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Saltwater Cowboy: The Rise and Fall of a Marijuana Empire
In 1979, Wisconsin native Tim McBride hopped into his Mustang and headed south. He was twenty-one, and his best friend had offered him a job working as a crab fisherman in Chokoloskee Island, a town of fewer than 500 people on Florida's Gulf Coast. Easy of disposition and eager to experience life at its richest, McBride jumped in with both feet.
But this wasn't a typical fishing outfit. McBride had been unwittingly recruited into a band of smugglers--middlemen between a Colombian marijuana cartel and their distributors in Miami. His elaborate team comprised fishermen, drivers, stock houses, security--seemingly all of Chokoloskee Island was in on the operation. As McBride came to accept his new role, tons upon tons of marijuana would pass through his hands.
Then the federal government intervened in 1984, leaving the crew without a boss and most of its key players. McBride, now a veteran smuggler, was somehow spared. So when the Colombians came looking for a new middle-man, they turned to him.
McBride became the boss of an operation that was ultimately responsible for smuggling 30 million pounds of marijuana. A self-proclaimed "Saltwater Cowboy," he would evade the Coast Guard for years, facing volatile Colombian drug lords and risking betrayal by romantic partners until his luck finally ran out.
A tale of crime and excess, Saltwater Cowboy is the gripping memoir of one of the biggest pot smugglers in American history.
But this wasn't a typical fishing outfit. McBride had been unwittingly recruited into a band of smugglers--middlemen between a Colombian marijuana cartel and their distributors in Miami. His elaborate team comprised fishermen, drivers, stock houses, security--seemingly all of Chokoloskee Island was in on the operation. As McBride came to accept his new role, tons upon tons of marijuana would pass through his hands.
Then the federal government intervened in 1984, leaving the crew without a boss and most of its key players. McBride, now a veteran smuggler, was somehow spared. So when the Colombians came looking for a new middle-man, they turned to him.
McBride became the boss of an operation that was ultimately responsible for smuggling 30 million pounds of marijuana. A self-proclaimed "Saltwater Cowboy," he would evade the Coast Guard for years, facing volatile Colombian drug lords and risking betrayal by romantic partners until his luck finally ran out.
A tale of crime and excess, Saltwater Cowboy is the gripping memoir of one of the biggest pot smugglers in American history.
- GenresNonfictionDrugsBiography
272 pages, Hardcover
First published April 7, 2015
38 people are currently reading
566 people want to read
About the author
Tim McBride
3 books7 followersMy 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
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
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
December 7, 2020
I’m a huge pot smoker so when I saw this book I knew I had to pick it up to get a behind the scenes look at how weed was smuggled into America. I’m not American but it was still SO fascinating to learn about because here in Canada most pot you can buy illegally is just grown here and you can just buy it legally to avoid any issues now. It was truly mind blowing to see everything that goes on to get pot into America, I still can’t quite believe that things like this happened and the unbelievable amounts of money involved. Things have probably changed in recent years but it’s still wild to think about it. I was hooked from the very first page and couldn’t stop reading once I started, I needed to know it all immediately! McBride has one hell of a fascinating story to tell and I highly recommend it to my fellow pot smokers.
July 10, 2015
A very entertaining book. Good writing. I found myself really enjoying his stories about drug smuggling in the 80's, as well as his accurate descriptions of life in a federal prison. I myself worked for the Federal Bureau of Prisons for over 20 years, during the time period the author was incarcerated. I only have one complaint about the book, a rather large one, which prevented me from giving it a higher star review. According to the author, every law enforcement officer, prison guard, probation officer, and Federal judge, were, in his words, a piece of s*@!t. I don't know if the author has ever come to terms that HE was the one who chose to break the law, and that the people he dealt with were a consequence of his choice. He claims that he was just a good old boy, who never hurt anyone. This as he tells story after story about driving while completely stoned, never acknowledging that his actions could have easily killed an innocent bystander. He claims that his actions should be vindicated, as marijuana is now becoming legal. He completely dismisses the fact that it was not legal at the time. I guess he thinks that everyone should be able to choose which laws they obey, and that should be okay. If you can overlook his mindset on the appropriateness of laws, it is a good book.
March 1, 2015
McBride’s stories as an international marijuana smuggler during the freewheeling 70’s and 80’s are told in the “guy seated at the end of the bar” kind of way, reliving his past glory days with relish and a cheap vocabulary common in high testosterone and adrenaline soaked careers. Many of the stories he recounts have their share of humor but they become repetitive as each one essentially boils down to “we had so much pot in that” – {boat, plane, car, Winnebago, etc.} – “that there was no way in hell we shouldn’t have” – {sunk, crashed, been arrested, etc.}. And along the way, he made piles of cash so big that mice were making nests out of it and he was literally wiping his a** with it.
Look, nobody is going to buy this book that doesn’t already know what he’s in store for. It fills a niche that some people want and some of it is genuinely humorous. Along the lines of comparable types of autobiographical books, such as Jordan Belfort’s “Wolf of Wall Street” or Richard Marcinko’s “Rogue Warrior” or Lee Morgan’s “Reaper’s Line,” where the “hero” is the smartest, his friends are the craziest, the enemies are the dumbest, the whiskey is the strongest, the explosions the biggest, the hookers the hottest, the cocaine the cokiest, and the money the fastest - hyperbole and superlatives rule the narrative. If you like that type of book, then this brag won’t disappoint.
I would have given this book three stars because it delivered what it promised, however the Afterward that McBride included just struck me as too odd. Among other things, he defends his involvement in the drug trade as noble because even though the international drug lords for whom he ultimately worked made murder a regular part of their business, he and his cowboys never personally hurt a soul. Even though I fully support the decriminalization of marijuana, it stretches a bit beyond naivety to see him wash his hands of any culpability. Two stars.
This review pertains to an Advanced Reader’s Edition I received through a Goodread’s giveaway.
Look, nobody is going to buy this book that doesn’t already know what he’s in store for. It fills a niche that some people want and some of it is genuinely humorous. Along the lines of comparable types of autobiographical books, such as Jordan Belfort’s “Wolf of Wall Street” or Richard Marcinko’s “Rogue Warrior” or Lee Morgan’s “Reaper’s Line,” where the “hero” is the smartest, his friends are the craziest, the enemies are the dumbest, the whiskey is the strongest, the explosions the biggest, the hookers the hottest, the cocaine the cokiest, and the money the fastest - hyperbole and superlatives rule the narrative. If you like that type of book, then this brag won’t disappoint.
I would have given this book three stars because it delivered what it promised, however the Afterward that McBride included just struck me as too odd. Among other things, he defends his involvement in the drug trade as noble because even though the international drug lords for whom he ultimately worked made murder a regular part of their business, he and his cowboys never personally hurt a soul. Even though I fully support the decriminalization of marijuana, it stretches a bit beyond naivety to see him wash his hands of any culpability. Two stars.
This review pertains to an Advanced Reader’s Edition I received through a Goodread’s giveaway.
April 12, 2015
I won an Advance Reader's Edition of this book through Goodreads. I'm so happy I did because otherwise I would never have picked it up to read and that would have been a shame. Saltwater Cowboy is the memoir of Tim McBride describing his life as a South Florida drug smuggler and as a 'guest' of the American federal prison system. The book reads like a novel, told in the first person. An easy read, the book is an eye opener to the massive marijuana (and sometimes cocaine) traffic coming in from Cuba and South America in the '80s. The tight choreography needed and trust involved in smuggling the drugs to their destination is mind blowing. I highly recommend Saltwater Cowboy to anyone looking for an entertaining read.
March 22, 2015
I recieved this book through GoodReads First Reads. I loved this book! Very well-written, the author just blew me away with all of the details of the business of transporting and selling marijuana. This was factual yet a true adventure of a book. Thank goodness that the Fed is more relaxed about pot now, I live in the great green state of Washington, so things are more relaxed here, keep fighting the good fight and legalize medical marijuana. I highly recommend this book for anyone, it is a modern-day take on the ole moonshine days.
March 14, 2015
I couldn't put this book down - a must read page turner! The attention to detail places the reader directly in back country Florida during the 1980's. Equally thought provoking in regards to the American penal system and marijuana regulations in the U.S.
February 14, 2015
Saltwater Cowboy sucked me into this brash, rollicking adventure of Tim McBride, a drug-smuggling pirate who makes it sound like so much fun!!! You got me with the first sentence of your book Tim. It's the real story of how marijuana in the early days got into this country and the crazy lives of these smugglers who had money than they could spend, and lived harder and faster than most of us can even imagine. Well written and a very entertaining read. Hope he writes another!
February 8, 2015
I read an Advanced Reading Copy of this book. It is a page turner and well-written memoir about Tim McBride's experiences in the marijuana business. It also includes some of McBride's experiences during four years in prison. I enjoyed the book. My caution for readers is the foul language scattered from the beginning to the end. SALTWATER COWBOY would have been more effective without it. I found the story compelling and kept my attention from the opening to the end--a solid reading experience.
June 30, 2022
I moved to Florida East coast in the mid-1980s. Working out of Miami I was warned of the Drug Wars in and around Dade County, but never thought about what was going on just 87 miles to the west in the small fishing hamlet of Chokoloskee.
Tim McBride tells (almost) all of how the marijuana empire functioned right under the radar of the Federal government. Now that Florida, along with many other states, have legalized medical marijuana it seems almost archaic how much time, effort and money the U.S. government spent, and more importantly the lives of so many altered just because of a plant.
Tim McBride tells (almost) all of how the marijuana empire functioned right under the radar of the Federal government. Now that Florida, along with many other states, have legalized medical marijuana it seems almost archaic how much time, effort and money the U.S. government spent, and more importantly the lives of so many altered just because of a plant.
January 16, 2021
This was a great read on a personal level. I know all the places discussed in the book and even know a few of the people. I've met Tim and heard him speak a couple times. Solid dude. I love that I read the entire thing in his voice and it was like listening to my uncle or Dad tell a crazy story.
April 24, 2022
Oh the good old days
This story took me back to a time before Tim started his adventures. Growing up in Tucson AZ the Mexican border was our ocean and we exploited our backyard knowledge much like Tim, all a lark. Thanks Tim for the nostalgic ride.
This story took me back to a time before Tim started his adventures. Growing up in Tucson AZ the Mexican border was our ocean and we exploited our backyard knowledge much like Tim, all a lark. Thanks Tim for the nostalgic ride.
July 10, 2018
real good shit. crazy antics told in a compelling manner.
December 13, 2019
HBO or someone should make this into a mini-series.
November 12, 2021
Super interesting story! Just a bit repetitive and slow at times.
November 20, 2025
he’s not from florida, but he is a florida man
August 8, 2024
Very interesting account of the weed business.
December 31, 2016
I nearly burned my skin off for this book.
I was in the gym Jacuzzi by myself, just chillin, when the author, Tim McBride, came in. We chitchatted a bit until I, mistakenly, asked him what he does for a living. Then began a thirty minute conversation on him discussing his book that he wrote. I was dying. Imagine yourself stuck in a conversation while in a hot-tub and you have no choice but to say "uh-huh" and "oh really?" and "wow." I didn't want to be rude, so therefore my skin suffered. When I finally got up, my skin looked liked a pepto-bismol bottle. This author is very proud of this book, and by the amount that I suffered for it, I figured why not read it.
It really isn't that bad of a book. It is an easy read. His views are definitely different than mine, but I can appreciate it.
I was in the gym Jacuzzi by myself, just chillin, when the author, Tim McBride, came in. We chitchatted a bit until I, mistakenly, asked him what he does for a living. Then began a thirty minute conversation on him discussing his book that he wrote. I was dying. Imagine yourself stuck in a conversation while in a hot-tub and you have no choice but to say "uh-huh" and "oh really?" and "wow." I didn't want to be rude, so therefore my skin suffered. When I finally got up, my skin looked liked a pepto-bismol bottle. This author is very proud of this book, and by the amount that I suffered for it, I figured why not read it.
It really isn't that bad of a book. It is an easy read. His views are definitely different than mine, but I can appreciate it.
January 21, 2016
Saltwater Cowboy: the Rise and Fall of a Marijuana Empire by Tim McBride (St. Martin's Press 2015) (Biography). It's hard to take a story about grassroots marijuana smuggling into the Everglades and then turn it into a boring tale, but this book comes close. I'll say that at least it's the most boring book about smuggling that I've ever read. It's not that the author has no story to tell, for he does, but the problem is the way he tells the tale. There's no detail and no frosting. I'll bet that the author would have great tales to tell sitting around a fire. It's not that this book is bad, it just could have been so much more! My rating: 7/10, finished 6/2/15.
March 14, 2015
I won a copy of SALTWATER COWBOYS by Tim McBride in a GOODREADS giveaway. It is a very fast paced, easy ride about the author's rise and fall during the 70's and 80's marijuana industry in Florida. I am sure Mr. McBride has taken some "artistic leeway" with this book; some of the information seems a tad too far fetched to believe. But even taking it with a grain of salt, I still enjoyed the book. It could have been proofed better as there are repetitive information. . . but overall feel it warrants a 4 out of 5 star rating.
February 10, 2015
This is a wonderful book on the life of a marijuana hauler in South Florida and his life experiences as such and the time he spent in jail. But I wanted to learn a lot more and a lot of information was left out. Maybe a follow up would include how he paid the fines if he did and what happened to all the money and cars and property he owned. The book was a very easy read and left me wanting to know more. I would have given it 5 stars if it had the above mentioned additions. Well Done!
April 5, 2016
3.5 would have been higher if the author had spent more time talking about smuggling. Which from the subhead I thought this book would be about and less about prison.
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April 5, 2016Good read. Interesting.
August 1, 2016
Highly entertaining and well written, but he does seem to have a problem with law enforcement authorities. He breaks the law and hates those who are just doing their jobs.
December 2, 2018
A well written book separating crime and marijuana.👍🏻
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews