Point Dume

I just finished my new novel “Point Dume” which will be published in May by Overlook Press. Prominent themes include the death of surf culture, human traffiking, the Mexican drug cartel, illegal pot farms on public lands, environmental devastation, and obsessive love. On July 17 law enforcement discovered 3,500 pot plants in the Malibu mountains.

Read about the pot farms in the Malibu Times

Malibu used to be a remote, blue-collar community. When I was a kid, there wasn’t even a town, just 21 miles of coastline between the Pacific Palisades and Oxnard. It was a wonderful place to grow up, remote and wild. In recent years, Malibu has been invaded by the rich who often build gigantic mansions on the hilltops and strip the land for their vanity vineyards. Other new neighbors include the drug cartels, who are growing marijuana on public land (often right in the backyards of the billionaires). I didn’t need to do any research about the wealthy Malibuites; they live in your face. But I had to do a lot of fieldwork to find out about the cartels and the pot farms.

I interviewed a bunch of law enforcement, made some connections and somehow wormed my way onto “Operation Loccust”, a multi-agency investigation in July of 2008 up in Sequoia National Forest that resulted in 36 arrests and $1.4 billion in eradicated marijuana plants. Under heavy guard by the U.S. Park Police, I got to hike into active grow-sites and breakdown the infrastructure of camps and gardens. I saw first hand the how the growers are permanently polluting waterways and killing animals. I hauled out miles of PVC pipe and crawled though tunnels of poison oak to access the water sources. (I also got to fly in a Black Hawk helicopter). The whole operation was dangerous as hell and totally thrilling.