About this item
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 Floridas Gulf Coast. Easy of disposition and eager to experience life at its richest, McBride jumped in with both feet.But this wasnt 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.
About the Author
My name is Tim McBride and I am a former marijuana smuggler/pot hauler/ living on the edge of the Everglades in Southwest Florida. From 1979 to 1989 I ran these southern waters and the Caribbean with a band of modern day pirates known by locals as, Saltwater Cowboys.
Night after night we offloaded up to 20 tons at a time from any vessel that would make the trip from South America.
How did I get involved in this crazy profession, you may be asking yourself.
Well, my life changed in the spring of 1974.
I had just ended my sophomore year of high school in the small town of Delavan, Wisconsin. We lived in a beautiful house on the lake that bears the town's name. My brothers and I had a few friends over to help us put our boat dock in for the summer and one of the guys had a joint. I had never tried marijuana before. I wasn't against it so much as ignorant of it, however. That was the day I learned all about weed. We smoked it before going to work on the dock ... well, the dock didn't get put in that day. We were too stoned.
After that day I continued to smoke weed and, not long after, I began experimenting with other drugs. Smoking weed had no influence whatsoever on my choice to try other drugs. The awareness just wasn't in your face like it is today. Nevertheless, I managed to graduate from high school and I had a good job working as a machinist. I was stoned all the time, even at work.
In the summer of 1979 I got a call and was asked by a friend if I wanted to move to Florida with him. Just like that the next day I packed everything I owned into the back of my Mustang and took off.
We set out for Southwest Florida, more specifically Everglades City, a small town on the edge of Everglades National Park. From there we took a short ride across a causeway to our new home on Chokoloskee Island in the heart of the "Ten Thousand Islands."
Shortly after arriving I began crewing with my friend on a fishing boat trapping stone crabs. My first day of work was actually my first night hauling pot.
My second day of work went the same way. I had worked two nights and I earned $5000 each night smuggling over 50,000 pounds of marijuana. Not bad for two nights work. That was just the beginning.
The smuggling continued and seemed to have no end. It became almost routine, pulling traps and catching stone crab by day and hauling pot by night. As the pot hauling work increased, so did my pay. After those first two nights my rooky pay increased to anywhere from $25,000 a night to $70,000 per night depending on how many tons we were handling. The loads ranged in size from no less than 15 tons to as much as 60 plus tons.
In the beginning we were working a lot. Once or twice a week was the usual pace but there was a time when I had worked 28 nights in a row. I was being called to my captain's house so often to pic
