Weed Man. The Remarkable Journey of Jimmy Divine

244 Pages·2010·1.06 MB·English

by  John McCaslin

Weed Man
Also by John McCaslin
Inside the Beltway: Offbeat Stories, Scoops, and Shenanigans
from Around the Nation’s Capital

© 2009 by John McCaslin
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transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCaslin, John.
Weed man : the remarkable journey of Jimmy Divine / John McCaslin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-59555-153-5 (hbk.)
1. Moree, Jimmy, 1952-2. Drug couriers—Caribbean Area—Biography.
3. Drug traffic—Caribbean Area. 4. Drug traffic—United States. 5. Marijuana industry—Caribbean
Area. I. Title
HV5805.M67M33 2008
363.45092—dc22
[B]
2008054290
Printed in the United States of America 09 10 11 12 13 QW 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
INTRODUCTION
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
FOR LANE AND FINNEAS AND THEIR CREW
ON HARBOUR ISLAND
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THIS BOOK IS BASED ON A TRUE STORY TOLD FOR THE first time
by Jimmy Moree, who lives on a tiny Bahamian island accessible only by
boat. Several of the story’s characters are identified by their actual
names or by nicknames. Identities of others have been changed to
protect the guilty.
— JOHN MCCASLIN
Washington, D.C.
October 2008
INTRODUCTION
THE SUN-BAKED BOTTLE OF KALIK SPEWS SUDS AS Robert
Arthur’s golf cart, the primary mode of transportation on tiny Harbour
Island—spoken “Briland” by the locals—bounces along a rough road
called Coconut Grove, past the sand dance floor of Gusty’s Bar, and onto
a crater-filled path leading to the Narrows, a secluded stretch of paradise
where some of the world’s wealthiest people try to avoid the rest of us.
“You’ll enjoy meeting the couple,” Robert says as I suck the foam from
the beer neck. “Jimmy’s Bahamian—a white Bahamian—and Hannah is
Canadian. There aren’t two nicer people on the island.”
That was all the tri-tiered baker/Realtor/minister bothered to say
beforehand about the Morees (pronounced Mor-ease), although I knew
Robert ran with good company. Before he began glazing donuts,
peddling properties, and preaching God’s Word every Sunday, Tuesday,
and Thursday in his Kingdom Hall (attached to Arthur’s Bakery) of
Jehovah’s Witnesses, the handsome black Bahamian had worked in
broadcast journalism, as I did early in my career. During the 1970s he
was splicing tape in the same studio where a budding broadcaster
named Lawrence Zieger, better known today as Larry King, hosted a
local talk show over Miami television station WTVJ. Like Larry, Robert
would rise to become a star in his own right, “blessed with one of those
one-in-a-million success stories in TV and film,” as he describes it. Now
he’s come back home to this charming speck of coral floating off the
northeast coast of Eleuthera his ancestors helped settle centuries ago.
Indeed, despite being raked by an untold number of hurricanes,
Harbour Island’s colonial-era homes still stand today, lathered in tropical
shades of pink, green, and blue long before Lilly Lee Pulitzer painted her
house a watermelon sorbet. One 1935 visitor to the island, Nora
Benjamin, described a storybook setting for Nassau Literary Magazine:
“We found ourselves facing a perfect model of a town, a candy box of a
town. There was a coffee-colored house with raspberry shutters; a lemon