The Last Pirate

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.

April 1, 2014
Looking to cast light on a lost age of outlaw heroics, NBC News senior writer Dokoupil digs into the adventures of a major drug smuggler of the 1970s and '80s: his father. If you smoked marijuana on the East Coast after President Richard Nixon declared war on drugs in 1972, chances are "Big Tony" Dokoupil had a hand in getting it to you. Highly intelligent and entrepreneurial, the senior Dokoupil was a college dropout and recovering junkie when he discovered that dealing pot was a highly effective way to earn lots of money quickly. Within a few years, from bases in Miami and the Caribbean, he was helping to smuggle hundreds of thousands of kilos of Colombian Gold all the way north to New England and as far west as Colorado, until a cocaine habit he developed clouded his judgment and sent his life and career into a tailspin in the mid-1980s. Once a self-described "Pirate King" at the apex of Miami's drug scene, by the early '90s, Big Tony was a paranoid wreck, sleeping under bridges, assumed to be dead by his former friends and family, trying to remember where his buried treasure went and waiting for the Drug Enforcement Agency's ax to fall. Though Big Tony was more an idea than a steady presence in his life, Dokoupil the younger, now a father himself, struggled with an intense ambivalence about his dad. A bit of a delinquent himself in high school, Little Tony was saved, mostly, by a talent for baseball that earned him a college scholarship, but he remained haunted by the ghost of his father in his genes. "I've tried to write a broad chronicle of marijuana-smoking, drug-taking America rather than a closed circle of family woe," he writes. While the author does show how the drug culture has grown up and settled down, his father's story and his own outshine the large-picture history and bring it up-close and personal, with humor, sensitivity and a keen eye for the surprising detail.

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March 15, 2014
If you smoked Colombian weed in the 1970s and 1980s, the author writes, I owe you a thank-you card. Drug money paid for his fancy education and privileged childhood. His father moved literally tons of marijuana along the East Coast, and, though often distant from his son, he affected him greatly. He is clearly the major source of the information here; thus, despite the younger Dokoupil's journalistic abilities (he's a senior writer for The Daily Beast), one might be skeptical of some details, his having been a child then and his dad wasted. There is a pseudoheroic, merry-band-of-pirates tone to these often-hilarious adventures in the drug business during the Reagan era. Dokoupil recounts how the smuggling and distribution business ran and contextualizes it within the Great Stoned Age. Partly the history of a generation, yet very much a family story, the tale darkens dramatically with the father's precipitous, if inevitable, decline and fall. Though there are no heroes, readers owe the author thanks (perhaps reciprocating his thank-you card) for this well-told, ironic, and gripping story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)