When most people think of drug smuggling busts in the United States, they picture high-speed chases in Miami or massive DEA raids in Los Angeles. Few realize that one of the most significant crackdowns in American history didn’t start in those big cities, but along the seemingly quiet coastlines of South Carolina.

In Part 1 of this series, we explored the rise of the Gentleman Smugglers — a loose network of daring, intelligent Southern outlaws who moved marijuana and hashish across oceans and along the Eastern Seaboard with seeming impunity. These weren’t violent cartel enforcers or street dealers. They were sailors, risk-takers, and adventurers who believed the tides and their wits could always keep them ahead of the law.

By the late 1970s, however, their success had attracted a level of attention that would change everything.

In this installment, we pick up where the smugglers’ lavish lifestyle and daring runs start to unravel, as federal law enforcement finally catches up and launches one of the largest, most consequential drug investigations in American history: Operation Jackpot.

From a rural airstrip in Georgia to the coastlines of South Carolina, from hidden offshore bank accounts to international extradition fights, this is the story of how the Gentleman Smugglers were pursued, caught, tried, and, in many cases, imprisoned for decades.

The Turning Point

The pivot from smuggling success to federal priority didn’t happen overnight. Early in the 1970s, maritime smuggling was still often treated as a local or regional issue. Boats could disappear into inlets and coves. Radios went silent. Evidence was buried or washed away.

But by the end of the decade, something had changed. The volume of marijuana and hashish entering the United States through South Carolina’s coast was no longer a trickle. It was an industrial-level stream, with multiple offloads yearly numbering in the thousands of pounds.

This shift did not go unnoticed.

Federal agents, along with IRS investigators and Customs officials, began to take the patterns seriously. It was no longer enough to chase after one boat or seize one load. The evidence pointed to an organized system — and systems are something prosecutors know how to dismantle.

Operation Jackpot: A New Kind of Enforcement

Under the leadership of U.S. Attorney Henry McMaster, a multi-agency task force was formed that would come to be known as Operation Jackpot. Rather than focus solely on individual smuggling runs, agents and prosecutors began following assets, tracking financial anomalies, examining property records, and questioning people who had suddenly acquired expensive homes, boats, and cars without any legitimate income.

For the first time in a major drug case, civil forfeiture became a central tool. Boats, cars, money, and even businesses began to be seized long before trials concluded. The message was clear: smuggling wasn’t just prosecuted as a crime, it was made a financial liability.

This approach led to arrests not just locally, but internationally. When fugitives fled the United States, they were hunted down in places like Costa Rica and Australia. Extradition battles, including a lengthy legal fight in Australian courts, eventually brought key figures back to face charges.

Fugitives, Arrests, and Sentences

Operation Jackpot’s net tightened slowly but relentlessly. Some of the most prominent men in the smuggling world were eventually apprehended.

Barry Foy, at one time one of the most infamous figures in the network, was tracked down and arrested at New York’s LaGuardia Airport after investigators used information from an intercepted phone call to lure him into a trap. He served roughly eleven years in federal prison and later re-entered the legal cannabis industry as a businessman, founding an operation in Massachusetts before returning to live in Hilton Head Island.

Les Riley, who had fled to Australia, was arrested in 1983. His extradition became a years-long legal battle that ultimately helped clarify how international law treats drug kingpins. He served about seventeen years before returning to a quiet life near Seabrook Island.

Lee Harvey, whose role in the network was portrayed by prosecutors as involving weapons and intimidation in addition to smuggling, received one of the harshest sentences — forty years — a term that reflected his involvement beyond simple transportation.

Other figures, like Tom Rhoad, served prison time and later died after release. Bob Byers was caught overseas in Antigua and later escaped from custody before serving his term. Some, like Christy Campbell, chose to surrender rather than be dragged in — walking into the U.S. Attorney’s office to turn themselves in.

Across the entire operation, more than one hundred defendants were convicted and sentenced in connection with the combined Georgia airstrip busts and Operation Jackpot indictments.

A New Era of Prosecution

What sets Operation Jackpot apart from earlier drug cases is not just its scale, but the way it was prosecuted. By building cases around financial evidence, conspiracies, asset forfeiture, and enterprise-level structures, federal law enforcement created a template that would be used in countless complex drug and organized crime cases in later decades.

The result was not just the dismantling of a smuggling network, but a fundamental shift in how drug trafficking was understood and pursued in the United States.

The Legacy of the Gentleman Smugglers

Today, the Gentleman Smugglers are remembered not just for their daring runs and extravagant lifestyles but as part of a transitional moment in American drug history. They highlight a period when smuggling was still romanticized as an adventure, before it became the darker, more violent and cartel-dominated era that followed.

Their downfall offers lessons about the limits of ingenuity when faced with an evolution in law enforcement strategy, and the inevitable attention that comes with scale and visibility.

Whether through offshore bank accounts, hidden airstrips, or Mediterranean hash runs, the world they inhabited was one of risk and reward — but ultimately, unsustainable.

If Part 1 told the story of how they built their world, Part 2 tells the story of how that world came apart.