Download or read book A History of Smuggling in Florida written by Stan Zimmerman and published by True Crime. This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the smugglers' paradise that is Florida.
Download or read book A History of Smuggling in Florida written by Stan Zimmerman and published by History Press Library Editions. This book was released on 2006-10 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Think you're a smuggler? With that box of Cuban cigars or those unclaimed duty-free souvenirs from last summer's trip to Paris? Untaxed and untraced commerce-call it contraband-is a trillion-dollar-per-year global business. New technologies to discover and curb smuggling are met by equally well-equipped perpetrators, determined to stay below the radar. With its long coastline, hundreds of remote landing strips and airports clogged with sun-seeking tourists, Florida is a superhighway of smuggling. It is easy to move illegal goods like weapons, drugs, slaves, exotic birds and flowers; all while avoiding the best efforts of U.S. and international customs authorities. Who does this smuggling? Well one Florida governor and the wife of another, for starters. Hardscrabble commercial fishermen, Spanish explorers, Mafia mobsters, crew chiefs for fruit pickers, respected attorneys, just about everybody in Florida is a smuggler. Smuggling touches every major episode in Florida's history; it's discovery and settlement, the Seminole Wars, and the Civil War were shaped by smugglers. The state's repeated land booms-including today's-are heavily influenced by smuggler profits. Today's business economy is warped by the manipulation of smugglers laundering their profits. Stan Zimmerman means neither to vilify nor glorify these entrepreneurs. Nor does he intend to leave any stoned unturned or suitcase unopened. With stories of drug runners and prostitute pushers along side the exploits and follies of Florida's elite, we are able to see why throughout its long history, Florida has always been a true "smuggler's paradise."
Download or read book A Social History of Drug Smuggling in Florida written by R. Thomas Dye and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A History of Smuggling in Florida written by Stan Zimmerman and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-23 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why Florida has been a smuggler’s paradise for centuries—and how traffic in everything from weapons to exotic flowers has shaped the state’s history. Amateur smugglers may sneak a box of Cuban cigars into the U.S. here and there—but in the big picture, untaxed and untraced commerce, aka contraband, is a trillion-dollar-per-year global business. New technologies to discover and curb smuggling are met by equally well-equipped perpetrators, determined to stay below the radar. With its long coastline, hundreds of remote landing strips, and airports clogged with sun-seeking tourists, Florida is a superhighway of smuggling. It is easy to move illegal goods like weapons, drugs, slaves, exotic birds and flowers, all while avoiding the best efforts of U.S. and international customs authorities. Who does this smuggling? Well one Florida governor and the wife of another, for starters. Everyone from hardscrabble commercial fishermen, Spanish explorers, Mafia mobsters, crew chiefs for fruit pickers, respected attorneys—and even one Florida governor and the wife of another. This fascinating history covers the role of smuggling in Florida history, including its discovery and settlement, the Seminole Wars, and the Civil War. With stories of land booms, money laundering, drug runners, and more, this is a book that leaves no stone unturned—or suitcase unopened
Download or read book The Smugglers Ghost written by Steve Lamb and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2015-01-07 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marijuana turned a Florida teen into a millionaire fugitive
Download or read book Run the Rum in written by Sally J. Ling and published by True Crime. This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover the tricks of the trade: smuggling the liquor and evading the law. Learn of the dealings of ?the Real McCoy.' In this history of Prohibition in south Florida, author Sally J. Ling explores the impact of bootleggers and moonshiners on Palm Beach, Broward, Miami- Dade and Monroe Counties, presenting tales of rumrunning and lawbreaking as told through personal and written accounts.
Download or read book Pirates Smugglers of the Treasure Coast written by Patrick S. Mesmer & Patricia Mesmer and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2019-10-21 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For hundreds of years, colorful characters and criminals used the myriad coves and inlets along the Treasure Coast for illicit commerce. From the early days of privateer Henry Jennings to the notorious Prohibition exploits of the Ashley Gang, these sandy shores have been a refuge for those looking to trade on the dark side of the law. Legendary tales of Don Pedro Gibert, Spanish Marie and Al Capone all contribute to the lore of a region that is home to buried treasure and family crime empires. Join historians Patrick and Patricia Mesmer on a journey through the Sunshine State's shadowy past.
Download or read book Smugglers Times written by M. Taylor and published by . This book was released on 2018-07-27 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life With A History of Smuggling. ISLAMORADA, Florida; with Don - "Marijuana is a people business," explained Don, a long-retired pioneer of the marijuana smuggling industry. Working under the name Gomer, he started out in the 1970s, flying tiny, single-engine planes back and forth from Miami, Florida to Ciénaga, Columbia near Cartagena becoming infamous in the business, carrying up to a million dollars-worth of pot per load, in today's money.Later he and his friends used boats and vehicles, and expanded connections throughout the states, Mexico and the Philippines, even working with Federal Agents. All the while living and playing in South Florida. Bringing in marijuana through the Keys which run from the mainland for more than 150 miles out into the Gulf of Mexico, leeward of the barrier reef. Closer to Havana than it is to Miami, the famous tourist island-town of Key West is just ninety miles across the Gulfstream from the Cuban capital. An equal distance up the Keys is Plantation Key. In between are thousands of islands and coves and basins and inlets and channels and places to hide. That's why the area has been a haven for smugglers since the times of the Spanish Main up until sometime late last night and continuing for as long as some people outlaw items others choose to make a profit from supplying.The waters have been sailed by the famous and infamous, from Bogie to Blackbeard. Pirates and privateers during the seventeenth century. Blockade runners in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Rumrunners during alcohol prohibition. Migrant and refugee traffickers. Marijuana purveyors. Cocaine cowboys. And other contraband smugglers of today have all made the area rich in the history of people bringing in stuff the government has said they were not allowed to import.In what people remember as a permissive era of the 1970s, the government also cracked down on rebellious protestors, dissidents and malcontents, when the establishment fought back with the beginning of the "war on drugs," specifically marijuana. Some of the opposition to the authority's crackdown efforts are told in this tale. "I'll tell you about the life of a smuggler," said Don. "When marijuana is legal. we will be like the rumrunners during prohibition and people might be interested in how it was in the old days, so enjoy some real stories of real people willing to risk their lives and liberty to bring back the goodies; for adventure and the high life back in Smugglers' Times."Experience a brisk read written in journalistic style by M. Dennis Taylor, a South Florida writer with 40-years of experience in creating advertising, newspaper and magazine pieces. It's a fast-moving tale filled with adventure, humor and an in-depth look behind the scenes of the smuggling industry in the Keys, all over Florida and throughout the United States.With a huge cast of "characters" bringing color to the stories of Don and his friends, as they earn and spend millions of dollars as marijuana smugglers living a play-filled life under assumed names.No matter how many millions the Feds might make a smuggler forfeit if they take a fall, they can't repossess all the fun they had spending the money they made and went through living a life of easy money. The memories remain and for adventure there is risk.
Download or read book Saltwater Cowboy written by Tim McBride and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1979, Wisconsin native Tim McBride hopped into his Mustang and headed south. He was twenty-one, and his best friend had offered him a job working as a crab fisherman in Chokoloskee Island, a town of fewer than 500 people on Florida's Gulf Coast. Easy of disposition and eager to experience life at its richest, McBride jumped in with both feet. But this wasn't a typical fishing outfit. McBride had been unwittingly recruited into a band of smugglers--middlemen between a Colombian marijuana cartel and their distributors in Miami. His elaborate team comprised fishermen, drivers, stock houses, security--seemingly all of Chokoloskee Island was in on the operation. As McBride came to accept his new role, tons upon tons of marijuana would pass through his hands. Then the federal government intervened in 1984, leaving the crew without a boss and most of its key players. McBride, now a veteran smuggler, was somehow spared. So when the Colombians came looking for a new middle-man, they turned to him. McBride became the boss of an operation that was ultimately responsible for smuggling 30 million pounds of marijuana. A self-proclaimed "Saltwater Cowboy," he would evade the Coast Guard for years, facing volatile Colombian drug lords and risking betrayal by romantic partners until his luck finally ran out. A tale of crime and excess, Saltwater Cowboy is the gripping memoir of one of the biggest pot smugglers in American history.
Download or read book Smuggling written by Alan L. Karras and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2010 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this lively book, Alan L. Karras traces the history of smuggling around the world and explores all aspects of this pervasive and enduring crime. Through a compelling set of cases drawn from a rich array of historical and contemporary sources, Karras shows how smuggling of every conceivable good has flourished in every place, at every time. Significantly, Karras draws a clear distinction between smugglers and their more popular criminal cousins, pirates, who operated in the open with a type of violence that was nearly always shunned by smugglers. Explaining the divergence between the two groups, the book illustrates both crossovers and differences. At the same time, states and empires tolerated smuggling since eliminating smuggling was a sure route to a disgruntled and disorderly citizenry, and governments required order to remain in power. As a result, smuggling allowed individuals to negotiate an unstated social contract that minimized the role of government in their lives. Thus, Karras provocatively argues that smuggling was, and is, tightly woven into an uneasy relationship among governments, taxation, citizenship, and corruption. Bringing smugglers and smuggling to life, this book provides a fascinating exploration for all readers interested in crime and corruption throughout modern history.
Download or read book The Orchid Thief written by Susan Orlean and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2011-07-20 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK A modern classic of personal journalism, The Orchid Thief is Susan Orlean’s wickedly funny, elegant, and captivating tale of an amazing obsession. Determined to clone an endangered flower—the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii—a deeply eccentric and oddly attractive man named John Laroche leads Orlean on an unforgettable tour of America’s strange flower-selling subculture, through Florida’s swamps and beyond, along with the Seminoles who help him and the forces of justice who fight him. In the end, Orlean—and the reader—will have more respect for underdog determination and a powerful new definition of passion. In this new edition, coming fifteen years after its initial publication and twenty years after she first met the “orchid thief,” Orlean revisits this unforgettable world, and the route by which it was brought to the screen in the film Adaptation, in a new retrospective essay. Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more. Praise for The Orchid Thief “Stylishly written, whimsical yet sophisticated, quirkily detailed and full of empathy . . . The Orchid Thief shows [Orlean’s] gifts in full bloom.”—The New York Times Book Review “Fascinating . . . an engrossing journey [full] of theft, hatred, greed, jealousy, madness, and backstabbing.”—Los Angeles Times “Orlean’s snapshot-vivid, pitch-perfect prose . . . is fast becoming one of our national treasures.”—The Washington Post Book World “Orlean’s gifts [are] her ear for the self-skewing dialogue, her eye for the incongruous, convincing detail, and her Didion-like deftness in description.”—Boston Sunday Globe “A swashbuckling piece of reporting that celebrates some virtues that made America great.”—The Wall Street Journal
Download or read book The Florida Keys a History Through Maps written by Todd Turrell and published by . This book was released on 2020-03 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of maps in the Florida Keys.
Download or read book Jackpot written by Jason Ryan and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1970s and early '80s, a cadre of freewheeling, Southern pot smugglers lived at the crossroads of Miami Vice and a Jimmy Buffett song. 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 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 is sure to become a classic story from America's controversial Drug Wars. “The adventures, the long-gone economy, and the sting that ultimately brought them down and changed US drug policy are meticulously documented and lucidly spun…. Part New Yorker feature-part Jimmy Buffet song. . . . The result is adventuresome, lavish, informative fun.” —GQ “[A] rollicking story, Ryan manages to pack in one amusing tale after another.... Jackpot is a rip-roaring good read.” —Charleston City Paper “High times on the high seas: Investigative reporter Ryan recounts the glory days of dope smuggling and their terrible denouement.... A well-told tale of true crime that provides a few good arguments for why it should not be a crime at all.” —Kirkus Reviews “Reads like an international thriller. . . . chock-a-block with hilarious and hair-raising anecdotes of fast times.” —New York Journal of Books “[A] thoroughly researched account of Operation Jackpot, the drug investigation that ended the reign of South Carolina’s ‘gentlemen smugglers,’.... Ryan recreates the era with a vivid, sun-drenched intensity.” —Publishers Weekly
Download or read book The Ghost People of The Everglades written by Barbara Tyner Hall and published by Page Publishing Inc. This book was released on 2022-11-03 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last frontier is no more. Commercial fishing has been banned in Everglades National Park, and the locals were forced to find other means of work, but no one expected drug-smuggling to become big business in a small sleepy fishing village with less than one thousand people in population called Everglades City, Florida, and an island called Chokoloskee. The intertwined and dense mangrove system of the Ten Thousand Islands that surrounded the area and with remote locations provided a perfect environment for smugglers to bring and hide their drugs until they could deliver them for big profits. The Daniels family knew the backcountry of the Everglades and the complicated waterways of the area and knew how to travel through the shallow and treacherous waters and go through other passages unknown to anybody else. The Daniels family were sought after and hired to bring in large loads of drugs from South and Central America, as well as a few other countries. This family was born in the area and knew it like the backs of their hands. The Daniels crew was dubbed the "Saltwater Cowboys" because of their daring and reckless style and the "Ghost People of the Everglades" because they could disappear at a blink of an eye. Their wild and daring stunts happened on the high seas as well as in the complicated waterways of the Ten Thousand Islands. These boys could turn into a cluster of mangroves and disappear into another waterway just behind it. This adventurous family that turned outlaw became the largest importer of drugs into the United States that ran throughout our country. This area was world-renowned to some of the largest cartels or drug-smuggling rings around today and now call Everglades National Park their home.
Download or read book Webs of Smoke written by Kathryn Meyer and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2002-10-02 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating history of international drug trafficking in the first half of the twentieth century follows the stories of American narcs and gangsters, Japanese spies, Chinese warlords, and soldiers of fortune whose lives revolved around opium. The drug trade centered on China, which was before 1949, the world's largest narcotic market. The authors tell the interlocking stories of the many extraordinary personalities_sinister and otherwise_involved in narcotics trafficking in Asia, Europe, and the United States. Drawing on a rich store of U.S., British, European, Japanese, and Chinese archives, this unique study will be invaluable for all readers interested in the drug trade and contemporary East Asian history.
Download or read book Hotel Scarface written by Roben Farzad and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The wild, true story of the Mutiny, the hotel and club that embodied the decadence of Miami’s cocaine cowboys heyday—and an inspiration for the blockbuster film, Scarface... In the seventies, coke hit Miami with the full force of a hurricane, and no place attracted dealers and dopers like Coconut Grove’s Mutiny at Sailboat Bay. Hollywood royalty, rock stars, and models flocked to the hotel’s club to order bottle after bottle of Dom and to snort lines alongside narcos, hit men, and gunrunners, all while marathon orgies burned upstairs in elaborate fantasy suites. Amid the boatloads of powder and cash reigned the new kings of Miami: three waves of Cuban immigrants vying to dominate the trafficking of one of the most lucrative commodities ever known to man. But as the kilos—and bodies—began to pile up, the Mutiny became target number one for law enforcement. Based on exclusive interviews and never-before-seen documents, Hotel Scarface is a portrait of a city high on excess and greed, an extraordinary work of investigative journalism offering an unprecedented view of the rise and fall of cocaine—and the Mutiny—in Miami.
Download or read book The Jews of Key West written by Arlo Haskell and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Nonfiction. Jewish Studies. History. 2017 Florida Book Award, Phillip and Dana Zimmerman Gold Medal for Florida Nonfiction. The dramatic story of South Florida's oldest Jewish community and a major addition to the history of this unique island city. Long before Miami was on the map, Key West had Florida's largest economy and an influential Jewish community. Jews who settled here as peddlers in the nineteenth century joined a bilingual and progressive city that became the launching pad for the revolution that toppled the Spanish Empire in Cuba. As dozens of local Jews collaborated with José Martí's rebels, they built relationships that supported thriving Jewish communities in Key West and Havana at the turn of the twentieth century. During the 1920s, when anti-immigration hysteria swept the United States, Key West's Jews resisted the immigration quotas and established "the southernmost terminal of the Jewish underground," smuggling Jewish aliens in small boats across the Florida Straits to safety in Key West. But these and other Jewish exploits were kept secret as Ku Klux Klan leaders infiltrated local law enforcement and government. Many Jews left Key West during the 1930s and their stories were ignored or forgotten by the mythmakers that reinvented Key West as a tourist mecca. Arlo Haskell's THE JEWS OF KEY WEST is an entertaining and authoritative account of Key West's Jewish community from 1823-1969. Illustrated with over 100 images, it brings to life a history that had long been forgotten.
