Robert Platshorn
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| Robert Platshorn | |
|---|---|
| Born | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States |
| Died | 1 April 2023 |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Salesman; marijuana importer; medical cannabis campaigner |
| Known for | Partner in the Black Tuna Gang, a Miami marijuana importing ring of the 1970s; the Silver Tour |
Robert Elliot Platshorn was one of the partners who ran the Black Tuna Gang, a ring based in Miami that imported marijuana from Colombia into the United States in the second half of the 1970s.[1]: 985–987 Convicted with his partner Robert Meinster in 1980, he was sentenced to 64 years in prison.[1]: 985 n. 2 He left prison in 2008 and from about 2010 campaigned among older people in Florida for the legalisation of medical cannabis, through a series of talks he called the Silver Tour. An obituary published by the Neptune Society gives his death as 1 April 2023.[2][3]
Before the ring
Platshorn was born in Philadelphia.[4] He finished high school in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and studied communications and journalism at Temple University and the University of Miami without taking a degree. Before 1974 he worked as a pitchman, demonstrating kitchen appliances and other goods to crowds at fairs and on the Atlantic City boardwalk.[5]
In the Black Tuna Gang
The appeals court traced the ring to August 1974, when a Florida dealer arranged with Platshorn to send a load of marijuana to Meinster in Philadelphia.[1]: 985–986 Platshorn told Miami New Times in 2008 that it began at the Wisconsin State Fair that month, where an acquaintance looking for buyers asked him for a contact and he passed the man on to Meinster, a friend since childhood.[5] He moved to Miami in 1975.[5] In the spring of 1976 he leased a property in Miami for an automobile auction, which the court found was a cover for the partners' importing and distribution of marijuana.[1]: 985–986 The business was the South Florida Auto Auction, which the two partners owned.[4]
In the autumn of 1976 Platshorn went to Colombia and arranged to buy marijuana directly from the supplier Raúl Dávila Jimeno, at about 60 dollars a pound.[1]: 987 A witness testified that Platshorn told him he had been arrested by soldiers in Colombia and held until Dávila paid 300,000 dollars.[1]: 987 n. 6 In the version Platshorn gave the Miami New Times in 2008, soldiers stopped him at an airstrip near the Caribbean coast on his second buying trip and Dávila freed him with 40,000 dollars.[5][6]: 113 Platshorn gave the ring's members a medallion in the shape of a dark fish, worn around the neck.[1]: 987
Until March 1977 the ring's headquarters was a suite at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. In April Platshorn acquired a houseboat, which was moored beside the hotel and became the next headquarters. In July 1977 he met a man from North Carolina whom a co-defendant had brought in. He told him that he planned to import 40,000 pounds (18,000 kg) of marijuana over the Labor Day weekend and would rather land it in North Carolina than in Florida. In August he confirmed to the same man that the ring had earned about 12 million dollars the year before. The load was to come on an 85-foot yacht that Platshorn had bought for 250,000 dollars in cash.[1] It ran aground in the Bahamas.[7] In January 1978 Platshorn and two others made several attempts to bring in marijuana from Dávila, none of which succeeded.[1]
Platshorn told the Miami New Times that after police raided one of the ring's stash houses in the spring of 1977 he meant to stay on the margins of the trade.[5] The court found that a single conspiracy ran through the whole period of the indictment, from August 1974 to April 1978.[1]: 985
Trials and sentence
Platshorn was arrested in May 1978 and released on bail. After the bail was revoked, federal agents arrested him at his home in September 1978.[5] In the first trial, in North Carolina, he and Meinster were convicted of aiding and abetting the importation of marijuana over a shipment seized by customs officers in December 1977. The Fourth Circuit upheld the convictions on 18 April 1980.[7] Platshorn later said that neither he nor Meinster had been near that shipment.[5]
A federal grand jury in Miami indicted him with 13 others on 1 May 1979.[6]: 112 Time called him and Meinster the ring's "alleged bosses".[4] One count of the superseding indictment charged the two partners with running a continuing criminal enterprise.[1] The trial ran from September 1979 to February 1980. On 6 December 1979 the government obtained an indictment charging several defendants with conspiring to obstruct justice, alleging a plot to disrupt the trial and kill the judge.[1]: 985 The Miami New Times reported in 2008 that a jury later rejected the allegation that Platshorn and Meinster had plotted the judge's murder; Platshorn denied it.[5]
He was convicted of the continuing-enterprise count and of offences under the racketeering statute (RICO), the Travel Act and the federal drug laws. The court sentenced him to 64 years in prison, fines of 325,000 dollars and special parole terms totalling eight years. Of the 64 years, 34 were for the continuing-enterprise count, which carries no parole.[1]: 985 n. 2 The Fifth Circuit upheld his convictions and sentence on 28 December 1981.[1]
Prison and release
While held at the Federal Correctional Institution, Petersburg, in Virginia, Platshorn petitioned for habeas corpus against the warden and the United States Parole Commission. The district court denied the petition on 1 December 1997 and the Fourth Circuit affirmed on 15 January 1999.[8]
On 1 April 2008, after 28 years in prison, he was moved to a halfway house in West Palm Beach.[5] The Federal Bureau of Prisons released him from its custody on 26 September 2008.[9] He told the Miami New Times that year: "I'm the longest-serving marijuana prisoner." In prison he had written a book on a typewriter, The Black Tuna Diaries, which had found no publisher by mid-2008.[5] After his release he made it into a memoir.[10]
The Silver Tour
Platshorn dated the start of the Silver Tour to 2010.[3] Its talks took the case for medical cannabis to retirement communities and synagogues in South Florida, where doctors, nurses and other campaigners spoke alongside him on its use for pain, insomnia, multiple sclerosis and Crohn's disease.[11][12] He said he had picked older people because they voted and would write to their members of Congress and call their senators.[11] In 2012 the tour put up two billboards in Deerfield Beach calling for medical marijuana to be legalised and rescheduled.[12]
Before the Florida votes on medical marijuana in 2014 and 2016 he made a 30-minute television infomercial, Should Grandma Smoke Pot?, and he paid for 8,000 radio spots. The 2014 proposal fell short of the 60 per cent it needed; the constitutional amendment of 2016 passed with 71.3 per cent of the vote. He later toured South Florida in a bus, which he also used to take older Floridians to Washington to lobby Congress.[10]
By 2019 the presentations were sponsored by Trulieve, a Florida medical marijuana grower and seller.[3] He told the Miami New Times that year that the Colombian marijuana the ring had imported, which he called Colombian Gold, became "the mother strain for every good medical strain in the U.S. today".[3] By 2022 he was selling medical marijuana legally for a Florida dispensary company, including a strain named Black Tuna.[13]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 United States v. Phillips 664 F.2d 971. 5th Cir. (1981).
- ↑ "Robert Platshorn Obituary". Neptune Society. Retrieved 3 November 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Alvarado, Francisco (15 April 2019). "Former Marijuana Smuggler Robert Platshorn Pitches Pot to Seniors". Miami New Times. Retrieved 3 November 2026.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 "Nation: Tuna Catch". Time. 14 May 1979. Retrieved 3 November 2026.
- ↑ 5.00 5.01 5.02 5.03 5.04 5.05 5.06 5.07 5.08 5.09 Hargrove, Brantley (19 June 2008). "Black Tuna Gang Leader Gets Out of Jail". Miami New Times. Retrieved 3 November 2026.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Sáenz Rovner, Eduardo (2011). "Entre Carlos Lehder y los vaqueros de la cocaína. La consolidación de las redes de narcotraficantes colombianos en Miami en los años 70". Cuadernos de Economía (in español). 30 (54): 105–126.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 United States v. Meinster 619 F.2d 1041. 4th Cir. (18 April 1980). Retrieved 2 November 2026.
- ↑ Platshorn v. Hahn. 4th Cir. (15 January 1999). No. 98-6115 (unpublished). Retrieved 3 November 2026.
- ↑ "Find an inmate: Robert Elliot Platshorn". Federal Bureau of Prisons. Retrieved 3 November 2026.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 Pinsky, Mark I. (28 May 2019). "How Old Florida Jews Helped Legalize Medical Marijuana". The Forward. Retrieved 3 November 2026.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Rapado, Donna (27 January 2012). "Former Drug Smuggler Leading 'The Silver Tour' for Medical Marijuana". NBC 6 South Florida. Retrieved 3 November 2026.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 Lilly, Christiana (15 March 2012). "The Silver Tour: Former Drug Smuggler Robert Platshorn Targets South Florida Seniors For Medical Marijuana Advocacy". HuffPost. Retrieved 3 November 2026.
- ↑ Byrnes, Joe (20 April 2022). "On 4/20, it's high time to talk about Florida seniors and medical marijuana". WMFE. Central Florida Public Media. Retrieved 3 November 2026.