SMUGGLER: Barry Seal

While Barry Seal was still in high school, he and a long-time friend and fellow pilot named John Odom flew from Baton Rouge to the small town of Lacombe, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, directly across from the New Orleans Lakefront Airport.

According to John Odom's brother, lawyer and author Richmond Odom, when Barry and John landed they saw a group of about 30 to 40 young Hispanic men in military fatigues mustered at the edge of the tarmac. Most likely they were Cuban exiles, and they appeared to be doing military rifle drills as they followed the barked orders of a strange looking man sitting in a wood and canvas director's chair. The man wore black clothes, black boots, and had a black beret perched atop his bald head. He also had what looked like a .45-caliber pistol strapped to his side.

Barry told his friend John that the strange looking man was David Ferrie, said Richmond Odom. Ferrie suffered from a rare skin disease known as alopecia areata that left him completely hairless. To hide his lack of hair, Ferrie frequently wore a wig and fake eyebrows, which gave him an unusual appearance.

Stacked close to Ferrie and the men he was drilling were dozens of shipping crates.

"Seal asked my brother if he wanted to make a couple of hundred dollars a month, just flying a plane on the weekends," Richmond Odom said. "John had a funny feeling about it and declined the offer."

A few years later, the FBI raided a secluded house and its surrounding property in Lacombe. Agents seized a ton of high explosives, military bomb casings, and other weapons at what they were convinced was a training base for anti-Castro Cuban rebels. The Cuban exiles, the FBI agents believed, intended to use the base as a staging area for an assassination attempt on Fidel Castro.