Excerpts

The first time I got busted I was seventeen years old, sitting on the deck of a thirty-foot Mako with the sun in my eyes and roughly six hundred pounds of Colombian below my feet. The helicopter came in low and loud out of the west — a U.S. Customs Sikorsky, painted gunmetal gray, kicking up enough wind to flatten the chop around us.

My partner — and I'll get to him in a minute, because you won't believe me when I tell you his name — looked over at me from the wheel and said one thing before they got to us: "Don't say a goddamn word."

I didn't. Not a single one. I sat there and watched the agents board with their hands on their pistols and their jaws set, and I thought: so this is how it ends. Seventeen years old and I'm going to federal prison on a boat that doesn't even belong to me.

Spoiler: it didn't end. Not even close. That was just the opening bell.

They came through the back door at four in the morning. Five of them, balaclavas, handguns — the kind of crew that knows exactly what they're walking into because somebody on the inside told them. I woke up with a pillowcase over my head and a knee in my back and a voice in my ear saying where is it, where is it, where is it.

"It" was the money. About two hundred thousand dollars, give or take, sitting behind a panel of drywall in the basement utility room — a hiding spot I had built with my own hands six months earlier and never told a single soul about. Or thought I hadn't.

They didn't find it. I won't tell you how, but they didn't. What they did do was leave me on the kitchen floor with a broken nose and a cracked rib and a very long night to think about what I was doing with my life. That was the second time I should have quit.

I didn't quit then either.

Sometimes it seemed as if I had multiple personalities — well, actually only two. There was Hank Cooper the thrill-seeking smuggler, the guy who had started out looking for excitement. The odd thing about this Hank Cooper was that, even though he was scared shitless 99% of the time, he stayed with it for 15 years. Why would I put myself through that?

I finally figured it was like being on a roller coaster. You're terrified during the ride, but when it's over, you realize it was so exhilarating you want to get right back on and do it again. An adaptation of the old saying — the greater the risk, the greater the return — except substitute "thrill" for "return."

Then there's Hank Cooper the invincible smuggler, who, against all odds, eluded death and long-term incarceration for 15 years. As this Hank Cooper, I would often feel like a puppet on a string, being controlled and manipulated by forces outside my control. I frequently operated almost unconsciously, as if propelled along by some invisible force. How do I account for this Hank Cooper?

Then I came across the fact that the day of Shalom Cohen's death and my birth coincided and thought, "What if reincarnation is at the root of all this?" Whether you buy this explanation or not, there's no denying that my making it through 15 years of cocaine and heroin smuggling and then a severe addiction is nothing short of uncanny. Or supernatural.

So perhaps the soul of great grandfather Shalom Cohen did transmigrate to me at birth and has kept me safe and alive for all this time. Then again — maybe I was smuggling with Jesus.

Dr. Neumann, after many years of giving me weekly methadone treatments, was fascinated listening to my smuggling stories. He not only thought that my 15-year journey was unbelievable and almost unearthly, but that, by surviving it, I must have been meant for something — that I've been saved for some purpose. Whether that's true, who knows? And if it is, who'll be running the show — me, Shalom Cohen, or Jesus? Time will tell. Maybe.

Every once in a while, I'm asked if I'd ever go back to drug smuggling again. Given what I've been through — the nonstop anxiety, the imprisonments, the addiction, the five years of methadone treatment — why would I? So I tell people, "Absolutely not. Once was enough."

But in the back of my mind, I always remember — I can never say no.