Sea of Greed

Sea of Greed just got a nice write-up in New Bern’s newspaper, The Sun Journal. Here’s an excerpt:

The end of dictator Manuel Noriega of Panama began on the shores of eastern North Carolina with two New Bern men and a Carteret County man playing major roles, but the men did not know it at the time.

In the early 1980s, New Bern’s  Gary Clemmons was an assistant U.S. attorney and Charles Ken McCotter Jr. was a U.S. Magistrate Judge.  Doug McCullough of Carteret County, now an N.C. Court of Appeals judge, was a first assistant, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District. .

Clemmons and McCullough were the government prosecutors when the Coast Guard stopped a Gulf Coast shrimp trawler near Cape Lookout in the Beaufort Inlet on the July 4th weekend of 1982.

That routine stop by the Coast Guard set in motion events that ended with the U.S. invasion of Panama, the overthrow of Noriega and one of the largest drug hauls in America’s history.

McCullough has written a book about the case, which involved shrimp boats, cruise ships, Lear jets, Caribbean hookers, Detroit teamsters, Hollywood stars, Vegas nights, bribed U.S. customs agents, offshore banks, and millions of dollars, all with the goal of smuggling tons of high-grade Colombian marijuana into the Carolinas, Georgia and Louisiana.

The book is titled Sea of Greed. McCullough said the book is nonfiction with transcripts of interviews and court testimony woven in. McCotter, who read a draft of the book, calls it compelling. "It was hard to put down," he said.

…..You can read the rest of the article here.