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

by Dokoupil, Tony

  As 1985 rolled into 1986, word spread that many pot farmers were planning to take the summer off rather than hassle with the law. Many others—in a preview of the future—were moving indoors. They were buying extension cords and generators, and trying to re-create the equatorial sun with thousand-watt bulbs. By 1987 they would flood America with marijuana again, and the pot world would never be the same.

  But for the moment my father’s talents could still be used. America’s stashes were actually empty. Weeks and weeks went by without new loads, and shortages were reported coast to coast. As America’s remaining potheads—proud protectors of the marijuana culture in its darkest hour—got more and more frantic, the price of good pot began to rise again. Between 1981 and 1986 the price of an ounce of pot doubled from $200 to $400, according to the DEA. That meant each ton my father could secure was worth at least the soaringly, effervescent street value of $12 million, more than $20 million in today’s money.

  Bobby relayed the outlines of this new market to my father in Miami, and my father called Charlie and Willy again. He explained that it was last call at the bar, and as any barfly knows, you always order a last round. When he explained what it could mean financially, Willy proposed they go bigger than they ever had before: thirty-five thousand pounds, the exact amount that the feds used to throw around as a single day’s supply of dope in America. That’s probably a bogus estimate, the way everything else is in the War on Drugs. But it’s better to think that it’s true, and to imagine it as my father and Bobby did, as a last scam for one day of dope in an America that was gasping for it.

  7

  The Last Scam

  New York City and Guajira Department, Colombia, Summer and Fall 1986

  Every smuggle is makeshift and freelance. The people involved are the people available, which is not the same as the best people, the ones you would pick if a decade of your life depended on it. The cocktail-napkin version of the job hadn’t changed since Charlie and Willy first teamed with my father and Bobby back in 1979. What changed was the rest of the team: a cast of oddball pirates plucked from Central Casting, or as Charlie often put it, “The finest group of intellectual, pragmatic men I’ve ever known.”

  There was Scrimshaw, a British-born cabdriver from London who sailed to Antigua in the 1970s to work as an artist. He carved whale bones, shark teeth, and driftwood into cane heads and jewelry. His job was to find and manage a summer apartment for money drops in Manhattan. For this, he would get $75,000 and, with luck, the anchor he needed to look forever through a magnifying glass, turning Moby Dick into a wedding ring.

  There was Inga, a pretty sailor with straw-blond hair down to her collarbone and a tomboy’s penchant for boating caps and khaki shorts to mid-thigh. From her base in Massachusetts, she was to relay radio calls between Colombia, the sailboats, and the ground crew. She would also be paid $75,000 for the work, enough to refill her cruising kitty so she could sail to the West Indies every winter.

  Daniel was a freshly divorced sailor from Camden, Maine. He gave his wife everything but $25,000 for a small ketch that he promptly moved to the east end of St. John, an island hop from St. Thomas. He was to broker the job, gathering contributions of almost $100,000 to help Willy make his down payment to the Colombians. Daniel expected a three-to-one return on his investment.

  Pierre was a silver-haired French braggart who claimed to have sailed with Jacques Cousteau. He worked for years in the Caribbean as a treasure hunter before he met the vacationing daughter of an oil executive in 1973 and pillaged her as well. After “I do,” he had control of an eighty-slip yacht harbor in Urbanna, Virginia, a tobacco port older than America itself. There, he hung an American flag from the back window of his pickup, and presented himself as super-dad, heading up soccer carpools and taking the team tubing on the Chesapeake. His contribution was property: For a fee, he rented out his marina to smugglers, charging $25 a pound and even helping with the off-loads.

  Last but not least, there was Timber Tom, the quintessential sailor with squinty eyes and a romantic soul. The Caribbean was once full of such men, for whom sailing will always mean sextants and stars, not cell phones and global positioning; for whom new sailboats are fiberglass Clorox boxes compared to an old wooden schooner, whose hull is as close to a living thing that man can make with his hands. When they see indictment papers coming down the dock, men like this are known to pull up anchor, smile wanly, and disappear for twenty-five years.

  Tom came to this vocation relatively late in life. He’s a craggy, good-looking artist, who spent his twenties in big cities, acting and performing. One summer he saw the coast of Nova Scotia, however, and decided that the only sane response to such beautiful water was beautiful boats. He bought one, learned where all the ropes go, and relaunched his life as a guitar-picking charter captain. His job in this smuggle was to pay off the Colombians, pick up the marijuana in whatever they secured for him, and make sure the dope was loaded safely onto the sailboats, which would take it to America. For this he would get $35,000, less than almost everyone else but the farmers, because Tom would have done it for free.

  There were other players involved, including a thirty-something carpenter named Jimbo who helped Willy in Colombia, and a sailor named Corky who hired the crews for all six sailboats that made the trip. But these were the core players along with the original quartet.

  My father met Bobby in New York for the planning phase, which began about March 1986, six months before they expected a payday. So much of smuggling is waiting that it’s important to have a good watering hole, a place where the pay phone is inside, preferably above a barstool. For my father and Bobby that place was the Landmark Tavern, a century-old saloon built on Eleventh Avenue when that still meant the waterfront.

  When my father first found the place, around 1978, it was a dangerous corner of Hell’s Kitchen, a red-brick Irish pub in an area controlled by a red-knuckled crime family that knew how to make bodies disappear. In the gathering spring of 1986, however, the silver smoke of the bar mirror told a different story. It contained Bobby and my father, and over their shoulders a room of young professionals, open-faced and bright, their ten-speeds locked up neatly outside. They sat remarking on the tin ceilings and oak beams, chomping bangers and mash, and making my father and Bobby feel like wax figurines from the golden era of pot. They were not meant for an era when two of the Top 20 songs in America were called “Jump.”

  They had $300 worth of quarters on them for the job. There were no cell phones, no discount international calling plans. Colombia cost $12 to reach. The Caribbean about $10. Either way it began with a few rolls of quarters torn open and fed into the slot. Popopopopopopopopop. Hold. Ka-ching. Popopopoppopopopopop. Bobby could reach Barranquilla before my father got to the bottom of his beer.

  As my father continued his dream of nonconformity, I was in kindergarten at Gulliver, where his tuition money funded a regime of cotillion rigidity. He spent days in a state of unshaven bliss, while my hair had to be short, natural, and brushed. He wore white pants and plumage, while I had to be in khaki and navy shorts with a tennis shirt bearing the official school crest. In a concession to geography I could choose lime green, turquoise, pink, or tangerine, which simply meant I looked like a well-scrubbed piece of fruit.

  My mother was pleased with such a discrepancy, because after my father’s false retirement, she knew the nature of his relationship to the business. She didn’t suspect it or fear it: She knew he would never quit these insane adventures, never stop until he was in a coffin or a jail cell, and she knew both were waiting for him. She started teaching again, since I was in full-time school. She started phase two of her plan, plotting to make her final break.

  In March Inga and Willy found winter coats and flew to Richmond, Virginia, where they met Pierre at the airport to talk through the use of his dock. They made a quick tour of the site, and then flew to New York City, where they joined Charlie and called the pay phone at the Landmark. Bobby picked up, and my fa
ther called out a meeting place, a “splendiferous” locale near St. Patrick’s Cathedral: the Palace Hotel.

  He then used the line to hire a limo as a not-so-subtle fuck-you to the more down-at-heels Willy, who was always playing his guitar as though he were some sort of heroic bard. The fivesome talked trucks and transportation, resolved a few minor questions about the Virginia drop point, and had the deal done before the appetizers came. Afterward, they drank away half the night, becoming pirates by midnight and little boys by dawn.

  Imagine subterranean meetings, recon missions, counterintelligence strategies, and deep planning, replanning, and contingency planning. Imagine blowups about leadership, scuffles over money, and close calls with the authorities even before the job started. Imagine the movies, in short, and then bang it all out of your ears like seawater.

  Willy returned to St. Barts, where the planning itself was a groovy time. He threw parties, and under the guise of casual conversation talked to Inga, Scrimshaw, Daniel, Charlie, and his other players. It wasn’t hard algebra, after all, just simple x’s and o’s, and big round numbers. What’s the weight? What are the payouts? When? Where? Who? This wasn’t anyone’s opening night on Broadway. They all knew their lines.

  Later that spring my father and Bobby went to Urbanna to shake Pierre’s hand, see the setup, and start thinking about the transfer. They also traveled to Maine, where they rented a cabin near Seal Cove, since you couldn’t rely on hotel rooms on the coast in the summer. Back in New York, their operation moved to Avenue X in Brooklyn, where Bobby had a mechanic prep the gang’s two trucks and my father bought new scales.

  Scales were the only way to figure out the “shake mistake” in every bale, the percentage that isn’t smokable because it’s all dust or stem parts. When buying scales, most dealers would pay in cash, use fake IDs, and park their cars blocks away. But they all bought from the same egg-shaped shopkeeper, who watched the same clowns come in over and over. One year they buy a triple-beam scale. The next they buy a medium-bar scale and a big trolley cart. Finally, they get the mammoth scale used for bales of hay—in the middle of Brooklyn!—and, hey, they weren’t selling counterfeit jeans by the pound.

  Last but not least, my father rented the stash house, which was an art in its own right. The house could never be a commercial place or have a retail vibe of any sort, but neither could it be somewhere too residential, too community-focused. You didn’t want people wandering over, wondering what’s up at the old McLean place. And you made sure the landlord was out of state. You don’t want a retiree popping in, checking on his carpets.

  My father settled on New Canaan, Connecticut, one of the most affluent towns in America but also one of the most anonymous. It’s forty-five minutes from Manhattan, about equidistant from Richmond and Portland, with a housing stock that’s rich in attached garages and hardwood flooring (the best for dragging and sweeping). It also has a local population of movers and remodelers, people who hire other people and who have an utter lack of curiosity about things not themselves. People who spend their summers elsewhere. One of my father’s gophers rented the actual place, telling the owner he needed it to work on a photography book, which wasn’t untrue.

  In early June my father came back to Miami for my kindergarten graduation, where he was celebrating more than my little white graduation hat, flooded by more than fatherly pride. Gulliver organized a big ceremony in a packed off-campus auditorium. In the crowd there were tears of parental affection, suits and dresses made for church. As my turn to walk approached, my father took a camera and prepared to record the moment. But he was so coked up he couldn’t get the lens to focus, couldn’t get the machine to match reality as he saw it.

  “Give it to me,” my mother said, with increasing agitation, “and sit down.”

  But my father had another idea. Rather than adjust the lens, he decided to adjust himself. He climbed the bleachers until the image was in focus. He climbed and climbed, stepping on people’s hands, crushing sunglasses, cracking plastic cups of water. He would later deny anything more than “a little toot” in the bathroom, but there’s the matter of the pictures: There are none. Just a studio shot of me in a white hat.

  The next day my parents hosted a graduation party for the entire class at the Falls, a new open-air mall built like a pirate’s hideaway on a series of man-made lagoons. It was a weekend, early afternoon, and as moms, dads, and grandparents walked into the restaurant, they saw bottles and bottles of booze. Behind them was a man pouring drinks, trying to pull people into his state of mind: my father, of course.

  That same month, his weed was secured in Colombia.

  The northernmost country in South America, Colombia has nearly two thousand miles of coastline. Almost all the marijuana smuggling, however, happened on a sparsely inhabited peninsula shared with Venezuela. It was officially known as the Guajira Department, better known as the badlands and not only because of its scarred stretches of desert. The terrain, inhabited by one of the only indigenous peoples who never fell to Spanish rule, was bloody even by the blood-soaked standards of Colombia in the mid-1980s.

  Bogotá and Medellín were civilized, downright posh environs compared to the Guajira, where death was omnipresent. When friends asked Willy about the conditions, he would shake his head and say, “Barbaric and dangerous,” a world of “jungle warlords and uneducated men,” a place “where everyone is subhuman and treated as such.”

  Some of that is bombast, but the fact remained that in a typical year in the 1980s, American authorities recorded dozens of missing gringos in the region, none of them likely to turn up in a morgue. One drug lord was busted with an in-home crematorium and a lot of ash in the pan. The DEA found a cave near the Venezuelan border with at least a hundred bodies in it, all presumed smugglers. And the countryside was pocked with fresh holes, the last signs of drug dealers who were sometimes treated like lame racehorses, shot dead and buried if their plane would not take off, their boat leaked, their truck failed to start.

  Willy’s Colombian adventure lives in the rum diaries of friends and the notebooks of federal agents. Where memory and prosecutorial necessity breaks down, it lives in the tales of other smugglers who have followed the same gringo trail into the jungle, come out with their bales, and recorded their story for posterity.

  He spent June 1986, the month of the smuggle, on the Dutch side of St. Martin, doing cocaine and watching the World Cup from a storm-damaged suite in a grand hotel. The grounds were closed to the public while repairs were under way. Willy found someone in management who was willing to let a drug dealer in while tourists were locked out. Then he found a generator and a satellite television.

  He was bored with Colombia, bored of ten years on the same trails, the same roads, shaking the same hands. There was a sameness to smuggles out of Colombia in the era, just as there was a sameness to smuggles out of Mexico or Jamaica. A gringo who wanted to buy the country’s reefer could just fly into Barranquilla, a Colombian port city scouted as a place that makes the Wild West look like Club Med.

  He could stay at El Prado Hotel, the watering hole for visiting white guys who travel light and hope to have a conversation. By walking in and lying by the pool, his intentions would be as well known as those of a man wearing hiking boots at Everest base camp. After a day or two, if no one approached, he could go outside and lean against a taxi: Every driver in town could yank a chain of associations and help an aspiring felon fulfill his dream.

  Or kill him on the flimsiest of pretenses.

  I often think of this when I hear people talking about the harmlessness of marijuana. Smoking it, sure, but smuggling it was a ticket to death, dismemberment, or a long jail term, quite possibly in a place where electro-shock to the testicles isn’t a sight gag. All that carnage has to end up in the weed, and not only in the price. In America, my father would wake up in his stash house and wonder: Am I going to make a million dollars today or am I going to get busted? In Colombia, Willy woke up and wondered: Am I goin
g to make a million dollars today or go to sleep with a sock in my mouth?

  After a few days of whiskey and accordion trios, a smuggler would find his way into the backseat of a Ford Bronco, a pile of tires on the cushion next to him, unsmiling men in front. The only road into the Guajira was a ribbon of asphalt that hugged the coast from Barranquilla to Santa Marta, a city of white beaches framed by abrupt snowcapped mountains, the highest in the country. After Santa Marta, the roads got bad, the spare tires became necessary.

  This was the drive Willy had taken dozens of times by then, and every time the view from his window was Third World romantic: zinc roofs that catch the afternoon sun, stray dogs with swollen tits and strange bumps. After a four-hour climb, a State Department billboard warned U.S. passport holders that continuing into the countryside may be fatal. Then Willy reached Riohacha, the capital of the Guajira. It was to marijuana what Medellín or Cali are to cocaine. The local disco had a marble dance floor.

  Smuggling became big business here in the 1860s, when enterprising boat owners realized they could get a better price for coffee if they snuck it to Aruba, a free-trade Dutch port ninety miles off the coast. For a century, boats would leave with beans and return with black market liquor and cigarettes. When American sailors in Aruba began to request marijuana, it slowly pushed coffee from each load until weed was the whole load and the return trip was nothing but money. By my father’s day, there was no need for the boats at all. The gringos came directly to the source.