IN COCONUT GROVE: An Evening with Capt. Scott E. Sherouse, PhD

Books & Books in Coconut Grove is proud to present an evening with Scott Sherouse discussing Miami Outlaw: Kid to Kingpin (MIAMI OUTLAW SAGA) (BookBaby, $32)

This event will take place at Books & Books in Coconut Grove. RSVP is free, but please only register if you intend to join us as space is limited. Can't make the event or want your copy early?

MIAMI OUTLAW: KID TO KINGPIN fuses historical research, anthropological detail, and deeply personal experience into a rich portrait of OUR very ill-fated war on drugs. Scott Sherouse details youth not fueled by desperation, but on a quest for riches; and their willingness to do nearly anything to get them. America's post-Vietnam social woes are the backdrop for the chronicles of a few mid-1970s Miami Palmetto High wrestlers from the mat to narcotics traffickers. The author tells a story he helped create; he nurtured the main protagonist in the beginning of a decades-long journey that led to smuggling on three continents.

Part oral history, part mea culpa, MIAMI OUTLAW, weaves an omnivorous tale of avarice and deceit with a personal inquiry into the slippery disposition of truth, betrayal, and human nature. An epic filled with a poignant sense of discovery in a coming-of-age tale gone awry: a true American tragedy, and an unflinching view into the forces that shaped a generation: an insatiable market for drugs, a broken justice system that rewarded expediency over truth, and the vast gray area between outlaws and lawmen.

Dr. Sherouse intertwines the personal with the political—linking midnight boat runs and nightclub deals to Cold War-era policies and CIA complicity. Scott the smuggler, names names, reveals logistics, and shows how the Miami Vice mythos obscured a much stranger and more human reality.

The author recalls bootlegging stories from his earliest childhood memories on Miami's early '60s docks, which helped him self-legitimize the first small pot runs. The mayhem slowly builds with plane crashes in gin-clear water coupled with family tragedies that are all too human. Through vivid characters and electrifying scenes, the book captures the thrill and ruin of life on the edge. Sherouse’s prose is sharp and searching; he neither glamorizes nor condemns but instead demands a reckoning with the blurred lines of American justice, capitalism, and survival

Scott C Sherouse is an American author and United States Merchant Marine yacht captain.Born 1955 in Tallahassee, FL where his father was Executive Director of the Florida Bar, they returned to their hometown Miami, in 1957. Scott was a Miami Palmetto High school wrestler and football player and went to Miami Dade College on a wrestling scholarship. Scott then went to Florida State University and played on the 1975 state champion rugby team before taking a job at the US Navy base AUTEC on Andros Island, Bahamas. Sherouse started smuggling marijuana in 1977 while living on Andros Island. He was indicted in 1990 and released from Pr*son in 1994. Following his release, Sherouse began a second life at Florida International University, where he amassed an array of interdisciplinary degrees, with high honors.

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