Boston George Jung on Cape Cod
A recent post on twitter reminded me of the fact that Boston George Jung is kind of a cult hero to alot of the younger generation “ballers” out there.
Since the movie Blow came out almost ten years ago, Boston George has been in rap lyrics, has a Myspace page, has several Facebook fan pages and is on t-shirts, etc… with internet status like Tony Montana.
Disclaimer: I was never personally involved in any of the incidents outlined below. All of these stories were told to me by Boston George himself or his close local acquaintances who I knew through the commercial fishing industry twenty or so years ago. I also realize that this post is probably not going to get me any internet marketing clients, but I’ll take the street cred.
I met Boston George Jung here on Cape Cod in the late 80′s, early 90′s through one of my fishing industry connections. The man who introduced me to Boston George was an old fisherman friend of mine (now deceased), who I had known for years. Since he has grown children, I will just call him “Sneakers”.
Anyways “Sneakers” introduced me to Boston George some time before he met with author Bruce Porter. George was laying low at this time, as far as I could tell.
Porter wrote the book Blow: How a Small Town Boy Made $100 Million with the Medellin Cocaine Cartel and Lost It All, which was released in 1993. At the time I was told that George was paid $100,000 for his story. The book was the basis for the 2001 movie Blow starring Johnny Depp.
George was a big drinker at the time, so “Sneakers” and I would pick up George at the house he was living at in Harwich and take him down to the Wooden Shoe bar down the road in Dennisport for drinks. George loved vodka at the time and I was told that he drank most of the book proceeds away.
George told me many stories about his drug running career. How Manuel Noriega was his “banker” and when the US invaded Panama all his money was seized (about $20 million I was told).
He told of how he met Carlos Lehder in jail in Connecticut, which started the whole cocaine smuggling deal going. He also talked about going to Pablo Escobar’s ranch, how crazy it was there and that it was a very sketchy place.
Most of the cocaine smuggling stuff has been told in the movie, so I am not going to rehash that stuff here, but here are a few stories you may not have heard about Boston George Jung.
First a couple smuggling stories of note that were told to me from both George and “Sneakers”.
Chainsaw Runway
When they were running pot, one of their favorite vehicles was the Winnebago. They would take four or five guys and drive the Winnebago to the drop point where they would meet the plane.
One of these incidents involved driving to a remote highway in Texas, where two guys were dropped off. One with a chainsaw and one with a gun. The guy with the chainsaw would block the road by dropping a power pole across it. The guy with the gun would stay there to enforce the “roadblock”.
The Winnebago would then go up the road a ways and pull across the road blocking it from the other end. Then another guy would get out of the vehicle with a chainsaw and the two “lumberjacks” would work towards each other cutting down all the power poles along the side of the road, dropping them off to the side. This would give the plane a nice clear runway.
The plane would come in and land coming to a stop near the Winnebago where the goods were offloaded into the motor home. The guys would then turn the plane around by hand and it would take off in the other direction. Then they would take the motor home for ride back East, where the pot was distributed.
Pot Smuggling Fail
Another time they told me that they were getting paranoid that they were being tailed by the DEA, so they wanted to try a different way of hiding the pot in the Winnebago.
Instead of stuffing the motor home with the bales of pot, George had a connection somewhere down south place all the pot in six tires and put them on rims. They drove the Winnebago down to meet the connection and switched out all the tires on the vehicle with the pot filled tires. They then drove the Winnebago back to Cape Cod.
When they got back to the Cape, they took the rims and tires off and tried to get the pot out of there. I was told that the pot was so compressed from the centrifugal force and the heat from all the driving that they had to cut the tires away from it with a Sawzall.
“Sneakers” who was a giant guy (like Andre the Giant) told me that he was hitting it as hard as he could with a splitting maul and could not break enough of it off to “roll a joint”. The whole load ended up at the Dennis town dump, where it sits buried today. Still in the shape of tires I would imagine…
Boston George’s Last Bust
In the Wikipedia entry it says without a citation:
After working some “clean” jobs, Jung began to work in the marijuana industry again. In 1994, he reconnected with his old Mexican marijuana smuggling partner and was arrested with 1,754 pounds of marijuana in Topeka, Kansas and faced a 15-year mandatory sentence
From what I remember George’s last arrest happened at his then girlfriend’s house right up the road in East Dennis, MA where he was busted with 300 lbs. of pot that was hidden in a fake wall under the cellar stairs.
Article from: The Boston Globe (Boston, MA)
Article date: April 16, 1995
George Jung once boasted of building the world’s most feared and opulent drug cartel.
On Friday, the Weymouth native was arrested for allegedly dealing marijuana from a sleepy house on Cape Cod.
Jung, 52, and two others — Linnea Jewett, 53, and Jesus Gomes Moreno, 43, of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico — are accused of trafficking marijuana from Jewett’s house on Cedar Hill Road in East Dennis, police said.
Following a State Police investigation of several months, police who raided the house shortly after 8 p.m. Friday found between 200 and 300 pounds of a “green, leafy vegetable matter thought to be marijuana,” said Sgt. Mark Conant of the East Dennis police. They also … (source)
According to “Sneakers” another ex-fisherman had driven a pickup truck to somewhere and drove a number of big drum cases (like bass drum cases) filled with pot back to the Cape where it was stashed in the house in East Dennis.
Apparently the DEA had followed him the whole way and had photographs of the vehicle every step of the way.
After the bust “Sneakers” was interrogated by the police several times. He told me they had pictures of him carrying boxes out of the east Dennis house and putting them in his car. He told me he just kept telling the investigators that the boxes were full of kitchen stuff and as far as I know he was never implicated.
Another funny thing about this whole story is that a guy I know bought the girlfriend’s house at auction after it was seized by the DEA and he lives there with his family to this day.
So that’s a few things about Boston George Jung you may not have heard. When I met George, he struck me as a broken man. He definitely lived an exciting lifestyle and may be a cult hero to some, but try to learn a life lesson or two from his story. There are many there to choose from…
