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

by Dokoupil, Tony

  The Colombians called it a caleta, which literally means “a hole.” Some of the fancier cartels had holes outfitted with generators and mini-fridges stocked with Heineken. Others operated out of warehouses, and kept the gringos out of the jungle altogether. But the luckiest smugglers—Willy included—were offered the magic of a behind-the-scenes experience. They were brought through the “staff only” door of America’s marijuana factory, as close to the source as white men would get until they started growing their own. A stream burbled nearby, camouflage scrub nets hung as insulation against military helicopters, and cartel members in dusty street clothes lazed about on crates, cleaning guns, spitting.

  High Times called the Guajira “pirate paradise.”

  But to appreciate what this must have felt like for a smuggler, remember that before marijuana became an over-the-counter experience, the very process of securing a single joint was an ecstatic challenge, a high before the high. Then multiply the feeling of a score by all the levels between a joint in your bedroom and a crop in Colombia, all the dealers between a ten-gram baggie on a corner and a ten-ton boatload on an ocean, all the miles between evading American parents and evading international law enforcement, all the hours and the years of freedom at risk if you falter, and then square that number to account for the sheer economic power of it all.

  The patriarchs of local farms presented samples of their finest crops, hoping Willy would buy the field, feed their family, make the year a good one. Willy, for his part, would smell the product, roll it between thumb and forefinger, check the tops for the fine red hairs that told him it was ready to smoke. It was that moment, as the farmer waits and America waits, that hooked smugglers on the life.

  That, and cocaine. Willy was so lit up by cocaine that he sent Jimbo to negotiate with the Colombians. At the same time, Charlie pushed Daniel out to find investors in the smuggle. Scrimshaw looked for that apartment in Manhattan. Corky looked for sailors. As an insurance policy against Willy’s load falling apart, and out of sheer professional duty, my father agreed to sell a load of John’s dope that was coming into Massachusetts in October.

  John spent his week in the mountains sleeping in a hammock and working to refine his load down to the bare essentials. With a team of locals helping him, he rose at dawn and worked until dusk, until his fingers cracked and the bugs bore into him. He helped remove three tons of stems and leaves, cutting the size of his load in half, making it pure bud.

  “See the little blisters here, here, and here?” he later said to a friend in the lobby of a hotel in Boston. He held up his hand for inspection, business travelers marching around him, smoothing their ties. He might as well have returned from some sort of adventure travel package aimed at rich, corporate types. Journey to the heart of the Colombian badlands to clean just-pulled ancient herbs. Start the bidding at $5,000.

  By late June, Willy’s load had been selected from the source with no problems, but Jimbo had bad news: The Colombians wanted more money to move it. He learned this in Barranquilla, where he visited the gaudy compound of the cartel leader. The house was part vacation villa, part prison, and entirely self-conscious. The armed guards wore polo shirts. The hallways were lined in riding trophies. There was even a book on the coffee table, put out by a vanity press, entitled 103 Murders. It carried the byline of the cartel leader himself.

  Timber Tom was dispatched to Barranquilla with a top-off sum: $60,000 taped around his thighs. His first thought, as he looked at the aquarium in the living room, was that he had somehow slipped into a Fellini dream. He was reminded of why he had taken this job: not only because his coffers were down but also because it was a pure act, and if you succeeded, no applause was needed.

  When Tom got into the compound, he peeled the cash off his legs and tossed the money at Jimbo, who blanched at the sight of it. The money wasn’t for the Colombians, as it turned out—it was for the Americans, local DEA agents who wanted $10,000 apiece to accept and perpetuate a false story about the travel plans for the boat Tom would take from Barranquilla to the Guajira. There were twelve of them in town, not six.

  “We need $60,000 more,” Jimbo said.

  Days passed.

  Willy tried to sober up, scrounge some more dough. In the meantime Timber Tom went to the roof, where he had a view of the city, a bustling port at the mouth of the Magdalena River, the biggest in Colombia. He tried some of the weed he would be carrying, feeling his skin start to tingle, and he watched the sun fall toward the horizon, setting windows ablaze and plunging side streets into darkness. He could scarcely believe his eyes as soldiers appeared, closing down intersections, waiting in parked trucks, surrounding the compound. He looked at the joint and back at the street. But it wasn’t a hallucination, and it wasn’t a bust. The pope was in town, bringing a message of, what else: Don’t do drugs.

  Later that week or the next, Tom walked to the river, where he hoped to get a glimpse of his ship. The cartel had rented it to Willy, who of course requested that the boat be fresh and clean, rather than recently boarded or busted by the Coast Guard. One vessel in particular he said was hot. “Whatever you do,” Willy had stressed to Tom before he left for South America, “don’t let them give you the ocean-going tugboat.” Tom was looking at the ocean-going tugboat.

  More delays.

  As Tom went to work on the boat, my father and Willy languished at the Landmark. They nibbled cold shepherd’s pie as their ice cubes melted. It was face-rakingly boring, absolutely typical, and kind of a blast. Time froze on the brink of something worth the wait.

  At a hardware store, Tom bought a dozen cans of white paint, a dozen cans of black paint. Over the next couple of days he turned his boat into a replica of the striped service tugs that pulled fresh water between the islands. When Tom finished, the cartel’s Colombian captain of the boat came on board and shrugged at the labor. He was a big man with a limp hand. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, not sorry at all. The rest of the money had come in, he continued, and it was all-aboard time.

  The next morning Timber Tom, the fish-handed captain, and twelve Colombian nationals left port. They traveled fifteen miles south to where the silty brown of the Magdalena dumps into the Caribbean. They headed straight out, as though taking fresh water to Guadeloupe, roughly the midpoint in a necklace of islands that runs from Puerto Rico to Caracas, Venezuela. At Guadeloupe, Tom veered south again, following the arc as though still on a water route, which the DEA in Barranquilla had been paid off to confirm, before making a night dash toward the coast of the Guajira. The move added a thousand miles to the journey, but that’s a small price to pay for an alibi.

  The meeting point was a tendril of land that created a little lagoon, a brackish pond of river water and churn off the Caribbean. Tom found it without a problem but he didn’t see anyone waiting for him in the tree line. Still more days passed. No word from shore. No word from Willy. No one to call, nothing to do but scan the tree line, leave, and scan it again.

  Tom guided the tug back out to sea, where he let her drift a while to save gas. When he returned to the spot, he saw vibrations in the leaves and then a mule appeared and then another and another. He saw multiple bales of pressed marijuana lashed to their sides and backs, each mule rocking like a railroad car as it approached the lagoon, led by farmers, followed by gunmen. Tom lost count after two hundred and fifty animals had gathered along the stunted shore, where Wayuu Indians waited in hand-carved canoes.

  In the early days of Spanish rule, the Wayuu taught themselves firearms and riding, recognizing what was needed to survive. In the quarter millennium that followed, they continued to improvise, profiting from guns, gold, emeralds, pearls, sugar, coffee. Every thing was sold with their help, or their hostility. This time it was help. They moved the marijuana from shore to boat, splitting the sea with new outboard motors lashed to pieces of old-growth tropical rain forest.

  The switch point was to be Île Fourchue, a quarter mile of wild-flowers and rocks. John used Guadeloupe and St. K
itts for his meeting points. The truth is, just about anywhere on the map would do. Caribbean narcotics “squads” were usually a single constable with a billy club and a set of jangling keys. If he caught you, he was as liable to ask how much for ten bales as to put you in his one-room jailhouse. And don’t worry about the locals saying anything.

  During the golden age of piracy, 1715 to 1725, sympathetic crowds rescued men from the gallows and offered refuge from assault. More than two hundred and fifty years later, during the golden age of pot and beyond, similar crowds assisted the smugglers. In the Turks and Caicos, when American authorities arrested the president, who allegedly let smugglers refuel on his islands, his people booed. In the Bahamas, the DEA pursued a smuggler’s boat onto a crowded beach, only to be beaten back by crowds hurling bottles and rocks. Marijuana paid the bills there, too.

  It was the open water, not land, that got smugglers into trouble. The Coast Guard alone had twenty-one vessels a day searching the Caribbean, and averaging a bust for every four patrols, usually the result of a chance run-in (Hey, a ship!) and a gut feeling (Doing what, exactly?). Tom reduced his risk by following the semicircle of islands northward again, well out of his way. But as he curled the tug around Guadeloupe, he saw it on the far side of the island: the White Horn, a hundred-foot Coast Guard cutter, prickling with antennae. It seemed to be waiting for them.

  “Everybody down below,” he yelled to his adopted crew. “Come up and I’ll shoot you.”

  Tom walked out of the boat’s towers and stood on the bow, the picture of counterfeit ease. He lit a cigarette, and as he puffed, he couldn’t help but count the number of gold marijuana leafs on the hull and smokestacks of this mammoth cutter. Each one represented a million pounds of confiscated dope, dozens of busts. One, two, three, four, five … He almost went slack in the knees. The White Horn had fourteen leaves on her. He waved at his fellow captain, or to whoever was behind the tinted windows of Reagan’s warship. Then he turned his back, casually, he hoped, and prayed.

  Tom waited for what he felt was an unsuspicious interval, then slid the tugboat alongside a neighboring cruise ship, blocking the Coast Guard’s line of sight and giving him a cloak of radar coverage. Then he peeled off around the next uninhabited island, into a cove where he spent the night. At dawn he was out again, making good time to Île Fourchue.

  In the 1970s, Charlie used to sit on the peak of that island with night goggles and a flashlight. Coast Guard cutters were always circling the area, seeing nothing, when in fact the sea around every bend was hot with activity. This time, no man waited for Tom atop the mountain, so no one was there to tell him not to bother showing up for the transfer. A chartered yacht had anchored in his drop spot for a cocktail party.

  He called yet another audible and arranged the drops to happen off the coast of St. Barts. The captains of the sailboats he was meeting balked at the idea, citing the seaside dining spots. Tom insisted that from a well-lit area the patrons would not be able to see into darkness. “We’ll be ghosts,” he said.

  One by one, as fat and happy diners gazed at their own reflections in the windows or else a vague ocean of seamless black, the six sailboats navigated to Tom’s “mother ship.” That’s what big dope boats were universally dubbed, in a beautiful blend of Cold War and Star Wars lingo. Inflatable Zodiac rafts shuttled the dope from the tug to the sailboats. After the last transfer, Tom left the ship to its Colombian owners and hitched a ride on another Zodiac.

  A few feet from sand, he hopped out. Damp and reeking of weed, he walked up the beach, through a murmuring French restaurant, glowing with that special energy that comes from a quantity of adrenaline dissolved in bliss. Willy was waiting for him on the main street, and they drank champagne until dawn, their reefer sailing on toward America.

  Dope is a terrible first mate. It consumes all the living space, all the food space, all the bed space. At night, the captain sleeps topside or on the bales themselves, waking with watery bloodshot eyes at best and to a tarantula that has crawled out of the pile and into his stomach hair at worst. All the dope is good for is curing seasickness. That and boredom, which was inevitable during the three- or four-week journey north with little more than crackers and canned cheese to eat.

  The timing of the smuggle was perfect. It was mid-July—the height of the sailing season. Tens of thousands of boats would be on the water. That meant tens of thousands of boats nettling the Coast Guard with incompetence. Inga was in a hotel room in Fredericksburg, Virginia, with a VHF radio and a single-sideband radio. As soon as the boats were within nine hundred miles, she could communicate with them, clearing their path with bogus SOS calls if needed. A week after the boats departed St. Barts, the first three turned left at Bermuda and made radio contact. Inga relayed progress reports to my father and Bobby, who by now had another driver with them.

  My mother and I had spent the rest of June on Cape Cod, where she won $500 playing scratch-off lotto and I breathed the air of affluence at a summer camp. We drove to New York in early July, where my father squinted and stumbled his way a block west to meet us at the Intrepid Museum, a decommissioned aircraft carrier on the Hudson. One picture tells the story: a shot of us on the deck, or rather on a shelf dug into the side of the deck. I’m five years old and a “big boy,” as they say. And yet my father has hoisted me in his arms, and his smile is this strange blend of clench and calm, like the smile of a bodybuilder in full flex on the cover of a muscle mag or a paunchy man sucking in his gut as he passes a pretty girl.

  Days later we flew home to Miami, and my father drove his truck to Richmond, where he padded around in his element: an anonymous high-end hotel. The theme was the Old World tobacco trade. When men like my father get busted as “organizers” of a smuggle, defense lawyers often deploy the same tired line, scoffing at the notion of an organizer driving trucks, working the docks. They ask the jurors to see the ridiculousness of the idea. “It’s like the CEO of General Motors down on the shop floor kicking the tires.” Sometimes juries even buy it, not knowing that kicking the tires is exactly what these men are in the business for in the first place. They didn’t become criminals to keep their hands clean.

  His phone rang as the first ketch slipped over the submerged middle third of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, ceding to the weary authority of passing freighters. The crew trimmed sails and yanked on a small outboard motor as state parks passed in darkness on either shore. My father and the other driver slid into their trucks, the vinyl seats imparting a predawn chill. As the first sailboat followed a finger of the Chesapeake toward Urbanna, my father exited I-64 and crossed the York River, passing farms and forest for thirty thought-provoking miles until the road forked again at Old Virginia Street, and he was in Urbanna.

  Some smugglers get cute on their journey toward American shores. If they own the boat, they paint a high-water line around the hull so at a glance the vessel appears to be riding empty. Others hang a foreign flag when in international waters, in hopes of deterring the Coast Guard, and run the Stars and Stripes near the shore, in hopes of deterring customs and everyone else. Still others hang a sack of getaway scuba gear off the stern—praying they won’t have to use it.

  This crew kept their running lights on to avoid a “safety check,” the maritime equivalent of being pulled over for a missing taillight, but they hewed to Charlie’s principle of invisibility in plain sight. Besides being a tobacco port, Urbanna had once been a schooner and steamship dock, with its tiny creek dredged and widened repeatedly over the years, enough to accommodate sailboats with relatively deep keels. The boats sailed right in, as though returning home. They hung a left into the Rappahannock River, then another into the creek, and sidled up to an outcropping of Pierre’s inherited marina, a covered structure called the Oyster House, because that’s what it was usually for: unloading oysters.

  A century ago the sons of Urbanna stretched the necks of pirates on a wharf across from Pierre’s marina. My father parked the Mario’s Fish truck in an alle
y. His colleague backed the Global Moving truck to the edge of the water, and the men got to work. With help from Pierre and two friends, they unloaded the bales, about a hundred and twenty-five of them.

  Each bale was about the size of a large sofa cushion, and it arrived pressed and triple wrapped. Like hay or mulch, marijuana has a tendency to warm up in the center and leech potency. So each bale was wrapped once in brown paper, which absorbed some of the moisture and sweat; once in plastic, which kept oil or bilge or seawater from spoiling the load; and, lastly, it was wrapped in a burlap sack that was thrown over the bale and sewn shut, so men like my father could heave and toss the stuff into trucks and onto the scales.

  My father shut the back of the truck as silently as he would the door to my room as I slept. When the first truck was gone, he backed his up to the water’s edge. This was the unnerving part: the wait for boat number two, staggered miles behind the lead vessel. The off-load crew and my father waited and waited, burning cigarettes and staring at the pay phone by the dock. They scuffed their shoes on the wood and spit and watched the moon lose and gain clouds. They were cold and scared and thinking, Man, this is fun. It was almost sad when, around 5:00 a.m., my father’s big bony elbow was poking out the window, his foot on the gas. He turned the radio on, whirling the dial in search of a road song.

  As a precaution, a premonition either Inga or the captain had, the third boat was diverted to a private off-load spot in Maryland. The other driver, a friend of Bobby’s, was radioed to meet it. There were no chase cars this time. The Global Moving truck was alone at the drop point, and it was alone on the highway. It was also alone at the rest stop near Philadelphia, where it broke down and the driver skedaddled, leaving behind a disabled truck with out-of-state plates and more than a million dollars of marijuana inside.

  My father made it all the way to the stash house in New Canaan, Connecticut, some ten hours north, before he heard from Bobby, who was frantic. They only had two trucks, after all, and Global Moving was one of them. It needed to be in Maine in a day, and, anyway, it couldn’t sit there and bake in the sun. The last that Bobby had heard from their deserter was that the truck was drivable but risky: The gas pedal was sticking, and the vehicle kept lurching and jerking, which would make it a cat toy for cops—if the truck had not been searched already.