Smuggler’s Blues: A True Story of the Hippie Mafia

Featuring encounters with the late David Bowie and Norman Mailer, plus Mick Jagger and convicted murderer and mob boss Whitey Bulger, this memoir by Stratton, a former editor and publisher of High Times magazine, details the author’s final years as part of the so-called Hippie Mafia. Beginning in 1980, he rehashes his time smuggling pot around the world and encountering an eclectic and often laughable cast of characters. Stratton went on to spend eight years in federal prison for transporting and harboring marijuana. While there, he wrote the cult classic novel Smack Goddess, and many of the tales of his real-life adventures in search of a massive high and the ultimate payday are absorbing in the same zany way as his fiction, often at the expense of credibility. Most of the individuals he mentions are identified only by nicknames such as Fearless Fred Barnswallow and Jonathan Livingston Seagull (later referred to as Jonathan Dead Seagull). Stratton’s liberal use of dialogue casts some doubt on the veracity of his action and sex scenes. There’s no doubt that Stratton is a keen and thrilling writer, but he reveals pieces of his own back story the same way he operated as a criminal: on a need-to-know basis. Agent: Ria Julien, Golden Literary Agency. (Apr.)