Coronado High Audiobook By Joshuah Bearman cover art

Coronado High

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for $0.00
Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 3 months. Cancel anytime.

Coronado High

By: Joshuah Bearman
Narrated by: Brett Gelman
Try for $0.00

$0.00/mo. after 3 months. Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $6.95

Buy for $6.95

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

Nobody would've figured the kids from the sleepy beach town of Coronado, California, for criminal masterminds. They were just some hippie surfers, high school friends who'd come up with the idea of swimming bundles of marijuana across the border from Tijuana during the summer of 1969.

Within a decade, however, the Coronado Company had become the largest pot-smuggling operation on the West Coast, a $100 million empire with outposts from Mexico to Morocco to Thailand. And sitting at the top of it all was the most improbable of kingpins: Lou Villar, a former Spanish teacher and swimming coach at Coronado High School.

Drawing on exclusive interviews with Villar and his partners in crime, Joshuah Bearman - author of the Wired article that became the film, Argo - tells the inside story of the Coronado Company's unlikely rise and the intrepid DEA agents who brought its principals to justice. Coronado High is an epic saga of daring escapades, hedonistic excess, and friendships betrayed, played out across the era when the innocence of the Summer of Love curdled into the paranoia of the Drug War.

©2013 The Atavist, Joshuah Bearman (P)2013 The Atavist, Joshuah Bearman Americas Organized Crime True Crime United States Crime Mexico Latin America
All stars
Most relevant  
Brett Gelman (the reader) has a sexy-surfer voice but I wish I'd had a hard copy of the book as I found it hard to keep everyone straight. I don't know if this was a long article for a periodical but it reads like one. In the end...crime pays (if you're willing to do a bit of time) and that's kinda sad.

Crime pays

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.