lou, the company's leader, had thought this was crazy\u2014Oh sure, why not use zeppelins?\u2014but he was eventually persuaded to green-light the purchase of the seven-and-a-half-ton vehicle. The Company shipped the beast by train to Oregon, where Don Kidd, the crew's mechanic, reconditioned it.\n\nNow Don was in the cockpit of that hybrid metallic monster, which did fifty miles per hour on the road and six knots in the water. He'd welded on a wave shield so the ship could make it through the brutal surf. Don and a pilot plowed through the murky night (\"nine feet up a black cat's ass,\" as he put it) to meet the ketch. They tied up, quickly transferred the load to the Duck, and turned around, finding their way back using shore lights that marked a safe passage. Dave, the beach master, looked at his watch: So far, so good.\n\nIt was a funny thing to see the Duck rise from the darkness, seawater dripping off it like a real-life Nautilus. Until it stopped rising. Then it wasn't funny. By now the tide had gone out, and the Duck, heavily weighted with Thai gold, immediately sank to its axles in the soft beach. You're supposed to deflate your tires to drive on sand and then reinflate on asphalt. But even deflated, the Duck's wheels were too hard to gain purchase. The tide wouldn't lift the boat for another six hours, by which time the sun would be overhead and the Duck would be as conspicuous as a relic on Omaha Beach. \"Fuck,\" Dave said over the radio. \"We're stuck.\"\n\nThe pilot hit the throttle and spun the wheels, sinking the Duck deeper. \"Kill the engine!\" someone yelled. Don got out, looked at the tires, and stood back. \"Don't panic,\" he said. \"I know exactly what to do.\"\n\nDon told the team to get the pickups \"and a lot of rope\" and quickly assembled an elaborate pulley system that attached their four-wheel drives to the Duck's winch.\n\n\"Are you sure this is gonna work?\" Dave asked.\n\nDon didn't flinch when the motors fired, and sure enough, his ad hoc Archimedean apparatus allowed the Duck to lift itself right out of the sand and drive back up the beach to the road. It was a goddamn glorious sight. Cheers went up along the coast.\n\nThe Duck's cargo was unloaded and safely hidden in a barn behind an old general store. It was a sweet reward to sample the supply. Don thought the faintly purple buds were thick and beautiful\u2014the finest he'd ever smoked. It was the biggest haul to date: $8 million (about $33 million today). The Company had stepped up its game, bringing in better product with more sophisticated technique, and the distributors were going to be very happy with the fragrant cache.\n\nBy now those dealers had been waiting a long time, too. Lou had had a hell of a job keeping them calm. As the ringleader, Lou rarely set foot near the beach; instead he was installed in a cabana at the Beverly Hills Hotel, quarterbacking from downfield. He was worried their reputation would be ruined if the supply didn't show. It was a relief to call the clients and announce that \"the Eagle has landed.\"\n\nThe exchange always happens fast. Like in the movies, the money would come in Halliburton briefcases. Unlike in the movies, the Company usually waited to count it.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nCoronado's swim team with Ed \"Otter\" Otero, who swam dope from Mexico with the Company.\n\nAnd count it. And count it. And count it. It took so long to count that much cash, they got bored. The partners each made half a million. For his rescue of the Duck, Don got an MVP award, a new Company institution, which came with a bonus payment of $25,000. Everyone else got their wad and prepared to scatter to the winds\u2014the sweet, distinctive scent of their trade wafting from their clothes and hair.\n\nIt was exhilarating, the money and the camaraderie. The Company members saw themselves as hippie outlaws. There was no violence, no guns, just the threat of the law, which bound them together. They were criminals, but they were also a family. Afterward, Lou and Dave sat in his cabana, going through receipts, accounting for a very good year. They hoisted two flutes of champagne. \"Here's to everyone's efforts,\" Lou said. \"Let's do it again soon.\"\n\n\n\n1964\n\n Lou got in his Corvette in New York and knew he wouldn't stop until he reached the Pacific. He was making that modern-day migration west, a twentieth-century Manifest Destiny, with the top down the whole way and the red metal-flake lacquer flashing off the hood in the sun. On the radio were Dick Dale and the Beach Boys, singing about girls, woodies, and surfing.\n\nLou\u2014who was born in Cuba and moved to Brooklyn at 14\u2014had heard about a job teaching Spanish at a high school in Coronado, a spit of land in the middle of San Diego Bay. For a fast-talking kid from Flatbush Avenue, it was all he could have hoped for: a low-slung beach town of 18,000 people known for its naval base and its isolation, a sort of military Mayberry, accessible by ferry. From the moment he arrived, Lou loved the nonchalance that came with the geography. Everyone called it the Rock. Or, playfully, Idiot Island: a place where people did their own thing. No matter what your rush, you waited for the ferry to get anywhere. And how romantic was it, Lou marveled, taking a boat to and from home?\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nSwim coach and ringleader Lou Villar.\n\nLou wasn't like the other teachers at Coronado High. He was handsome and charming\u2014and at 25, he was not much older than his students. Soon he was everywhere at school: teaching Spanish, coaching basketball, then the swim team to the regional championship. He was the kind of coach the kids could confide in. They thought of him as the bohemian teacher; no one else pulled into the faculty lot in a red Corvette and shades. And when the school banned sunglasses, Lou wore his prescription sunglasses anyhow, teaching in Ray-Bans like some kind of beatnik professor. For the students of Coronado, it was a sign of solidarity. They saw Lou going through the same changes as they were.\n\nImagine starting high school in 1964, how fast it was all moving between freshman and senior years: from Tonkin to the Tet Offensive, from the Voting Rights Act to the Watts riots, from Help! to the White Album. Like the students', Lou's hair was growing. After basketball practice, his kids taught Lou to surf. He started inviting a group of them, along with some girls, over for dinner. A few of Lou's fellow teachers had already thought he was too chummy with his kids; now he was having them over to his house and talking waves while the hi-fi played the Doors, whose frontman had lived in Coronado.\n\nEventually, Lou quit teaching. Nobody wanted to be in the establishment anymore. By the summer of Woodstock, the generational shift was too powerful. Lou traded his Corvette for a VW bus. He and his old students sat around in his backyard and smoked their first joints. Everyone was scared, convinced they'd go crazy. But teacher and students sat in silence, smiled, and pondered.\n\nThat August, not long after Lou left school and several of his star students graduated, the bridge was built. The two-mile feat of box-girder engineering arced gracefully across the bay, connecting Coronado to the rest of the world. Everyone gathered to see the bridge open, waiting to watch those first cars roll across, knowing things would never be the same.\n\n\n\n1969\n\n The Coronado Company started small. Lance Weber, the founder, was an unlikely entrepreneur, known around town as the likable oddball. After he graduated from Coronado High, he joined the navy so he wouldn't get shot at in Vietnam. His father, a navy captain, wanted Lance to be an officer. But the life didn't suit Lance, and when his tour was up, his parents had to accept that he was another washed-up swabbie hanging out back on Idiot Island.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nVillar, a.k.a. \"Pops,\" rocking out at the height of the Company's power.\n\nLance was a wiry but fearless nut whose time on a submarine had forced him to learn how to fix anything. He could fabricate parts and bring to life whatever fantastic idea came to mind. He tricked out a VW Type 2 microbus with the engine of a Porsche 911 and built, by hand, the first lowrider bicycle in Coronado. (Seven years later, he would think up the Duck.) \"Here comes the Wizard,\" people would say, watching him cruise the beach on his tuned-up lowrider, barefoot, shirtless, his long blond hair flowing behind him, a goofy smile on his face.\n\nIf the Wizard was on that bike, he was high. Everyone was. That fall, demand for pot in the United States skyrocketed. Simultaneously, supply suffered as Nixon launched a huge interdiction program at the Mexican border. Prices spiked, which encouraged ever more creative efforts to bring the stuff in. There were mules caravanning the Sonoran Desert, planes flying low over the Arizona mountains, tires stuffed with green at the border. It was the dream of every pot smoker to get a block, or a kilo, and make some scratch while getting free weed. For someone in San Diego, there was an enormous arbitrage opportunity just a few miles south, in Mexico. The trick was getting the stuff home.\n\nIt was Lance who dreamed up the idea of dodging the border altogether. Down in Baja, he got his hands on twenty-five pounds of pot and swam it north. He washed up on the U.S. side, a bleak stretch of beach with no name, facilities, or parking lot. It was dangerous, being in the water at night with only some fins and blinking radio-tower lights for guidance. But it was worth it: Each delivery netted five grand (more than $32K today). Soon Lance had a little team of pot Marines working with him, swimming as many bundles as they could find. They were misfits, guys who couldn't get girlfriends in high school before Lance put pot and money in their hands, and now they looked to Lance as their eccentric leader.\n\nUntil he got busted. Lance spent six months in prison in 1971, and when he came back, he worked as a boat mechanic and tried to stay straight. But whether Lance liked it or not, he was Coronado's first hippie hero, the local drug legend. So when one of his misfits, Paul Acree, had a new lead on pot, he asked Lance to revisit his old border route. They swam a few bales in the hard way and then realized a little motorization would help. Lance pulled one hundred pounds of grass across in a Zodiac, an inflatable rubber craft like the ones used by Navy Seals. It was easy money. Paul introduced Lance to Ed Otero, a nice addition, since \"Otter\"\u2014who looked like the archetypal California boy (blond, square jaw, cleft chin)\u2014was on the swim team back at Coronado High and could break through any surf. With Paul arranging supply, Lance piloting, and Otter swimming bales, they quickly developed a solid operation. The only thing holding them back was the connection. They called their guy in Tijuana \"Joe the Mexican,\" and since none of them had taken Lou's Spanish class, they couldn't understand a word Joe said.\n\n\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nThe DEA's James Conklin at work.\n\n\"You speak Spanish, right?\" Lou was in dungarees, standing on a ladder, paintbrush in hand, when Lance rolled up on his lowrider bike.\n\n\"S&amp;amp;#xED;,\" Lou said. \"Naturalmente.\"\n\n\"Then come down here,\" Lance said. \"I got an idea.\"\n\nLance offered Lou fifty bucks to go with him to Tijuana for dinner.\n\n\"I just need you to do a little translation.\"\n\nLance wasn't one of Lou's students, but they'd hung out around the Rock together and roasted some pigs on the beach. (Luaus had become the thing.) By then, Lou was painting houses for money, living in a little cottage. A bona fide beachside Buddhist, he surfed, read Carlos Castaneda, pondered the evils of materialism, made candles, and meditated with a local guru named Bula. Lou loved the life. But he never got used to being so broke.\n\nMexico was the easiest fifty bucks Lou ever made\u2014until Lance offered him a hundred the next week to do it again. With the ubiquity of pot, Lou didn't think twice about the illegality or the ethics, and he was a natural dealmaker. While translating the second time, Lou sensed an opportunity for his friends and negotiated a larger load for a better price. Thrilled, Lance offered Lou the chance to share directly in the next shipment. Lou helped Lance, Paul, and Otter inflate the Zodiac and load it at the little salt-eaten Rosarito beach shack where Joe the Mexican delivered the goods. On the other side, he received ten grand.\n\nIt was more money than Lou had earned in years. And it was all he needed to give away his nascent painting business. Like everyone else, Lou had been smoking pot for fun, but then came a moment of clarity, when he took that joint from behind his ear, sparked it up, and saw the future.\n\n\n\n1972\n\n Gigs, they called them. Or scams. Or barbecues, since they would plan them while throwing steaks on the grill at sundown. Everyone would get a call\u2014\"Do you want to go to a barbecue?\"\u2014which meant it was time to mobilize. The missions were simple at first, with just that twelve-foot Zodiac that they inflated with an Electrolux vacuum. As the loads got bigger, so did the effort. It's not easy loading a boat with fifty-pound bags through head-high waves. Lou could help, but it was Otter who had the brute in him; he was the mule.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nCompany members pose on a throne of kilos.\n\nWhen the boat arrived at Silver Strand beach in California, Lance would just signal with a flashlight and then run the Zodiac right up onto the sand\u2014Burn up the motor, we'll buy a new one\u2014so they could get those bags on land, deflate the boat, and load the van in five minutes. Just like that, they each made twice their parents' annual salary.\n\nThat was every month. Then every week. The new partnership was an overnight success. Within a year, they worked up to power boats, fishing boats, a forty-foot cabin cruiser. As the money piled up, they reinvested in the business. Lance bought a spacious Chris-Craft called the Lee Max II and rebuilt the engine so he could carry serious weight at seventy knots. The scams grew, but they were faster and less frequent, minimizing exposure. They hired beach crews to expedite the off-load. Lou thought it was risky, letting in new people, but this was Coronado, and everyone knew one another. \"If we take care of them,\" Lance said, \"they'll take care of us.\"\n\nThe partners could afford generosity. Everyone except Lou was in their twenties, with $50K in their pocket. Then $100K. Then a quarter-million dollars. Lou felt it gripping them, the uncontrollable joy of becoming sudden millionaires. Or as Lance put it: \"Don't you love it when life goes from black-and-white to Technicolor?\"\n\nPot was too green to pass up. High Times even started publishing a reference table for rising street values of varietals. Smugglers everywhere figured grass would be legalized\u2014polls showed the population increasingly approved of legalization; Jimmy Carter would favor decriminalization, as would several states, including Oregon. If that happened, the golden goose would be cooked.\n\nIn the meantime, the Company couldn't move enough of the stuff, going back and forth to Mexico, driving with their boards to get some time at K-38 and other Baja surf spots. It was about this time that Lance started calling Lou \"Pops,\" a nickname that caught on. \"What do you think, Pops?\" Lance asked one night as they watched the break crash just offshore in Mexico.\n\n\"I think we got a good thing going here,\" Pops said. \"Let's not fuck it up.\"\n\n\n\nPot was officially everywhere. Even rich people wanted to smoke. Lou met the manager of the Albatross Restaurant, a nice seafood place built in an old church in Del Mar. He thought the place was groovy: good food, drinks, music, and well attended by rich dopers. Lou knew that smuggling was about personality as much as it was about know-how. To climb the ladder, you had to play it cool. Which is what he and the restaurant manager did, warily revealing their mutual interest, pulling their cards away from their vests to talk about how they might fit into each other's business model.\n\n\"How much can you handle?\" Lou asked.\n\n\"How much can you bring?\" the owner said.\n\nBy now, Lou had cut his hair, gotten rid of his beads, and traded his hippie duds for silk shirts. He realized that's how the game was played. These guys had money and acted like it. When Lou suggested bringing in a ton and the owner said he'd pay cash on the barrel, Lou saw the horizon expanding right before his eyes.\n\n\n\nLou told Lance about the new demand. \"Let's feed the beast,\" he said.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nIn the early days, Lance (in orange) sits atop \"the Duck\" surrounded by a few gawking locals.\n\n\"We're gonna need a bigger boat,\" Lance replied.\n\nLance, the Wizard, delighted in the prospect of expanding their little navy. He bought a Sea Ray and stripped the cabin for just cargo and extra gas. He changed the waterline so it didn't look low when laden. More weight meant more freight and even more people on the beach\u2014five, ten guys, running bags up and down the sand. Lou, now the de facto leader, wanted to tighten the screws on the organization. He wanted dependable people, synchronized, there at the right time, gone at the right time.\n\nThe Company reorganized, cut weak links\u2014early member Paul Acree had gotten hooked on heroin and was voted out of the organization\u2014and became more structured. Just like when he was coaching, Lou knew how to motivate people, gain mutual trust, field a squad, and make them believe in their abilities.\n\nStill, Lou needed a right-hand man. He recruited his good friend and former student Dave Strather. A solid body surfer, Dave started off as a loader, but he was more effective at planning, and it wasn't long before Lou gave him managerial duties. Dave was a natural. Even as a hippie, he was fastidious, shampooing his long hair every day. That hair was cut short once Dave started running around with a clipboard and checklists, buying and storing equipment, running smuggling gigs like a stevedore superintendent.\n\nLou moved out of Coronado, and much of the outfit followed. The town had become too small, their presence too obvious and well-known. The one thing they kept was the name: the Coronado Company. Lou thought it sounded official.\n\nIt was fun in those early days, he told his boys in the Company, but amateur hour is over.\n\n\n\n1975\n\n Lou and Dave were south of the border, at a Tijuana flophouse near the racetrack, surrounded by men with machine guns. A dozen cartel foot soldiers stood around them, their combat arms accessorized with belted, chrome-plated pistols for good measure. No one moved. Dave and Lou waited. The seconds felt like hours.\n\nThey had gotten themselves into this situation on purpose, having decided to do some supply-chain outreach. Lou sweet-talked his way up the ladder to a guy they called Rick Pick, who said he knew Roberto Beltran. The Don. The head of the Sinaloa traffickers. One of the biggest drug dealers in the world. Lou and Rick met, sized each other up, and Lou said: \"Introduce me to the Don.\"\n\nWhen the call came, Lou arrived two hours late on purpose. That's the Mexican style of business, he thought. Ma&amp;amp;#xF1;ana! Lou figured that keeping them waiting would show they're equals, but now, spirited deep inside the cartel-owned flophouse, they were clearly the small fish. The Don's bodyguard led them into a small room. There, on the bed, was Beltran. Dave and Lou were surprised to see that the Don looked like a maharishi, or maybe a bum: scraggly hair, jeans, T-shirt, unshaven. When they walked in, the Don didn't get up. It was a weird scene, the two of them standing at the foot of the bed, unsure of what to do. Dave thought they'd be killed. Especially when Lou decided to start the negotiations by taking a pillow and lying down on the bed right next to the Don. Dave said a prayer. Lou remained unfazed. To him, this was a game.\n\nDave couldn't understand what was being said as Lou and the Don, faces inches apart, started chatting softly. Within a few minutes, the Don was grinning, then laughing. Lou's instincts proved out; the Don respected the wildly daring initiative of showing up like this. No one from the States had ever approached him. \"What do you have to lose?\" Lou told the Don. He knew the Mexicans were sending half-tons north a million ways, losing a lot of product at the border. It was a model that made money: The supply that made it through paid for the losses. But still, that's a lot of smuggler's shrinkage. This is what Lou told the Don, in not so many words: The Coronado Company can reduce your shrinkage. \"Let's do business,\" the Don said.\n\n\n\nFifteen tons, Dave thought, right on the goddamned beach? The Mexican job was an enormously challenging off-load; in prep, Dave had bought more sophisticated equipment and procured several houses as staging sites and covert entrep&amp;amp;#xF4;ts, including a rental right off the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu.\n\nThat's where the team assembled, including some new beach runners. One of the mules, Allan \"Fuzzy\" Logie, was a surfer who became a motorcycle racer. He was amazed at the scale of the Company's operation. Fifteen people on the beach, all in plain view of neighbors, whose lights were on. And they were out there for hours, buzzing around in the Zodiacs, carrying everything by hand. Luckily, it was overcast, and the reflective glow of the city gave them light.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nThe crew does some pre-smuggling surfing in Mexico.\n\nIt took forever to get the load off the beach. Runners like Fuzzy ran for eight hours straight, all through the night. By the end, they managed to fit all fifteen tons in three rented Ryder trucks. Fuzzy threw his last bale and wanted to collapse from exhaustion. Instead he got behind the wheel. Turning onto the PCH, he drove right past a highway-patrol cruiser writing some poor bastard a speeding ticket while 2,000 cubic feet of pot sailed by at sixty miles an hour.\n\nAt the warehouse, Dave had organized an assembly-line-style repackaging system\u2014every brick was weighed to the gram, bagged, marked with a sticker, and recorded. Lou came up from his cliffside house to inspect the wares. It was a job well done. When everyone got their cut, Fuzzy asked if he could get paid in weed. He had to settle for $20,000 cash instead. \"Well,\" he told the Company, \"I hope I get invited to another barbecue.\"\n\nLou, intent on impressing the Don, decided to deliver the cartel's money immediately and in person, without an invitation. \"This is going to blow his mind,\" he told Dave as they flew south together. When Lou and Dave, again surrounded by machine guns, handed over two duffel bags, each with $1 million in cash, the Don smiled. \"We owe you a party,\" he said. That night he feted them at a restaurant in Sinaloa, where Lou arranged the next consignment: another twenty tons.\n\nThere was no precedent for the Company's operation. A bunch of young hippies sat atop an empire. Most were in their twenties; the oldest among them was Lou, at 34. When they got that twenty tons into the safety of a warehouse in Santa Cruz, the load was ten feet high. Otter pulled out some blocks and arranged them into a chair, and they all took turns sitting on a throne of hard-packed kilos.\n\n\n\n1976\n\n The first time the DEA heard of the Coronado Company was an accident. The San Diego office got a call about a guy in a holding cell across the bay who had some very interesting information.\n\nPaul Acree was probably jonesing already when he was arrested for petty theft. He had gotten an $8,000 severance from the Company, but it was gone. By the time Paul was interviewed on tape, he sounded like a man a&amp;amp;#xB1;icted, shaky, asking cops for dope. Instead he got a deal, in return for spilling, and he became the DEA's first informant in Operation CorCo.\n\nThe DEA was dumbstruck to discover such a sophisticated operation right under its nose. Smuggling was, until that time, fairly haphazard. As was enforcement. Only a few years old itself, the DEA was still an underfunded, overlooked agency. Special Agent James Conklin, a recent transplant from the New York office, spearheaded the CorCo investigation. When he started in San Diego, his unit had four cars: two American Motors Javelins, a seized purple Plymouth convertible, and a Buick Riviera with bullet holes in it. New agents received guns but no holsters. Most of the men were border veterans and looked like Mexican vaqueros. They spoke Spanish and wore beards and mustaches and colorful guayabera shirts. The agency could barely cover the county, much less sniff out an organization like the Company.\n\nSensing opportunity, the DEA allowed Paul to go free to gather more information. Back in Coronado, Lance was still hanging around, and he filled in his old friend Paul on the Company's latest exploits. That was how the DEA learned about the Don and about the latest trip to Morocco\u2014the Africa connection had come from a Coronado guy who had gone surfing on the edge of the Sahara and came back talking about hashish. But it was when the DEA heard chatter about an even more profitable product, Thai stick, that they took serious interest. Lou's former student and a star swimmer made the Thai connection. He had gone overseas for some mystical time in the Pacific and learned about \"one-hit shit.\" Otter saw the potential immediately. \"We can make so much more money,\" he said.\n\nHe was right. According to Conklin, Thai stick was among the most profitable commodities in existence: $100,000 for a ton in Bangkok that sold for $3.5 million Stateside. Unlike drugs flowing north from Latin America, Thai stick had to come by boat. And boats were the Company's specialty.\n\n\n\n1977\n\n As the boss of an ever growing empire, Lou had long since traded his VW bus for a black-over-blue 1966 Ferrari adorned with a vanity license: 20K. In the trunk, he'd carry a valise full of \"fun tickets\": C-notes to satisfy any whim. The idealism of the '60s had given way to the excesses of the '70s. Lou and Ed collected a fleet of Mercedeses and Ferraris between them and bought palatial homes. Lou spent fifteen grand on a fake passport using the name \"Peter Grant,\" bought a Mercedes as \"James Benson,\" shopped at Wilkes Bashford as \"Richard Malone.\"\n\nSometimes Lou's story was that he was a trust funder. Sometimes he was the son of a Texas wildcatter. Once he was mistaken for a member of KISS, and he didn't deny it. Whoever he was, Lou owned it. \"I'm in oil,\" he'd say. \"And if you ask any more questions, I'll ask you to leave.\"\n\nEventually Lou bought a place in Tahoe, where he entertained friends and investors: bond brokers and lawyers and other pedigreed people who couldn't resist the two- or sometimes three-to-one return Lou was offering. Lou had an affinity for networking up, and he made the drug business look like any other business. Supersanitary, no rough edges. It was like the aspirational subtext of The Godfather\u2014where capitalism eventually turns all criminals into respectable businessmen\u2014only without the guns. The Company didn't want to be gangsters. They wanted to fit in and live the good life. They got their own accountant, buying properties on their behalf, creating shell companies with names like Mo Ching Trading Co., Tow Tow Ltd., and Ku Won Investment Co., LTD.\n\nThere, above Tahoe's electric blue lake, a thought dawned on Lou: Money is energy, a frictionless medium for amplifying your will. Their attorney liked to use what Lou called \"innovative\" legal tactics to help his clients. \"Don't deal in anything white,\" he told Lou after getting a $300,000 retainer in cash, \"and I'll always be able to get you off.\"\n\n\n\nWord from buyers was that the East Coast was dying for smoke. Switching geography, the Company figured, would throw off any heat. The company didn't know the feds were on to them, but the border had become a smuggling frenzy, and the DEA was stepping up efforts around San Diego. So Dave\u2014who had moved beyond beach master to something like a general manager\u2014got out his maps, studied, and praised the gods of fractal geometry for giving distant Maine as many miles of coast as California. He purchased a beach house on Dennison Point in Cutler, Maine, overlooking Machias Bay, plus an equipment house in Freedom and a communication house near Skowhegan. Across the globe, Otter attended to maritime details: cargo-ship certifications, port clearances, tonnage certificates for the Canal. A shipment of prime Thai stick was on the move.\n\nBy now, the Company was practically corporatized. Those Mexico loads had been sloppy successes, with too many runners and too little cohesion. Since then, Dave had built a real close-knit crew of as many as fifty people at a time, men who knew one another's families and had a clear chain of command. The DEA didn't realize the extent to which the Company had perfected a cell structure, both loose and extremely well organized, bonded by friendship and mutual trust. Company guys lived around the country, under various assumed names, and communicated by 800 numbers with answering services, where they'd leave coded messages with callback numbers to pay phones. Everyone always had a bag of quarters. Dave was an early adopter of beepers. You'd get a message\u2014\"Burma Christmas\"\u2014and know whom to call back. The Company could disappear for months at a time and then re-emerge, at the ready. \"These kids were the best in the business,\" Special Agent James Conklin says today. \"They were ahead of their time. They operated almost like a military unit.\"\n\nAnother coast, another challenging off-load. Maine wasn't like back home in Coronado, with 300 yards of flat white sand; Machias was all cliffs down to the water with its huge, quickly changing tides. They'd have little time on the beach. So Don, the mechanic, suggested they install a yarder\u2014a five-ton piece of industrial logging equipment\u2014to winch pickups straight down the cliff face and, once they were loaded on the beach, hoist them back up right into the garage.\n\nIn a nineteenth-century barn, they stored the rest of the gear: motors, boats, gravity feeds, and the new Maravias\u2014inflatable thirty-five-foot-long Kevlar barges\u2014for towing the pot back from the mother ship. Dave had them custom-made, telling the Maravia sales agent that they would be used to transport cattle across the Rhine River. Nearby, at the communication house, a former Coronado High ham-radio enthusiast operated the radio tower's 5,000-watt transmitter. That sixty-foot tower ran a lot of juice; when you'd turn it on, the lights would dim, the room would hum, and you'd get warm standing next to it, waiting for word to come that the mother ship was nearing Machias Bay.\n\nWhen the boat arrived, the crew motored out in a smuggler's blackout beneath a moonless sky. They dropped chem lights in milk bottles as buoys to mark the way back and held up aluminum so the mother ship could pick them up on radar. The Zodiac crews wore thick wet suits, and hockey helmets rigged with radio headsets that worked hands-free (a critical tactical upgrade the U.S. military would take years to discover). The crew looked ridiculous, black and wet like analog-robot seals, with six-inch antennae sticking up from their heads, but they made short work of the load while Dave watched on a night-vision Starlight scope.\n\nAfter traveling 10,000 miles, the Thai stick breezed through the flawless final stretch. Don won the MVP award again, a record-setting third time, for solving the cliff problem. In a suite at the Waldorf, Lou and the other partners divided their cut. The celebration was epic. They always were. \"Why settle for a glass of champagne,\" Lou would say, \"when you can have a magnum?\" It always felt great, watching the flutes get filled as soon as they were empty, unless you followed Pops's lead, draining your glass and throwing it into the fireplace. With a girl on your arm and gilded pockets, all juiced up, stumbling out to the limos at dawn, it felt like you were going to live forever.\n\n\n\n1978\n\n Lou was on the slopes at Vail when he learned about the indictment. Eight counts, unsealed in the district court in San Diego, naming him, Otter, Lance, and twenty-three others. Lou and Dave were skiing with their attorney. \"I have bad news,\" the lawyer said, after a call came in from his office. \"The bloom is off the rose.\" Lou frowned, planted his poles, and kept skiing.\n\nLou figured that if the authorities knew where they were, they'd have been arrested already. And no one was putting up wanted posters, were they? Besides, the DEA was essentially looking at a dead-end case: They had no leads on the Company members' whereabouts, and they lacked the resources to go after fugitives.\n\nLou and Dave met with their attorney, Phil DeMassa, at the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco to discuss the indictment. \"As your attorney, I advise you to turn yourself in,\" he said. \"Now with that out of the way,\" he added, \"let's get down to business.\" Using carefully worded hypotheticals, DeMassa advised the Company on how to be a fugitive. The group agreed that the principals should stay on the run and that some others might surrender and strategically cooperate so as to get light sentences but not provide any information. This was a new idea, doing time for the Company. But things were different now, more complicated, and Lou would turn on the coach charm and tell his team that sacrifice was necessary. That's what the Company is about, he'd say, the big picture. \"We can get slaps on the wrist for the underlings,\" DeMassa promised.  \n\nThe indictment did claim one casualty: Lance, the Wizard. \"We know you're talking to Paul Acree,\" Otter told him during an uneasy meeting. \"It's on tape.\" Lance didn't hear the recording, and he denied it, but Otter said their lawyers had gotten the tapes from the United States attorney's office.\n\nLou remembered the day Lance showed up on his bike, like some kind of stoned angel, asking him to get off the ladder and go to Mexico. There wouldn't be a Company if it weren't for Lance. Now Lou and Otter had determined to buy him out, settling on a $400,000 lump sum. Their lawyer, DeMassa, met Lance in the parking structure of the Orange County courthouse, where they chatted briefly, and DeMassa told him to \"stay out of trouble.\" Then the lawyer pointed at a briefcase he'd set between them. \"Oh,\" he said, as they parted ways, \"I think this is yours.\"\n\nHiding in plain sight, the rest of the Company's principals went even further upscale, spending more time in ritzy Santa Barbara. They moved into huge Spanish-style haciendas, had fierce tennis matches, and discovered polo. (Otter stabled his twenty ponies at the Santa Barbara Polo &amp;amp; Racquet Club.)\n\nIt was a dangerous game, being that high-profile. Otter couldn't reinvent himself with a patrician facade like Lou. While Lou played it cool, Otter wanted to be cool, speeding down Shoreline Drive in his Ferrari. Indiscretions notwithstanding, Otter earned his keep in the business, running point on the Thai supply chain, where he had managed to connect directly with growers, cutting out the middlemen, increasing the Company's profit\u2014the kind of profit that made it possible to throw money at DeMassa, hold the feds at bay, and keep the cogs of the Company machine moving along while the partners played aristocratic pastimes in the afternoon and drank the nights away.\n\n\n\n1980\n\n Fugitive Status was taking its toll on some of the Company faithful. Dave, like the rest of the indictees, had gone deep underground. He'd been living a double life for several years, and he was paranoid, always looking in rearview mirrors and store-window reflections. He and Lou would meet in public places to plan the next gig. \"I don't know if I can do this anymore,\" Dave said one day, hardly able to concentrate on their conversation. He had a kid now, and his wife was tired of living a secret.\n\n\"I know how you feel,\" Lou said, coaching him through. \"I feel it, too. But the Company needs you.\"\n\nDave and the others had good reason to be paranoid. A second round of indictments had appeared as the DEA stepped up its investigation. Operation CorCo had become a mobile task force with more men assigned, including an agent from the IRS. Since the days of Al Capone, that was how you built the central case around organized crime: Follow the money.\n\nThat's how Special Agent Conklin found himself digging through the trash of an accountant in San Diego. After he received information connecting the Company to the accountant's office, Conklin got a warrant. Each week, he accompanied the local waste-management company to the guy's building, sorting through his bins. Turns out the accountant should have owned a shredder. \"We got gold,\" Conklin told a fellow DEA agent. \"Look at these letters.\"\n\nConklin had found an epistolary trail from the accountant to Lou, mostly under aliases. The meandering paper trail eventually led to an ongoing investigation of a suspected drug dealer who owned a palatial estate in Hilton Head, South Carolina. The suspect's contractors claimed their boss was a drug smuggler. They called him Mr. Thai Pot. They knew only aliases, so Conklin flew them to the San Diego office and showed them his smuggler's folio. They immediately picked out Lou Villar.\n\nIt was the break that Conklin had been searching for. But when he brought it to his superiors, along with evidence that Lou, based on the value of his houses alone, was worth $6 million, it wasn't enough. The Justice Department wanted a surefire conviction. Conklin was miffed but patient. He and his team had been on Operation CorCo for years now. It was the biggest case of their careers. For some, it was the biggest they'd ever work. And in truth, Conklin liked matching wits with the Company. They were worthy opponents, guys who'd be good at anything, Conklin thought. It just so happened they were really good crooks.\n\n\n\nDave was at 5,000 feet, riding shotgun in a Cessna four-seater, looking down at the site of the Company's most ambitious gig yet: off-loading ten tons of Thai stick via military helicopter. Dave was all the way at the tip of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, near the Makah Indian reservation, a nearly unpeopled landscape of forest, salmon streams, and jagged sea stacks on the beach. He had planned the gig for late August, when the gray usually breaks above the peninsula, and he had already contracted a pilot to \"borrow\" the helo from his Air National Guard squadron. For the off-load, he had ordered the construction of special wire cages that would enable the massive double-rotor Chinook to lift the entire haul\u2014just under the aircraft's 24,000-pound capacity\u2014off the deck of the mother ship.\n\nBut when their ship, the John L. Winter, arrived on August 23, the coast was shrouded in dense fog. Helicopters couldn't fly in that kind of visibility at night. Waiting for the fog to lift was a problem. The ship's captain came onshore; he and his crew didn't want to float out there and get plucked by the Coast Guard. The army pilot bailed, pointing out that joyriding with a military-owned Chinook was tough to reschedule. Dave was pissed\u2014at them, at himself, at the weather; his supremely elegant plan was spoiled by an unseasonal dew point.\n\nThe Company regrouped, renting a U-Haul to transport the load and fetching their old beach equipment from storage. They also hired some local Makah Indians from the reservation to assist with their fishing boats. But by then, tempers were short.\n\nAs each day passed at Neah Bay, there was plenty of time for anxious speculation. Fuzzy, admittedly nosy, listened on the radios as the crew kvetched to Dave, and everyone else complained about something. Like the Indians, whom no one in the Company trusted. Fuzzy thought: You don't want to be meeting new people in medias res on a smuggling site. The Indians were charging $150,000\u2014the kind of deal you strike in an emergency\u2014but they were wild at the wheel and unpredictable, unable (or unwilling) to get their ships into proper position. On the night they commenced the off-load, Fuzzy could hear everyone arguing on the radio, blabbering back and forth for hours. It was the opposite of the Company's streamlined command structure. \"Get off the channel,\" someone finally said. \"And get in here!\"\n\nIt was a bad start, hours late, already past midnight. Earlier, on the beach, Fuzzy watched tiny waves lap at his feet, but his surfer's instinct told him that these waters would rise. Sure enough, by the time they started, enormous eight-footers were crashing on the rocks. Fuzzy fought his way out with a Zodiac and the Maravia barge, then docked at sea with the John L. Winter. The Indians met him there. It was raining, but they managed to transfer six tons of Thai stick while the sea heaved a full story every twenty seconds. Luckily, the high tide allowed a small vessel to shoot the mouth of a tiny river that emptied into the ocean near Neah Bay, so the Indians started ferrying the stash, 500 pounds at a time, into the shelter of the river.\n\nDave was positioned on a hill, using his night scope to watch a constellation of green figures running on the beach and battling the sea in what the cops would later call a scene of \"naval warfare.\" It was a battle the Company was losing. The tide was shifting. The boats were scraping the shallows. The Indians were erratic, not following orders. When one of the Indian pilots knocked his hull on a rock, he refused to continue. \"I'm worried about my boat,\" he said.\n\n\"How much does your boat cost?\" Dave asked over the radio.\n\n\"A hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars,\" the pilot said.\n\n\"We'll buy you two goddamn boats,\" Dave said. \"Just bring the shit in!\"\n\nThat was good for one more trip, but the night had been a slow-motion debacle, and now the tide had gone all the way out. No boat with a keel could get through, and there was $10 million worth of pot still sitting out there on the barge. The Indians motored off en masse. On the horizon, the black of night turned slightly pale with the first hint of tomorrow.\n\n\"I'm getting that barge!\" Fuzzy yelled into the com. Through the scope, Dave watched Fuzzy break a Zodiac through the pounding surf and race out to sea. He strapped up the barge. The Maravia was enormous but flat-bottomed, so Fuzzy figured he could tow the entire barge, stacked several feet high with pot, onto the beach, where it could be unloaded.\n\n\"Go for it, man!\" Dave yelled through the radio. \"Gun it!\"\n\nFuzzy couldn't hear Dave through the whine of the Zodiac's outboard and could barely see through the ocean spray, but he got the barge close. And then, just as he reached the shore, he felt himself elevating.\n\n\"Holy fuck,\" Dave said to himself. A monster wave had suddenly curled up and lifted Fuzzy, his Zodiac, the barge, and the Thai stick ten feet above the beach. It would have been a tough run on sculpted fiberglass, but it was even trickier with tethered inflatables; and as the crest toppled, the thirty-five-foot barge was dropped directly on top of Fuzzy's Zodiac. Fuzzy felt the weight of it pinning him to the rubber floor. A fatalist, he thought, How ironic to be killed by my own stash. The wave started to swamp the Zodiac. But before the boat capsized, Fuzzy realized his hand was still on the Zodiac's throttle. He instinctively cranked that little motor, and when the wave shifted, his boat broke free and shot down the face of the wave.\n\nAfter tumbling in the foam, the barge dumped some of its load in the water and floated gently onto the beach. The crew unloaded what remained on deck. The rest of the bales were collected from the river. Dave had come down from the hill and welcomed Fuzzy back onto the beach. \"You barely got out of there with your life!\" Dave said.\n\n\"It's like I always say,\" Fuzzy responded. \"When in doubt\u2014punch it!\"\n\nDave and the beach crew scrambled to get the load into a U-Haul truck. First light was upon them. There was only one way in and out of this heavily forested area, and if the police got wind of what was going on here, the Company would be sealed in. They started for the stash house, ten miles away, but the road out of the forest was slick and canted, and the truck didn't get very far before sliding right off the asphalt and landing on its side. \"Leave the truck,\" Dave said. \"Transfer the stash to the pickups.\" But the U-Haul's rear door was jammed. The truck's whole frame box was warped and wouldn't open. \"Get an ax!\" Dave yelled. But there were no as.\n\nDave looked around. The crew was losing faith. Birds were singing, announcing the morning. The scale of the disaster was dawning on them. \"All right, everybody,\" Dave said wearily over the radio. \"This is a code red.\"\n\nIt was the first time Dave had given the order to abort.\n\nThey had sixty bales in the pickups\u2014a small fraction of the load. The rest they left on the beach and in the U-Haul, along with the boats and motors, the conveyor belts and generators. Dave instructed everyone to get their emergency kits, which contained oiled rags, for clearing fingerprints. \"Wipe it all down, boys,\" he said. They scrubbed every vessel, then mounted the pickups and tore out. As he was bumping along in the bed of one of those trucks, leaving the disaster scene behind, Dave wondered what he would say to Lou.\n\nThe recovered bales went to pay back the investors. The rest was a loss. Smuggling is speculative and expensive: It had cost a lot to stage this fiasco. A million bucks spent to lose $20 million in potential profit. The Indians got some hush money. Later, Lou convened the Company for a postmortem at his place in La Costa. Dave, ever faithful and feeling guilty, bought Lou a gold Patek Philippe watch as an apology\u2014even though, as Fuzzy noted, \"everyone knew it wasn't his fault.\"\n\nHours after the code red, Walter Cronkite reported on the national evening news about the mysterious drug-trafficking incident on the Olympic Peninsula. The police discovered the entire smuggling operation in situ\u2014the bales in the water, the truck, and all the gear\u2014but they didn't find a single print.\n\n\n\n1981\n\n After Neah Bay, Lou started talking seriously about retirement. Despite the loss, he still had money buried (literally) and had already investigated real estate options for his Bahamian exit. He and the other partners decided to \"do one last gig.\" His palm reader said to be wary, but from his hundred-acre orchid farm, he had managed to coordinate another successful import of four tons of Thai stick. To celebrate, all the Company partners gathered in Santa Barbara, returning to form with a classic victory party full of girls, food, drink, and drugs.\n\nThe timing couldn't have been better for the DEA and Special Agent Conklin, who were already in Santa Barbara, waiting.\n\nConklin looked at his watch. It was 11 a.m. Another agent called in an approaching silver four-door Mercedes. They made the license plate: 1ATM158. The car turned west on Alston, then south on Cima Linda Lane, where other surveillance units made the driver: Ed Morgan, a.k.a. Kenneth Eugene Cook Jr., a.k.a. Edward Otero, a.k.a. Otter.\n\nThe DEA had been sitting on the houses of the partners for months now. Lou had no idea his contractors had led the heat to his doorstep. Now Conklin had teams in place. \"Let's do it,\" he said.\n\nOtter saw the tail and tried to run. He didn't get far. Shortly thereafter, DEA agents saw Lou driving his signature 6.9 Mercedes and got him, too. Dave was riding with Otter. For all his investigative efforts, Conklin didn't realize who Dave was, or the important role he played in the organization. The agents found twenty grand in Otter's trunk and seized Dave's valise, in which there were two fake IDs, an airline ticket, and several notebooks\u2014all detailed accounting ledgers.\n\nThe house where the Company members had celebrated the last shipment was soon surrounded by yellow tape and filled with tagged evidence: three safe-deposit keys, $144,800 in cash, photos of landing sites, and records showing payments to ship captains. In total, the DEA confiscated $12 million in cash, contraband, vehicles, and property from the Company. After nearly a decade and gigs all over the country, the Company had thrown its last barbecue.\n\nWhen the news broke, the DEA told reporters the Company had netted $96 million over the past decade (nearly $300 million today). At a minimum, Lou thought in his cell. The real number was hard to know but may have been twice that.\n\n\n\nFrom their individual cells, the members of the Company tried to stay together. Lou was running damage control, even managing collections from distributors from jail. The Company had a strong sense of trust, but the DEA was looking for cracks. It knew there were a lot of loose ends out there.\n\nIn fact, no sooner had the news about the busts gotten out than the DEA received a call from Lance, the Wizard. Lance offered to talk, and then started working on Fuzzy. \"I'm sure you know why I'm calling,\" Lance told his friend. He had already arranged for Fuzzy to sit down with the DEA. Fuzzy was conflicted, but Lance told him: \"It's every man for himself.\"\n\nConklin's approach mid flattery with directness. \"We want to know how you guys did it,\" Conklin told Fuzzy. \"You guys were the A-team.\"\n\nLance and Fuzzy's incredible recall of detail helped the DEA fill in the blanks, and they quickly expanded the indictments. Dave faced an 848, also called the Kingpin Law, which carried the prospect of decades in prison. Dave wasn't a kingpin, but that's how the government puts on the squeeze. The Company's lawyer arranged a plea bargain for Lou before he could get charged with the 848. The kingpin never faced the kingpin statute. Instead, he got ten years.\n\nIn his cell block, three miles from the warm sands of Coronado, Lou met a prisoner named Howard, the resident autodidact, who traded homespun legal advice to prisoners for cookies. \"Want my advice?\" he told Lou. \"Get yourself out of here. That's what all these other motherfuckers are trying to do.\" Lou was transferred to Terminal Island to \"do his dime,\" as it was called in the yard. He looked around and thought: \"I can't spend ten years here.\" The DEA was shocked when it got a call one day: \"Lou Villar wants to talk.\"\n\nIt was controversial within the DEA whether or not to let Lou turn. He was too high up, some people said. But he could provide detail on the financing, suppliers, and dealers. He could also influence Dave, who was still facing decades behind bars. So far, Dave had rebuffed all DEA efforts. But now Conklin came to him, told him about Lou, and said he had one last chance before the charges turned into thirty years. \"You're a smart guy,\" Conklin said. \"Don't throw your life away.\"\n\nIn a way, Conklin thought these guys were lucky to have gotten caught when they did: The days of the hippie smugglers were giving way to violence, as cocaine culture and gangsters moved into the grass business. \"You have a chance to be a regular guy again,\" Conklin said. Dave finally agreed and spent weeks being debriefed by the DEA. In the end, Lou and Dave were the only Company players to turn in prison. P&amp;amp;#xE8;re et fils, the two switched sides and disappeared from their cells.\n\n\n\nNOW\n\n Many Company members and their associates did time. Eventually, more than one hundred people were indicted. Some spent just a few months in prison, others years. Otter refused to cooperate and served part of a ten-year sentence. Fuzzy and Lance spent years on probation. Somehow, through it all, Lance managed to form a friendship with Conklin, who later came to Lance's wedding and presented him with handcuffs in a shadow box engraved with Congratulations on your life sentence!\n\nSome people never recovered and drifted back into crime. Others were able to reassemble their lives. Dave moved away to the Pacific Northwest, where he got into real estate. After a second stint of smuggling and prison, Otter started a legitimate and successful air-conditioning business. At 40, Lou Villar changed his name, started over, and found another career. He was successful, he says, but it wasn't the same as the Coronado Company. \"Then again,\" he says, \"what could be?\"\n\nWhen I finally managed to meet Lou, I found a different man than the tanned playboy I'd seen in pictures and newspaper articles. He was a retiree now, his hair white and his smile warm. Arranging the first meeting was complicated, requiring the kind of cloak-and-dagger planning that he knew from the days of the Coronado Company. I appeared at a pizza place, waited, and was later approached by Lou after I \"checked out.\" Lou was spry, fit, and still sharp as he jumped into a story that hadn't been told in thirty years.\n\nAs I spent time with Lou, I could see the charming and charismatic man that found himself at the center of the Company. But I also saw the tragedy of the story. By the time we met, I had spoken with many who still felt the sting of his betrayal.\n\nDid Lou have regrets? He did. He'd testified against people he cared about. It was an agonizing decision, one he couldn't rationalize away: \"I told my story in exchange for freedom, and I'll always have to live with that.\" Of course, it wasn't just Lou's story to tell. Some people see the Coronado Company as a cautionary tale, others a story about greed, and some a parable of power. Everyone said that the beginning was glorious, the time of their lives, but no one agrees about the end. The one certainty is the heartbreak: For all members of the Coronado Company, it was a coming-of-age story, where the exuberance of youth eventually runs aground on the hard reality of adulthood's disappointments and consequences.\n\nIn his previous media appearance, just after prison, Lou said he regretted his Company days, because they affected his family and destroyed most of his friendships. Things seem different to a 76-year-old man looking back on his life. \"Those were lessons that had to be learned,\" he says. After the sentencing, Lou and Dave found each other and became friends again. When they spend time together, their wives have forbidden them from talking about the halcyon days of the Company, because it goes on for hours. No matter how nostalgic he gets, Dave says he wouldn't do it again. Now Lou says that he would. The highs, the lows, the hard lessons. \"Because,\" he says, \"those are the things that made my life.\"\n\njoshuah bearman wrote the story that became Argo. An expanded version of this story is available at atavist.com."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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