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

by Dokoupil, Tony

  Nicky met his customers at the northern end of the New Jersey turnpike at a rest stop: two trucks parked in opposite directions, windows rolled down. “From the Old Man,” he would say, jerking his thumb toward the covered bed of his pickup. Bobby opened the tailgate and took his first whiff of the weed, which was spongy and yellow-green.

  “Shit,” he said, “how many can I have?”

  All through 1978 Nicky added bales to Bobby’s orders and Bobby sold them. But Nicky’s big mouth became a problem. It was inevitable. He bragged to the wrong guy, who asked for a meeting, where Nicky brought his pickup loaded with reefer and his curious consumer brought a gun. It was a heist, and it meant the loss of a couple of hundred pounds of weed, maybe $100,000 worth.

  In response my father cut Nicky from the deliveries list and handed all the business to Bobby, the only downstream dealer who could sell big enough to fill the role. Bobby was also the ideal behind-the-scenes complement to my father, who could be recklessly confident.

  My father and Bobby met in a bar in Brooklyn to discuss Charlie’s offer. It was typical for a gang to consider a new partnership. Everybody in the big-time dope world was incomplete: They had a source but no market, or a market but no source. Dope circles were always forming and reforming on this basis, molding into more interlocking configurations than the Olympic rings. Billy in Miami wouldn’t mind what my father and Bobby got into as long as Billy still had a market.

  But Bobby started shaking his head. “No,” he said. “No, no, no.”

  They already had a second supplier. His name was John, a slap-happy bald man whom Bobby and my father adored, unspooling the hours inside the best bars in New York City, the three of them in love with one another like British boys between the wars. Howl, splutter, guffaw, repeat.

  John was the son of a big New York State funeral-home family, and as a teenager, he’d distributed calendars with the home’s name above every month, so you always know where to call for coffins. He went to college but fell in love with boats and crime stories, and in the late 1970s an older cousin showed him how to satisfy both loves at once. On an early smuggle, he spent a night at the Seamen’s Club in St. Martin, slept with a Colombian hooker, hitched a first-dawn ride on a church bus, and still connected with a trawler full of the finest Colombian Gold. He could get all he wanted. He just needed a man like my father to sell it.

  All of which is to say that Bobby was right: They didn’t need Charlie and Willy.

  They also didn’t need any more trouble. The bigger my father got, the more people came crying for jobs, crying for extra bales, crying about seeds or stems or low-quality dope, crying about price. It was typical bullshit, which is why my father’s reputation survived, but bullshit could still be dangerous. If a buyer was angry enough, he could rat you out or rob you or kill you. If he was reckless enough, he could invite violent crime or federal custody.

  The very fact that Bobby and my father were partners was proof of the danger all around. Looking back Bobby viewed the robbery as a reason to stay low, limit the number of trucks on the road. My father viewed it as something in the rearview mirror. He viewed it as a reason to push down the pedal.

  Next he brought Charlie’s proposal to Ann, who agreed with Bobby. She had learned enough to distrust my father’s crinkled smile. His mouth was always the most expressive part of his body. It was closed and bolted against distraction when he was thinking, and dropped into a little u when it was late and he was stewed. In the late 1970s, as his business grew, he used every version of that face every day, until the spectrum narrowed and narrowed into just dashes and angles and he toppled over, passed out on the floor.

  For him the years were remarkable from a business perspective. For her, quite naturally, the years linger in memory as the period when they decided to start a family. It was something that bubbled out of my father one morning in bed. They lay body to body. A silver sky bled orange just over the tree line. I wish I could be more specific about what they were thinking. A teacher and her bleary-eyed boyfriend with the hefty business in contraband: The ideal parents? They had never been married, in part because they didn’t want to mingle their finances. But they played their first round of high-stakes cosmic ring toss that very morning, hoping for the stuffed bear.

  In retrospect my mother explains the decision as part of a grander plan, a fond hope that a child might subdue my father, who she worried about more than herself. Even when he was happy he was a man with a temper, a rage he could summon using the most basic raw materials: a sponge left in the sink, a dog leash gone missing. He peed on things: a balky radio, a smoking outboard motor. When his Mercedes broke down, he walked around to the hood, calm and spookily vague about what his plan was right up to the moment he squared his shoulders and unzipped. Which makes it sound kind of funny, but Ann heard reports of far worse than a golden shower.

  My father owed Billy about $100,000, for the product that was taken at gunpoint, and to square the debt he agreed to deliver some furniture to Carolyn in Colorado. Billy still felt partly responsible for Carolyn’s well-being, and Tony had the ledger at his antique business.

  “Call it a sale,” Billy said, and my father agreed.

  He rented a U-Haul truck and headed west. But it vexed him to seem weak in front of his sister, and to fight his feelings he did lines of cocaine from Davenport to Des Moines. When he got to Colorado, where Carolyn was feeling really good for the first time in years, he went grinding up the mountain to Carolyn’s house, accelerating through a little hollow—where he flipped the truck.

  Carolyn ran out to see if her brother was okay, but when she saw him she went back inside and locked the door. After so much cocaine, it was as though he had turned to concrete inside, and so the flow of his normal emotions was faster, like a river pushed through a small corrugated tube and turned into a gusher. It was rage, and Carolyn knew it because she had seen it before in their father.

  “It’s astounding,” she later told Ann. “The person he hated most was our father and there he goes and repeats all the sins. Like father, like son. It happens in societies all over the world—it’s one of those wonderments.”

  By the fall of 1979, my father had decided to visit St. Thomas, where Charlie and Willy waited to talk about the next season of business. Bobby still thought the trip was crazy. He saw it in terms of exposure and evidence, as though he had access to the mind of a DEA agent. He could see the agent taking notes, talking into a two-way radio, asking for a detail on this Anthony Dokoupil. He could see the prosecutor pacing the courtroom, underscoring the extreme strangeness of Tony’s sudden wealth and the coincidence that he hangs out with known drug dealers.

  My father cornered Bobby before leaving. He wanted an assurance that Bobby could sell tons at a time if my father secured it. Bobby said he could, but he continued to press my father for a reason.

  “Just promise me you’ll sell it,” my father said.

  “Just tell me why,” Bobby countered.

  Lives turn forever on the power of small incidents, tiny bumps against the wheel of progress, making people hold on tighter and tighter, confident that when the wheel turns over again they will rise to the top of the arc. My father had such an incident in the weeks before his trip. He was in Miami with Billy, who had a few thousand pounds of weed in a stash house on Star Island between Miami Beach and the mainland. My father was due with his little convoy. But before he arrived, the police did. A nosy neighbor had dialed the force, who flushed Billy out back, where he threw his datebook into the bushes and rolled up his pants legs. He walked the shoreline to the bridge, climbed it, and stood with the fishermen. He rolled his pants legs back down. A patrol car picked him up anyway, perhaps because of the seawater pouring from his sneakers. The neighbor couldn’t identify him, so he was cut loose.

  It was simple luck that my father hadn’t been parked in the driveway, simple luck that Billy hadn’t been identified, a bang-bang moment of fortune and misfortune, as though both men had fallen
out a window only to bounce off an awning, crumple into the shrubbery, and walk away with little more than torn coats.

  Many men would have had a contemplative smoke, considered their loved ones, and either quit the business altogether or at least stuck with the safest possible partner and only one possible partner besides. But not the Old Man. For him a near miss had become part of the fun.

  He boarded an island-bound flight in November 1979, the very same month that Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy for president, framing it in the language of sobering up and buckling down, of purging “past excesses” rather than reelecting Carter and seeing “this great country destroy itself.” Although Reagan would later be called opportunistic and cynical, especially on drug policy, his disgust for marijuana was not a new or subtle accessory.

  The country had changed enormously in the eighteen months since Peter Bourne had resigned in disgrace, tarnishing the pot movement in the process. As political reversals go, this one was unmistakable: as big and bizarre a reversal as War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Strength is Ignorance—Pot is Poison?

  When Reagan declared himself, he was fresh from a major radio address on marijuana, mocking the way potheads wheeze on about the plant’s harmless charms, “exhaling smoke on every line.” He seemed to know that attacking marijuana would tap into a growing displeasure with wayward teens, slack productivity, and a society of apathetic Carter voters, seemingly content to sit out life in a duct-taped bean-bag chair. He revealed what “science now knows,” including the dubious “scientific facts” that smoking dope leads to cancer, sterility, and “adverse and irreversible effects on the mental processes.”

  My father alternately relished and ignored the new tenor from Washington, as did Charlie and Willy, who greeted my father inside Ferrari’s Ristorante, a mid-scale Italian joint that Charlie owned. It was on the crown of the island, where the roads were etched into the mountain and a mistake meant a half-mile roll in the bush. Three men. Three Heinekens. Three mustaches. One career path. The buzz of the jungle outside beggared the electricity.

  Willy told Buffett stories and generally clowned around like some general’s kid or the heir to a public fortune. My father felt confirmed in his opinion of Willy as a pain in the ass, ostentatious and self-amused, like a jock reciting lines in a high-school play. Later that night when a woman asked him what he did for a living, Willy looked her straight in the eye, as though to say, You seriously want to know? He told her, “Terry cloth. I invented it.”

  My father heard Bobby’s voice in his head: Why do we need this idiot? He’s a risk, a loudmouth. He’s probably being watched by the feds already.

  The next day the trio ran out of cocaine, so my father called his gopher in Connecticut, who flew down a few more ounces of fun. Marijuana smuggling, like almost all major nonviolent crimes, is never really about the money. There has to be chemistry, and so far there wasn’t.

  The summit returned to Charlie’s house, with its many hammocks and views of the faint white waves of Magens Bay, a thousand feet below. My father invited a couple of girls back from the bar, but they declined and it threw him into a funk, one that deepened when Willy excused himself to play a gig on St. Barts and Charlie’s girlfriend came over.

  Dad found his bed and slipped into it alone, feeling like a fool. He was ashamed of himself. What was he thinking coming down here, playing the big shot, defying his wife and his best friend and probably getting himself pinched at the same time?

  He had the uneasy feeling of being in another person’s thoughts, and just as he began to tell himself that it was the drugs talking, he heard a sound like footsteps on the path between Charlie’s room and his own. He knew immediately that it was over. He was busted.

  There was no use running. He got up and walked to the balcony, stared at the night sky, soaked in the profound sadness of the moment. He would never be a father. The footsteps grew louder, more distinct, unmistakable and numerous. He deserved what he got, but that didn’t stop him from fearing it.

  When the door opened, he had his back to it and it felt like his entire sensory system was located in between his bare shoulder blades. That’s where the eyes of the law would first fall.

  “Tony Dokoupil?”

  He turned slowly, not wanting to get shot, too consumed by emotion to realize that the voices were female. He turned expecting grim, doughy-faced white men. Instead he saw two splendid women in white T-shirts and flimsily knotted white skirts, a brunette and a blonde. The women from the bar, he realized, and in that instant my father’s mood moved from one pole to the other. Oh the shock. But oh the excitement, too, the knowledge that he was using the full register of experience rather than just a few clicks off the mean.

  My father leaned down and kissed his new companions on the cheek, sweetly, then swung an arm around the brunette’s hips and lassoed her to his side. He kissed her hard on the mouth, smashed his face against hers. She let him slide his tongue between her neat white teeth and into her mouth. The blonde took his hand and the hand of her workmate and dragged both bodies toward the bed, where she swung her own weight in a semicircle and pushed her colleague and her mark down. She tore her skirt off with the flourish of a magician, laughing, self-conscious, and the brunette did the same as best she could from the bed. Before my father fully knew what was happening, they were on him and it was over in more ways than one.

  He and Charlie settled their business in the morning and my father went home content. He was moving out of frame again, his life off center, skewed, a series of glances at the mainstream, none more defining than the one he took with him into 1980, the rise of Reagan and the prospect of fatherhood. The high-toned responsibility of having a child did not subdue him, it enticed him. He loved the shadow of catastrophe, how it erased the elevator stillness of the everyday, the emptiness that made him quake with anxiety. A child gave my father a life, a reason to live, and thus something to lose—without which he might as well be betting with play money.

  It also made him ashamed, or one has to assume, because he returned from St. Thomas with a tolerance for risk that seemed as much about fun as it was about self-erasure. He flew to Miami for a “breather,” a few days of fun with Billy. No work, no stress. He threw $40,000 into a manila envelope and made his way to airport security. No one smuggles drugs into Miami, but they sure as hell buy them there, so for any flights from New England to Miami, you can expect the gate agents to be looking for stake money. That’s why Billy had told him years ago that it’s best not to fly with cash at all, or to check the bag and pick it up on the other end.

  My father’s bag went through the machine and was yanked off for searching. The agent went right for it and even Tony was shocked to see the envelope in the light of the airport. It didn’t look official. It didn’t even look like an envelope. It looked like a rectangle trying to be a cube.

  “What’s this?” the agent asked.

  “Just my papers,” Anthony said. “My business papers.”

  The agent turned the cube over in his hands.

  My father’s heart pounded and his head swam and he was hit with the realization that he was happy to have been caught, found, stopped before he could go on with his plans to bring new life into the world. He wanted to kiss this fat, beef-faced agent with the barely closed uniform and mace on his hip. He wanted to thank him, but some instinct made him protest.

  “So what!” he broke in. “So I got a bunch of money. It’s mine. It doesn’t belong to anyone but me. I didn’t break any laws. I can have money. I didn’t steal it.”

  “How much money?”

  Somewhere in my father’s head he knew that $10,000 was a cut-off point for legal travel.

  “About $9,000,” he lied.

  The guy shrugged and released my father back onto the path of destruction. His “breather” ended up being a two- or three-day binge at Billy’s house. Women were called, professionals who brought with them professional tolerances. On the first night some sort of baby-oil
orgy ruined the mattress in Billy’s master bedroom, so he suggested a change of venue: the Sonesta Beach Hotel, one of the swankier resorts on Key Biscayne, a breakwater island between Miami and the coast of Africa. The chickadee huts by the shore shaded conventioneers and wedding parties. ABC booked the beach for skin-flick television specials. And the ocean was always there for those in need of a briny rebirth.

  Billy doesn’t much remember the party, but he does remember the moment the party stopped and his friend Anthony seized up on the couch, choking and sputtering, utterly unreal, as though his body were yellow rubber and his insides a cocktail of special effects cooked up for the big screen. Billy had to go knuckle deep into this strangeness and pull out my father’s tongue. My father woke up like that—like a snake eating a man.

  “What happened?” he asked, after Billy had withdrawn his paw.

  “I was gonna ask you the same thing, asshole.”

  Afterward my father returned to the usual work of making a baby. He even gave Ann a gift to ignite the fires of procreation, a negligee from Lisa’s in Coconut Grove. She opened it and smiled and took the piece into the bathroom, whereupon she noticed something wrong with it. Was it used?

  She called her friend Connie, who was by then divorced from her own Anthony-like first husband and the proud owner of a Porsche Carrera RS. “Honey,” she said. “Are we done yet?”