“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. --Mark Levine
Review
Praise for The Last Pirate:
Vanity Fair “Hot Type” Pick, April 2014
GQ “Best in Culture” Selection, April 2014
Esquire “Passage of the Week” Selection, April 2014
"A probing, exuberant memoir about the history of the American drug economy, the ambitions and failures of politicians and outlaws, fathers and sons...a fascinating tale about the wreckage of addiction and the shadow side of the American dream."
-Domenica Ruta for The New York Times Book Review
“Dokoupil’s early childhood wasn’t exactly ordinary. It was a hedonistic life of beach resorts, yachts and private schools paid for with drug money–a million of it stored in coolers and buried in backyards around the country…Now in his thirties with two children of his own, Dokoupil mines his father’s memories and his own to produce a funny, beautifully written and sometimes unsettling personal narrative that is entwined with the story of marijuana’s dramatic ascent in the United States over the last three decades.”
—Time
“At the height of the 1980s' war on drugs, the scoundrels who defied Reagan by smuggling in tons of pot viewed themselves as latter-day pirates who lived by their own code of ethics and, apparently, the lyrics of Jimmy Buffett songs. Four years ago, journalist Tony Dokoupil tracked down one of the era's most infamous outlaws: his own father…Get a contact high from the golden age of pot.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“The book is fascinating…more than just a rollicking, dope-saturated yarn. Yet the book is also a rollicking, dope-saturated yarn.”
—Salon (Book of the Week)
"A meticulously researched history of America's rocky relationship with marijuana... It's also a memoir about a son struggling to process his abandonment by a dope-obsessed, deadbeat dad who happened to be a key figure in all that smuggling, distributing and dealing. And, as those first two descriptions suggest, it's the kind of narrative that screams out to be adapted into a gritty, layered cable TV drama with a prime-time slow on AMC or FX."
—The Washington Post
“The Last Pirate” is an astonishing account of a marijuana millionaire’s hedonistic life—one so stuffed with cash that he literally buried a million dollars worth of bills in ice coolers on Long Island and in New Mexico. Anthony Dokoupil’s story of incredible excess is told by his son, NBC News senior writer Tony Dokoupil…Dokoupil’s prose is as artfully vivid as the tale itself and explicit about the sins of the father who abandoned him.
—New York Daily News
“He wrote the book to explain his own father, who was smart and self-destructive and finally was arrested in 1992. As a writer, the son saw a larger story about my father's generation and the world he lived in. The rise and fall of a certain kind of outlaw who no longer exists.”
—USA Today
"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."
—Kirkus
“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… 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.”
—Publisher’s Weekly (Starred Review)
“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…though there are no heroes, readers owe the author thanks for this well-told, ironic, and gripping story.”
—Booklist
“With its unmistakable ring of truth, The Last Pirate strips away the self-serving blarney about big-time pot smuggling of the seventies and eighties to tell the sad but compelling story of a narcissist who, with a notable lack of self awareness, wrecks his family and his own life to fulfill his delusions of grandeur. In reporting on and coming to terms with his father’s colorful and destructive past, Tony Dokoupil has added remarkably to the nonfiction literature of the drug business.”
—Bruce Porter, author of Blow: How a Small-Town Boy Made $100 Million with the Medellin Cocaine Cartel and Lost it All
“The Last Pirate is crazy brilliant. Both hysterically funny and irresistibly disturbing, I could not stop reading it. The TV show Weeds is a nursery rhyme compared to the real-life grit, danger, and devastation of this family’s story. But it wasn't only the mayhem that I loved. Tony Dokoupil also shows us how a son can forgive and accept a father who really doesn’t make it easy.”
—David Sheff, author of Beautiful Boy
About the Author
Tony Dokoupil is a senior writer for NBC News. He was a senior reporter at Newsweek, where the article that led to this book first appeared. Dokoupil holds a masters degree in American studies from Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and children.
