By Kristen McGuiness. Built in the s, the building looks like it only exists on a rainy day, the rock-lined exterior out of another time. I step out of the Uber and look up at the restaurant where, in , my father was arrested after escaping federal prison. He had spent two years on the lam, and was brought down by the U. Marshals after eating breakfast with his longtime mistress.
He had just come from organizing a new shipment from Colombia. I imagine the day was also rainy. When the Cadillac arrived at my hotel, I had to laugh. The last time I saw my father, he, too, was driving a black Cadillac. He had just arrived in Los Angeles from Phoenix, less than a year out of prison after serving a nearly year sentence from that arrest in Queens. He patted the back of the car and smiled. As I wait at the diner, I look up to see the former agent approach.
David Hoyt is himself now an old man, and though he spent the better part of the s in a Catch Me If You Can game of chase with my father, he only remembers him with fondness. Even as I began interviewing the men who worked with him, the women who loved him, and the agents who brought him down, one thing became clear: Dan McGuiness was only known in pieces; no one knew the whole story, certainly not me.
By the time my father was caught in , he had developed some of the most important drug routes from Central and South America and across the Eastern Seaboard. Even as I research him for this article, I find a much older Rolling Stone piece about Operation Grouper , the DEA plot to take out the marijuana industry, which features him. Dan McGuiness was a slight but handsome Irish Italian American with tight black curls and a style that made people think that he came from the wealthy part of Connecticut, not the working-class neighborhood in Bridgeport where he grew up.
By the time I was born in , he had amassed a fortune fit for a kingpin, with houses in Jamaica, Florida, Connecticut, and the Hamptons, where we shared a property with the founder of Rolling Stone , Jann Wenner.
