How a celebrated Navy SEAL and CIA operative became a big-time drug smuggler in SC

James Dennis “J.D.” Smith was a decorated SEAL who led raids in enemy territory and a CIA operative cited by the agency.

But after years in government service, from about 2012 to 2017 when he was a civilian, he led a different life. He used his SEAL and CIA covert skills to avoid the law as he flew his twin-engine Cessna with cargoes of marijuana from California to South Carolina and other states. He transported thousands of pounds of the drug and was paid up to $350 per pound.

After his 2017 arrest, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency seized hundreds of thousands of dollars from him. Agents found guns galore — 12 pistols, five shotguns and an AK-47 assault rifle. He and fellow traffickers stashed the weed — some of it labeled medical marijuana from California, law agents said — in storage units here and there.

Last week, Smith, 52, was sentenced in federal court for his secret life.

How did he go from celebrated SEAL to a big league drug smuggler?

The simple answer: love of danger and its adrenaline rush, says his lawyer, Greg Harris of Columbia.

“He had been molded and trained to expect chaos, catastrophe and adrenaline. When he came back from war, and the expectation was not fulfilled, he actively sought the rushes that he used to experience on a daily basis,” Harris wrote in a court brief.

“Eventually, he turned back to covert, high-risk activity. Only this time, instead of flying to austere CIA outposts in Afghanistan, he was flying marijuana across the country he previously risked his life to protect,” Harris wrote. “His conduct was by and large a means of facilitating the only lifestyle he knew: high-risk, dangerous, and clandestine.”

There’s an even more complex answer — an answer so compelling that it recently helped get a federal judge and federal prosecutors to recommend mercy and save Smith from a 10- or 20-year or more sentence for his marijuana crimes.

Court’s reasoning for sentence

Earlier this week in Columbia, as U.S. District Judge Mary Lewis prepared to sentence Smith, she looked across the federal courtroom and said, “This is not something that I have ever seen before.”

A minute later, Lewis gave Smith 18 months in federal prison — an unusually light sentence. He had already served 7 months in jail after his arrest four years ago in a Charlotte airport, so he will have about a year to serve in prison. Others being sentenced for similar crimes — conspiracy to deal in large quantities of marijuana and having a gun — might have served decades.

At the hearing, Lewis said she considered various factors: Smith had no criminal record. He was pleading guilty, sparing taxpayers a trial’s cost. He had fully cooperated with DEA and law enforcement, providing evidence about South Carolina traffickers and major suppliers in California that led to their arrests and convictions. And he was a decorated veteran with a Bronze Star for valor, meaning, for an action in a combat situation.

Smith’s combat record included being a SEAL team leader in Iraq in dozens of nighttime raids in the early 2000s, where he killed and captured Iraqis, according to court records.

“He blew the doors off of houses and was the first to run inside; and (as a combat medic) he has saved the lives of both Americans and Iraqis who became casualties of war,” according to court records. He later roamed Afghanistan with CIA teams stalking the enemy.

Above all, there was testimony from Amy Meyers, a Florida psychologist who has treated Smith.

Meyers, who said she has counseled some 1,000 of America’s special operations combat veterans, told the judge what she’s learned in therapy sessions with these veterans about how their kind of close-up violent warfare devastates their personal lives.

The “ceaseless, high-tempo combat” and special forces’ soldiers’ “experiences at war arguably defy what humans are biologically and evolutionarily built for,” said Meyers. “We are not meant to watch our friends die, often all at once. We are not meant to kill, and we are not meant to risk our lives every day.... It is simply inhuman.”

Many Special Forces operators develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and Smith had “one of the most severe and debilitating presentations of PTSD I have seen,” Meyers said in a transcript of her remarks made available to The State

Smith’s symptoms included severe depression, suicidal thoughts, panic attacks, paranoia, memory loss, impaired judgment, interpersonal difficulties, impaired impulse control and many other symptoms resulting from his PTSD, Meyers told the judge.

“His poor judgment and poor decision-making that led to flying that (marijuana) was a result of his PTSD,” she said.

Smith did not smuggle marijuana in his plane just for the adrenaline rush, she said. Combat had given him powerful feelings of being indestructible, indifference to his fate and guilt for having survived so much violence where his friends died.

Smith’s guilt includes being ashamed of the Bronze Star he won in a combat action where he killed a young boy. “Killing the boy was part of his duty to kill armed enemy. He did not describe it as heroic,” she said. “He casually told me he wishes he had died that day because it would have been more honorable .... He sees himself as a monster for fulfilling the exact duties that earned him the prestigious Bronze Star.”

“The Navy told him he was a war hero and he felt he was a villain. This is beyond guilty. It is moral injury and it profoundly exemplifies his shame — shame for who he believes he has become,” Meyers said.

With two failed marriages and estranged children due at least in part to his prolonged absences at war, Smith believed he was a failure on a personal level too, she said.

Using his plane to smuggle large loads of marijuana gave Smith a positive purpose in life, Meyers said, because he had learned that in some medical cases, it was helping relieve suffering of the sick and dying.

Marijuana smuggling also gave him a sense of retaliating against a country for which he had sacrificed everything and now had found himself without family or friends and “mentally ill and unemployable,” Meyers said.

Early life and drug arrest

In an Oklahoma high school, Smith — who was born in 1969 — was a good student and good athlete, competing on football team and wrestling, according to evidence in his case and court records.

Out of high school, he joined the Marines, then the Navy and became a SEAL serving for 16 years, including in combat situations in Iraq. He took specialized combat medic courses and was recognized for saving lives. As a CIA operative, he participated in strike missions in Afghanistan. After the CIA, he worked security for American billionaires such as the Koch brothers, according to a filing by Smith’s lawyer.

Around 2014, out of the service and out of the private security business he worked for — Smith fell into marijuana smuggling, transporting thousands of pounds much of it medical marijuana, around the country from California, in duffel bags.

It was in South Carolina in 2014 that the Richland County Sheriff’s Department first became aware of a marijuana trafficking operation involving two Columbia area brothers, Carl and Byron Rye, according to court records.

“In cases like this, when we realize it’s more than just Richland County, we have to make a decision — do we get the smaller fish, or do we get bigger fish? This case is an example of that. We went for the bigger fish,” said Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott. “These cases take a lot of work and they can stretch for years.”

Local authorities brought in the DEA. Over the next few years, a joint federal-local investigation determined that Smith regularly landed his plane at Jim Hamilton-L.B. Owens Airport in Columbia to bring in marijuana and pick up money from the Rye brothers.

Law enforcement surveillance was extensive. It included airplane records, safe deposit box records, text-message records, vehicle electronic tracking devices, video surveillance cameras, drug-sniffing dogs, GPS cellphone tracking, still photographs and plain old-fashioned stakeouts and the tailing of suspects, according to court records.

In early June 2017, more than a dozen heavily armed law agents bashed in the front door of a Rosewood Drive apartment house and arrested the Ryes.

The same day, numerous DEA and other law enforcement agents were at a terminal at the Charlotte airport where Smith was transferring from a domestic flight to an international flight to Italy.

Because Smith was in an airport secure area, agents were reasonably sure he had no weapons. Because he had hand-to-hand combat skills and was considered potentially dangerous, law enforcement cleared the terminal where he was getting off the plane, assembled a large team of arresting officers and swooped down on him, said a law enforcement source.

Far from being trouble, Smith began cooperating with law enforcement almost from his arrest, records say.

One major drug trafficker Smith led authorities to was Chris Daugherty, a California man who supplied Smith with thousands of pounds of marijuana over the years. Nearly all the marijuana was marked “unlawful to redistribute” and was medical marijuana legally grown in California, according to court records and evidence in the case..

When federal agents arrested Daugherty and searched a residence he owned in Napa, Calif., they seized 800 pounds of marijuana and approximately $400,000, DEA agent Doug McElwain testified at a 2019 court hearing in Columbia.

Daugherty has since been sentenced to five years in prison. Both Ryes have pleaded guilty to drug charges. Carl Rye is serving 37 months in prison and Bryon Rye is awaiting sentencing.

Therapy, prison, volunteering

In the last three years, Smith has sought and received intensive therapy in individual and group settings at a Veterans Administration hospital in Tennessee, where he has been living under home detention, his lawyer Harris said in a court filing.

Although Smith’s mental and emotional well-being have improved over the past three years while under the constant care of the VA, he still experiences nightmares, depression, guilt and mood swings, Harris wrote. He is continuing getting therapy individual and group settings, Harris said.

Smith also suffers from traumatic brain injury and post-concussion ailments caused by the multiple explosions and gunfire he was close to, Harris wrote.

“The concussion and over-pressure from these explosions resulted in TBI, a condition that may improve with treatment and medication. He also deals with PTSD every day: he has killed enemy combatants at close range, he has been shot at, and he has had teammates die in combat,” Harris wrote.

In the next few months, Smith will report to federal prison.

Judge Lewis said in open court she hopes Smith continues getting therapy. She said she didn’t think Smith is a threat to anyone, especially since in the last few years while awaiting sentence he has spent 800 volunteer hours helping a local charity, where he has done everything from food delivery, construction work, property management and clothing assortment.

Harris had asked Judge Lewis for 15 months.

Ben Garner, one of the federal prosecutors who acknowledged Smith’s total record and help to prosecutors, asked the judge to give Smith at least 33 months because of the seriousness of the crime. Smith wasn’t just a “mule” ferrying the drugs, but a critical part of the smuggling operation who used his SEAL and CIA knowledge to transport drugs undetected by law authorities, Garner said.

Judge Lewis, in her comments from the bench, said, “This is a very serious offense and it can’t go without punishment.”

She said she didn’t expect to see Smith in court again — but then knocked on her wooden judge’s bench for luck.

And then she gave him 18 months.

A few minutes earlier Smith, in his court remarks, had indicated no judge would be seeing him again.

Smith quoted Isaiah 43:18, which says “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.”

And then he added, “I’m not the same man I was four years ago — not even close.”