Perlowin, who lives in Oakland, said he has sent out about 30 of the resumes so far, and gotten back about 10 positive responses.

He has not nailed down anything yet, but he said an “environmentally conscious” company handling a food product harvested in the rain forest has tentatively offered him a position as a national sales manager.

“I feel I’m highly qualified to enter the job market,” he said. “I’ve demonstrated my organizational skills.”

And quite an organization it was.

Perlowin–a slight, soft-spoken man of 41 who sounds more like a ’60s flower child than an entrepreneurial giant of the ’80s–cheerfully admits to running an operation that used a fleet of 90 boats and ships to haul 500,000 pounds of marijuana into California between 1974 and 1983. Sales totaled half a billion dollars.

He tells how he hired a research firm in Berkeley to study how other major drug dealers had operated, “finding out what mistakes they had made,” and seeking out the weak spots in law enforcement so he could set up his own counterintelligence system.

He talks about his hilltop surveillance centers that overlooked San Francisco Bay, crammed with sophisticated electronic gear used to monitor the FBI, Coast Guard, Drug Enforcement Administration, customs agents and police.

He mentions the 1,000-foot pier he bought in the bay, safely under the radar shadow cast by the Richmond Bridge, where he set up a dummy boat-building works to cover massive offloadings of marijuana, “right under their noses.”

Also, he describes an elaborate money-laundering scheme–involving a Las Vegas casino, a Luxembourg trust, a Panamanian corporation and a bank in the Grand Cayman Islands–that he used to process the vast flow of small-denomination “street bills” generated by his illicit business.

And he reminisces, a bit wistfully, about the $3-million mansion that he built in a lovely canyon in Mendocino County–complete with bulletproof walls, a stairway that could be electrified to repel invaders and a complex communications center that tied him to the disparate operations of his international smuggling ring.

Thirty months after federal agents closed down his marijuana operation in 1983, Perlowin told The Times in a jail interview that he had been “the biggest in California–one of the biggest anywhere. No one else came close to the scale we were operating on.”

Federal officials did not dispute any of this.

“He’s for real,” Assistant U.S. Atty. James Lassart, head of a drug task force in San Francisco, said at the time. “When you meet him, you think he’s kind of flaky. But after you get to know him, you realize what he says is true. We corroborated it.”

Perlowin, who admits that he used to be “addicted to greed,” says it all started when he discovered as a teen-ager in Florida that there was enormous profit in selling marijuana to his high school friends.

“I thought people should smoke pot, take LSD, to expand their perceptions,” he said, recalling that he had justified his actions by telling himself that he “cared” about his customers.

As Perlowin’s sales expanded from ounces to pounds and eventually tons of marijuana each week, he moved his operations to California.

Transport planes were acquired to fly potent Punta Roja marijuana from the interior of Colombia to the coast, where it was loaded on boats recruited from the financially troubled Northern California fishing fleet. Larger craft–a 125-foot tug and an 85-foot minesweeper–stood by to assist in case of a breakdown on the 4,500-mile voyage to his dock in San Francisco Bay.

Perlowin said that by spring in 1983, his personal profit had totaled more than $30 million.

He said that even as he was mapping plans for one last, great haul before retiring from the smuggling business, one of his employees, documentation in hand, had begun talking to the FBI.

On March 11, 1983, Perlowin was on a jetliner, “headed for a yoga class in Detroit,” when the plane made a stopover in Chicago.

Perlowin wrote the unusual resume upon his release last month from nine years in federal prison, reasoning that, under the circumstances, filling out an ordinary job application would be “somewhat preposterous.”

The resume referred to Perlowin’s considerable management abilities, honed as he built and ran a smuggling empire that used a fleet of 90 boats and ships to haul 500,000 pounds of marijuana into California, with sales totaling half a billion dollars.

One of those who read the resume was Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa, a former manager of the Grateful Dead rock group who now heads Rainforest Products. “I think he’ll do a great job,” Khalsa said. “He’s shown that he’s imaginative and can work on a large scale while keeping track of details at the same time.”

He tells how he hired a research firm in Berkeley to learn how other major drug dealers had operated, “finding out what mistakes they had made” and seeking out the “weak spots” in law enforcement so he could set up his own counterintelligence system.

He mentions the hilltop surveillance centers overlooking San Francisco Bay, crammed with sophisticated electronic gear used to monitor the Coast Guard, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, Customs agents and local police.

He brags a little about the 1,000-foot pier he bought in the bay, safely under the radar shadow cast by the Richmond Bridge, where he set up a dummy boat-building works to cover massive offloadings of marijuana–“right under their noses.”

Money Laundering

He describes an elaborate “money-laundering” scheme–involving a Las Vegas casino, a Luxembourg Trust, a Panamanian corporation and a bank in the Grand Cayman Islands–that he used to process the vast flow of small-denomination “street bills” generated by his illicit business.

And he reminisces–a bit sadly–about the $3-million mansion that he built in a lovely canyon in rural Mendocino County; complete with bullet-proof walls lined with steel, a stairway that could be electrified to repel invaders and a complex communications center that tied him to the disparate operations of his international drug-smuggling ring.

“I was the biggest in California–one of the biggest anywhere,” Perlowin said. “Nobody else came close to the scale we were operating on.”

Federal officials don’t dispute the point.

“He’s for real,” said Asst. U.S. Atty. James Lassart, head of the federal task force in San Francisco that put Perlowin behind bars.

‘What He Says Is True’

“When you first meet him, you think he’s kind of flaky,” Lassart said. “But after you get to know him, you realize what he says is true. We’ve corroborated it.

“He’s a very intelligent man. Very organized. He ran a very heady operation–the biggest we’ve ever seen.”

Perlowin–who has been spending most of his time recently at the federal penitentiary in Texarkana, Tex., where he has been serving concurrent sentences after pleading guilty to racketeering, income tax evasion, currency violations, smuggling and engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise–is currently in the San Francisco County Jail.

Prosecutors here are trying to get him to testify before a federal grand jury about some of his more than 200 associates in the smuggling operation.