My father took all this in and added his own insights into the trade. His conversations began to sound like snippets from a night course on entrepreneurialism.
Anthony Dokoupil on personnel: “Don’t have people working for a shirttail. The service they do is what keeps you in business.”
Anthony Dokoupil on infractions: “If you’re high, bye-bye. If you’re wired, you’re fired.”
Anthony Dokoupil on networking: “The best thing to say is nothing, and the best thing to do is work alone.”
Anthony Dokoupil on ethics: “Never short-stack. Pay by the laws of the multiplication tables.”
He started calling his team of wheelmen and the route they took north the Reefer Express. He called his product Dade County Pine, in semiconscious homage to the long-dead forest that once stretched from the Everglades to the Atlantic. Because it had the aroma of a grassy knoll, very clean and sweet, like the air after a thunderstorm, he joked about attaching a tag to this new dope, explaining how the product was sourced and transported as though it were not dope at all but an imported rug. My father’s tag would have read:
This resinous Colombian bud incorporates every imaginable color and shape into a kaleidoscope of exotic beauty. Sticky, seedless, and sold by the ton, it is imported by strong men with brush mustaches and wiry chest hair, men who have braved hustlers, honchos, honkies, federales mucho, and informers galore. Their prize, your glory, has long hairs turned red by Mother Nature and leaves of heavy resin that ball like glue between the thumb and forefinger. Never again will you wonder, Do I feel anything? The answer is: Yes. You do. For connoisseurs only. Medical note: This is a great choice for sensitive lungs. The strong chlorophyll content will cool the body like a summer monsoon.
The country was in a recession, but Billy and my father never once worried about money except for how to transport it. Most of the millions of dollars my father sent to Billy went via Eastern Air Lines. In those days my father could buy a ticket, check his suitcase of money, and never get on the flight. Billy walked right into baggage claim at Miami International Airport and took his money off the conveyor belt. This went on even after somebody else’s suitcase was abandoned and recovered by Peter Bensinger, the head of the DEA, who opened the prop at a Senate hearing on drug money, laying $3 million on the witness table.
A referral brought my father to the door of a criminal lawyer (heavy emphasis on the criminal) who knew the ins and outs of money laundering and who helped my father incorporate two front operations: a rare-furniture concern that my mother used as a hobby machine and a custom-home company that my father managed.
He opened a business banking account with a string of drug-backed cashier’s checks, bought land in Vermont, and retained a full-lime building staff: three carpenters, a crew of woodworking specialists, the best in the area. The houses they built were opulent faux-rustic mansions of the sort that one imagines trees themselves would build if they ever needed to show off their use and beauty. The first sold to a Timex Corporation executive for $200,000 (more than $750,000 in today’s money). From then on, everything was legit as far as Uncle Sam knew.
In the weeks and months that followed, my father went on a spree. He bought a good smuggler’s house in Middlebury, Connecticut: dead-end street, concealed garage, stream, woods. He hired a mason to build a barbecue that aliens might mistake for Stonehenge east. Another crew built a secret compartment underneath the kitchen sink, a false-walled cabinet where he could stash money, drugs, contraband. The place itself was chockablock with antiques—oak rolltop desks, marble-topped side tables, a mahogany dinner table.
My mother spent her weekends waving a number on the New England auction scene. She also joined the Middlebury Racquet Club and sweated it up with the professors’ wives and IBM widows. At home she ordered Château Margaux and Château Lafite Rothschild by the crate, and chopped farmer’s market broccoli to the sounds of Steely Dan on new McIntosh speakers.
My father junked the Dodge Dart and bought his first Mercedes, a four-door “executive line” with a fat-rimmed steering wheel and glistening dash. He decided to buy a tie and a blue blazer with gold buttons and a pair of classic gray trousers with a sharp crease.
Together my parents sampled the best restaurants in New Haven and New York City, where it wasn’t unusual to spend $1,000 on dinner, a show, and a weekend in a fancy hotel. They followed their whims, forgetting their anti-consumerist roots and spending cash with abandon. One of their favorite new places was Le Château, a French wonder in South Salem, New York, about forty minutes west as the Mercedes flies. It was a stone-and-timber Tudor-style mansion built in 1907 by J. P. Morgan as a gift to Reverend William S. Rainsford, who lived there until his death and the home’s eventual resurrection. It was a place where kids are meant to stare silently at their soup or stay home entirely.
Initially my parents felt uncomfortable in such splendiferous surroundings, which stirred up feelings of fakery and shame, and made my father walk so self-consciously that anyone looking on would assume he had a severe sunburn. The diners struck him as old and staid, like guests of the original tenant, and when he looked down at his new tie it seemed suddenly alive and warm-blooded, less a garment than a predator, a nuclear mutation that had sprung out of a puddle and gone for the throat.
My mother never felt more like a grocer’s daughter. The menu was in French, a language neither of my parents spoke, yet one they did not want to appear to be unable to speak. If you had asked them that night about Honeygrass Farms, their land in Maine, their idyll for all-time, they wouldn’t have known what to say. It was as forgotten as a children’s toy. The canoe had rotted and then been stolen, the camping gear slowly mulched into nothing, lashed by the weather.
They bridged the manners gap by politely snorting a little cocaine in the bathroom (my father) and politely pointing to the items on the menu they most hoped to enjoy (my mother). It worked like a dream and they ended the night by politely feeding each other strawberries drizzled with chocolate and glazed in Grand Marnier. They were themselves again, a bomb of a man and his sparkling fuse.
This golden age of marijuana came to an appropriately golden close in 1977, at the hippest Christmas party in Washington, D.C. No one was prepared for tragedy, because the party itself seemed proof of untouchable triumph. It was NORML’s holiday bash. Four hundred guests were expected, so Keith Stroup secured a cream-colored town house on S Street, one so big that he worried about filling it.
The house was open plan. From the first to the fourth floor there was no ceiling, the roof floating somewhere over the staircase, the dance floor as exposed as a stage. People streamed in, shucking coats and emitting unconscious burbles of excitement. The lights went low and the music went up. A psychedelic juggler tossed glowing orbs until the sea of people coming through the door swallowed him up.
There was no real food, but waiters moved through the crowd with silver trays of caviar and hand-rolled joints of weed grown in Kentucky, a sample of what was possible in the domestic market to come. There was also a lot of loose cocaine, and the party would have been legendary even without its unusual guest list.
There were badge-holders from the Food and Drug Administration, the Council on Drug Abuse, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse; people from every echelon of the anti-drug establishment and their counterparts at NORML, High Times, and the great outlaw underground of pot.
Everyone assumed the War on Drugs was over. The White House’s midterm drug-control policy was the treaty. “Drugs cannot be forced out of existence,” it said. “They will be with us as long as people find in them the relief or satisfaction they desire.” And so the forces of good and evil were allowed to mingle like never before, sending up smoky wreaths and radiating an unprecedented glow of fellow feeling.
There was the millionaire founder of a rolling-papers conglomerate; the scion of CBS founder William Paley; the daughter of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner; eight or ten members of the Carter White House; front-page wri
ters for The Washington Post and The New York Times; and overseeing it all Mr. Marijuana, the Prime Minister of Pot, that man from NORML, the great Keith Stroup and his not-so-silent backer Thomas Forcade, the smuggler-dealer who founded High Times.
At about 11:00 p.m., there was a commotion at the door, followed by whispers, elbows, and exclamations. No one could quite believe that Peter Bourne had just walked in, the self-described “first drug czar,” the first person to be given authority over both the treatment and law enforcement sides of federal policy, the person who most held the dreams of marijuana in his hands. Bourne was the only senior drug-policy official ever to back decriminalization, which had just been endorsed by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Here was America’s top drug warrior and yet some of his views aligned with America’s top drug lobby. Some of his tastes did as well. The word spread that Bourne was here for more than a hello. “Peter’s here,” a friend told Stroup. “He wants to get high.”
At the top of the house, in a room guarded by an ex–secret service agent, Bourne joined a stunned circle of partygoers and stayed in the circle as a small, bullet-shaped container of cocaine—a contraption with a twist top that loaded a hit with each turn—made the rounds. There were at least five journalists in the room, including High Times staffers, an editor and reporter for The Washington Post, and the poet laureate of the drug scene, Hunter S. Thompson. When the bullet came to Bourne, he coolly loaded the tip, hit, reloaded, and hit again—a one-and-one. As Bourne finished, Thompson threw his arm around a writer for High Times, sighed loudly, and declared, “My God, man, we’ll all be indicted.”
He was wrong.
What happened was worse than an indictment. The forces of change had come together—only to vanish up someone’s nose.
One year rolled into the next and it seemed like the marijuana movement would continue unchanged. Nebraska became the eleventh state to set free the pot smoker, removing all criminal penalties for personal use. Almost one in five people used the drug at least once during the course of the year, and my father continued to contribute mightily to that unending market.
He transformed himself into the kind of kingpin he used to adore from a distance. He got the opportunity because Mexican authorities began to spray pot fields with paraquat, a deadly herbicide that ruined the last dealers of Mexican reefer, including none other than Eddie, my father’s old wholesaler. Eddie had lost the concert business by the time my father found him in that suddenly shabby-looking house overlooking the tidal stream.
“Eddie, Tony. Tony, Eddie.”
A play was developing, just like it had five or six years earlier, and by the end of the conversation, my father had jumped again. He was Eddie’s supplier. He was Eddie’s guy. Actually, he was more than just Eddie’s guy. He was the guy in his corner of New England. And the realization of that fact seemed to rewire my father’s brain a little.
He began to host parties, where he rolled joints from dope soft as overcooked pasta, oily enough to stain clothes, nearly resinous enough to hold fingerprints. From behind the false wall in a cabinet in the kitchen, he produced opium, hash, and so much coke he put it in a sugar bowl on the counter. These weren’t beer-and-nut parties, the men in packs, fingers slung over bottles of beer, women wondering why nothing has changed since high school.
These were more like kids’ birthday parties that happen to be for adults: there was running and screaming and carrying on. My father was the host, the self-styled Great American Outlaw who curled his way from toke circle to toke circle, talking rhyming nonsense. “Tony’s my name, smoke’s my game.” And again two minutes later. “Tony’s my name, smoke’s my game.”
My mother had also allowed the business to do a number on her synapses. For years she had been merely an observer, but in late 1977 and early 1978 she started running the switchboard for some jobs. She relayed information about where to “pick up the pizza.” At times she was also my father’s bookkeeper. She hid money in our front hall closet when the space under the kitchen cabinet overflowed. She was a first-issue subscriber to High Lady, the magazine of empowered women. For Christmas, the master carpenter at Fox Run made her a nutcracker with the head of a penis. “To my favorite ball buster,” the card read. “From Santa.”
But perhaps her most triumphant moment came one cold winter morning in 1978, when she stepped in to get Billy a crucial infusion of cash. She woke before dawn, dressed for her teaching job, and drove to the Tweed New Haven Airport, where she carried a satchel of blank lesson plans to work on during the flight. At her feet: a suitcase heavy with hundreds of thousands of dollars.
As the sun bounced up from behind the rim of the earth, she was sitting in a Lear jet, taxiing down the runway, two attendants and a pilot catering to only her needs. From the air, she called in sick to work, her stomach flipping with excitement, and by the first bell she was looking at the curve of the world and thinking how fine it was to be this clever, this sneaky. Was there a finer feeling in all the world?
In July 1978 my mother and father and the rest of America learned that Peter Bourne had resigned from the White House. His one-and-one had held for six months and it might have held forever, but Bourne, a psychiatrist, came under scrutiny for writing a comely female assistant a quaalude prescription under a false name. There was an honest explanation, but ’ludes were popularly known as an aid to languid, tantric sex and the press went for the twofer.
To confirm the cocaine story, a reporter called the last people you would expect to tell on another drug user: two staffers from High Times, who have never been identified, and Stroup, who was out of his gourd on cocaine and furious with Bourne for his support of Mexico’s paraquat spraying. Stroup and company confirmed the story: “Drug Czar Does Cocaine at Pot Party.” It broke on Good Morning America.
Bourne has always denied having anything more than “good old American whiskey” at the party, but it didn’t matter. He had been there and that was enough. He resigned within thirty-six hours, and the incident killed drug reform for Carter, who dry swallowed his previous policies on marijuana and flipped a mental switch in the White House and American newsrooms.
The White House announced a new “war on marijuana.” It expanded the size of the DEA, preached the need to snuff out smugglers and wholesalers. Time covered marijuana’s possible role in killing chromosomes and causing “psychotic reactions, personality change, impaired learning ability and development of a chronic lethargy.” New York magazine ran an essay called “Thirty-six Hours of Insanity: A Marijuana Nightmare.” It ran another warning that “what whiskey did to the Indian, marijuana may do to white middle-class America.” Reader’s Digest, Ladies’ Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post all ran half a dozen articles on marijuana’s links to cancer, heart attacks, sterility, loose sex, male breasts.
Suddenly men like my father were slave traders again. More, they were militant slave traders. “The romance is gone,” as one federal agent put it. The New York Times magazine ran a ten-thousand-word piece about “the dark and violent world of the Mexican connection.” Time revealed “the Colombian connection,” which “owns an armada of ships and planes” and has “an army of bush pilots, seamen, electronics experts, roustabouts and cutthroats.”
High Times declared “Dope War II,” which meant that the heroic men of marijuana were once again enlarged and rewritten in the public mind. They were transformed from pied pipers to horned toads, from good-bad men to bad-bad men. In the process, the size, scale, and nature of marijuana rings was wildly exaggerated. It had to be in order to justify a drug war with real bullets.
But no matter how sophisticated they seemed on the evening news, even the biggest, most famous cases were on closer inspection skunky with incompetence, failure, family tragedy, heinous narcissism, grandiloquence, and the stupid pursuit of some long-ago childhood adventure that can’t ever be found. At least they were consistent. There was really only one kind of big-time marijuana dealer and smuggler, and my father was
it.
When he learned of Carter’s reversal, he didn’t consider curtailing his trade and my mother didn’t consider asking him to stop. On the contrary they sent a deputy to Chicago to scout the market and inaugurated a monthly tradition: Saturdays at Scribner’s, a modest post-and-beam building with knotty-pine tables, wainscoting, and the best seafood on the Connecticut coast. To accommodate the gang, the owner wheeled in a big circular table, where members of the Reefer Express drank and smoked and shook the ceiling beams until the small hours.
Dealer McDope had arrived.
3
The Old Man
South Florida and New England, 1979–1981
Among the people who mattered, my father was known as God’s pocket with reefer and cash. In more than eight years he’d never lost a load to the cops or missed a payoff to his partners. He had never cheated or cried. And he could turn over tons of dope in days, send a wave of money washing across time zones, across a team of wheelmen and sailors and endless gophers, all the way back to the dirt, to the farmer working the end of a hoe in the equatorial sun.
When a customer’s men flaked, he dispatched members of his own team. When a bale fell into the sea, he dealt from his personal reserves. Sure, it helped him to help his customers, but it was also a criminal promise, a handshake and a hug into the all-enclosing fraternity of the Great American Outlaw.
People called him the Old Man because he could get a bit melancholy about his life, a bit bored with the work of getting and selling drugs. Breaking the law is like anything else. It can become a job, a grind, so routine that you sell the equivalent of enough marijuana for another Woodstock and feel like you haven’t accomplished a thing. Such was the state of my father’s criminal soul. He would tell friends, “I’m not made for this world,” and they would laugh. “The Old Man!”
The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana Page 7