It started with a throwaway line. I was corresponding with a distant cousin when he mentioned that we shared another relative, Harold Derber—”a gunrunner, sailor of fortune, and smuggler who was gunned down in the streets of Miami.”

I didn’t believe it. Family legends tend to grow in the telling, and this one sounded taller than most. But when I started digging through newspaper archives, the rumors held up. Article after article confirmed Harold’s exploits, and the more I read, the more I understood I’d found something no one had written about.

His story starts ordinarily enough. He was a British radio officer in the merchant marine. But in the wreckage of the post-war years he became something else: first a celebrated refugee smuggler, then the largest marijuana trafficker of the 1970s, and finally one of the men who built the architecture of the modern drug trade.

Over the past year I’ve interviewed his old criminal associates, the undercover agents who chased him, and relatives who would rather not talk. I’ve tracked down his lover’s unpublished memoir, lost government files, surveillance photos, and recently declassified intelligence reports. Piece by piece, a portrait emerged of a man who lived a dozen lives in one, traversing the major organized crime rings of the twentieth century.

I’m now in the final stretch of preparing the manuscript, which publishes this September, and I’m looking forward to sharing Harold’s story. Over the coming months I’ll preview some of the book’s most dramatic turns: his schemes to smuggle Cuban refugees, his long game against international law enforcement, and his untimely demise at the hands of professional hitmen.

What began as an idle genealogical discovery became a search spanning continents, and the story turned out stranger than anything I’d imagined. I hope you’ll follow along when The Wireless Operator launches this fall.

Image courtesy of Florida Keys History Center, Monroe County Public Library.