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

by Dokoupil, Tony

  He followed with two weeks of raving paranoid madness. My mother, Charlie, Timber Tom, Willy, and others all danced out of his mind, making car alarms go off when he passed, pushing revolving doors into his heels. They pop up and smile, he said, brandishing pencil drawings and little red cans of gasoline, and once they even took over his favorite radio station, playing “Every Breath You Take (I’ll Be Watching You).”

  My father begged me to “intercede,” to “ask Charlie, Ann, Tom and Willy to stop torturing me.” In the margins, he asked for help six more times: “Please help me Tony,” “Please help me Tony,” “Please help me …”

  I did not help.

  I could not help.

  I could not let him in.

  After a lull, my father sent me a hundred-dollar bill, attaching a note.

  It said, “The rest is in my heart.”

  At my lowest I took three different buses to end up at the Golden Gate Bridge, where I had a fluttery feeling I recognized from other times when I’d held an object at a great height, near a railing, say, a mishap away from losing it. There’s a reason people throw things into oceans and ditches, out car windows and from the end of piers. It feels good, that destruction. It feels fine.

  Instead of jumping, I moved to New York. I enrolled in a master’s program, American studies, of course, the most romantic of all fields, and to pay for it I signed on for tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. It took all of an hour to fill out the forms online and click “Apply.” I was approved in what felt like seconds, the money slammed into my student checking account.

  My father still hung on the periphery of my life. During a rare phone conversation he tried to sell me his computer; the time before that, his shoes. I had no intention of paying the loans off. I planned to be dead before they came due. I planned to get low and dirty, and go down in a wash of glory, like a surfer falling slowly backward into the foam. Without realizing it, I was planning to go down like my dad.

  Then I met a girl and in that timeless way, I thought, maybe I’d like to live a little longer. Maybe, for that matter, I’d like to buy a new suit and take her out for a nice dinner. I asked my mother about what my father had said about her having money, how certain he had been. There was money, she confirmed. But my father had lost it.

  And still I didn’t know where it had really come from, this lost pile of money. She said some of it had been buried but she never explained why. I started dreaming about it: buried treasure, my father’s dough, the legend of the Pirate Kings. Maybe it was true. My mother was more encouraging this time. She could tell I was desperate, maybe, or maybe she was curious. “Who knows where the money went,” she admitted. “There was a lot of it.”

  I stopped by unannounced and rang the buzzer with my name on it. All I could think about was the time on the boat in 1986, the last time my father had seemed whole rather than helplessly, hopelessly deranged, kneeling over a glass table, the Mets on TV.

  To my surprise, his neighborhood was nice. The street had shiny meters and clean new awnings. Somewhere in my mind the old myth machine turned on. He really was swashbucklingly rich after all, I thought. The old dog.

  Then I found his building. Just a block away from the shiny people, two blocks from a well-tended community garden, his was a dreary apartment building for ex-cons, the kind of place that brings down real estate prices and is quietly campaigned away by people with children. His name, my name, comes from a Czech word that means “Bought it all.” I recognized the shaky block letters on the buzzer label.

  No answer. Another resident was leaving, so I slipped in and sat in the lobby. Metallic-green floors, overpowering smell of ammonia, institution-strength metal doors. What was I doing? For years I’d worried about this guy dropping into my life. Here I was, dropping into his. I started to leave when the elevator opened, and he walked out.

  He looked like a guy who had been on an all-night bus every night of his life. He had the Dokoupil look, as he would call it, or the remains of it, anyway. But I suppose a physical description of him would have to begin with his mustache, still woolly, and his cheeks, the color of dusty marble. He was a walking public service announcement for liver disease. And it was definitely him. He seemed to catalogue me warily, the way you note the presence of a dog off its leash.

  “Are you Tony?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Tony,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “No,” I said. “You don’t understand. I’m Tony.”

  “Your name is Tony, too?”

  “Yes. I’m Tony.”

  “Stop shitting me.”

  “No, I’m Tony.”

  No response. “Your son?”

  Here comes the bear hug, which I returned like a member of a prize-giving organization, the Publishers Clearing House of Estranged Children. He pushed me back into the wall. He was a smoker. He used Right Guard. He saved money on laundry. He was skinny except for his belly, which was fat in that way people appear to be fat when they’re undernourished. His fingernails were thick and brown and yellow, and everything about him was raw: his eyes, his fingers, his voice. Yet he also seemed jolly, a bit slapstick, and his eyes were watering unnaturally. I found myself wondering if he was high.

  His room was a studio with a shared bathroom down the hall. It was barren of furniture except for a bed with a body print on the mattress, night sweats in the sheets. There were a couple of hardback chairs, a desk. The walls and surfaces were cluttered with Christian iconography and plastic cups with cigarette scars.

  But I could see where he got the goober voice, the “Hel-oh” that sounded like weakness to me. I could see why even his craziest letter came with a return-address sticker with a butterfly on it. He was trying to make himself as normal as possible. He had the For Dummies series—computers, novels, and screenplays—along with titles like 50 Ways to Hook the Reader, How to Sell Your Fiction, The Market Guide for Writers. The first item on his to-do list was “teach oneself to use the computer.”

  “Pirate Kings” is written out in long form on paper stolen from the library. He can be memorable on the page. A man’s face is “all rolls and hollows like a moving sea.” But his manuscript is mostly just wildly annotated outlines, splashed with exhortations: “Yes!” “Yes!” “Develop!” “A sound and believable premise!” “Use it!”

  He refused lunch, saying he couldn’t handle crowds and showing me the pen-cap-size pills he took to stave off schizophrenic episodes. We went for coffee, his treat, he insisted, and then to his local library, where he introduced me to the bewildered librarians, their eyes assuming the same unfocused look of kids confronted with a chalkboard full of hard math. We were a head-scratcher, all right. I was fit, twenty-six, a graduate student in the big city. He was fat and unkempt, sixty, eyes wild in a way that made a person feel perverted by association.

  Less than thirty minutes later, I excused myself. I did not even ask him about the money. A man in his sixties who should be living a life of nice meals, vacations, and sprees but instead shares a bathroom down the hall is emphatically not hoarding cash. I consciously went unconscious about my father, burying him in order to live.

  And still no one said anything about marijuana.

  We may have plowed the ground only to there if not for the fact that soon I expected to become a father myself. It was two years later when I heard the news: a weekend morning, lazy and sweet. Most dads would celebrate the chance to pass along their heritage, but I was keen to replant the family tree, to recast what it means to be a man in the Dokoupil family. To do that I knew I needed to see my father again. I scheduled a visit for June 2009, but I also decided to go armed with something I had never had before: the basic facts.

  I contacted the National Archives and Records Administration, keeper of America’s most important files. Of every document ever created by the federal government, only “1%–3% are so important for legal or historical reasons that they are kept by us forever,” according to
a statement on the NARA home page. I doubted the crimes of Anthony Edward Dokoupil were of such importance, but I asked anyway.

  At the same time I ran my father’s name through the world of digitized court records. The result was a few lawsuits, an old DUI, an old pickup for cocaine possession. Small-time stuff that put me in an odd sort of black mood, a disappointment driven by my father’s all-too-good behavior. Then an e-mail arrived from Boston, a fourteen-page e-fax. I clicked the file open. My screen blinked and I could make out the smudged heading of a document, case #91-CR-10280: “The United States of America V. Anthony Doukupil [sic].”

  I read what followed and I read it again. Then I e-mailed a friend who appreciates this sort of insanity.

  “I just got my father’s records,” I began. “He was arrested for importing 35,000 pounds of marijuana in 1986 alone.”

  “Zounds!!!” came his reply, and I felt the same way. The job would have had a street value of more than $100 million in 2009. Never has a son been so happy to discover that his father was a federal felon.

  I called my mother, who had always supported my reconnection with Big Tony, once she could be convinced that he was still alive.

  “We were going to tell you,” she insisted, cutting me off mid-sentence.

  “I’m thirty,” I said.

  “That seemed about right. But then you got that journalist bug, and I thought, Oh boy, here we go.”

  My stepfather, Charlie, came on the line to tell us both to shut up.

  “Phones are fucking ridiculous,” he explained. “Never trust a phone.”

  We hung up.

  He called back. The TV blared in the background and he talked over it. He said he had a few names and phone numbers to help me learn “the truth,” whatever that meant, but first I needed to swear to tell people that my source was William Terry. “I don’t know if he’s alive or dead and I don’t care,” he said, “but I’d like to live the rest of my life. You understand?”

  I told him I did.

  “I don’t think you do,” he said. “Maybe you think this is ancient history. It isn’t. It’s serious shit. You don’t want to cause a death do you? Because they’ll kill your father. Now, I don’t care. But I’m serious. I’m dead serious. Think about your mother.” Then he added, by way of signing off, “Okay, I’ve had a belly full.”

  He handed the phone to my mother, who suddenly remembered the Yukon gold mine and the lost money. She said her memory was like “an antique dresser with sticky drawers” that had just come unstuck. She gave me a number for a man, she explained, who had a lot of my father’s money and who could be compelled to give it back. “I wouldn’t meet him alone,” she advised. “He was a crazy son of a bitch.” Then she was my mother again, telling me about her latest nature photos before ringing off to finish a game of Yahtzee.

  In the movies people always get their cathartic moment. They get their “why” conversation, the key exchange they needed for closure. In real life that moment rarely happens. The people who caused you pain are long gone. The violent young man is replaced by a gentle old one who is as confused as you are by the actions of the person he sees in old pictures. But what if you could bring the young man back? What if you had no choice?

  It was a drizzly day in late June when I took a train up to Boston to meet my father. I recognized him, standing at the end of the platform with the same mustache he’s had since I was a kid. I sized him up again: beige Windbreaker, jeans, slicked-back hair. He was dressed up for this, but with the same red-rimmed eyes and ashen cheeks, he still looked like a man from a public service announcement.

  “God, you look like a movie star,” he said, and compared to him I suppose I did. In the dead silence of the car-rental kiosk, I could hear his breathing, quick and shallow.

  We drove to a different subsidized apartment, a federal home for the elderly and disabled, half a mile from Harvard University. It was still spare and grimy, adorned with the same Christian iconography and cigarette-scarred plastic cups. It may even have had the same liter of Diet Pepsi in the fridge.

  We sat at the card table in the center of the room, where my father clapped his hands and smiled. He said he was happy about the apartment and he bragged about his health and my physical inheritance. “My lungs are great, Tony. You’re so lucky, you’re going to live forever.” He lit one of his off-brand cigarettes and in the fading light he began to tell me all the things I couldn’t remember and never would have known.

  Hurricane Andrew didn’t kill my father because he had already been extradited to Massachusetts, where he was held in an overflow county facility with federal prisoners. Metal bunk. Metal desk. Metal can. Here’s what he hated about prison: “pants with no pockets, open showers so you are cold on your back while washing your front, and a constant high noise level of babble and yelling and cursing, so you can’t watch television enjoyably.”

  The DEA, FBI, and IRS pressed him about his missing money and why he hadn’t hired a lawyer, like all his partners had. They asked him, in so many words, what the hell he was trying to pull, pretending to be broke. They accused him of having an alias, a silent partner, someone holding money for him. “I told them,” my father recalled, “I don’t own one sock, not even underwear.”

  My father was sort of honorable. He kept my mother out of it, and he kept his customers out of it. When there was bullying talk of booking everybody as part of a continuing criminal enterprise, he refused to cooperate against his old networks in Miami and Connecticut. But he was more than willing to pledge new and unknown details about “Willy T, the snitch and Charlie M, the snitch” as well as his other partners.

  He was a rat, in other words, like hundreds of ex–pot barons moving through the judicial system. But he thought back to when he began in his line of work, when he and his best pals in the world shook hands and made their most solemn good-guy promises to button their lips and stand tall together, pirates for life. He broke the code and in the end it left a stain on his conscience that will most likely never go away. “I feel I have been a whore for you,” he wrote in a copy of a letter to his lawyer, or possibly a draft of a letter never sent. “I feel my life will be in danger and that hasn’t been addressed.”

  Even with cooperation, sentencing hearings are an uncertain business. Judges do not have to accept plea bargains, and drug cases are as likely as any to inspire flights of personal vengeance. In Virginia the judge sentenced Pierre, the marina owner in Urbanna, to sixteen years in prison for his role in a prior load of twenty-four thousand pounds of dope—“a shocking amount,” he intoned from the bench, “heavens knows how many lives you wrecked by bringing those drugs into this country.” (It did not help that his wife wrote to the judge that Panis “considers himself a pirate.”) In Florida a judge sentenced Jimbo to five years for driving that U-Haul truck (Adventures in Moving, indeed). In a Massachusetts courtroom, John was called “a grave threat to the safety of the community,” and sentenced to a hundred and thirty-five months, or more than eleven years.

  By comparison, my father and his colleagues were lucky. If their crime had been committed a year later, it would have triggered a mandatory minimum sentence of more than a decade without parole. Instead they drew a strict civil libertarian judge who, while he happened to look like the severe blue eagle from the Muppets, was easy on gentleman dope dealers. No one got more than three years, even the guys who did not talk. My father did a year and a half in custody: six months time served, six additional months in a home for addicts and the insane, six more for violating the rules of the home.

  He showed me his first post-prison résumé, which presented a man “able to manage multiple tasks, set appropriate priorities, and meet deadlines,” all of which was true enough. His first straight job was as a medication officer at an old folks home, aka the drug guy behind the Plexiglas, still the dealer. Later he was an overnight security guard in the John Hancock Tower, “maintaining the safety and security of a 42-story office building,” per a later résumé
, king of the world’s biggest stash house.

  After talking for a couple of hours, we stepped out into a cool summer evening, hunting dinner in downtown Cambridge. We still made for an odd pair, I guess, because when we stopped at a bank to use the ATM, the guard came over to make sure I wasn’t being bothered. My father claimed to have less than $5 in his pocket, so I bought him a pack of cigarettes and took him out to a decent seafood joint, where he slipped right back into the good life, ordering a strawberry daiquiri, white wine, a plate of mussels, and coffee with a splash of Sambuca for dessert. “When you’re rich you can do anything,” he said with a wink.

  Reality returned the next morning with breakfast at a Dunkin’ Donuts. Dad seemed to know most of the down-and-outers who wiled away their hours in the brightly lit space. I hate to say it, but he fit right in. His taste buds were so fried from drugs that he used ten packs of Sweet’N Low. His arms were shredded from needles. His teeth were stumps with visible rings and would never be otherwise unless licked clean by flames. With a face grooved and dented by prison fights and repeated falls after blackouts, he was the guy you move away from on the street, the guy I wanted to move away from then.

  But of course, it’s not so easy.

  I needed to go inside that stripped-down, straightforward document from the National Archives. I needed to know what kind of man my father was. Because that July I had become a father myself. And I realized you can ignore your old man forever. You can turn over his pictures, decline his calls, and spend a lifetime pretending you were flown in by the stork. It doesn’t change who you are.

  10

  Reunion

  Massachusetts, Miami, and New York City, 2009–Present Day

  My father did not waver when I asked him to act as a tour guide to his former haunts. We started tramping through New York City, loitering in the lobbies of the five-star hotels he used to frequent. We walked into the tasseled opulence of the Palace Hotel and walked back in time. A house detective picked us up at the door. Dad waved at the dick, a little toodle-oo move, and sure enough he followed us through the foyer and the dining area and watched as my father pawed toward the check-in counter.