COPS GET $25 MILLION IN SEIZED DRUG CASH WINDFALL FOR MONROE SHERIFF (FLORIDA )
Monroe's big payday comes from the $50 million surrendered in 1997 by ex-smuggler Paul Edward Hindelang, formerly of Fort Lauderdale and Miami, who has subsequently become a legitimate millionaire pay-telephone entrepreneur.
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Hindelang helped pioneer the so-called "mother ship" marijuana smuggling technique that revolutionized the illicit trade that dominated South Florida's underground economy in the mid-to-late 1970s. A "mother ship" freighter carrying up to 180,000 pounds of marijuana would be unloaded at sea by a fleet of 50-foot fishing vessels, which would relay the drugs to smaller craft that blended in with recreational boaters for the trip ashore.
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The harder part for Hindelang was making a clean breast of the past he had so successfully concealed from his teenaged children, neighbors in the exclusive enclave he developed in Santa Barbara and business partners. The board of directors at Pacific Coin, the company Hindelang founded with a handful of pay phones in some of Southern California's grittiest communities, fired their CEO in December 1998, shortly after the forfeiture case became public in South Florida.