Sisters' Life of Adventure Wasn't What It Seemed

A mother's curbside trash run turned out to be the key to decoding one of the wildest suburbs-gone-sideways stories you've probably never heard. In Atavist Magazine, Barry Meier unspools the incredible saga of Erin and Meredith McCann, Pittsburgh sisters whose seemingly charmed 1980s childhood—Tudor mansion, Steelers players singing carols in their living room—imploded when their father fled a federal cocaine investigation. John McCann had seemed like a pillar of society, all while secretly building a massive cocaine-smuggling operation with partner Steve Hagerman in the early 1980s. When the feds closed in, both men fled the country with their families.

For Erin and Meredith, the experience was presented as a grand adventure. Whisked across borders under fake names, the girls bounced from a Majorcan villa to a British boarding school to a remote Canadian ranch while their parents ran drugs, laundered cash, and built a secret pot farm in a locked basement. John McCann was eventually captured and spent the rest of his life in prison, dying there in 1996. Years later, after their mother's death, the banker's boxes Erin rescued from her mother's trash—stuffed with federal files and grand jury transcripts—would reveal a father far more calculating than she'd believed, and a mother far less innocent than she'd claimed. Read the full story.