They were not killers. At least not to themselves.
Reagan took a different view. He announced a War on Drugs, which was foremost a war on marijuana, and he made the metaphor real. For the first time since prohibition the Coast Guard fired on American ships suspected of smuggling. For the first time since the Civil War the military pursued domestic criminals. For the first time ever the FBI and CIA joined the hunt for narcotics. And in the process the hey-man hippie merchants of marijuana were redefined as true enemies of the state, pursued like terrorists, prosecuted like armed combatants, vilified like pirates.
It’s hard to believe it all really happened. A ragtag army of Vietnam-era castoffs, cokeheads, and beach-bum marijuana dealers squaring off against all the toys of the Cold War. It sounds like a bad movie, something on the same shelf as kid ninjas save the universe, and yet …
Navy pilots really did buzz the coast in hot pursuit of smugglers. Massive four-prop air force radar planes really did circle the Caribbean, spying on foreign ports and looking for the beep-beep of a mother ship. Between the first joint my father ever sold in 1972 and the ten tons or so he sold in 1982, the federal budget for drug enforcement rose twentyfold, from $43 million to nearly a billion dollars.
To justify that kind of war chest, the Reagan administration resurrected old ideas about marijuana’s virulence and added a few new ones, spread with the help of a war-joyous press corps. Family Circle ran a story about marijuana’s “slow erosion of life”; Reader’s Digest covered pot’s “devastation of personality”; Science News unveiled a landmark study “proving” that marijuana is “a cause of heroin use,” a line picked up by the new parent activists, who began talking about all those pot-smoking teens as “pre-addicted” junkies.
The government won over parents by making sure the pot problem felt ubiquitous. The telltale signs of teen marijuana included “keeping late hours,” “schoolwork suddenly gone bad,” and being “furtive about phone calls,” according to Parents, Peers and Pot, the most requested U.S. government publication of all time. Some versions added “not doing chores,” “forgetful of family occasions (birthdays, etc.),” and “not cutting grass.” The First Lady echoed these risk factors in an interview with U.S. News & World Report: “Children [who smoke pot] get very laid back and cool,” she advised. “They undergo a personality change, become combative, secretive, unable to get along with the family.” Clearly, something had to be done.
In June 1982, Reagan appeared in the White House garden to officially declare his intentions. “We’re taking down the surrender flag that has flown over so many drug efforts; we’re running up a battle flag. We can fight the drug problem, and we can win. And that is exactly what we intend to do.” Marijuana was the only drug to merit specific mention.
The hysteria continued in a wave so big that it swallowed all boundaries, made it impossible to go too far. Dealers were compared to vampires, murderers, and traitors. And before long the War on Drugs began to sound like a comic-book battle between good and evil, which is why the absolute best gauge of the times is when the War on Drugs actually became a comic-book battle between good and evil.
In 1983 DC Comics, the publisher of Superman and Batman, produced a special issue of its New Teen Titans series, a superhero story aimed at elementary-school readers. The Titans battled a “Plague!” of drug pushers “who couldn’t care less if kids died using their garbage.”
Foom! Klang! Krak!
The gang clobbered the skulls of a remorseless drug ring. But they were too late! Three kids overdosed and died before the Titans could save them. In every death pot was a gateway to the underworld. Speedy, the battling bowman, was himself once a pot-smoking teen; he’s wiser today. “They said pot had no bad side effects. That was before they did further research.”
On the back page of the comic Ernest J. Keebler, the noted Dutch American political scientist, cookie maker, and magical elf, made a patriotic case for drug-free living. “When the Founding Fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, they were announcing to the world that America would be free from the control of another nation,” Dr. Keebler wrote. “When we make a declaration to stay away from drugs, we are saying to others and to ourselves, that we are in control of our own lives.” But it was Nancy Reagan who set the tone. “Picture yourself in a battle,” she wrote in a letter on White House stationery, on the inside front cover of the comic book. “In fact, it is one of the most important battles our nation has ever fought.”
My father gathered the daily grenades against his profession and tossed them back at his attackers. This was hard for politicians and parents to understand, but all high-level drug dealers and most low-level dealers felt superior to politicians and parents. It didn’t matter that Reagan and his cronies called them beasts because in some grander sense they thought of themselves as beauties, their works not vile breaches of the social code but good and proper extensions of it.
Reagan could call drug abuse “a repudiation of everything America is,” but the drug dealers went on feeling like the bedrock of the nation. They were self-made, self-directed, self-styled. They broke laws but they obeyed the natural commandments. They were good talkers, fine dressers, friends to women and children. As far as my father was concerned, he and his friends were American in the extreme.
The outlaw is “our fighting vicar against aristocracy, against power, against law, against the upstart, the pretender, the smugly virtuous, and the pompously successful person or corporation whom we envy,” in the words of Emmett Dalton, an early twentieth-century bank robber who became a professional scriptwriter after prison. The outlaw, Dalton concluded, “is our hero of democracy.”
Every morning my personal hero woke at about nine, taking a habitual line of coke off of the antique dresser next to his bed. The table bloomed with loose cash and a glistening gold Rolex, a gift from good old Billy after one of my father’s daredevil smuggles out of the Keys. Through the window he could see a tinkling blue pool and tiled patio, framed on three sides by a small but glorious lawn. Each blade of grass was as green as a basic green crayon, as thick as a butter knife, and always wet with warm dew or rain—an instant foot treatment for whoever walked to the plantain tree for cereal toppings.
In the kitchen he drank orange juice, still shirtless, rubbing his belly, massaging his chest, imagining the juice as it filled the dark places inside him. He swallowed a multivitamin, which he swore he could feel healing his broken chromosomes. When he was done, he looked at two-year-old me in my Jet Set jean shorts and striped Ocean Pacific polo shirt, and he did something twitchy with his mustache—my cue to run and hide, beginning the daily drama of hot pursuit, a game he loved as much I did.
Before the sun got too high we changed into our bathing suits and headed for the beach. My mother was always in a one-piece, even before she had me, but this wasn’t a mommy suit. It was cut high around the thighs, low around the top, and it stretched drum-tight around the mid-section. The belly was a work of art—a great Warholian screen print—and she looked like some kind of novelty drink, the sort of beverage a cartoon alcoholic dreams up on a dry island. My father lifted her upward for a kiss as though the tilt might spill something cold and boozy and absolutely delicious.
We headed to the Sonesta Beach Hotel, which did double-duty as one of my father’s favorite hangouts for partying and parenting alike. The poolside bartender Geno made a name for himself by pouring sweet rum into the straws of his piña coladas and daiquiris, and my father went to see him or a deputy right away. He downed the first drink, sipped the second, and started walking toward the water.
As my mother anchored an umbrella and unfurled towels at a safe distance, my father pointed his chest toward the midmorning sun, took off his shirt and sandals, listened for a moment to the roll of the waves and the hiss of the tide, and returned to us ready for his nip of fatherhood.
Anyone walking by would have seen a loving dad, a pillar of his community, the perfect family man. He smashed
his mustache into the top of my head, smelling me in that deep, needful way parents have with their kids. We played Wiffle ball in matching Speedos, and that night he and my mother took showers and put on clean clothes and forgot they were parents and drug dealers.
On such nights my father looked at Ann and remembered their first drive together in his dented green Dodge Dart, her body sunk down into the seat, a flowery skirt over her perfect knees. She’d rolled down her window and put her brown toes on the dash and smiled that boozy smile.
Over the years they slurped cream of escargot soup, used those tiny silver spoons for salmon mousse and Grand Marnier soufflé, downed oysters at the Miami River Raw Bar. They drank Margaux and Lafite and perfect simulacrums of a Havana daiquiri. My mother’s evening wear was rayon Peruvian island knit. My father did all his shopping at Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue, depending on which was closer to his parking spot.
One night at the Hotel St. Michel in Coral Gables, they drank too much wine, did too much coke, and were gently tossed out, the check appearing at my father’s elbow, the waiter whispering something deferential but clear. Outside my father dropped $20s and $50s at the feet of street performers, and folded the same into the change cups of the homeless and hungry. That was Anthony Edward Dokoupil at thirty-six: high and wild, generous and kind.
Before Thanksgiving 1982, he appeared in the palm-fringed lobby of the Miami Herald Building on Biscayne Bay, where he donated $10,000 to the annual food drive. That same year his sidekick, Dougie, my mother’s younger brother, was diagnosed with cancer. My father gave him painkilling strains of weed throughout the chemotherapy process. He also helped pay for many of his procedures, including the cost of freezing his sperm. A decade later Dougie became a dad.
Our daytime family default was one of the jungles, Parrot or Monkey, both of which offered regal creatures riding bicycles and buttoning their own Oxford shirts. At the planetarium, we ran our hands over a piece of glacier and grinned inside a pair of diving bells. At the Seaquarium, my father disappeared altogether, leaving my mother in the awkward position of explaining to me what that long purple thing was and why the whale was rubbing it against our side of the ring. Dad’s timing was always good that way.
They pushed my stroller through the Coconut Grove Arts Festival, the Key West Arts Explosion, and Art in the Heart of Miami Beach, walking around like albino elephants sniffing the shooters on a hunting preserve. They bought things in pairs and triplicate. It was all a good deal, all certain to appreciate in value. There were the three banana portraits, including “skid row banana” and “junior never learned to look both ways.” The dramatic chair sculpted out of a single hunk of wood, which mostly went on to future service collecting wet towels. The American flag wristband with attached eagle sculpture.
Every few weeks we took a family outing to Vizcaya, a Gatsbyesque villa built for the millionaire cofounder of International Harvester. The mansion is a dream of antique grandeur with ten acres of gardens, fountains, statues, and reflecting pools. As I ran around on lawns thick enough to stumble on without injury, Mom and Dad sat on white wrought-iron benches, fingers interlocked, their perfect lives in fullest bloom.
“Shall we buy it?” my father said, and he felt as though he really could.
Mom said, “Definitely,” and felt like she already owned it.
Part of the fun of being a criminal is the crisp satisfaction of living by the criminal’s code. Forget the U.S. justice system, the pope, your parents, God, the devil: The criminals themselves decided criminal conduct, like ten-year-olds in a tree house. All in favor? Yea. Now pull up the rope ladder and let’s write some bylaws for the life.
First of all, no guns.
Second, a handshake is binding; your word is your signature. Third, everyone shares equally in success, suffers equally in failure. It doesn’t matter who’s at fault. Legal fees come out of everyone’s take.
Fourth, keep your mouth shut. No rats.
Fifth, and this is nonnegotiable, no drugs during a job.
The motto: “I’m okay, you’re okay.”
These were the real rules of my father’s trade, bylaws of the brotherhood, a code nowhere written down but known by all, breathed in like a mist and spread through the gang and beyond, permeating the pot underworld. There was honor among the scammers and it was talked about to the point of cottonmouth.
An extended declaration of the smuggler’s code would include a ban on selling cocaine, a prohibition on partnering with the American Mafia, and a moratorium on physical violence. It would end with a pious declaration, a finger pointed at the real enemy, the unjust War on Drugs, and the real criminals, Ronald Reagan and all who support him.
My father’s criminal code was mostly an homage to another group of men, a clan all marijuana smugglers seem to have been sweet on: the pirates of the Caribbean, the real ones, who had a real golden age from about 1715 to 1725.
In many ways, the era of piracy and the era of pot are an uncanny match. Both the pirates and the marijuana smugglers cursed and cussed, sang bawdy songs, gambled, whored, profaned the holy days, gave in to lust, reveled in uncleanliness, and were greedy for life, liberty, and merriment, which they gulped down to the last.
They shared the same latitudes and the same appetite for intoxication, the pirates indulging in hogsheads of claret and brandy, the marijuana merchants indulging in everything invented since. “Sobriety,” wrote one eighteenth-century pirate scribe, “brought a man under subject of being in a plot.” He need not update the line for marijuana smugglers.
They also shared florid personal styles and working titles, from Calico Jack to Bubba Capo, as inspired as their facial hair. Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard, had “a Large Quantity of Hair, which, like a frightful Meteor, covered his whole Face, and frightened America more than any Comet,” in the words of one of his biographers. My father walked into a room mustache first, jawline obscured by fuzz, hair to his collar.
But there are even deeper parallels. The pirates were angry about being “pressed” into the Royal Navy; the smugglers fumed about Vietnam. The pirates protested the lightless horizons belowdecks on the world’s biggest ships; the smugglers rejected the air-conditioned anthill of their parents’ America.
Both groups of men also stepped onto a stage prepared by forerunners going back thousands of years to the first pirates, the oldest spiritual guerrillas. Both were called Robin Hoods, the pirates because they stole from the rich, the smugglers because they defied the powerful to give pleasure to the poor, or at least an intellectual underclass that didn’t trust money or power. Both operated in bands, clasped into a brotherhood, a confederacy of overlapping, interlocking, endlessly splintering and cohering groups.
And for both sets of men money was never the point. The pirates lived for plenty, satiety, pleasure, and ease, punctuated by the wild drama of adventure. “A merry life and a short one” was the motto of Bartholomew “Black Bart” Roberts, reportedly the most prolific pirate of the golden age. The smugglers of course would heartily agree. As Jimmy Buffett sang at the time, “I made enough money to buy Miami, but I pissed it away so fast. Never meant to last.”
The arc of their lives matched as well. In the beginning both groups had an abiding sense of social mission. The pirates, as one captain put it, wanted “to revenge themselves on base Merchants, and cruel Commanders.” The marijuana smugglers wanted the personal liberty to toke up. The pirates saw themselves as relatively harmless, secure, in the words of one eighteenth-century journalist, that “Whatever Robberies they had committed, they might be pretty sure they were not the greatest Villains then living in the World.” The marijuana smugglers would drink to that.
And the very reason pirates still glow in our imagination is largely a matter of the pirate’s code, which was a real document, a way to behave in the midst of epic misbehavior. The pirates conformed to a pattern of nonconformity just as the smugglers acted rationally in the service of irrational excess. The articles of agreem
ent, as they were known, restricted pirates from drinking on the job, required clean weapons, and specified an orderly way to divide a bounty, including arranged compensation for the injured. Protests were put to a vote, amendments added, disagreements settled more or less peaceably.
The historian Marcus Rediker thinks that pirates, through their example of a democratic, fair, and tolerant society, “built a better world.” If one believes that marijuana is good for mankind—that it’s a powerful medicine, a door to meditation and knowledge; that it makes people more peaceful and fills them with love for all living things; that if it were consumed more there would be less war, conquest, avarice, and suffering—then my father and his brothers in the business succeeded as pirates did. They “built a better world” through weed.
Unfortunately they also suffered as pirates did. Both groups inspired new laws, treaties, and task forces, and over time both groups let their mission drift, their discipline waver. They grew drunker on the job, more daring in their exploits, less interested in a grand social cause than in sex, drugs, and survival itself.
The number of pirates slipped from the thousands in 1715 to the hundreds a decade later. Scores were arrested, hanged, and then displayed as a warning to all who might turn toward the life. Many were honorably antiestablishment until the end. But the vast majority ended up beggarly, disabled, or jailed, and many suffered all three before sleeping in a pauper’s coffin. Pirates sailed under the black flag and died under it. Marijuana smugglers worked in the service of freedom and lost their own in the process.
This last fact lit a slow fuse in my father’s brain. Even as he enjoyed a marooning life of movies at noon and fatherhood by the heart-swelling hour, he boiled with forbidden euphoria. It’s the kind of kick that changes a person.
The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana Page 11