My mother picked up the call in the kitchen.
It was Billy’s wife, the mother of his two little girls, and she had bad news: Billy had been busted. It was the summer of 1981, my first summer of life. With Miami in turmoil, and my father on a kind of paternity leave, Billy had taken a job in South Carolina, a break from the normal routine of Key West drops and long, dangerous drives north.
The job had gotten off to an auspicious start. Billy met a girl at a bar the first night he was in South Carolina. As a rule, smugglers believe that trucks with innocent pretty women in them are less suspicious than trucks with guilty mustachioed men. So he invited the girl along for his job, explaining the whole plan and enjoying the way she seemed to hang on his every word. Such was the ego of the true American outlaw that Billy and my father assumed—I mean really believed—that every girl wanted to sleep with them.
The next day Billy left the stash house with more than a ton of Colombian dope in the back of his pickup truck, the girl riding along beside him. He stopped at a four-way intersection feeling fine. He noticed some workers were laying pipe or cable along the road to one side. One of them, a ham-and-egger in a hard hat, jeans, and an orange vest, walked over slowly as if he were about to let Billy know about a cement truck pulling in.
At the door he pulled a gun from beneath his vest and with that the whole job site sprang to life. “DOWN ON THE GROUND!
DOWN ON THE GROUND!” For an instant Billy thought to run, and he turned to his companion—this poor girl—but she too had produced a badge and a gun and had Billy against the door of the cab, and then out of it, and as he laid down on the pavement he saw a cop pull a shotgun out of a parking cone.
Billy pled guilty to possession with intent to distribute more than two thousand pounds of marijuana. One of his men fled to Tahiti and never returned; he could have stuck around. Billy was a good pirate, a stand-up guy, as they say. He didn’t tell on people; it was a state charge, anyway. He was sentenced to two years of mechanic work on a farm in central Florida, where he turned bolts and met his children at wooden picnic tables.
When my mother first heard that Billy had been busted, she was consumed by fear, a great tide of emotion she had been swallowing for years, tamping it down with all the good in her life. She was not exactly like other mothers, however; she was a little more of a gambler. Rather than thinking about her exit strategy ahead of a similar disaster, my mother began to think about how she might mitigate the losses, maximize the gains.
She wanted to break the chain, but she calculated that if Big Tony were busted, she would have no choice but to become an overworked single mother with a kid in a crowded public school. She saw no point accelerating such a change, so she committed herself to staying with him, saving money for the one thing the government could never seize: an education for me.
It wasn’t easy. She sometimes ran into old friends and it would occur to her that they were not raising a drug dealer’s child; they were not defying their president and risking their freedom. She began to have bad dreams, visions of the jackboots in her flower bed, the battering ram at her door. But she had a plan and she stuck to it.
Not that it was easy for my father, either. He liked to talk about skill, but as law enforcement personnel at all levels jockeyed for victory, the dope business became almost a pure gamble. Customs agents ran patrols called “goat gropes” along the waterfront roads and marshes of the East Coast. The Coast Guard applied “random boarding” at port. The DEA stopped people at airports for “walking slowly, walking quickly, being very tense,” or “appearing cool,” according to a published report. Even cases that resulted more from classic police work often began with a tip from some idle person, happy for the chance to display their smarts.
Hardly a week went by without a perp walk, drug-on-the-table press conference, or raw video footage from the latest raid. In Florida the DEA confiscated so much weed, it borrowed a circus tent from Ringling Brothers in order to store it all. (The feds couldn’t just burn marijuana like lawn clippings. When Kentucky state troopers had tried that, they complained of “light-headedness” near the bonfire.)
The acid drip of this kind of anxiety began to eat at my father by 1983, shortly after Reagan declared “all-out war on big-time organized crime and the drug racketeers who are poisoning our young people.” He asked Congress to fund 1,200 new investigators, 200 new prosecutors, and a dozen regional task forces. The New England office of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force in Boston opened a file, which would grow to contain my father’s life and the lives of his friends.
In St. Thomas, Charlie sat at a bar called Horsefeathers, a burger-and-beer joint built into a grounded schooner, spitting distance to the water. In St. Barts, Willy hung around Le Select, a whitewashed open-air café where he and Buffett played and locals danced on crushed shells. Undercover agents, out-of-place men dropping conversational hooks and snares, cased both joints.
And in Miami my father felt the appraising eye of the city’s new super-narcs: righteous DEA jocks with lats that jumped from shoulder to ear, wiry FBI agents with mother-of-pearl snaps on their gun holsters. Every day his nervous system dealt with the fact that the vice president, the First Lady, the commander in chief, every functionary and official beneath them, the might of the American military, all the law enforcement in the land, and a thousand parent groups had pledged to hang him. Mix in a new baby and enough white powder to substitute for flour in the world’s largest cake, and it’s no wonder my father began to make some unusual business choices. If you were to graph his net worth and his brain-cell count, the lines would make a perfect X, with his money piling up as his mind boiled away.
At around the $500,000 point, criminal proceeds become a significant headache until they’re stored properly. In the best-case scenario, drug money is washed through a legitimate business. But that became harder to do under Reagan. The IRS had gotten aggressive in its pursuit of all financial irregularities.
My father kept $100,000 to $200,000 in a Miami safe-deposit box, inside a small mirrored building of safe-deposit boxes. He was a philosophy minor in college, so he chose “Plato” as his access password. But he didn’t trust safe-deposit boxes. To put money in a box in broad daylight rather than an FDIC-backed savings account always struck him as more or less an admission of criminal behavior. So in 1983 he started creating his own safe-deposit boxes. All it took was an Igloo cooler, sandwich baggies, rubber bands, a caulk gun, and a shovel.
No one knows how many money wells my father made, least of all him, but Connie’s shed on Long Island barely shut with all my father’s shovels inside. He definitely put $100,000 in her garden and $200,000 in the soft ground near her woodpile. There exists a picture of my father and me standing in front of that woodpile, sometime around Thanksgiving judging by the weight of our coats. I’m about five, holding a football and smiling. My father has his hands on his knees, and he’s smiling too, like he’s very proud of my college fund underfoot.
Burying money, of course, was even more incriminating than a safe-deposit box. The DEA tested money for mildew, moisture, and other signs of “unconventional storage.” Faded, mummified money was automatically suspicious. But in my father’s ever more cloudy state of mind, this seemed like the best possible path to go down, and he went down it again and again. Then he got a brighter idea.
In June 1983 my mother took me to her family’s cottage on Cape Cod, the same cottage she had visited as a child. It’s a modest rectangle, but the road to the front door is soft sand and the bay is visible from the porch. It’s also the only red house on the block, in addition to being ours, and we loved it. I spent the first six summers of my life there, and parts of many of those that followed.
My father sometimes found time to fly into Hyannis or drive the arm of the Cape and stay for a couple of weeks. Simple summer fun, it would seem, but life with my father in 1983 had become a splotchier experience. Richard, a ruddy Boston lawyer who is widely remembered as “
Always a Dick to me!” and his partner, a young stockbroker, joined us for some knock-around fun.
On the Fourth of July they packed an arsenal of illegal explosives into fat polyurethane pipes, causing everyone else on the beach to huddle together in the background, watching through splayed fingers. But the purpose of the visit was more business than pleasure. These guys specialized in investing dirty money in legitimate ventures, and the venture they were pushing that summer was Carolin Mines—a Canadian company forecast to become the biggest gold producer in North America.
With the dollar unsteady, gold prices were soaring, Dick explained to my father, and the world’s other big-producing countries had baggage that turned off gold buyers. Daddies want to give their little girls a pendant, not fund an evil empire. Canada was clean by comparison, and Disney might as well have invented Carolin Mines for the movies. The mother lode was known as the Idaho. The closest town was called Hope. It was all located in remote British Columbia, shouting distance to Alaska and the famous Yukon, and for confirmation, my father didn’t need to hire a dog sled. He could read about it in Barron’s and The Wall Street Journal.
Granted, the mine hadn’t actually begun producing yet. There had been some construction delays, funding problems, a cyanide spill, two environmental shutdowns, a weak dam, thousands of dead salmon, and hundreds of very angry townspeople downstream. There was also some market volatility. Shares of Carolin were trading for 20 cents in 1980, and peaked near $60 in 1982. In 1983 they were somewhere in between those numbers. But after a “tuning up process,” as the company called it, the mine was primed to reach its potential.
Not everyone knows that, Dick said. The time is now.
My father took long walks on the beach to think about it. His long walks were always with our dog, Captain, the purebred black Lab that my father bought precisely for moments like this, when he saw himself as though from the porch of a house along his route, a woman in a sundress tracking him with binoculars, his every movement heavy with significance.
“Darling,” he could almost hear the binocular woman say, calling her husband down from his stepladder, where he was hanging an American flag. “Who is that beautiful man with the beautiful dog?”
“Why, it’s Anthony Dokoupil, dear. I have seen him around, and made a point about finding out more. I hear he’s some sort of drug dealer.”
“Well, my heavens. I only know him for his fireworks.”
The only hitch in this reverie was the dog. My father refused to neuter him, never trained him, could not control him. The dog humped anything that moved, pissed on everything that didn’t.
“I’m going to kill that dog,” my father roared when he came back inside.
“What happened?” my mother asked, knowing she could probably guess.
“He pissed on some lady,” my father said.
My mother laughed.
He may have hit her right then, just as her face broke, when the lip was taut. Or he may have stored the anger away and pounded her the next day or the day after that. The lip was split just the same, and the emergency room doctors heard about a balky cabinet or slippery floor at that red house on the sandy lane.
Ann told Connie and Connie was once again ready to help her run, taking me along. But this was my father’s worst transgression in years. He apologized profusely for it. Anyway it was just a slap. Not a punch or a knife. Not worth uprooting plans. Because how else would my mother pay for private school?
Later that year, my father gave Dick and his partner the first installment of what would become a $660,000 off-the-books investment in Carolin Mines. He told my mother that this was their nest egg, and she believed him.
He was the same kid he was at the Beachcomber, talking about books he wanted to read, one he wanted to write, his hair vibrating as he spoke. Life was hard, scary, but that summer he was sure the wheel of progress was pulling him skyward, never doubting his direction until it was too late to change it.
In the fall of 1983, after the marijuana season was over, my father had his first grand mal seizure, a total convulsion of body and mind, akin to what doctors induce through shock therapy, only without the benefit of a soft bed, a body strap, and a rubber mouth guard. When the musician Eric Clapton had one in 1978, it was enough to scare him sober. He woke up in a hospital bed, declared rock bottom, and founded a rehab center with all the money he saved not doing drugs. My father did not.
At least five more times that fall my father lost consciousness. He heard voices and woke up with empty pockets. What he could not have known, and no one ever told him about, was what his face looked like, vacant as a corpse, and what his body did when his brain flicked back on and his muscles twitched with the roar and crackle of life. Some people call it the funky chicken dance, which makes it sound kind of fun. My father nearly died, but he kept on working.
Late in the summer of 1984, he and Willy agreed on their biggest load yet, an eighteen-thousand-pounder into New York City. Told to secure space, one of my father’s gophers rented a warehouse on Hunts Point in the Bronx. My father signed off on the selection, and even delivered one of the two truckloads of dope, sticking around long enough to process it for Bobby’s buyers.
He was high, however, and the skull-and-crossbones code of honor got its first hole. Because he was high, he never realized that his stash house was across the street from a juvenile detention center. Because he was high, his gopher felt okay being high, too. And so they both elected to commit a crime in full view of guard stations and police cars.
When my father walked off to God knows where, for God knows what, Bobby arrived and took one look at the guard stations across the street and went into full damage-control mode. He ordered everything thrown back into the trucks—scales, bales, twine, knives, brooms, and boxes—and left without sweeping the floor.
He drove the lead truck toward the highway, hired help following in the second truck, and both accompanied by a third vehicle, a beat-up sedan known as the chase car. The War on Drugs, much like the War on Terror two decades later, called on average citizens to spot evildoers, and sometimes those citizens felt compelled to do more than just call the 1-800 number.
As the trucks searched for a way onto I-278, the Bruckner Expressway, the chase car noticed that someone in an unmarked car stayed with them, following them through side streets, alongside a rail yard, and all the way to an entrance ramp some miles down the road. It seemed like too many turns to be a coincidence. So when traffic accordioned near the on-ramp, the chase car did its job—crashing into the curious citizen watchdog. That ended the chase, but it drew a lot of attention, more than any gang can comfortably afford.
A couple of weeks later my father, Bobby, and Bobby’s best friend had collected the last $500,000 owed for the job. It sat in a medium-size moving box inside a hotel near LaGuardia Airport. Bobby called Charlie who would bring the box of money to the Caribbean, starting the wash of cash that marked the end of the season. As they waited for the little guy, who was by then nicknamed the Shrimp, my father did some more coke—to hell with the pirate’s code—and his mind began to wander toward his own personal after-party.
Everyone in the drug business back then seemed to believe in a certain mystical class of women. They had classics degrees from Sarah Lawrence and bodies so fine and light they could traverse a lawn party without bending a single blade of grass. Like criminals with a code, these were call girls with class, the fairy tale of the realm, and in this way the sad plain reality of sex with hookers became like pirates bedding princesses.
In the middle of this daydream in the airport hotel, Bobby’s friend went downstairs for more cigarettes. Minutes later he burst back into the room like he had discovered a carpet fire. “It stinks down there,” he said. “There are all kinds of suits and guys standing around without luggage or apparently anywhere to be.”
My father was too high to safely operate a juicer, but he took control of the stage, volunteering to go down for a second look. He too n
oticed men standing around without luggage, not even glancing at him, like they were pretending they didn’t notice him when in fact his presence set off pinball madness in their brains.
My father tucked into the bar for a drink, something brown and fiery. He wanted to clear his head. Like golfers, drug dealers learn to account for the elements: I’m high, my father thought. It’s just the drugs talking. When the suits were still standing there a couple of rounds later, however, he hustled upstairs.
“It definitely stinks down there,” he said, and the sentence went off like a gun. Everyone stood up and danced in place. All of humanity, the totality of life, narrowed to a single question: What the hell were they going to do? They could leave the money in the room and walk out different exits. But couldn’t the agents just open the room and trace the money to them? What were those guys waiting for anyway?
My father decided that the best move would be whatever was least expected. If the feds expected them to sit up here and wait for the boom, they would launch a surprise counterattack. They would pack their bags and pick up the box. They would get it into the elevator, and when the elevator door opened they would crab-leg it for the front door, hoping to look like three men late for a flight who for some reason were also carrying a moving box.
It was a terrible idea. The year before, in one of the big Fifth Avenue hotels in New York, John and my father walked into the lobby with an even bigger box of money, a million dollars or more. It was hardly hot weather, and yet they were carrying money in an old air-conditioner container. They felt the box breathe slightly before it caved completely in the middle of the marble lobby. They buckled with it, so none of the money fell out on the floor. Then they dragged it back to the elevator. The moral of the story was simple: Use a luggage cart. Apparently my father had forgotten.
The elevator ride felt like a journey down in a Huey helicopter in Vietnam, the descent punctuated by an open bay door and furious combat. The men burst into the lobby, feet working, brains screaming, eyes boiling. They slowed only for the magic eye of the automatic sliding door to the outside world, which closed behind them and didn’t open again until they were inside a car driving toward their warehouse in Brooklyn.
The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana Page 12
