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The Last Pirate

A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

In the tradition of Blow and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, The Last Pirate is a vivid, haunting and often hilarious memoir recounting the life of Big Tony, a family man who joined the biggest pot ring of the Reagan era and exploded his life in the process. Three decades later, his son came back to put together the pieces.

As he relates his father’s rise from hey-man hippie dealer to multi-ton smuggler extraordinaire, Tony Dokoupil tells the larger history of marijuana and untangles the controversies still stirring furious debate today. He blends superb reportage with searing personal memories, presenting a probing chronicle of pot-smoking, drug-taking America from the perspective of the generation that grew up in the aftermath of the Great Stoned Age. Back then, everyone knew a drug dealer. The Last Pirate is the story of what happened to one of them, to his family, and in a pharmacological sense, to us all.      
     The Last Pirate is a cultural portrait of marijuana’s endless allure set against the Technicolor backdrop of South Florida in the era of Miami Vice. It’s a public saga complete with a real pirate’s booty: more than a million dollars lost, buried, or stolen—but it’s also a deeply personal pursuit, the product of a son’s determination to replant the family tree in richer soil.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from March 10, 2014
      NBC News senior writer Dokoupil offers a gripping examination of his longtime marijuana-dealing father, as well as a researched look at the evolution of American narcotics laws. In the early 1970s, Dokoupil’s father, also named Tony, dropped out of graduate school to deal marijuana. The charismatic “Old Man” was quickly able to make the necessary connections and, with support from a woman he married, rose to a position of power on the East Coast drug circuit, eventually setting up base in Miami. According to Dokoupil, who grew up in 1980s Miami, his father’s constant need for excitement and hedonistic tendencies coupled with an ever-changing drug market led to his eventual downfall. Drug and prostitute binges, risky schemes to smuggle drugs across borders, shady associates, and the frequent mistreatment of his family (including throwing a knife at his wife and leaving his four-year-old son alone at a hotel at Disneyworld) eventually led to the family falling apart and Tony’s incarceration in 1992. Dokoupil’s sharp eye for detail makes for a lively and often moving narrative full of cinematic scenes and snappy dialogue. Dokoupil draws on his experience as a reporter to deliver an unflinching and detailed look at a criminal family’s life.

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  • English

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