"Padilla looked Mexican, so he was going to go to Mexico and score the weed for the trip," Ashbrook says. Padilla's mission: drive south to Guadalajara with Smitty and meet with the man who stood as the source of the marijuana smuggling empire that Brotherhood smugglers like David Hall and "Lyncho" German had been using for years. The enigmatic "Papa" was the biggest marijuana dealer in the rugged and largely lawless mountains along the coast of Sinaloa, where hundreds of hilltop farms produced high-quality weed exclusively for foreign export. Papa's speciality was superfragrant marijuana plants whose tails - colas or colitas in Spanish - packed the most powerful high Mexico had to offer.
"Papa was the man," Ashbrook says. "He had the best weed. He was the first ever who had kilos of colas, the first one to have beautiful hand-laid, fluffy blocks, the first really nice stuff." Ashbrook wasn't alone in his high opinion of Papa's colitas. They were so legendary in the late 1960's and early 1970's that they inspired the first few lines of "Hotel California," the hit song by the Eagles: "On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair, warm smell of colitas rising up through the air".
"We just had a big party and started going through the bags, " Ashbrook says. "Nobody had ever seen anything like this. It was all colitas , fresh from the farm, fifty kilos per costal. That was fun, boy, opening those up and pulling those out. It took us a couple of days to divvy it all up."
The Mexican weed we unloaded from the Jafje quickly became famous throughout Maui as "Lightning Bolt." Padilla came up with the name while sitting on the beach in Mexico with Joe Angelini, preparing to load the yacht. "We were taking it down to the beach and hiding it and I pulled a cola out, and held it to the sun and said, 'This looks like a lightning bolt.' That's how it became the Lightning Bolt load. We told everybody about it."
Within a month, so many Lightning Bolt seeds had been thrown out the window or off the porches of various Brotherhood houses in Olinda, Makawao, and Kula that a robust crop of marijuana plants began to spring up like the weeds they were. "It was so fertile all you had to do you just drop a seed and let it rain," Padilla says. When Les Potts first arrived in Maui a few years before the Aafje, he recalls that there wasn't much marijuana growing on the island. "But some people started planting seeds, " he recalls. "A strain that started was called the Kula Crippler." It came from the seeds left over from the pot that the Tohki brothers threw over their shoulders when they were done separating out the various grades to make their hash. "They'd give you bales of that stuff if you could smuggle it out of Afghanistan," he claims.
After the Jafje arrived in Maui, a surfer from Santa Barbara somehow managed to crossbreed a Lightning Bolt plant with a Kula Crippler plant. It wasn't long before acres of the rich farmland near Kula were blooming with the new strain of marijuana plants. As word of the new crossbreed marijuana strain spread throughout the island, hippies began carrying it back to California. Brotherhood smugglers like Fat Bobby and Johnny Gale began shipping the weed to Laguna Beach, first in suitcases and hollowed-out surboards, and then in everything from falsely labeled cans of soup and vegetables to cars and boats and airplanes. Named in honor of the Brotherhood's island utopia, the high-grade pot became a worldwide phenomenon, more famous in some circles than the island itself.
"I guess the Brotherhood served it's purpose by bringing those seeds to Maui," Mundell allows. "It was pretty popular stuff. It was Maui Wowie."