On June 14, 2010, Meili Cady, now 29, was busted for carrying 13 suitcases full of weed on a private plane. She writes about being led into a life of crime by her best friend, Lisette Lee, who claimed to be an heiress to the Samsung electronics fortune, in a new book out Tuesday, “Smoke: How A Small-Town Girl Accidentally Wound Up Smuggling 7,000 Pounds of Marijuana with the Pot Princess of Beverly Hills.” Here, Cady exclusively tells The Post’s Kate Storey her tale.
On a bright afternoon, my best friend Lisette and I screech into the parking lot at a Beverly Hills bank in her green Bentley. She pulls a wad of cash out of her Chanel purse.
“It’s $40,000,” she says in her slightly British lilt. “Just follow my lead.”
I had just started working for Lisette as her executive personal assistant, and it’s my first official job.
She clicks in her stilettos up to the teller window, asking to do a transfer for a private jet. When the teller passes through the paperwork, Lisette slides it over to me.
I begin to panic. I know there’s something she’s not telling me. I can hear my heart pounding in my ears as I sign the slip.
That was the day my life turned into a real “Orange Is the New Black.” Piper Kerman, the author of the book and the inspiration for the Netflix series, and I have similar backgrounds. We were both raised in nice, middle-class families in the burbs. We both had squeaky-clean rap sheets. And we were both led into massive drug-smuggling operations by a woman we loved.
My relationship with Lisette Lee was platonic, but I was a naive aspiring actress in Los Angeles looking for comfort when we met in 2005. And Lisette had me wrapped around her little finger.
When I left the small town of Bremerton, Wash., I was 19. I’d always wanted to be an actress, performing in community theater since age 8.
My dad, a real estate agent, and my mom, a nurse, were supportive, giving me enough money to rent a room near Sony Studios in Culver City, Calif., and enroll at an acting studio in the San Fernando Valley.
A friend I met through the studio, Daniel, was the one who introduced me to Lisette.
“You need to make some girlfriends here,” he said one day after class. “I should introduce you to my friend Lisette. She’s the Samsung heiress.”
“The Samsung heiress?” I asked. “As in Samsung Electronics?”
Daniel nodded and took out his phone to show me a photo of her. The woman in the photo was wearing loads of makeup, was stone-faced and seemed totally unapproachable.
A few weeks later, Lisette reached out on Myspace, and we made plans to go shopping together.
When I met Lisette in person, she greeted me with a huge hug. She was so much warmer and sweeter than I expected. We got along famously, chatting about her family — she said her mom was Korean and the granddaughter of the founder of Samsung and her father was Japanese and ran casinos.
Lisette was fascinating and sophisticated. She told me she’d gone to a private prep school called Buckley in Beverly Hills with Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian before going to Harvard at age 16. She said she’d dropped out after two years and had been working for her family at Samsung and performing as a pop star in Korea.
Lisette and I would hang out as much as we could, spending hours at her West Hollywood apartment with the blinds drawn, watching movies like “Scarface,” drinking cocktails and occasionally doing coke. Sometimes, Lisette would take calls from one of the guys she said she was dating — Leonardo DiCaprio, Channing Tatum or one of her other many suitors. But, strangely, I never saw her with any of the A-listers she claimed to date.
Lisette was supportive of my acting career, encouraging me to go out for auditions. I finally scored a role in Showtime’s “Californication,” and I thought my career would just take off from there — even though it was only a scene which implied I was performing oral sex under a restaurant table.
The roles didn’t come rolling in. When things got really tight, I asked Lisette if I could borrow $1,000. Despite always insisting that I should let her know if I was ever short on cash, she gave me a cold, “No.”
But a few months later, she approached me with a different offer.
“I know that you need a job. How would you feel about being my personal assistant?” she asked.
“Of course!” I responded. I was thrilled — I’d have time to go on auditions and I’d be working for my best friend.
I earned $2,000 per monthly flight to Ohio to ensure that her dozen or so suitcases got there OK. I traveled with a rotating roster of hulking men on the private jets paid for with the money in my account.
Lisette skipped the first two trips, and I was expected to play the role of the diva in charge — which didn’t come naturally to me. On one trip I offered to help the guys with the luggage.
“Anyone who would travel with seven suitcases, with a f - - king bodyguard, would never offer to help with the bags!” Lisette yelled at me when she found out.
From then on, Lisette joined us on the jet, and everything was upgraded — there’d be a limo there to pick us up, Champagne waiting in our hotel room, and Lisette would disappear for a few hours with no explanation.
She instructed me to tell my friends and family I’d signed a non-disclosure agreement when I began working for her, so they wouldn’t ask questions. Not that I knew what was going on anyway.
I assumed our trips were a little less than legal. My best guess was that we were doing something related to her dad’s gambling business and she was keeping me in the dark for my own best interests.
When I was Lisette’s employee, our relationship ran hot and cold.
After embarrassing me by calling me T - - s McGee in front of the guys, she’d do something sweet.
“Hold out your hand,” she said one night, dropping a sparkly, emerald-cut diamond ring in my palm. “It’s 2½ carats! It’s a symbol of our friendship.”
I teared up. Lisette wasn’t perfect, but she made me feel special.
Things went on that way until one day, on one of the flights to Ohio, I caught a whiff of weed. That night in the hotel room, I heard Lisette yelling at the guys.
“I was waiting for one of the captains to say something because you could practically get a contact high!” she said. “This is f - - king amateur hour! We need to be more careful!”
It finally hit me — the luggage we were transporting was full of marijuana. We were drug traffickers, and my best friend had dragged me into this fully aware of the danger she was putting us both in.
But I didn’t say anything. I was afraid. I’d trusted this woman whole-heartedly, and she gave me a sense of belonging in a city far from my family . . . and I didn’t even know who she really was.
For the next couple of months, I continued to go on the Ohio trips. I was terrified of drawing attention to myself — I had no idea how many people were involved in our drug-smuggling operation, and I’d overheard Lisette talk about Mexican drug cartels. I had terrible nightmares, and I’d try to quiet my anxiety by drinking to help me sleep.
There was no sign of trouble until the summer of 2010 — eight months after our first trip. I was in a van that had come to pick us up from the airport when we turned a corner. Suddenly six cars with lights flashing and a row of about 40 agents in blue uniforms with submachine guns came into view.
I turned my head and came face-to-face with the barrel of a massive gun.
“Put your hands in the air and get out of the vehicle,” the officer said calmly.
I turned to look for Lisette, who was in a different car, but I couldn’t see her. Instead, I saw the drug dogs sniffing the 13 suitcases coming off the plane.
I was handcuffed and walked to a black DEA SUV.
I sat next to Lisette, who was telling the officer, “My family is going to be very upset about this.”
That was five years ago — and the last time I ever saw Lisette.
A couples months after the bust, I went to court charged with conspiracy to distribute more than 500 pounds of marijuana.
There, I learned we had trafficked an estimated 7,000 pounds of marijuana over eight months — equivalent to about $3 million in street value.
While I was waiting for my sentencing, my attorney gave me the book “Orange Is the New Black” — years before the show started and became a hit on Netflix.
When I read it, I broke down in tears. I wasn’t alone.
I was sentenced to a month in prison. There were some similarities to the prison life on the show — I made one close friend there.
The scenes where women wait to use the phone while other inmates cry to their loved ones on the outside are so realistic. I remember how gut-wrenching it was to see these women talking to their kids.
After prison, I spent a year under house arrest.
I set a Google alert for Lisette’s name, and I found out the judge sentenced her to six years in federal prison and described her as having a “narcissistic dimension.”
It wasn’t until a 2012 Rolling Stone article I’d cooperated with came out that I learned Lisette’s past was a lot more complicated than she let on. She wasn’t, in fact, a pop star or a Samsung heiress — although it appears likely she is related to the family. She was born out of wedlock in Seoul, but was raised by a family friend in LA — her guardian said in court her birth father sent her up to $50,000 a year. She never went to school with Hilton or Kardashian — or attended Harvard, for that matter. And she told me at one point she was one year older than me, when in fact she is four years my senior. The famous boyfriends, the ring she gave me and even her age: all fake.
I’ve been a free woman for more than two years now, and I’m getting my life back on track. I’m acting again — I recently scored a Toyota commercial. And my book, “Smoke: How a Small-Town Girl Accidentally Wound Up Smuggling 7,000 Pounds of Marijuana with the Pot Princess of Beverly Hills,” comes out March 24. Paramount has already optioned my life rights.
Demo Reel from Meili Cady on Vimeo.
Lisette should be getting out of prison this year, but she legally can’t contact me for five years. But even if she does, there’s no place for her in my life, and there never will be.
I’m 29 years old now, and my life won’t be defined by the mistakes I’ve made and my past willingness to be fooled by Lisette. I’m ready for that chapter to close, so that I can finally start a new one.