[waves crashing]
[helicopter sounds]
You have to be pretty top notch in your profession
just to survive it all.
You get heavy turbulence.
You've got to slow the aircraft down,
because you could have structural failure.
Losing a wing wouldn't be much fun.
A North Atlantic storm in November.
It's a pretty impressive event, to put it mildly.
My name is John Raymond Boulanger.
I'm what you would call a mercenary pilot.
I fly for hire to he who pays the most.
I had 4,343 kilos of cocaine, and I was flying from Colombia
directly to Canada.
Normally, the flight would be about nine hours, give or take.
But I ran into this storm for about 45 minutes or an hour
before I broke out.
And, lo and behold, there were the FATs.
[jet engine sounds]
Then they were off to my rear.
And the other guy came up close beside us and flying around me,
making signals to go down.
I just waved to them.
They can't shoot at you.
But they were running out of gas.
We would just time the guy and say,
OK, how long is it going to be before they're
going to run out?
It was interesting.
He gave us a nice little show.
I went down to treetop level.
I flew the rest of the way treetop level,
below radar so nobody knew where the airplane was.
The authorities put out an alert to all the airports.
There's a big white Convair somewhere in Canada,
if anybody sought to report it.
I should have arrived around 6 o'clock in the morning
but I arrived at quarter to nine instead.
I was standing out on the runway,
waiting for the crew hired to go and do the pick up.
We looked all over the place, couldn't figure out
where the hell these guys were.
Turns out they had been there since 3:00 in the morning.
At around 7:30, they decided I wasn't coming, and they left.
So anyway, I started walking, and a truck went by.
I hitchhiked, and he gave me a lift all the way down
to the lumber camp.
And that's where I was when the RCMP arrived
by helicopter, because the police
had blocked off all the roads.
So they asked, what's in the airplane?
I said, "Cocaine."
He says, how much?
I says, "A lot."
It's being touted as the biggest
drug bust in Canadian history and probably the most dramatic.
[suspenseful music]
CHRIS FEISTL: The seizure of 4,300 kilos of cocaine really
reverberated through DEA.
That's a staggering amount of cocaine, coupled with the fact
that it was flown directly from the north coast of Colombia
into Canada.
JOHN RAYMOND BOULANGER: I would have made around 45 million.
It's a pretty good payday for one day's work.
That's not bad.
I was arrested, pled guilty, and got 23 years.
That was it, and I became famous.
But I take things with a grain of salt. It was,
and I believe it still is, the biggest bust ever in Canada.