Dan McGuiness was one of the architects of the modern drug trade: creating a marijuana empire, ordering up Learjets, escaping from prison, and more. Now, his daughter reports on the life and times of the father who never came home.
steeped in the lore of my father’s life, the picture colored in by my family, and ultimately 20 pages of his own memoir, which he sneaked to me while in a supermax prison in central Pennsylvania. At the time, I hadn’t seen him in years, and it had been decades since we had met in the free world. It was a hard day, as he admitted that his nearing release date would not bring the reunion for which I had hoped.
Daddy’s first escape happened in that tiny Connecticut jail, where he and another inmate filed out the bars of the cell, before heading back to California with bigger ambitions than dealing with biker bars and bricks of. He was living with a friend from Connecticut, another pot dealer, named Jim Hill, and together they decided that the real money didn’t come from selling weed; it came from smuggling it.
As his former mistress Susan Greenberg remembers, “We once rented this house on the beach in Puerto Vallarta. He used to go out in the water with no fins and go spearfishing. The ocean was his most favorite thing in the world.”The Mexicans didn’t know what to do with these American smugglers, but they earned respect after my father made the 10-mile oceanic trek, landing on the American side of the Tijuana Sloughs.
They decided to go to a lesser-known part of Mexico, where one of their Tijuana connections had a cousin. As my father’s former mistress Greenberg tells me, “Your father was like Houdini. He probably had more escape attempts on his record than most people in prison. He could get himself out of anything.”
At the time, the Colombian market worked as a co-op, not as a cartel, with local farmers pooling their product and profit. According to Hoyt, they would meet monthly to divvy out the revenue and settle any debts. But air travel from Colombia into domestic airports proved as risky as smuggling across Tijuana in its heyday. At one point, Knudsen found himself caught by the DEA while flying into a Connecticut commuter airport.
According to Hoyt and others involved in my father’s business, Dan McGuiness would become one of the biggest exporters of Colombian marijuana throughout the 1970s, and yet still, he wasn’t the most prolific. “I never knew what was going on,” she tells me when I try to interview her. “I just wanted to be left out of it. I wanted to raise you, and honestly, K, I was scared. It was scary.”
Over the next few years, David Hoyt tracked Dan McGuiness, but what he didn’t know was that more than the money or the power or the nights out at Studio 54, my father got high on getting away with it: tricking the feds, running from the cops, escaping into the night . As my father once wrote, “That’s what it was about, the rush.”
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