Black Tuna Diaries

---

Gang", his years as an actor, a famous pitchman, a successful entrepreneur in America and England, Bull Fighter in Spain, TV producer, smuggling pilot, big game fisherman, and the celebrities and villains he met along the way.

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

The last section of the book deals with his twenty-nine years in federal prisons. From the infamous Super-Max at Marion Illinois to Camp Fed in Florida, he takes the reader on a tour of the federal prison system and introduces him to the convicts. Bell called the Tunas the "slickest, most sophisticated pot smugglers of the 70's.

Later, the DEA would claim the Tunas brought in anywhere from one million to three million pounds of high-grade grass and made over three hundred million dollars. Twenty nine years later, the official DEA website still has a picture of the gold medallion they claim Black Tuna gang members wore as "a talisman and symbol of their membership in this smuggling group. Now, after twenty-nine years in federal prison, Robert Platshorn, better known as The Black Tuna, breaks his silence and tells the true story of Americas' longest serving marijuana prisoner.

From his first toke to his last ton, Platshorn accounts for every pound, every penny, every plane and every yacht, including a few that the government never knew about. Meet the Black Tunas: Captains Randy, Crunch, Tico, and Elm.

Connect. Discover. Share.

Their crews, Barry the Stoner, Marty, and the Outlaws. The South Street Gang: The Other Important Characters: It's my kind of story. I'm going on a book tour and I'll tell my readers that I'm reading your book. There are rules here at the Center of Hope. Residents are not allowed to own cell phones. They aren't allowed to leave without written approval. They can't move out until gainful employment is found. Remaining free is contingent upon following the rules.

Black Tuna Gang Leader Gets Out of Jail | Miami New Times

He frets about being late from preapproved jaunts or staying on a collect call long enough to annoy his supervisors. He raises his voice over the muddled roar of the dining room and leans in. The silver-haired former smuggler wants to talk about his wild days. He speaks quickly and clearly, his Philly patois slightly altered by a few missing front teeth. He's self-conscious about it and says he plans to get his teeth fixed as soon as he has the money. Yet when he talks about a smuggle, a near miss, being one step ahead of the feds, his eyebrows go up and his face comes alive the way it did when he was a pitchman selling newfangled contraptions to passersby on the Atlantic City boardwalk.

Each turn of phrase is practiced, crafted during long hours behind prison walls. The price he paid, his "debt to society," hasn't quashed his nostalgia for the good ol' days.

Navigation menu

Platshorn is 64 now. On the day of his release, he wore year-old gray sweats. His hair was almost completely gray. But none of the indignities of age and hard time has erased the boss man in him.

He complains New Times didn't provide him with nearly year-old newspaper clippings quickly enough. He orders a reporter to bring filterless Pall Malls and lobster bisque to the halfway house. Platshorn was a pitchman — the guy in a white smock demonstrating how well contraptions such as Remington electric knives, Dial-O-Matic blenders, no-run hosiery, and electric toothbrushes worked, dazzling crowds with his gift of gab.

He wasn't a barker," says Jerry Crowley, age 71, who pitched with Platshorn from the beginning. Things were going well: He was married and had a son on the way, as well as a few successful businesses. He studied communications and journalism at Temple University and at the University of Miami, but he never graduated.

He was a smart middle-class kid with a restless soul. Unlike many who entered the drug trade, he wasn't clawing his way out of poverty; he was just a natural-born salesman and entrepreneur. At the state fair, he met an old acquaintance from Philadelphia who was looking for some buyers to offload several shipments of marijuana. And so it began for Platshorn, who got a little dough for referring a contact to Robby Meinster, his childhood buddy.

Meinster declined to be interviewed. Richard Nixon was out of the White House by then, and the prevailing attitudes toward pot suggested to Platshorn that legalization was just up the road. There was an opening for profits, but he had to move fast. Besides, moving marijuana was so much more exciting than hustling no-run hosiery.

In , Platshorn moved to Miami and began ascending the pot-purveying hierarchy, establishing Miami-Cuba connections as a middleman. These Cuban connections would later be severed as the Colombians violently wrested control of the cocaine trade. Meinster relocated to Miami, and business began moving on all fronts. When Platshorn went to Barranquilla, Colombia, to salvage a failed deal that his weed-hustling customers' money depended on, he met "Johnny. Platshorn needed a load of pot on credit, and Johnny knew just the right people.

The Associated Press later described him as "dark-eyed and handsome," a man who "never [moved] without his local militiamen or his silver-plated. He was never extradited to the United States to face those charges. For his second load from the wealthy Colombian, Platshorn arranged for 5, pounds of some "primo Colombian yerba. He'd be released as soon as the load was sold and payment was deposited in an account. It was in the fall of , after an almost three-week stay in El Rodadero de Santa Marta on Colombia's Caribbean coast as a "hostage," when Platshorn finally rendezvoused in Aruba with a couple of pilots and the DC The noon sun glared high overhead, and Platshorn was wilting in the oppressive humidity.

The soldiers pointed to the far end of the runway to the man in charge. He was a lieutenant, dressed in olive-drab fatigues, with two Dobermans on a leash in one hand and a chrome automatic in the other. When he finally joined them, the lieutenant asked Platshorn if he was the boss.

Platshorn said he was just a laborer: The Colombian officer didn't buy any of it.

So he ordered Platshorn, laborer that he was, to begin unloading five tons of Colombia's skunkiest, one fecund pound bale at a time. Platshorn was desperate for something to drink and eyed the lieutenant's canteen greedily.

Recommended For You

The officer chuckled and waved him toward the DC-3 with his gun. The cargo hold had by then turned into an oven, and waves of heat stole his breath when he stepped inside. But the heat was suffused with the odor of baking marijuana. The THC — tetrahydrocannabinol, the active ingredient in pot — from 5, pounds of Santa Marta Gold was coaxed into the air by the rising mercury, intoxicating him like some massive vaporizer as he toiled and sweated.

He stacked the bales in fours, but after only a few stacks, he found himself utterly stoned. But the lieutenant's patience was wearing thin, and he was toying with the idea of shooting Platshorn, making him an example of what happens to traffickers who don't pay his "landing fees. He tore a corner off one of the bales and joined four rolling papers.

Then he rolled a massive joint and lit it like some pungent torch. The Colombian soldiers laughed at him and crowed, " Loco. To them, this man didn't seem to be much of a threat at all. The lieutenant returned and ordered Platshorn and the pilots down a trail through a banana grove and into a van. They were to be taken to the village of La Cienaga, Platshorn says, and shot as an example.

The smuggler might have been stoned, but he still had his wits about him. He plopped down in the middle of the trail, and the pilots followed suit. Platshorn was stalling for time. Though this particular load involved almost-lethal complications, it was the beginning of a lucrative partnership that would last the length of the Black Tunas' smuggling operations. As the money began flowing in, the Tunas invested in other businesses.

They operated out of the Fontainebleau Hotel on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach for a time and even out of a houseboat moored along the same brightly lit main thoroughfare. Platshorn had a million-dollar home with an Olympic-size swimming pool just across the Intracoastal Waterway from the Fontainebleau. Its treasurer, Mark Phillips, whose family owned the company, joined the enterprise, court documents say. He was able to retrofit yachts for maximum carrying capacity, painting water lines on the hulls to give the illusion they weren't riding low even when they were pregnant with tons of grass.

Thus, when pleasure boat traffic was hull to hull, streaming into Miami or Port Everglades, the Black Tunas could hide in plain sight. Platshorn never saw the "herb business" as a career, he says. Smuggling means living on borrowed freedom. Sooner or later, it all comes crashing down. The Black Tunas, in fact, were in for a reality check in the spring of A stash house on San Marino Drive in Miami Beach was filled to the ceiling with eight tons of weed when police raided the waterfront home located off the Venetian Causeway.

With a modest amount of money and a couple of relatively profitable legit businesses, Platshorn resolved to stay on the margins of the smuggling trade, no longer a key player. Others, including Phillips, tried to make a go of it on their own, but it would come as no surprise to Platshorn that these later smuggles would end in disaster. But it was when the son of a well-to-do Ford dealer in Fayetteville, North Carolina, entered the Black Tuna Gang's operations that the outfit really drifted off-course.

More important, Purvis who couldn't be found for this article and is said to be in the federal witness protection program had connections in the auto industry that could save the by-then struggling South Florida Auto Auction. Platshorn needed his legitimate businesses to be financially solvent so he could provide for his family when he left the game. One hand washes the other: Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.

Product details

Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Black Tuna Diaries 4. Almost 30 years in federal prisons. Kindle Edition , pages. Published first published September 24th

• Selected Poems (Borzoi Poetry)
• Public Disputations of James Arminius
• Die Legenden der Albae: Vernichtender Hass (Die Legenden der Albae 2) (German Edition)
• Culture and Identity in Global Politics (World Politics Review Features)
• Researching education policy: Ethical and methodological issues (Studies in Mathematics Education Se
• The Berry Amendment: Requiring Defense Procurement to Come from Domestic Sources