Honor Thy Father: The Saga Of A Drug Smuggler’s Son
Brady Cobb’s Sunburn Cannabis: A Legal Tribute to His Smuggling Father.
Brady Cobb founded Sunburn Cannabis as a tribute to his dad, a legendary “saltwater cowboy” who once operated a $300 million ring smuggling Colombian weed into Florida. Bill Cobb was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his crimes. His son will sell $50 million of pot this year—all legally.
Clyde Walton Cobb might not have been the best father figure, but he was a hell of a pot smuggler. Between 1977 and 1981, Cobb, who used a suntan oil business as a front, and along with a group of “saltwater cowboys,” generated $300 million by smuggling marijuana from Cartegena, Colombia to the rivers and swamps of the Florida panhandle with a vast network of airplanes and shrimp boats.
At his height of his prolific drug smuggling career, Cobb—whom everyone called “Bill”—was responsible for bringing $14 million worth of weed into the United States every ten days. During the government’s three-and-a-half-year investigation dubbed “Operation Sunburn,” the authorities seized more than 50 tons of marijuana Cobb and his crew smuggled into the U.S. The federal government estimated that the crew successfully brought in more than 100 tons of weed in just a few years.
“At that point in time, they were the biggest in Florida,” says Nick Geeker, a retired judge who was the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Florida and led the Operation Sunburn investigation that eventually brought down Bill Cobb.
Father and Sun: Brady Cobb modeled his cannabis brand on his father's legend as a pot smuggler—fast boats, fast money, hot girls in bikinis, strong drinks and stronger weed.
COURTESY BRADY COBB
Some 40 years later, long after Cobb passed away from cancer, his son, Brady Cobb, launched his own cannabis company, naming it Sunburn Cannabis in honor of his father. The biggest difference? The younger Cobb is doing it legally.
“I went the licensed route because I've already had one member of the family go to prison,” says Brady Cobb, 43, on a hot day in June. “Now I’m just an un-convicted felon.”
“Sunburn is all about back when you did not have to wear seatbelts, when dudes were dudes, chicks were chicks, and everyone's having fun,” says Cobb, leaning on a rocket launcher. “If there’s one thing we stand for it is freedom.”
Inside Sunburn Cannabis’ headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Cobb shows off a photo of his father, wearing shorts and a Rolex while smiling next to an 800-pound swordfish. A giant American flag covers one wall, a few hot pink Make America Great Again hats speckle a desk, and two weapons are in reach—a bazooka and a Super Soaker. Sunburn is a good-ol’-boy cannabis brand, not the woke, politically correct corporate kind preaching about how marijuana is “Nature’s medicine.” Sunburn’s ethos is far more personal: Only in America could the son a drug smuggler exceed his father’s wildest dreams.
“Sunburn is all about back when you did not have to wear seatbelts, when dudes were dudes, chicks were chicks, and everyone's having fun,” says Cobb, leaning on the rocket launcher. “If there’s one thing we stand for it is freedom.”
And that freedom comes with a price—for its customers. Sunburn, which is on track to generate just over $50 million in revenue this year from its 13 dispensaries across Florida, competes in one of the largest cannabis markets in the U.S. The Sunshine State, which only has a medical marijuana program, sold $2 billion worth of cannabis last year, making it the country’s biggest medical market.
A ballot measure to legalize recreational cannabis sales in Florida is headed to the polls this November, and if it passes, the state’s weed market is expected to swell to $5 billion, according to marijuana sales data firm Headset. While many cannabis companies are spending money to expand ahead of the vote, Sunburn is cutting costs—the company reduced the salaries of 86 employees, around 5% for low-level staff and up to 35% for executives—with the goal to be cash flow positive by the third quarter of the year.
“If the vote goes our way in November,” says Cobb, while driving his Ford Raptor to his retail store on U.S. 1 in Fort Lauderdale, “I'll be a coiled spring and don't need help from anybody.”
Brady Cobb was born in 1981, the same year his father and 12 others were indicted on dozens of charges related to trafficking marijuana. The Cobbs were living at 461 Ocean Boulevard in Golden Beach, Florida—the same house Eric Clapton named his 1974 album after and where, four years earlier, two men posed as police, handcuffed Bill and stole $1.5 million. (The thieves, carrying the cash in plaid suitcases, were apprehended, and Bill got some of his money back after the IRS took its taste.) Bill was looking at a life sentence, the former prosecutor Geeker says. But after turning state’s witness, he got a better deal: if he ratted out his associates and copped to a charge of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, he would only get 20 years. (The other 12 members of the crew were convicted of more than 30 counts of violating the Controlled Substances Act for importing and distributing marijuana and the continuing criminal enterprise statute.) He went to prison in 1982. Two years later, represented by the attorneys Johnny Cochrane, F. Lee Bailey and Alan Dershowitz—who later found fame as part of O.J. Simpson’s “dream team” of lawyers—he was released after a successful appeal. But he went right back to smuggling until he was arrested again. Brady’s mother and father divorced, and he grew up not seeing his dad much.
By 1999, when Brady went to Florida State University in Tallahassee, his father owned 90 acres of farmland nearby. Brady and his friend Chris Rice would visit Bill to ride four wheelers, shoot guns and bring handfuls of pot back to school from Bill’s stash. Sitting around the fire pit, smoking joints, Bill would regale his son with outrageous tales of his smuggling career. (One of his favorites: when an associate stiffed Bill on a couple hundred thousand dollars, Bill took him up in his Lear jet—he owned two—opened the door and told him to find the money or jump. The guy quickly found the cash.) But Bill would always warn Brady about not following in his flip-flops.
Most criminals, of course, want their kids to become a doctor or lawyer, and that’s exactly what Brady did. After graduating from law school at Barry University in Orlando in 2006, he went to work for the former Florida State Senator Jim Scott at his law firm, Tripp Scott, where Cobb “carried briefcases and shut up and listened,” he says. While Cobb had a great job, and eventually made partner, he watched in the 2010s as marijuana legalization slowly started to expand from California and knew his next step would be in the licensed cannabis economy.
“When I became a lawyer, part of me did it so I could do what Bill did legally,” says Cobb while eating a burger and drinking a Coors Light.
In 2016, Florida legalized medical marijuana and Cobb wanted in. By that time, he and a friend were running their own law firm and lobbying in Florida. A few of their clients wanted to get into the cannabis industry, so they raised some money and bought a license in Florida, starting the company Liberty Health Sciences.
His mother was furious.
“She was so mad at me for doing that,” he says. “‘What are you doing in that business? It ruined our family,’” Cobb remembers her saying.
After running another cannabis firm, Sol Global, which invested $200 million in other marijuana companies, Cobb saw an opportunity to strike out on his own. In 2019, after raising $40 million, he bought a medical marijuana license in Florida with a few partners. He and the small team didn’t have the money to build retail stores, so they focused on growing quality cannabis—Brady convinced some growers from California and Colorado to join and bring their innovative genetics to Fort Lauderdale—and One Plant was launched as a vertically-integrated delivery service.
“It’s better to be lucky than good because when Covid came around in 2020, we had the only delivery service in the state,” says Cobb. “And then we started opening stores. We built that business up and sold it.”
In April 2021, Illinois-based multi-state operator Cresco bought One Plant for $213 million in an all-stock deal. Cobb received about $4.2 million in stock. In June, he and the One Plant management team resigned from Cresco, and he took a month off and went to Aspen with his family, passing the time hiking and fly fishing.
By August, Cobb had returned to Florida and was restless. He and his One Plant cofounders began going back to their old office, which is family-owned, to kick around some new ideas. Before Bill passed away, Rice interviewed him about his smuggling days and wrote a movie script based on his adventures. But instead of developing it into a feature film, they decided to give it a different kind of Hollywood ending—and turned Bill’s story into a cannabis company.
They built an investor deck based on Bill’s legend—fast boats, fast money, hot girls in bikinis, strong drinks, and stronger bud. A marketing agency dissected their pitch deck—which featured a woman in a skimpy bathing suit on page one—and told them to “proceed with caution.” A well-known founder of a cannabis public relations firm called Cobb and yelled at him for objectifying women. But Cobb and Rice, who both grew up in Florida, trusted their vision.
All the other cannabis companies, from Trulieve and Curaleaf to Green Thumb Industries and Cresco, built brands around the idea of cannabis as a wellness product. But for Sunburn, they wanted to build a brand that spoke to Florida’s pirate past, and long history of drug smuggling, party culture and soaking up rays. The company logo features a shrimp boat in a nod to Bill’s cartel days.
“That's our DNA,”says Cobb. “The nature of our economy is about having fun. There's a reason Jimmy Buffett built Margaritaville into the brand he did and sings about boats, girls, drugs, fishing—that’s basically my entire childhood.”
In fall 2021, Cobb and his team started approaching investors and by the next August they had raised $45 million, mostly from high-net-worth individuals and cannabis investors. Even Don Hankey, the billionaire subprime loan king who recently put-up President Trump’s $175 million bond, agreed to lend Sunburn $31 million. The company used the money to buy MedMen’s Florida assets in August 2022 for $63 million—the once promising “Apple of weed” that crashed and is now in receivership thanks to poor management. With two cultivation sites, 13 retail stores, including one on Duval Street in Key West, a few doors down from the Pier House, where Bill Cobb smuggled his first 70,000-pound load from Colombia, the company began making a name for itself.
Today, Sunburn is ranked 14th in in the state, in terms of number of retail stores—Trulieve, the state’s largest, has 137 locations—but it has big fans. Actor Bill Murray has been spotted wearing Sunburn merchandise. And Emily Paxhia, a cofounder of San Francisco-based cannabis hedge fund Poseidon, invested around $2 million in Cobb’s company—despite being hesitant at first. “Now, everyone is talking about Sunburn,” she says, “I’m kind of obsessed.”
Bill Cobb never lived long enough to appreciate his son’s success as a cannabis entrepreneur. On July 10, 2010, three days after Bill slipped into a coma, Brady made the tough decision to pull him off life support. Even though Bill was unconscious, the man with the cojones to smuggle millions of pounds of Colombian weed into America during the height of the war on drugs, kept breathing for seven more days.
“He had the same rebellious spirit all the way through,” Cobb says.
Now a father himself, Cobb says that while he loves his dad, he didn’t exactly look to him as a parental role model. He says he has learned to take both the good and bad from the man known as “Dollar Bill.”
“I'm not saying he was a great person: he cheated on my mom, he wasn't really in my life, and missed a lot of my birthdays,” says Cobb. “I have taken some of the negatives of how he lived his life and do the opposite.”
Still, when things get tough, he thinks to himself: What would Bill do?
“Cowboy up,” says Cobb. “Cannabis has always favored the bold.”
