My dad and the crew exchanged nervous looks, but they were excited, too. Dense and potent, you could smell it the instant it came on deck. When he and the crew hauled them up, among thousands of scallops were chunks of a sticky, leathery substance shaped like the sole of a shoe. While dredging the ocean floor that afternoon, his nets had caught something else. My father wasn’t thinking about scallops, though. The haul was worth $7,000, about the cost of a new pickup. Joshua’s Delight’s 300-horsepower engine strained under the weight of the day’s catch-over a thousand pounds of scallops. That night, he hoped his luck was changing. Despite fishing these waters for almost ten years, he was barely able to keep our small family fed. Our drafty cottage was built for two seasons, but we lived there all year long-it lacked indoor plumbing and was heated with a wood stove. He shared a two-room cottage with my mother and me, then just a toddler. One of the fishermen aboard that night was my father, Frank Ryan, then 33. Out on the dark waters, a 42-foot scallop-dragger named Joshua’s Delight glided toward the harbor. They waited in the shadows, ready to look for the evidence that would confirm the rumors. They’d received an anonymous tip that some of the scallop boats tied up at the dock had been carrying illegal drugs along with their catches. With them, a drug-sniffing dog strained at the end of a leash. One cold April night in 1983, authorities from the Drug Enforcement Administration and Maine State Police arrived at the Northeast Harbor Marina on Mount Desert Island.
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