The Fugitive Childhood of a Cocaine Smuggler’s Daughters

Barry Meier | The Atavist Magazine | May 2026 | 1,747 words (6 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 176, “You Can Run.”

The Boxes

Erin McCann raced along the Pennsylvania Turnpike at seventy-five miles per hour, desperate to reach her mother’s house before it was too late. Erin, a lawyer, had left Philadelphia soon after the call came, and as she drove past the farms of Pennsylvania Dutch country, she could still hear her mother’s voice: “They’re out there. I’m done.”

Erin’s mother, Leah, had called to tell her a secret. Decades earlier, she had hidden away two boxes filled with government documents connected to a series of extraordinary crimes. She told Erin that she couldn’t bear to keep the records any longer, so they were now at the curb with the trash. Erin, who had not been aware that the documents existed, asked her mother to bring them back inside. Leah refused. Now Erin’s only hope of learning the truth about the events that had shattered her childhood was getting the boxes before the garbage collectors did.

The Atavist, our sister publication, publishes one deeply reported, elegantly designed story each month. Support The Atavist by becoming a member.

Back in 1984, when Erin was 13, her life seemed perfect. Her father, John H. McCann III, was successful, charming, and funny. Leah was beautiful and elegant. Erin and her younger sister, Meredith, who was ten, lived in a Tudor-style mansion in Fox Chapel, a wealthy suburb of Pittsburgh. The family had two golden retrievers, Ginger and Nutmeg, and Erin took riding lessons on a horse named Super Pony. There was a swimming pool in their backyard, along with a zip line, a tree house, and a playhouse from FAO Schwarz that looked like a log cabin.

Then, one September morning, the doorbell rang. When Meredith opened the front door, two men in suits asked if her parents were home. Her father was away on a business trip, but Leah came downstairs and told the men that she would be right back to speak with them after dropping Meredith at school.

By the time Erin and Meredith got home that afternoon, their mother had left town. They weren’t worried; she often went to Florida, leaving them with Julie, their favorite sitter. Over the next few days, Julie took the girls to Baskin-Robbins—Erin ordered mint chocolate chip, while Meredith got pink bubble gum. Whenever the pay phone outside the ice cream shop rang, Julie picked it up and handed the girls the receiver. Their mother was on the line. Leah said she was in Fort Lauderdale, decorating a new condo their father had bought.

After about two weeks, Julie told Erin and Meredith that they would be flying to Detroit for the weekend. Their mother was already there, she said, visiting her younger sister, Sally. The girls liked Sally and her husband, Steve Hagerman. Steve roughhoused with his nieces and gave them presents from the small chain of running-shoe stores he owned in the Detroit suburbs. Julie hauled several suitcases filled with Leah’s clothing to the airport, along with goodie bags of stickers and candy for Erin and Meredith. As she hugged the girls, she seemed confused. “It was like [she was] saying goodbye,” Erin recalled, “but we were like, ‘See you Sunday.’ ”

Sally was waiting for her nieces at the Detroit airport. Instead of driving home, she crossed the U.S. border into Windsor, Ontario, and parked outside a motel. She took Erin and Meredith to a room. Their mother was inside.

Leah told her daughters that they wouldn’t be going back to Fox Chapel—not after the weekend, not ever—because the government had accused their father of not paying his taxes. It wasn’t true, Leah insisted. Still, with federal agents searching for John, the family had to leave. They would all disappear and start a new life elsewhere, under new names. Leah told her daughters that they would never see their friends again. They couldn’t even call them to say goodbye.

Erin and Meredith cried and begged to stay behind—they said they would live with neighbors, with their grandparents, with anyone. Their mother was unmoved. She made it clear that, from now on, they needed to do exactly as they were told.

The McCanns vanished, as did Sally and Steve. It wasn’t that hard; they were living in the golden age of fugitives. Passports were easy to counterfeit, hotels and airlines took cash, and there weren’t cell phones or personal computers that authorities could track.

For a year and a half, Erin and Meredith hopscotched around the world with their parents. Their hideouts included a villa on Majorca, first-class hotels in London, and a remote ranch in British Columbia. Meredith, who had her father’s dark features, went by the names Alexandra Gregor, Alison McCarthy, and Rachel Mercer. Erin, who was blond like her mother, attended an elite British boarding school as Christine Jordan, an alias chosen by her father in tribute to Jordan Almonds, the candy. The girls told made-up stories to their new friends about who they were and where they were from. Then one day they would wake up to learn that they had to disappear again.

Their time on the run ended in heartbreak, and Erin and Meredith felt the reverberations through adolescence and into adulthood. For years they asked their mother to tell them everything she knew about the events that had turned their family into fugitives. Leah refused, and eventually they stopped asking.

Now Erin finally had a chance to get answers. She took the exit for York, the small city a hundred miles west of Philadelphia where her mother had grown up, and where she had taken her daughters after their lives came crashing down. When Erin turned onto Hillock Lane, she glimpsed the ranch house where she had spent her senior year in high school. The boxes of government files had been there in the basement, right under her feet.

Slowing down her car, Erin scanned the curb. There, alongside trash cans awaiting pickup, she glimpsed the outlines of two battered banker’s boxes.

Boom Times

Growing up, Erin loved hearing her mother tell the story of how she met John. She was on summer break from college, working at a luncheonette in Ocean City, New Jersey, when he walked in, ordered a Coke, and left her a huge tip. After that, Leah said, he swept her off her feet.

John spent his summer evenings collecting cover charges outside two popular clubs, Bay Shores and the Dunes, that his father owned around the coastal town of Somers Point, just across a causeway from Ocean City. John was raised in Philadelphia. He was an intelligent kid but had struggled to concentrate in school. His father, a former bootlegger, did not hesitate to hit John and told him he would end up driving a truck. After John failed all his classes one year in high school, his frustrated mother sent him to a military academy in Florida.

In Somers Point, John earned the nickname Cash because of all the money he collected at his father’s clubs. He used his income to reinvent himself. He started going by John H. McCann III, which he thought sounded more impressive than his given name, John H. McCann Jr., and dressed the part: He slicked back his wavy black hair, bought monogrammed shirts, and wore a ring engraved with his family’s crest. He drove a white Austin-Healey sports car and purchased expensive suits at a shop across the street from Princeton University. He told girls that he was a student there, even though he really attended Rider College eight miles down the road.

John liked to shower girlfriends with extravagant gifts. Before meeting Leah, he fell in love with a young woman named Susan. When she told him that she was flying to London on vacation, he purchased her a ticket to travel instead on the SS France, a luxury ocean liner. “He was a meticulous dresser. He knew about Hermès, Tiffany, and all of that,” Susan said in an interview. “He was a big-time spender.” John proposed to Susan, but she said no. She didn’t trust him, and she suspected that he was stealing money from his father.

When John and Leah became engaged, the newspaper announcement described him as a student at Stetson Law School who had earned a graduate degree from Princeton, where he was Phi Beta Kappa. Leah knew John hadn’t attended Princeton and had just flunked out of Villanova Law School, but these were the first of many lies she let slide. Along with his love, John offered Leah something she had always dreamed of: a lavish lifestyle.

As a child in York, Leah had felt embarrassed by her family’s economic situation. Her friends’ mothers were all housewives, but her mom had to work because her father didn’t earn much money doing radio and TV repair. Soon after meeting Leah, John romanced his future in-laws by sending them a new refrigerator and other appliances.

After getting married, John and Leah attended a small law school in Baltimore together, and for a few years afterward, John worked for a condominium developer. Then he decided to try politics. During a 1971 parade in Somers Point, where the couple had made their home, John and Leah sat perched on the back of a convertible waving to onlookers, with Erin, then an infant, on her mother’s lap. A banner affixed to the car read “McCann for Mayor.” At 29, John won the mayor’s race. A year later, he was also elected as a surrogate court judge.

Those jobs were fine, but John wanted to be rich, and eventually the opportunity presented itself. In 1974, the long-dormant coal industry was booming back to life after Arab countries halted oil shipments to the United States to protest its military support for Israel. Speculators were scooping up coal mines, and John’s old boss, the condo developer, said he would buy one if John agreed to run it. The pair purchased a mine outside Pittsburgh, and John began spending all his time there. He was still collecting his salaries as mayor and judge, but he wasn’t attending city council meetings or court hearings. When someone tipped off a local paper, the Press of Atlantic City, it sent reporters to stake out John’s office and soon ran an exposé depicting him as a no-show public official. John resigned, telling the paper that he was eager to move on to a new future in coal anyway.

Erin often heard about her father’s days as mayor of a small New Jersey town. She didn’t know that his tenure ended in scandal, because her parents never told her.

Read the story