Tony Dokoupil - The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana

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, TonyFamily. 3. Dokoupil, Anthony, 1946 4. JournalistsUnited StatesBiography. 5. EditorsUnited StatesBiography. 6. Marijuana industryUnited States. 7. Drug tradeUnited States. I. Title.
PN4874.D63A3 2014
070.92dc23

[B]
2013034094

ISBN 978-0-385-53346-1

ISBN 978-0-385-53347-8 (eBook)

v3.1

For my children

Main entry: Dokoupil

Pronunciation: Da-ko-pull

Function: verb, past tense

Etymology: Czech

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

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 fathers version of events, or the most plausible version, in that order. Most of the sources were also friends and family, so Ive repaid their generosity by altering their names and on occasion other details so their past lives may remain past. The only names I havent 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.

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 Floridas 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 cousins house. Sure, my mother loved the open road. She also knew you couldnt 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 hed 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-1980swhich was also the peak of the drug war, and an impossibly late date for pot smugglinghe 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 hed 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 weekone idiot with a lead foot and a Ferrari, in factof 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 environmentalists nightmare of plastic baggies, enough bud for thousands of part-time dealers, and millions of left-hand cigarettes, pinched and passed between friends.