HIGH TIDE

Record Drug Deal Sabotage At Sea

Sinks Professor-of-the-Year's Best-Kept Secret

A 74,000-word work of fiction inspired by true events

 Heartbeats from the biggest drug deal in U.S. history, “Apple” Solamente’s mob family trawler Maltese is fifteen miles off the Jersey Shore in stormy seas. March 17, 1981. Midway through off-loading twenty tons on hash and other illegal drugs from Colombian freighter Hombre, the drunken Maltese captain suddenly realizes his transferred load is too heavy!

    In the chaotic howling-wind-and-rain sinking, crewmen are saved by a mob-commandeered “escort” boat that they knife-point blackmailed from Seaport College Professor-of-the-Year Rick Maddigan, under threats to expose his marijuana habit.

    As the Maltese goes down, Hombre turns and runs — six murders, five drownings, and a dozen arrests in her wake. 40,000 hash “balls” surface from the plunging trawler’s swirling sink hole, and bob off into the black of night to wash up on boardwalk beaches at high tide. Scavenging hippies scramble the shoreline in frenzied pursuit, and half the payoff money . . . $12.5 million cash, is still missing!

    The rescuing boat is Maddigan’s live-aboard love nest that he shares with his amorous student intern, JP. The two coerce DEA Agents Hartley and Leeds to back off filing drug charges against Maddigan in favor of helping them get their boat back. JP uses coded rendezvous information she intercepts, as bait to get the agents help, and enlist Coast Guard assistance.

    Sabotage success . . . JP and the Professor’s boat is retrieved, but in the process, they stir up mob family politics and wind up tossed to Apple’s feet at gunpoint. Their lives are saved in a bullet barrage by last-minute, turn-coat heroics, and the two are unexpectedly rewarded with 10% of the recovered cash. The vanished $12.5 million stays missing —along with two “drowned” crewmen suspected as the source of anonymous cash bundles mailed from Costa Rican jungles to needy children’s organizations around the globe.