SMUGGLER: Barry Seal

Now I'm hiding in Honduras. I'm a desperate man.
Send lawyers, guns and money, The s--- has hit the fan.Warren Zevon

Barry Seal's Mexico caper cost him his job with TWA. Then, as now, international airline captains made good money. When the explosives smuggling case against him was finally thrown out, Seal was 35 and unemployed. He had an ex-wife and two kids to help support and a budding romance with a beautiful restaurant cashier, 12 years younger than he, whom he'd met in Gonzales, La.

Seal needed to make some money fast. So he started smuggling drugs.

Between 1976 and 1979, Seal flew to Central and South America at least half a dozen times. Each time he smuggled either cocaine or marijuana back into the United States. He dropped the loads off mostly at isolated airstrips around Baton Rouge.

After two years of smuggling drugs, Seal's luck was holding. He had money, a new wife, and three new kids. Then his luck ran out.

On December 10, 1979, he got busted in Honduras. Accounts of the arrest differ. Some say Barry had 40 kilos of cocaine concealed inside his airplane. Some say the load was more like 17 kilos. Seal, himself, later claimed there were no drugs on the plane, just a machine gun.

Either way, Barry spent nearly nine months locked up in a Honduran prison before being released. Some say he bribed his way out. Debbie Seal, Barry's wife, visited him several times, catching flights from New Orleans to Honduras.

On the flight back home after his release from prison, Seal met William Roger Reeves, a cocaine smuggler who said he flew for the Ochoa family of Medellin, Colombia.

Reeves promised to introduce Barry Seal to the organization.