For a group of teenage surfer dudes hanging out in the quiet beach community of Coronado, California in the 1970s, opportunity knocked big-time after they started swimming packages of marijuana from Mexico to their local beach in the middle of the night. And when they brought in their former high school Spanish teacher to help them, over the next decade they would grow their business into a $100 million-dollar global drug cartel, replete with secret bases and luxury homes on both coasts.
Katherine Nichols’ new ‘Deep Water’ (Simon True, true crime young adult imprint of Simon & Schuster) drops the reader smack into the middle of the action, revealing a charismatic, interestingly likeable crew that applied innate business savvy to create lavish lifestyles and mystique before being forced to face very adult and very serious consequences for their actions and decisions.
Nichols grew up in Coronado, and like those Coronado High students, has had a life-long affinity for the ocean and long distance swimming. She’d always heard the myths and rumors of the infamous Coronado Company, and was determined to understand the whole story—not only the events as they transpired, but the personalities and the motivations of these unlikely smugglers.
As she told me, she approached the story (which she first began considering as a book back in the 1990s) with an open mind, wanting to convey the characters as they truly were, as opposed to judging them for the crimes they were ultimately convicted of.
“I wanted to deal with them as human beings, vs. as criminals. I didn’t want to make them better or worse, just capture the reality of what was happening: a group of smart young guys that saw a business opportunity and who were very entrepreneurial. They made mistakes and they paid for them. But I tried to capture both the strengths and weaknesses of each person. These were complex individuals which I never really got the sense of when I’d hear the stories about them growing up in Coronado. So part of my mission was to represent them accurately.”
And so the one-time journalist skillfully approached the story by digging deeper and discovering aspects of the main characters and situations that had not been written about before. As a local, she was able to penetrate many walls that had been placed up around these events and produce a thrilling story that reads almost as fiction; as romantic and adventurous as it is taut and dangerous.
“Researching was a frustrating yet fascinating process of digging up elusive, archived court records, tracking down key players, and interviewing anyone who could offer first-hand accounts of these people at various times in their lives,” Nichols said. “Interviews posed their own difficulties, as these events took place decades ago. Sifting through the information and deciding how to focus the story loomed as a challenge throughout.”
And as a tenacious swimmer/athlete herself (Nichols is a three-time finisher of the Ironman Triathlon World Championship in Hawaii) she was able to capture and relate to the strenuous physical challenges inherent in earliest stages of the cartel formation.
She is currently earning a Master’s of Business Administration (M.B.A.) degree at Yale School of Management, and was particularly fascinated by the founders’ ingenious negotiation and operational skills, as well as their ring leader’s charisma and vision.
“I never really appreciated the depth of their business skills until I’d be sitting in class and all of a sudden it would hit me: my gosh, they understood the aspects of scale, and market disruption and differentiation. These guys were smart.”
Many old timers in the city of Coronado have moved on from this story, and while at first Nichols was concerned that locals would push back against someone trying to dredge this to the surface, the response locally has been quite positive.
"It's part of the history here and I think people understand that it remains an interesting story. It happened long enough ago where I don't think it puts the city in any sort of negative light. The early 1970s, culturally, is a long time ago. Our country was different, and while you certainly can't excuse what went on, when you place it in context of how things were then, it's really not that shocking. This was an opportunity these guys felt they could not pass up. And when you think about their lives back then, it's not too hard to see how they got swept up in all this."
Nichols’ gift for detail and narrative organization has resulted in a finely-crafted book that delivers the goods (and the bads), in a thoroughly compelling page-turner. As we approach the summer reading season, when everyone starts to think about what books they want handy by the beach and by the pool, it's hard to imagine anything more appropriate the 'Deep Water.’