Jackpot

High Times, High Seas, and the Sting That Launched the War on Drugs

By: Jason Ryan

Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright

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.

©2012 Jason Ryan (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Living in Charleston could relate to a lot of the people

Enjoyed from start to finish a lot of local places and people and how the war on drugs began

An epic tale of the southern drug smuggler

The thoroughly informative story of the southern gentlemen who masterminded the lucrative drug smuggling operations in SC in the early days of the post-1960's counterculture movements that liberated a generation of anti-establiment youths. This is the story of the extraordinary lives behind the exciting entrepreneurly spirits who built an underground network of trade for supplying America's drug craze and the political establishment set to try to stop them.

The early days of smuggling pot.

The first half of the book is interesting. It's interesting because you get know the people who there during the early days of smuggling pot. It's interesting learning about how pot was smuggled and how the people smuggling pot that it was an adventure. The second half of the book is nothing War on Drugs bullshit. The narrator's Reagan impression sucks, just like Reagan (too bad Hinkley failed) and those who voted for him suck.

Intriguing and adventurous

Very interesting story all the way through. It covers both sides of the coin from the smuggler to the investigators. you wont be disappointed.

A piece of unknown American history

Who knew this is how the war on drugs started?!? Very interesting piece of American history.