An article published in The Miami Herald in August 1971 warned about the rapid growth of drug consumption in Miami compared to previous years. Until then, drug use had been associated almost exclusively with impoverished African American neighborhoods, but between 1968 and 1970 hippie culture and the counterculture had already spread beyond the Village in New York and San Francisco, normalizing marijuana use to the point that the government itself debated the possibility of legalizing it. In that short period, arrests for drug possession, basically weed, increased by 183%, resulting in nearly seven hundred people detained.
Consumption was not the only thing growing in Florida: the state became the main gateway for marijuana into the United States. It is estimated that, in the early 1970s, more than 80% of the marijuana seized nationwide entered through its coasts, from the Keys to Tampa, with Miami as the epicenter. The Everglades functioned as a virtually uncontrollable corridor. In Everglades City, a town that at the time barely exceeded five hundred inhabitants, almost every family was involved, directly or indirectly, in the business. It was not until the early 1980s that federal authorities managed to dismantle a structure that had been operating in plain sight for more than a decade. But before that, the main protagonists of marijuana smuggling were the members of what came to be known as the Black Tuna Gang.
Its members never called themselves that. The name was assigned by the DEA and the FBI during the investigations that led to their downfall, because all of them wore around their necks a medallion depicting a black fish: a tuna.
Bob Platshorn and Robert Meinster, childhood friends from Pennsylvania, were the group’s leaders. Both looked more like California surfers than like drug traffickers draped in gold and Oscar de la Renta suits with wide lapels. Their personalities also complemented each other. Platshorn was charismatic and outgoing, a natural salesman; Meinster was reserved, methodical, almost hermetic. Platshorn liked to describe himself as a pitchman—someone capable of selling anything—and he was the one who took the first steps.
It all began almost by chance, at a trade fair in Wisconsin. An acquaintance told him he had a shipment of marijuana and that, if Platshorn helped him sell it, he would receive an attractive commission. Platshorn agreed and delivered. At first he acted as an intermediary, a simple broker, until he realized that the real money was in selling directly. He proposed the idea to Meinster and, shortly thereafter, both moved to Miami, the ideal hub for smuggling marijuana into the United States.
In the city, they opened a used car dealership as a front: Auto Auction, located at 2900 NW 36th Street. Their next step was to travel to Colombia, from which they returned with the necessary contacts to traffic on a large scale. From then on, operations intensified. Platshorn was in charge of getting the marijuana into Miami; Meinster handled distribution. Entry routes were both maritime and aerial. Their headquarters, with the consent of hotel owner Ben Novak, were set up in none other than the presidential suite of the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. There they received their clients, who arrived carrying briefcases stuffed with thick bundles of cash.
Toward the end of the 1970s, the DEA and the FBI began to detect suspicious financial movements in accounts linked to the Black Tuna Gang. The United States had already formally declared the war on drugs, and the alerts multiplied. In May 1978, the members of the organization were arrested. Federal agencies announced that they had dismantled the largest drug trafficking network in the country up to that point.
The media impact was devastating. Neither Platshorn nor Meinster immediately grasped the magnitude of the trouble they were in. They never denied trafficking marijuana, but they insisted they were far from being a cartel of such proportions; they saw themselves more as a group of friends who liked smoking weed, the beach, and easy money. Even their lawyers attempted to dismantle the charges by arguing, using figures and evidence, that the quantities of drugs attributed to them were exaggerated.
None of it worked. In February 1980, Bob Platshorn was sentenced to sixty-four years in prison and Robert Meinster to fifty-eight. At the time, these were the harshest sentences ever imposed in the United States for marijuana trafficking.
The fall of the Black Tuna Gang marked the end of an era. But the vacuum it left behind was quickly filled. At the beginning of the 1980s, Miami would trade weed for snow. And the business, far more violent, far more profitable, was only just beginning.
