The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by Tony Dokoupil

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  This work is based on “My Father the Drug Dealer,” which first appeared in Newsweek (July 2009).

  Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor

  Jacket photograph courtesy of the author

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dokoupil, Tony.

  The last pirate : a father, his son, and the golden age of marijuana / Tony Dokoupil. — First edition.

  pages cm

  1. Dokoupil, Tony. 2. Dokoupil, Tony—Family. 3. Dokoupil, Anthony, 1946– 4. Journalists—United States—Biography. 5. Editors—United States—Biography. 6. Marijuana industry—United States. 7. Drug trade—United States. I. Title.

  PN4874.D63A3 2014

  070.92—dc23

  [B]

  2013034094

  ISBN 978-0-385-53346-1

  ISBN 978-0-385-53347-8 (eBook)

  v3.1

  For my children

  Main entry: Do•ko•u•pil

  Pronunciation: Da-ko-pull

  Function: verb, past tense

  Etymology: Czech

  Definition: to buy it all, as in “I bought it all”

  Author’s Note

  This is a true story. To tell it, I researched it. I pulled court documents, troweled newspaper archives. When I thought I had every relevant record, I hired a lawyer to come behind me and make sure. I also reported this story, traveling to five states and into interviews with the DEA agents who investigated the case, the former head of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force who prosecuted it, and more than a dozen former smugglers and dealers, most notably my father himself, who showed me the sights in Miami and New York. Although this is in practice a work of journalism, the sources were often very happily unsound during the years in question. Where memories differed or broke down, I deferred to the written record, my father’s version of events, or the most plausible version, in that order. Most of the sources were also friends and family, so I’ve repaid their generosity by altering their names and on occasion other details so their past lives may remain past. The only names I haven’t changed, in fact, are those of the three feds, who are proud of busting the biggest pot ring of the Reagan era, and of my father, who is proud of being part of it.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: Digging Holes

  I Inhale

  1. The Jump

  2. Dealer McDope and the Golden Age of Marijuana

  3. The Old Man

  4. The Pirate Code

  II Exhale

  5. Three Little Blond Boys

  6. The Pirate Life

  7. The Last Scam

  III Coming Down

  8. Busted

  9. Big Tony, Little Tony

  10. Reunion

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Digging Holes

  Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1988

  My mother tucked me into bed, changed her clothes, and walked outside to find a shovel. She searched the perimeter of the house, a mansion in the mountains outside Albuquerque, and decided on a spot near the foundation, a few steps from an old pine tree. She paused there, poised between one era of our life and the next, looking warily toward the tree line. On a cloudless southwestern night the stars throw off enough light to read a newspaper, and my mother could see she was alone.

  She thrust the shovel blade into the ground and turned up the soil.

  Nothing.

  She thrust the blade into the ground again.

  Nothing.

  She was almost forty at the time, still youthful, straw-haired, stylish, neither fat nor thin, a fresh golden cake color.

  After a few feet the dirt was a little darker than the topsoil and she felt a change in the air. She scanned the horizon one last time, aimed the shovel, and stomped hard. She turned up the soil and saw the first flashes of white: pieces of a large Styrofoam cooler, no more than three feet down.

  My mother removed the lid. Plastic baggies, dozens of them. They were filled with what looked like crustless sandwiches gone rotten. For an instant she thought bugs had chewed through everything, which they sometimes did, but when she opened a bag and then another she found what she expected. Each bag had $5,000 inside, moldy but still usable, and there were bags down as deep as her arm could reach.

  The following morning my mother took the wheel of a rented motor home, two thousand miles to go before we reached home in Miami. I was seven, working a flap hat against the summer sun, responsible for radio stations and refilling the water bowl for Captain, our flatulent black Lab. We had been doing a lot of driving lately, my mother taking advantage of the long hours behind the wheel to draw me out about grade-school crushes and playground fights.

  We hit Florida’s Redland region to pick up a pair of collectible cars, which Mom loaned to the makers of Miami Vice. We hit Long Island in pursuit of other coolers stuffed with cash and buried behind a house in the suburbs off I-495. But by far the richest prize was the one in Albuquerque, half a million dollars dropped into a hillside at my cousin’s house. Sure, my mother loved the open road. She also knew you couldn’t take more than $10,000 on an airplane without telling the authorities.

  The man who buried the money began to amass it in his mid-twenties, selling a few baggies of pot. By his late twenties, he sold bricks of Mexican reefer every weekend, sometimes from the window of a Good Humor ice-cream truck. By the time he was thirty, he moved hundreds of pounds a month in the trunk of an old Buick, crisscrossing the mid-Atlantic states under the guise of delivering concert tickets. When he’d saved enough money, he flew to Miami, uninvited and alone, to knock on the door of a former car mechanic who imported tons of Colombian marijuana. He pitched himself as the most reliable black marketeer on the East Coast, “the best there is from box to box” (drugs to cash). He drove mobile homes packed with weed out of Key West, secured a fleet of pickup trucks from New England, and began to transport acres of South American mountainside up the I-95 “reefer express.”

  This was the late 1970s, I should add, which was also about the same time that he decided to start a family. He became a father the year he graduated to loads of ten and twenty thousand pounds of marijuana, transported on freighters and tugboats from the extreme northeastern edge of Colombia to sailboats near the Virgin Islands and ultimately to New York City wholesalers, vacation markets, and college towns along the East Coast.

  In the years that followed, he buried nearly a million dollars, invested more than half a million more in a Yukon gold mine, and prepared the paperwork of escape, should he ever have to hit the reset as a card-carrying union welder and avid user of the Monmouth, New Jersey, library system. At his peak in the mid-1980s—which was also the peak of the drug war, and an impossibly late date for pot smuggling—he broke a weeks-long national dope panic, a drought that New York magazine dubbed “Reefer Sadness.” In a single load he supplied enough marijuana to levitate every college-age person in America and send them sideways to the store for snacks.

  By that time the Old Man, as h
e’d come to be called in the business, ran stateside operations for one of the most successful marijuana rings of the twentieth century. In careers that spanned the drug war from Nixon to Reagan, the Old Man and his friends slipped every major counter-narcotics operation, and came within one week—one idiot with a lead foot and a Ferrari, in fact—of getting off forever. In all they hauled and sold hundreds of thousands of pounds of marijuana, and the Old Man distributed at least fifty tons of it, an environmentalist’s nightmare of plastic baggies, enough bud for thousands of part-time dealers, and millions of left-hand cigarettes, pinched and passed between friends.

  At a certain point he grew into a “marijuana millionaire,” as the press dubbed his kind, and the Old Man decided he needed to start acting more like a drug dealer. He bought a succession of inky-blue Mercedes sedans, a thirty-five-foot cruising yacht, and a hundred-acre swath of pristine Maine forest, dotted with lakes and capped by a dome of powder blue sky. He moved from Connecticut to Miami, the Wall Street of American weed, where he paid cash for a three-bedroom home south of the city and doted on the son he’d always wanted.

  Together they toured the real pirate forts of the Caribbean and had a pillow fight beneath the gilded ceilings of the Plaza Hotel in New York. But perhaps their most blissful adventure came in late 1986, when family and friends gathered for a kind of retirement bash in the U.S. Virgin Islands. During the previous two years the gang had pulled off massive deals, netting the Old Man and his partner a million-dollar payday.

  What followed was not your average cake-and-wine send-off but a weeklong bacchanalia culminating on an eighty-six-foot schooner near St. Thomas. The Old Man and his son were there, along with three other smugglers, distributors and dealers, two other kids, two unmarried mothers, and an escort turned girlfriend (because that’s how dope dealers roll). Because he wasn’t sure what pharmaceuticals were needed to fuel this exit to Eden, the Old Man packed everything he could sneak onto an Eastern Air Lines flight. Cocaine behind his belt buckle. Cocaine in film rolls. He brought a shaving satchel of rare herbs with heavy names like Oaxaca Red. He figured security wouldn’t search a man traveling with his family, even if President Reagan had recently “run up the battle flag.”

  They sailed along, a dozen people partying on a boat designed to accommodate forty-nine. The parents drank Heinekens. The kids quaffed orange juice. Everyone ate lobster sandwiches and red snapper fillets. They napped on the white-pine deck and read Carl Hiaasen and Curious George in the cozy cabins below. The three kids—ranging from six to twelve years old—took turns steering the ship. And when they reached one of the area’s lush, uninhabited cays, they slid off the stern and snorkeled right where they fell.

  They swam to the shallows, where manta rays glided beneath them. And they nearly became fish food—or so they were thrilled to think—when a pair of plump, prehistoric-looking barracudas floated over for a look at their fathers’ gold chains and shiny watches. When they went ashore, they fed hibiscus leaves and dahlias to wild iguanas and army-crawled beneath the decks of beachfront bars, where drunks and sun-stroked tourists dropped change between the floorboards.

  Each day ended with the ocean smeared purple, the men holding their ladies close, and the kids clustered on the bow, dreaming of shipwrecks, pirates, and buried treasures. The world around was fenceless and so was the future. But the Old Man was restless in this paradise. He had broken a cardinal rule of dealing and become an addict himself. Coke and hookers, mostly. He left the party early in search of both.

  I know all this because the Old Man was my old man and when I was six I watched him go.

  My father and I are separated by only an adjective—Big Tony, Little Tony—and when I was truly little we toured Miami with our seamless tans, windblown blond hair, and Lacoste swimsuits. My father liked daiquiris, virgin for me and an extra shot of rum in the straw for him. He also liked girls, and he liked how approachable he was with a toddler staring awestruck from the next stool over. His first drink would disappear as fast as a cup of ice melt tossed into a breeze. But he sipped the second one, pushing aviator shades onto his head. His face got interesting then, his features adrift, and he would start talking to people. Dad liked hostesses in particular.

  Hostess: “Would you like our special shrimp sampler?”

  Dad: “I’d like to take a shower with you.”

  If you smoked Colombian weed in the 1970s and 1980s, I owe you a thank-you card. You paid for my swim lessons, bought me my first baseball glove, and kept me in the best private school in south Florida, alongside President George H. W. Bush’s grandsons, at least for a little while. But the truth is, I never really knew my father, not as a man, not as a person distinct from the figure I idolized in the abstract. For the early years of my childhood, he was someone I adored. He taught me how to hit a baseball, read a newspaper, and shave (without the blade). By the time I was old enough to care about those things, he was long gone, leaving only stories behind.

  At the Grand Canyon, he let me crawl to the edge for a better look. During a trip to New York in the dead of winter, he dared me, aged four, to lick a Central Park slide; my mother had to pour hot-dog-stand coffee on my tongue to get it unstuck. At Disney World he let me watch movies alone in the hotel room, where I fielded a call from my mother while he hit the bars. In Miami we sometimes played baseball using a big orange basketball, which sure was easy to hit but not so forgiving. The bat bounced hard off the ball, right into my mouth. It looked like Halloween when I flicked the light on in the bathroom.

  As an older kid in Miami, if you asked me about my father, I would have told you he can’t come to career day. He’ll have to miss the father-son brunch. His work is in New England, where all the antique-furniture auctions are held, or he’s in Vermont this month, where he develops property. I might have said he’s in Key West, where he zips snowbirds into their wet suits or St. Thomas where he spits into their dive masks. If we were friends, I might have told you he was in rehab, and that would have been the truest possible answer.

  I never knew the full truth. For most of my adult life, I had only scraps of information about my father. Some were fun, like streamers left behind after a party. Others were dark, like bats from the mouth of an unmapped cave. My mother almost never spoke of him, but I knew that he did drugs, sold weed, slept around, and bottomed out so completely that friends presumed him dead long before he was forty. My mother advised me to assume him dead as well. But I did the opposite.

  As a teenager, I recoiled from this image of my father as a violent mess, and I began to build a better version in my own mind. A heartsick boy can compose a small, speculative history of manhood from a few black-and-white photographs and a knife left behind in a drawer. Such was the style of my own imaginings: I told people my father was a cross between Tony Montana and Willy Loman, a big-time drug dealer, licking his wounds somewhere in Colombia. I could accept this vision of him, and anyway, I needed it to survive. High school is hard enough without having to wonder about the blood you have, the brain you’ve inherited.

  When I was twenty, I felt established enough to face the truth, so I called my father. He refused to see me. After a few letters, he changed his mind but I refused to see him. Each of us backed away reflexively, as though closing the door of an occupied bathroom.

  I was almost thirty, and years into a journalism career, before I was ready to talk to my father again. Peering over a notebook this time, I saw him as a character in a larger story about outlaws. In a digital age, hackers and Internet pranksters are the mantle bearers, people whose work is massively influential but rarely romantic, almost never sexy. There are no grand vistas, no beer-commercial-grade photo ops, no tradition of carousing and womanizing, winning it all and losing it fast. There are no deathless pop songs about computer keystrokes.

  And this criminal awe deficit, as I saw it, was the starkest in the weed business, where yachtsmen and beach bums like my father have been replaced by businessmen and botanists. Bronze skin an
d corn-colored hair have faded into cubicle complexions and cowlicks. Where there was once the thrill of foreign fields, leaky boats, and suburban stash houses there are now indoor “seas of green” and legal channels to market. I believe something was lost in this shift. Weed is undeniably better today—every bud is a green chandelier of head-ringing crystals—but it’s infinitely less interesting.

  Many of the old smuggler-dealers have come to the same realization. They see themselves as the last great outlaws, a people for whom pirates are idols and criminal vitality is the only worthwhile kind. They see themselves as heroes, in other words, righteous flouters of a silly prohibition. And they sure hope you will agree. My father and members of his ring are no different, which is why almost all of them were willing to talk with me. A sign of how little things change is that all but my father asked me to disguise them. I was happy to do so. These friends and family have given me a true story if not an honorable one. It’s a public saga complete with a real pirate’s booty: more than a million dollars lost, buried, or stolen. It’s also a private pursuit that’s more important to me with each day.

  See, I recently became a father myself. We had a boy and it didn’t take long before I saw what I was up against. On my very first Father’s Day, in fact, my infant son came home from day care with a preprinted poem, a trifle called “Footprints.” Millions of dads probably got the same lines, giving them no more than a sidelong glance before dinner. But the poem set off tiny sticks of dynamite behind my eyes. It contains every immutable truth our society pushes—and I fear—about fathers and sons mimicking each other through the generations. It ends with the most painful idea of all, a repetition of the lines “walk a little slower, Daddy, for I must follow you.” I think it’s the “must” that really stabbed my heart.

  I, for the record, am not an Anthony, either on my birth certificate or so far in life. But my father still haunts me, making me terrified of the genes I carry and the man I may become. There must be a way out of this loop, I decided, so one day I set about finding it in the arc of my father’s rise and fall. This is a personal story but also a story of generational change, of talents wasted and talents redeemed. It’s specific to my father’s experience but also representative of what I believe many children of the 1970s and ’80s feel as descendants of the Great Stoned Age, the greatest explosion of illicit drug use ever recorded. I’ve tried to write a broad chronicle of marijuana-smoking, drug-taking America rather than a closed circle of family woe. Everybody knew a drug dealer back then. This is the life of one of them and, in a pharmacologic sense, the story of us all.