Let me throw some words at you: 50 Doberman, Alligator Alley, guerrillas, Colombia, flying pot… The world is mine?

 

Snowbird presents Andrew Barnes as the gentleman’s drug smuggler. Tasked with helping Andrew tell his story before he goes to jail, William Norris weaves what essentially amounts to a recalling of the good old days into an account of a seemingly normal man’s enormous range of transgressions.

 

It is obvious how much Barnes loved flying, as there are many details about plane types and flying technicalities. I could have done without but I can see how they are necessary to a reader with any education on the topic. The book is a little repetitive but that makes sense, as it’s an account building to a court case and it gets crazier as it goes so you move along.

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If you are a fan of police procedurals I think you’ll like this as the other side. Barnes paints himself in the most flattering light but Norris includes court statements such as his argument for why it was ok to bring his 3 year old son along on drops to keep things legit. In case you’re wondering why Andy Jr. came along, “He liked to fly”.

 

Things I learned: A bale of marijuana can sink a boat if dropped from above, at times there were tons of marijuana floating around the Caribbean because they lost them during drops, air traffic control has come a loooong way, many of the pilots responsible for flying actual tons of cocaine into the United States were former servicemen, and when you’re making as much money as these guys were, paying 120,000 to get out of a foreign jail is a Tuesday.

 

The only real fight I’ll pick about this one is that there were A LOT of people to keep straight. There are a lot of people involved in this scale of criminal activity after all. I became less worried about the who and why and just enjoyed the spectacular events. When else are you going to hear about flying pot?