All right, Josh, let me set the scene for you.

What are you doing?

Where's my foghorn?

Oh, I see.

It wasn't obvious. It's Thursday, March 6, 1980, and it's a foggy day along the coastline outside of Arnhamtown. Local fisherman Roger Morton wakes up, looks down the coastline, and see something crazy.

You look right off there, and it looked like a ghost ship sitting there in the fog.

It's a massive ship that ran aground right off the beach. And if that isn't crazy enough, there's a whole fleet of shrimping boats speeding back and forth from the ship to the docks, and they're unloading cargo.

So hold on. The ship ran up on the beach?

No, just far enough out that they can't wade out there to it and.

Okay, what are they trying to get off of it?

A lot of drugs, according to all accounts.

Okay. I'm somehow not surprised.

Welcome back to Varnhamtown.

So, Roger Morton, this fisherman, sees this giant drugship run aground just outside his house. But I thought you said that the whole town was in on this. So why would Roger Morton care?

Very good. You've been paying attention. Well, it turns out that Roger isn't exactly a local. He and his brother Dwayne moved to the area from a ways inland.

So he's actually an outsider.

Exactly. And that's about to cause a whole heap of problems.

I'll never forget. First time I went to Barnumtown, people would just stand out in the yard and stare. Stare at you. I said, these people are 50 years behind the rest of the world. But I like that. I still like that. It was very remote. I loved it. But my wife didn't think too much of it. She didn't want to move. I promised her everything in the world to get her to move. I just wanted to be able to fish and explore the ocean and see if I could make a living doing it.

What did fishing mean to you? Like, what was the draw?

Well, evidently, you're not a fisherman.

So Roger shows up in Varnumtown thinking it's paradise, and he starts going to breakfast at Ma's Driftwood grill, the local diner. But he starts to notice something. Most everyone at Ma's is talking about drugs, not eggs Benedict.

I don't think they're talking about eggs Benedict at Ma's Driftwood grill.

Okay, maybe the hash.

The hash?

Yeah.

And I'd go up there and eat breakfast sometimes, and they'd just be talking about it like it was a common thing. I heard one one morning, sitting there a young boy said, you want to help us tonight? Said, you can make $5,000. I mean, they're talking about it like it was legal.

Roger didn't like that his vision of paradise was getting messed up by a bunch of criminals. Never mind that these folks had lived there for generations and he had just showed up. It just didn't fit with his idea of the perfect life.

It didn't take long for that to kind of sour with me because I'd spent about everything I had getting to that point. And I said, I'm not going to let them mess it up.

Well, it got worse. Some of the suspected smugglers started to harass his wife.

Sometimes they would follow me home.

And I had two children, and especially.

Amy, young, pretty girl. That's Pat Morton, Roger's wife. And here's his daughter Amy.

Because I had to walk to the beach past them, it was uncomfortable because they would whistle and make sounds and stuff.

And how did all this unwanted attention paid to his wife and daughter by a bunch of coked out local smugglers.

Make him feel I wanted to beat him to death?

So Roger called the local police chief.

And he said, well, roger, let me tell you something. Ain't nothing you can do about it. If you try, they're going to involve you or some of your family or do something to you or burn your house. And I said, I'll tell you one thing, son, you don't want to even say anything like that to me.

Whoa.

So the police chief is telling him to back off. What do you do at that point?

Well, you've got three choices. You either back off, she's saying, and.

Live with it, which I don't know. I mean, maybe, to be honest, he's an outsider and he just showed up. If this is the way they want to live, then shouldn't he just either accept that or leave?

And I don't think leaving is an option.

So what are the other options?

So the last option is that you stay and fight.

It's interesting because what he's afraid of is being harassed, and yet the path that he's choosing is only going to increase the harassment.

Yes.

They could all be killed.

Yeah. And there's no one in the town to rally for him, at least not so far.

It's like there may be elements in the town that are not happy with this, but they have not spoken up. They have not chosen this path of fighting.

No, he's come forward. He's the first to come forward that we know of. Roger was upset about what was happening in his slice of paradise. But there were others, locals who had been there for generations, who thought that what was happening was actually good for Varnhamtown. They thought that Dale Varnum's deal with Pablo Escobar was making things better.

Dale, his business took off with the cocaine.

This is cookie locomy, Dale's cousin.

And that's when the seafood industry picked up, because people that were associated with Dale, they were able to build shrimp boats, buy shrimp boats, pay their shrimp boats off. People were buying houses, cars. My parents built a convenience store. And it was know for a while, you know, everybody's prospering, everybody's doing good.

So Cookie felt that Dale, well, he was trying to help Varnhamtown.

He was going to remake Varnhamtown, this sleepy little town. He was going to create a vision of paradise. It just wasn't a vision that Roger Morton liked.

But I can understand with the pressure of the industry at that time, the fishing industry was in decline, and there was really no solution. People were hurting.

And then Dale comes around and says, guess what? I've met Pablo Escobar.

I have the answer to all your problems.

Imagine if somebody came up to you and said, kyle, I know you've got a lot of problems. I've got the answer. Pablo Escobar.

I'm in. And one thing that kept coming up over and over was that this was really a tight knit community. There were 300 people living apart from the rest of the world, largely overlooked and forgotten, and they had to band together to survive.

Everybody almost was family. Like, everybody knew. Everybody knew everyone's business. We just kind of were in our own little world, you know?

This is Amanda Gibson, Dale's daughter, and she remembers the change in the town and the change in her father.

He would have tons of gold. That was his thing. Gold chains that threw up flags when I was little, a lot of melted gold. He had a red BMW, a white BMW, and a blue BMW, all brand new, and then a Corvette. And I just remember thinking, oh, my God. And all my friends would be like, oh, man, your dad's got some nice cars.

I mean, we were lucasy boots and gold chains and idiots, you know what I'm saying? That's lefty, the local 80s drug dealer that you might remember from episode one.

So it's just, it was, you take.

A bunch of people that never had money and give them some, and they're.

Going to want it to shine a little bit. One day I went up there and done his laundry.

This is cookie. Lack of Megan, who spent a lot of time at Dale's house, there's boxes.

I thought it was washing powder and it was stacked up on the shelf. I'll never forget I've said, big old scoop of it. Hey, I didn't wash one load of clothes with it. I wash clothes half of a day. Sheets, blankets, I mean rugs. I mean, everything that you could think of that need to be washed. The hand towels. The towels. And they'll come back a couple of days later and said, you have messed up. You washed my clays with cocaine in this, not laundry detergent. He didn't get upset. He didn't get angry. He just said, you've just got everybody blowing bubbles.

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A lot of the fellers that wound up in the drug world wound up with some money, and I built houses for them and things like that, and majority of them that around here were actually dirt poor. And we got that money. It went to their head. It drove them crazy.

Do you know why they call him grunts?

I do not.

It's because when he was a baby, he grunted a lot. Makes sense. And somehow the entire town knew this.

Now, that's a small town.

It is a sign of how tight knit the town is, because this guy's now in his seventy s. And they're still referring to him by the way he acted when he was a baby. He didn't grunt a lot when we talked to him.

No, he didn't. No, he didn't. He grew out of it.

Roger Morton witnessed the craziness and he didn't like it. And he wasn't going to give up trying to stop it.

Well, that first conversation with the chief of police only made Roger angrier. So he met with him again and tried one more time, and he said.

Roger, we don't need to be enemies. I said, we're not enemies. You got a job to do, and I got a job to do. My main job is to look after my family. And your job is to clean up this beach. And you're going to do it or somebody else is going to do it. It's just that simple.

Listen to the kind of threats that Roger was hearing around Barnumtown at the time.

He said, look here, son, you better take your family and go back to Mooresville while you're still able to, because this is the biggest smuggling operation on the east coast, and you fixing to get in serious trouble coming down here.

This is incredible. It's like somehow poor Roger Morton has stumbled into the midst of a real mess. The biggest smuggling operation on the east coast.

Yeah. Part of the issue, I think, at the end of the day, is that Roger, he's not a varnum. He's not from Varnumtown.

He's from western North Carolina.

Right.

Which isn't that far away, but it's far enough away.

It is.

You don't have to be very far away from Varnumtown to not be from Varnumtown.

I completely. You know, he shows up, this outsider, and says, this is not the paradise that I want.

This is my paradise. It's mine.

He searched for it, he found it, and he put down roots here.

Yeah.

And people like Dale Varnum are. No, no. We've been here for generations.

Who the hell are.

Yeah. Yeah. So now, in the midst of this escalating tension, this giant drug ship runs aground outside of Roger Morton's house. So we sat down with Roger to find out exactly what happened.

So you're saying a trawler filled with marijuana and cocaine ran aground basically outside your front door?

The captain, Tom, that was the name they had on it. It was owned by the president of Columbia, South America.

We couldn't confirm if a colombian politician owned the vessel, but investigators did find evidence that seemed to link the boat's registration to Colombia.

Just like the Ario speedwagon plane.

Yes.

So this reputed colombian ship somehow ends up run aground in Varnumtown.

Yes. And the cargo ships, they can't come into Varnumtown because this place, the harbor, is very small.

So why didn't they know this in the first place? And they somehow managed to get it right to the exact spot, but they weren't sophisticated enough to realize that it wouldn't fit into the harbor.

Who knows? Maybe they were imbibing some of the cargo.

So Roger Morton decides to escalate his concerns, and he asks the sheriff of the whole county to meet him on the beach. The sheriff is a guy named Herman.

Strong, and, man, he is a character right out of central cast.

Herman Strong. Hermann. That's a great name for a sheriff. Perfect, right?

He dresses all in black. Black pants, black shirt, black boots. He's got a giant black stetson he wears. This is a guy you don't want to mess with.

So he came down there, pulled up, he said, well, where's the boat at? And I said, come here and look right here. And I showed him. I said, why don't you confiscate that boat and sell it and put the money in Brunswick county? And he said, I don't know where I can do that or not. I said, yeah, I know you can do that. What do you mean you don't know that you can do that? You got jurisdiction 3 miles. The state does. He said, well, if I had a way to get out there, I'd do that.

I love this image of a giant ship loaded with drugs trying to run into this harbor and just getting stuck at the mouth of the harbor, and it's just sitting there, stuck in the sand. And then the sheriff of this small fishing town can't find a boat to go check it out.

I said, I got a 50 foot boat sitting right there. Let's go.

So Roger gets the sheriff on his little fishing boat, takes the guy out to the cargo ship, which a newspaper says is 150ft long, good size, and Roger and the sheriff hop on board.

I guess everybody was gone at that point.

Yeah, it's just them. And here's how Roger describes what was in the hold.

I don't hardly know how you describe something like that. I'd never seen that kind of marijuana in my life. It was a hole, was about 14 foot deep, big, huge, and it was stacked all the way to the top. It was a lot of grass, I'll tell you that.

There was 18 tons of weed. That's 36,000 pounds. Of marijuana and who knows what else is packed away in there. It was like a ghost ship floating in the fog, filled with drugs from Columbia. The funny, not funny part. The smugglers tried to sink the boat by opening the drain valves, basically opening the ship to the sea.

But it wouldn't sink because it was stacked with bales of marijuana which were wrapped in plastic all the way to the top. It was just like a piece of foam right there. It couldn't sink.

What do you think the point of sinking the ship is? Because it seems to me that it's already sunk, it's already jammed up on the sand.

Yeah. I don't think they were thinking a sinking state.

I think they were super high. You could imagine the captain of this ship perhaps smoking some of the weed, some of the 36,000 pounds, a lifetime supply for anyone other than you. They would arrive and they would think, wait, what are our instructions here? It says, deliver to Varnhamtown. Maybe they missed a little asterisk that said, don't go into Varnum town because it's only 5ft deep and you've got to ship a massive ship. So the guy's like full steam ahead.

Well, maybe they were thinking straight. Maybe they decided to sink the ship in shallow water and then they could easily access it.

I guess that's true. If you have a cargo that is very valuable, you wouldn't want to sink it way out at sea where it's gone forever.

Right?

So maybe this was in the manual, in the drug runners handbook. On page like 86, it says, sink it in shallow water.

Underlined.

Underlined. Yeah. But I think probably on the page before that, it says, do not run aground. Probably on page one. So what does Roger decide to do?

Well, the sheriff shrugs. The guy doesn't really want to get involved, which is strange. But Roger, he's not about to let this happen on his watch.

So we got a rope on the boat and I started towing it with my little boat.

This is amazing. Roger literally impounds the ship himself and starts dragging it across the ocean with his little fishing boat.

It's like, it reminds me of the little engine that could. Right?

Yeah.

Can you imagine how the smugglers in Varnum town feel about this?

Not good.

No. Roger Morton, this outsider, this newcomer to town, towing away their boat, getting rid.

Of their drugs, I bet they don't like it.

No, not one bit. And it's about to cause a world of trouble for Roger Morton.

You know what? This is kind of shaping up to be like an old western showdown. It's like Roger Morton on one side and Dale Varnum and the rest of the Varnum town smugglers on the other, and we're just waiting for high noon.

Well, Roger seems like he's even sort of usurped the sheriff's job. He's come in and said, I'm taking over, and this is the way things should run. Yeah.

There's a new sheriff in town.

There's a new sheriff in town. Yeah.

Okay, so we've got the Lone ranger here, Roger Morton, going up against Dale Varnum and the rest of the town pretty much.

And Roger, you know, he's pretty proud of his efforts to impound the ship, but he quickly realizes that he's up against something much bigger.

So, Kyle, if you're enjoying this show, if you're enjoying Varnumtown, I don't know if you are, but if you are very much, you are good. I'm glad to hear that. If you are, then there's another true crime podcast I would recommend to you.

Tell me.

Take a listen to 90 night.

Hello, I'm Rabia Chaudhry. I invite you to join me every Tuesday for new episodes of 90 night bedtime stories to keep you awake. Now on podcast one, this new incarnation of 90 Night is an anthology of stories that bring to life classic horror stories, some you're definitely familiar with and others you'll be hearing for the first time. Join me as I tuck you into bed with stories that will leave you sleepless all night long. Get new episodes of 90 night every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts.

There was bails floated on the beach for a know where they had dropped them. And I learned after that, Dale told me that one of the cops brought him two or three bails.

I love it that this town is so small that Dale and Roger just have straightforward conversations about this stuff that Dale would. Dale would even share with Roger that the cops are bringing him the marijuana?

Yeah, it's like he's taunting him. Like Dale's taunting Roger?

Yeah, like Dale's. Like the cops are bringing me the drugs. So what are you going to do about it? You can't do anything.

I mean, the system's corrupt. What can you do?

You try to become the system, probably.

Which is exactly what Roger tried to do. He decides to take over the city council.

Did you go around and say, look, if you elect me, I'm going to get on the council and I'm going to try to stop this smuggling?

Absolutely.

That was your platform?

Yeah.

What was your pitch? What did you say to people, well.

I just told them that there was things going on that was not right and they knew that they were not right and we needed to change it, that we had families living on the beach that didn't deserve that kind of stuff going on and have to have guts enough to do it if they were going to get it done. And all of them agreed.

Do you think they were just agreeing with him to his face, but, like, secretly laughing at him?

Possible. His first order of business pushed the police chief to get rid of the smugglers.

Well, I put a lot of pressure on him to do his job, and I told him, either you do your job or we'll get somebody else to do it. And so he resigned and started running around telling people I was a crook and he couldn't work for me.

What kind of crook did he say you were?

Well, he didn't say. He just said I was a crook.

This won't be the last time that someone accuses Roger of being in league with darker forces. And now Roger is in the crosshairs. A local cop comes to him with a message for anyone trying to stop the flow of drugs into the area.

Here's what he told me. He said, what you better do is get your aws out of here. You can't do anything about this operation down here. It's bigger than all logic. You just as well spit on me as tell me this, because that's not the way it's going to be.

In the next episode, Roger Morton is going to go above local law enforcement, way above. He's going to ask president Ronald Reagan to intervene in Varnumtown.

And where is Dale Varnum in all of this? The man of mystery, the wizard behind the curtain, orchestrating this mayhem, seemingly making it all happen? Will we find him? Well, we're going to try, and we'll eventually succeed, but it's a wild ride. So stick with us for episode three and hang out after the credits of this episode for some behind the scenes stories of Varnumtown.

Varnumtown is produced by Epic magazine, Picture Perfect Federation, and full picture special thanks.

Go out to the residents of Varnumtown for telling their story.

The epic team includes Harry Spitzer, Josh Levine, Frank Slidisco, Malis Tussare, Dan O'Sullivan, and Leela Thulen.

Additional reporting by Keejin Higashibaba the Picture.

Perfect Federation team includes Patrick Waxberger, Ashley Stern, Tyler Nell and Samina Martin.

The full picture and DGNL team are Desiree Gruber, Anne Walls, and Nier Lieberbaum Frank Reyna supported me during production. Original music composed by Jonna Bechtolt and Rob Keesweater additional music provided by american production music Epidemic Sound and premium Beats Studio recordings took place at Silver Lake Recording Studios.

Well, welcome to our behind the scenes after show here on Varnumtown. One of the things that I was really interested in hearing these stories from episode two, in listening to the residents of Varnumtown, is that there was a real split between neighbors, people who live side by side. And it makes me think of conflicts between neighbors that all of us have experienced.

Right? Yeah. Over the years, of course. Have you ever experienced any problems yourself?

I'm thinking about this incident that I had with my neighbor. I live in San Francisco, and I would eat lunch at my desk at home where I work. And the neighbor, in the middle of the day every day, would take a shower. He would go into the bathroom for approximately 2 hours, and he would open the window and turn on the music and blast it out of the window.

What music did he Favor?

He favored favor. Well, he favored. It's more than favored. He played one song on repeat.

Okay.

Over and over for 2 hours. It was baby, I need your loving by the four tops, over and over. And I like that song.

Yeah, nice song.

But after 1520, and this went on for days and then weeks and then months, and I was losing my mind.

Yeah.

I mean, you just can't listen to a song over and over. And it was like. I felt like a pavlovian response. At 1130, right before I was going to eat my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the music would come on and I would tense up and I'd be like, oh, no, not again. And I don't know. What do you do.

Apart from draw the curtains and close the window? And you can't, though.

It's loud. It was loud.

Yeah.

Well, finally I just tried to kind of stiff up her lip. Look, people can do whatever they want in their house.

Sure.

Who am I to say that you shouldn't listen to the four tops on repeat for months on end? But eventually I snapped. I just couldn't. I was sitting there, I was eating the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and something came over, like, I saw red.

Yes.

And this is San Francisco, so the houses are really tight.

Yeah.

And there's a fence, a wooden fence between us. And I just walked out the door with my sandwich, and I climbed up the fence and I leaned into the window of the bathroom.

Oh, my God, you're asking for trouble.

And I didn't know what I was going to do, right. Our houses are so close together that I was resting against the second story wall of his bathroom. Because the bathroom was on the second story.

Could you reach out and touch your house? Your wall? Was it that close?

Very close, yeah. I could basically brace myself between the two. I was thinking, that's the image I had. And I didn't know what I was going to do. The music was playing, and I just stood there on the fence. Standing on the fence, eating my sandwich. He saw me.

Oh, my God.

And he said, hi.

He said, did he say hi at long last? No, finally.

And I said, hi back. It was just totally normal. I was like, hello? And he said, how's it going? And I said, I'm just eating my lunch. Because I wanted him to know that it wasn't just him that was listening to this song. Listening to, baby, I need your loving over and over and over again. It was me. It was the entire neighborhood.

Right.

And so I was showing up, eating my sandwich, having my lunch, but being present in his space so he could see that he wasn't alone in this acoustic experience.

This is very thought through.

Yeah, well, no, it wasn't. I just wanted to confront him in some way. And so there I am, standing on the fence, and I say to him, I like your music. And he says, oh, yeah, me, too. And I said, well, if it's okay with you, I'm just going to eat my sandwich and listen here with you. And he said, yeah, that's fine. So that's what I did. I stood on top of the fence, leaning into the bathroom window, eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

What's he doing at this point in time? Is he still in the shower or is he out of the shower?

He is sitting on the toilet, but the toilet seat is closed. He's, like, sitting there and he's reading a magazine.

Okay.

He's just sitting on the toilet reading a magazine.

Okay.

So I sat there. I stood there and I ate my sandwich. And I finished the sandwich, and I said, okay, I'll see you around.

See you tomorrow.

I'll see you tomorrow. I did, actually. I said, I'll see you tomorrow.

Yeah.

And you know what? He did not play the music the next day.

Oh, my gosh.

The music ended. It worked.

It worked.

It worked.

That's an amazing story. Yeah.

And it really blew my mind because I did not know where it was going to lead.

Right.

And I had felt anger towards him up until that point, and he could have been angry at me. Like, hey, get out of my window.

Sure.

But he wasn't. He was very gentle, and that was surprising to me. The whole interaction was very gentle.

Yeah, that's surprising to me, too. Although in a situation like that, I think you just don't know what to expect. Right. I think he was very brave, although I don't think you were thinking like that at the time, to go to the window with not a combative.

Attitude. Yeah, I was just eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Peanut butter and jelly is an awfully nice way to go in. That's a gentle.

It's hard to enunciate when you have peanut butter in your mouth. So I couldn't really say much very clearly.

I love that. I was just walking by with my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and I wanted to pop my head in and.

Say hello, but there's a little bit of. With neighbors, you're in your house, you're in your own space. It's your castle. You think you can do whatever you want, and you feel that way up until the point that somebody kind of shows you that they also exist. Right. And that you exist side by side.

Right.

And I feel like that's kind of what's happening here in Varnumtown. People are existing in their own worlds, in their own bubbles, until somebody like Roger Morton comes along and holds a mirror up and, hey, hey, this is happening, and it's not good. He's eating his peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the fence, looking at everybody, saying, this music is really loud. He's saying, I don't like the four.

Tops, or at least every day for months at a time.

That's my neighbor's story.

I love the fact that I don't think you really escalated it. You just brought it to his attention.

Yes.

That his actions were impacting you and by where you were in proximity, the neighborhood.

It was being noticed, and sometimes that's enough. It's just being noticed, which you didn't.

Even say, hey, guy, would you mind maybe lowering the volume, maybe not opening the window, maybe whatever it is. Yeah.

I never said that.

Yeah.

I mean, Roger Morton, however, really is going at it and saying, you have to stop doing.

Yeah.

He's not saying, turn the volume down.

Oh, no. It's a personal affront to him, and he takes it personally, and he responds in that way, and he escalates things.

To me, it's like, at this moment in time in world history, there's a lot of wars going on, a lot of people living side by side who can't get along. Yes, and Varnumtown is a microcosm of the world. There's people who see things differently, and the question is, can they work their differences?

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, next time on Varnum town, we're going to go talk to another outsider, the DEA agent Mike Grimes.

So stick with us for episode three on the Unrudator. Ragod no devetok Rudy bulga kuroska the Via launcher essay Yakroti Kudleta Shah no maviyam fuivrugoni Shah no imnikaminik tobindaku iligla the Vyarlancha kane dowiya willa isagota bratniyamima yefane fuimaris old it imni bruceasta ish.

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