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Salvage is a one-hour, character-driven drama set during the cocaine wars of The Bahamas and South Florida (1978-1983). The show tells the story of Ben and Patrick Lawson, marine salvage operators who stumbled over a sunken DC-3 during a routine search and rescue mission in July 1979. Diving down on a single breath, Ben found an empty cockpit and a cargo hold full of cocaine. He ignored the drugs but took the pilot’s case, hoping it contained registration or insurance documents essential for filing a valid salvage claim. But when he cut the case open, he found $900,000 in wet dollar bills instead. The brothers vowed not to touch the money for a year. So they spent the weekend drying it out with a hair dryer and packed it into the brick chimney of their house for safekeeping.
A few days later, a Colombian businessman arrived searching for the DC-3. He furnished the Lawson brothers with the plane’s last known coordinates received during a mayday exchange with the pilot. That man was Carlos Lehder, a Medellin Cartel kingpin, later dubbed “The Henry Ford of Cocaine” by Florida D.A. Robert Merkle. Lehder was building the world’s first industrial-scale cocaine operation on Norman’s Cay, an island just 25 miles north of the Lawson’s salvage base. He offered the brothers a cash bonus if they could locate and salvage the plane, but of course, they’d already found it. What happens next reveals the fallacy at the heart of Reagan’s War on Drugs, tells the true story of the Medellin Cartel’s Bahamian odyssey, and sheds new light on Oliver North’s 1984 illegal arms pipeline to the Contras. Lehder’s operation connected Gen. Noriega in Panama (who laundered the Cartel’s money), the CIA (who paid Noriega to push their agenda in the Americas) and Oliver North (who turned a blind eye to Contra drug running through the Bahamas). In fact, Lehder was the chief prosecution witness at Noriega’s 1992 conviction on eight counts of drug trafficking, racketeering and money laundering charges.
Salvage is the product of 4 years of investigative research by Christian Barby, a former The Economist, Times of London and NPR journalist, and David Mitchell, a marine salvage operator in The Bahamas. All of our characters are based on real people – people with stories that have never been documented or captured on screen before. Our vision for the show is to film on location in The Bahamas and recreate this era in precise, authentic detail. The out-islands in the late 70s were a sunny place for shady people. A world where government corruption bled into society-at-large and everyone had a price: an analogue wild west. In an archipelago of 700 islands, people use seaplanes like cars, hunt for their food beneath coral ledges, navigate by the stars and rely on rainwater. Salvage is set in the era just before technology infiltrated our lives, when people made plans using VHF radios and coordinates on a chart.
In a society without supervision, it’s not about laws, it’s about rules.