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High Times, High Seas, and the Sting That Launched the War on Drugs
Lyons Press
May 2011
On Sale: April 20, 2011
320 pages
ISBN: 159921976X
EAN: 9781599219769
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a cadre of freewheeling,
Southern pot smugglers lived at the crossroads of Miami Vice
and a Jimmy Buffett song. In less than a decade, these
irrepressible adventurers unloaded nearly a billion dollars
worth of marijuana and hashish through the eastern
seaboard’s marshes. Then came their undoing: Operation
Jackpot, one of the largest drug investigations ever
launched and an opening volley in Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs. In Jackpot, author Jason Ryan takes us back to the heady
days before drug smuggling was synonymous with deadly
gunplay. During this golden age of marijuana trafficking,
the country’s most prominent kingpins were a group of
wayward and fun-loving Southern gentlemen who forsook
college educations to sail drug-laden luxury sailboats
across the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean.
Les Riley, Barry Foy, and their comrades eschewed violence
as much as they loved pleasure, and it was greed, lust, and
disaster at sea that ultimately caught up with them, along
with the law. In a cat-and-mouse game played out in exotic locations
across the globe, the smugglers sailed through hurricanes,
broke out of jail and survived encounters with armed
militants in Colombia, Grenada and Lebanon. Based on years
of research and interviews with imprisoned and recently
released smugglers and the law enforcement agents who
tracked them down, Jackpot does for marijuana smuggling what
Blow and Snowblind did for the cocaine trade.
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