Why I Wrote This Memoir

For most of my early adult life, I had no desire or intention to tell this story. Not publicly, and certainly not in detail.

The events that shaped my period of my life — my involvement in drug smuggling during the 1980s and 1990s, and my role in a surrogacy case that created new legal precedent in 1998 — were things I carried quietly. Some of it was painful. Some of it was misunderstood. Much of it was reduced to headlines or secondhand accounts that missed the truth.

The Turning Point

For years, people who knew fragments of my story told me I should write it down. I always dismissed the idea. Who wants to read about someone else’s mistakes?

But as time passed, I realized the story wasn’t just about my mistakes. It was about what happens after them. The rebuilding. The consequences that follow you for decades. The systems — legal, social, personal — that either help you recover or make recovery nearly impossible.

Not a Glorification

I want to be clear: this book is not a celebration of smuggling. It’s not a wink-and-nod adventure story. The lifestyle I led destroyed relationships, cost me years of freedom, and set in motion a chain of events that I’m still dealing with today.

If anything, I hope readers come away understanding the true cost — not the romanticized version Hollywood sells, but the real, grinding price of choices made in your twenties that follow you into your fifties.

The Surrogacy Story

The second half of the book — the surrogacy case — is equally important. It’s a story about how the law handles situations it was never designed for. About how a child can become a legal abstraction in a courtroom. About how good intentions and bad decisions can collide in ways nobody anticipates.

That case made national headlines. TIME Magazine wrote about it. The LA Times covered it extensively. But none of those accounts told the full story from the inside.

A Cautionary Tale

This story exists because time changes perspective — and because some stories don’t stay buried. I wrote it hoping that someone, somewhere, might read it and choose differently. Or at least go in with their eyes open.

That’s all any cautionary tale can aspire to.