Registration Opens - and Closed Today - : Jackpot with Jason Ryan

Update: 1:15 PM 18 April 2023 - At record breaking speed, the next BDC co-sponsored program has reached room capacity. No tickets remain.  

Nothing draws in folks to local history programs like tales of death, destruction, and scandal! We end Season 6 of the joint Beaufort History Museum-Beaufort County Library local history series on one of the biggest scandals in Beaufort District's long and storied history: Operation Jackpot. I often tell those who ask to think of Operation Jackpot as the Murdaugh scandal of its day. It was - and remains - a big deal. In fact, you just might run across a participant or two in the course of your daily life in Beaufort County. I'm pretty sure that everyone who was sentenced has served their time and are back home now.  

Topographically speaking, if smuggling is on your mind, then our county's waterways are just about perfect! For centuries a variety of outlaws have used the twisting waterways of the South Carolina Lowcountry to conceal illegal activity. Pirates found refuge in Carolina creeks, Civil War blockade runners sneaked supplies past a naval blockade, and rumrunners imported alcohol in the midst of Prohibition. But smuggling didn't stop in the 1930s, though the product being smuggled changed and launched the country's War on Drugs.

Learn about the escapades of South Carolina’s “gentlemen” marijuana smugglers, who sailed nearly $1 billion worth of pot into Southern marshes during the 1970s and ‘80s from the man who literally wrote the book about Operation Jackpot. Come learn how a group of fun-loving college dropouts from the Palmetto State made it big in the world of marijuana trafficking before losing it all at the hands of a  federal investigation. 

Jason Ryan is a nonfiction author and journalist in Charleston. His books include the marijuana smuggling tale Jackpot: High Times, High Seas and the Sting that Launched the War on Drugs, the true crime thriller Hell-Bent: One Man’s Crusade to Crush the Hawaiian Mob, and the early aviation account Race to Hawaii: The 1927 Dole Derby and the Thrilling First Flights That Opened the Pacific. He is a former reporter for The Beaufort Gazette and The State newspaper and is currently at work on a book about the Murdaugh family of South Carolina.

Jason has been very kind to revisit his book periodically for us over the years, though he has moved on to other topics as the list of his books above indicate. I am very grateful that he consented yet again to my entreaties to do another Author Book Talk about his investigative look into Operation Jackpot. It's always a crowd-pleaser. Registration  opens today for this session through the Beaufort History Museum's website. Go to https://beauforthistorymuseum.wildapricot.org/event-4962913 to reserve a seat.  

A few tips: If past attendance at a Jackpot local history program can be applied to this session, it will "sell out" quite quickly. And indeed they did - in record time. But even I was surprised by the speed at which we reached room capacity.   Sign up asap before the seats are all taken; We will provide seating for ticket holders beginning at 1:30 PM the day of the program. Our usual rules will apply: Any empty seats not occupied by a ticket holder will be offered to those standing by beginning at 1:55 PM. Don't be late the day of the program or your seat may be given to someone else. Please understand that given the speed at which tickets were expended, odds that there will be an empty seat at 1:55 pm on Tuesday, May 2, 2023 for stand-bys are slim.