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 Companys 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 clichs: no guns, no violence, no dramatic shoot-outs or car chases.

The untold history of the underground marijuana trade in Thailand—from surfers and sailors to pirates. Located on the left bank of the Chao Phya River, Thailand’s capital, Krungthep, known as Bangkok to Westerners and “the City of Angels” to Thais, has been home to smugglers and adventurers since the late eighteenth century. During the 1970s, it became a modern Casablanca to a new generation of treasure seekers, from surfers looking to finance their endless summers to wide-eyed hippie true believers, and lethal marauders left over from the Vietnam War. Moving a shipment of Thai sticks from northeast Thailand farms to American consumers meant navigating one of the most complex smuggling channels in the history of the drug trade. Many forget that until the mid-1970s, the vast majority of marijuana consumed in the United States was imported, and there was little to no domestic production. Peter Maguire and Mike Ritter are the first historians to document this underground industry, the only record of its existence rooted in the fading memories of its elusive participants. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with smugglers and law enforcement agents, the authors recount the buy, delivery, voyage home, and product offload. They capture the eccentric personalities of the men and women who transformed the Thai marijuana trade from a GI cottage industry into a professionalized business moving the world's most lucrative commodities, unraveling a rare history from the smugglers’ perspective. “Highly recommended for anyone who loves adventure, cannabis, surfing, or all of the above. It’s every single bit as heady, energetic and captivating as the title implies.”—Cannabis Now

“A mash-up of Erik Larson and Richard Preston.” —Tina Jordan, New York Times Book Review podcast On March 6, 1900, the bubonic plague took its first victim on American soil: Chinese immigrant Wong Chut King. Empowered by racist pseudoscience, officials rushed to quarantine Chinatown—but when corrupt politicians mounted a cover-up to obscure the threat, it fell to federal health officer Rupert Blue to save San Francisco, and the nation, from a gruesome fate. Black Death at the Golden Gate is a spine-chilling saga of virulent racism, human folly, and the ultimate triumph of scientific progress.

Presents the history of San Francisco's Angel Island Immigration Station that operated between 1910 and 1940. Argues that Asian immigrants, rather than being welcomed, were denied liberties and even entrance to the United States.

When Edwin Sutherland introduced the concept of white-collar crime, he referred to the respectable businessmen of his day who had, in the course of their occupations, violated the law whenever it was advantageous to do so. Yet since the founding of the American Republic, numerous otherwise respectable individuals had been involved in white-collar criminality. Using organized smuggling as an exemplar, this narrative history of American smuggling establishes that white-collar crime has always been an integral part of American history when conditions were favorable to violating the law. This dark side of the American Dream originally exposed itself in colonial times with elite merchants of communities such as Boston trafficking contraband into the colonies. It again came to the forefront during the Embargo of 1809 and continued through the War of 1812, the Civil War, nineteenth century filibustering, the Mexican Revolution and Prohibition. The author also shows that the years of illegal opium trade with China by American merchants served as precursor to the later smuggling of opium into the United States. The author confirms that each period of smuggling was a link in the continuing chain of white-collar crime in the 150 years prior to Sutherland’s assertion of corporate criminality.

"By the Golden Gate" by Joseph Carey. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.