Our friend, Tim McBride, recently took Vice to Everglades City in Florida where he told them of the days when he ran a pot smuggling empire back in the 80’s, transporting millions of pounds of Caribbean cannabis into Florida.
As Tim told CLN, “I was making $100-200 million deals in downtown Miami in a Cuban cafe sipping coffee and doing the deal with a handshake.”
Everglades City, which is a small town of about 500 people, sometimes had half of the entire town involved in a single job, and Tim and his team were making millions- but by the time the law caught up with him, he was facing multiple life sentences. As he told CLN, “I was looking at 160 years mandatory to life in a federal prison and $16 million in fines”.
Watch as Tim and an old pot hauler buddy navigate the Florida backwaters and reminisce on how they avoided the law in the Everglades’ islands in what a former U.S. customs agent called a “cat and mouse game”.
But as Tim tells it, “It’s just how we grew up as kids. My story spans 40 years and 3 generations, and we ran those southern waters of Florida and the Caribbean with impunity.”