Pirate Yarns: August 2014

Thursday, August 21, 2014

Looking For Johnny

Who is Johnny Oceans?

Mickey Munday, last of the Cocaine Cowboys reveals the terrifying truth about this enigmatic smuggler turned agent, in grammy award-winner Robin Klein's investigative documentary, Looking For Johnny, shot on location in Miami, FL.

Johnny Oceans, the hero of Pirates by Greg Cummings, is partly based on a real-life Floridian smuggler. In 2010, while big game fishing on the Kenyan coast with the author, the real Johnny Oceans revealed confidential matter about his past, some of which was incorporated into the novel. Only he and the author know what is fact and what is fiction.

Seeking to capitalise on the abstruseness of the character, and inspired by a piece in The Flamingo Sun, filmmaker Robin Klein (who won a Grammy Award for Rock and Roll Circus) flew to Miami in June 2014 to make a short documentary, interviewing some of the people who knew Oceans.

In the 1980s Mickey Munday helped smuggle $2 billion worth of cocaine into South Florida for the Medellin Cartel. He became famous after the release of Cocaine Cowboys (2006) directed by Billy Corben.

In Klein's documentary Munday speaks openly about his association with the former smuggler, claiming only to have known of Johnny Oceans. "He's a ghost, and I like that. Sometimes a ghost bumps into a ghost."

But nothing is quite what it seems...

Looking For Johnny from gorillaland on Vimeo.

Biography

Italian American Gypsy, born Miami, Florida, 1959. Keen bill fisherman and scuba diver. Formerly worked in "inconspicuous import/export" on the Florida coast. Was a member of the Devini family, Meyer Lansky’s gaming connection in 1950s Havana. Managed their casino in Malindi until his disappearance.

Has no known military record.

During the Second World War, Oceans' grandfather Capitano Luigi Salvatore was stationed in Africa Orientale Italiana, today’s Eritrea, Ethiopia, South Central Somalia and Puntland. Somaliland meanwhile belonged to the British. Capitano Salvatore’s division, the Granatieri di Savoia, under the command of Generale Guglielmo Nasi, was part of the force that conquered British Somaliland in 1940,Italy’s greatest victory in the war. In the following month, while his unit was on patrol in the Sanaag, they stumbled on a valuable antiquity and swore a blood oath never to reveal their discovery to any one. Eight months later, the entire unit got wiped out by British forces in Dongolaas Gorge. Capitano Salvatore is among the many thousands of Italians who died in the Battle of Keren in Eritrea.

In 1987 Oceans' criminal record was mysteriously wiped clean by the DEA, after which his whereabouts became unknown. Five years later he turned up managing his Uncle Bobby's casino on the Kenyan Coast. In August 1998 while scuba diving on the Malindi Watamu bank, he vanished and is presumed dead.

"The good guy's Keyser Soze..."

Ocean's always carried a small .38 snub nose hammerless 5 shot, with a Pachmayr grip and MIC holster, which he kept loaded with +p .38 hollow-point bullets: "Go in like a pencil and come out like a typewriter!"

Gitmo alumnus Ali al-Rubaysh finds inspiration in the most unlikely places.

One for the Road by Harold Pinter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Arguably Pinter's most powerful political play. But it must be read slowly, deliberately seeking out the drama in each and every murky corner of Pinter's pendulous pauses before reading the next lacerating line. What appears to be a paragraph on the page may go on for some time on stage. 'What do you think this is? It’s my finger. And this is my little finger. This is my big finger and this is my little finger. I wave my big finger in front of your eyes. Like this. And now I do the same with my little finger. I can also use both…at the same time. Like this. I can do absolutely anything I like. Do you think I’m mad? My mother did.'

Much of the chatter is one-sided but Nic is no obvious monster, as he demonstrates certain vulnerability and empathy with his victims: a husband, wife and son who are being held prisoner by an unnamed State and tortured. But these are only the tools of a seasoned bureaucratic tyrant, a ploy to make the pain of his victims less bearable when he finally tells them the truth. Or is it the truth?

One For the Road counts among my list of profoundly influential pieces of literature.

View all my reviews