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

by Dokoupil, Tony

  We were not.

  My mother was feeling guilty. She had her own fling. He was older, powerful, crooked in a way that struck my mother as new and exciting. She met him as the buyer for the antique business. He was an auctioneer. After she bought a few of his pieces, they started working a little scam together. She went to all his sales and waved her number like a fan, bidding up the prices and batting her eyelashes.

  A few months later Tony took his Miami act north, stowed away with a girl in a hotel off I-84 in Waterbury, Connecticut, and after spotting him at a party with this lady—who was pretty and clean but clearly not in it for love—Ann felt a bit differently about the whole relationship. She had an unfamiliar feeling of anger, which blossomed into fury, and she decided to confront my father. She found his room and knocked, and when he came to the door, a fight ensued. There were tears from him and pleas from her, and then a shift in the mood, a pebble-size change in the flow of the conversation.

  Anthony became the agitated one. His whole existence narrowed to a single goal: to stop the yelling. He disappeared into the room and picked up his whittler’s knife, the one he used to slice the twine on a bale of marijuana, the one I would find sitting innocuously in a drawer in Miami years later. With the three-inch blade extended, he threw it at Ann. If you want to be lawyerly about it, he tried to kill her, except he missed.

  Ann called Connie again.

  “Honey,” she said. “Can we move on?”

  We could not.

  In love, more than any other human affair, you don’t know what you’re doing. You act and react. You run off in the direction of yes, flee in the direction of no, and sometime later you explain the decision in whatever way feels right. In the end the only thing for sure is what happened. And what happened was my mother stayed. She worked up the gumption to leave, but then she felt she couldn’t do it because, finally, she was pregnant.

  The month when it happened my father had been around more because he had been arrested. He had gone to Texas to help Billy and stayed to party with the buyer. The police found him spinning the wheels of a rental car outside a roadside bar, an open container of vodka sloshing around on the seat next to him.

  My father was scared of being a father. He was so scared he tried to destroy himself, and when that didn’t work he tried to destroy my mother. But when he could avoid it no more, he finally embraced it. He attended Lamaze classes and devoured the new books on children and parenting. One day he came home with bags and bags of almonds, unsalted, plain, whole almonds. He’d read that they were “brain food” for babies, so he sliced and crushed them onto three meals a day for Ann. Then he read to the bump and played classical music for the bump. Eight days before I was born, he wrote the bump a letter:

  My Dear Baby,

  I’ve been meaning to write you a few lines now for a couple weeks but have not had the time. Since the doctor gave mommy a due date of December 15th, you could be here any day now. We’re both very happy and anxious to see you so we can show you our love and care. We have a nice maple crib for you with warm blankets and covers. Your room is yellow and has a bassinet in it from your Uncle Joseph and Aunt Ruth. There is also a nice antique dresser with a big beveled mirror for your little things. We haven’t picked out a rug or curtains yet because we don’t know if you’ll be a boy or a girl. We could have learned your sex by using a sonar sound machine at the hospital that gives an outline of your fetal shape (and thus your sex) in mommy’s uterus where you are, but it’s based on x-ray radiation and mankind has not learned enough about it to satisfy Mommy and me that it wouldn’t cause you or mommy any harm. We read about armed services veterans who have been exposed to various kinds of radiation during government tests of bombs (yes, my baby, Man builds bombs to kill other men), who have since developed cancer. So we can wait to see your sex at birth, rather than risk your health, so essential to happiness and success.

  Love,

  Dad

  That Christmas eve this man who cared for his unborn child so much he would not risk sonar was in the delivery room as his partner gave birth. It was the coldest December on record in Connecticut, more than a dozen notches below zero, the snow measurable in feet, heaped in gray piles that lined the roads like dirty institutional laundry. My father was as calm as an anonymous Good Samaritan on the drive to Farmington Medical Center, where he was to coach my mother through the labor and then cut the umbilical cord.

  A decade later my father wrote me a letter recounting what happened that night at the hospital. I was turning ten, so of course “the story of the beauty of the miracle of your birth” was not exactly the first item on my wish list. In fact I have no memory of ever receiving the letter, so either my mother screened it, and then out of some muscle-memory reflex kept it, or I read it and part of my brain jumped on a live grenade to protect the rest of it.

  It’s a breathtaking document. My father is the same straight-backed Good Samaritan, although a little more cheerful and sparkly eyed. “Mommy and I were in the hospital waiting happily for you,” he begins, “with mommy pushing and pushing and me next to her holding her hand and wiping perspiration from her face.”

  After three or four hours “you crowned,” a term helpfully defined for me, a fourth grader, using the phrases “silver dollar sized patch” and “mommy’s vagina.” That set Dad up for his big conclusion: “So after a little while of waiting like this, the doctor decided to give mommy an episiotomy, that is, he cut her with a knife to make the birth canal bigger so you could come out. As soon as he did this, sure enough, there you were!”

  My father almost passed out at the sight of me. An invisible hand smothered his face and crushed his chest. His vision went fuzzy, the world went gray, and his brain cried out for oxygen. The nurse held me by the foot, blood-specked and fish-belly white. She was yelling, “It’s a boy, it’s a boy,” and waiting for my father to make his legs and arms work so he could cut the umbilical cord and wash me off in a tub of warm water. He tried to speak, to explain himself, but words turned to gum in his throat.

  He ran into the bathroom and shut the door. He felt almost dead at the sight of new life, almost suicidal at the thought of how that life needed him. He patted his pockets, located a flip-lighter and a pinkie-size bone of his own imported Colombian reefer. He considered it medicine, a way to slow his breathing so he could think for a second.

  One hit, two hits.

  He was starting to feel better when the nurse banged on the door. Her voice was a serrated blade through his lungs. He cussed and put out the joint. How much time had passed? He had no idea. Smoke was everywhere. When the door opened the cloud ducked out and up and danced along the ceiling, looking for a way out. I was wrapped in a blanket, perched on my mother’s chest.

  “I have to take the baby,” the nurse said.

  “No!” my mother cried.

  She looked at my father and waited for the nurse to do the same: “Take him!”

  “I’m sorry, miss. I understand, but I have to take the baby.”

  It was only for the night, not forever, and by New Year’s my father was holding his child, whispering hopes and dreams into my ear in a house full of love and friendship. These early moments, minus the dope scare, ended up in “Grandma’s Brag Book,” a little photo catalogue with, of all characters, Peter Rabbit on the cover.

  What a heavy choice for a mass-market photo album. I happen to know the story of Peter Rabbit because I read it to my own son. It’s about a little bunny whose father went into Mr. McGregor’s garden and ended up dead and eaten, “put into a pie.”

  “Don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden,” Mrs. Rabbit warns her only son. “Your father had an accident there.” But the little bunny doesn’t listen to his mother. He follows something else, something deeper and unexplainable. He follows in his father’s footsteps, to see and feel what Dad saw, and he nearly dies in the process.

  Mother was never one for deep readings, but she knew enough to silently resolve to “break the c
hain,” to end the cycle of sons following fathers down through the generations to their doom. I discovered one of the reasons when my own son was an infant, and I called my mother late at night, telling her that the baby had croup, a barking cough that makes it hard to breathe.

  She gasped, not because the baby was sick, but because she slid down the sound of my voice and into her past, to when I was an infant and had croup. She’d put me in a steam bath to clear my lungs, and she went to call the doctor, leaving Big Tony holding me in the shower mist. He put me down and shot up instead. He plunged the needle in where the forearm becomes bicep, where the veins crest for an instant, blue like a hidden river, and he sluiced in the heroin. It’s a pretty part of the body, delicate and vulnerable. And yet mainliners call it “the pit,” as in “Hit me in my pit,” and when the needle gets done with it, it’s not so pretty anymore. By some cosmic joke, I was born with a birthmark in my pit, a little chocolate splotch that I’ve decided is either a magic shield or a sign of the devil.

  My father recovered himself and resolved something else entirely. His realization came while smoking another joint on his back porch in Connecticut in the spring of 1981, a few acres of woods and a stream spread before him, a handful of springy green buds on a black rolling tray in front of him. As he got high, he got reflective, and he picked up his product. He bounced it in his hand. He crushed it, breathing in the tang, feeling the sticky resin between his fingers. He put it back on the tray and just stared.

  Two months before I was born Reagan was elected president, crushing Carter by nearly ten points. As a candidate, he’d branded marijuana “probably the most dangerous drug in America,” an explanation for everything. Why is your teenager refusing to cut the lawn? Marijuana. Why is your industry falling behind Japan’s? Marijuana. Why do you have to lock your door at night? Hard drugs—which start with marijuana.

  Did this mean Anthony Edward Dokoupil was probably the most dangerous man in America? Was he the new public enemy? It was ridiculous. And yet even my father had to admit that he had become a massive drug dealer. Besides his work with Billy, he was selling through Willy, and as he thought about his new multiton scores, a still-grander image of himself formed like a beast in a forest clearing. He would be a smuggler extraordinaire, the Greatest of Great American Outlaws, a pirate of pot. If you were going to be such a figure in the ’80s there was really only one city for you.

  “Miami,” my mother told friends. “It’s a really healthy atmosphere.”

  4

  The Pirate Code

  Miami, Florida, 1981–1984

  My father was greeted like an arriving duke, which would not have pleased him so much if he’d known the reason. It was not an instinct about his character or even his money. It was the fact that he was there at all, in downtown Miami, sitting in a tulip chair at Flagler Federal Savings and Loan.

  This was the spring of 1981, a third of the way through the most violent year since Miami incorporated in 1906. Rapes and muggings had doubled. Murders reached a national high. The death toll was so intense, the bodies such an unexpected flood, that the Dade County medical examiner expanded his morgue space, leasing a refrigerated meat truck from Burger King.

  The city had been hit by a trifecta of big, ugly national stories, starting in 1979, when gunfire interrupted a weekday afternoon at the Dadeland Mall, one of the largest shopping centers in America. A white van with “Happy Time Complete Party Supply” stenciled on the side dropped off two men with MAC-10 machine guns. They walked into a store near the entrance to JC Penney, shot one man in the face, and sprayed another man with so many bullets that the coroner later gave up counting the holes. So started the Cocaine Wars, an ongoing bloodbath orchestrated by the cartels of South America as they wrestled for territory.

  The following year brought one of the goriest race riots in modern American history. It began on a Friday evening, after an all-white jury acquitted four white police officers in the beating death of a young black insurance agent, a former marine with four children. By Saturday a young white man, not unlike my father, took a wrong turn on his way home from the beach. He was dragged from his car, hit with a block of concrete, stabbed with a screwdriver, bludgeoned with a metal newspaper box, run over by a car, and left with one ear lopped off and his tongue cut out, facedown on the tarmac. When authorities rolled him over, they found a red rose in his mouth.

  That same year Fidel Castro decided, “I’ll flush my toilets.” He opened up prisons and insane asylums, and put their occupants onto rust-blotched freighters and listing fishing trawlers so full they carried people in their nets. Many of the 120,000 Cubans who made the trip were law-abiding or merely criminals by Castro’s puritan definition. But thousands were indeed hard-core thugs, people whose creative business style inspired the chain-saw-to-brain scene that would appear in Scarface a couple of years later.

  Put it all together and by 1981 Miami was “a boiling pot, not a melting pot,” in the measured words of the mayor. The Miami Beach commissioner warned of “absolute war in our streets,” and a member of Miami’s Special Homicide Investigation Team (yes, the SHIT squad) called the city “the most dangerous place on earth.” As though confiding in my father personally, the governor of Florida added, “If you want sustained stability, don’t come to Miami.”

  My father came to Miami. He was an oddity, in other words, a statistical anomaly, the only lonely white person heading to Miami for every ninety who fled the city, according to canceled voter registration cards. That’s why his handler at Flagler dispatched a beautiful young broker whose cheeks glowed like crushed flowers. She met my father in a new Cadillac, and they eased into traffic on Biscayne Boulevard, the most notorious city in America opening before them.

  For Cubans and Haitians and thousands of other immigrants, Miami was a place to be different, a land with the same air and sun but none of the limiting physics of their homeland. For men like my father, Miami was a place to be more intensely the same, to join a hundred thousand other members of the drug world in the tropical sun.

  Besides, Miami had charm. Every T-shirt in south Florida seemed pushed to its structural limits. Sleeves torn off, great vents slashed into the fabric, revealing rib cages and lower backs. Some of the more casual tops only looked like T-shirts but were in fact simple beach towels, modified by a hole cut in the middle, then thrown on like a Caribbean riding coat. Young women, as my father could not fail to notice, walked dogs and smoked cigarettes in bikinis no larger than the remnants of a burst balloon.

  Just off MacArthur Causeway, half a dozen cruise ships glistened at the docks, a skyline set afloat and lying on its side. Behind them the real downtown loomed soft-edged in the heat, shuddering as though still rising from the swamp. Even at two in the afternoon everything pulsed sorbet shades of mint and fuchsia.

  My father and his escort floated through Coral Gables, spun around the traffic circle at Cocoplum Plaza, and merged onto Old Cutler Road. Right there, just south of Coconut Grove, through a tunnel of banyan trees and belly palms, he found a nice three-bedroom in the biggest planned community in southern Florida. Across the street there was a park and a lagoon. On the ceiling of the master bedroom was a mirror. My father was home.

  For most of the next three years my family sat level on life’s great seesaw. My mother left her teaching job in Connecticut and became a full-time homemaker, aided by a cleaning lady, pool guy, and lawn team that attacked the property on a weekly basis. I took my first steps in the neighborhood park, my hair a lopsided puff of white cotton candy.

  Business boomed. Dad sold more than twenty thousand pounds of Colombian Gold in 1980. He did it again in 1981 and again in 1982. Each scam was cautious, clean-minded, and disciplined. It worked like this: Charlie and Willy got an old tanker or tugboat of weed from Colombia to the Caribbean islands. From there the load was parceled out to private sailboats, some of which belonged to unwitting East Coasters who paid to have their yachts moved north for the season. Timed to blend in
with regatta traffic, the sailboats headed for summer spots: Chesapeake Bay, Cape Cod, the Hamptons, and other points as far north as Maine. Charlie kept the vessels outside American waters until they sailed north past Nova Scotia, where they turned and hugged the coast, heading south and therefore attracting less interest as potential drug boats.

  My father and Bobby met the bales wherever they made shore. They bought a seventeen-foot refrigerated rig with MARIO’S FISH painted on the side and a twenty-six-foot vehicle marked GLOBAL MOVING. They secured a warehouse in a rancid, tumble-down section of Brooklyn, way out near the Atlantic. And they took every precaution. They rotated stash houses, fired workers who showed up high or drunk. Although they felt like heroes—like four-star generals in the dope brigade—they acted like nobodies. They were shiny stressed-out faces in traffic, the embodiment of nothing to see.

  In the Reagan years many dope rings switched to cocaine, which was an easier smuggle and a more profitable sale. To gross the same million dollars, a cocaine dealer needed to sell a mere thirty pounds of an odorless product small enough to fit in a backpack, while my father moved more than a ton of bulky, pungent plant matter you’d be lucky to fit in a pickup truck. Cocaine was Tinker Bell. Marijuana was the Big Green Elephant.

  My father and his friends looked down on the cocaine dealers, the more famous of Miami’s outlaws. Cocaine struck them as a lower-class criminal enterprise, the domain of a different kind of outlaw, who would make poor company for gringos with college degrees and vegetarian tendencies.

  The cocaine cowboys were sports cars, speedboats, discos, machine guns, and cleanly shaven faces. The marijuana dealers were pickup trucks, sailboats, acoustic guitars, baseball bats, and Pancho Villa mustaches. As a public nuisance they were the buzz-muffle of an airplane over your house at midnight, the glow of brake lights on the highway. The cocaine cowboys murdered cops and bribed judges while marijuana dealers tipped their caps at the law and wished their competitors a happy chase. The marijuana dealers were in some ways never more than kids in paper pirate hats, playing in the yard, burying tinfoil-wrapped chocolate doubloons.