The local narcs could never catch the east side curb side drug dealers who had look outs and would scatter before the narcs could get close to them. So the narcs staked-out the dealers to catch College of Charleston students buying weekend party supplies. They would observe a sale and radio a description of the student’s car to waiting police cruisers who would blue light the students for minor traffic offenses as a pretext to search for the drugs they already knew they had. One Friday evening, the narcs observed a car pull up and exchange something with a dealer. An alert went out over the police radio, “green Mustang 5.0 just pulled up and bought something.” A more seasoned supervisor quickly squawked back over the radio, “Never mind, that’s just Bobby Howe picking up his fee for the weekend.”
Although Bobby much preferred cash, his easy payment plans for criminal fees were as flexible as his office accounting system. Some of his fees I recall included a new screen porch on the back of his house, a built-in sauna, a gigantic jacuzzi tub, new hardwood floors, and more rooms painted than the Plaza Hotel but the fee of his I want to write about this morning involved ten gallons of top-secret anti-fouling black paint the Navy used on nuclear submarines.
Bobby had a bad habit of leaving his 17 foot 1963 Boston Whaler tied up to whatever dock he ended up at after a long, hard day partying out on the water. The factory installed blue anti-fouling paint had long since lost its effectiveness, so he’d often end up having to spend hours scrapping barnacles off the bottom his boat by hand at local car washes. He figured the submarine paint was worth a fee because it would last forever and he never gave a second thought to it being highly illegal for anyone to possess any.
Bobby being Bobby could hardly wait for the submarine paint to dry before taking his boat out for a shake-down cruise in the harbor. He was still dressed in his suit slacks and white shirt as he rode full throttle across the harbor in the late afternoon sun. There’s no telling what other contraband may have been on board when the military style speed boat with a 50 caliber machine gun mounted on the bow pulled up alongside and the captain, dressed in full military body armor, began hailing him over a megaphone. Bobby thought he heard, “We are armed, and will use force!,” so being Bobby he kept looking straight ahead and kept going at full speed. Again, he heard, “We are armed and will use force.” What? Over a couple gallons of lousy paint Bobby thought to himself but, not wishing to be machinegunned to pieces, he decided to throttled his engine back and talk his way out of it. When the military craft slowed alongside, he heard the captain actually ask, “Are you a member of the Orange Force?” Confused, but relieved at the same time, Bobby replied, “Well, no, officer, I was just out test driving my new paint job.” Before he could regret mentioning the paint, the military craft sped off in another direction. It turned out Bobby had gotten himself tangled up in a military training exercise on securing Charleston harbor in the event of a terrorist attack.
Bobby’s father nicknamed him Cat because cat’s have nine lives but I’m afraid his father seriously underestimated the number of lives Bobby would run through. Whatever number that number may have been, he was clearly down another life because of this submarine paint fee. He lost that 63 Whaler in Hurricane Hugo, so we never found out how long that illegal submarine paint would keep the barnacles off the hull, but I’ll just bet, like Bobby himself, nothing ever stuck to it.
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