Our room had a view of Central Park all the way to Harlem. The ceilings were gold and the beds squeaked like living things. I bounced over one and then another, then bounded to the window, my mother snapping photos, which show me wearing a cycling hat with a Porsche logo, a gift from Connie on Long Island. We had forty-eight hours to play.
We took it slow at first, a carriage ride through Central Park, followed by a visit to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the archdiocese of my father’s boyhood, home to all of New York City’s Catholics. Inside my old man stood calm as a skyscraper, never kneeling or praying but obviously consumed with feeling. Catholics believe God contains a kind of “Footprints” poem himself, a trinity of equal and divine persons, each born in the image of the former in the way of all fathers and sons. “This is my beloved Son,” says God the Father, at the baptism of Jesus Christ, as the Holy Spirit is said to hover on the horizon, “in whom I am well pleased.”
We exited in a blissful daze and when we turned the corner, the street opened into a cheerful square, the courtyard of a different hotel, the Palace, one of my father’s favorites. And there was my mother, sitting on the edge of a low wall. She was still looking in the direction of the cathedral, but when she turned and saw us, there was serenity in her face. She stood and took a few steps, arms outstretched.
Then we were off again, expected at a heliport on the West Side, where we rose higher and higher, sailing over the city and the river, the roof of every skyscraper dribbling steam like a balky cloud maker, the Hudson ablaze in the slanting light of the day. When we landed, we rushed uptown. We had orchestra seats at a kids’ show at Symphony Space, a performance that matched our mood. It was called Whoop-Dee-Doo!
We flew home the next day, flew home to a city that itself had become the subject of cartwheeling exclamations. Miami was no longer Vietnam South but the new Casablanca, darling of Esquire and Vogue, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. No less than House & Garden called it “one of those magical American places.”
Drugs ruined the city, then saved it. They pushed up the murder rate, sent three mayors to jail, then rebuilt the skyline and drove the nightlife. Drug money was present in every paycheck, piled on every church plate, stuffed in every wallet. Statistically speaking, drugs themselves were unavoidable in this new Miami. The urban legend about trace amounts of cocaine on hundred-dollar bills originated in our town, and it was largely true. In 1985 a local pharmacologist tested bundles of randomly selected cash from seven mainstream Miami banks and found “large amounts of cocaine” on all of them. If you handled more than $1,000 in a year, in any denomination, you had drugs on your hands.
The previous fall, Miami’s sex appeal had gone national. The sounds outside were still the normal noises. The gunshots and the screeching tires, the girls on West Thirty-ninth dancing beneath the neon signs. All that carried on. What changed was the orientation: The iconography of the city, already recognized subconsciously, was pulled together and splashed across the screen in the most dramatic fashion. Miami Vice debuted.
Afterward, the city of Miami started talking about itself differently. Otherwise serious, sober people dropped $2,300 on dinner, $1,600 on shoes. They went out every night then slept it off under gradually turning ceiling fans in immaculate fruit palaces. Suddenly it seemed all of Miami was on the same page as my father, who did more than look on from the banks of Babylon. In fact, he acquired his own longed-for Vizcaya, the luxury dream home or, at least, the luxury condo version of it, a mile north of the real Vizcaya along the shore of Biscayne Bay.
The condo was high in a just-completed four-tower complex with six tennis courts, a clubhouse, two pools, its own fake beach, and the pedigree of being located along the Millionaire’s Row of old Miami, where William Jennings Bryan might have borrowed sugar from his neighbor, the artist Louis Comfort Tiffany. It was across the street from the Atlantis building, the blue one with the fifty-foot hole in the center, a “sky court” with a red spiral staircase, a palm tree, and a whirlpool, all of it made famous by the opening credits of Miami Vice. Turn right out of my father’s front gate, and in five minutes you were in Miami’s banking district, and the new downtown.
He was home most nights, but he felt entitled to play around some, and my mother didn’t stop him. She had become like the wife of any ambitious professional. She put up with long hours, big trips, presumed affairs, potential swings of fortune, and all with good cheer, because of what she got in return: money, freedom, travel, and the best education for her son that money could buy.
This was my first year at Gulliver Academy, my mother’s top choice for turning drug money into something the federal authorities could never confiscate. Gulliver was one of the best private schools in the country, home to “the big names and big bucks of South Florida,” according to a defeated Miami Herald reporter who toured the school with her son, “feeling nervous” in her Toyota Sentra. My mother liked the reading program, the cursive handwriting program, and the science lab, which had not only baby chicks but sea turtles and tarantulas, too. She liked the small class sizes and optional extended day care.
She also liked the facilities, which were anchored by a country house and accessed only through a cool oak-lined hall that you couldn’t enter without a moment of absolute coal miner darkness as your eyes adjusted from the hard light outside. Pass through that, and the backyard was a warren of flower-lined walkways and cozy classrooms, yielding to fleecy green grass that ran for a quarter mile.
Gulliver was the school of Du Pont scions, members of the Estefan family, the Iglesias family. The grandson of George H. W. Bush was my classmate, and the unsmiling totems of my childhood became Secret Service agents, bearing silent witness as I peed on a fire-ant hill. At the end of each day, when the agents would finally move, they were somehow never stiff when sliding into a limo with “The Bushes” emblazoned on the door.
The tuition at Gulliver was more than the University of Florida, but many parents, my own included, paid in cash, benefiting from a small discount that encouraged it. A joke circulated, a wry one-liner about what all the school’s fabulously wealthy Latino fathers did for a living. “They aren’t doctors or lawyers,” it began. “They must be Indian chiefs.” At some point my mother admitted her situation outright to Mae, my best friend’s mother, and the news didn’t damage their relationship. It deepened it. The two women began to pop wine and trade Miami stories while us kids played.
Mae’s stories kept pace with my mom’s. In the late 1970s, she and her husband had moved out of Coconut Grove, concerned about raising kids in a tropical Gomorrah. They felt confirmed in their sound decision-making when a naked lady jogged past their moving van. Later, as the office manager of her husband’s medical practice, Mae grew accustomed to patients—even fellow Gulliver parents—paying huge bills in cash. And on Fridays, she walked out with some of it in her purse, treating Clay and me to a cart-filling shopping spree at Toys“R”Us. The only reckoning was “Just Say No to Drugs Day,” when everyone’s parents rode around town wearing red ribbons, soft smiles floating above steering wheels.
This was also the year I started to act more like my father. Family is an important part of the recovery process, the doctors told my mother, and after all, he is the boy’s father, they explained, so as crazy as it sounds, I was allowed to spend more time with my father post-rehab than before. These were long, strange hours of bonding. A season of broken baby teeth, knocked out when Dad pitched me a basketball and the bat exploded back toward my mouth. It was also the season of the alligator.
We were at Matheson Hammock, a local beach and freshwater estuary, when the beast emerged from one of the pools leading up to the shore. This wasn’t surprising in Florida, and if the gator stayed there for long, park rangers would wrap the pond in yellow tape and put a cone nearby, as if nature had just spilled itself. The message seems redundant. Go away, you say? I think the gator already made itself clear on that point. But my father edged toward the alligator, and bro
ught me with him until the gator flinched and we ran, laughing.
Around the same time my father took me and a friend from Gulliver out for a madcap fishing trip. My father’s occupation as a boat captain was bogus but his yacht was real, a beautiful vessel with two outboard motors, a big, proud bow, and a cockpit that made a man feel like a chariot racer on the high seas. We etched white waves into the middle of shipping channels, jumped wakes that would have swamped us broadside, and wove through Stiltsville at a rate that would light the cherries on a police boat if one were ever around.
My sharpest recollection is of the steady thwack of the hull on the waves and the hum of the engines suddenly giving way, replaced by a new sound that reminded me of a headfirst dive into third base. I remember the shock of the boat actually stopping, and rocking to its side. I looked over the hull and saw sand. We had hit a low-tide island, and apparently a pretty popular one because when my father got out to push us, he cut his bare foot on a broken bottle. The blood mixed with water and turned the whole deck red. And that was before we started fishing the flats for barracuda, the man-size predators with razor teeth. Dad had me pose with two meat-eaters bigger than me.
This was our shared Miami: riotous, swarming, unpredictable. The city averaged six feet above sea level, which meant when I touched bottom in our Miami swimming pool I was deeper into the sea, in terms of elevation, than when I was already bobbing in the Atlantic chop. It meant I could strike water with a few plastic shovel blows in the front yard, and we had to board one of those cruise ships before putting any meaningful distance between ourselves and mother ocean.
Our Miami was a place where a single giant wave could sweep the land clean. It was a city where teenagers canoodled in the glow of television weather reports and hedged against drowning as virgins, while kids like me wore strainers on their heads and stood like Washington on the prow of their couches. It was bracing to live with that kind of sword dangling overhead. It added to the intensity of existence in Miami, where Life and Death seemed to be roommates rather than neighbors.
Our Miami was a place where canals clogged with bags of drowned kittens and headless farm animals, the dregs of a voodoo prayer; big snakes crossed roads, encircled toddlers, and squeezed dogs. At a playground one day, my mother yanked me off a jungle gym because a coral snake was sunning itself on the play mats. We were told not to retrieve balls we lost in the river, after an animal—probably an alligator, maybe a panther—remaindered the neighbor’s poodle.
Every day in our Miami it rained in great slashing curtains, heavy water skating around, pelting one location, leaving the next untouched. At my Little League games the rain turned infielders soppy and left outfielders dry; this father running for cover, that one licking his pencil and keeping score. It put one in mind of a cartoon God somewhere above the thunderheads slouched in a lawn chair, a finger looped over the long neck of a beer bottle, flicking the hose.
Our Miami was life as shipwrecked fantasy: a place where people ran away to live on squirt cheese and crackers, sleeping on their boats or way out in the ocean in houses on stilts. In our Miami a lightning strike could burn a forest and reveal an ancient burial ground, and pirate’s treasure wasn’t abstract and lost offshore but liable to wash up after a storm. Or appear in the folds of a pull-out couch, as $10,000 did one night when Aunt Carolyn came to visit.
My father and I once walked to the end of this shared Miami, or one of the many ends of America’s only entirely unnecessary city. We came to the end of a sidewalk in our neighborhood, where the road was paved and then dirt and then just a path. We took it past bullet casings and painted rocks and empty beer cans. We saw condoms and dung piles, and we pushed on until the vines crowded in, and the mangroves enveloped us, and it was easy to imagine the palm fronds slapping a dinosaur in the face. Eventually there was no more landfill, just half-deluged fields and impenetrable swamp, alive with unseen possibilities, like my own darkened room or my father’s unfolding evening.
Miami was an exciting place to a drug dealer or a little boy.
It was barely a place at all.
Every night at bedtime my father told me a story. One of them, The Wreck of the Zephyr, I read to my own son. It’s the legend of a boy who briefly learns to sail above the waves, his boat flying through the clouds, until he gets too cocky and crashes on a bluff, breaking his leg. The narrator is skeptical when he first hears the tale, relayed by an old man sitting next to a broken boat high on a bluff. But on the last page, the wind picks up and the old man walks off with a limp, and you know in that instant that he has spent his whole life trying to fly again, searching for that perfect wind, the one that got him high and made him crazy.
My father always said that he’d quit the drug business when he made his million dollars. “Almost there,” he told friends in 1981, like a man a few payments away from owning his car. He repeated the claim the following year, and the year after that, and soon it was less a reflection of sentiment than of superstition, a perpetual retirement process.
It’s not that my father was lying to people—or to himself. He really was “almost there.” What he didn’t say is that the million he was working on wasn’t his first, which was lost in the penthouses of Biscayne Bay and downtown Miami, where the cocaine came in softball-size mounds and the prostitutes stayed for days. It wasn’t his second either, which was lost in much the same way. The million he was working on was his third. And for the first time in his career my father felt genuinely afraid of losing it.
As drug traffickers glowed with ever more perceived evil, they lost many of the federal protections enjoyed by murderers, rapists, and some of the more run-of-the-mill defilers of society. Every arm of the U.S. government was reaching for them. Uncle Sam could search bags and vehicles without a warrant, snatch property without a trial. Prosecutors took anything they believed was bought with drug money or equal in value to the drug money they believed was earned.
All they needed was probable cause, the belief that something was an ill-gotten gain. And on that alone federal agents took hotels, ranches, planes, boats, and topless bars. At the same time, in an effort to halt what The New York Times called the “annual invasion” of weed every summer—an invasion my father had a starring role in—the Coast Guard started racking up busts: twenty-eight tons on a cargo ship off the Massachusetts coast, thirty-two tons on a shrimp boat near the Florida Keys.
So many bales of marijuana were hastily thrown off planes and boats, usually when the authorities were in pursuit, that Floridians developed a nickname for this floating contraband: square grouper. It washed up on the beach like driftwood, or bobbed like cork and was swept around the nose of Florida by the Gulf current. Fifty-seven bales were found off St. Lucie, thirty-eight bales drifted ashore on Jupiter Island, another thirty-four landed on Vero Beach. The Gulf of Mexico became a kind of medicinal tea, flavored by thousands of bales.
Once you know what waits for him, the details of my father’s life take on a fated quality. It’s hard to imagine him ever doing anything else, which may be true of any life you study closely, but it feels particularly true in my father’s case because the factors shaping his life were so much bigger than him. He might have dropped out of the drug trade in 1985, much as he might have done in 1976 if history had not given him Jimmy Carter. This time the gang was kept on course by a smaller but no less profound gift. It came when Charlie took a trip to Portland, Maine, where he met a Coast Guard commander, a very drunk and very sad-seeming man.
“How’s it going in the Coast Guard?” Charlie asked him, and the commander looked at Charlie’s bronze skin and sun-bleached hair.
“Are you a sailor?” he asked.
“I sail whenever I can,” Charlie said.
“Well we must know a lot of the same people,” the commander suggested.
“I bet we do,” Charlie said, and they talked on, whiskey taking both men captive, making Charlie bolder, the commander more maudlin. The man said that he was planning to retire
from the Coast Guard. He said the Coast Guard had lost its way. Six fishermen had drowned in the seas off the coast of Maine while his ship was in the Caribbean, hunting for pot. “I love the sea,” the man said. “I want to save people from it. If I wanted to stop pot, I would have joined the DEA.”
Without saying more he reached into his briefcase and handed Charlie a map of the East Coast and the islands. To Charlie’s astonishment it had summer routes for the Coast Guard and the placement of stationary radar balloons. Charlie folded the chart into his coat pocket, paid the man’s tab, and walked away with the deed to an uneventful season.
How could my father quit then? One more year, he said.
That summer Charlie and Willy confirmed their own plans to exit the business. Bobby was still keen to work, and my father’s other source, John, forget about it, he wasn’t going to stop for nothing. But if the principal band was breaking up, the last show should be a doozy, their biggest yet. And it was: twenty-two thousand pounds of Colombian delivered and sold from August to October 1985.
My father took his final cut from a stash house in Connecticut: $500,000 (the equivalent of twice that much in today’s money), which he packed into two suitcases, each one heavy enough to tear a man’s rotator cuff. He didn’t party or dawdle; he got a ride to Katonah, New York, where he took $5,000 from a safe-deposit box, and continued on to New Haven, where he bought a $20 road map from the bookstore at Yale. He rented a car and set off for Albuquerque, New Mexico, his back end sagging ever so slightly.
The journey took four days and three nights, which my father spent in Columbus, St. Louis, and Oklahoma City. He was clean the whole journey. Even without the paranoia of cocaine, however, he was constantly checking for a tail. The White House boasted of arresting ten thousand “traffickers” a year and pot culture itself was shriveling amid what Nancy Reagan proudly called “an atmosphere of intolerance.”
The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana Page 16