At one stage of his career, George (Jorge, a Columbian National) Morales was a world champion in his sport. That was the apex. What came before and after was an arduous, though imaginative, twisting, turning, climb to and fall from grace.
Morales set a world record during a 1985 race from Miami to New York, piloting a 46-foot catamaran through 1200 miles of coastal ocean in less than twenty hours. Morales raced super power boats and was considered the best speedboat driver in the world at that time.
He raced offshore. None of this race across the lake stuff, no-sir-ee Bob! Serious super boat racing over ocean swells and white water chop. Boats flip, boats flop, boats fly.
This isn’t dragster racing on a short track, though there are similarities. No. This kind of race includes distance and stamina. This is a long course navigated by a 45 foot boat of 2100 h.p. at upwards of 100 miles per hour. That kind of racing will tax a man and his boat.
But the sea and boat conditions aren’t the only problems with which competitors must deal. Morales had to deal with a personal demon or two or three.
Morales managed to win 3 world championships in this sport, his last in 1985. In what was one of his last races, off of Key West, he won while under indictment for smuggling marijuana and other drugs into the U.S. from the Bahamas. But at the time of this race he was free on a $2 million signature bond (although the IRS claimed he owed almost that much in back taxes).
A $2 million signature bond.
It bears repeating because it indicates that Morales was a man of considerable resources and that the courts were well aware that he had such resources. That he raced super power boats was, in itself, an indication of some personal wealth, as such boats are quite expensive. A paint job might run $70,000. A world-class boat might cost several hundred thousand dollars.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s go back to the beginning.
The time was 1984.
While four prime time soap operas battled it out, along with Cosby and Michael J. Fox, for network supremacy, Miami Vice was beginning its evolution from South Beach art deco crime show into the neo noir top ten TV show it would briefly become.
Vice Detective Sonny Crockett sported Armani jackets, drove a Ferrari, lived aboard a yacht, and cavorted with partner Rico Tubbs about the bay ways and rivers in a power boat.
While such a gaudy lifestyle for a detective may seem a stretch, it was, remember, Miami in the ’80s. It was the era of the Miami River Cops scandal; it was the era of Scarface and of smuggler’s blues.
Not that Crockett was on the take. No; impossible. More likely he was trying to look the part of a tainted badge. It was, after all, endemic of the era.
This was an era in which the 1985 Indianapolis 500 rookie of the year, Randy Lanier (of Davie, Florida, near Miami), was indicted under suspicion of smuggling some 300 tons of marijuana over a five-year period for distribution in Illinois. The bales of marijuana were handled off the coast of Florida and transported by boat for distribution.
Benjamin Barry Kramer, a power boat champion, had been previously and similarly arrested, and would later gain a notoriety all his own.
Camel GT winner John Lee Paul earned a 20 year sentence for attempted murder and drug trafficking. His son, John Paul Jr., was sentenced to five years in prison on drug charges.
But these are stories simply told. The story of George Morales is not as pedestrian as these, and not as simply told.
Part 2 Soul for Sale
George Morales won his first power boating championship at about the same time he found himself indicted for smuggling marijuana into the U.S. His preferred smuggling method was via powerboat from offshore drop points, or from the Bahamas, which had long been considered a safe – albeit well paid – haven. Some say that super power boats were originally conceived as a means to an end, the end being to outrun the U.S. Coast Guard. There are few who can provide lucid insight into that development as most of the participants are either dead or behind bars.
One power boat champion, Sal Magluta, purportedly smuggled some 78 tons of drugs worth an estimated $1.25 billion into the U.S. He and a partner were acquitted of smuggling and murder charges, but were found guilty of laundering some $730,000. Magluta received in 1996 a 195 year stacked sentence and was this year denied by the Supreme Court a review of his case.
Miami was awash, in the ’80s, in swashbuckling smugglers who raced Coast Guard cutters. Throw a life-preserver into a group of powerboat types of the period and you’d be likely to hit three smugglers in one toss. Five if you count the ones who ducked. Want a hit TV show to wow the MTV generation? Miami was the perfect setting. Boats, bikinis, beaches, night clubs, drugs, and machine guns.
But this story isn’t about ordinary “cocaine cowboys” and Miami Vice. No. This gets bigger. Better. It gets decadent in its surreallism.
Morales wasn’t ordinary. He was so good that he sneered at the law and at the clumsy Coast Guard cutters he sped past, and at the competition.
No. He was not ordinary. Oh, he had that Miami style; he had the girls, the glitz, the loud ego backed by a wad of cash. But he had more. He had planes. He had a pilot’s license and a landing strip. A hangar. Helicopters. And he could instruct pilots. He was a mover. And then, in 1983, a champion.
And then, in March of 1984, he was indicted. Then he bonded out.
Prosecutors, sure of their case, tried to “flip” Morales in a plea bargain. They would guarantee a reduced sentence if he would detail the workings of the drug trade from Columbia to Central America to the Bahamas and Florida. They waited for him to cave under the prospect of a much different lifestyle than the one to which he was accustomed. They waited and waited while they tightened the lid on Morales’ personal pressure cooker, waiting for the steam that would never come.
While Morales was considering his options, while his counsel engaged in delaying tactics that would have produced a nervous tic on the faces of Mount Rushmore, Morales won his second power boat championship and established that 1985 speed record. He topped that off with another championship in 1985, while he was admittedly racing under some duress. Such was the pressure of waiting it out, of living a double life.
The prosecutors watched and waited for Morales to come to his senses and agree to the bargain.
What they didn’t know was that Morales had already bargained for his soul. What Morales didn’t know was that he had become, simply, an asset.
He had met with Marta Healy.
To be continued….
Flintstone Drive 