You are about to read one of the most rollicking, real-life adventure stories ever written: Sugar Alpha, the first half of Roger and Melissa Nelson’s Sugar Alpha Chronicles, the original draft of which Roger wrote while doing time in federal prison for tax evasion and running a “Continuing Criminal Enterprise.” Roger died in a skydiving accident before he could get it ready for prime time, so his daughter Melissa took the project to the next level, then enlisted me to put the finishing touches on this tale that will make you mad and happy and keep you amazed and utterly entertained from the first word to the last—which pretty much also describes the amazing man around whom the whole tale revolves.
Roger Nelson lived life out of the box. Whatever he went after in life, he injected into it big dreams and big ideas, always framed by those two big questions that are the holy grail for out-of-the box thinkers: “Why?” and “Why not?”
Roger went after three main things in life; sport parachuting and drug smuggling, two activities connected by a love for adrenalin, adventure and high-wire-without-a-net consequences if you make too many mistakes; and his family, the needs and wants of which were usually out of sync with and often diametrically opposed to the wants and needs of his other loves.
Let’s start with parachuting, the arena in which I knew him—or knew of him—for close to 20 years. When he died in 2003 at age 47, Roger Nelson had more than 9,000 jumps, 100 hours of freefall time, multiple instructor ratings and a two-year stint as a director on the board of the U.S. Parachute Association. He was also a commercially-rated pilot with more than 10,000 flight hours.
Beyond the numbers, however, Roger left a legacy not only as one of sport parachuting’s most dynamic, colorful and controversial characters, but as one who arguably accomplished more than anyone before or since to change the sport’s thinking and practices so it could develop it into the amazing extreme sport community it is today.
He organized parachute centers more like ski resorts and hosted large skydiving “boogies” that were basically raves with airplanes and parachutes as well as the standard partying that went along with that. He engineered competitive skydiving innovations so far outside the box but still inside the rules that flummoxed event organizers disqualified his team the first year he did it only to… well, you’ll learn in Sugar Alpha what finally happened.
Not long after that, Roger developed student training and equipment doctrine so outrageously different but so unassailably better than the status quo that it shook the souls of parachuting’s “that’s-the-way-we’ve-always-done-it” crowd and changed almost everything about how people now learn to skydive. And all along the way, his personality and personal adventures gave rise to stories told so many times around so many parachute center fire pits that they became legends and cartoons—except that, as it turned out, the more outrageous and unbelievable the tale was, the more likely it was to be true.
That’s because Roger Nelson’s second great adrenalin love was drug smuggling, a secret life he began living not long after he started jumping. He’d done low-level drug dealing in high school and, out-of-box thinker that he was, he noticed a lot of airplanes sitting at airports doing nothing when they could be in the air doing something productive. He also noticed that both pilots and skydivers seemed to like living on the edge as much as possible even if they weren’t exactly thinking outside of the box—so he combined these two elements and his alchemy produced a gold mine of adrenalin, adventure, cannabis, cocaine and Krugerrands. Roger was unarguably a drug smuggler par excellence and one of the most innovative and methodical drug outlaws who ever ran a gig. As he did with parachuting, he challenged conventional wisdom and came up with ways to bring top-shelf weed into the United States that both satisfied his customers and boggled the minds of federales and fellow smugglers alike when they figured out what he was doing. It was not for nothing that he was known among drug smugglers as Señor Huevos Grandes.
But eventually the feds did figure it out and so, after a 20-year run as a full-time professional parachutist and 15 years of “pioneering outside the sport,” as he sardonically put it to me in a 1997 Skydiving Magazine interview, Roger pleaded guilty to several drug and tax evasion charges, forfeited a pile of assets and in 1987, surrendered to federal authorities for an extended, all-expense paid vacation as a guest of the United States government.
He was also trying to be less colorful; while he’d always had a not-so-noticeable spiritual side, Roger had in prison become bunkmates and close friends with disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker and, as a result, Christianity essentially replaced drug smuggling in the non-skydiving part of his life. Gone were the wild days and nights of partying and hell-raising, and the “pioneering outside the sport” recounted in The Sugar Alpha Chronicles. When reminded of adventures past, however, Roger acknowledged them cheerfully, as he did during our Skydiving interview when at one point I asked: “What was that story about you and Kong at Freak Brothers a few years back? Something about local whuffos (non-skydivers), a chain bolted to a baseball bat and a .357 magnum?”
“That wasn’t at Freak Brothers,” Roger replied without hesitation. “That was the Nationals—and it was a .44 magnum.”
And then he died. Fortunately for us, The Sugar Alpha Chronicles still live, with all of their great storytelling, compelling characters, outrageous adventures—and object lessons about the lure of money and power, and the oxymoron that is “good government.” As I said earlier, Sugar Alpha is a rollicking, real-life adventure tale about skydiving and pot smuggling and loyalty and brotherhood and pushing the limits a dozen different ways. I’ll leave the second half of the Chronicles alone for now except to say that it’s provisionally called Charlie Bravo, and it’s a darker, more dangerous and disturbing saga about cocaine smuggling, personal betrayal and political corruption—and those high-wire-without-a-net consequences I also mentioned earlier.
Fortunately for Roger, the skydiving and drug smuggling that was so out of sync with and diametrically opposed to the wants and needs of his family did not in the end prevent him from being as successful a family man as he was a jumper and outlaw—and the unarguable proof of that is the children he and his wife Jeanie produced, all in the middle of the maelstrom that was his first two loves. I know both Melissa and Rook. I respect and admire them both, and every time I think of who they are and what they themselves have already achieved, I tip my hat to their father and mother and say, “well done, Mom and Dad, well done”—and I know that praise would mean more to him than any accolades for his many parachuting or smuggling accomplishments.
In the end, Roger Nelson had everything he ever wanted except a longer life, and even on that score, he came out all right, too, at least according to the man whose face he saw so often during his 47 years.
“A long life may not be good enough,” said Ben Franklin, whose name is synonymous in outlaw circles with the American $100 bill on which he appears, “but a good life is long enough.”
Good thing for Roger that the first Franklin didn’t say life had to be legal to be good.
—Robin “Black Death” Heid, Northridge, California, April 2013