SID: Hello, Sid Roth here with Anita Duggan, and I’m reading this article that in 1975, in the state of Mississippi, the largest drug bust in their history, Anita, you just don’t look like a drug buster, I mean there was a whole sting operation, but let’s kind of go back a little bit. You were raised in a conservative Jewish home, what did Judaism mean to you? What did God mean? This was in Miami, right?
ANITA: Unhuh, I was raised in Miami, Florida, I was a conservative Jew, went to temple, was sweetheart of the high school fraternity, went to a Jewish sorority, but I always loved the Lord, I always knew about God, I just did not know that Jesus was my Messiah.
SID: Now you say that you always loved God, I was raised in an orthodox Jewish home, and God was like, my father called God, described God as like a fire, you know Moses and the burning bush, and it’s kind of hard to relate to afire, and so, but you were different, you had this some, innate love for God, that’s wonderful! And so you got married, you had children, and you were supposed to live happily ever after, but that’s not the way it was written, what happened?
ANITA: No, I got divorced, it was during the hippy time, there was drugs, I wound up being a single mom raising my kids by myself, I ran a woman’s health spa, I made a lot of money.
SID: Well how in the world did you get, I mean, at least you pulled yourself up, so to speak, you were doing okay, so how in the world did you get into drugs, become an addict, a dealer.
ANITA: Well I had become accustomed to a certain way of living and then they cut my commissions in half, and I was already doing drugs, but I got involved with this huge drug smuggling ring, which at the time I did not know that, I was just buying drugs, but I didn’t have enough money to take care of the kids, we moved into this house, and I wound up getting involved.
SID: Out of curiosity how do you move into a house with young children with drug dealers, why did you do that?
ANITA: Oh Sid, back then during the hippie movement, you just didn’t care, you didn’t think about right and wrong, you just did what you wanted to do to get high. And there would be many times in my life where I thought back, I cannot believe I did that to my children, but at that time you just didn’t care, you just did what you had to do.
SID: Well tell me about this big bust in Mississippi.
ANITA: Well we had been involved in this drug ring, I had moved to the Bahamas, we were smuggling drugs back and forth between Colombia and Miami, and I hooked up with this guy, I did not know at this time he had turned state’s evidence, and they were setting us up for a sting in Mississippi.
SID: It’s just like you see on television, but it was you.
ANITA: Yeah, it was
SID: It was for real.
ANITA: Yeah it was.
SID: This isn’t supposed to happen to a nice Jewish girl from Miami raised in a conservative synagogue.
ANITA: That’s what they told me, that’s what they told me. So I invited him along to this big thing we were going to do in Mississippi, and he had set up the DEA agents already, he had turned state’s evidence for a bust that he had been involved in prior to that.
SID: and you didn’t have a clue.
ANITA: No, they had surveillance going, they had undercover agents watching us, they had pictures of me unhauling bales of marijuana, from the freighter to a speedboat to a truck.
SID: So when they came to arrest you, when you realized it was a setup, what did you do?
ANITA: The woman that I was working for gave me $4500, threw me the keys to her Cadillac, and said I want you to go towards Alabama. So I got in the car and hit the gas and headed towards Alabama, but once I got about ninety miles an hour and I saw the blue lights, the red lights behind me, whatever color they were.
SID: Now you were going to be one of these women they have a helicopter and they watch you on TV running
ANITA: Well you know there might have been a helicopter, I don’t know, but I know there were police cars following me and I knew that if I didn’t pull over I was going to die. So I pulled over, just like you see on TV, they got me out of the car, slapped me against the roof, frisked me, took my money, and arrested me, took me straight to jail.
SID: Okay now, reality is sinking in, the dream world is over, the bubble is burst.
ANITA: Yeah, I was scared.
SID: Were you really; I mean if you weren’t there would be something wrong with you.
ANITA: Well you know I was laying in the jail cell and it was my daughter’s birthday, and I had put the children’s pictures above me, and I looked up and it was the strangest thing, because I couldn’t believe I even did this, but I said, “God, if you are real, if you will get me out of this, I promise I will never get in trouble again.”
SID: And so almost immediately you get bailed out, who bailed you out?
ANITA: My partner.
SID: Why did he bail you out?
ANITA: They bailed me out because I had the key to the safety deposit box that had their fake passports in it in Coconut Grove, and if I had stayed there any longer than a week I would have probably would have broken and turned state’s evidence. And the only way they were going to get out of the country is if I got out of jail and went to the safety deposit box.
SID: Okay, so then you go to where it is the most intelligent thing to do, you go home to your father who lives in Miami, and he welcomes you home, but then he gets a disturbing phone call.
ANITA: Yeah, Daddy had a scrap metal company on the Miami River and he had gotten a call from Colombia, some drug lords called him and told him that if I talked my parents would find me at the bottom of the Miami River with a ball and chain around my ankle. My parents were just absolutely disgusted with me, they were, I mean they were scared; they were scared for their lives because they knew if I had a death threat on me that they probably would die too.
SID: So what did you do, did you stay home?
ANITA: Well, the first thing I did, was I went to Coconut Grove, and fulfilled my end of the bargain which was get the passports and give them to my boss and her boyfriend so they could get out of the country. Then, I still hadn’t learned my lesson though, I gathered up pounds of marijuana and speed, put them in the backseat of the car and my children and drove to Gatlinburg.
SID: But they were about ready to ship you off to prison and you were never going to be seen again.
ANITA: I know, but I was a drug addict. I was a drug addict, plus I also had suicidal tendencies, I had tried to take my life several times as a teenager, and to be honest with you, I was going to go to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, find my ex-husband, drop the children off and probably go kill myself.
SID: You got a pretty big surprise though, your ex-husband becomes a Jesus freak, and he is teaching it to your children, how did you react to that?
ANITA: I was pretty ticked off, I was living in the Bahamas, this was before I got arrested, and I had sent the children to Gatlinburg for the summer, and they had gotten saved, so when they flew to the Bahamas to end the summer with me, I opened the suitcases and there was this pile of Bible, little Bible story books and a Bible, I was, being Jew I was infuriated.
SID: Listen, if you want to hear about, you think you have a mess, you don’t know what a mess is, we’ll be right back and we will find out how the mess was cleared up from a supernatural force, and this force has a name, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, be right back.
