“A few years ago, in the waning hours of a summer barbecue, my elderly downstairs neighbor started to tell me a little bit about his life,” Jack Crosbie recently wrote. “Now, I get to tell all of you.” For a decade, Crosbie’s neighbor, Harvey Prager, ran a marijuana smuggling operation, filling the hulls of a small fleet of sailboats with Colombian weed and then moving it into the US. The logistics of Prager’s smuggling operations are fascinating enough, but the longer story of his life holds the most outlandish details. A fun caper with more than a few surprising turns (and a solid Jimmy Buffett cameo).
Prager’s extraordinary court case, which resulted in one of the most unique sentences ever passed down, was a media frenzy in the late 1980s. You’re reading the full story now — how a Harvard fellow built a drug empire from Colombia to Cambridge — not through any feat of reporting on my part, but because of a very simple chance of fate: Harvey Prager lives in the apartment below mine, in a six-unit brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, with a high-school sweetheart he reconnected with decades after his time as a criminal on the run across the globe.
More picks about smuggling
My Road Trip With the Do-Gooding Cactus Smugglers
“Can poaching ever be ethical?”
Tracking the Pacific Drug Highway
“How Latin American cartels are reshaping the narcotics trade across the world’s largest ocean.”
Unmasking “The Scholar”: The Colorado Woman Who Helped a Global Art Smuggling Operation Flourish for Decades
“An investigation into how Emma C. Bunker helped Douglas Latchford sell stolen Cambodian antiquities.”
