For decades, the smuggling era of Everglades City and Chokoloskee lived mostly in quiet conversations and local lore. Back in March, we shared the news that some of the people who lived through it had decided to speak publicly in a new documentary, Outlaws of the Everglades. At the time, only the trailer was out, and the film was preparing for its debut at the Gasparilla International Film Festival in Tampa.

If you watched the trailer earlier this year and have been waiting for the full picture, it’s finally here. The full documentary is available to rent and stream at outlawsoftheeverglades.com. It costs $6.99, and you have five days to watch it once you start.

For anyone who has only heard pieces of this chapter in rumors over the years, the film offers a chance to hear it told firsthand. It runs about 71 minutes and is built around the accounts of local fishermen, families, and journalists who witnessed the smuggling operations that unfolded in the Ten Thousand Islands during the 1970s and 1980s.

The story it tells is a familiar one to many here, even if it has rarely been said out loud. As fishing regulations tightened and traditional livelihoods became harder to sustain, a number of longtime commercial fishermen faced difficult economic choices. For some, the decisions that followed would change the community forever. The film lets the families themselves explain how that happened, in their own words.

Author and journalist Carl Hiaasen also appears, helping place what happened here in the broader context of Southwest Florida during that era.

It’s a piece of our history that’s been talked about for a long time but rarely told in full.

You may also be interested in Locals Share Smuggling Stories in New Everglades Documentary (The Trailer) or Smallwood Store A Glimpse of History.