The Last Pirate II

By John Philip Stirling

This is the true-life story of Captain John Philip Stirling, one of the world's most significant drug and money smugglers. Just Google him to find over 1000 news articles, and then join him bringing 2,566 kilos of cocaine worth over 250 million dollars from the Colombia-Ecuador border back to Canada only to get busted on his final approach aboard the 109-foot Western Wind.

Go to the jungles of Colombia, where drug labs operate night and day. Learn smuggling out of Peru, and Mexico, and read the truth about the people you hear in the news daily. Learn how a pro navigates and travels the world's oceans smuggling pot, cocaine, heroin and meth. Join an exciting trip around the world and into the lives of the people who do this, and many times pay a very high price for it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tiberious Publishing
• Release date: Feb 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215485927

John Philip Stirling

I was born in St. Thomas Ontario Canada in March many years ago . I do not remember my blood Father being at home and when I was 10 my mother remarried to a wonderful man named Len Stirling. We moved from St Thomas and I grew up in Kingston Ontario. I had a normal childhood and Len taught me to fish and camp and bought us all a summer cottage that me and my brother were at from the minute we got out of school for the summer till labor day Sunday every year I can remember. I was a defensive end and a Halfback at my high school called Frontenac, plus played hockey and by the time I was 16 was playing for Three teams all at the same time, the Kingston Township Midget All Stars and Kingston Township Juvenile All Stars (which was a league 2 years older than I was) and the Midget Panthers in the house league. Kingston was a great place and I got my more refined education and dates at the Lakeview Manor Pub. We partied hard then and my best friends Richard M. , Charlie G. and Kenny W. plus the many others had a riot but separated in later years as people do. A sad thing really having to grow up. I met my wife of 37 years Marlene Hewitt in Kingston Ontario Canada at the lakeview Manor but earlier, I was a drug dealer starting in grade 9 where I drove from Kingston to Eddy St Pool Hall in Hull Quebec most Thursday afternoons while skipping classes . Every drug in the world was for sale there and I would buy $100 of MDA in caps for $0.60 each that they would count out on a pool table and then I would sell them at the high school during the Friday night dance. Everyone did them and if anyone whoever went to a Friday night dance put on by Paul Stanton our class president and fellow football and hockey buddy, says they didn't, their a liar. Hogan and I moved with Dirt Man Dan and his skanky girlfriend at the time, Diane Huff to Key Largo Florida where I went to buy pot. After a few months Dan and I were running 200 pounds of pot from Florida to Calgary Canada during the oil boom and making a fortune. My Smuggling started there and the rest is in the 4 books I have written called The Last Pirate 1,2,3,4 & 5 . I am available for and questions or advice or help or possible consultation at [e-mail] anytime and will never lie about anything to you. I did finally learn, the truth hurts sometimes a lot but only for a while, but a lie hurts forever and really bad.

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The Last Pirate II

Captain John Philip Stirling

Copyright

This book, as with all my books are a warning that drug smuggling may be hazardous to your health and freedom and that the information here may or may not be 100% accurate.

The Last Pirate II

Copyright © 2023 John Philip Stirling

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Published in Canada by Tiberious Publishing

[e-mail]

ISBN 9798374841442

Book design – Iryna Spica

Printed and bound with KDP

In dedication

to

all the Pirates

that

went before me.

Many court documents are the actual trial transcripts or evidence packets from the cases.

There is only one chapter in all our lives and so it is here.

Contents

Copyright

1. An Encounter with the Colombian Gorilla

2. Experience Behind Bars in Canada

3. The Dreaded Ralph

4. Mike’s Perception of Ralph

5. Terrifying Experience with the Corps

6. First Encounter with Lee and Gyrator

7. My Dilemma

8. The Voyage in a Ship

9. Inside the Giant Ship

10. Handling the Cocaine

11. Getting Down to Work

12. Conveying my Experience with U.S. Authorities

13. Caught in Trouble

14. The War is Far from Over

15. Life in Confinement

16. The Police Interrogation

17. Surprise Conversation with Red

18. Life in Remand

19. When Duty to the Family Comes First

20. When Sadness Strikes

21. When Cops Decide to Robe Us

22. When Enough is Enough

23. The Mistake of Trusting Everyone

24. My Home under Siege

25. Slander by the U.S. Newspaper

26. Trips to the Marina

27. The Contents of Shers’ Book

1. An Encounter with the Colombian Gorilla

I had been forced to complete a trip from the cocaine lab down the Rio Guainia river in the same name state to the closest little village we could get the trucks to. I was there because the other person who had first set this deal up was a man named Ricardo. He had been bitten by some nasty spider and had to be taken out. I was left to stay with the load, and my employer had wanted me to keep track of 1450 kilos of cocaine and try and sell Farc various weapons. We depended on the Farc to escort us out of the labs once we reached a point upriver. This is where we moved the coke out of canoes and river boats and onto donkeys and horses to make the last 30 miles thru the jungle and to the closest village you could get a truck into.

The trip in the boat was uneventful, and the jungle started to open up as we continued north. The Farc, which are the Colombian Gorillas controlling parts of the jungle we had to travel through to get out, were always waiting like vultures for us. They charged $500.00 a kilo tax to pass thru their self-proclaimed area. There were 8 of them when we landed with the boats on the river banks. I made my way up the slippery river bank to the beginning of the trail leading us north and out of the godforsaken jungle. We had ten donkeys and eight horses, and I quickly claimed the best horse I saw for myself. I loaded my packs and riffled on the beast as the ten workers there plus the six men from the boats unloaded the boats and packed the mules.

There were two FARC members in their camo uniforms and red, black, and yellow armbands looking over everything and counting bales. The leader of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia or FARC was a very disgusting person with blood and piss stains on his uniform and a face like an evil person should have, including beady eyes and scars on his left cheek. I just had the worst feeling right then. He and his men were going to be trouble. I just knew it by the way they were looking at the other workers and me. He asked me how many kilos were there, and I told him 1,450. He called me a liar immediately and shoved me in the chest as he walked over and started counting again.

I wasn’t carrying any gun at the time, or I would have shot him right there. Instead, I went to my pack and got an envelope that contained the payment I was authorized to pay. I handed it to him, and his mood seemed to change to a somewhat better attitude. He began to count, and the greed in his eyes grew as he worked his way thru the stack of hundreds. There was $725,000 there, and it would take him a while. As always, I went up the trail and found a place to sit and rested my eyes. It had been three weeks since I got here, and I had been through enough shit over the last six months and wanted to go home. Several hours later, the caravan seemed ready to move the FARC scurred on by us, and I let donkeys all pass and fell in behind the group at the end of the line. Although I knew the FARC were not far ahead of us, I could only hear them once in a while.

The monkeys and numerous parrots kept the jungle alive. Now and then, one of the Gorillas would let his automatic weapon blare away. All the birds and animals would scatter and scream as they tried to find cover from these animals who just seemed to kill everything for the sake of killing. I was happy to be at the back of the caravan just to be away from them. It was not till late in the afternoon of the second day that we were finally close to the village and our trucks. Ricardo had made arrangements with one of the villagers to keep our trucks safe, and I could hardly wait to get off this horse as he was scrawny, and my ass was killing me.

About one mile away, I heard automatic gunfire. Usually, I would have been concerned, but with the gun-happy FARC escorting us, I figured they were fucking around. They usually put on a gun show in villages to keep the villagers in line and scare the shit out of them. As I arrived at the village 15 minutes later, I saw some commotion at the small school with no door or windows. I couldn’t tell something was on the ground until I came closer. It was bodies. One man, two women, and three children had to be under ten years old; one little boy and two small girls. Their bodies were riddled with bullets, and the blood was still oozing from their wounds.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. How could any child deserve a death like this? I remember smelling them, and I wanted to cry. I also tied my horse to a tree as it was afraid of the smell of death and walked over to the bodies. A few women were crying, one holding the boy while the two little girls bled into the ground they were lying on alone. Those animals who killed them were now moved into the school. I could hear them laughing about what had happened and how they knew the man that was dead was a Colombian Government Agent. That was no reason to kill the children.

I walked back to my horse, opened my pack, and took out three grenades; then, I grabbed my AR-15. The school had windows but no glass, so I crept up calmly and silently as I had been trained and went to the window closest to the door. I pulled the three pins on the hand grenades and threw them in.

As the explosions occurred, I ran to the doorway and opened up with the AR-15 into the smoke-filled school room. I emptied all four clips, and when the smoke cleared, they were all dead. I ordered the trucks loaded, and as they were doing that, people from the village came up to me and started giving me things. They could not afford to give me money. However, they gifted me food and booze and even offered me their daughters. I took nothing, of course, and instead packed up as fast as I could and left the village and the mess that was left behind. How did I get here?

I am back here in this second of four books to talk to you about sailing, boating, and traveling the world. I have also come back to tell you about the general disgusting state of North America and some of the people in it I have had the unfortunate luck to meet. In my first book, I told you about things in my life that had to lead up to me being on my ship, the Western Wind, with 2.5 tons of cocaine and ended where the DEA and FBI just stopped me while the Coast Guard and the Canadian RCMP were just arriving at the scene. I described the past but not the year before the actual position that led to me being there at that time.

2. Experience Behind Bars in Canada

As you recall, I was on my 109-foot ship, the MV Western Wind, and we had picked up 2,556 kilos of cocaine contained in 101 bales. I had the drugs sealed in forwarding fuel tanks we emptied on the 5000-mile trip south from Victoria, BC, Canada, to just outside the 200-mile EEZ of the Colombia and Ecuador border. We had met a Peruvian ship at the coordinates given to us who passed off the cocaine to us while we were on route back to Canada when we were stopped about 20 miles from our final destination by the American DEA, FBI, Coastguard, and eventually the Canadian Navy and RCMP.

First, I should explain how I got here and the connections leading to such a thing. I can only say jail is a great educator for those seeking to expand their drug connections and international knowledge of the world. The court and the cops couldn’t have done more if they tried than to put all the big smugglers and drug dealers under the same roof and in the same prison. What a bunch of buffoons, idiots, and fools!

In 1989 I was arrested for smuggling pot and cocaine and given a five-year sentence, as I explained in my book 1. I was put in William’s head institution in Victoria, BC, Canada, along with several other similarly big drug dealers from different parts of Canada and a few other countries, mostly Asians. As in all prisons, birds of a feather flock together; such was the case here. The drug kingpins all stuck together and ran the prison as their own Kingdom.

Unlike in the United States, you have to have a little thing to convict someone that Canadian police all hate; it’s called evidence. You also have to give something America does not provide to inmates confined in prison, which is fundamental human rights. In fact, for all its flaws, Canada has at least some basic ways a prisoner can complain about their treatment within a specific prison. In Canada, the prison population can vote for two people who will speak for them in a democratic election. These two people cannot be punished or disciplined for what they say to guards and the warden on behalf of a complaint they received from another inmate. I was fortunate and honored enough to have been voted into one of those positions for 90% of the time I was incarcerated at William Head Prison. This position led me to meet all the prisoners there, and I did my best to help all the people who came to me and even some who did not. The other smugglers and drug heads made our plans together in meetings to improve our lives in prison. For the most part, we achieved significant advances in our treatment.

I am still friends with one person I met today, Big Mikey. He was a drug dealer from Quebec but was not French. He was also there for arms and got two more years than I did. Newspaper articles showed him with rocket launchers and 20 or 30 of the army’s most powerful rifles and grenades. He was a great guy, and I loved him like a brother to date. He phones me drunk every Christmas. Mikey and I did several things, one, we were released from William’s head on the same day but to different halfway houses. Me, to the Salvation Army and Mikey to some 12-step halfway house I cannot remember the name of in Victoria. At that time, his wife moved to Victoria with her daughter, and my wife, Marlene, and she had become friends during visits to the jail to see Mike and me.

The other thing we did was to start scheming different drug deals and scenarios during and after our prison sentence ended. We were both on parole and were limited in our ability to move around the country as we required a pass from our parole officer. After time those restrictions were less and then finally done and gone. During the waiting period, though, I got back into fishing and made a good living. Mikey just happened to be an engineer, and I got him a job on the same boat that I worked on after my release from prison than on my boat later on after that. Neither of these lasted long on the first ship as neither of us took orders very well. Doing that work just then in our lives ate up some time for us and served its purpose, and it also led us to a few new people; one person was Ralph Harris.

Mickey had met him up in a place called Nanaimo, a town about halfway up Vancouver Island. He was a biker, or at least let on he was and was and was interested in smuggling some dope or doing some drug business. He claimed to have connections with the Biker club in the area to Mickey at some point and poor Mikey, knowing me well as a captain and thinking about our many talks and dreams we had spoken of both in and out of jail, led Mike to introduce Ralph to me. Three of us together led to a few situations before we got to this present situation of 2½ tons of cocaine being on my ship that this book is about. I must tell you this because if you have been following me this far, we must be friends, and I owe you the truth.

3. The Dreaded Ralph

So, in the beginning, first off, there was a speed lab. Ralph wanted a house somewhere in the woods to set up a lab to make speed, which he relayed to Micky. So, Mike and Ralph showed up at my house one day and asked me to look around, as a friend does, for a house. I did ask around for him and Ralph. I was not directly involved at this point except that I had a friend who had been growing pot in a house he owned in the middle of nowhere near some town called 100-mile house, which was about six hours drive from Vancouver on the mainland.

My buddy, who owned the house for years, wanted to go to Europe for a year but wanted to rent the place out and didn’t care what was about to happen as long as he didn’t know about it and got his high rent that he asked while he was out of the country.

It seemed perfect for Ralph and Mikey and helped my buddy Mike out of his dilemma, which seemed perfect for everyone initially. Well, let me tell you now, don’t get involved assisting a friend in helping another friend of a friend, of a friend, of a friend when you’re making nothing in return, you get nothing but headaches or sometimes dead.

Such was the case here, and to make a very long, complicated story very, very short and is/was none of my business and something I was only told by Ralph Harris years later. After the fact, it turned out the guy making the speed was the President of the Hells Angels in the Nanaimo named Zeke, who, after not paying anyone, including Ralph, the $2 million he had promised him for his partnership in the speed factory, so says Ralph and Ralph who then, in turn, did not pay Mike or my buddy, the owner of the house, who was just a nobody hippie pot grower now in Europe that owned the place where the speed factory was.

Now Ralph, instead of paying everyone he owed, instead ended up putting a bullet in the head of Zeke the Hells Angels President ( Who I never met or knew of at all ) and hiding his body in a hole in the ground on a logging road near Nanaimo, which indecently has to this day has never been found. Ralph then dumped his car at the ferry terminal near his house. He said it was to throw off the Hells Angels and Zeke’s family, who would be looking for Zeke at some point.

I remembered hearing about the disappearance of the Hells Angels President on the radio during the news many years ago. I also knew about the problems at the speed house, but it did not dawn on me that Zeke may be involved or was now dead. Ralph was a killer. I knew that, and he had done several people in Zeke, Richie, a guy I was in prison with and living with Ralph. Ralph thought Richie had stolen money from him. Whether he did or not, I don’t know or care. Ritchie was a real piece of shit in jail, and I imagined Ralph probably saved many people from a lot of pain and suffering and murder at the hands of Richie. He really was a scumbag, for sure. Death or attempted murder eventually led to Ralph, his friends, and now to me. It took me years to hear everything from Ralph’s mouth. He just told me about our friendship and business plans that seemed to merge over 15 years. I did not realize what he was or what he was capable of until it was too late, and I was up to my neck involved with him and unable to get rid of him without getting shot myself. One thing that always struck me first as strange about Ralph was that he did not like music of any kind.

My first indication of his evil and sadistic abilities was when he wanted to kill Mike, one of my best friends. I still doubt that Mike took anything as Ralph claims, but I gave Mike one of my handguns for his protection and warned him that Ralph would kill him because he thought he had stolen money and a gun from him. Some six months earlier, I did not realize what Ralph was up to until he finally asked me where Mike was as he could not locate him to kill him. I gave him false info and said I had not heard from Mike. Mike had moved to Calgary, and I knew he was safe there as Ralph would never go that far in a car alone.

Then there was another Hells Angel who lived only a few miles from Ralph and was somehow connected to his family by marriage. His name was Lee, and if Lee only knew how many times Ralph was waiting for him in the Bushes around his house, he would shit his pants.

The only reason he isn’t dead now is that, for one, me trying to talk Ralph out of it more than once. Secondly, because of the many times, Ralph was waiting to shoot him, Lee had a girl or a child with him when he got out of his car in his driveway at night.

He fucked with me also with his big mouth and no facts about anything. He made a mistake, which may cost him his life, but that’s between them and its money again. He was calling people rats who weren’t rats trying to throw the blame on Ralph and others, including me, and away from himself. That’s Ralph tried to kill all his friends, eventually including me. Ralph Harris, the original bad news gang. A gang of 1.

Putting this stuff aside, I hope you realize what I just told you. I was unaware and did not know much of what I was just saying until many years later. I will carry on. I hope I didn’t cloud the issue for you too much. I really had to get that off my chest and do not care about the consequences now at this point in my life. Ralph should have been hung a long time ago. Maybe me too, for that matter. Hopefully, Mike and I can stay away from death at the hands of Ralph Harris. After leaving, Mike did not, unfortunately, take Ralph with him. Although he lived far from me, he showed up one day with his specific question about smuggling cocaine out of Columbia and if I felt up to the task. After a long talk and a few weeks of thinking about it, I said yes and that I would consider an offer, but that one thing I would need would be $100,000 upfront.

Several weeks later, Ralph showed up with the guy tattooed from top to bottom. He had many direct questions, and obviously, he had been involved in shipments from Colombia, as I had. I liked him very much, and he said he would get back to me. Ralph was afraid of this guy, you could just see that as he never said a word, and that’s unusual for Ralph. I was not sure exactly who this tattooed man was, but I thought he looked tough as nails and seemed like a mover.

During this time and the next few days, Mike had phoned my house several times. He moved to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, in the past month. He took on a new job as a refrigeration mechanic for a major company. He had broken up with his former wife, left her in Victoria, and was trying to move on with his life. I asked him if it was because of Ralph and his concern for her safety because Ralph was trying to kill him. Although he did not directly admit to it, he did, in not so many words, imply that he had had an overdue breakup and didn’t want her to get involved in his problems.

I asked if he thought he or Ralph was hot because of the threats and Ralph trying to find him? He said no hotter than usual, and I thought about that for a minute and figured nobody was hotter than I was so that I would be about right. A stupid question for me to ask in the first place.

I wanted to tell Mike what was happening but not on the phone, that’s for sure, so I told him I was on my way out to his place and asked if he would pick me up at the airport. He agreed, and as Calgary is only an hour plane ride from Victoria, I left the house and got on the next plane I could get.

Mike picked me up an hour later at the Calgary airport, and I made a return flight 2 hours after landing so I could return to my home by 9:00 PM that night with my family. We just went to a restaurant that wasn’t far away. I told Mike what had just transpired in the way of an offer to captain a boat to pick up cocaine off of Columbia for 20% of the load and asked his opinion about it if maybe somehow he wanted to be involved, maybe go with me on the ship or maybe pick up a little boat? No, he replied. Honestly, he was done with drugs and making $40 an hour working. He was happy and had met a new girl he liked, and so forth. We talked about Ralph and how he had killed Richie and Zeke and a couple of other former friends and who knows who else and how he was trying to kill Mike. Mike swore he had never stolen anything off Ralph and that Ralph was twisting things around in his sick mind or smoking crack too many times.

I asked him straight up, How can the cops or the angels not know he killed Zeke with all that is going on?

I was taken aback when he replied, They do.

What do you mean, Mike, I said, "the cops know all about Ralph because he works for them, the Mother Fucker, and is trying to set up the Angels. The cops do not care if any Hells Angels or you or I get killed, but they want to arrest the bikers, put them all in jail, and pay Ralph big time for it. They will never investigate any Biker murdered because they don’t want to catch anyone doing their job for them for free.

‘‘There is nothing in it for them, no glory, no promotion for the cops, he said, and I asked, how much do you know Ralph is working for the cops?"

Mike replied, "Because nothing ever happens to him. He has a speed / MDA lab that gets busted. He gets off after nine years, in many other situations that you or I would be in jail for, and nothing happens to him. He grows pot in the wide open and talks over the phone about drugs and deals; nothing happens to him. He sells cocaine, speed, and pot, nothing.’’

‘‘Why Phil? Do you think that is normal? No, I did not see him talking to the cops, but I know he is." he said.

Jesus, what now? He brought this guy to my house and introduced me to him as Gyrator. He claims to be a biker, but I had never seen him before, but he sure knew his stuff. I told this guy I needed 100 grand up front in front of Ralph. Maybe he’ll come back, and then again, perhaps he won’t. What do you think, Mike? I asked.

I know who he is, and he is connected in Montreal and doesn’t know anything about Ralph, or Ralph would be dead for killing a patch Angel who is president of the club. He’s big Phil, and he’s not your problem. Ralph is as he is probably setting you and Gyrator and the other bikers up, and that’s why he has not killed you yet. I’m out of it now, and it’s up to you. Mike continued, "Ralph owes us both big money from the speed house because he killed the guy who’s supposed to pay us, and how do we know that he didn’t pay Ralph already? Because Ralph says so? Maybe he did pay millions already, and Ralph is lying to both of us and has ripped us all off.

He killed Zeke because he intended to do that all along and steal all the speed; kill Zeke first, now kill me, and probably you next, Phil. I think you better think about that possibility. We know Zeke and his chemists made millions of dollars in that house because you and I drove the glassworks and the chemicals up there and used them all. Where is the speed? Where is the chemist? Probably buried