Donald Steinberg - America's Largest Marijuana Smuggler - tells all for the first time in: The Blue Jean Millionaire

From the jungles near the Cambodian border — where he served as a combat medic in 1969 — to the waterways of South Florida, from a Manhattan townhouse with an indoor pool to a California arrest that ended with a federal agent putting his gun away because Don asked him to: this is an American life that doesn't fit any existing category. 

As America's Largest Marijuana Smuggler, he accidentally started the Florida Mafia war. He was part of a nationwide manhunt and was caught because the DEA recognized his dog's name. He pleaded guilty, forfeited what was left, and served less than six years of a mandatory ten-year sentence — released through a good-time loophole that changed federal sentencing law. 

He walked out of prison the same month his name appeared in Playboy's cover-featured special report on drug enforcement — the only American, and the only marijuana trafficker, named alongside the Colombian cartel figures the article used to illustrate the scale of the drug trade.

Then he built himself back — through options trading, telecom, legal cannabis, and a series of public companies — without ever stopping to feel sorry for himself.

• TIME Magazine, November 1981 — "Life in the Drug Trade": named, quoted on the record, at peak national circulation as a notable figure in the marijuana smuggling world. 
• Playboy, December 1985 — featured alongside Pablo Escobar, Roberto Suárez Gómez, and Gonzalo Rodríguez in a cover story focused on drug enforcement. 
• Rolling Stone, June 1986 — The Underground Empire serialized across two consecutive covers (the Madonna issue and the Tom Cruise / Top Gun issue), highlighting the true crime story of the era. 
• CBS News Chicago / Bill Curtis, 1979 - "Marijuana Incorporated" — a three-part investigative TV special whose on-screen graphic read: "Marijuana Inc. — $1 Billion Gross Profit." The footage is no longer publicly available anywhere. It is in our possession. 
• PBS / Charlie Rose, 1981 — national broadcast identifying Steinberg as "the Henry Ford of the marijuana industry — made more money than U.S. Steel." 
• U.S. Department of Justice, 1984 — CENTAC 20: "Donald Joseph Steinberg Org. — Marijuana" — named in an official report transmitted to President Reagan. 
• ABC — acquired mini-series rights to the Underground Empire in the mid-1980s. Never made, because Don declined to participate. 
• The Archives — Include 50+ newspaper and wire articles. 21 publications. 7 books and literary works. Court records, DEA files, and federal government documents — all on file.

Don is not sharing his story for ego or glory. He has pushed it behind him for decades, always looking forward, not back. To be close enough to Don to actually hear his stories requires a human relationship — at minimum, mutual respect. To understand him at a deeper, emotional level requires trust and love.

James Mills wrote a best selling book partly about him, and ABC acquired mini-series rights to that book — not to Don's own life story. Oliver Stone's team came looking too. None of them established the relationship needed to truly understand Don's journey, and none of them held the rights to tell it.

The co-author is the niece and goddaughter of Carol Carlson — Donald's fiancée, who passed while they were on the run. She grew up in Carol's family, carrying the weight of that absence for decades, and found Don in a way that life sometimes arranges: unexpectedly, just when both of them were finally ready.

It took five years to build what this project is founded on. That's not just a research relationship; that's trust and love. And it's the reason this story — which has been circling for forty years without being told from the inside — is finally being revealed now.

This is not a marijuana smuggler story. It is not simply a true crime story. It is the narrative of an American life — fuller, stranger, and more honest than anything previously written about Donald Steinberg. For the first time, it is being told by the one person who experienced it all. 

Every comparable story in this genre — Escobar, the Medellín Cartel, the smugglers of the Florida coast — has been told after the fact, by journalists and filmmakers working from the outside, often after their subject was dead or unreachable. This one is different. Donald Steinberg is alive, present, and telling it himself.

Whether as a memoir, a limited series, or a documentary, The Blue Jean Millionaire is a tale that has been waiting for the right moment and the right collaboration. 

Now, both are finally in place.