But he was serious. His only solace, as befit a man of his times, was cocaine. The drug still had the Big Weekend approval of mainstream America. It also had a high that felt like all life’s advantages, an ingestible form of great parenting, a proud lineage, and everyday purpose. Each hit made my father a new man and each new man wanted another hit, another bubbling behind the breastplate like the perfect locker-room speech—which happened to be exactly what my father needed to go on. His future was waiting for him offstage, in a prison cell, on charges of smuggling marijuana. And when the future got out, it brought off what has to be one of the greatest one-shot smuggles ever attempted—and created the biggest East Coast dope ring of the Reagan years.
The story begins in 1944, the year that Charlie Montfort and William F. Terry III—my father’s future partners, and in Charlie’s case, my future stepfather—were born, and their lives began to arc toward each other and the rest of pot-smoking America. Charlie was a sickly kid. In high school, however, he became a scholastic wrestler, a champion of the ninety-eight-pound weaklings. By graduation he claimed victory over both the navy champion and the army champion, and accepted a scholarship from the University of Maine, where he claims to have trained for the 1964 Olympics. During the trials, an opponent—let’s just call him a bully—made a St. Louis arch with Charlie’s body, breaking vertebrae in his back and ending his athletic career.
But Charlie had other talents. He excelled at math and logic. As a senior he aced IBM’s test for programmers, landing a job with Mutual Life Insurance in Portland, which ran IBM mainframes. But soon Charlie found himself torn between the starched satisfactions of traditional power and the feel-good hazards of protesting the establishment. For a while he balanced one against the other. He wore a suit to work but spent his lunch hour out near the highway, waving a cardboard sign and hollering, his voice coming and going in gusts.
“End the war!” Zoom. “Give peace a chance!” Zoom.
In 1968, after his bosses complained, he quit and moved to San Francisco, where he swam in the counterculture by night and tuned computers for Macy’s by day. But his two lives still didn’t mix well. He got up to five vodka martinis a day at lunch. He was waiting for an excuse, a reason to break free, and he got it one morning in January 1971 when two oil tankers collided under the Golden Gate Bridge. The prow of the Arizona sliced forty feet into the Oregon, which gurgled out more than a million gallons of black fuel. By sunrise the poison had reached the far corners of the bay. It lapped the shores of Alcatraz and Angel islands, licked the pilings at Fisherman’s Wharf, and blanketed the moneyed coast of Marin County. Dead marine life washed in with every wave.
Charlie skipped work and joined a rescue crew, furry freaks wiping down wildlife until their own hair and clothes were shiny and smeared. The president of Standard Oil tried to calm everyone down. He assured the public that his firm would buy new animals to replace the dead ones, importing them, if necessary, a promise that only further goaded the volunteers.
Charlie didn’t return to Macy’s until the following week, and his boss called him in immediately.
“Where the hell have you been?” he said.
Charlie hadn’t bothered to call in sick.
“Helping with the cleanup,” Charlie said.
“That’s the hippies’ business,” his boss said.
Charlie thought about that for a moment. In those days the view from the executive suite in the Macy’s building near Union Square was unimpeded for hundreds of miles, a view like secular stained glass, and Charlie felt the presence.
“I guess I’m with the hippies,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“I quit, sir.”
“You can’t quit, you’re in the middle of a project.”
“That’s your business.”
Charlie went into the Macy’s computer room, cleared out his stuff, and sat down to write one more code before security could show him the door. He arranged the punch cards to celebrate his birthday. The following year, if Charlie’s defiance went unnoticed, everyone in the department would get a bonus—a double-large check courtesy of the hippies but straight from the man.
The next summer Charlie ran out of cash, so he returned home to Maine with a pound of Oaxaca-grown Mexican weed in his duffel bag. He sold it on the beach in Ogunquit, a fishing town between Kennebunkport and Portsmouth, and he amassed a little nest egg, building it a joint or two at a time. In the fall he moved into a cabin in Wells, a one-man hippie commune with beams so crude they still had bark on them. There he founded Slam Bang Construction and entertained a new friend, a man named Willy Terry.
In his lifetime, Willy was a musician, a pilot, a father, and many other things besides, but most crucially, he was the biggest marijuana smuggler in America, the quintessential “good” bad man of the era. He looked a bit like Robert Redford circa 1975, with feathered blond hair, a long, lean body, and the bounce step of the high-school track star he had once been. He could trace his line back to the Mayflower and the man who built the oldest surviving wood-frame house in America.
He also happened to be Jimmy Buffett’s next-door neighbor, my father’s partner, my stepfather’s best friend, and eventually a rat so big he gave the feds more cases than they could possibly pursue. He was the only son of a flawless American clubman: a sportsman and mechanic, president of his local men’s club, golfer, Boy Scouts volunteer. But what Willy most wanted to do was play the guitar and sing.
Charlie met him in Maine and helped him manage his performances, driving him to Boston and Providence and points in between. Willy made his first marijuana run to Mexico sometime in the late 1960s. Back then kids could drive a van across the border at Laredo or El Paso and start looking for a supplier, who would also be looking for them. There was no trick to finding a dealer: put the word out with taxi drivers and bartenders, then drink in plain view of the door for as long as it takes for someone to come get you.
The safest smuggling route, if you didn’t mind smallish loads, was to carry your product across the Rio Grande and into the United States, dropping it off wherever you could reliably hide it. That’s what Willy would do. He picked Texas, near El Paso, and after the drop he’d walk back into Mexico, find his car, and drive back into America the same way he’d left. Sometime later, maybe a couple of days, he’d retrieve his dope from the underbrush and there’d be joy—and a 100 percent markup—on the coast of Maine.
In the summer of 1974 Willy tried for his first two-hundred-pound load. He put it on a raft and walked it across the drought-shallowed Rio Grande. Then he sank the raft under some rocks and a few days later, he went for the pickup but he wasn’t alone. A team of customs agents had been tailing him since the checkpoint at El Paso.
They had noticed his muddy shoes. In the dry season in Mexico, there’s only one place your shoes might get muddy on such a short trip: the Rio Grande. On that alone customs followed him, and Willy led them right to the dope.
He got a year in prison and served less than six months in Danbury, Connecticut, close to his parents. It’s a correctional facility instead of a penitentiary, and a plaque outside the counseling center read: “You are the designer of your life. If you want something, you can plan and work for it. Nothing is easy, but nothing is impossible either.”
Charlie visited Willy in prison, and Willy always looked bright as ever behind wire-rim glasses. They had read enough penny novels to know that prison was like graduate school for the criminally ambitious. And that plaque outside the counseling center was right on.
“I’m learning a lot,” Willy told Charlie.
“Anything interesting?” Charlie said.
“Yeah.”
“What’s that?”
“Fuck Mexico.”
In early 1975 Charlie flew to St. Barts to meet with Willy’s contact from prison, a revered older smuggler who had made a name for himself with solo guerrilla tactics. When strong winds snapped the mast of his schooner off the coast of South Carolin
a, he lashed it together with rope and limped back to St. Barts, waving off help from the Coast Guard and concerned sailors. Charlie found him sitting in a room with five other people. The furniture was wicker, the tables were glass. On the beach, the waves broke languorously along the shore. A just-arrived three-day-old Sunday edition of The New York Times was doing nothing on a side table. No one was talking.
Charlie picked up the paper and started to read. On page 40 there was a small article about a tall-ship festival to mark America’s bicentennial: dozens of vessels, an international naval review, the whole harbor crawling with the Coast Guard and private yachts. It was called Operation Sail.
“Can we use this in a scam?” he asked, and everyone smiled.
Operation Sail was the brainchild of sixty-year-old Frank Braynard, the founder of New York’s outdoor mall, South Street Seaport, and previously the Shipping News reporter at the old New York Herald Tribune. His team worked out of an office at One World Trade Center, and he too was using the bicentennial as a diversion—“a delicious excuse,” he said—to bring together the biggest collection of windjammers and warships since the war for Greek independence in 1827.
In the summer of 1976, the stage was set for both events, the smuggle and the celebration. Braynard called his festival a seagoing salute to America’s birthday. Charlie saw his work in a similar light. He and Willy were sons of the revolution, fighting for freedom: the freedom to get stoned, the freedom for adults to control their own lives, expand their own minds.
Operation Sail grew and grew until more than a dozen tall ships were scheduled to make a majestic Fourth of July journey from the lower bay, past Brooklyn and Governor’s Island, past the Statue of Liberty, past the canyons of Wall Street, and up the Hudson to the far tip of the island. In their wake would come an armada of schooners and yawls, cutters and catboats, ketches, sloops, brigantines, barques, barquentines, eighty or more international military vessels, frigates and destroyers, submarines, amphibious trucks. And less classifiable fare: a Chinese junk, a Spanish galleon, a “history barge.”
More than five million people were expected to watch live, either from the shore or from the deck of twenty thousand private vessels. And at the symbolic center of it all, the USS Forrestal, an eighty-thousand-ton aircraft carrier that would host President Ford and Vice President Rockefeller: the boys of honor, overlooking their bathtub of toys.
Willy went to the Sierra Madre mountain range in Colombia, the highest in South America. Charlie secured two piers in the lower bay, near Sandy Hook, New Jersey, where the tallest of tall ships—the ones that couldn’t clear the 127-foot Brooklyn Bridge—would be based before and after the parade. These piers were right out in the open. But that was the point.
Two theories of crime dominate the underworld. According to the first, crime is best carried out in secret, where no one can see and thus no one will know. That’s true, but according to the second theory, the best way to keep something secret is to do it out in the open, to act like it’s the most natural thing in the world. In other words, never whisper, always yell. That way no one will listen to you.
At dawn on June 25, 1976, six marijuana-laden sailboats appeared off the East Coast, tacking north. By Friday, July 2, the sailboats were anchored at the mouth of the Hudson. By July 3 they were just another group of toys in the tub. The Coast Guard was busy with inexperienced boaters, drunks falling overboard, idiots capsizing because of an ill-placed keg. There was so much work that they told people who broke down or ran out of gas to just drop anchor and someone would get them in the morning. No one bothered the gaggle of longhairs with bales and a fleet of U-Haul trucks.
At full dark, a firework show began. As a helicopter dragged a hundred-foot electric American flag above the Statue of Liberty, the masses sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Meanwhile, eight tons of Colombian was on its way to the streets.
In the years following the bicentennial, Charlie and Willy grew rich together, selling an annual load, sometimes two, with eight or nine tons of Colombian marijuana apiece. Willy cleaned it of seeds and stems and most of the leaves, so there was no wasted weight, no wasted labor.
With the proceeds Charlie moved from Maine to a bungalow on St. Thomas with views of Magens Bay, a white sand beach that’s among the most popular in the world. He founded Salty Dog Enterprises, a bullshit American postcard and beer jacket purveyor. Willy moved to St. Barts, where he bought a small house on a hill and then a big house on a higher hill.
Jimmy Buffett lived next door, and Willy and Jimmy played the same stage at Le Select, Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band headlining over Willy’s band, which was called Will He Make It in the Contraband. (As a matter of fact: Yes, he will.) After shows the party was either at Buffett’s Autour du Rocher, a disco attached to a five-room hotel and an all-night jewelry shop, or at Willy’s house, where the cherub statues never stopped tinkling chlorine and the pool stayed warm all night long.
In 1979 Buffett was arrested after he told Rolling Stone that he moved some marijuana through the islands, an admission since repeated hundreds of times from the stage. He later denied actually handling drugs but admitted that some of his best friends were dealers. He scattered one smuggler’s ashes off the coast of Provincetown, dipping the wing of his seaplane in tribute. With his songs of island high jinks, Buffett added still more enchantment to the whole marijuana-running world, providing propaganda for the lifestyle in the late 1970s when lots of dealers were dropping out or switching to cocaine.
Charlie and Willy never wavered in their commitment to reefer. They discovered that their stateside partner was diversifying. He was a Boston guy, and he ran a combination of cocaine and weed, accepting shipments of both drugs in endless varieties, like a café collecting bags of coffee, breakfast buns, and cage-free eggs. It was bad news being tied to that kind of organization. If one of their far-flung smugglers fell, you can bet they’d try to take the whole ring down. So Charlie and Willy started asking around for a new contact, and they kept hearing the same name: the Old Man.
The trio met in the open air, cross-legged on a blanket my mother shook out. She arranged cheeses and breads, kneeling on the hem of her white skirt. My father leaned back on his hands and listened to the starlings call. He was barefoot with jeans rolled above the ankle, summer flannel cuffed to the elbow, unbuttoned to mid-chest. As the light faded he heard the first notes from the stage.
This was the Tanglewood Music Festival, a rolling series of concerts held every summer on a serene estate in western Massachusetts. My father and mother pointed themselves toward the Shed, the steel pavilion where Jimmy Buffett was due to perform that night, August 14, 1979. And what a picture they must have made: young lovers, nestled and comfortable, his body and hers in a pose they had taken years to perfect.
After Buffett took the stage Charlie and Willy arrived from the direction of the music, not the parking lot. Decades later, my father would remember that he hated them both on sight, but that’s almost certainly a false memory, a mirage. In the pencil-sketch light of early evening my father would smile at the devil himself.
He shook their hands and showed his teeth, and then Charlie started shaking his head and wincing, as if each note from the stage were a tiny gleaming knife in his eardrum. “This son of a bitch can’t play,” he howled to my father’s delight. “I told Jimmy, you need to hit a C there and you’re hitting a D, but listen to this shit. He just can’t do it.” Willy unzipped a guitar and strummed it in time with his friend onstage, his eyes closed, the lyrics of “Treat Her Like a Lady” or “Come Monday” on his lips.
Charlie had once dated one of my father’s drivers, who put the parties in contact. By coincidence they were all going to be in Maine in another week, so the flirtation could continue. My mother and father had rented a century-old cabin near the beach in Kennebunkport.
In the mornings Anthony went into town for coffee, where he lingered over his mug, sitting in an old diner booth, reading the paper and listening to
the hypnotic sound of rubber tires rolling over gravel and then stopping. Charlie appeared and slid onto the bench across from him. He said, in so many words, “I know you know and we certainly know, so how about it?” He said, “Can you move product by the ton?”
For the first time in his career my father had no reason to lie. He felt like breaking into a countertop musical number to explain as much. But instead he just nodded and sipped coffee and waited for the next prickly soft echo of pressurized rubber on gravel.
“I’ll have to talk to my crew,” he said finally.
“Of course,” Charlie said, and my father nodded again.
He was trying not to smile.
The secret to my father’s bottomless potential was a man named Bobby, a connected Brooklyn kid, former navy man, and a city employee, a guy who lived beneath the lid of a Yankees cap, shoulders round and muscled, perpetually hunched, as if someone were trying to peer at his cards. He seemed to know everyone in the tristate area. If you needed a forklift by 3:00 p.m., Bobby knew who to call. He knew how to make it legit, too, with registration numbers, permits.
Bobby had a New York market, a network he’d cobbled together from his old neighborhood, where his father had pushed a fruit cart outside the factories and his mother had sewed name tags into uniforms. He joined the navy in 1971, worked the pantry on an aircraft carrier, stocking toilet paper, toothpaste, the basics. It turned him into an organized man. The ports of the Middle East and Asia turned him into a wise one.
He returned to Brooklyn, married young, and joined the Sanitation Department. “I’m a garbageman,” he’d say brightly, because he never saw himself as a garbageman for life. The collection hours were 6:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., perfect for a fledgling pot dealer who could use the afternoon to make sales. He made his first big jump in the dope world in 1977, when he ran into one of my father’s wholesalers at a Christmas party. This particular wholesaler, Nicky, was a friend of my father’s from high school, a braggart who paraded around promising big loads from the Old Man, his bottomless connection. Bobby got an earful before midnight, secured a deal by dawn, and picked up the product a couple of weeks later.
The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana Page 8
