Square Grouper: Godfathers of Ganja

Square Grouper: Godfathers of Ganja, directed by Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman. In 1979, the U.S. Customs Service reported that 87% of all marijuana seizures in the U.S. were made in the South Florida area. Due to the region's 5,000 miles of coast and coastal waterways and close proximity to the Caribbean and Latin America, South Florida was a pot smuggler's paradise. In sharp contrast to the brazenly violent cocaine cowboys of the 1980s, Miami's marijuana smugglers were cooler, calmer, and typically nonviolent. Square Grouper paints a vivid portrait of Miami's pot smuggling culture in the '70s and '80s and its major players: the smuggling Black Tuna Gang, the pot dealing Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church and the tiny fishing village Everglades City. Click here for more information or to order.

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Jackpot: High Times, High Seas, and the Sting That Launched the War on Drugs

Jackpot: High Times, High Seas, and the Sting That Launched the War on Drugs, by Jason Ryan. 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 ten years, 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. Click here for more information or to order

The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World's Greatest Reptile Smugglers

The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World's Greatest Reptile Smugglers, by Bryan Christy. Imagine The Sopranos, with snakes! The Lizard King is a fascinating account of a father and son family business suspected of smuggling reptiles, and the federal agent who tried to take them down. When Bryan Christy began to investigate the world of reptile smuggling, he had no idea what he would be in for. In the course of his research, he was bitten between the eyes by a blood python, chased by a mother alligator, and sprayed by a bird-eating tarantula. But perhaps more dangerous was coming face to face with Michael J. Van Nostrand, owner of Strictly Reptiles, a thriving family business in Hollywood, Florida. Van Nostrand imports as many as 300,000 iguanas each year (over half the total of America's most popular imported reptile), as well as hundreds of thousands of snakes, lizards, frogs, spiders, and scorpions. Van Nostrand was suspected of being a reptile smuggler by Special Agent Chip Bepler of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who devoted years of his life in an obsessive quest to expose The Lizard King's cold-blooded crimes. How this cat-and-mouse game ended is engrossing and surprising.

Bryan Christy has had a life-long fascination with reptiles and an even greater fascination with the men responsible for smuggling them to the U.S. He graduated from University of Michigan Law School, took a Fulbright Scholarship to University of Tokyo Law School, worked for Senator Bradley, and later in the Executive Office of the President. In 1999, he was asked to become the country's first post-Vietnam War resident legal adviser to the government of Vietnam but turned it down to write. This is his first book.

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The Medici Conspiracy

The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities--From Italy's Tomb Raiders to the World's Greatest Museums, by Peter Watson and Cecelia Todeschini. A true-life thriller completely exposes the network behind the illegal trade in ancient artifacts--and features a rich cast of rogues and some of the world's most prestigious art institutions. The story begins, as stories do in all good thrillers, with a botched robbery and a police chase. Eight Apuleian vases of the fourth century B.C. are discovered in the swimming pool of a German-based art smuggler. More valuable than the recovery of the vases, however, is the discovery of the smuggler's card index detailing his deals and dealers. It reveals the existence of a web of tombaroli-tomb raiders-who steal classical artifacts, and a network of dealers and smugglers who spirit them out of Italy and into the hands of wealthy collectors and museums.

Peter Watson, a former investigative journalist for the London Sunday Times and author of two previous exposes of art world scandals, names the key figures in this network that has depleted Europe's classical artifacts. Among the loot are the irreplaceable and highly collectable vases of Euphronius, the equivalent in their field of the sculpture of Bernini or the painting of Michelangelo. The narrative leads to the doors of some major institutions: Sothebys, the Getty Museum in L.A., the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York among them. Filled with great characters and human drama, The Medici Conspiracy authoritatively exposes another shameful round in one of the oldest games in the world: theft, smuggling and duplicitous dealing, all in the name of art.

Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers, and the Looting of the Ancient World

Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers, and the Looting of the Ancient World, by Roger Atwood. Writing for magazines such as ARTnews, Atwood is an expert on the global traffic in stolen archaeological objects. His meticulous book tracks his investigation of one such object, a gold ornament cast by the Moche culture of pre-Columbian Peru. But in a prelude, Atwood recounts the night he accompanied, with their permission, Peruvian grave robbers at work. Although sympathetic to their destitution, Atwood is appalled at their obliteration of a site's archaeological value. Of course, the demand for these objects emanates from the acquisitive appetites of museums and wealthy collectors, who appear in the course of Atwood's account of the Moche "backflap." Plundered by grave robbers in 1987, it was smuggled into the U.S. by a corrupt Panamanian diplomat and seized in an FBI sting in 1997. Atwood's high-velocity, true-crime narrative immediately hooks readers while also informing them about the international antiquities business. A case study of the sordid trade, Atwood's stern admonition to the art world to reform, before archaeological knowledge becomes irretrievable forever, deserves a hearing. Gilbert Taylor Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Lateral Thinking About Brain Waves

Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy

Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy, by Moises Naim. A groundbreaking investigation of how traffickers are changing the world—transforming economies, reshaping politics, and capturing governments in globalization’s greatest untold story. Pick up a newspaper anywhere, any day, and you will find reports of illegal migrants, drug busts, smuggled weapons, laundered money, or counterfeit goods. Illicit trades are booming and so are the traffickers’ revenues—and their political influence. Hamstrung bureaucracies in rich and poor countries alike are losing the battles against these agile, well-financed, politically powerful, and ever-shifting networks of determined individuals. Religious and political zeal drive terrorists, but it turns out that simple profit is no less a motivator for political upheaval and international instability. Black-market networks are stealthily transforming global politics and economics.

Filled with fast-paced, vivid examples that are as real as they are surprising, Illicit shows how we got to this dangerous point—and stresses the interconnections between these illegal enterprises, and how they endlessly recombine to breed new lines of business, distort the economy of entire countries and industries, enable terrorists and even take over governments. From pirated movies to weapons of mass destruction, from human organs to endangered species, drugs, or stolen art, Illicit reveals the inner workings of these amazingly efficient international organizations and shows why it is so hard—and so necessary—to contain them. Illicit offers a fresh, ingenious and compelling vision of this untold story of globalization. It provides a powerful new lens with which to assess how today’s world really works and where it may be headed. Illicit will surely ignite urgent debate at the highest levels—and change the way you think about the world.

Altered States of America: Icons and Outlaws, Hitmakers and Hitmen

Altered States of America: Icons and Outlaws, Hitmakers and Hitmen, by Richard Stratton. Altered States of America is a riveting collection of journalism by outlaw-turned-author Richard Stratton. Stratton's years as an international marijuana smuggler, his 8-year bid in a federal prison system, and subsequent ascendance to acclaimed author and filmmaker, give him the credibility with which to wrest an uncommon truth from his subjects. The stories in this collection read like adventure fiction. To name a few: the story of Greg Scarpa, a Columbo mob captain turned informant; Bonecrusher, a guard at Corcoran penitentiary who witnessed the bloody gladiator fights between convicts; the CIA's top-secret MK-ULTRA program in which the CIA secretly dosed unsuspecting civilians and its own agents with LSD, or the heartbreaking profile of Joe Stassi, America's oldest living gangster, who was ordered to murder his best friend. Each piece is linked by Stratton's reflections on and connections to the people and places he describes. Whether he is talking with Oliver Stone or a prison guard, Hunter S. Thompson or a gangster, Sean Penn or a CIA agent, Stratton has an empathetic understanding of his subjects. This collection truly embodies Bob Dylan's famous line: "To live outside the law, you must be honest."

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