September 5th, 2023
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Trey Scott
Three Flames Productions

MONTANA - Many of the Coronado Company members, with either very short or longer involvement with their operations, have died. Those who are still alive are now well into their 70’s.

After hearing from several confirmed reports about Lou’s death, we are officially announcing that fact - Lou Villar is dead at 86.

Like many lives, we are all complicated. There was a side of Lou that shined as he took on coaching high school students and teaching them Spanish at Coronado High School in the late 60’s and early 70’s. He was a role model and admired. His past was a mystery though and the few who he may have confided with about his past, have not shared that history. We do know he was born in Cuba and his youth was spent in Brooklyn, NY.

This said, there was a dark side to Lou. His moral compass was askew from the start and this resulted in his quiet departure from the school, forced by the School Board. He languished until original members of the Coronado Company approached him while on the roof, painting a house alongside his former student and Coronado Historian and author, Joe Ditler.

Eddie Otero, Lance Weber and Paul Acree needed a Spanish translator as they were long done with swimming bales of Mexican marijuana across the border from the Tijuana bullring to Imperial Beach. They were also keen on bigger payloads, tonnage in weed that they were operationally moving across the border. Night operations in black Zodiacs.

To this day, no one knows what Lou said and translated for the Coronado Company but living members of the group are confident, Lou managed to negotiate a cut of the deal on the side for his own benefit. He saw the opportunity and seized it.

And he never let go.

He managed to be involved in every deal afterwards with Company members, many of them his former students. But his role lasted only briefly on the beach, where the actual operations occurred. He handled the money and saw to it that he garnered the bulk of the wealth being generated on the backs of Company members.

The darkest chapter was of course, when they were all busted in Santa Barbara and Lou flipped, became a snitch for his freedom, always negotiating, and walked free while many of the Coronado Company members did hard time in prison.

Lou began to live off the radar, changed his name to JR Reynolds, and reportedly lived in Oregon and Montana while traveling extensively in his RV, playing golf and pickleball. His notoriety surfaced though and his reputation was leveraged by writer Josh Bearman who featured Lou’s story along with the Coronado Company in an article for Atavist magazine with an excerpt appearing in GQ magazine. The sources for this story were the snitches in the Coronado Company, along with the arresting officer. The story was eventually optioned for a motion picture deal. Lou continued to receive option money for his story until the project lost momentum.

His betrayal of his former students and Company members was unforgivable based on the code of smugglers. Lou was selfish and managed to escape many of the consequences his former students had to endure after the end of the Coronado Company.

The Coronado Company in many ways is an early history of weed in the 60’s and 70’s and early 80’s. It was before the powders and cartel beheadings, the turf wars and gang tattoos.

The true story of the Coronado Company is being developed to this date. Lou’s passing is a milestone and a reminder that as stories evolve over time, long past those who lived it, we all eventually, turn a page and leave life behind.

For more information about the Coronado Company story and to share any thoughts or memories about members, please use our Contact form on this website.

Dec. 20, 2021
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Trey Scott
Three Flames Productions

TRUE STORY OF ‘CORONADO COMPANY’ GOES GLOBAL

International Journalist Marianna Van Zeller Interviews Coronado Company Member Lee Strimpel and DEA Agent Jim Conklin.

CORONADO – The story of the global drug smuggling ring, known as the Coronado Company, has been talked about for decades. Now, for the first time, the true story of the Coronado Company comes to light under the careful expertise of Peabody Award winning journalist, Marianna Van Zeller.

During the mid-1960’s through the early 1980’s the Coronado Company was responsible for smuggling hundreds of tons of Mexican and high-grade marijuana (known as Thai sticks) from Thailand into the US along the isolated shorelines of California and Maine. This also included shipments of Middle eastern hashish from Afghanistan & Morocco.

The sophisticated operations of the Coronado Company began humbly, with surfers, under cover of darkness, swimming and paddling kilos of marijuana across the border separating Tijuana and San Diego, as a lark. It soon became a multi-million-dollar operation.

The Coronado Company, as it was to become known, was made up of local high school students and navy brats from Coronado, who, along with their ex-high school Spanish teacher, brought staggering amounts of weed into the country.

The soundtrack to this story echoes the social changes going on in this country during the celebrated Summer of Love that historians now refer to as the liberating and revolutionary era of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Van Zeller, along with the popular National Geographic series, TRAFFICKED, showcases a variety of topics that are all underground and crime related. Her 2nd Season features an episode on the black market for marijuana that still persists, in spite of legalization. The production company, Muck Media, reached out to Lee Strimpel for an interview.

Strimpel, working in tandem with a production company led by local San Diegan, Joe Balla and his CoroCo LLC, have been developing a limited series podcast and eventual series for streaming platforms all about the Coronado Company, with the end goal of creating a streamed series unlike any other.

Most of the original members of the Company are dead now, but Balla and his team have been working on the Coronado Company story for years, collecting interviews, testimonials, photographs, book manuscripts and court records. While there have been other efforts to capture this unique and nearly-unbelievable story, this is the first one that relies on truth to capture not only the players and the events, but the era as well.

Lee Strimpel, who has quietly been working on a Montana ranch for recovering veterans these past few years, is one of only a small handful of survivors from this era of camaraderie and intrigue. “Quite simply, this is a tragic story of friendships and betrayal,” said Strimpel. “Fast cars and endless streams of money for some of the crew. We thought there was no end in sight. We had quite a life together, before government informants ended it all.”

Jim Conklin, the DEA agent who is also interviewed for the National Geographic podcast suggested the same. “We rarely catch these guys unless an informant is willing to work for us,” said Conklin. “My team and I followed them, and uncountable leads and clues for years, before we brought them down.”

The attached link is a 44-minute podcast featuring those two men, each telling their story in the most visual and dramatic manner.

To listen to the podcast, click here.

By Lily Yates 02/12/2022 (Updated 2/17/22)

View the original article to see embedded media here.

The saga of the former Coronado drug smuggling ring known as the Coronado Company is one that many locals know well, but hearing islanders talk openly about it has been rare. Now, a group of Coronado High School (CHS) graduates and a media producer aim to bring the tale to a larger audience, and they’re looking for contributors to help bring it to life.

In December 2021, the team, which works under the name CoroCoLLC, launched a new website as the hub for all news relating to the ongoing media project; it is also a space for people to share their own stories. Anyone interested in submitting anecdotes, documents, or photos relating to the people or events of the Coronado Company is encouraged to use the site’s submission form with the option to remain anonymous if desired.

The smuggling ring these contributions will focus around operated in Coronado from the mid 1960s to the early 1980s, running hundreds of tons of Mexican marijuana into the U.S. with the help of local high school students and their former Spanish teacher, Lou Villar. Eventually, they had netted over $100 million. The team behind CoroCoLLC has been collecting information on the time period for years already; a podcast series is in the works, and a potential extended streaming series could follow.

While the project’s premiere date is yet to be announced, the team’s media producer, Trey Scott, expects a great deal of public interest in light of the traffic the new website has already garnered; Joe Balla agrees. A San Diego native, 1971 CHS graduate, and the project’s executive producer, Balla is currently working with a talent agency to probe various options for realizing the series. “Bottling magic,” he says of what they hope to achieve.

Balla refers to a time when Southern California was swept up in the so-called “Summer of Love” of 1969, the revolutionary era of Beach Boys, Beatles, and an emerging surf culture. Lee Strimpel, project contributor and himself a former member of the Company, remembers a simpler Coronado as seen through a teenager’s eyes. “At that time, we didn’t have any stop signs except across Orange Avenue,” says Strimpel. “Our hobby, other than going to Mexico on weekends, was cruising, finding some guy to go buy us some beer and cruising the island at 25 cents a gallon, driving along all night long.”

In the early days, several Coronado Company members actually paddled marijuana bales across the border from Tijuana to Coronado; a small group was eventually arrested and served jail time for their connections to the ring. Strimpel has, in the past, shared his story to CHS classes in hopes that students might better understand the potential consequences of their actions. Now, he helps run a Montana ranch that supports wounded veterans.

Strimpel has also recently been featured in an episode of National Geographic’s “Trafficked” podcast series. However, with the new project, he has specific ideas about what he’d like to get across. “Who can tell the story? Some of the legal guys are still around you know, but most of our key people have passed away,” he says. This includes his friends Bob Lahodney and Eddie Otero, also part of the ring and who have passed away in recent years. “I’ve made a commitment to both of those guys in that when it’s storytelling time, I’ll make sure that they’re honored and the truth is told about who they were,” he says.

Over the decades, others have been interested in telling this story on a public scale, but the team thinks this project will be different. “It’s a story that everybody thinks should be told, but the attempts thus far to tell it have fallen short. I think all of us agree on that,” says Joe Ditler, 1969 CHS graduate, author of the book “Coronado Confidential” and longtime consultant for the project. “It’s about time that the true story of the Coronado Company was told.”