The Golden Gate Smuggling Company: A San Francisco Marijuana Empire

%In 1979, Brett Douglas was a twenty-eight-year-old US Marine Corps veteran working as a commercial tuna fisherman in California. That year, a young man named Bruce Perlowin came looking for professional seamen and found a few, including the author. The fishermen he recruited became a crew that played an integral part in smuggling more than 250 tons of marijuana that FBI agents credited to the “Perlowin Conspiracy.”

The Golden Gate Smuggling Company provides a true, behind-the-scenes story of “The Company,” the largest marijuana smuggling operation in the history of San Francisco. In the early 1980s, commercial tuna fishermen used long-range tuna boats specially outfitted for the eight-thousand-mile round-trip between San Francisco and Colombia. Each boat carried at least 30 million dollars worth of marijuana to the Company’s private pier in the San Francisco Bay area. Douglas, a fisherman who lived through it all, narrates this adventure from load number one to the federal courthouse in San Jose four years later.

Through the story of the Company, Douglas chronicles a laid-back, Californiastyle drug-smuggling empire that operated free of Hollywood clichés: no guns, no violence, no dramatic shoot-outs or car chases.