GQ Longform
The Great Cocaine Treasure Hunt
If you knew where a million dollars' worth of blow was buried, would you go dig it up? Rodney Hyden would. We pick up the story at this critical juncture
Daniel Riley
Jack Unruh
Good goddamn, the way Julian told that story.
It was the sort of story that imbued the mind with possibility. That lingered like campfire smoke in a sweater.
But it wasn't just the particulars of the story—Julian burying the million-dollar stash of coral-white cocaine he'd found washed up on the beach in Culebra—that captured Rodney Hyden's imagination. It was the sounds of the story—the slithering South Carolina accent, the whistly snicker at parts that weren't funny to anyone but Julian. And the picture of the storyteller, too. The silver hair down around Julian's shoulders, the big Gandalf beard distracting from his slight frame, the bare feet, and always that Mason jar of wine that kept bottoming out and filling right back up again.
Friday nights, about eight or ten of the men who lived out there on the edge of Archer, Florida, not far from Gainesville, got together for happy hour at the fire pit by Watermelon Pond. They grilled out, ran southern rock through a sound system, and polished off bottles of beer (or in Julian's case, jars of wine). Even to the beer drinkers, Julian had a way of making wine look good. The first time Rodney heard the story, a Friday in July 2004, he could tell by the way the others reacted, the way they oversold their delight at the laugh lines, that this was not the first time they'd heard it. Turns out Julian had been telling the same damn story for years. Especially when someone new, like Rodney, came around. And with good reason, Julian always started with the turtles.
Julian Howell and his wife moved to Culebra, an island off Puerto Rico, in 1986 to work for the sea-turtle-preservation project. For hundreds of years, on account of people eating the turtles and their eggs (the eggs an alleged aphrodisiac), the turtles' numbers had been dwindling. So for several hours each day for a decade, Julian walked the beaches of Culebra, looking for signs of turtles. Often the beaches were empty—no sign of anything, turtle or human. But one day, amidst a profound ordinariness, Julian spotted a plastic-wrapped bale, about the shape and weight of a large piece of luggage, just plopped there in the froth of the tide. He approached it tentatively, as though it were an animal that might wake. As he got closer, he peered over both shoulders to see if anyone else was around, if anyone had dibs.
He'd heard about this sort of thing down here, even on Culebra—drugs that had been tossed overboard or dropped from a plane, missing their target and washing ashore. It was almost funny. He'd been walking around the island for nine years now, looking for something to smoke, thinking, Okay, God, where's my bale? And here it was, perhaps: forty, fifty, sixty pounds. Think of how long it would last him! Still, it was wrapped so thoroughly in plastic and rubber, he couldn't tell for sure what he was dealing with. Weed, he hoped. But it could be coke, or something else. He wasn't certain it was worth the risk. In an effort to buy more time, he dragged the package up the beach, dug a depression near the rocks, and covered it with leaves and debris.
He mulled it over for weeks, until curiosity overwhelmed him. After putting in his hours at the bar one night, he built up enough courage to head back to the beach. It was one in the morning, but there was enough moonlight to find the bale and ease it up into the bed of his pickup. He hauled it home, then hid it in his toolshed for a couple more weeks. Finally, after waiting for his wife to leave for work one day, he took a kitchen knife to one of the wrapped segments, just to get a better look. What flaked off was white, pink-white. Cocaine. He strapped the bale to his back and stood on the bathroom scale, did some quick math: The coke weighed seventy pounds. Thirty-two kilos, wrapped thoughtfully in sixteen double-kilo bundles. Street value at the time: anywhere from $16,000 to $20,000 per kilo, depending on which street. Though those sorts of numbers weren't on Julian's radar.
One day, amidst a profound ordinariness, Julian spotted a plastic-wrapped bale, about the shape and weight of a large piece of luggage, just plopped there in the froth of the tide.
Hell, I'm a millionaire, he thought, but just not of the money kind.
Julian was no drug dealer. He didn't even really like blow. But he cut some into a jelly jar he kept in the kitchen, the way you keep nutmeg around for the rare party that requires eggnog. Then he buried the rest. Dug a hole out by the cistern at his house, and into the ground it went.
That was more than fifteen years ago. Julian and his wife kept looking for the sea turtles, but not for much longer. They split up, and he moved back to the States, eventually settling in an Airstream trailer on a big piece of land in northern Florida near a dozen new neighbors who'd get together on the edge of Watermelon Pond and swap stories on Friday nights.
Ain't no way that coke is anywhere but where I left it, he'd say. A million bucks in the ground, and all someone's gotta do is grow a big enough pair to go and get it.
A few years after hearing the story for the first time, Rodney Hyden moved onto his own forty-acre plot of land, out by Julian's. Archer was a thirty-minute straight shot from Gainesville, followed by a murderously bumpy four-mile dirt road the men blamed for at least four divorces.
Rodney had been raised in Gainesville, worked summers at his father's work sites, and enrolled in the building-construction program at the University of Florida, right there in town. In 2000 he started his own construction company. There were good years there in the early aughts when they'd do $10 million to $20 million in business—hotels, airport expansions, the new skybox at the University of Florida football stadium, a.k.a. "the Swamp." B&H Builders grew to eighty employees. Rodney got married to a local girl, had a daughter with her (they each had a kid from previous relationships), built a house for his family in Gainesville, and purchased another one down in Crystal River.
When the real estate market collapsed in 2008, northern Florida was sucked into the fiercest whirlpool. Rodney had already been forced to cut his payroll to six. The bank claimed his river house and his office. He'd grown close with those folks out in Archer and had decided to move there himself. Those Friday-night fireside happy hours became a beloved ritual, and after enough wine, Julian would tell the cocaine story. If my ex-wife wasn't still down there, Julian would joke, maybe I'd even go back and look for it myself. The story wasn't a sworn secret—no telling how many people Julian had told over the years—but the cloistered conditions in Archer made it feel like one. Which is why Rodney was taken aback one morning when a guy he barely knew approached him and said:
Hey, man, I can help with that coke down in Puerto Rico.
This was Danny Jimenez. Danny lived with a kid who did odd jobs around Rodney's once. At some point, the kid, Andy Culpepper—"a self-admitted functioning drug addict," in Rodney' "not one," in Andy's—had gotten wind of the cocaine story. And because Andy liked talking loose and dreaming big when he got high, Danny knew about it, too. When Danny leaned into the passenger window of Rodney's truck that morning, he said he knew a guy who could get the coke back to Florida and another guy who could sell it.
Rodney had never thought seriously about it. He'd always accepted the verity of the story, but never considered for a moment what he'd do if he had a chance to dig it up himself.
We're in January 2012 now. The construction business in Florida has yet to recover. Rodney's down to two employees, including himself, and billing just $600,000 a year. Prospects for new work are grim. That morning, the first time Danny mentions it, Rodney says, "Danny, it's just a story."
But Danny keeps coming by the once, stoking the notion. He knows a drug dealer in Jacksonville who's got a pilot—they fly coke up from Colombia on the regular. They'd do the job for us if we cut them in on some of the product. Then we take what's left and hand it straight to a dealer in Tampa, El Neg (short for El Negro). Or better yet, Danny says, I'll cut it and double the quantity. El Neg gives us cash for coke, and we split. That did sound pretty straightforward to Rodney. He wouldn't even have to touch the stuff.
In March, Danny drops by again. Something has changed in Rodney. He's got his arms crossed and a fat lip packed with Copenhagen, spitting into a Solo cup, sort of bouncing in his chair. After tiptoeing, for months, out to the edge of the diving board, he finally seems ready to leap. He relishes the challenge of transporting the haul from Puerto Rico to Gainesville. He suggests an airdrop into his soft and sandy yard. They'll fashion a little parachute out of a bedsheet that'll catch just enough breeze to ease her down. No sweat. It's just a one-time-in-a-life opportunity, he says to Danny again and again. He even lays it out with a trusted friend: "I said, 'Man, I'm gonna fucking do it.'"
Three months later, he fucking does it. In June, Rodney drives from a job in Crystal River to a Mexican restaurant on the south side of Jacksonville. Casa Maria has a life-size cardboard cutout of The Most Interesting Man in the World, an electric (broken) countdown clock to Cinco de Mayo, and margaritas available by the pitcher. When Rodney sits down with Danny and the drug dealers, he orders one unsalted on the rocks.
"Y'all had to pick a tight table!" Rodney says, squeezing in. (Rodney's about 300 pounds, his top half shaped like the parentheses around this sentence.) In previous meetings with Danny, Rodney had been firm about wanting to work with a pilot he knew personally, but Danny has persuaded him to meet with some experienced drug-running pros. Carlos is Puerto Rican and does most of the talking. Grant is a pilot.
"We've done a lot of favors, and so people owe us a lot of favors," Carlos says. "We have the freedom and the luxury after all these years to actually land in certain places...and do what we need to do to make money. Because at the end of the day, it's all about the money."
Carlos has set up the meeting to vet Rodney and his information. He peppers him with questions about the old guy who used to live in Puerto Rico, the story that Julian tells. He interrogates Rodney about his drug-running bona fides (lacking) and the referral from El Neg.
Rodney tells Carlos and Grant the whole story, emphasizing the supposed quality of the product. "The little he did—I say 'a little,' the lot he did—he said that he could do it and then, two hours later, eat, go to bed. No side effects, no drip and all that stuff. And I'm going, 'Wow, sounds like it's some good stuff.' " Julian has never seemed to care that much about the money—he just loves spinning the tale—but Rodney wants to make sure Julian gets his windfall while there's still time to enjoy it. "He's getting old, man. He's 68 years old," Rodney says. "If he dies before this all happens, it ain't gonna ever happen. And that's sad."
"How much does he want?" Carlos asks. Rodney says Julian has never mentioned a firm number but that a quarter-mil finder's fee is what he's thinking. "That's all?" Carlos says. Rodney doesn't know even a ballpark estimate of the market value. About thirty grand per kilo, Carlos says. There are thirty-two kilos in the ground, so that's about a million bucks—especially if they can unload some of it in New York instead of Florida. Danny's job is to find the buyer (possibly El Neg). Rodney will pay Carlos and Grant in kilos rather than dollars. Say, four bricks to start, maybe more, depending on what they find. Just take it off the top when you transport the cargo, Rodney says.
Rodney articulates his desire to travel to Puerto Rico to unearth the bale himself—he feels he owes that to Julian—and Rodney and Grant hash out the logistics of getting the coke off the island. "Now, the good thing about Puerto Rico," Grant says, "it's a U.S. territory. That makes it very easy for us."
I'm not about being a drug dealer. But this opportunity, man—for some reason, I was made aware of this opportunity. Believe what you want. It could be sent here from God, for all I know.
"Do you have to have a passport to get in and out of there?" Rodney wonders.
Nope, Grant assures him, and if you fly direct, there's nothing to worry about. "I've been flying twenty years, and I've never had a ramp check."
Rodney says he wants to get down there within the next couple of months. "I take my time with everything I do.... I want to make sure it's right," he says. "[Julian is] probably wondering why it's taken me so long to come back to him, but I just didn't want to commit to him or commit to you guys until I knew it was golden.
"I've worked hard my whole life in the general-construction business," Rodney continues. "Made a bunch of money. But when the bottom fell out five years ago, I didn't draw a paycheck for two years. I had a couple million in the bank [for the company], and now it's gone. It's just, the market fell out, so what am I left with? My 401(k). I'm tired of it. I'm not about being a drug dealer. Don't care to get into that. But this opportunity, man—for some reason, I was made aware of this opportunity. Believe what you want. It could be sent here from God, for all I know."
In late June of 2012, Rodney books a last-minute trip to Puerto Rico. The sudden timing isn't surprising so much as the partner he brings along: Andy Culpepper. Andy, in spite of his "fucking big mouth," might prove helpful on recon. Rodney's wife and daughter are heading down to Daytona Beach for the week, and he tells them he and a buddy are going on a fishing trip. The two men catch a flight to San Juan, then a puddle jumper to Culebra.
Before they go, Julian gives Rodney Rodney keys them into Google and generates a printout. He doesn't think of it as a treasure map, but it's a treasure map.
Rodney nearly shits his pants as they approach Culebra. The wind is blowing hard and sideways, forcing the plane to skirt the mountains. We're not gonna make it, he keeps saying to Andy. We're not gonna make it.
They make it and head to Club Seabourne—a resort Rodney gets at a cut rate, a hundred and fifty bucks a night—and Rodney settles in with the map. Andy heads to a bar, talks to a kid on a skateboard, finds some weed. Holy shit, Rodney thinks, Julian can't find anything to smoke down here in ten years, and it takes Andy an hour. It's latish, too late to go searching tonight, so Rodney and Andy grab dinner at the tiki bar and make plans to head out early tomorrow.
But in the morning, Andy is too sick to leave the room. Rodney's not sure whether it's drug withdrawal or food poisoning. Disgusted, Rodney heads out alone and tracks Julian's instructions through the turtle reserve to the spot where Julian's mobile home used to sit. All that's left is part of the plumbing. Turns out the home was carted off just a few months ago. Still, he's able to locate the cistern, where the bale is buried. Rodney eyeballs the spot eight feet off the cistern, right where it's supposed to be. Everything is as Julian described it.
Except that over the years, it seems, water and sand and coral have calcified into a top layer as hard as concrete. Rodney also notices that there's a government building not more than 200 yards away. He's pretty sure it's where the military does its desalinization—probably Army guys walking by every day. Rodney had been expecting to dig right in with his hands, in complete privacy. But there's no way he can break through, especially while exposed like this.
Rodney is prepared to walk away from the whole scheme, but Andy persuades him not to give up entirely. We'll come back, Andy says, when I'm healthy, an able hand.
Two weeks later they're back, and this time Rodney buys a shovel. They head straight to the spot. But "two ching-chings" into the dirt, they still can't crack the coral. They dig for a while but don't get far. Andy whines that it's too hot for this shit. After a couple of hours, they throw the shovel into the bushes and give up. Rodney decides, if it's there, nobody's gonna be able to get it out.
On the way home, when they land in San Juan, customs pulls every bag off the plane and brings out a couple of German pointers. There's nothing in their bags to worry about, but Rodney decides right then and there, I'm not coming back here. Not just I'm not coming back to Puerto Rico but
I'm not calling Danny again. I'm not calling Carlos again.
After returning, Rodney ghosts. Nobody hears from him for about a week. Carlos and Andy look for him independently. Andy texts, "I figured u would pull some bullshit like that steal my connections and then cut me out." Rodney finally tells everyone, I'm through, I'm done, it's over, forget it. Carlos does not like the sound of this. What if, Carlos suggests, we change the terms? What if
we go get it and you pay us eight bricks instead of four?
Rodney's willing to hear him out, so it's back to Casa Maria, just Carlos and Rodney this time. After some chitchat about the Summer Olympics ("If I were you," Rodney suggests, "I'd pull for the States"), they turn to business. "I'm gonna tell you honestly," Rodney says, "I never wanted to come over here. But you kept insisting."
Rodney takes some serious convincing but eases into a reversal, now that Carlos is offering to do the heavy lifting. "Here's the way I look at it, brother," Rodney says. "Been down there twice. Spent $5,000. I've got some options here. But I'm hanging my hat on you.... You're Puerto R you can do things that a gringo cannot do down there."
They make plans for how Carlos will make his trip. After the issue with customs in the airport, Carlos says he'll go by boat.
"The ferry?" Rodney says.
"I don't go on the ferry, my friend. No, I go on a sixty-foot yacht. I go there tranquilo. Couple of girls. We have a good time, you know? I send my people to look, and I sit back sipping tequila."
Rodney finishes his drink and, basking in the stresslessness of the new plan, expresses both relief and gratitude. "Before I met you," Rodney says, "I looked at what it would cost to charter a jet. Where you would go. Where you would land. Where you would take off from. And then you come along and it's like: There is a God. There is a God."
Before they split up, Rodney hands Carlos the same Google map he'd printed, but with a series of annotations to make it a little easier for Carlos—lines, arrows, X's and O's. "You're going to laugh at this," Rodney says. "You're going to say, 'What the fuck, man?' It's not particularly sophisticated, but it'll do."
"I'm going on an egg hunt," Carlos says excitedly. "Like Pirates of the Caribbean."
In Puerto Rico, Carlos is in touch with Rodney via text. Little questions about the location, confirmation of details—the look of the cistern, for example. As the afternoon of the hunt wears on, Rodney gets anxious. He e-mails Carlos: "Did you find the nest?" And then, just like that, bam, an e-mail with a photo.
It's tough to see clearly—the bricks are wrapped in plastic and rubber, just as Julian had said they'd be. But it's difficult to make out any sort of quantity. Just a bunch of yellowed wrapping and a little white. Still, the nest appears to have been found.
Damn, Rodney thinks,
they're living up to their end of the deal.
Carlos sends another couple of photos, one with the "double keys"—thirteen pairs of kilos—lined up. Carlos wants to know if this is it—didn't Julian remember there being more? He did, yeah, he said there were sixteen pairs, but we're talking fifteen years ago, Rodney says. "You're right," Carlos e-mails him, "you keep 18 eggs!"
It does indeed look as though the weather's gotten to the bundles—he'd always known cocaine to be pure white, and this looks kinda dark. But who's Rodney to say? Carlos seems ecstatic. Rodney can't believe that after all the talking, all the feinting, all the doubts, it's actually happening. I'm gonna see some real money.
A couple of days later, Carlos calls Rodney to let him know he and Grant got the coke back without incident. Carlos wants to make the handoff that very same afternoon. Now gimme a second, Rodney says, I can't quite do it that quickly. Even though he's in the Jacksonville area, not Gainesville, he says he needs to meet up with Danny first. But Carlos is firm. First he suggests the World Golf Hall of Fame in St. Augustine. But then Carlos changes his mind: Meet me down the highway at the Gander Mountain sporting goods parking lot in a half hour or the deal's off.
Rodney has begun to feel a growing respect and admiration for Carlos, regarding him as something more than just a drug dealer who's warned again and again, since the first meeting at Casa Maria, that he was only there because of the money. Rodney's having a nice time now, isn't ready for this abrupt and unsentimental end. "What's sad," Rodney tells Carlos, "is that you're so good to do business with. I wish I had some more business to do with you."
Rodney hustles across the neck of northern Florida, calls and texts Danny along the way—"Answer the damn phone. He said he will not wait that long" / "Bullshit you don't answer your phone." Danny finally responds, saying he got a flat tire coming back from Tampa and won't be able to make it.
When Rodney arrives in the parking lot and calls Carlos, he says he's inside, picking out a fishing pole for his son. Come into the store, Carlos says, and I'll give you the car keys. Rodney heads inside and finds Carlos, who hands Rodney his keys and says he'll be out in a minute.
Rodney's blood is running quick. He feels it in his wrists and throat. He steps through the sliding doors and out into the August heat, a pregnant three-dimensional heat. His truck is right here, and Carlos's gold Cavalier is over there, but there aren't many other cars in the enormous prairie of blacktop. Rodney gets in his truck and starts driving in slow circles, thinking hard about the strange journey that has led him here. He presses out wide to the edge of the parking lot, avoiding a direct line to the Cavalier. He sees nothing but the adjacent highway and empty asphalt—the stillness of the whole scene seems safe.
He pulls up beside the Cavalier, unlocks the trunk, and picks up the duffel. Less the fat cut taken off the top, it feels about right in weight. Eighteen kilos, about forty pounds. He slides the duffel onto the bench seat in the back.
And that's all there is. It's over. After the countless meetings and phone calls, the pair of trips to Culebra, it ends up being that easy—even more straightforward than Rodney had ever dreamed it. He takes a step back and just kinda stares at the bag, beholding for this protracted instant what he's pulled off, so fixated on the duffel that he doesn't hear the footsteps approaching, or at least not until he notices the red lasers dancing on his shirt like the mosquitoes that rule Watermelon Pond.
The first thing Rodney thinks while being shouted to the ground is,
Don't have a hair trigger, buddy. But then, there isn't a whole lot of sense to be made. He sees St. Johns County sheriff jackets, Homeland Security lettering. Who are all these guys? But slowly and then quickly, like thumbing the pages of a flip-book into full speed, the movie plays backward in his mind. And on the first page, standing there nearly a year ago at the side of his truck—a face in the window filled with divinely intervened helpfulness—is Danny Jimenez.
In the winter of 2012, Danny Jimenez was pulled over by cops in Alachua County. He had 130 oxycodone pills in the car. He fled on foot at first and ultimately faced a fifteen-year mandatory minimum sentence. The state was flooded with oxycodone dealers—Florida's addiction to the drug was the worst in the nation—and an Alachua County deputy sheriff named Joe Rawley told Danny that good information would be taken into consideration when his case was up for review. Danny delivered a few small-beans drug tips, and then one day he mentioned this story his friend Andy had told him.
In March of 2012, Rawley hooked Danny up with a wire and a small camera so that the Alachua County sheriff's office might see and hear a little about the plans Rodney Hyden had in store for the cocaine down in Culebra. What landed on the tape was enough to get the Homeland Security Investigations unit involved. Rawley started working with an agent named Ryan McEnany. Together they recruited "Carlos" and "Grant," undercover agents who would pose as drug dealers throughout the sting.
Rawley is a young sheriff who sometimes works in an office Rodney helped build. McEnany is more experienced and seems to have called most of the shots in the operation. He has a goatee and looks like he'd be really good at adult softball. "Part of the reason Joe contacted me is that nobody in his office really believed him," McEnany says, smiling.
Though all the lines in the script were delivered by "Carlos," McEnany dictated the meeting places ("We wanted to see if he was willing to go out of his way to get to the meeting, in a place that was inconvenient for him, during the afternoon, on a weekday") and terms of payment. He analyzed the map Rodney handed over and directed the operation in Puerto Rico. Carlos never went to C local agents dug up the coke.
McEnany and Rawley deliberately kept Danny away from Rodney that day. "We wanted to make sure there was no evidence that we had entrapped him," McEnany says. "That there was not a guy coaxing him over. He would literally be by himself.... Rodney was in the driver's seat the whole time." At the end, in the parking lot, McEnany helped Rodney off the ground and moved him to an official vehicle. "We've been watching you for months," he told Rodney. "You got anything to tell me?" Rodney asked for a lawyer.
Rodney, therefore, is charged for intent to distribute not what federal agents actually found but what he was expecting them to find—a crime of anticipation.
After six months of surveillance, the coordinated role-playing efforts of a half-dozen undercover federal agents, a Puerto Rican excavation, and an expense report that included several margarita tabs at Casa Maria, one might argue that it was a Pyrrhic victory for law enforcement. Rodney Hyden wasn't exactly a kingpin. But McEnany and Rawley insist there was a principle at stake—a principle worth defending. "I think he was really just driven by greed," Rawley says. "He wanted the quick money, he wanted the reward. When the economy goes, people turn to other things, but he could've done a lot of different things to supplement his income. No one else did what he did."
Rodney is ultimately charged with attempted possession, five-plus kilograms of cocaine—a ten-year mandatory minimum. The coke he was arrested with was not the coke they dug up in Culebra but rather a blend of sham and real cocaine packed by McEnany and Rawley.
Though the contents of the duffel square with the eighteen kilos Rodney was promised, they don't reflect what was pulled from the ground in Puerto Rico. Not even close. Of that bundle, what actually tested positive for cocaine was merely 2.2 kilos—and that wasn't even sellable, it was such shit. A calcified blend of seawater, sand, and coke-ish rock. Rodney, therefore, is charged for intent to distribute not what federal agents actually found but what he was expecting them to find—a crime of anticipation. This fact is paramount to Rodney's lawyer, Mark Rosenblum, a Jacksonville attorney who looks a little like Joe Lieberman minus the parts that remind people of the emperor from Star Wars.
The salient legal issue, Rosenblum argues, is whether Rodney Hyden was entrapped. Rodney is not a drug dealer. He didn't know the market value of a kilo of cocaine. He didn't know that you could get to Puerto Rico without a passport. He almost certainly would never have pursued the Culebra cocaine if he hadn't been approached and persuaded by Danny Jimenez—a confidential informant participating in a self-serving sting operation. And he had no other drug-dealer connections besides Danny and the undercover cops he met. "And the guy playing Carlos was as good as I've seen," Rosenblum says. "I mean, Hollywood quality."
In July 2013, Rawley and McEnany bring Julian Howell, Andy Culpepper, and Danny Jimenez to Jacksonville to testify. (Despite living with Danny, Andy never caught on to the sting, nor was he charged with abetting Rodney.) When asked what he was doing in Puerto Rico, Andy lies under oath—"building sand castles"—and cracks up the jury and judge. By contrast, Rodney is staid, suited, dignified. But he can't fight the impression made by the surveillance footage—Rodney sitting like a don at his office desk, spitting into a cup, talking up his weed stash and firearm, assessing the prospects of a cocaine airdrop as "easy as shit."
Within hours of closing arguments, the jury issues a guilty verdict.
"I think the jury just didn't like me," Rodney says later. "They saw me in that first taped meeting in my office, smirking and sitting with my arms crossed—that's just how I sit!—but they took it as Mr. Cocky."
While the judge considers the sentencing, Rodney and Mark file a motion arguing for leniency, based on a new recommendation from Attorney General Eric Holder's office that nonviolent drug offenders receive reduced sentences. This is a national problem, of course—the Rodneys of America plugging up jails. The prosecution recommends forgoing the ten-year "mandatory" minimum, asking for thirty months, but Rosenblum argues that Rodney's skills as a general contractor will better serve the community outside prison.
The judge struggles to arrive at what he deems to be a just sentence, ultimately handing down sixty days behind bars followed by five years of community service. The government's aggressive role in the planning and execution of the sting clearly bugs him:
If they would have left it buried in the ground, it would still be there, is the sentiment. Though the jury rejects the claim of entrapment, the light sentence seems to spell out the truer spirit of the court's opinion. What a shit-ton of fishing line and tackle we've wasted, the sixty-day sentence suggests, for such a small fish.
As for Rawley and McEnany, they're satisfied with where things end up. "I couldn't have imagined a better sentence," McEnany says. "He has way more to contribute to society managing the construction of homes than sitting in a box. And when you look at terms of the community service—twenty hours a week for five years?—it's actually pretty harsh. There are some cases where you say, 'I can't believe they only got this.' This is not one of those."
Rodney clocks his two months at Jesup federal prison in southern Georgia. In addition to a horde of white-collar criminals with whom Rodney spends most of his time, there's one of Pablo Escobar's top American deputies—serving a thirty-year sentence—and the guy who hacked Scarlett Johansson's phone. "One thing I learned in there," Rodney says, "is that once the government's got you in the crosshairs, you're asking for trouble. Almost anything you do can be construed as a crime."
Rodney and I had been in touch for eight months before we met in person. It had been his intention, he'd said, to tell me his version of events in full, but not until after the trial, and then not until after the appeal of his sentence, and finally not until after his time in prison. The week after he gets out, he suggests we talk in Rosenblum's office in Jacksonville so that he might "be kept from wandering off the rails."
"For a long time I was angry for doing something so stupid," Rodney says at one point. "At my age, I should know better." He mentions the moment Carlos told him to go to the car by himself. The fact that "Grant," the pilot, wouldn't let him see his tail numbers. All signs he should've picked up on. "I did something stupid. But I think, as the judge pointed out in the sentencing, they had some culpability, too. I just think it was a waste of taxpayers' dollars."
We cover A to Z, which mostly corroborates everything I already know from the court documents and wiretap transcripts, but I feel as if Rodney holds back a little, as if there's some door of his I've failed to knock on. I suppose I'm digging for a better explanation than "I did something stupid." Rodney and I leave Rosenblum's office together. After talking about his football days and shaking hands on the curb, it's over.
I'd booked a hotel room in Gainesville, under the initial assumption that we'd do the interview there. I decide to head down the next morning anyway. That afternoon, I tool around campus and, expecting nothing, drop Rodney a note about maybe checking out his office. My phone lights up at once.
"Hey, Dan? I can't believe you're here, man," he says. I expect the cautious Rodney of the previous day, but instead: "Guess who I just got off the phone with. How would you like to meet Julian?"
It's only fifteen miles from Gainesville to Archer, but where we go next is less a distance traveled geographically than psycho-spatially. At the abrupt end of a paved lane lined with pine trees, we're dumped onto the dreaded four-mile dirt road. Besides the neighbors I've heard about before—Rodney and his wife and daughter, Julian and his Airstream, the guy with the fire pit—there are a handful of others, including a Vietnam vet, who serves as the lone-wolf neighborhood watch, and a man with two pet elephants.
We pass Rodney's house, a double-wide on forty acres. He has a garden out back, a brown dog named Brown Dog, and a featherless cockatoo, all black skin like a plastic bag. He says you can sometimes see the elephants from the porch as they stroll to Watermelon Pond for a drink.
We drive in deeper. The road becomes softer, sandier, and there's a Big Top of overgrowth. At the edge of Julian's property, we confront a gate guarded with a gopher tortoise crossing sign, the (real) skulls of several cows, and the (fake) skull of a human. "You ever see the movie
Deliverance?" Rodney says. "This is it, man." We push deeper still and then we're there. Rodney cuts the engine and the live oaks fizz with insects, the static of dropped radio contact. Julian pops out of his Airstream and meets us near his Volvo—white T-shirt, shorts, neat ponytail, trim scruff. He'd cut his beard for a recent road trip.
Julian finds it all sorts of funny that I'm back here, that I even heard of the story at all. His voice is about as excitable as Willie Nelson's. (Perhaps that's the ponytail's power of suggestion.) He offers to show us some new projects he's working on—he hoards old cars, buses, and boats—and on the march out back, past an eight-foot pit filled with hundreds of wine bottles, I notice the infamous bare feet. Amidst the sand spurs and starfish-sized spiders, Julian hasn't elected to wear shoes in twenty years.
After Rodney's arrest, the question of Julian's culpability hung around unresolved. Law enforcement never charged Julian, but they never officially cleared him of wrongdoing, either. He did bury that bale in the first place, after all, and Rodney's plan called for Julian to clear $250,000. But from the go, Rodney kept Julian in the dark about the dirty work—he limited his involvement to telling the story and helping with the map.
Rodney mentions, kind of incredulously, that during their investigation, Rawley and McEnany found their way back here to pay Julian a surprise visit. "They were a little nervous when they walked up on me," Julian tells me as a light rain begins to fall. "I was in the shower, and I came out, and they were shouting and armed with all this stuff. And my beard was down to here, and my hair was out to here.... It was reasonable for them to think I might come out swinging a machete or something." But after speaking with him, they realized Julian was just as Rodney had described him: all beard, no bite.
At the time of my visit, it's two years to the week since Rodney's arrest. From the beginning, various observers have ascribed his motivation to greed (that's the view of law enforcement); the recession (small-business owners); the desire to leave an inheritance for his wife and daughter (fans of Breaking Bad); stupidity and hubris and a midlife crisis (some of the papers that cover the story). Motivations that implicitly characterize Rodney as an individual with full agency over the episode, rather than the product of a group and that group's unique regard for society.
But if, in the end, we're all still looking for a named thing to hang the blame on, we could do worse than this: Blame the four-mile dirt road. Blame the Airstream. Blame the elephants. Blame the fantastic remoteness of this place. Back here beyond the boring constraints of better judgment, beyond the easy dismissal of a tall tale that's too good to be true, a whole lot more seems possible. Back here is such a pure place for good talk, but also a greenhouse for bad ideas. Which is no big deal if those ideas stay back here. But when you introduce the convictions cooked up at the campfire to the outside world, the cocaine dream spreads like a flame that's found fresh air, engulfing every true believer in its path.
So blame the perfect conditions of just the right story told just the right way in just the right environment. Blame the sounds of the story—the slithering South Carolina accent, the whistly snicker—and the charismatic look of the storyteller. Blame the snap of the fire and the warmth of the wine.
A little later in the afternoon, at what people who are not Rodney and Julian might call the magic hour, the biting bugs swarm and the rain steams right back up off the ground and into the clouds. It's time to go. But first, one final thing:
I know this may seem unnecessary at this point, I say, but will you tell me the story?
"Well," Julian says, "it's the same version Rodney told you, I'm sure."
But it can't be, because it's not just the facts of the story, I start to say, it's—
"He wants to know," Rodney says, getting my meaning just right, "what the hell prompted me to go down there and do something dumb."
Julian tells the story. It's really good.
Rodney laughs hard and steers Julian into some favorite details. Little twists, extra texture, and then this new chapter, the third act, starring Rodney Hyden. Later I'll tell Rodney I get it, I get why it worked. And Rodney will lean in and quietly say, "You should hear it when he's shitfaced."
As Rodney and I make our way back to his truck, Julian's mind seizes one last note. "The thing I like to think about sometimes," he says unprompted, "is what a neat scenario it is that anybody else could've found that bale and had an entirely different experience. It's a fun thing to think about. You can put anybody in that situation and go everywhere with it." A blameless thought exercise, like the whole thing used to be. And then he and Rodney, good neighbors, laugh softly and shake their heads, like, What a crazy story that'd make.
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