On the Run | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

we never talked about being fugitives because at that point we didn't know later on when we were started to find
out we still didn't talk about it then either because you've all been raised with this one rule which is don't tell
and it's very hard you know even now to the states it feels surreal to talk about it so openly
Tyler weatherall has lived all over the world she grew up in 13 houses in five countries and no matter where her family
went the rule was always the same don't talk so when I was nine years old I remember coming home from school one
day with my sister and we saw these two characters in our front room there are two strangers I sort of
remember them being these Shady looking figures um and we went to let ourselves in and Mum
was there at the at the back door to greet us and she told us that we should go back to our neighbor's house
um who was a good friend of ours and wait there for her and we could tell that there was
something a mess in the way that she said this so we went back to our neighbor's house and
I remember even that night we we ended up staying over because she'd phoned and said that Granny was sick and that she
would uh see us the next day and that night sleeping at our friend's house we whispered about it and even
then we knew something was wrong um that these people who were in our living room represented something was
going to change um and it was maybe a week later and she hadn't woken me up for school one
morning and I actually remember I remember really vividly because I thought that we've been allocated a day
off I thought it was a reward for something uh and I was excited to buy this day off and I went downstairs and
Mum was waiting for us and her she had this amazing bed we call it the never-ending bed it's this enormous
king-sized bed where we've spent many mornings and Christmases and birthdays and where I would curl up when I was
sick and she was sitting up in this bed waiting for me and my sister we made a round of tea and we all got in
and she told us that there was something important she was going to have to tell
us um that something had happened and things were going to be quite difficult for
some time and then she told us that dad was a fugitive he was wanted by the police and
that they were looking for him and that he had gone that she didn't know where and she
didn't know when we'd be able to speak to him again foreign she told us that in all probability
Scotland Yard had bugged our phone and our perhaps our car perhaps our house and that we had to be careful about what
we said about Dad and about the times we had spent with him because we didn't want to give them any information they
might be able to use and then we noticed them shortly after that I remember my sister pointed them
out to me one day that they followed the car home from school and then you're never sure you don't
know if they're following you you don't know if they're there but you know they might be and that kind of creates quite
pervasive sense of anxiety uh a sense of being watched what did you think your father had done
I had no idea you know I was so young and what do you know at you know 9 and 10 11 12.
um you don't know a lot you don't have a look very nuanced understanding about the nature of different crimes so when
you when you have like I understood he must have done something pretty bad because all these people are after him
and I I couldn't imagine that it was something small all this trouble uh but you think about could he have robbed a
bank could he have killed somebody you know I never really thought that that was a possibility but you're running
through this the type of crimes that you're aware of in your head and I spend a lot of time thinking about what he
might have done but I never came I never landed on anything firm [Music] hi I'm Ben and I'm Tyler's father and
the first time I ever sold pot was I rolled a hundred hundred joints for the Beatles
And I was paid a dollar a joint Ben is a pseudonym he agreed to speak with us on
the condition that we didn't use his real name he grew up on Long Island in the 1950s he went to school at the
University of Pennsylvania where he studied finance and then he got a job on Wall Street he was successful both in
his real job and his side job selling pot at first I was very nervous around but I
had a Wall Street business I was doing well and it made me very nervous to be around
pot I was afraid I was going to lose my license and slowly over time I became more and more comfortable with larger
amounts of pot uh and I had a friend who was bringing a pot from Florida and they were at first they were
bringing it up in suitcases and they would actually put the suitcases on airplanes at that point they were
unchecking suitcases for terrorists and sometimes they just put the suitcases on the on the plane without
even a person being on and someone would pick it up at the other side so it was definitely more fun than Wall
Street and the people were a lot nicer and there was demand in the in the country for more and more pot this was
the uh this was the mid 70s then and then I finally left Wall Street and I moved to California
and my and my business grew to the point where other people who were bringing in
pot would come to me to sell the pot so at that point I realized that uh well maybe I should
bring be bringing in the pot since uh not reselling it for these other Smugglers
and what I started to do was take my Wall Street principles one of the things that I had learned in Wall Street and
started to apply it to the pot business such as raising money to finance a trip um paying people who are three to one on
investment and then we started to um actually develop a marketing they started putting decals on the bags of
pot so people could recognize their brand and the stakes kept getting higher what is it about risk that's so
appealing I guess it's the reward uh and and maybe the unknown I always like to gamble not wild gambling but measured
gambling and that's why the stock market appeals and it still does it's a little
bit of the unknown that makes it more interesting not knowing what's going to happen every day
he was also making a ton of money he collected art vintage cars he built a huge Yellow House in Northern California
with a two-acre lake an octagonal tennis court so balls couldn't collect in the corners they had ponies an elaborate
playground for his kids we were just a normal family living a very idyllic life and um
and then I would go off and make my pay phone calls and have secret meetings and of course it's uh it was scary but
you you don't realize what level of fear you're able to deal with until you're faced with it
once they installed a false wall in the back of a truck and then went to Goodwill and filled it with Furniture
thinking that if they got stopped no one would want to unpack all of that and even if they did the pot was still
hidden behind the false wall they chartered planes one time he commissioned a hundred foot three-masted
Schooner to sail from Thailand to Tacoma Washington packed with pot he was an actual drug kingpin at the top
of his game but then everything went wrong he packed up his wife and kids and started running
I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal [Music] I had everything at that point I really should have stopped and and
then a person that I was involved smuggling with was doing another venture and he asked me if I wanted to invest
which I was tempted and I clearly shouldn't have and I I did invest and I also had some of my friends invest
in the in the venture and where it was supposed to be a small Adventure it kept getting
larger and larger what do you mean what type of venture well the Venture was our
contact in Thailand they would isolate a piece of property in Thailand in the jungle
and they would just grow pot dedicated to our venture and there would be entire families and
communities that all they did was grow and package the pot and they would put them in 10 pound
Vacuum Pack bags with our label but then things started to fall apart I was really worried that everybody would get
in in trouble and everybody's going to lose the money and it was quite substantial
it was uh about 35 000 pounds of Thai so that was worth about 50 million dollars
Ben says he made sure he never left a paper trail but six months later he learned that not everyone had been so
careful one of the men he'd been working with was raided and identifying information
about Ben was found in some of the documents at that time I was receiving or information about what the fvr was
doing on the investigation uh how I received it is not important but it reached a point
where I realized that uh it was going to fall apart for me and I had the choice of fighting it
which I knew I would lose based on on the way things came apart uh Reagan was President and Nancy Reagan
was saying no to drugs and the sentences were beginning to be Draconian and they
were trying to make examples so I could be facing uh 20 years to life for organized crime
and so I talked about it with my wife and she was always quite adventurous as well she was a very interesting
brilliant lady and but she really you know didn't want to see me go to the prison
and so we talked about it and I did a bunch of research on which countries had extradition which didn't
or I had some friends in Europe that were living very nicely in the south of France and in England as fugitives
and seem very happy [Music] so they drove through the night they packed up the family into the cars we
had one suitcase each in a small bag and we drove um through the night to the airport to
fly first to Rome and then onward from there and the plan was that we would fly that first leg of
the journey and our real names and we didn't plan to stay in Rome so at that point we would have created a false
Trail leading to Rome and I know that night when mum was pulling out of the driveway there was definitely a fear
that we might be followed my main reason really was to I wanted to be with the kids when they were young I
felt if I had to go to prison later if they were more formed and and had more time with me and the family uh
those early years I felt was more important than the later years did you have enough money to run
comfortably how much money were you leaving with uh absolutely I had enough money to live comfortably and I was also
somewhat uh knowledgeable about investing it so I could make more money with the money I
have plenty of money to leave without no problem millions and millions of dollars
or Millions yes I think at that time when I left I had I think like five million dollars
liquid liquid how difficult was it to keep what was going on from your children did they just think this was a
big adventure well they didn't know what was going on to them it was uh we we first went to
Portugal and the kids were young so they were too young to really have a sense of what was going on
and we went to a nice community and they went to a pretty good European schools and we got a lovely family life
Tyler's family was constantly on the Move Rome Portugal England the south of France back to England he wanted to
resurrect that life that we'd given up that beautiful life in the yellow house he wanted to make it better and to fix
it but in doing that and in that fixation on that goal he lost himself to that and he became I think quite distant
for mum um his entire life revolved around talking to lawyers on the phone he was
also his organization by the time um he got into trouble had grown into about 20 people and each of those people
who were implicated he was trying to support so some of them were also in hiding some of them were going through
the court system back in the States and I you know I think deep down he felt incredibly responsible uh for them and
had a a burden of guilt as well that it had all Fallen apart like this and so those were his days was on the phone
trying to contain This Disaster that happened and in everybody's lives and I think that took that put an enormous
strain on their marriage and it couldn't sustain that and I think by that point um it was very difficult for my mum to
accept how far this had changed our lives uh and how much she had to sacrifice in order for him to be free
thank you foreign might be the right word I I think she was rightfully angry that he had put us in a
situation and we were the ones at home with Scotland Yard with him down our neck
and also a sense of you know when was this going to end Tyler's mother and father separated he
moved to London and they worked together to make sure he saw the kids as much as
was safely possible most of all she felt like the FBI had taken away our lives completely and she didn't want them to
win she supported Dad when Dad was on the run and made sure that um he got to see us and
she I mean by supported I mean she helped him see us basically and helped him have
a relationship with us in London Ben lived in a townhouse and had the attic converted into a playroom
for the kids when they visited Tyler remembers getting to watch The Simpsons and ordering pizza he was living under
his false identity and he was going and paying taxes under his false identity he
had legitimate businesses he once got a speeding ticket and actually went to court for his speeding ticket
and they didn't know anything so it seemed pretty secure but he also wasn't making the money he used to be making
and that money was dwindling I think he never found he had something like uh two
hundred thousand dollars of gold buried in someone's back Garden which he never found again so he started to invest
money for another pair of drug smugglers and he he saw this he didn't see this as risky
at the time for him it was the sense of getting back to his financial roots with
Scotland Yard showing up at Tyler's mother's house the family devised an elaborate method of secret communication
so the way it works is he we would have the numbers of the various pay phones and then we would set three appointments
to speak at three different pay phones with a different time and date for each one and the reason you do always work
three in advance was that if you missed one there'd be a chance to catch up on the next one and you if you missed that
one too you know that there was something wrong and there'd be a third final phone call just in case but you
always wanted to make sure that those phone calls were planned in case one was missed and that was a warning system as
well so if we didn't hear from him on those occasions or if he didn't hear from us he'd know something was wrong
and he always in the phone calls and he also wrote us letters he never specified
where he was and he had the letters are fascinating because you can see him trying to tell
us about what he's doing and trying to connect with us while giving away absolutely nothing in case the letters
were intercepted these secret visits and phone calls and coded letters worked pretty well her father kept moving from
place to place managing to evade a rest to celebrate Tyler's 12th birthday it was arranged that she and her sister
would travel to St Lucia to be with their father the girls made it there safely but on
the actual day of Tyler's birthday authorities showed up at Tyler's mother's house in England hoping to find
Ben and they raided the house searching for evidence of where we were and they found I think we've never known
exactly what they found we think maybe our flight details were maybe one of our jacket pockets or something we'd
overlooked um something small and that's when they came for us in St Lucia Tyler's mother called Ben to warn him
Tyler remembers the phone call she'd had a wonderful birthday they'd gone scuba diving and seen a volcano and we got
back and we were gonna go and have lobster that evening in Rodney Bay um and I'd never had Lobster before so
this was pretty exciting and we've gone up to get dressed for the evening and we
came back down me and my sister and we saw him in his office dressed for dinner on the telephone and we knew at that
point and we knew we knew immediately Ben told the girls to pack their bags and they took a car to the airport and
halfway along the road he stopped in the middle of this um banana field and he got out and he said that's as far as he
was gonna go with us and the driver would get us to the airport safely and we'd been flying all over the world at
this point by ourselves so we knew what we were doing um and he said goodbye and he was sorry
he screwed up my birthday and uh and I remember this image of him looking out the back of looking at the back of the
car and he was standing on this this road in the early morning the sport bag sort of thrown over his shoulder
waving goodbye at us and we didn't know you know when we would see him again or how long it would be
seven months later Tyler and her sister got a letter I'll be content just to know that you
are well and together if you miss me just think of that wonderful time together and know that it
will surely happen again life is long and full of surprises much much love Dad thank you
he was convicted under the continuing criminal Enterprise statute sometimes called the Kingpin statute as well as a
hundred odd different charges over the years every time he was going on the run or
changing identities each of these things carried charges and so he had the original charges then he had later
charges from when he was investing the money for the other set of Smugglers he ended up occurring I think 143 different
charges against him he was given a month to get his Affairs in order before his prison sentence
began I remember we went to Alcatraz which is uh you would think a strange thing to do when you're about to start a
prison sentence but I guess that counts as sightseeing and we made jokes all the
way through um but during this time he also sat us down and for the first time he told us what
he had done it was surreal to hear it at last and also to hear my dad talk about drugs
which by this point I kind of understood what drugs were but I really didn't know
very much so to hear that he was a pot Smuggler was wild it blew my mind the things and
not just any pot smoker that he had been a major pot Smuggler he was sentenced to 10 years at the
Lompoc federal correctional institution in the end he served five years and a few months
I think the kids were angry with me for a long time for doing that last deal while I had kids and
um at first I didn't accept responsibility I always saw myself as a a victim because the way things fell
apart but after a time I did accept that it uh that I screwed up and I never should
have done been involved at all and uh if you could go back to that time when you
were young with a Wall Street job all above board would you do anything differently
yeah the only thing that I would do differently is I wouldn't do that last deal after Ben got out of prison he moved
back to Northern California and he's gone back to his original career as an investment advisor
do you ever do something or say something and or think something and realize that
oh I'm just like my father uh [Laughter] I think the thing I think about most I think that I still now one of the things
I still work through is the knee joint reaction when when things are tough of oh I could just jump
on a plane and go and that would make everything okay and that's a that's a complicated one
because obviously that didn't make everything okay when we were younger in all reality Dad should have done his
time straight off the Baton that was the most sensible thing to do um and yet there's this part of me when
things are hard that wants to get on a plane and disappear criminalists produced by Lauren Spore
Nadia Wilson and me audio mix by Rob Byers Matilda folino is our intern Julian Alexander makes original
illustrations for each episode of Criminal you can see them at thisiscriminal.com and we're on Facebook
and Twitter at criminal show if you want to know more about Tyler weatherall's life and her father you can
read her book it's called no way home criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina public radio wunc we're a
proud member of radiotopia from PRX a collection of the best podcasts around and we're excited to tell you about the
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foreign here I was 10 years ago sort of at the height of my so-called career I was you
know success I'd made money I was at critical Acclaim still with all of that I felt like an absolute loathsome
complete worthless object who hadn't done anything and whose entire trajectory of my life had had gone up
and then was plunged down into absolute zero pit go listen special thanks to adzerk for providing
their ad serving platform to radiotopia I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal [Music]

When Tyler Wetherall was a kid, her mother and father packed up the family car and drove through the night. They were on the run from the FBI. And by the time she was 9, Tyler had learned how to communicate in codes, adapt to new countries, and to never reveal who or where her father was.

Tyler Wetherall wrote about her time on the run in her book, No Way Home.

Music in the episode “Ray Gun - FasterFasterBrighter” by Blue Dot Sessions “Vernouillet” by Blue Dot Sessions “Neil Takes Two” by Blue Dot Sessions “Building the Sled” by Blue Dot Sessions “Our Digital Compass” by Blue Dot Sessions “Begrudge” by Blue Dot Sessions “Jat Poure” by Blue Dot Sessions “Collingwood” by Blue Dot Sessions “Game” by Chad Crouch

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Episode transcripts are posted on our website https://thisiscriminal.com/.

Episode 96 originally published 8/3/2018 https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-96-on-the-run-8-3-2018

Brief Summary

Tyler Weatherall recounts her family's life as fugitives due to her father's drug smuggling past.

Key points

The Family's Secret Rule. Tyler Weatherall reflects on the family's unspoken rule of silence about their fugitive status.
The Final Goodbye. On Tyler's birthday, Ben has to say goodbye to his daughters as they flee.
A Father's Confession. Ben, Tyler's father, reveals his life as a major pot smuggler to his children before prison.
Reflecting on Choices. The speaker contemplates their past decisions and the impact on their life.
The Weight of Expectations. Despite success, the speaker feels a deep sense of worthlessness.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

We never talked about being fugitives.

WatchJan 14, 2023

Tension

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