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It was the wee hours of a February morning. I was aboard the Sibelius Express between Moscow and Helsinki. The Berlin Wall was down, the Soviet Union collapsed and a shaky new Russia was rising from the wreckage. Winter snow covered the poplars streaming outside the window of my train compartment.
Suddenly there was banging on the door. “Customs! Passports!” The door slid open as I tumbled in my underwear from my sleeper. I was confronted with one of the ugliest women I’ve ever seen. She looked like a toad dressed in a heavy wool uniform. “Passport!” she croaked.
I started to put on my trousers, but “Niet!” was her response, so instead I extracted my passport from my bag and handed it to her. We stood in silence while she flipped the pages, and then examined my hard-won visa on a separate sheet of paper. It had taken years to arrange that visa; its sponsor was the new Russian Ministry of Defense, for I was in the new Russia to interview ex-Soviet submarine designers.
That didn’t cut any mustard with my early hours visitor. “Declaration?!” she nearly shouted. “No,” said I. “Nothing to declare.” She spun and motioned to four men in the carriage hallway. They entered the compartment—it was getting crowded now—and proceeded to take it apart. The ceiling came down, the seats and bed were disassembled: it was a practiced deconstruction, completed in only a few moments.
Toad lady surveyed the wreckage and then motioned for me to open my bag. I pulled down the zipper, and her eyes lit on a small oil painting I’d purchased in St. Petersburg. “Forbidden to export art from Russia!” she said, as she lifted it between thumb and forefinger. Her bully-boys then attacked the bag with a vengeance, uncovering my other prize—a catalog in French from the Pushkin in Moscow, the museum where all the impressionist paintings expropriated during the Russian Revolution ended up.
I purchased my small oil painting in a freezing rain outside the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg for a pittance. I even asked for a receipt, a scrap of paper with a scrawl I couldn’t read. Later I saw the exact same painting, in larger and smaller sizes, all over St. Petersburg. But I didn’t mind, I still enjoyed my little seascape.
By now the compartment was chaos: my dirty clothes mingling with parts of the ceiling, my reporter’s notes fallen into the disemboweled bed, my shoes dangling from the luggage rack and my painting still between the thumb and forefinger of the toad woman.
She looked at the Pushkin catalog and then at my wee painting. I produced the receipt. She examined it carefully. She put the painting down and thumbed through the catalog. “Art is good,” she said, and walked out. I scurried to repack my belongings as the bully-boys rebuilt the compartment. Then they too were gone.
I waited for the cops to arrive and haul me away, but they never came. I arrived in Helsinki, painting intact, with the internal glow of a successful smuggler.
The Sibelius Express was not my introduction to smuggling. As a reporter, I served an apprenticeship in Florida and spent journeyman time here as well. Smuggling stories were at times an almost daily occurrence. As a broadcaster, I covered the transition from marijuana to cocaine. As a sailor in the Ten Thousand Islands of Florida, south of Naples, I observed the low-flying DC-3s bearing illicit cargoes over the Everglades en route to landings on the deserted streets of undeveloped proto-cities like North Port and Cape Coral.
On one trip, I witnessed the nighttime passage of an unlit ship reeking of human stench as it passed within a stone’s throw of my anchorage. It was an odorous reminder of slave ships in centuries past. Other times, I’ve seen bales of marijuana bobbing like sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico, jettisoned or lost overboard by midnight pot haulers. Yes, I’ve been close to smuggling.
As a reporter, I covered trials of major cocaine smugglers, senior law enforcement officers and even a sheriff caught in the coils of smuggling. And years later, my community became involved in the story of a single orchid, smuggled out of Peru and ending up in a botanic garden that pled guilty to the federal crime of possessing a protected species. A friend is still in prison for selling Cuban cigars to the cognoscenti of Longboat Key.
Smuggling is a very old and very profitable profession in Florida. While few talk about it openly, there is every reason to believe it is the largest industry in the state. And probably has been for decades, maybe centuries. Because of the state’s peninsular geography, smuggling may always be a major component of Florida’s economy.
Floridians want to believe the state’s largest industry is tourism, and indeed, millions of people come here every year and spend billions to enjoy themselves. Some of them linger to buy real estate, the state’s second largest legal industry. It is an old tradition, selling swampland to Yankees. But the Yankees may not realize that the land they are buying might—at some point—have been involved in a smuggler’s scheme to launder profits. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the relationship between real estate and smuggling is profound.
The history of smuggling in Florida is the history of Florida. Smuggling has done more to incubate the development of the peninsula than any legislation. Smuggling is a recurring theme, for something is always being smuggled in Florida.
Smuggling is the economic crime of possession and transport of illicit materials across national borders. Today there are a myriad of different items you cannot bring into the United States. If you do, you can go to jail. Some of these items depend on their origin. For example, cigars are legal unless they are made in Cuba.
Smuggling can involve a single flower. Or it can be an industrial enterprise, such as tons of guns and ammunition. Regardless of scale, it demands an eager buyer, because smugglers don’t keep inventories. The sooner the “hot goods” are unloaded and sold, the happier the smuggler is.
Smuggling almost always requires an avid resale market. Whether it’s bootleg rum or Colombian cocaine, a wholesaler requires retailers. The price markup is drastically higher than normal retail, which is why the trade in smuggled goods is so lucrative. Smuggling is a very pure form of entrepreneurial capitalism. By definition, smuggling evades government regulation.
Smuggling has a romantic side. Jimmy Buffett’s smuggler anthem “Havana Daydreamin’” (“waitin’ for some mystery man to pay him for his time…”) resonates with anybody who’s smoked a joint, snorted a line, preheated a Cohiba or moved a “forbidden” piece of Russian art. The dashing Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind was a smuggler.
History is replete with good-guy smugglers. William McCoy comes to mind, as do the skippers of U.S. Navy ships who picked up contrabands. Totch Brown and Junior Guthrie are icons for this kind of thinking. You’ll read about them all and more like them.
Smuggling also has a grim side. There is slavery and murder in these pages, spread over centuries, including our own. Because smugglers live beyond the law, there is treachery, double-dealing and cruel revenge.
Florida’s history of smuggling parallels and amplifies the official history of the state. Even before its “discovery,” there was smuggling in Florida. The tale begins with slavery, a practice continuing to this day.