The Dukes of Oxy: How a Band of Teen Wrestlers Built a Smuggling Empire. How a crew of hard-partying Florida teens cashed in on an epidemic and built a multimillion-dollar OxyContin smuggling ring.
Prisoners pitch me their stories from time to time. But I’ve never before reported an article based on the manuscript of a tale written by a convicted drug dealer and a major mortgage fraud mastermind, both inmates in a federal facility in Florida. A while back, Doug Dodd and his prison writing partner, Matthew Cox, sent me a document titled “Oxy Rush: From High School Wrestlers to Oxycodone Kingpins,” asking if I might be interested in writing about the story. Dodd was serving 80 months for trafficking illegal prescription drugs and money laundering. Cox was doing 26 years for a massive fraud he’d committed by originating fake mortgages and stealing the proceeds. The hundred or so pages they’d written were printed in the form of prison-issue e-mails, with inmate numbers stamped at the top.
I read the description of Dodd’s adventures as a teenage drug dealer, and the story described a universe I didn’t know existed, the half-crazy swirl of a gang of high school wresting buddies who turned themselves into an extremely unlikely organized-crime enterprise. There was a certain kind of charm to Dodd and his pals, even as they broke the law with abandon. Mostly I liked Dodd’s voice: He was a maniac, but he was also smart and observant. He was like a pill-pusher version of The Wolf of Wall Street, it seemed to me, or the mobster Henry Hill in GoodFellas: an insider whose descent into the chaos and collapse of a major criminal conspiracy offered a window into an amazing underworld. So I checked out Dodd’s tale — court records, DEA files, press clippings, interviews with two of his co-conspirators. And the story lined up: What follows is his account.
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