• U.S.

Life in the Drug Trade

4 minute read
TIME

By the time Donald Steinberg was 28, he and his Fort Lauderdale “company” owned waterfront homes and office buildings in Florida, apartments in Houston and a town house in New York City that was later sold for $2 million. With his partners, he maintained a fleet of three dozen or more boats—no one kept count—and a cash reserve so large they could shrug off million-dollar business losses. Eventually they had to buy their own turboprop airplane to ferry overflowing cash profits to uninquisitive banks in the Bahamas and Cayman Islands.

Steinberg and his partners made scant effort to hide their wealth. At restaurants they ordered $400 bottles of wine. At Steinberg’s $400,000 home were parked a Maserati, a Lamborghini, a Ferrari and the inevitable Rolls-Royce. One of Steinberg’s partners gave a Mercedes to a girl he barely knew.

Gradually they became sophisticates in international finance. For one deal, says Steinberg, they siphoned money through a yacht broker in Miami to a bank in the Caymans, thence to Hong Kong, and ultimately to Thailand. Later Steinberg dispatched cash and trusted aides to start a multimillion-dollar agricultural operation in Kenya. The crop: marijuana.

Steinberg and friends were South Florida drug dealers. Big ones. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, at Steinberg’s peak in 1978 his group imported one-sixth of all marijuana entering the country. Steinberg accepts the DEA’S estimates of his business ($100 million annual revenues on 500,000 Ibs. of marijuana) but not his exalted rank. Says he: “There are hundreds of outfits like mine. Certainly there are scores.”

Like many other dealers, Steinberg started as a pot smoker in his home town (Carpentersville, Ill., pop. 23,000), trying to finance his recreational use. The business seemed so easy that it just grew. Throughout their perilous escapades, Stein berg and friends remained calm, peaceful, fun-loving, devil-may-care. They never used force. If an aide was kidnaped, they paid the ransom. If a distributor burned them on a payoff, they simply did not deal with him again. Their mothers, aunts, wives, girlfriends were recruited to rent safe houses in Miami suburbs for storing drugs or to ride along as evidence of propriety when they were transporting a shipment. Says Steinberg: “I never saw a gun the whole time I was in the business.”

As the business grew they took precautions: changing telephone numbers frequently, talking in code, using electronic black boxes to conceal the locations from which they spoke. Yet at heart, the dealers remained kids who believed they would never be caught. The downhill slide started when Steinberg directed one operation from a Fort Lauderdale hotel room. Calls to his extension tied up the entire switchboard; a suspicious owner called the police. The gang scrambled out the windows but left behind marijuana, 7 Ibs. of cocaine (value: $180,000) and $1.2 million in cash, plus meticulous account books and records. It took police a year to trap Steinberg.

Then a technical error in their search warrant gave him time to win his release and flee.

He made his way to San Pedro, Calif. There DEA agents caught him, despite a suitcase full of fake IDs and passports, because of concern for his dog: he had given a veterinarian his home phone number and the real name of his St. Bernard, Sasha. Special Agent Richard Mangan, a resourceful DEA investigator, recognized the name.

Convicted under an organized-crime statute, Steinberg languishes in a South Florida jail, facing possible life imprisonment. To mollify prosecutors, he handed over $2 million, his last remaining assets from a business that once reaped a $12 million profit in 90 days. His marriage broken, his friends in jail, his career ended, Steinberg still sees himself as much the same gentle youth who served as a medic in Viet Nam for eight months in 1968. Says he: “Marijuana doesn’t hurt anybody. We never saw ourselves as really doing anything wrong.”

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