After spending 32 years in prison for a nonviolent cannabis offense, Richard DeLisi returned to Colombia with his son Rick to retrace the places, stories, and decisions that shaped their family’s history.
“Did you ever work from here?”
Standing in Cinto Bay, surrounded by crystal-clear Caribbean water and jungle-covered mountains, I finally asked my father a question I’d wondered about for years.
He looked around the cove for a moment and shook his head.
“Nah.”
Then he pointed toward the mountains behind us.
“There was a road back there,” he said. “We’d drive through the desert. At the end there was a salt flat on a cliff over the ocean. That’s where we launched the planes.”
In that moment, standing in Colombia nearly 50 years after many of those flights took place, stories I had heard my entire life suddenly became real places.
Returning to Colombia
The original purpose of the trip was business.
After my father’s release from prison in 2020, we founded DeLisioso, a cannabis brand built around redemption, reform, and second chances. In 2021, what started as rebuilding our family after three decades apart slowly evolved into something much larger.
This trip brought us back to Santa Marta, Colombia, where we were exploring potential partnerships with our friend Carlos Vivas Jr. and his partner Santiago, both heavily involved in Colombia’s medicinal cannabis industry.
For us, the trip was about genetics. Rare expressions. Authentic Colombian cannabis. Landrace varieties and terpene profiles shaped naturally over generations in the mountains and coastal regions of the country.
For my father, Colombia meant something deeper. Back in 1973, before any of the history that would later define his life, he and his brother Teddy were driving around Florida late one night, completely stoned and looking for munchies.
They stopped at a 7-Eleven. While standing there, my father picked up an Auto Trader magazine and started flipping through it. There it was. A tiny listing for a coffee plantation in Minca near Santa Marta, Colombia. The property was listed for around $16,000. Most people would have kept turning pages. My father grabbed a roll of quarters, walked outside to a payphone, started making calls, and by the next day he and Teddy were on a plane to Colombia.
That impulsive decision would become one of the defining chapters in our family’s story.
Before the Headlines
Most people know my father because of what happened later.
In 1989, Richard DeLisi was sentenced to 98 years in prison for a nonviolent cannabis offense. He would spend 32 years behind bars before finally being released. But before prison, before courtrooms, and before headlines, he was a smuggler financing a dream.
Cannabis funded his racing career.
Growing up in Brooklyn, he spent his childhood around engines and bodywork because his father owned a gas station and body shop. Cars were part of everyday life. Racing became an obsession. The money he made smuggling cannabis helped finance an NHRA Pro Stock team during the 1970s.
Richard DeLisi eventually became known on the East Coast as the “#1 Waco Kid,” winning major NHRA Pro Stock races in 1978 and 1979, including victories at Englishtown and the Gatornationals. That same obsession with machinery eventually expanded into aviation.
For years, I wondered how someone operating aircraft in Colombia during that era managed to avoid becoming entangled in cartel violence and narco politics.
The reality is that my father’s downfall didn’t come from violence. His case ultimately stemmed from a reverse sting operation involving a former pilot who became an informant after being caught in an unrelated munitions-smuggling case.
No violence.
No murder.
No victims.
Just cannabis.
Paradise With a Past
Getting to Colombia was chaotic. Flying into Bogotá, our plane nearly landed before pulling back up because another aircraft was still sitting on the runway. We circled for nearly twenty minutes before finally landing and barely making our connection to Santa Marta.
By the time we arrived, exhausted, Carlos and his crew welcomed us into a beachfront apartment overlooking the Caribbean.
The next morning, he told us we were heading into Tayrona National Park to visit Cinto Bay. Then he casually mentioned something that immediately got my attention. Cinto Bay carried deep historical ties to cannabis smuggling throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.
The following morning, we boarded a thirty-five-foot fishing boat and headed into the bay. When we arrived, I couldn’t believe what I was looking at.
White sand beaches.
Crystal-blue water.
Tropical fish.
Jungle-covered mountains rising directly from the sea.
It looked like paradise. We spent the day swimming, eating fresh seafood, smoking local flower, and talking with friends. And honestly, the cannabis shocked me.
The Colombian flower completely shattered every stereotype I had ever heard about South American cannabis. The terpene profiles, resin production, aroma, and effects were incredible. It became obvious very quickly that Colombia’s future in medicinal cannabis is much bigger than most people realize.
The Stories Became Real
Later that day, we were invited up to a massive tiki-style villa overlooking the entire bay. Hammocks hung beneath a giant palm-thatched roof. Fresh red snapper, coconut rice, and patacones were prepared for us while music drifted through the ocean breeze. To this day, it remains one of the best meals I’ve ever had.
For a few hours, all the darkness historically attached to Colombia disappeared.
What remained was beauty.
Hospitality.
Culture.
Family.
Cannabis.
Connection.
As the afternoon unfolded, I kept looking around the bay. Everybody knew this place. Smugglers. Fishermen. Locals. The history was impossible to ignore.
That’s when I finally asked my father the question.
“Did you ever work from here?”
His answer led somewhere even more fascinating.
He pointed toward the mountains and began describing a desert road that led to a dusty salt flat sitting on a cliff above the Caribbean. That’s where they launched the planes. The way he described it sounded less like aviation and more like survival.
The old DC-3s would accelerate toward the edge of the cliff and disappear completely from sight. For several long seconds, nobody knew whether the aircraft had enough lift. Nobody knew whether it was climbing. Nobody knew whether it was gone forever. Then, eventually, it would rise back above the horizon. Only then could everybody breathe.
Standing there decades later, listening to him describe it in the same region where it happened, gave me chills. For most of my life, these stories existed as fragments passed down through family conversations.
Now they had coordinates.
The deeper we traveled into the mountains around Minca, the more it felt like we were searching for something bigger than a property. We thought we were looking for an old coffee plantation. Instead, we were uncovering memories.
The older I get, the more I realize that history isn’t always found in books or court records. Sometimes it’s hidden in a mountain road. Sometimes it’s waiting beyond a jungle.
And sometimes it’s sitting next to you on a boat in the Caribbean, pointing toward the horizon and reminding you where the story began.
Full Circle
For decades, Colombia existed in our family history as stories, photographs, and memories. Returning there transformed those stories into real places.
What began as a cannabis business trip became something far more personal: a chance to walk through the landscapes that shaped our family’s past and see them through a different lens.
Some trips are about discovering somewhere new. This one was about understanding somewhere old.
Photos courtesy of Rick DeLisi.
This article is from an external, unpaid contributor. It does not represent High Times’ reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.
