From the Archives: 9 Tons of Pot (1974)

Seven Men and a Barge Test Florida Justice

By Rod De Remer

Regular newspaper readers probably remember that spectacular bust last year of a barge with nine tons of pot aboard. It was the first in a series of setbacks for major dealers.

So what happened to the poor bastards whose boats were loaded to the gunwhales with Jamaican and whose heads were loaded with lush green visions of profit?

A fews weeks ago, they were tried in the same courtroom where, a few weeks earlier, the Gainesville Eight had been acquited.

The Gainesville Eight were Vietnam Veterans Against The War who were charged by the federal government with conspiracy to commit violence at the Republican Convention in Miami.

But there was a clear contrast at this trial to that of the Gainesville Eight. There was little publicity and even less sympathy for the defendants.

The “Steinhatchee Seven” were just pot smugglers.

Maybe four or five years ago people could rally around pot as a politically unifying force. Certainly the nine tons the Steinatchee Seven were accused of trying to import would make an impressive rallying point. “Alright, everybody,” shouts the movement leader, “we’re gonna dance around this pile of pot and nobody, not the pigs, not our parents, nobody is gonna take it!” However, it has always been the ideal, the freedom to smoke pot (unfortunately not included by our shortsighted forefather in the Bill of Rights) and not the actual physical substance itself that has been defended. When a group of dudes are playing around with more than nine tons of the stuff they’re after the big cabbage — man, they’re in business. A high-risk, lucrative business to be sure. No, there weren’t many who rallied to the cause and shouted, “Free the Steinhatchee Seven.”

The Steinhatchee Seven are: Barry Korn, 23, David Strongosky, 23, Michael J. Knight, 23, Richard Ericus, 22, and Steven Lab, 20, all from the St. Petersburg area; Floyd Capo, 40, from Cross City, and James Maslanka, 24, from Gainesville.

What they have been convicted of doing is attempting to bring nine-and-a-half tons of Jamaican bush up the small West Florida waterway called Rocky Creek on a barge owned by Capo and then to disburse it at Florida wholesale prices in effect during the spring of the year. Of course, no one is ever convicted of selling nefarious drugs at wholesale prices. No siree, the commonly quoted figure in the press, so often supplied by the prosecution, was that four-and-one-half million hard-earned American dollars would fetch that barge-load to the backdoor of your garage or warehouse or where ever else you could cram that much bush. Roughly, the breakdown is somewhere around $245 a pound. Must be some sort of government subsidized farm program. (Not content with that overblown figure, the Independent Florida Alligator, the University of Florida student newspaper, used a $9-million figure reportedly obtained from a Steinhatchee narcotics official.)

But the lack of a defendable cause was not the only contrast to be drawn between the Gainesville Eight and the Steinhatchee Seven. In the government’s political hatchet job attempted on its war veterans, it was the defendants, at least some of them, who were famous personalities and even heroes to many Americans. The best the Seven could muster was a well known attorney, Percy Foreman, who has defended the likes of Candy Mossier and James Earl Ray.

Foreman did present a commanding figure to the courtroom observers and, to some extent, the participants. However, one important participant did not seem overly impressed. US District Judge David L. Middlebrooks, while never tagged as a hanging judge, is not a man anyone would pick to pass judgement upon eternal soul were there a prohibition against drug usage in order to rise heavenward, with a key to the golden gates. No, Judge Middlebrooks does not look favorably upon those who sell, use or even think about drugs.

The Foreman-Middlebrooks clash came early in the trial when Foreman attempted to tell the judge how things are done in most of the federal courts he has practiced in. Middlebrooks leveled his eye at Foreman and shot back, “You’re going to follow the rules in effect in this court Mr. Foreman, and if you don’t like it you can go to New Orleans on appeal!” (New Orleans is the seat of the 5th Judicial Court of Appeal.)

Percy Foreman was not enough. He was not enough even though none of the defendants were caught with that mound of weed on Capo’s barge runaground on a sand bar that popped up in the middle of the creek. Not only that, but mild-mannered youthful Robert Crongeyer, assistant US attorney from Pensacola, admitted from the beginning of the government’s case that the evidence was circumstantial.

That circumstantial evidence, he promised the jury in his opening remarks, would “weave a web of circumstances that must fall over all of these defendants.”

Source: https://hightimes.com/culture/from-the-archives-9-tons-of-pot-1974/