Shortly before he started dating my mother, Charlie ran into Alan, the old friend who had shepherded in that disastrous load of Thai Stick, the one that almost got them mown down by the Boston Mob. The two laughed and talked, and at some point my father’s name came up, and Charlie talked about the Old Man’s insanity: the buried money, the lost loot. He pointed out that if Tony were busted it could get everyone in trouble, and there was really only one way to guard against that possibility: marry Tony’s girl, my mother, Ann.
There’s no doubt that Charlie loved my mother, and she loved him, but it’s also true that he knew she could be a bulwark between him and prison. He knew that if he married my mother, he could take my father’s money, win amnesty for himself, and lock her off as someone who could rebut his testimony.
Through the first half of 1990, Charlie lived off my mother’s cooler money and some money he had managed to get refunded from the Yukon gold investment. Tony was God knows where, maybe dead but certainly not busted, so Charlie didn’t propose to Ann just yet. Then one night the phone rang, and Charlie’s reason was on the line.
It wasn’t my father. It was Willy. Charlie hadn’t seen Willy since 1986, but the old bastard said he was around the corner, sipping a Greenie in a bar along the same strip where we bought our groceries: a block from my Little League field, two blocks from Uncle Frank’s pizzeria, where my father and I used to play endless games of Frogger and Track & Field, celebrating in super-slo-mo to the instrumental sound track from Chariots of Fire.
It was a short drive away, in other words, but Charlie had enough time to realize that this call was bad news, probably the worst kind of news imaginable, because how else did Willy get this phone number and address and find this little bar years after the last job when he and everyone else disappeared into the wind?
Willy did not walk away as planned after the 1986 job. He did one more job for what amounts to his second family, a ring of three brothers in Boston. They were dumb with their cash. They bought cars and boats and ran a mortgage company that, upon closer inspection, seemed to only loan money to friends and family. In 1988 the criminal division of the Internal Revenue Service called the Boston branch of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. A year later the three brothers were charged with importing more than a hundred tons of Colombian dope since the late 1970s.
Willy had been one of their biggest suppliers, but the brothers didn’t know Willy like Charlie and my father did, or else they protected him exceptionally well, because on the indictment Willy was identified as “LNU”—last name unknown. Even when the feds got his full name, they couldn’t find him and as a new decade dawned the task force turned its attention to more pressing crimes.
Federal prosecutor Paul Kelly and DEA agents Damian Farley and Joe Desmond were exceptions. Kelly was five years into a job as the assistant U.S. attorney for Massachusetts and had just become acting head of the task force. Cocaine was the new public menace, but from what Farley and Desmond were showing him in the DEA’s files, Willy was the biggest East Coast pot smuggler of all time. The drugs had all been sold, and the principal ring long retired, but these three were old school, even if they were all under thirty-five. A fugitive is a fugitive, they figured.
Besides, like most law enforcement, they rather enjoyed marijuana dealers. No one condoned what they did, but when you catch them, they’re good company. So the case grew and grew and in early 1990—after a DEA search that included a visit to Jimmy Buffett—a U.S. marshal named Bill Degan found something: a tall American guy in Portugal. He was living in some tiered mansion on the sea, driving a Ferrari. It was Willy Terry. He was living on the southern coast, near Vilamoura, the largest purpose-built resort on the Continent.
The Portuguese authorities busted him at the dentist, no less, and then waited for the team to arrive from Boston. Kelly says he knew right away that Willy would cooperate. His girlfriend was pregnant, for one, and for another, the sooner he opened up, the sooner Kelly could get him free again. Not two months later Willy was on a flight to Miami to bring Charlie into the deal.
“It’s all over,” Willy said, even before Charlie sat down at the bar.
He explained that he was cooperating with the feds, and he urged Charlie to do the same. “There’s a pay phone there.” He pointed to the end of the bar. When Charlie looked back down at his beer, he saw that Willy had slipped a number to him on a napkin.
“And if I don’t use it?” Charlie asked.
“They’ll break down the door,” Willy said.
“When?” Charlie asked.
“Tonight,” Willy said. “They’ll break it down. They’ll arrest Ann. They’ll put Tony in foster care. You don’t want that. Here’s the number, Charlie. Turn yourself in.”
Charlie did.
Summer turned to fall before the government announced its next move: a sit-down proffer session with Charlie and Willy. Kelly’s team was flexible about the location. They were also getting chilly in New England, so when Willy suggested Fort Lauderdale, the team agreed. Charlie and Willy checked into ocean-view rooms, where they spent their last night as respectable pirates.
In the morning they met Kelly, Farley, and Desmond under blue umbrellas in the sand. Charlie remembers everybody was in bathing suits. Anyone walking by would have seen the outlines of a teambuilding corporate retreat, a session of man therapy, not the drug war. The crew even had virgin drinks with the funny straws.
There are two types of snitches. The first kind will shake hands, sit down, talk patiently and politely, and then go away without any sign of remorse. That was Willy, who met alone with the feds first. The second kind won’t shake hands, delays sitting down, bites the questioner, and tries to insult the process. That was Charlie. When he arrived for his turn with the feds, one of the DEA agents called the blue umbrella a cabana, and Charlie corrected him: a cabana is thatched. Then he started in with the ethnic jokes. Irish wedding this, and O’Brien twins that. “How do you make a seven-course meal for an Irishman?” he asked Kelly, as though by clapping his backside at the passing royal yacht he was still a pirate and not turning state’s evidence. “Boil a potato and hand him a six-pack.”
The meetings lasted three days, and both men were called back for meetings in Boston, a total of more than a week of questioning. Kelly’s office started looking like a psychopath’s bedroom, the walls papered with leads. He was sharing reports with multiple federal agencies and multiple local departments. By the end, they had more cases than they could possibly pursue, but my father’s name had floated to the top of a list, along with Bobby and eight other men attached to Willy and Charlie’s side of the smuggle. It was a case the feds pursued for the next year, from the fall of 1990 to late 1991.
Now Charlie was in the marrying mood. He insisted on it, in fact, arguing that I was wild and needed a father. My mother relented. She later said she knew the legal strategy behind it. Either way she always seemed game for going along with someone else’s story.
One sunny Saturday afternoon in December 1990, as the task force continued its investigation, I poked my head out of a blue limousine and flashed peace signs to the Miami skyline. That evening my mother married Charlie on a small sailboat in Biscayne Bay as a red sun set the city ablaze. She wore a white dress. He wore flip-flops, white shorts, and a blue shirt, which he unbuttoned to the navel. I was the best man and I wore the same.
My mother walked down the aisle with two of her oldest girlfriends, Connie and the second wife of my father’s old partner, Billy. Charlie’s post-informant entourage consisted of a ten-year-old boy and a teenage runaway my mother—who was now a school counselor—had volunteered to work with on the weekends. I stood by Charlie’s side during the ceremony and handed him the ring for my mother’s finger. I shook his hand after he said “I do.” And later he gave me sips of beer and taught me how to fart downwind.
Charlie was a conscientious objector during Vietnam and a self-styled dealer in the movement, but in the end he got a g
et-out-of-jail free card for his service to his country’s War on Drugs. Willy almost got the same deal. He pleaded guilty, in February 1991, to conspiracy to import ten tons of marijuana into Seal Cove, Maine, in 1985 and 1986, a fraction of his career total, which, to the outrage of DEA agents up and down the coast, was totally overlooked. According to the deal he struck with Kelly and company, he would get ten years in prison for this crime. He would not serve that time.
His records were impounded and sealed, and have most likely been destroyed. Neither I nor a lawyer I hired could find them, or anything at all about William Terry except for a short press release about his arrest, and a judge’s unstated understanding that Terry could not be called to testify in a civil dispute between two old friends. Willy was released into a “witness protection–like” program, according to Kelly, who arranged the deal. He was given a new name and social security number. And that was the end of the Terrys who came ashore with the Mayflower.
As the task force continued knocking on doors, in the summer of 1991, my mother and Charlie moved our family to Maryland, telling everyone on my father’s side of the family that we were just going to Tallahassee for the summer. The story was that Mom had a temporary teaching job that might turn permanent. If it did, she promised, we’d be sure to invite everyone over to our new residence. But of course we never did.
At a going-away party at my friend Clay’s house, four pals and I had a cake fight on the patio. We washed off with giant cannonballs from waterfall to pool. As the sun set, we unhitched Clay’s boat and in the light wake of the bay took little-boy oaths of fidelity, and forgot each other by middle school.
Before he vanished, Willy paid Charlie and my mother a visit in Maryland, just to say goodbye. I wasn’t home the night Willy came over, although I can’t imagine I had a friend’s house to go to. I was protesting the move by wearing orange and green Miami Hurricane T-shirts every day for a year. But I must have been gone. Charlie and Willy drank their fill of Grand Marnier and Heineken at my father’s antique table, beneath my father’s ugly jungle painting, in a room of my father’s things or things he paid for. Willy was invited to spend the night in my room, the room of the son of the man he betrayed, and he accepted.
I wonder whether he looked around before turning in. On my corkboard was a picture of my father sitting on the steps of our house on Cape Cod, his black Lab, Captain, between his legs. He would have seen the pinholes where I’d stabbed the picture dozens of times, rearranging it on the board but also needling it like a voodoo doll. And he would have noticed that the only picture in worse shape was my own picture on the same steps.
Whatever the case, Willy did not sleep well that night under my blue comforter, because in the morning he and Charlie eyed each other uneasily, emotional muscles sore. They argued briefly but fiercely and then Willy was gone. In the wastebasket in my room he left his old license and identification cards, along with a letter from the federal government, bestowing on him a paperwork makeover, the freedom to run.
In October 1991, a few weeks into our first fall in Maryland, two dozen of my father’s peers gathered in secret in Boston. This was his grand jury. The voice of the American public. Grand juries are where the federal branding iron gets hot. After the grand jury, government agents get to come through the pantry with weapons drawn, and the next day the paper boy gets to run through town with news of what the Bill of Rights called “infamous crime.”
Kelly made his case against my father and his coconspirators, and the jury agreed, returning a three-count indictment, which Kelly had sealed out of concern that my father and company would run. It was unbelievable timing. The law had five years to make this case, the clock ticking from October 15, 1986, which was considered the day of the last criminal act, when the last dollar of drug money was laundered, and the last door was locked against the night. They made it after four years, fifty-one weeks, and a day, returning the indictment on October 9, 1991, less than one week—six measly days—before the statute of limitations was set to expire, freeing my father and his partners for life.
Three additional, overlapping indictments followed, along with a global manhunt. With an assist from Interpol and local law enforcement, U.S. marshals pursued suspects in Canada, England, Thailand, the British and U.S. Virgin Islands, Virginia, New Jersey, Maine, and, of course, New York City, pouring through Bobby’s door one day before dawn while his son was in the house. In all, they would seize more than $4 million in cash and assets, including a marina in Virginia, a restaurant in Maine, two houses in Massachusetts, and several six-figure sailboats. They located drug money in Zurich, Hong Kong, Guernsey, Curaçao, London.
John was arrested at Boston’s South Station and the authorities found him sitting on a pair of $250,000 homes, a mint-condition antique Jeep, two MG convertibles, and an ivory 1978 Mercedes. In his wallet, they found a license and ID cards in the name of Stephen Crea and a passport in the name of Edwin Lugo. Occupation: pizza man.
Pierre was busted at his home in Virginia, where authorities commandeered The Phantom, a sixty-six-foot racing yacht. Later they shoulder-tapped two of his local partners in a Canadian airport, trying to smuggle $200,000 in rare rubies.
Timber Tom was arrested in Canada as well, where a few weeks before the authorities got to him, his car was hit by a bus near Nova Scotia, almost killing him. He had been planning a sailing trip around the world.
Jimbo was handcuffed outside a Waffle House in Miami, arrested after climbing into a U-Haul truck that undercover agents had led him to believe had a ton of dope in it. The rest of the busts were routine. They got Scrimshaw in England, where he had once been a cabdriver, and Inga in Martha’s Vineyard, where she was working as a boat captain. Daniel was busted in St. Thomas.
After an exhaustive eight-month search, most men were in custody. But a few remained “elusive,” as federal prosecutors put it in a request for an extension. They wanted more time to hunt suspects before the indictment was made public, potentially sending people further into hiding. Among the men they couldn’t locate was one of the sailors, who had fled to Thailand, and the man atop the indictment, a certain Anthony Edward Dokoupil, who had the best hiding place of all.
A DEA agent called my mother in Maryland. He told her he was going to ask her something very important, and that before she answered she should remember that lying could mean they would take me away.
“Do you understand?” he said.
“I do,” my mother said.
“Where is Anthony?”
My mother threw a cloud of guilt over our house simply by telling the truth.
When my father left his apartment for the last time in 1989, he took his $50,000 to Overtown, the palm-fringed black slum near downtown, a place where less than a decade earlier mobs were beating and burning white people. It doesn’t get seedier than Overtown, and as a result the slum imparted a certain status to those who navigated it. But my father never got too far into the ghetto. In the back of the cab, he passed out.
He woke up on the floor of an old wood-frame two-bedroom house in North Miami, his box of money intact beside him. The bed in the room had three women in it, Carol, Sylvia, and Lauri, each of them hookers working a stretch of the South Dixie Highway, and marching for hooker’s rights each election season. The owner of the house was the owner of the cab: Lou.
Lou was a salty, white-haired man with a pension from some maritime union, who worked as the driver for these women, ferrying them from john to john and running the meter the whole time. They never paid. But they stayed in his house rent-free in exchange for sexual favors. My father also stayed rent-free because he did pay the meter. Lou would drive my father all over Miami to buy cocaine, which by then was mostly sold as crack, then drive him to some fleabag hotel on South Dixie. Sometimes the girls would join him, accepting crack as payment for sex. This continued, off and on, the whole year.
Against all odds, as a matter of fact, I’m drawn to this image of my father chauffeured around the
city by a maniacal old sailor turned taxi driver, who keeps his fares, his sex, and his friends in-house and cruises Miami as if in a flying boat. I even get a weird charge out of just how awful that house really was, if you strip away the fever-dream romanticism. My father buried his cash behind Lou’s house, in what he describes as a “rotten-egg spot” that collected runoff from the outdoor shower. That was his ATM.
By the end of the summer, he started cadging money from family. He called his siblings and his mother late at night with sad stories about a bed at the Salvation Army for the weekend until his bank opened again on Monday. He would have wiring instructions ready: names, addresses, phone numbers. His mother died with $17,000 worth of Western Union receipts between her and the boy who got away.
But the money was useless. Each dollar was a needless word in a book, a slack minute in a movie. It created extra scenes in my father’s story, but it didn’t change the ending.
Sometime late in 1989, my father slept for the first time under the I-95 overpass, next to the Miami River. It was extremely abnormal for a white man to sleep here, of course, but that was a redeeming quality. My father was marooned, living the kind of extreme existence he could always love, if not enjoy. He dribbled away his days, mooching hot-dog stubs and hamburger buns from teenagers at the arcade. He arranged himself, as though in a series of self-portraits: on a bench on the bay-side, in front of a street musician, on a patch of city grass, rejoicing at the sight of a smokable cigarette butt.
In the evening, he joined Huck-and-Jim hobo teams that fished the river for food using found nets and rods liberated from the yachts nearby. Usually all they caught were minnows, good for just one bite of meat, prepared in a soup can with river water boiled by a scavenged Sterno torch. After dinner he slept in a box. His only change of clothes had been stolen, and he would wake up with palmetto bugs nibbling his eyelashes or resting on the plateau of his cheek. It got to where he always felt like they were on him. And bugs are bigger in Florida, novelty size. When a Miami cockroach catches a bit of streetlight it looks almost decorative, a work of elfin craftsmanship and design.
The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana Page 22
