- Tony Dokoupil‘s new book The Last Pirate details how his father Anthony ran one of the biggest marijuana operations in the last century
- Dokoupil attended Miami schools with the Bush family and lived a life of luxury thanks to his father’s multimillion weed business
- His father Anthony ran some 50 tons of Colombian marijuana worth $6 million over the course of his career
- His father spent the family’s money on cocaine and hookers and eventually left them when Dokoupil was 9
09:59 EST, 30 March 2014
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19:07 EST, 30 March 2014
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An NBC News writer has revealed how his father lead a secret life as a millionaire drug dealer before he blew it all – ending up a penniless sanitation worker.
Tony Dokoupil has told how his father Anthony ran one of the biggest marijuana operations in the last century with a lavish life that was straight of the gangster epic Scarface.
Anthony made the equivalent of $6 million during his career and but did not tell his young son who only found out the truth when he was 20.
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The high life: Anthony Dokoupil ran some 50 tons of Colombian marijuana worth some $6 million up the east coast from Florida over the course of his career
Tony discovered that their family holidays had actually been an excuse to find drug money that had been hidden away around America.
When they visited family his mother would go into the back yard and dig up some of the $1 million they had buried at relatives’ homes.
Tony writes that the illusion of his childhood fell apart – he had lived a life of luxury and was enrolled at the prestigious Gulliver Prep school in Miami where his classmates included President George H.W. Bush’s grandchildren.
His father owned two Mercedes cars, a 35-foot yacht, holidays to the Caribbean but it all collapsed when Anthony committed the ‘cardinal sin’ of being a drug dealer, becoming an addict himself.
By the time he was arrested in 1992 all the money had gone and he was working on a sanitation crew on Miami Beach to make ends meet – and was even happy to see the US Marshals.
In his memoir ‘The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son and the Golden Age of Marijuana’, Tony says that between 1975 and 1986 his father distributed at least 50 tons of Colombian and Mexican pot into America.
Anthony became known as ‘Old Man’ or
‘Big Tony’ because he was unflappable in a crisis – a temperament which
would serve him well in the drug trade.
He
was born in 1946 in New Jersey and had a genius IQ but started using
heroin whilst at the University of Detroit and dropped out before
heading back to Milford, Connecticut.
He married his wife Ann who would become Tony’s mother and help him run his drug empire.
Anthony
started off his operation by renting a car, driving down to Florida and
driving marijuana back himself before selling it in the North East.
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Best schooling drug money can buy: Tony was sent to the best prep school in Florida, which he attended with members of the Bush family
Good times: Things were good for the family as Dokoupil’s business, dubbed the Reefer Express, flourished to become one of the biggest of its era
He did well and hired three more drivers in a service he dubbed the ‘Reefer Express’.
By the early 1980s they were meeting sailboats from Florida full of pot at docks and transporting the product in a garbage trucks and a refrigerated truck made to look like a fish delivery van.
The money began flowing in and during one deal he had to carry around a million dollars in a box to make a deal at a Manhattan hotel.
Anthony invested $660,000 in a gold mine, stashed another $200,000 away and moved his family to Miami.
Tony writes that his father always said he would quit after making his first million and he did in 1985 – but he could not handle retirement.
He had also started to use drugs himself.
Tony writes: ‘The Old Man was restless in paradise.
‘He
had broken a cardinal rule of dealing and become an addict himself.
Coke and hookers, mostly. He left the party early in search of both.’
When
the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs began to strangle the pot
supply in America Anthony came out of retirement and assembled an
Ocean’s Eleven style crew for their biggest job yet.
The
gang, who had names like Timber Tom and Scrimshaw Mike, planned it at
the famous Landmark Tavern in Manhattan where they spent days hogging a
table and constantly using the payphone.
The
plan was to smuggle nearly 18 tons of Colombian weed to a port in
Virginia and it nearly failed when Anthony had to rescue a truck full of
pot that had been abandoned by a driver because the gas pedal was
sticky.
But thanks to his cool head it was a
success and he split the $1.5 million profits with his partner – as they
celebrated in the penthouse suite of the Plaza Hotel in New York.
It
was his biggest ever score but despite his success Anthony’s addictions
were claiming ever more of his money and destroying his family.
In 1986 they fled Florida and rented a motor home, embarking on a tour of states like New Mexico, New England and New York.
For
Tony it was great fun but the trip had another purpose – to hunt down
money that was buried in back yards during his father’s glory days.
As
he slept inside a cousin’s house in Albuquerque – earlier they had
bought fossils and visited the Petrified Forest National Park – his
mother was out the back hauling a cooler containing a quarter of a
million dollars out of the ground.
Too high: Things began to unravel as Anthony, now in his 60s, spent all the family’s money on coke and hookers
Now: Anthony now lives in subsidized housing in Massachusetts and occasionally uses crack cocaine
They had to drive it back home because his mother could not board a plane with more than $10,000 in cash.
Despite the haul it all went on his father’s addiction to drugs and by the time Tony was nine things began to fall apart.
Anthony lost his ID so could not access many of the safety deposit boxes he had stored it in.
He gave $75,000 to a woman he had just met because the registration on his Mercedes had expired and he was worried about getting caught.
With no money for school fees Tony became known as the poor kid because he could not afford basic supplies.
Anthony’s last $50,000 was spent in Miami sleeping with three prostitutes at a time before he became a homeless bum and slept under a highway.
It was not until Tony was 20 – 11 years after he last saw him – that he wanted to learn the truth so looked his father up.
Tony Dokoupil has told how his father Anthony ran one of the biggest marijuana operations in the last century with a lavish life that was straight of the gangster epic Scarface.
Anthony made the equivalent of $6 million during his career and but did not tell his young son who only found out the truth when he was 20.” class=”blkBorder img-share” />
Tony Dokoupil is a senior writer for NBC News and the author of The Last Pirate (Doubleday, April 2014), a book about a father, his son, and the golden age of marijuana.
Over the years, his reporting has made The Daily Show (the moment of zen) and The Tonight Show (the opening monologue), and generated guest spots on CNN, NPR, MSNBC and The Today Show. His writing—which has recreated drug smuggling, hate crimes, suicides, and free sperm donations (not a euphemism)—has garnered attention from the good people at Longform, Byliner, and Longreads.
HBO awarded a development grant to turn his story “The Devil in Deryl Dedmon†into a documentary film, and NPR’s Fresh Air made his piece "The New Pot Barons" into an hour long program. His earlier cover story “The Coffee Shop Baby†became a 30-minute segment on ABC’s 20/20, and his profile of the antiquities-hunter Forrest Fenn helped push the man’s hidden treasure into the pantheon of findable millions. His 20″ class=”blkBorder img-share” />
Despite being happily married ith a job he loves, Tony writes that his
father ‘still haunts me, making me fearful of the genes I carry and the
man I may become’
Anthony, who served a year and a half in jail, is now in his 60s and currently lives in Cambridge, MA, in government-subsidized housing where he still occasionally uses crack.
Tony writes that his father has left him a complicated legacy and a conviction to ensure that his own son has more stability than he did.
Anthony is also unapologetic about what he has done and told his son: ‘I’ve liked my life’.
In the book he says: ‘I liked the drugs and the girls and the money. I liked living like a pirate, outside the real world, never doing anything but dabbling and talking.’
Before writing the book Tony has spoken of his anxiety over his family before and in an article for Newsweek he has said: ‘My father’s implosion has been too complete for me to really fear becoming him.
‘I have a lovely wife, good health, great friends, and a job I like, so it’s hard for me to imagine detouring into a life of drugs and crime.
‘But he still haunts me, making me fearful of the genes I carry and the man I may become.’
In an interview to promote the book on CBS, Tony said that the cover story he had been given for years was that his dad sold real estate.
It was true – but it was not the whole truth.
The search for his dad led him to the National Archives in Boston where he pulled out an indictment charging his dad with drug trafficking, and he tracked him down.
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