LOCAL ANGLERS REEL IN A BIG ONE

Andy Crean, Royal Radtke hook $500,000 bale of marijuana off Mexican
coast, turn it over to U.S. Coast Guard.

NEWPORT BEACH -- A pair of prominent residents boated down to Mexico
hoping for a few halibut steaks and instead reeled in a $500,000 bale
of marijuana.

"We saw this thing floating and didn't know what it was," said Royal
S. Radtke, former president of the Corona del Mar Chamber of Commerce.
"We pulled it aboard to see what it was and when we cut it open, it
was [100 pounds of] high-grade marijuana."

Andy Crean, owner of Villa Nova restaurant, had taken his father's
$10.5-million boat down to Mexico for a three-week vacation with
Radtke. They were about 12 miles off the shore of Cabo San Lucas when
they saw what appeared to be a bale of taped hay floating in the
ocean, said Crean.

They hooked the object, pulled it in and cut it open.

"We didn't know if it was money or a dead body," Radtke
said.

But once they ripped through the tape, the odor made it abundantly
clear what it was.

"We were freaked and started laughing hysterically." Radtke recalled,
adding that there were 20 individually wrapped blocks of marijuana in
the bale.

They immediately called the U.S. Coast Guard, which arrived at the
behemoth yacht, Donna C. III, waiting for their catch.

Donning surgical gloves, masks and blue hospital-like gowns, Coast
Guard seamen told Radtke and Crean to simply throw the bale of
marijuana into their Zodiac, which is basically a small, rubber boat.

"It was like they were handling the plague or something," Crean said.
"The bundle hit the [Zodiac's] tube and all 20 packages went flying."

The deft seamen scrambled and collected all the blocks.

After the excitement was over -- and vacation photographs, with an
issue of the Daily Pilot, were taken -- they made their way back to
shore.

Crean told friends on the mainland that they had caught a "definite
tournament winner, but released it to the Coast Guard."