MIAMI OUTLAW: KID TO KINGPIN

620 pages.

Featuring a matte laminated cover with deep, full-color artwork and stylish inner flaps for hardcover-like presentation. This edition of MIAMI OUTLAW: KID TO KINGPIN is designed to feel substantial in the hand – and unforgettable on the shelf. 

The Alex DeCubas story,
as introduced on ESPN’s PIN KINGS

THE MIAMI OUTLAW: KID TO KINGPIN.

In one of Miami’s few upscale suburban high schools, a solid young tenth grader went out for nearly every athletic team, and his success was stunning. As early as ninth grade they were writing about him.

Vin Mannix, a sports writer for the now defunct South Dade News Leader, wrote, “The staggering fact about this youngster is this: Except for last season’s championship match, DeCubas has NEVER wrestled beyond the first period the last two years. He has pinned everyone he faced.” -The Miami Herald

In a searing examination of modern society’s thirst for drugs and the folly of the official drug war, THE MIAMI OUTLAW: KID TO KINGPIN mixes meticulous historical research, investigative reporting, and anthropological detail to illuminate the origins of a few young men’s quest for riches and their willingness to do almost anything to get them. In doing so Sherouse sets them within a landscape of South Florida’s other societal woes in the years just after Vietnam. The result is a tour de force of history and storytelling combined with a plaintive cry for understanding. The author is revealing a story he helped create, he nurtured the protagonist in the beginning of a lifelong journey that led to his envelopment in the criminal underworld of three continents.

THE MIAMI OUTLAW: KID TO KINGPIN dismantles myths as it moves from the naïve optimism of “Just Say No” through the treacherous ripoff world of Miami’s hungry criminals. Sherouse follows the dizzying paths young men chose for immediate gratification through an upward spiral leading them to cocaine shipments of over 10,000 lbs. Throughout, the story animates a world often sloughed off to pink flamingoes and fancy cars; its emboldened characters —drug smugglers, ripoff-men, government careerists, and fools, dance about living life alongside a parallel universe of normality. Drawing from years of research, prison interviews, a decade living the life, and recently declassified government records. Dr. Sherouse also presents a richly human account of an evolution in our nation’s view on drugs. Sherouse’s prose does exactly what the best historical or anthropological writing does—it takes the familiar and shows us another side; it takes the unfamiliar and lets us see inside. His scope is omnivorous—Sherouse is dazzling in his research and due-diligence. This is a book about connections between people and culture, people and history, people and the transnational economy. Sherouse pulls together expanding threads of a vast story and what emerges is disquieting.

THE MIAMI OUTLAW: KID TO KINGPIN is an epic filled with a poignant sense of discovery in a coming of age tale gone awry: a true American tragedy.