The Tribune

By ERIC WIBERG

A Miami Herald article from September, 1980 provides some explanation why South Bimini became the destination du jour for drug runners during that time. “The airstrip closes at sunset,” it reads, “access can be controlled because only one road leads there. The only communication on the field is a radio in a snack bar that closes at sunset. Boats can come within several hundred yards of the runway. No police live on South Bimini, and the customs officers are accommodating.”

The DEA actually watched Bahamian law enforcement help move pot into a brown police truck. Cubans then bought a waterfront house and two Convair aircraft with duplicate tail numbers, one of which they staged in the daytime as disabled – deflated tires, open windows, etc. When the new one landed at night, they switched them, unloaded the cargo from the fresh one, then made it look derelict again.

In September 1980, a straight lawman named Ezra Curry cleaned up Bimini substantially, leaving just two drug planes on the runway, a shot-up A-26, which the DEA monitored, and a DC-4.

“Wreckage of aircraft in the thick forests, clear offshore waters, and sandy beaches give this tiny island [North Bimini] the appearance of a World War II battlefield,” well-known Miami Herald journalist, Carl Hiaasen, wrote after a visit to Bimini in the 1980s. It was “a favoured spot to unload a drug plane and ferry its illicit cargo 50 miles by speedboat. Crashed drug planes lie scattered near the [South Bimini] runway and skeletal wreckage eerily protrudes from the ice-clear shallows offshore--testimony to Bimini’s enduring popularity among drug traffickers and alien smugglers.” One smuggler, Luis “Kojak” Garcia, referenced in a previous column, even used a DC-3, Merlin, and Fairchild 27 with the Bahamas flag on them.

One of the most photogenic beached drug planes crashed just short of the runway at Bimini and was apparently salvaged. The drug-running aircraft crash-landed on a beach while engaged in a smuggling of narcotics, according to reports. Its last known operator was Taxi Aero Guaviare (TAGUA) of Colombia.

On his blog The Dakota Hunter, Hans Wiesman provides an interesting summary of the incident. “The aircraft used to be a decent Passenger/Cargo hauler from Villavicencio/ Colombia, flying since some years in this Tagua livery. But one day, or better one night, she was spotted flying at very low altitude over the Caribbean Sea from Northern Colombia to the Bahamas. The most probable scenario is that she was detected by an overhead flying US Patrol aircraft, like the P-3 Orion. That aircraft with an AWACS-like antenna dish on top of its fuselage had picked up the Dakota on her down-looking radar or heat-detecting infrared camera.

“What happened often is that the pilots of the suspect plane were summoned to land on a major airport for a checkout. The pilots of this Tagua DC-3, like many other pilots of drug smuggling aircraft, opted instead to land in nearby shallow waters or on a beach, trying to escape their apprehension.”

It was reported some time earlier that a DC-3 "HK-1505" had made an emergency landing on a farm in the Zulia state, Venezuela, on a drug smuggling flight in February, 1984. The four Colombian crew disappeared, but it's not certain if it was the same aircraft.

The engines of the beached Tagua DC-3 were later taken off, as they are the most valuable part on the plane. On his Dakota Hunter blog, Weisman explains further.

“It was not uncommon that certain DC-3s vanished, or were seized and scrapped or declared lost while that very same aircraft a year later or so popped up with a new livery, registration number, and a different Manufacturer’s Plate/Tag and Factory serial number riveted inside the cockpit. This ‘transforming’ of airframes could well have been practiced in the drug hauling circuit for obvious reasons: to deceive the authorities. Worse, there were original/legal owners, who lost aircraft in confiscations by the judicial authorities and were accused of drug trafficking themselves, though actually innocent and victims of theft. With no trials, the ‘distressed’ aircraft vanished out of sight for a year, only to reappear with a new ID, now in hands of the same authorities that had seized the aircraft some years earlier.’’

In September 1984, the Miami Herald reported that only one person in Bimini in the early 1980s ever went to jail, and that was simply because he couldn’t pay bail! About a third of the island group’s income was related to smuggling. When someone was arrested on the North Bimini dock, locals chanted “arrest the police, too! They’re all involved in it.” Even a former Florida policeman named Robert Acana was arrested for flying 282 pounds of cocaine into Bimini.

As one can imagine, crazy things happen when stakes are so high and the equipment is so fast. There were gun battles between police boats and drug-running go-fast boats at the eastern approaches to Nassau at the time. In daytime you could see these fast boats on the water, and on weekends some would come over from Miami in the morning and go back at night. According to one report from the mid-1980s, “police in Bimini found themselves in a gun battle with three men who had landed in a private DC-3 and opened fire with automatic weapons. And a police corporal was shot at the same airfield a year later.”

In a 1987 article, the Miami Herald provided a clear summary of the actual drug route: a plane brings the minimum of 350 kilos--at $3,000 per kilo--and drops it in the water over The Bahamas. (At that time Long Island and places south of the surveillance balloons were preferred locations for the drop.) Infrared beacons then guide boats to find the floating drugs. The smugglers have counter surveillance planes spying to avoid government interference. A warehouse in Miami serves as a sophisticated communications command post. Guided by lookouts stationed on top of condos in South Florida, drug boats then speed the cargo into Haulover Inlet and others like it. Sometimes on deck they use hired “party girls” as decoys.

“Knots of Colombians gather openly in Alice Town, waiting. The unlighted airfield at South Bimini is said to be the site for regular night-time drug traffic,” another article in the Miami Herald from June 1981 recounts.

But not all boat captains were comfortable with the situation. “With seven Royal Bahamas Defence Force cutters at best to patrol 100,000 square miles of ocean, it’s a smuggler’s paradise,” Captain Richard Stanczyk commented. “Any place you have to carry a gun into, is no place for fun.”

Bimini has seen plenty of military, private, business, and drug running related aircraft wrecks. The list is a long one and includes two Cessnas in 1988 and 1996, a Cessna and an Aero Commander in 1995 and 1978, a Mooney in 1984, a Piper in 1974, 1975, 1993, and 1977, one destroyed in 1998, one in 1997, a Cessna and Dessault that crashed into each other in 1993 due to “inadequate visual lookout by the pilots of both aircraft resulting in their failure to see and avoid each other,” according to official reports.

And that’s not all. A Lake aircraft crash killed three in 1973, a Beechcraft owned by Pleasure Flying Airways crashed in 1991, another in 1977, a large Grumman amphibian seaplane in 1977, 1985, and 1987, another Chalks amphibian plane in 1975, and a Maule in 1995. These aircraft seem to have come down mostly on the main islands in Bimini--from Gun to Cat to Ocean Cay--as well as the waters east of (shallow) and west of (deep).

Although presumably not drug-related, an article in USA Today in December of 1986 celebrates an unlikely survival. The headline announced Pilot Repels Sharks with Sneaker Attack. It’s about Walter Wyatt, 37, a private pilot who crashed at Cay Sal Banks and floated for 15 hours before the US Coast Guard was able to rescue him. He ditched the plan on his way from Nassau to Florida after learning that someone had drained the fluid from his compass.

In August 1986, Trey Wolfhart of Fort Lauderdale was flying a Piper Cherokee from The Bahamas to Florida when he also ditched in the ocean and drifted for two hours before Bahamas Air and Sea Rescue (BASRA) and the US Coast Guard rescued him and took him to Nassau.

During the boom-boom drug-trafficking years, one Bimini local in the trade  built a $2M home on the small island. But by 1987, the island’s beaches and waters were littered with “underwater wrecks of a dozen such drug planes,” including the DC-3 in 30’ of water off the unlit runway’s eastern end. A Miami Herald article from June, 1990 recorded the hangover effect that descended onto the island after the crackdown on illicit trafficking began in earnest in 1987. “A dozen half-finished buildings [often unpainted exposed grey cinder block] attest to the day when the easy drug profits stopped.”

That, or the lives of the profiteers did.

Smuggling has never been new to the western islands of the Bahamas, where the glow of America looms over the horizon within sight. Nor is the trade ever likely to be completely extinguished. The large scale smuggling of cocaine and marijuana resulted in Bimini and surrounding waters being littered with dozens of plane carcasses, many of which can still be seen to this day. They remain a sad testament to this intense epoch.