On the run: author Tyler Wetherall on growing up with a dad constantly running from the FBI

When my dad needed to make a business call, we drove to the nearest pay phone.

As a young girl, I played at being secretary, handing him 20p pieces. I never questioned why he didn’t use the landline at home. He carried a locked attaché case and scribbled numbers on a yellow legal pad, but I never saw him actually go to work. I didn’t question this either. And I didn’t question why in my short life we had moved a dozen times through five countries, and counting.

I would later learn that when I first arrived in England in 1987, as a three-year-old girl, my family was on the run from the FBI. Dad’s organisation had been charged with smuggling 100 tons of marijuana worth nearly half a billion dollars from Thailand into the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The investigation started before I was born. By the time I was one, there was a surveillance team at the end of our driveway.

Dad came from a nice middle-class Jewish family. He met my mother in the Sixties, then a British model, and they fell in love. They drove around New York on matching Choppers, my mother in denim hot pants and Dad in cowboy boots and a cape billowing behind him. Dad started his career on Wall Street as a stockbroker, but in 1970s New York, other more lucrative opportunities presented themselves and under Jimmy Carter’s liberal administration, the penalties for pot smuggling seemed less severe. He and my mother later relocated to California and built us a beautiful yellow house beside a private lake. When trouble came, they didn’t want to break up our happy family, so they decided we would all go on the run together: Mum, Dad, my big brother and sister, and me.

The following years were peripatetic: an apartment in Rome, then Forte dei Marmi; onwards through Spain on an 18-hour sleeper train; and then Portugal, where we settled for a moment until Dad grew anxious of apprehension. So we changed names and moved again: a house in the Alps; and then Mougins, a luxury enclave for the dubiously wealthy (dictators and arms dealers were among our neighbours) until finally we settled in England.

My parents separated shortly after arriving in the UK, and my dad moved into a tall white town house just off King’s Road. London became the first city that felt like home — the first in which he believed we could be safe from the reach of the law. We lived with Mum and visited Dad every other weekend. He wasn’t like other boring old dads. He turned up at the school gates wearing a leather jacket driving a black BMW we called the Batmobile, always with a streak of mischief. Weekends at his house meant staying up late watching The Simpsons and having takeaway pizza before bed.

Ours was a London of the late 1980s: we rollerbladed in Hyde Park, rented videos from Blockbuster and hung out at the Trocadero. When friends’ parents asked why we had left the States, alerted by my transatlantic accent, I lied without knowing it. I said my parents wanted us to get a European education. I said they believed travelling to be good for kids. I said my mum wanted to be closer to her English family. The ease with which I switched stories makes me wonder if part of me, even then, understood we had something to hide.

I knew my name was Tyler Kane. It was sewn on the tags of my school uniform and called out in registration every morning. But I also knew my name was Tyler Wetherall, because it said so on my passport. I knew Dad’s name was Martin Kane, but I had heard him called Ben, too. Martin Kane was, in fact, a baby killed during the Second World War. In the 1980s, birth certificates were easily procured from hospitals and these could be used to develop a new identity, under which Dad could open a bank account, pay taxes; he even went to court for a speeding ticket and the authorities were none the wiser.

Living in London, Dad felt secure enough that when an opportunity arose to work with a pair of seasoned pot smugglers to invest their fortune, he accepted. He says he needed the money. But it had to be more than that — and more than hubris alone. Maybe he accepted because it was a touchstone to his former self, the self he had left behind in the US. All the same, when I found out, I was hurt; I wanted to know how he could risk the chance to watch us grow up all over again, and whether what he gained was worth it.

I was nine years old when I walked home from school one day to find two strangers in our front room. Straight away I knew something bad was happening, without knowing why. A week later, I learned those two strangers were detectives from Scotland Yard and they were looking for our dad. I was heartbroken. Dad wasn’t the person I thought he was, which meant neither was I. But worst of all, he had gone without saying goodbye. The police had raided his tall white town house in London, leaving a padlock on the front door and yellow police tape across the entrance, but by then Dad had escaped into Europe.

He made contact soon after and over the next two years we never lost touch. We set up a secret system of calls from pay phones, and later we visited him despite the surveillance, each time fearful that on this occasion we would be followed. Eventually, some of his associates tipped off Scotland Yard that I would fly to him for my 12th birthday, and they followed me to St Lucia where he was in hiding. When Dad was finally caught, he had been on the run for more than a decade. I was so shaken, I don’t remember much from this time, only a little later a sense of relief. The years of separation ahead were daunting, but at least one day it would be over.

My siblings and I visited him every summer throughout the five years and four months he served of his decade-long sentence in California. I had always been on Dad’s side, and he was on mine; but during his incarceration, I started to question the choices he had made. In the logic of a 14-year-old girl, I felt if he had really loved us, he wouldn’t have done it, and as I tried to work out that hurt, I did what teens do, and all of it too young.

I never confronted Dad back then; I wanted to make his sentence easier. Over time I came to see his choices in shades more graded than black and white. By the time he was released when I was 18 I had come to realise that he could have walked away from us and then he would have been free, but he didn’t and I knew he never would have. We have talked about it at length since, long conversations under the shade of the lemon trees in his garden in California, and I know these chats helped him, too.

When I moved to London in 2004 to work as a writer, it seemed a different city to me than that of my childhood. Dad flew over from the States to visit me in my cramped flat in Borough. We went to Fulham and passed the park he used to take us to as kids. I remember him breaking us into an adventure playground — the type with climbing frames and zip lines rented out for big groups — his eyes bright as he held up the wire fence for us to crawl under, and us thrilled to have the place to ourselves. When we got caught he wasn’t worried, giggling as we walked away from an angry security guard. We laugh about it now, and I realise that those years weren’t make believe after all. He was the same Dad — loving and kind — as the man walking beside me now, his past finally behind him.

*Some names have been changed.

No Way Home: A Memoir Of Life On The Run (St Martin’s Press) by Tyler Wetherall is out now