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

240 Pages·2014·1.23 MB·English

by  Tony Dokoupil

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 978-0-38553347-8 (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 he’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