Dan Davis, just back from a world tour and meeting the Dalai Lama, met with old friends from Onida on Saturday in Pierre, signing copies of his book on being a world-traveling drug fugitive and longtime federal prisoner.

“I’m June Cary,” said June Cary Classen as she approached Davis in the Prairie Pages Bookseller in Pierre.

“JUNE!,” Davis said, getting up to hug her.

She was class of 1975, he was class of 1972 in Onida.

“I hadn’t seen him since high school, which is why I came to Pierre,” she said.

She and Davis caught up, as she shared where her family and relatives were now.

Davis was born in Pierre but spent his childhood in Onida, living down the block from Peggy Stout, an owner of Prairie Pages.

Davis’ “Gringo: My Life On the Edge As An International Fugitive,” has sold dozens of copies at her stores since it came out late last year, Stout said.

Davis’ story is improbable and makes his old friends shake their heads and smile.

Believe it or not, Davis was a Boy Scout growing up in Onida where he excelled at wrestling and – as he has done everywhere, from Venezuelan drug deals to federal prisons in Nevada and Minnesota — making friends.

Some came Saturday to renew the old friendships.

After high school – “we didn’t even have pot in Onida back then” – Davis learned how much money he could make selling little white pills marked with a cross while at Black Hills State College in Spearfish.

He soon figured he needed a bigger market, he said and moved on to the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

He and a friend got serious about dealing the “white crosses,” known as speed at the time, although Davis says he found out after his partner’s lab work, they were actually ephedrine. It wasn’t an illegal drug at the time, but it gave users the effects of speed and sold by the sackful.

In 1978 he was 24 and making $200,000 a week – about $1 million in today’s dollar – flying the three small planes he had bought, to distribute the pills.

He got into dealing cocaine which meant even more money but more danger.

By 1984, the feds had him in their sights and and off he went to prison.

But friends he had made in high places, including his wife’s family, the Liens in Rapid City, helped him avoid even more time, Davis says.

However, his marriage was over, his infant child had died and when he got out of prison in 1990 he had lost millions and houses, planes, oil wells and apartment buildings, he says.

Keeping his promise to the feds to stay away from coke, he began dealing marijuana, he says. Less money but still plenty. Plus, he learned how to stash is money overseas and not to spend it all.

But the feds were onto him again. Facing probable decades in prison because he refused to rat out confederates, he went on the lam, spending 13 years as an international drug crime fugitive until his arrest in Venezuela in 2007. He spent just under nine years in federal prison in Minnesota, released in October 2015, knowing he had a book on his life started.

With writer Peter Conti he finished it last year, living in Key West.

But as part of the charmed life – given all the circumstances – of this man who everyone describes as charming, Davis was released early from federal probation early this year.

“I’m free, totally free, for the first time since, well, 1984, 33 years,” he said Saturday.

So he took off for Cuba, India – where he met and talked with the Dalai Lama, handing him a copy of his book, he says – Thailand, Shanghai and Singapore.

In India he also met a director in the national cinema, “Bollywood,” pitching his life story as a possible movie idea. “Bollywood is bigger than Hollywood,” he says. “They have, what, 1.2 billion people there.”

A steady stream of old friends came to get books signed and share memories, catching up on where everyone is, 45 years since high school .

His mother accompanied him on Saturday. She still lives in Onida and he tells old friends, “Mom is embarrassed by the book.” But she was enjoying seeing old friends from her son’s past in Onida as much as he was.

Davis says he probably won’t stay in Key West, now that he’s “free from federal oversight.

“I’m going to keep on traveling. Like Forrest Gump.”

Capital Journal