ProloguePrólogo
I've lived a life that, looking back now, sometimes sounds like it belonged to several different people.
I've flown airplanes into places most people would never think about going. I've traveled through countries all over the world, spent time in prisons in more than one country, crossed paths with people from every walk of life, and found myself in situations that could have turned out very differently than they did. There were times when I had money and times when I didn't. There were people I trusted with my life, people who became like family, and people who were only part of my life for a short time but left me with stories I still remember decades later.
For a long time, smuggling was a big part of my world. It took me across borders, put me in airplanes, introduced me to some interesting people, and eventually put me behind bars. But that isn't my whole story. Not even close.
My life has taken a lot of turns.
Flying was always part of me. So was the need to see what was on the other side of the mountain. Years later, that same curiosity took me into the gemstone world. Instead of chasing one kind of adventure, I found another. I traveled to places like Guatemala, Brazil, Madagascar, Myanmar, and other parts of the world looking for gemstones, meeting people, and seeing places most tourists never would.
Then somehow I ended up making a movie with my daughter.
That's the thing about my life. One thing always seemed to lead to something else.
There are stories in these pages that are funny, some that are dangerous, and some that are hard to believe. There are people you'll meet more than once because they weren't just part of one story—they were part of my life. Some of them are still here. Others have been gone for many years, but I can still see their faces and hear their voices when I think about those days.
I'm not telling this story to explain myself or to tell anybody how they should live their life. I'm telling it because this is the life I lived.
There are things I can remember like they happened yesterday and other things where the years have blurred some of the details. That's what happens when you're trying to reach back across more than seventy years of memories. But the stories that stayed with me stayed for a reason.
Somewhere along the way, I suppose I spent a lot of my life in one kind of danger zone or another.
So that's where we'll start.
This is my story.