From smuggler to businessman, Bruce Perlowin’s committed to the cause
By Paul Rogers
“It’s very embarrassing: the King of Pot doesn’t smoke pot!” admits Bruce Perlowin.
It’s true. Perlowin earned his lofty nickname not by smoking marijuana, but by smuggling it—in mind-boggling quantities. Legendary for the vast, innovative and extremely lucrative California smuggling operation he created at the turn of the 1980s, Perlowin remains hyper-active in the marijuana business to this day—only now he doesn’t deal with the product itself and stays firmly on the right side of the law.
Perlowin almost stumbled into the drug business in his native Florida in the late 1960s, when he and his teen friends sold marijuana and LSD mostly to fund their own supplies and to “raise people’s consciousness.” By the early ’70s, a boom time for smuggling in southern Florida, he was importing marijuana by simply checking suitcases full of it onto commercial flights. Perlowin was a multi-millionaire by age 25, but in 1978 the law did (almost) catch up with him and a Florida arrest warrant sent him scurrying to California.
Only Perlowin wasn’t done with smuggling—far from it. Once in Cali, he swiftly became the largest marijuana smuggler in West Coast history. A studious, meticulous man, he began by hiring a Berkeley research firm to analyze every major West Coast marijuana bust over the previous 10 years. This revealed that drop-off points were the usual weaknesses in these failed operations, so Perlowin simply bought his own pier in San Francisco Bay. Employing a fleet of ships bigger than many countries’ navies, he pioneered a smuggling route from western Colombia to San Francisco that, between 1979 and 1983, brought in half a billion dollars’ worth of marijuana. The operation counted counter-surveillance experts and international money-launderers amongst its more than 200 employees.
“It was built in a year and a half and then I just operated it for three years,” Perlowin deadpans of his empire. He’d made over $100 million by the time he turned 30; lived in a mansion in the Northern California mountains that seemed straight out of a Bond movie (complete with a bullet-proof, computer-controlled central command post and a spiral staircase to the master bedroom which could be electrified to repel invaders); and bought his then-wife an airplane for her birthday.
But in March of ’83 he was arrested after one of his money-laundering associates cut a deal with the feds. Refusing to testify against anyone in his organization, Perlowin served his full eight years in jail. A segment about him in a 2009 CNBC documentary titled Marijuana, Inc. put Perlowin’s smuggling exploits back into the public consciousness and now there’s a movie about his life in the works (which he’s not at liberty to discuss beyond that it “isn’t just about marijuana—it’s about entrepreneurialism, with marijuana as the product”).
Defying almost all drug smuggler stereotypes, Perlowin is no heat-packin‘, bling-drippin‘ muscle man. Rather he’s a mild-mannered, yoga-loving product of the ’60s who, for all the millions he made in the drug business, never resorted to violence. Today he promotes cannabis in other ways, but still with his signature business and marketing brilliance.
“I’m not involved with the marijuana itself,” he explains. “I’m involved with building the infrastructure to legitimize the industry.”
His current focus is on two divisions of a pair of publicly-traded companies he recently created with partner Don Steinberg: the Expo division of Marijuana, Inc., which produces large industry trade shows; and The Hemp Network, a marketing company that sells all industrial hemp products.
One model has permeated all of Perlowin’s wildly successful entrepreneurial adventures, legal and otherwise. “Knowledge of quantum economics—an economic model that no one on the planet has any clue about,” he says. “Another word for it is compassionate capitalism—marketing from the heart.”
One way or another, Bruce Perlowin has been making money out of marijuana since his teens (aside from that 8-year “federal vacation”). And he still holds true to many of his original, Flower Power-era ideals—though he doesn’t smoke it himself anymore.
“I believe in medical marijuana passionately—I’ve seen too many people healed by it,” he says.
www.bruceperlowin.com.
