Reef Perkins learned his Key West lessons
BY MANDY MILES Citizen Staff
mmiles@keysnews.com
Nearly 40 years ago, Paul Sawyer, a former county attorney, taught Mark “Reef” Perkins two crucial lessons about life in Key West.
“Number one, Key Westers will forgive you for anything — unless you cheat them. That they’ll remember for generations. And number two, if you’re getting run out of town, get in front of it and make it a parade,” Perkins said Monday, sitting in his pickup in the dust and gravel of Robbie’s Marina on Shrimp Road.
He was reflecting on his 46-year tenure in Key West. Well, 46 years minus the four months and 17 days Perkins spent as a guest of the federal government.
“From 1974 to ‘84 I was on the water, trying to make enough to buy Miami, as the song goes, but I pissed it away so fast,” he said of his pot-smuggling days. “And it was only pot, ever. And I never got caught in a boat. When I did get caught we were in a plane. And it was the real deal. We had the plane and the bales when we landed in Savannah, Georgia — then we had DEA agents all over us.”
Perkins remembered his attorney, who worked for the nonprofit group NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) representing people arrested on pot charges.
“Everyone else in my group was launching these big defenses, and my attorney basically told the judge, ‘Look, your honor, my client is sorry he did this. He just got back from Vietnam, which messed him up a bit, and basically he’s sorry about the decision he made.”
The judge handed Perkins a sentence of four months and 17 days while his “colleagues” got years.
“They all thought I’d rolled on them for a reduced sentence,” he said. “But it turned out, the judge had lost his son in Vietnam and when he looked at me, he knew it could just as well have been his son getting home from over there.”
Perkins spent four years in the Army, doing jobs in Southeast Asia that don’t get public citations.
“I was in a group called Special Warfare,” he said. “We didn’t really exist.”
By the time he made it home, Perkins was ready for something easier. Yeah, right.
So he became an experimental diver, jumping out of helicopters to recover nuclear torpedoes.
“Any job title that starts with ‘experimental’ attracts a serious bunch of crazy sons of bitches,” Perkins said laughing. By 1970, when he sailed into Key West with his friend, Bob Lehman, Perkins was ready to relax. He and Legman founded Ocean Charters, offering sailing excursions and other charters.
“We were right down at the Pier House, back when David Wolkowsky owned it,” Perkins said, nodding to most of the workers and boat captains who walked or drove past on Shrimp Road.
One of his old boats was on a trailer there — one of the original red-and-white Towboat US towboats, which Perkins started in Key West and operated for 25 years.
“I had Key West Harbor Services doing open ocean tows and that sort of thing before Towboat US did any of it,” he said. “They used to send their captains down to me to learn how to do open-ocean tows, so when they started a franchise in Key West, I became Key West’s Towboat US for 25 years.”
“Oh, and we had the ship’s chandlery, Perkins & Sons, shop on Fleming Street for years,” he remembered fondly.
Perkins has done nearly everything one can imagine on, in and under the water — and lived to tell about it, barely.
He published several of those high-seas adventures in recent years in a memoir called, “Sex, Salvage & Secrets.” Perkins also just released a second work of fiction called “Deep Air.”
“I was supposed to head to New York City, not Florida,” he said, starting up the truck to head to his next appointment. “But I was hitchhiking and the guy who stopped was heading to Florida. I said, ‘Then so am I.’ “
And Key West hasn’t run him out of town.
mmiles@keysnews.com
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