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

by Dokoupil, Tony

  A few minutes later he looked long and hard at my son, who was not quite two years old and still ate wood chips if you didn’t watch him closely. “Do you think he will be a genius?” my father asked, with complete honesty. “I think he’s going to work in research and development. I think he’s going to be somebody.”

  Maybe.

  But my son is another little blond boy, just as I was and as my father was. Beyond an eerie physical resemblance, there is an energy, a mischievous charisma that scares and delights at the same time. On swings in the park he throws his head back in bliss and closes his eyes, watching the sunspots on his eyelids. Bedtime is a struggle, but he falls off his scooter with stoicism, even gusto. His favorite hat is a pirate hat. His third birthday was pirate themed.

  At a coffee shop in our neighborhood, mid-winter, my boy arrived in an orange flap hat, thick-frame checkered sunglasses. There were smiles from the other tables as he sat down and solemnly removed his personal belongings from his pockets: rock, rubber band, rock, another rubber band, a temporary tattoo. Then he leaned back and waited for his muffin, sunglasses still on, a familiar death-to-sunlight affect in his body language.

  Then there’s the way he talks, this boy of mine. “I make my pee a waterfall,” he said in the bathroom one day. “My penis is as big as the moon,” he added a couple of mornings later.

  Do I think he’s going to work in research and development?

  In the early 1980s, a Coast Guard officer, plying the seas between Miami and the Caribbean, trying to disrupt marijuana shipments, had a similar thought. “It’s discouraging,” he said, “to think that one day we’ll look back at the dopers like we look back at the rumrunners. Who knows? One of their grandsons may become president.”

  Would it be so.

  Acknowledgments

  Before I can thank the many people who made this book possible, I must first offer a bow to my father’s side of the family, which sometimes had trouble understanding my desire to spotlight our blackest of black sheep but eventually accepted it with grace. I’m sorry I didn’t get the chance to grow up among you. I wish I knew Frances most of all.

  I also need to offer a bow to my mother, who endured questions about a past it was sometimes hard to relive, or even acknowledge, and yet who never turned away once I asked her to look. Thank you for understanding why I needed to write this book and for supporting it. I only wish there was something I could say to ease your mind. Maybe this: There will be no sequel.

  This work would have been impossible without the memories of many people who lived through the great stoned age and its unending aftermath. There is no way to thank them properly for their generosity without outing them for their excesses. But they should know that I know and that I’m grateful for their recollections.

  I’m also grateful to the many people who gave me assistance with the facts and the feel of the years described. They include former Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Kelly; DEA special investigator Damian Farley; DEA agent Joe Desmond; former “drug czar” Peter Bourne; the staffs of the National Archives in Boston, St. Louis, and Atlanta; the late public defender Owen Walker; along with Andrea Lofgren, David Bienenstock, Christopher Harwood, Richard Stratton, Keith Stroup, and Robert Platshorn, among many others who scramble the boundaries between friend and family member, participant and onlooker, source and scholar. Thank you all.

  A huge thank you to Tom Watson, one of the greats, who first suggested that I write about my father and who did more than most to teach me how to write in the first place. Thank you to Andrew Jackson (or was it Thomas Jefferson?) for distracting Jon Meacham long enough to allow Tom to smuggle the original article into the old Newsweek. Thank you to Tina Brown for giving me the time and space to write long, including the time off to write a draft of this book. Thank you to my new bosses, Hillary Frey and Gregory Gittrich, for granting me the delayed start I needed to rewrite and finish it.

  Good editors are so rare that I feel especially privileged to have had three of them on this book. My friend and former colleague Jennie Yabroff read numerous early drafts and made them so much better, especially on a sentence-to-sentence level. Alison Callahan, formerly of Doubleday, amazed me with her sense of structure and story, and without her support this first-time author would have been lost. Gerry Howard inherited the book but has treated it as one of his own, and for that I’m grateful.

  Thank you to Alison Rich and her team and to everyone at Doubleday for championing the project. Thank you to James Melia for doing the work of an EA with unflagging charm and exceptional taste. And of course a deep bow to my agent, Amanda Urban, who started me on this path of book writing and put me in better company than I probably deserve.

  During the years it took to write this book, I benefited from the insight, aid, encouragement, conversation, and company of too many friends and colleagues to name. I’m grateful to them all, but a special blessing on the heads of Devin Gordon, Bret Begun, Mark Miller, Marc Peyser, Susanna Schrobsdorff, Ted Moncreiff, Sarah Blustain, Andrew Blum, Andrew Romano, David Cutler, and Nick Iovacchini. Thank you to Seth Wenig for an author photo that erased the haggard look of authorship.

  Nobody put more into this book than my wife, Dani, who endured my absences and preoccupations and, despite a raging day job of her own, kept much of our family life spinning and our children in clothes.

  There are no words.

  About the Author

  Tony Dokoupil is a senior writer for NBC News. He was a senior reporter with Newsweek, where the article that led to this book first appeared. Dokoupil holds a master’s degree in American studies from Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and children.