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 rookie 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 pick up paper bags full of cash I could not remember which job I was being paid for. My position at that time in our little organization was crewman on a larger boat that went offshore to unload the motherships. We transported the marijuana into shore where the smaller boats could take it through the shallow waters of the 10,000 Islands to a small fishing village located on Chokoloskee Island, where it was stashed for the night in someone’s home. All of this was done during the cloaked hours between sunset and sunrise. The next day our shore crew would load the bales into cars, trucks, vans, motor homes and even dump trucks. If we could stuff it into a vehicle, it went down the road. Chokoloskee Island was connected to Everglades City by causeway, and from there we would drive the bales out of town to US 41, then on to Miami in broad daylight under everyone’s nose. One thing I told myself was that I would never be one of those guys that drove the stuff to Miami. Because on the road they were all alone except for guys running the route in other vehicles keeping in contact with everyone else by way of radio