The Man Who Got America High

He chartered the Rolling Stones while smuggling Pablo Escobar’s drugs on the side. After disappearing for decades, Alfred Dellentash finally shares his unbelievable life story.

Illustrations by Naomi Elliott | Edited by Brendan Spiegel

It is seven o'clock on a humid Los Angeles evening, and business is winding down at a suburban car showroom. I walk past a team of guys polishing Japanese hybrids with bright white rags, past the twenty-five-cent gumball machines and into the air-conditioned office. An attorney has arranged this meeting with one of America’s most mysterious men — who has reportedly had surgery to change his identity — at his place of work.

His name is Alfred Dellentash. When I first punched his name into Google, six months ago, the results were simply baffling. First, there is an archived People magazine article from 1978, titled: ‘TOURING ROCK STARS GO TO AL DELLENTASH WHEN THEY REALLY WANT TO GET HIGH.’ The headline is a clever joke, you see, because the story is about his multi-million-dollar private jet-leasing business, which he built in his twenties: “Among the acts that have chartered Dellentash's three Convairs, two helicopters and a Boeing 707 are the Rolling Stones, KISS and the Grateful Dead.”

The next hit told me Dellentash was moonlighting as a wingman for two of history’s most deadly criminal organizations, flying Pablo Escobar’s drugs from Colombia to the Gambino crime family in New York. His mile-high empire was a front for the most rock ’n’ roll drug smuggling ring in history. Ironically, Dellentash was secretly getting the whole of America high — hiding in plain sight as a chartered plane provider, and later, a music manager for 1980s acts including Meat Loaf and the Bay City Rollers.

I requested to speak to Dellentash through Jack Dampf, the Baton Rouge attorney who represented him during his 1984 trial in which Dellentash was charged with criminal conspiracy to distribute drugs. As soon as I mentioned the name "Dellentash," Dampf broke into laughter and told me: “Boy, this is one hell of a story.”

Online speculators have tried to link Dellentash’s name to the famous D.B. Cooper hijacking in 1971 (he was too young and short to have been Cooper), the C.I.A.’s covert operations in South America, and even the 9/11 terror attacks in New York — tinfoil-hat theorists discovered that Dellentash’s father was once a contractor on the World Trade Center. But the truth is not out there.

Here in the car showroom, he is known to colleagues as "Dell." While I wait, one of them, Susan, tells me her favorite Dell story: She was dealing with an angry customer who was rejected for poor credit. In a rage the thug rose to strike her, but Dellentash came from nowhere and subdued him with an expert arm twist.

And suddenly he is ready to see me.

Today, Alfred Dellentash, sixty-six, is mustachioed and bespectacled, wearing a colorful Hawaiian shirt. If there has been any surgery, I cannot see it. The expensive Italian shoes are the only glimpse of his past, when he infuriated the fusty airline industry by staffing his jet planes with Playboy models. According to feverish reports online, back then he was the equivalent of Richard Branson and Tony “Scarface” Montana.

In an office full of salesman trophies, I politely request his first extended interview since being released from his twenty-five-year jail sentence, of which he served just a fifth. I offer the chance to tell how it really happened, for the first time. But Dellentash explains that his head is compartmentalized — he keeps his past locked in a shadowy corner of his mind. This showroom, he says with a wave of his hand, was the choice he made long ago: to leave his past behind and stop running, to enter civilian life and try to win back the only woman who could keep up with him at full flight. He turns down my request.

Weeks later I am surprised when my telephone rings, and a thick New York accent asks:

“Where do you want to start?”