Ex-marijuana smuggler living in Estero cashed in, paid price

Tim McBride's first night of smuggling pot in 1980 netted him $5,000 in cash.
"Rookie pay," he said.
He picked up another five grand the next night.
"This is outrageous, man," McBride said, sitting in his Estero home recently, recalling his introduction to smuggling. "Hand me a little paper bag with cash in it. It was the greatest thing in the world. Here I am just 21 years old, I got 10 grand in my pocket."

 t got better and then much worse. What began as a gig crabbing out of Everglades City became an endeavor that eventually netted perhaps $25 million - plus four years in a federal prison and a $4 million fine.
Those days are long gone. Now, he's a 53-year-old single dad with two teenagers. He lives in a one-story house in the woods, and Saturday he and some of his smuggling pals gathered at Fred's Food, Fun & Spirits in Naples for a reunion.
The group drew a crowd.
"It's everything I expected, really," McBride said.
The purpose wasn't celebrating the drug days but merely recalling them."We weren't saints," McBride said. "We were breaking the law."He was just one of hundreds of young men hauling pot in and around Everglades City during the '70s and '80s. Two raids in the mid-1980s led to the arrests of perhaps 80 percent of the town's men. But the lure of big and quick money was tempting, very tempting. And very big.
Steve Whitlock was one of those young men operating out of Everglades City, darting in and out of the Ten Thousand Islands, bringing in marijuana and piling up money.
"It was fun, exciting," said Whitlock, now a 52-year-old artist in Sarasota who attended the reunion. "A lot of adrenaline. Running around the middle of the night, beating the man at it. It was almost a game."
Almost.
Whitlock served 26 months in prison.
McBride became known as the Saltwater Cowboy. His estimate of making $25 million might seem outlandish to some who weren't part of that time and place.
"That's a good conservative estimate," said David Waller, then a Florida Department of Law Enforcement special agent assigned to the case. He's now based in Lakeland.
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