The "Drug Wars" California 1970s

I seized that plane.


In the early 1970s, I was a young Customs agent assigned to the Terminal Island (San Pedro, California) office and working in the air enforcement group. Our job was interdicting drugs into the US from Mexico from planes, either owned by smugglers or rented from fixed base operators at small commercial airports around Southern California. One of the cases I was assigned as case agent (lead investigator)  involved a pilot who owned a Lockheed Loadstar and used it to fly hundreds of kilos of marijuana per trip out of Mexico. (I don't want to use his name because he may have turned his life around since.) When we were finally able to arrest him based on an arrest warrant, we were able to seize the plane after we located it at an airport in Southern California and found marijuana residue inside. Previously, when the owner was a fugitive, we had followed it in a Customs aircraft as a fellow smuggler flew it from Southern California to New Mexico (where we lost surveillance).  Later, I testified in  a court hearing as the owner was contesting the seizure.

I only learned today that the Loadstar in question was the same plane used in the film, "Casablanca" in the final scene where Ingrid Bergman bids farewell to Humphrey Bogart and leaves Casablanca.

Imagine that. (If only Ingrid had still been in the plane.)