I.

Good goddamn, the way Julian told that story. It was the sort of story that imbued the mind with possibility. That lingered like campfire smoke in a sweater.

But it wasn’t just the particulars of the story—Julian burying the million-dollar stash of coral-white cocaine he’d found washed up on the beach in Culebra—that captured Rodney Hyden’s imagination. It was the sounds of the story—the slithering South Carolina accent, the whistly snicker at parts that weren’t funny to anyone but Julian. And the picture of the storyteller, too. The silver hair down around Julian’s shoulders, the big Gandalf beard distracting from his slight frame, the bare feet, and always that Mason jar of wine that kept bottoming out and filling right back up again.

Friday nights, about eight or ten of the men who lived out there on the edge of Archer, Florida, not far from Gainesville, got together for happy hour at the fire pit by Watermelon Pond. They grilled out, ran southern rock through a sound system, and polished off bottles of beer (or in Julian’s case, jars of wine). Even to the beer drinkers, Julian had a way of making wine look good. The first time Rodney heard the story, a Friday in July 2004, he could tell by the way the others reacted, the way they oversold their delight at the laugh lines, that this was not the first time they’d heard it. Turns out Julian had been telling the same damn story for years. Especially when someone new, like Rodney, came around. And with good reason, Julian always started with the turtles.

Julian Howell and his wife moved to Culebra, an island off Puerto Rico, in 1986 to work for the sea-turtle-preservation project. For hundreds of years, on account of people eating the turtles and their eggs (the eggs an alleged aphrodisiac), the turtles’ numbers had been dwindling. So for several hours each day for a decade, Julian walked the beaches of Culebra, looking for signs of turtles. Often the beaches were empty—no sign of anything, turtle or human. But one day, amidst a profound ordinariness, Julian spotted a plastic-wrapped bale, about the shape and weight of a large piece of luggage, just plopped there in the froth of the tide. He approached it tentatively, as though it were an animal that might wake. As he got closer, he peered over both shoulders to see if anyone else was around, if anyone had dibs.

He’d heard about this sort of thing down here, even on Culebra—drugs that had been tossed overboard or dropped from a plane, missing their target and washing ashore. It was almost funny. He’d been walking around the island for nine years now, looking for something to smoke, thinking, Okay, God, where’s my bale? And here it was, perhaps: forty, fifty, sixty pounds. Think of how long it would last him! Still, it was wrapped so thoroughly in plastic and rubber, he couldn’t tell for sure what he was dealing with. Weed, he hoped. But it could be coke, or something else. He wasn’t certain it was worth the risk. In an effort to buy more time, he dragged the package up the beach, dug a depression near the rocks, and covered it with leaves and debris.

Rodney Hyden heard the siren song of Julian’s famous Culebra cocaine story so many times that it began to take on a mythic, irresistible quality. Less mythic was this mug shot, taken at the Alachua County jail.

He mulled it over for weeks, until curiosity overwhelmed him. After putting in his hours at the bar one night, he built up enough courage to head back to the beach. It was one in the morning, but there was enough moonlight to find the bale and ease it up into the bed of his pickup. He hauled it home, then hid it in his toolshed for a couple more weeks. Finally, after waiting for his wife to leave for work one day, he took a kitchen knife to one of the wrapped segments, just to get a better look. What flaked off was white, pink-white. Cocaine. He strapped the bale to his back and stood on the bathroom scale, did some quick math: The coke weighed seventy pounds. Thirty-two kilos, wrapped thoughtfully in sixteen double-kilo bundles. Street value at the time: anywhere from $16,000 to $20,000 per kilo, depending on which street. Though those sorts of numbers weren’t on Julian’s radar.