Barry Seal Net Worth: How Much Money Did Barry Seal Make?

In 1981, Seal began smuggling cocaine for the Medellin Cartel. At his peak, he earned as much as $500,000 per flight transporting shipments of cocaine from Colombia to the United States.

Seal’s smuggling method was to use low-flying planes and airdrop drug packages in remote areas of Louisiana. They were then picked up by Seal’s ground team and transported to the Colombian distributors in Florida. By 1982, Seal was using over a dozen aircraft in his smuggling operation. The number of planes and the frequency of flights soon attracted the attention of Louisiana State Police and Federal investigators.

To avoid this unwanted attention, Seal moved his aircraft to Mena Intermountain Regional Airport in Mena, Arkansas, where he did maintenance and modifications to improve the planes’ carrying capacity and avionics.

Seal’s activities in Mena later became the subject of rumor and controversy, but according to Seal’s biographer, former FBI agent Del Hahn, Seal did not use Mena as a drug transshipment point.