Her Just Say No campaign was one of the most unsophisticated anti-drug slogans ever. It suggested that drugs are evil but you can quit them any time. Side by side those concepts set the table for pleasure as surely as the phrase “diet vacation.” And yet the Reagans were reaching their goals: The number of annual pot smokers fell by nearly ten million from the Carter years, and two out of three Americans supported throwing smokers into prison, let alone dealers and smugglers.
It was a reversal of public sentiment, especially among the young, who no longer viewed pot as the drug of creative types and rebels but of wastes and dropouts, people who couldn’t succeed. Professionally. Socially. Sartorially. At Manhattan cocktail parties during the Carter years joints were smoked down to a finger-singeing ember, smoked until the remains fluttered to rest on the toe of a penny loafer. In the age of Reagan, the same joint came back full length, cold, untouched, and never to be passed again. If pot was once a light on in the attic, the light had gone off.
At each stop on his journey my father selected nice hotels near the city center, places where he could feel relatively secure with his precious cargo. He paid for his room for multiple days, hoping to give the impression of a man with business in town. Then he hung out a sign and disappeared before dawn, making sure only the rising sun was in his rearview mirror.
On the fourth day of his journey he called ahead to let my aunt and her husband know that all was well, and he would be arriving soon. They lived in a grinning McMansion on Indian land outside the city, a place with an indoor pool and arrowheads in the garden. Her husband worked in finance; she was a homemaker. My mother had set up the location because this was supposed to be our money, a security account, as my father explained, “in case something happens to me.” I have no idea why my aunt and uncle agreed.
My father arrived around noon, bearing an Igloo cooler, a new caulking gun, and hundreds of plastic baggies and rubber bands. With my younger cousins at school, he set to work on the kitchen floor. He would count a stack of $5,000, slip a rubber band over it, and bundle it into a baggie like tomorrow’s lunch. It took two hours but he confirmed the full half million, including a lot of fives and tens—which told my father he was holding street-corner money, the most evocative kind. The stacks fit perfectly, the lid just barely locking into place.
He had less than an hour to dig the hole before the kids came home from school, so he picked an easy spot in the freshly turned clay near the foundation of the house. He used a tree as his marker, moved four feet of dirt, dropped in the cooler, and anchored it with a big flagstone.
And that was that. Of all the decisions my father made, this was not among the worst. He expected my mother to tip out her family, but whatever the future held, he felt sure that she and I would be taken care of, and that left him feeling light and free. He heaved the suitcases and caulking gun into a clanking-big gas-station Dumpster and returned the car to the local rental office. He spent the night in an airport hotel, and the next morning he was flying home, flying toward her, toward me, aloft on his first full day of official retirement.
His career had spanned four presidents, survived two campaigns in the War on Drugs, and pushed the Big Green Elephant deep into the 1980s, a preposterously late date for something people can grow on a windowsill and the Coast Guard will sink you for. Many of his peers, maybe even most, had long ago switched to cocaine, flamed out, grown up, gone to graduate school, or been confined to reading The Odyssey in a federal pen. To stay on top all he had to do was precisely nothing.
But precisely nothing was the only thing he had never done.
In Boston the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force began referring to my father’s crew as “the confederacy.” They knew this confederacy had small-time roots in the early 1970s, but that in the first half of the Reagan administration, it had grown into a multiform monster. They knew the ring was really two rings, and then three, depending on the year, the job, who was in rehab, and who was trying to buy a new boat.
They knew that the men of these rings worked on one of two essential tasks, procurement or distribution, taking turns in different roles. By design, however, no one knew the ring’s entire structure and neither did the task force. That meant job insurance: Neither the buyers nor the sellers knew enough to cut the other side out of the deal. It also meant legal protection: People can’t testify about what they don’t know.
One configuration of the ring began with John in the mountains of Colombia, where he would select his product and ship it to my father and Bobby. A second configuration began with Willy in the same mountains, who delivered directly to my father, along with another distributor he kept to himself. During more than a decade these rings combined to push easily half a million pounds of marijuana into America, more than any confederacy ever uncovered. But they didn’t consider themselves “organized” crime.
They were men who peeled fruit, owned woks, and knew all the rules of fondue. Many of them gave to charity. They thought of themselves as artists, and to varying degrees they were. They played guitars, sang, acted. Mostly they wrote ballads in their heads and with their lives. My father and his crew were not The Last Smugglers. Until weed is legalized, no one will be. But their retirement did mark the end of a certain kind of criminal era.
“No matter what happens, drinking and drugging is not an option,” begins a notebook my father kept in the 1980s. The text has no date, and my father doesn’t remember it. But it reads like the jottings of a man on the other side of rehab, which would mean they were made sometime in the spring or summer of 1985, which is my best guess. One whole side of the page is filled with little urgings, reminders, and admonitions. The last line reads simply, “I must be concrete and specific about how I intend to stay sober.” Flip the page, however, and it continues in a different pen and a blend of rougher block lettering and ornate cursive. Someone has sketched a goblin with its legs crossed in the left-hand margin.
It begins: “I have made a very big decision.”
My father tried to settle into a normal middle-class existence, but it was like exiting an athletic career or work as a soldier. It turned off a certain kind of chemical in my father’s brain, and he felt cut down in middle age, sick for another round. Every morning the alarm would echo for decades. It would ring down the long, drab corridor of his life, the years stretching ahead, filled with nothing but regular-strength life. It’s sad, of course, that he could not survive on that, but it’s also understandable.
It’s not that my father and men like him had no skills, it’s that the straight world didn’t know how to value them. After a lengthy federal prison term, one wholesaler tried to bridge this divide: He circulated a résumé entitled “Ex-Marijuana Kingpin Needs a Job.” It generated national news but little work.
To fill his day my father volunteered as the “Daddy aide” in my kindergarten class. Apparently he just wheeled in a cart of milk and apple slices one morning, introducing himself to the teachers and creating the job. He must have mentioned some long-ago experience, his almost–master’s degree, maybe, and the real teachers let him stay, at least until he started hitting on Ms. Alvarez, the headmistress.
She felt compelled to call home about the incident, which got my mother’s heart thumping. The previous year I had bitten a teacher in my pre-K class, and my mother was braced for more bad news, some of the worst kind: a diagnosis of this or that, more difficulty, the ruination of her plan to turn drug money into scholarship money. She cradled the phone and waited.
“This is about your husband,” said Ms. Alvarez, and my mother about collapsed. She had a sudden image of a kidnapping, or an extortion scheme, or armed men in the classroom, blood spraying, the kind of unforgiving kill-your-child Latin American nightmare she clicked past on the television. “He’s been showing up to class,” Ms. Alvarez continued, and though the subtext was scandalous my mother began to relax. “It’s disturbing the learning environment,” Ms. Alvarez said, ever so gently, and Ann had to stifle
a laugh. “I bet he is,” she thought. And that was the end of my father’s volunteer work.
For Thanksgiving we all went to Connie’s house on Long Island, a neat and cheerful home on a wooded lot with a nice fireplace. The wine went down in gulps and the adults stayed up telling stories, which served as a kind of stand-in for logic, a narrative explanation for all the crazy years—because sometimes a good story is logic enough.
Connie told one story, about a weekend a few years earlier, when my father paid her to disappear, leaving him and Bobby to use the house for a job. She came home early to find him counting out a million dollars on the kitchen table, right where we all sat for Thanksgiving. That was a good story. And it was a good story to know the land outside was dotted with buried coolers of cash. And a good story about the time my father and Connie’s first husband went out for milk and disappeared for days, claiming they hit an anvil on the highway.
“I smell a movie,” my mother said, and everyone laughed and agreed. They talked on until all the wine was gone and there were no regrets.
The following month my father flew to New York for lunch with one of his old wholesalers, a nice guy named Alan, who wore a gold dolphin ring and a rope bracelet. They had a tradition of sharing a winter drink at Tavern on the Green, the polished three-star restaurant in Central Park West. They also talked about the good old days, because everything is funny in hindsight.
They roared about one time in particular. It was a year or two earlier, when Alan and Charlie broke the pirate code and got themselves into a tussle that put everyone on some sort of a hit list. The way Alan told it, he took Boston Mob money and tried to put together a load of Thai Stick, a legendarily potent strain of Far East dope. It was made by lashing marijuana to bamboo sticks and dousing each stick in opium or hash oil for an extra kick. If it were candy, Thai Stick would be Fun Dip, a flavored sugar wand dipped in stronger flavored sugar and served to people who really, really like sugar. After the fall of Saigon and the rise of Reagan, Thai Stick became popular, rare, and profitable.
Alan sent a guy to get the load out of Turkey, then he met the load in Maine, after it had been tacked across the Atlantic on two sixty-foot ketches. He was shocked by what he found in the hold. Not Thai Stick so much as stick stick: kindling, ten tons of marshmallow poles with some kind of wet coating, maybe drugs, maybe poison, maybe nothing. My father sent Bobby up from Brooklyn to take a look, who missed his kid’s basketball game just to state the obvious: This isn’t marketable to anyone in any form.
Alan went into damage-control mode. He paid a local farmer to feed the load to his pigs; six of them died so Alan paid for the pigs, too. Then he paid his sailors and off-loaders. Finally he called Charlie to request enough cash to cover the Mob investment, which was totally lost. Charlie refused. He and Willy figured it was Alan’s deal, Alan’s problem.
A few weeks later a man known as Ice Pick, a pale hulking Mob enforcer, walked into Horsefeathers on St. Thomas and asked for Charlie. He intended to kill him or at least kidnap him for ransom, but Charlie was visiting Willy in St. Barts, where he was tipped off to Ice Pick’s inquiry and irate at Alan, who ended up squaring things with the Mob—and going after Charlie and Willy himself. In Alan’s memory Charlie pulled a gun, and Alan yanked it from him. In Charlie’s memory Willy had the gun, a .38, sitting on a table when he and Alan walked into Charlie’s living room. Either way, it was a glorious goddamn good time.
And the story helped my father realize he hated his new life, hated being an ex-somebody even if he had money and time. Back home my father’s worst routines reasserted themselves. He woke with a line of cocaine off the cuff-link shelf of his antique dresser, which stirred him like a memory box. The flip blade he used, sentimentally, to slice open every bale he ever sold, was there next to his father’s brass U.S. Army buttons, which were next to the gifts my father received from grateful partners. The presidential gold Rolex Billy had given him. The gold cigarette case Charlie had given him, supposedly once owned by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
At midday he went off for breakfast at a diner in Little Havana. On the way he picked up The Miami Herald and The New York Times; pocketed an Almond Joy to get him through the late afternoon. When he got tired, he took another hit of cocaine, a toot from a modified nasal spray. One of my father’s last distinct pleasures was to peruse national drug coverage, which amounted to a newsletter of his competitors’ woes.
He felt utterly invincible reading these tales of intrigue, adventure, and personal woe on the trail of the Big Green Elephant. There was the dealer who failed to latch his briefcase and had bricks of marijuana fall out of it onto the feet of a cop. The pilot who landed his dope bird in a field where local politicians were hosting their annual Turkey Run. The pilot who was found floating in the Atlantic, clinging to a bale of dope he claimed just happened to be bobbing nearby, a story the police believed until they found him in the same condition a month later.
The captain of a marijuana-laden freighter who flew the Panamanian flag upside down. The driver of a hardtop pickup who forgot to tint his back window, and another driver who pulled into a gas station behind a cop, who immediately smelled the dope. Two more kingpins couldn’t make their drop because a canal that looked dredged on the map wasn’t dredged in reality.
The most tragic case involved a pilot who clipped a power line as he approached an unfinished portion of I-95. He lost a wing and cartwheeled down the asphalt while his ground crew scrambled to recover six measly bales thrown clear of the inferno. They drove off—success!—only to be pulled over because of a minor traffic violation: Their muffler was dragging, throwing off sparks.
As it happened, at that very instant, Charlie and Bobby and Willy were themselves struggling with life as ex–professional drug smugglers. The four of them had begun in this business young enough to believe that life would only get better, weed only more legal. Instead they were approaching middle age in the darkest hour in modern marijuana history, halfway through a nearly two-decade stretch without the passage of a single pro-marijuana law, state or federal, and mass incarceration at every level of the drug culture.
Worse, their profession itself was being pushed into history. Marijuana was here to stay but the business of marijuana was undergoing a profound shift toward domestic suppliers, the era of high-end homegrown reefer, which was an easier business to enter and carried less risk than a multiton sea smuggle.
My father and his friends could see the shift manifest in the pages of High Times. Those long boastful features about “Wheeling and Dealing” were replaced by short, knowledgeable tear sheets on how to make your marijuana plants love you. The ads for counterintelligence equipment were replaced by kits to detect the sex of a plant and traps to stop rabbits from eating your crop. The magazine even hired a companionable green thumb—the Ann Landers of pot—to answer readers’ questions on soil acidity and light density.
At first this confused men like my father. For most of their careers homegrown weed was the vegetable smoke of last resort, not unlike bathtub gin during Prohibition. That changed in the early 1980s, in the same parts of the country where moonshine was once distilled. In California, Oregon, Hawaii, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Florida, Kansas, Georgia, Missouri, and South Carolina, just to name the big ones, more than a hundred thousand mostly rural Americans discovered they could make a living growing marijuana.
And they grew it well, using more than just bravura to coax gorgeous green tops out of the ground and cart them to market. Unlike my father, who never did figure out acorn farming, the new domestic-grass farmer understood tractors, trade journals, and serious botany. Their weed was at least twice as strong as what my father gathered from Colombia. And production tripled between 1980 and 1985, according to federal estimates; by mid-decade NORML was calling it the market leader.
As individuals these farmers were often aging hippies, hermits, and freaks, about as sexy as the old couple in American Gothic. They marked time on a Druid calendar and
lived like Wall Street wasn’t about to become the number-one film in America. Some wouldn’t pluck dead leaves because they said it “traumatizes” the plant. But despite these oddities their work took on its own romantic glow, earning the name “guerrilla growing,” and to be fair it was a lot more than just gardening.
Furry naturalists who wouldn’t hurt a fly became tie-dye soldiers, slung rifles over their shoulders and slipped on ski masks to intimidate trespassers. They defended their plots using spiked boards, bear traps, moats, punji sticks, pipe bombs, hand grenades, and old-fashioned armed conflict. In the days of illegal whiskey stills, a code of conduct developed that when you found someone’s still, you drank a little to let them know that you weren’t about to tell the sheriff. In a weed field, you didn’t dare roll a joint.
When it came time for harvest, the guerrilla growers booked every bad hotel room from Florida to Oregon. There, in the glow of Diff’rent Strokes and Family Feud, they trimmed and packaged enough weed to push all of South America toward irrelevancy, my father and his team along with it.
My father’s confederacy might have been forced into retirement earlier, in fact, if not for an assist from the federal government, which shoveled enforcement dollars toward arresting growers. In 1982 the DEA eradicated more domestically grown marijuana than was previously believed to exist. The year after that “Ronnie’s Raiders,” as they were known, arrived in full force. They used military helicopters, U-2 spy planes, and thermal imaging to spot crops from the sky. Then they moved in using “mobile eradication units,” hundred-man crews that cleared the land with three-foot machetes called bush axes.
The national effort was called CAMP (Campaign Against Marijuana Planting). And it worked all too well. The year my father retired the raids were the largest ever, a series of D-days in the war on pot. Armies of bug-cussing doughnut-shaped sheriffs claimed to uproot some thirteen million plants, which they hauled away in giant “Dumbo” nets below their helicopters. They made the Big Green Elephant fly, but in doing so they created an opening for the old smugglers, men who were dying for one more chance to play pirate for a grateful nation.
The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana Page 17