Plastic-wrapped bricks of drugs floating in the waters of the Florida Keys are common enough that they have a locally flavored nickname: square grouper.
This summer, lobster divers plucked a brick of cocaine from the waters off Big Pine Key, about 30 miles northeast of Key West. The boat captain, unable to find any sheriff’s deputies once she anchored, left the brick — printed with a fiery sun, praying hands and the words “With God” in Spanish — on the hood of a fire-rescue ambulance.
Eager to score an easy payday — the bricks can fetch tens of thousands of dollars — others are not so honest.
Consider John Strama, a longtime boat builder and mechanic in the Keys who led a ring of people recently sentenced to prison for distributing cocaine found at sea. Mr. Strama, 44, used his knowledge of local waterways, tides and currents to home in on cocaine bricks that either fell off boats or were dumped by spooked traffickers, federal prosecutors said.
“Fishing for ‘square groupers’ in the waters off the Florida Keys is not a harmless pastime. It is drug trafficking,” Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, said in August.
The drug trade in the Keys has ebbed and flowed over decades, but cocaine is seeing a resurgence globally. Rick Ramsay, the sheriff of Monroe County, said packages of cocaine surface nearly every week, a consistent pattern, though a string of recent cases have drawn more attention than usual.
Though the Trump administration has ordered strikes on what it says are suspected drug boats in the Caribbean, the operations have taken place far from the Keys, making it unlikely that they are causing more cocaine to end up adrift. Neither the Coast Guard nor the Drug Enforcement Administration responded to requests for information.
The Keys remain an ideal place to offload drugs: The island chain offers hundreds of miles of coastline dense with mangroves and tiny spoil islands that make good spots to hide from the law.
During the heyday of the marijuana trade in the 1970s, traffickers enlisted commercial fishing boat captains and crews in the region. For some local teens, racing to catch bales of pot ditched at sea became something of a sport.
Mr. Strama, a father of four, knew the trade as a child, according to one of his lawyers, Sam Rabin. “His father sent him to sea alone to search for floating bales of marijuana,” Mr. Rabin wrote in a sentencing memo before a judge gave Mr. Strama 10 years in prison.
More than a few Keys residents made fortunes off their hauls as square grouper became local lore. Restaurants, T-shirts and bumper stickers bear the sobriquet. Residents rode square grouper floats at parades in Key West.
Over time, drug traffickers off the Florida coast have changed their tactics. In the 1980s, cocaine smugglers knifed through the ocean on “Miami Vice”-style speed boats that could easily outrun police boats. Today, they are more likely to use inconspicuous sailboats or freighters to transport cocaine to the Keys, Sheriff Ramsay said.
The packages are typically marked with numbers or symbols identifying their intended buyers, he said. Bricks stamped “333” have repeatedly popped up recently. Last Friday, someone cleaning a popular state park found a package featuring the cat from “Tom and Jerry.”
“Drug smuggling in the Keys is alive and well,” Sheriff Ramsay said.
Square grouper has occasionally proved deadly.
In 2011, a Keys man died of a cocaine overdose after ingesting drugs from a brick he found while on a fishing boat with his brother. Four years later, sheriff’s deputies discovered a young couple shot to death inside their Keys home, victims of a dispute that stemmed from the sale of cocaine that had been found at sea by a charter boat crew. A boat mate is serving life in prison for the murders.
Last month, Bradford Picariello, who owns Outlaw Fishing Charters in Marathon, Fla., pleaded not guilty after a federal indictment charged that he sold a brick of cocaine found at sea to an undercover investigator. Mr. Picariello, 66, faces between 10 years and life in prison if convicted.
A confidential source tipped off the authorities that Mr. Picariello was selling more than 20 kilos of cocaine that he had found, according to a police report. The source brokered a deal to buy some, and Mr. Picariello told the source to “bring a cooler to make it look as though he was getting fish,” according to the police report.
Then, in January, Mr. Picariello sold a kilo to an undercover agent posing as a buyer at a marina for $100,000, the police said. He was immediately arrested. Mr. Picariello directed agents to nearly 20 more kilos in a storage container.
His defense lawyer, Joseph Rosenbaum, said his client would fight the charges. “Every old fisherman that I talk to tells me he’s got a sterling reputation,” Mr. Rosenbaum said. “They’re all in shock.”
Mr. Picariello remains in federal custody in Miami.
Discovering cocaine at sea played out differently for Danielle Nutten, the boat captain who left a brick on an ambulance in August. She and her friends used to joke about what they would do if they found square grouper. After catching 48 lobsters that day, they found a brick floating among garbage.
They were incredulous — and briefly panicked. “One girl was terrified drug dealers were going to kill her,” Ms. Nutten said.
Ms. Nutten tossed the brick in the center console of her truck and drove around Big Pine Key looking for the authorities, a decision she now says might have gone wrong had she been pulled over. Later that night, she and her friends celebrated their unusual experience with a dinner a few islands away.
The restaurant was the Square Grouper Bar and Grill.
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