VANISHING POINT

Millionaire pot king Robert Golding's biggest deal was
with the DEA agents who let him walk.

Whatever was going down in Lakewood on the morning of August 11, 1999,
it was enough to give Jon Carter, a 54-year-old grill chef from Aspen,
and his lifelong friend David Ziemer a bad case of the jitters. The
two men entered and exited Carter's room at the Ramada Inn on
West Colfax Avenue several times. They paced back and forth across the
welcome mat and made calls from a cell phone. Throughout the late
morning and early afternoon, the pair appeared to be waiting for
something to happen.

Finally, at 2:15 p.m., something did happen: A drug dealer named Sean
Richards drove into the lot, steering his brand-new silver SUV, a
luxury GMC Yukon Denali.

Richards exchanged cool greetings with the men, then disappeared with
them into Carter's room for a few minutes. When the trio emerged, they
got into separate cars; Ziemer took off on his own, Richards drove
three blocks up Colfax to the Octopus Car Wash, and Carter followed
him, driving a black SUV.

Once there, Richards and Carter simultaneously backed their wagons up
against a fence and swung open the cargo doors.

Richards handed large brown U-Haul moving boxes to Carter, who
immediately slid them into the back of his SUV. The transfer took just
a few minutes -- there were only six boxes.

With a handshake and a slam of the cargo doors, the two men completed
the exchange. Carter popped back into his vehicle and sped away. He
met with his chum Ziemer at the Freedom Harley-Davidson parking lot
just up the road.

Richards didn't get the chance to take off. Agents from the Denver
field office of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration surrounded
him before he could punch the gas pedal. They searched his Yukon and
found a blue money bag, which they claimed had been passed to Richards
by Carter, with $35,000 in cash inside. Another $10,000 was stashed in
Richards's pocketbook. The agents also removed a wad of $2,720 from
Richards's front pocket -- some hundreds, but mostly twenties.

Inside a black duffel bag, agents discovered two blank birth
certificates from a Philadelphia hospital and various forms of
identification that pictured Richards with different aliases; one ID
card and checkbook claimed that Richards was Paul Robles of Urbandale,
Iowa. Agents also recovered a handwritten ledger containing a
meticulous list of "boxes" Richards had distributed and the names of
the buyers -- but only their first names. The debts lowballed at
$45,572 and topped out at $340,887. In all, nearly a million dollars
was still owed to Richards on thousands of boxes that had been moved.

DEA agents made a big score when they nabbed Sean Richards. At the
same time, a few blocks away, agents rounded up Carter, Ziemer and a
third buddy from Aspen, Wayne Reid, who had loaned Carter his black
SUV. When the feds opened the cargo door and tore open the boxes, they
found 212.5 pounds of marijuana -- enough weed to smoke out all of
Boulder. Twice.

After hours of questioning, all three of the men from Aspen were
released and sent back to their snowcapped town. They have never been
charged with a crime, and Carter staunchly proclaims their innocence.
Richards, however, stuck around a little longer -- long enough to
seduce his captors with promises of bigger busts to come.

Since the fall of 1998, DEA Special Agent Richard Hardman and task
force officer Brian Taylor had been trying to shut down the pot
pipeline that services Colorado. Richards was, by far, their greatest
catch. The 43-year-old smuggler bragged that he was responsible for
moving between 1,000 and 2,000 pounds of weed into the state each
month -- a multimillion-dollar operation every thirty days. He told
the agents he was dialed in to all of the region's kingpins, including
the suppliers in Mexico. He offered to become an informant in exchange
for his immediate release.

The two agents couldn't resist the deal. They asked Richards to call
agent Hardman the next day, and Richards happily agreed.

But Richards didn't show the next day, or the next. By the end of the
week, the two agents realized their new "informant" had just pulled
off the greatest deal of his life. The scammed feds raided Richards's
LoDo apartment but came away with little more than a pile of ashes in
a cold fireplace, the remains of fake passports and bogus checking
statements. Months later, with Richards's trail all but invisible, his
pursuers caught a lucky break: U.S. Customs agents arrested Richards's
26-year-old girlfriend, Mitra Hagh, at the Canadian border. A search
of her car provided a small clue that touched offa race between
Richards and DEA agents to recover nearly $6,000,000 in hard cash
sitting in a storage locker in Fort Collins.

Once Richards stopped running earlier this year, ending the game by
his own hand, agents recovered a total of $9,737,171 -- all of it in
currency -- stashed in Colorado and Kansas, the largest cash seizures
ever made in both states. Bank accounts around the world attributed to
Richards's aliases continue to produce hundreds of thousands more in
drug dollars. The true amount of his vast wealth is unknown.

And though he's now a dead man, local and federal authorities still
won't release a mug shot of Richards. They claim his picture alone
would jeopardize ongoing DEA investigations -- including lives on both
sides of the drug war. Richards, it is now known, worked under at
least twenty names and traveled freely between Canada, the U.S. and
Mexico with fake passports for each country. His ability to shed his
identity almost at will, even to con the drug agents trying to corral
him, is a tribute to the innate skills that made him so elusive -- and
so successful -- up until the end.