It was great to be back in Grenada, footloose and fancy free. I had saved a few bucks, and the Seymour estate agreed to give me a few months to pay them for Imamou. I eventually renamed her Samantha, and once again immersed myself in island joy.
There was a certain cachet in being a former New York City investment banker, so I teamed up with Grenada Minister of Tourism Paul Slinger and Englishman David Fraser-Harris to form an investment advisory firm, Slinger, Hazlehurst & Fraser-Harris. Nothing much came of it, but we managed to get a couple of contracts. I lived aboard Samantha, moored to a slip at Grenada Yacht Services.
One sunny day I met a pretty young woman walking down the GYS docks. Her name was Alice, and she was visiting her parents, New Yorkers who owned a winter getaway in Grenada. We hit it off immediately and agreed to meet for a drink at a local bar that evening. I was smitten, and so was she.
Her parents weren’t pleased.
“You’re dating John Hazlehurst?”, her mother asked. “Great summer romance, but a terrible husband. Watch out!”
We laughed it off, her parents went back to New York, and we got married soon after. It hadn’t taken long for me to understand that Alice was smarter, better educated (a Doctorate in clinical psychology) and in many ways more daring than me. We were absolutely committed to each other and our son Sam was born in Grenada in October of 1976. Clearly, we’d have to leave Grenada and go back to the States in a year or two. We dilly-dallied around, and suddenly it was 1978, we were pretty broke and Alice was pregnant again – but she had a plan.
There were a lot of itinerant sailors like us in Grenada, including our friends Art and Suzanne, who lived aboard their sloop Suzie. Suzanne seemed open and guileless, but not Art. He never talked about his past and had a certain steely coldness about him. We wondered about his past until they sat down with us one afternoon and made an offer.
Art and Suzanne would sail Suzie to a location on Columbia’s Guajira peninsula where Art would meet his contacts and load a ton of marijuana. He claimed that this wasn’t his first rodeo. Two of his co-conspirators would join them on Suzie and meet us on Samantha in the Grenadines. I’d sail north and offload the reefer near Essex, Connecticut.
It was an intriguing proposal. It was risky as hell, but we were broke and scared. If the Coast Guard got me … well, Alice would have to plead ignorance and ask her parents for help.
We sailed to a then-remote bay in the Grenadines and waited for Suzie. Art and Suzanne showed up as expected, transferred the dope to Samantha, and I sailed north with their two crewmen, while Alice and Sam returned to Grenada on Suzie. The crewmen were nice guys, with long hair and shaggy beards, so I made them cut their hair and shave their beards. We needed to look like rich young Long Islanders on a day sail, not hippie stoners running dope.
It worked. I wore a polo shirt and Bermuda shorts and waved cheerfully at a Coast Guard cutter as we approached Essex. Alice and Sam were there, and that evening we offloaded without incident and waited for our cash. The days went by and no sign of Art – had he stiffed us? Not exactly. He was paralytically drunk and stoned, so Art’s connection met us, paid and suggested that we work together in the future. Mr. Big, as we called him, was an educated Bostonian – not a stoner, not a drinker, and risk-averse.
It was risky as hell, but we were broke and scared.
Our daughter Melanie was born a couple of weeks later and we moved to a secluded house on acreage south of Miami and began living under assumed names. We were solvent and connected, so I started putting together deals, crews, boats, buyers and protection. At first, I was foolhardy – an initial run from Columbia to Key West almost fell apart when the guy who was to offload and deliver to Miami chickened out. I had a backup truck – deliberately inconspicuous (no high lift, no four-wheel drive, no stickers, no tinted windows), so I loaded at Tropical Trips and drove it to Miami.
I had a new connection: the little guy from Kansas. He took every bale, and paid cash. I was such an amateur that I didn’t have a bill-counting device, so I sat for an hour counting 20s and 100s. And where did I put the money? In a couple of garbage bags in our bedroom closet. The Feds and the Coast Guard became more dangerous every month, so we no longer offloaded in Florida. Instead, we rendezvoused in South Bimini with my custom-made speedboat, with a locked deck concealing the load. We called it the Mexican Cutie after the song “It’s a real beauty/A Mexican Cutie/And how it got there I haven’t a clue.” If anyone got popped, they could pretend that they had no idea what they were carrying. Powered by twin 16v-71’s, she could outrun the Coastguard even with a ton aboard.
I reveled at the thrills, the dangers and the money. I typically wore cargo pants, always had several thousand in cash, was usually armed, and had legal advice if necessary. Lawyers, guns and money, as Warren Zevon sang – but then the shit hit the fan.
Early morning, June 1981. I was sound asleep, and Alice was shaking me.
“Get up, goddamit! Dave got popped off Miami Beach, and they got Finbar and the Mexican Cutie coming to drop off a load here. They called the lawyers, and I just talked to them. We’ll get them out, but it’ll take most of our cash. What should we do?”
We had only escaped because Finbar was driving so fast that the DEA guys were afraid they’d lose him. They weren’t into the hired help – they wanted me, the anonymous kingpin. It seemed to me that we should get out of the dope-smuggling business, but Alice wanted to do one more run. No way – after we paid off the lawyers, we’d have enough to build a new life elsewhere. And after a long conversation (in a pay phone booth miles away) with my old friend Kathleen Collins, I knew where to go.
They wanted me, the anonymous kingpin.
“Come home to Colorado Springs!” she said. “You’ll love it now – it’s a dynamic, changing city, not a boring small town. You have your old friends, and you’ll make lots of new ones.”
We left that day, abandoning our furniture and my 1973 Oldsmobile four-door. I drove the truck and Alice followed in her Volvo with the kids. While we were on the road Kathleen had found a nice house to rent on Waco Court in Rockrimmon, a neighborhood that didn’t exist when I left the city 20 years earlier.
A new life beckoned, but I was still afraid. I left with many enemies and few friends and had no idea what the future held. It never occurred to me that I’d become a pillar of the community, a twice-elected Colorado Springs City Council Member and a fierce champion of the city of my birth. And after all the thrills, spills and chills do I regret anything?
Not really, but I miss my ’73 Oldsmobile …
John Hazlehurst has been deeply involved in the community, including serving on the Colorado Springs City Council and in the founding of the Historic Preservation Alliance. He has previously written for the Colorado Springs Independent and the Colorado Springs Business Journal.
All installments of The Hazlehurst Memoirs may be found at PikesPeakBulletin.org.
