{"id":130293,"date":"2012-03-20T13:47:29","date_gmt":"2012-03-20T17:47:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/?p=130293"},"modified":"2012-12-26T16:07:11","modified_gmt":"2012-12-26T21:07:11","slug":"a-weed-tell-all-one-65-year-sentence-later","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/03\/20\/a-weed-tell-all-one-65-year-sentence-later\/","title":{"rendered":"A Weed Tell-All: One 65-Year Sentence Later"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Article:<\/strong> America’s Biggest Marijuana Ring:Black Tuna Tells All<\/a> by Tony Dokoupil in the Daily Beast.<\/p>\n

The Text:<\/strong> It was late 1977 when the DC-3 lowered its landing gear onto a jungle airstrip, one of dozens on the Caribbean side of Colombia. The plane was to be loaded with two tons of marijuana, and then immediately turn back for Florida. But Colombian soldiers stormed the clearing, pulling an unlikely gringo from the cockpit. \u201cSelf,\u201d thought Robert Platshorn, a 34-year-old American, as he closed his eyes on machine guns and green berets, \u201chow in the hell did you end up here?\u201d<\/p>\n

It remains the preoccupying question of his life. Platshorn bribed his way out of Colombia, he says, but in May 1979, he was indicted as the mastermind of the biggest marijuana ring ever uncovered, a paramilitary squad responsible for the DC-3 job and much more\u2014a million pounds of Santa Marta Gold between 1976 and 1977. The 105-page indictment had \u201cmore intrigue than ten James Bond novels,\u201d as the Chicago Tribune put it: 13 codefendants, $300 million in earnings, a dozen yachts, a fleet of aircraft from a Cessna to a Lear jet, all of it coordinated from the penthouse of Miami Beach\u2019s largest hotel, the Fontainbleau.<\/p>\n

Platshorn was the first marijuana dealer to be prosecuted under the so-called Kingpin Statute, a 1970 law that targets elaborate large-scale drug syndicates. He was sentenced to 64 years in prison, making him \u201cAmerica\u2019s longest serving marijuana prisoner,\u201d according to High Times. This is a man \u201cwith no social conscience,\u201d the head of Miami\u2019s FBI office told a reporter at the time.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Now 69, Platshorn says the magnitude of his crimes was a fraction of what was accused, and casts himself as the first casualty of the war on drugs. \u201cKingpin?\u201d he says by phone from his home in West Palm Beach. \u201cI was not even a safety pin.\u201d He makes the case in the Black Tuna Diaries, a self-published prison memoir he has been promoting since his parole in 2008, and next month in the documentary Square Grouper, which makes its television premiere on Showtime on April 20.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not all history yet. Though he\u2019s traded aviator shades for a more senior style, Platshorn is still in the marijuana game, using his infamy for a kind of sweet revenge: legal weed. Since last fall, Platshorn, who is Jewish, has been on a \u201cSilver Tour\u201d of Florida synagogues and retirement homes, including his own Golden Lakes Village, stumping for medical marijuana as a first step toward outright legalization. \u201cIt\u2019s prescribed in Israel!\u201d he told a crowd at Temple Shaarei Shalom in Boynton Beach earlier this year. The first \u201cSilver Tour\u201d billboards went up in Pompano Beach this week, a late night infomercial is in the works, and several city council meetings are on the calendar. As Platshorn sees it, weed is an effective medicine for much of what ails the elderly population, which is also the largest demographic stumbling block to wider marijuana reform. Win them over and legalization may follow.<\/p>\n

\u201cOld people vote,\u201d he says of his target audience, \u201cand no one was out there educating them about marijuana.\u201d<\/p>\n

Platshorn\u2019s arguments for legalization are not new, but he is an exceptional advocate. The son of a Philadelphia shoe salesman, he went right to work, spending 15 years hawking Remington automatic knives and Vita-Mix blenders on the Atlantic City boardwalk and on fairgrounds nationwide. Briefly, he was one of the nation\u2019s top distributors of Breyer\u2019s vanilla bean. But by 1976 marijuana seemed to be the emerging market. President Carter supported the repeal of federal laws against simple possession. So Platshorn moved to Miami and pulled a chain of connections that landed him in Santa Marta, Colombia, where he says he was far from \u201cthe biggest and slickest\u201d smuggler that the government later described.<\/p>\n

He says he organized only four successful smuggles: two by plane, and two by boat. A third boat sank, and a fourth load was seized by authorities in North Carolina before his Colombian connection disappeared altogether. In all, Platshorn claims, he smuggled about 100,000 pounds of marijuana, or 1\/10th the number the government alleged at trial, and the Drug Enforcement Administration continues to tout on its website.<\/p>\n

Even the FBI agent who worked the case with the DEA, Dick Moehl, agrees with Platshorn about the scale of his smuggles. \u201cIt\u2019s probably all we agree on,\u201d he told the Daily Beast by phone. \u201cI had counted up about 100,000 pounds \u2026 I don\u2019t know where the 500 tons came from.\u201d According to a review of court documents, the 500 tons was based on the testimony of a single government informer\u2014and the jury never ruled on a specific weight.<\/p>\n

Still, Platshorn was hardly innocent. He expected to get a three-to-seven-year sentence, and be paroled even sooner\u2014a reasonable expectation for even multiton marijuana crimes at the time. What he didn\u2019t realize was how surely times had changed since his first trip to Colombia. In December 1977, Jimmy Carter\u2019s head of drug policy, Peter Bourne, reportedly snorted coke at a Christmas Party thrown by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Law. When the story broke the following summer, Carter stopped talking about marijuana reform and sent a first-of-its-kind FBI\/DEA task force to Miami to stop marijuana smugglers. \u201cWe were going to start the war on drugs,\u201d remembers Harold Copus, another of the FBI agents assigned to the case.<\/p>\n

Platshorn and his crew was the first bust by Operation Banco, as the joint task force was known. They were dubbed the \u201cBlack Tuna Gang,\u201d after the alleged code name of the group\u2019s Colombian supplier, and the trial was a five-month circus of strange happenstance and eye-catching allegations. Several months in, Platshorn was accused of plotting to obstruct justice by bribing a juror and assassinating the judge, forcing a mistrial. (He was later cleared of both charges.) \u201cThis is the most bizarre, gigantic operation I have ever seen,\u201d said one FBI agent at the time. And indeed Platshorn was hammered from the bench. \u201cThe price for participation in this traffic should be prohibitive,\u201d said Judge James Lawrence King at sentencing. \u201cIt should be made too dangerous to be attractive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps not surprisingly, Platshorn tells a larkier version of events. The government said the gang had operated an intelligence unit using high-tech mobile scanners; Platshorn says it was just two buddies in a van full of Radio Shack gadgets. The government said the gang had acquired their own airstrip, a dozen yachts, a private army to defend their loads from theft by rival gangs, and had planned to hijack a 737 jet for the ultimate smuggle. Not so, says Platshorn: the airstrip, armada, and private army are sensationalized descriptions of mundane partnerships, and the 737 plan was nothing more than a \u201ccampfire chat.\u201d Dennis Cogan, who defended Platshorn\u2019s childhood friend and closest partner in the gang, says the allegations in the case were \u201cso totally crazy.\u201d \u201cIt made for good theater,\u201d adds Arthur Tifford, who represented Platshorn against the obstruction charges. \u201cWith all due respect, persons in the executive branch needed headlines.\u201d<\/p>\n

Judge King declined to comment on the case, but Dana Biehl, one of the government\u2019s prosecutors at trial, was willing to revisit it for the first time. In a recent interview with the Daily Beast, he also remembered it as a highly political case. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to think about now, but what terrorism was after 9\/11 drugs were at that time.\u201d At first, the evidence suggested Platshorn and his partner Robert Meinster were \u201cmidlevel\u201d players, Biehl says, and he offered them 10 years in jail. Before the plea deal could be accepted, however, it was rescinded by Washington, according to the defendant\u2019s lawyers, and the case turned into a tentpole event for promoting government\u2019s anti-drug efforts. Biehl argued for a life sentence at trial.<\/p>\n

Today, he says he can certainly see why that might seem harsh. \u201cThese guys didn\u2019t ruin the number of lives that [heroin and cocaine traffickers] Frank Matthews and Nicky Barnes did, and they were not shooting all around.\u201d<\/p>\n

John F. Brown Jr., the youngest lawyer on the government\u2019s side, offers a similar view. \u201cI don\u2019t recall any proof that [codefendant Robert] Meinster and Platshorn ran a hard-nosed organization whose modus operandi included the use of the types of violence one would associate with, say, the Colombian gangs.\u201d Rather, \u201cthey seemed more like the Keystone Cops than slick masterminds.\u201d<\/p>\n

While he was behind bars, Platshorn\u2019s parents, sisters, and daughter died, and he and his wife divorced. \u201cI don\u2019t have the words,\u201d he says about the losses he has suffered. He would rather talk about his causes.<\/p>\n

For the first time in Florida, there are medical-marijuana resolutions in both the Senate and the House, and at least one poll shows majority public support\u2014thanks in no small part to Platshorn. \u201cWe have a lot of seniors in our community and people with terminal illnesses that truly believe they derive relief from medical marijuana,\u201d state representative Jeff Clemens told the Sun-Sentinel recently. Last January, after Platshorn pitched him on the idea, Clemens introduced a medical marijuana bill in the House. This year Clemens has joined Platshorn on the Silver Tour.<\/p>\n

With Republican majorities in elected office, it\u2019s still a long shot for marijuana legalization, medical or otherwise. But Platshorn is optimistic. Ever the salesman, he raises extra capital by selling Black Tuna Gang medallions on his website. The gold ones have sold out. Act now, however, and the silver could still be yours. \u201cEverybody who said Florida is impossible,\u201d says Platshorn, \u201cdoesn\u2019t know what a pitchman can do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Article: America’s Biggest Marijuana Ring:Black Tuna Tells All by Tony Dokoupil in the Daily Beast. The Text: It was late 1977 when the DC-3 lowered its landing gear onto a jungle airstrip, one of dozens on the Caribbean side of Colombia. The plane was to be loaded with two tons of marijuana, and then […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Weed Tell-All: One 65-Year Sentence Later<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Robert Platshorn got 64 years as America\u2019s biggest weed smuggler. 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