Watch a Michigan State Trooper bust "The Grandfather" in 2011. "Weapons? At age 87?"
In "The Sinaloa Cartel’s 90-Year-Old Drug Mule," Sam Dolnick writes a long, highly detailed story about 90-year-old Leo Sharp for The New York Times' Magazine.
The article, which will appear in Sunday's magazine, was posted today on the Times' website.
Sharp made news last month when he received a three-year sentence in Detroit federal court. But no local reporter has delved into Sharp's colorful life like Dolnick.
The D.E.A. spent months investigating the Sinaloa cartel’s operation in the Detroit area and tracking their most prolific drug mule: Sharp, a World War II veteran and great-grandfather with no criminal record. The Sinaloa cartel’s nickname for him was well chosen, Dolnick writes. They called him Tata. Grandfather.
Sharp was placed under arrest after being stopped by a Michigan State trooper in an orchestrated maneuver along I-94 in October 2011. In the back of his covered pickup was 104 kilos of cocaine, bound for Detroit.
Dolnick writes at length about the D.E.A.'s investigation into the cartel's business in Detroit, but he puts Sharp's life under the microscope, including his longtime ventures in raising day-lilies.
Day-lily admirers are as intense as boxing fans, arguing passionately about the beauty and staying power of this or that varietal. And Leo Sharp is their Don King — a widely admired hybridizer with nearly 180 officially registered day lilies to his name.
For years, Sharp attended day-lily conventions across the country dressed in either an all-white leisure suit or an all-black one. He traveled with an entourage of Mexican farmhands to help with the hundreds of flowers he would give away, making his admirers swoon.
“The people who do lilies are way cooler than other plant people,” said Nikki Schmith, a gardener in Worden, Ill., who writes a day-lily blog. “He was just a stud. He just had the air. He had 70-year-old swagger.” Schmith has more than a dozen of Sharp’s day lilies in her own garden.
“His flowers had almost a porcelain characteristic,” she said. “They all share that very refined form. It’s exactly like fashion. You can pick out some hybridizers by looking at the flowers they introduce.”
Sharp was known for producing relatively small flowers with eye-popping yellows, reds and pinks. His greatest hit was arguably the Ojo Poco, a 2½-inch apricot-colored flower with a red bull’s-eye at the center that he introduced in 1994. “Anyone who has over 100 day lilies in their garden would recognize it by sight,” Kevin P. Walek, a former president of the A.H.S., said.
