1992 was the year Bruce Perlowin was released from serving 8 years of a 15 year federal sentence, after he pleaded guilty on charges of racketeering, smuggling, currency violations, income-tax evasion, conspiracy and other related counts.
Perlowins pot-smuggling operation was a little more than selling a few dime bags to fund his own marijuana use.
When he appeared in court to answer his charges he readily admitted to running an operation that used a flotilla of 90 boats and ships to haul 500,000 pounds of marijuana from Columbia, into California between 1974 and 1983.
Gross sales totalled half a billion dollars.
He also explained to the courts how he went about hiring a research firm in Berkeley to study how other major drug dealers had operated, "finding out what mistakes they had made," and seeking out the weak spots in law enforcement so he could set up his own counterintelligence system.
If that wasn't hi-tech enough, he operated his own hilltop surveillance center which overlooked San Francisco Bay, crammed with sophisticated electronic gear used to monitor the FBI, Coast Guard, Drug Enforcement Administration, customs agents and police.
Making sure he stayed one step ahead of the game.
Transhipping consignments of marijuana which weighed in the "ton's" bracket was always going to be a security issue, so Perlowin bought a 1000 foot pier in San Fransisco Bay, which was ideally situated in the radar shadow of the Richmond Bridge. He operated the pier under the "front" of running a bona-fide boat-building company.
Transport planes were acquired to fly potent Punta Roja marijuana from the interior of Colombia to the coast, where it was loaded on boats recruited from the financially troubled Northern California fishing fleet.
Larger craft, like a 125-foot tug and an 85-foot minesweeper, stood by to assist in case of a breakdown on the 4,500-mile voyage to his dock in San Francisco Bay.
Perlowin said that by spring in 1983, his personal profit had totaled more than $30 million.
A little under three years after federal agents closed down his marijuana operation in 1983, Perlowin told The Los Angeles Times in an interview he gave from his prison cell, that he had been "the biggest in California. One of the biggest anywhere in fact. No one else came close to the scale we were operating on" he said.
Federal officials would not dispute any of what Bruce Perlowin says.
"He's for real," Assistant U.S. Atty. James Lassart, head of the drug task force in San Francisco, said at the time.
"When you meet him, you could be forgiven for thinking he's a little eccentric. Kind of flaky. But you do so at your peril.
After you get to know him, you realize what he says is true. We corroborated every detail."
And attention to detail is exactly whats needed to run any sort of successful enterprise, legitimate or otherwise.
According to a magazine article subsequently published about Perlowin's operation his organizational skills were explained as being "mythical - his management skills formidable, and his attention to the finest detail was legendary".
All of the qualities needed to take an idea from a simple visualization, and from it, create a public company which has since successfully floated on the stock markets. In our next installment we'll hear how Bruce Perlowin's 8 year stretch stood this poacher in good stead to go on and apply for the gamekeepers job.
CannaZine Cannabis News
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