Court Sheds More Light on Arrest of Teacher, Boatman

A Long Beach boatman who has been charged--along with an Edison High School teacher--with money laundering was arrested 13 years ago on a drug charge, court records made public Thursday show.

John Frederick Ford, 41, a self-employed boat builder and skipper, was arrested in 1974 for possession of cocaine with intent to sell, but the charge was “subsequently dismissed for lack of probable cause,” Allan J. Roth, a financial investigations officer with the state Department of Justice, had stated in an application for search warrants.

Those documents, which did not elaborate further on that arrest, were filed Thursday in Harbor Municipal Court in Newport Beach, where both Ford and science teacher James Ralph Hoyland, 42, of Dana Point appeared for arraignment.

However, Judge Selim Franklin continued the arraignment until Dec. 30, and both men were taken to Orange County Jail in downtown Santa Ana, where they remained Christmas Eve in lieu of $2-million bail each.

Ford, who lives in Belmont Shore, and Hoyland, who has taught science for 18 years at Edison High School in Huntington Beach, were arrested Tuesday night at their homes as a result of a yearlong investigation involving officers of the Newport Beach and Long Beach police departments and the Justice Department’s Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement.

Before the arrests, authorities confiscated $1.3 million in cash and gold from the bank safe deposit boxes of one or both men and seized Hoyland’s 53-foot racing schooner, the Zamazaan, from its Long Beach Marina mooring, as well as his Porsche and two Maserati automobiles.

Also searched were financial accounts at four bank branches, a Hoyland account at the Orange County Teachers Credit Union, Hoyland’s $450-a-month Dana Point apartment and the Zamazaan, a schooner worth about $250,000 that Hoyland bought from Ford, authorities said.

While the residue of a narcotic was allegedly detected on the Zamazaan by an Orange County Sheriff’s Department dog, neither Ford nor Hoyland has been charged with a drug offense. Newport Beach Officer Bob Oakley said Thursday that “we have no evidence in that direction at this time.”

However, the court documents made public Thursday accuse the pair of drug trafficking. And the papers state that a convicted cocaine smuggler was interviewed aboard the Zamazaan in San Diego Bay late the night of Dec. 15 by a Customs Service inspector “who was unaware of the narcotics ‘lookout’ (alert) on the vessel,” Roth wrote.

Despite authorization of a search warrant on Dec. 7, the schooner had not been searched, Roth said, because it was somewhere at sea.

But he said both the Coast Guard and the Customs Service were aware of the schooner’s “suspected involvement in narcotics trafficking.”

On Dec. 16, Roth wrote, he learned from a San Diego Harbor police officer he identified only as Goodwin that “the Zamazaan had entered San Diego Bay the previous evening at 11:25 p.m.” The officer notified customs officers.

According to Roth, Goodwin had said a customs inspector who was unaware of the alert on the vessel, boarded the Zamazaan and got the name of one of three persons on board, Robert R. Wallace, 38, who filled out a customs declaration.

The Zamazaan left San Diego Bay at 1 a.m. “without a thorough search of the vessel being conducted,” Roth wrote, adding that the destination of the schooner was unknown. The same day, Dec. 16, a Newport Beach detective, David Byington, learned that Wallace was “on record” with the Drug Enforcement Administration as having been arrested in February, 1979, in Bogota, Columbia, for cocaine trafficking. Wallace was released from prison five months later, Roth wrote.

In arguing successfully that the search warrants be issued, Roth identified a Seal Beach man who he said was believed to be trucking supplies to Mexico for the Zamazaan for a yacht race last month from Long Beach to Cabo San Lucas. Roth said he had seen the man before the race and linked him with Ford and Hoyland as “co-conspirators” in “a much larger organization involved in the trafficking of controlled substances and laundering money.”

Roth wrote that it was his belief that the man “is more than a casual acquaintance of Ford and is in a position to transport money out of the United States and/or return to the United States with narcotic contraband in furtherance of the conspiracy by Hoyland and Ford to traffic in controlled substances and launder money.”

Times staff writer Bob Schwartz contributed to this report.