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

by Dokoupil, Tony

  “You owe us fifteen K,” said his contact.

  “Fuck you,” my father replied. “You gave me shit.”

  The guy countered that he could send over a killing crew. My father paid.

  But what could Dealer McDope do now?

  After she drove to San Francisco selling Anthony’s weed, Carolyn Dokoupil, my father’s sister, moved to Miami to go to paramedic school. It was 1973 and before long she was dating a man a lot like her brother. It was not what she set out to do. Her boyfriend had been a smiley-eyed mechanic in coveralls the day she met him. After they started dating, however, Billy buttonholed his way into the pot business, promising a friend of a friend that he could sell a bale of Colombian marijuana that he had no lines on selling and could not even transport, since his only vehicle was a motorcycle. Billy sold that bale and then another. As his confidence grew, so did his connections and, ultimately, his paydays until one night he was ready to kiss the straight world goodbye for good.

  When the change took hold Carolyn was working her shift at Sambo’s, an all-night diner yet to be picketed for its racist name. One of her customers was eyeing her like something on his fork. The manager called Billy to pick her up and get her home safely, which he did after a fashion. He arrived in a cherry-red Porsche he hadn’t owned as of that morning. When Carolyn climbed into it wondering what fun was in store, Billy told her to take off her apron.

  “You quit,” he explained.

  He was wholesaling tens of thousands of pounds of Colombian reefer a year, serving as a middleman between Cuban gangsters and wholesalers in Texas, Louisiana, and the Carolinas. He bought a house in Florida and a vacation home in Hawaii, and the money came in so fast that Carolyn’s fingers turned greenish-gray from counting it until Billy started weighing it instead.

  Like my father, Billy was desperate to expand his business ahead of decriminalization, which Keith Stroup of NORML predicted would happen as early as 1978 and “certainly” by 1980. A new Gallup poll showed a clear majority of Americans agreed that pot should be decriminalized, and that fact alone helped remake the world of smokable pleasure, narrowing the distance between tobacco companies, which created model pot programs, and legions of hey-man hippie dealers, some of whom turned into rapacious capitalists.

  One of Billy’s associates was beaten with a sack of healing crystals and robbed of weed by the owner of a head shop. Not long afterward, Carolyn got into bed and Billy told her that she had a new Colt Python under her pillow. Then he opened the bedside table, where a second pistol rested atop the clutter. That was just about all Carolyn could handle.

  She was twenty-three. Her entire wardrobe was tie-dye, denim, and swimwear. She wasn’t ready to shoot someone or be shot. She wasn’t ready to go to prison, either, and she knew—since she wasn’t cursed with a coke addiction and didn’t have a gringo strain of machismo in her petite paramedic body—that while smokers were safe, dealers were still subject to long, hateful prison terms: as much as a year per pound of contraband. By the scale of Billy’s operation, a year per pound would put them behind bars until sometime shortly before the sun exploded.

  A few months later Carolyn was washing dishes and looking out the window onto their quiet dead-end street when a blue van barreled into view, swerved, shimmied down the paved straightaway where neighborhood kids rode bikes, and came to a halt in her driveway. The door of the van opened and out spilled one of Billy’s drivers, along with a shower of pills. The guy ran into the house as though pursued by bees.

  He found Carolyn in the kitchen and said, “Oh man, oh man, oh man. I just hit some telephone stuff!”

  “You mean a telephone pole?” Carolyn asked.

  “No, a Bell South guy. You know. In one of those cherry pickers.”

  A phalanx of police cars appeared and hurtled toward the house as though pulled by a tide. Billy shot out of bed at the sound of their sirens, and when he saw the lights, his pose was that of a man watching a building collapse. He had coke in the house. He had guns in the house. Because of some sort of problem with a hand-off, he had a quarter ton of Colombian Gold in the house, which on sight of the cops suddenly seemed very, very fragrant.

  If the cops came in, they were all screwed. Carolyn was screwed. Billy was screwed. The driver was screwed. Billy told the driver to get out front and face the consequences, which to his credit he did. That gave Carolyn time to put fresh coffee beans in the grinder and throw onions into a frying pan with a topping of eggs.

  Outside a young cop already had the cuffs out and a couple of Dade County deputies were heading into the house. They sat in the kitchen and started asking some questions. Time passed. They sipped coffee and listened to Billy and Carolyn explain about their poor, poor friend, and the dark hole he had fallen into. Eventually the cops left.

  Carolyn resolved she would leave too. She’d had enough of feeling like she needed a joint just to process the fact that her life revolved around selling joints. Before she could go, however, my father showed up.

  The sun was blazing. It exploded off the hood of Billy’s cherry-red Porsche and skated across the driveway. Everywhere my father looked, the light was hard and cut into his eyes like glass. He cussed his forgotten shades and slapped at the bugs dive-bombing the back of his neck, which felt cooked even in the shade of the veranda. This was Indian summer in Miami, and even in one of his almost translucent concert T-shirts, my father sweated like a man wearing a rubber diving suit.

  Desperate to get his hands on some Colombian reefer, he had called Carolyn, which he rarely did unless he wanted something. She wasn’t happy to get the call and could tell he was fishing. What’s your boyfriend do? Is he a big distributor? Can I get a piece of the action? My father could talk, he could charm, but he couldn’t bullshit family.

  “Don’t come down here,” Carolyn had said. “It’s not a good time.”

  My father came anyway. Carolyn had been casual enough to put her address on a letter. My father had stake money and, on the power of his sibling connection and sheer charisma, he planned to show up and beg to be let into the operation.

  He knocked three times, hard.

  He was standing outside the door to a stranger’s house. He held a duffel bag, letting it slip to his last knuckle, feeling its heft, counting the seconds, which stretched into minutes. What was taking so long? He let his mind wander, a trick he used to settle his nerves. That was always his greatest gift and maybe his biggest weakness: the ability to go blank in such moments and let the brain bubble up what it likes, a phrase maybe, something off topic, the title of a book he’d just read, Ninety-two in the Shade, which led him to think of its author, Thomas McGuane, a Catholic like him, which led to his own thoughts of being a writer someday, his idea for a pirate story, for a children’s book. Two hours could go by without my father even noticing.

  When the door finally opened, Billy was standing there wearing nothing but jean shorts and a mustache. Down a hallway and around a corner, members of his crew were watching a movie.

  “Hi,” my father said. “I’m Tony.”

  My father was the opposite of most men in awkward situations. Instead of going shy he could seem almost pert. His voice would get this vibration, like he was about to tell the raunchiest locker-room story you ever heard if you’d just sit a while. Anyway, it was a voice you usually heard out. But it was a scenario you shut the door on.

  “Oh, you must be speechless,” my father continued. “I’m looking to buy some Colombian reefer and sell it up north.”

  Billy slammed the door and found Carolyn on the couch.

  “Do you have a brother named Tony?”

  She nodded.

  “Get rid of him.”

  When the door opened again, Carolyn put a hand over her brother’s mouth and carefully shut the door behind her before batting at him like some sort of overzealous lover.

  “What. Are. You. Doing. Here.” She paused to wait for an answer. “I. Told. You. Not. To. Come.”

  “What d
o you mean?” my father said. “I called ahead.”

  Carolyn took a break from beating her brother and walked back inside. My father noticed that she was wearing a bathing suit. It might have been Tuesday. It might have been Sunday. Every day was the same. The place reeked of human excess, and he got a whiff of it as the door shut. It was especially heavy with what my father would later recognize as the scent of money, the kind that fills coolers and dirties hands.

  Billy came back outside, wearing a polo shirt. “What are you doing here? No one told you to come here,” Billy said.

  “I’m not leaving until you give me some pot to take back north,” my father said, flashing that fist-size smile of his.

  And so my father stood there, and Billy stood there, and little worms of anxiety spread in their chests, albeit for different reasons. At some point, Billy figured it was crazier to leave him out there than to bring him in. The two men played pool in Billy’s game room, smoked a few joints, drank a few beers, and then Billy declined to sell my father the hundred pounds he requested. His minimum was three hundred pounds.

  Late that night, he took my father’s $25,000, threw it in a bedroom, and told my father to go home, call in a couple of days. He’d sell him the load for 90K, including more than $60,000 on the arm. My father had his Colombian. He didn’t know it yet, but he also had a mentor.

  It was exciting to drive that three hundred pounds north in a rented Lincoln Continental. My father got into the car feeling as though somewhere deep in his brain the Doors had just appeared onstage in a tiny, floodlit stadium. He got out twenty-four hours later feeling like Jim Morrison deep in the ground. Not even making his drops managed to raise his pulse. It was routine without ever being new: Two bales to Buddy Bone in New Haven. Two bales to Arthur near Hartford. Two bales to Poughkeepsie. Two more to Dutchess County. Less than two weeks later the cash washed in. My father had $59,000 for Billy and a tidy $12,000 profit for himself. Not bad for a few days’ work. But that drive.

  Under Billy’s tutelage, my father decided to reinvent his business, becoming a manager, a person who delegates and philosophizes. He bumped up his Poughkeepsie people to a trunk load of their own and paid someone $5,000 to drive it. He used the same sum to recruit one of my mother’s former roommates and her good guy friend J.B., who also served as staff mechanic to Dealer McDope’s new garage. My father bought two one-ton Chevy pickup trucks with hard tops and arranged for his original connection, Arthur, and another guy, a friend of Arthur’s, to jockey them north.

  He also hired gophers to do chores for his growing empire. It was good money for friends and insulation from the front lines for my father. The lowest notch on the totem pole was Fred, a golden retriever of a man with kind eyes and a simple mind. He drew a salary for odd jobs, like buying new scales in Brooklyn or watching my father’s dog, Captain. Another guy bought my father a rotating fleet of used cars and scouted out viable stash houses, posing as a photographer with a need for privacy and very little light.

  Soon this merry band was moving some serious weight: at least a ton a month, sometimes three tons, and my father had his first $100,000 payday. In a single month, he made ten times what the average American made in a year, double what big-city lawyers, doctors, engineers were making annually.

  He also started acting more like the man in charge. He made Arthur move into a new house, something with a more private driveway. He made Buddy Bone use the storage space in his mother’s house to stash long-term product. Additional orders and customers came on board. Earl the Pearl got several extra bales a month. A man in Vermont named Smiley got a few bales a month. A friend in Maine got a few bales.

  Meanwhile the movement continued to spread. The legislatures of New York, North Carolina, and Mississippi lifted all criminal penalties associated with a person’s individual taste for weed, and marijuana was knocking on the door of Congress. Peter Bourne, the president’s chief drug policy officer, told the House Select Committee on Narcotics about the success of the state laws. He reiterated the administration’s support for a clear-eyed, humanistic approach to drug abuse, one that included the repeal of all federal laws against pot use. And he was joined by a big tent of political stars: Midwestern mayors, members of the black caucus, conservative columnists who foreswore pot but rhapsodized about personal freedom and states’ rights.

  At last President Carter himself took the floor of Congress on August 2, 1977: “Penalties against drug use should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself, and where they are, they should be changed. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against the possession of marijuana in private for personal use.” Therefore, he continued, “I support legislation amending Federal law to eliminate all Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce of marijuana …”

  He went on to stress that this was “decriminalization not legalization,” and that he was concerned about teen pot use, and that traffickers would still be vigorously pursued, mercilessly incarcerated, public enemies of promise. None of it mattered.

  In the American pot world the president’s words were taken in and experienced like a pardon for all crimes past and future. The New York Times announced the news on its front page: CARTER SEEKS TO END MARIJUANA PENALTY FOR SMALL AMOUNTS. What followed was pot’s proudest moment, the actual golden hour of the golden age, a summer of rejoicing and celebration, when smokers seemed to twirl around every lamppost and smile from the crook of every tree, at least for a little while.

  As summer gave way to fall, Billy bought Carolyn a house beside a national park near Denver, Colorado. It was a ski chalet with windows so high you’d have to swing a tall pine tree to dust them. She stopped eating meat, started meditating, and became a volunteer for the forest service. She was through with Billy—but Billy was scalawagging around with a new Dokoupil.

  He deputized my father, bringing him down to Miami to help expand the operation and position the business for the possibility of legalization. They figured their sales machine had to be among the most reliable, so they focused on growing the product side, which was limited only by the amount of dope the team could smuggle out of the Florida Keys.

  The Keys are the southernmost part of the United States, closer to Colombia than to Chicago, a coral archipelago that starts at the marshy southern tip of the Everglades and curls a hundred miles southwest toward Havana and Cancún. Billy’s connection would pull a marijuana-laden shrimp boat up to a special deep-water dock and pile the product in an old fishing shed, the contents of which Billy was responsible for smuggling north and sending to market. He used mobile homes with special shocks; put the equivalent of War Admiral and Seabiscuit into one of Billy’s vehicles, flip a switch, and the pounds vanished.

  It was a good scam with a major flaw: It was everyone’s scam. The Keys, the Glades, and the Ten Thousand Islands region on the Gulf of Mexico side—the whole southern tip of Florida—had become the entry point for almost all the marijuana in America. The feds knew it and treated Florida as though it were a six-hundred-mile bong through which pot was pulled into the lungs of the country.

  There’s only one road out of the Keys: Route 1, which was a private railroad until 1935 when a hurricane knocked much of it into the sea and left the state of Florida with the job of lashing and suturing the land back together again. The road was always choked with cops and tourists, but the only way for Billy to get more dope into America was to drive more of it out of the Keys. So he asked for volunteers. Who would be willing to make the drive two or three times a day for $25,000 a trip? Anyone? The only guy dumb or crazy or self-destructive enough to say yes was my father, of course. He didn’t need the money. He needed the feeling.

  He picked up the Winnebago from the Dadeland Mall, Miami’s largest, and drove south, passing through swamp followed by sea and salty little towns and more of the same. A straight flat bridge was built every two miles or so, and where there was no bridge, the waves were liable to lap over the road, which mad
e the journey feel as much like boating as driving. The turnoff for the shed was marked by a painted rock, and the gate, which looked locked, came open after two tugs on the bolt.

  The fishing shed looked more like a New England barn with a dock behind it. Cubans materialized out of the afternoon sunlight and some of them carried MAC-10 machine guns. One of the unarmed guys approached and smiled at his gringo driver with the brass balls. My father swelled with a pride he didn’t show. Then he got back in the mobile home, turned it so that the vehicle’s door was toward the door of the barn, and put down the little stepladder.

  The crew started to work. A bucket brigade of men handed bales to my father, who stacked them everywhere there was open space, from the bathroom to the back bed to inside the stove. He counted about two hundred bales in all. Finally, he flipped the switch for hydraulics, and as wordlessly as he arrived he left, hearing only the roar of his own neurons.

  As he drove he felt the sun, a full ten degrees warmer than on the mainland. Through the window he watched the water change color, passing from blue to green to black to milky white, all of it hiding the same peril that sank Spanish galleons and made these islands a pirate hideaway. Four hours passed like a song on the radio.

  My father met Billy back at the mall, in the food court. Someone else picked up the truck and set up a mobile dealing station—like a food truck for pot—or delivered the load to a stash house. After an hour, my father got up to leave again. Another Winnebago would be waiting outside, ready for another trip.

  “Fucking nut,” Billy said, as my father walked away.

  But my father just spread his arms and smiled.

  Throughout the fall, his dope IQ continued to grow along with his business. Billy taught him how to be a criminal, a professional one who writes phone numbers down in code and always pre-books his plane tickets under a false name, so the cops can never check ahead. He stressed one point above all: Don’t travel with a lot of cash. If you must take money, always put it in a series of official-looking manila folders—and if asked always say the folders hold personal papers. Never forget to smile.