Dollar Bill

It was in the late 70s that everything changed. I'm not clear on the exact year but I do remember we had a top floor walk-up on Greenwich Street in the shadow of the World Trade Center. The Franklin Street loft wasn't ruling my scene since I had widened my circle and now, instead of getting my product there, I was occasionally seen as a connection. And, to be sure, occasionally wasn't a problem since it didn't have to be that often to be extremely lucrative. Plus, for some odd reason, I always seemed to find the really powerful pot. Up to that point, the loads were measurably modest. A few hundred pounds was ordinary. 500-1000 was a lot. And most of it was arriving in Florida... Sometimes it got air-dropped... other times it got floated in... and then, suddenly there were mother ships and the loads were immediately jumped up to tonnage instead of poundage. It was the wild west down in Florida... The Florida folks, though, are elsewhere in the cast... This is about Dollar Bill.

One day, a gal I knew introduced me to another gal and that gal knew a guy who had 25-35 pound boxes of pressed Colombian. The stuff was, I soon discovered, stupidly perfect. It wasn't seedy; was wonderfully fragrant; had a rich gold color, not a lot of wood or seeds, and was perfectly cured and fresh. I took a couple of boxes, brought them around, and found out that nobody else was as directly connected as I was. This meant I had the best price... or at least a very very good price on the New York scene.

So I took a few boxes down to Franklin Street and found that nobody else had these things... And that they were priced in the low 300s... Normally Colombian was, in my circle, priced close to $400 a pound. I had a widespread 'retail' circle and was easily marking this stuff up $50 a pound and that meant each box was turning into about 2 grand in profit... and there seemed to be an unlimited supply... No matter how many I moved, there was no end... a few boxes... then 5 boxes... then 10 boxes... Now keep in mind that 10 boxes were like 400-500 pounds... and nobody knew where they were coming from. The gals in the middle were taking a small commission and the guy I was introduced to was amazingly low key... like this was nothing special. For whole boxes, I was adding $25 a pound and making a grand a box. It wasn't unusual to move 10 or 15 boxes in a week. I wasn't big time in the deal but I was making more money than I could keep track of.

At this point, I had no idea but the entire shebang was engineered by Dollar Bill. The guy was invisible but his product was everywhere. The deal lasted for months and at the end, anybody who touched the stuff was rolling in dough. The pot was extremely potent and amazingly, I can't remember any of it getting busted. The boxes were like 24 inches wide and deep and 36 inches high. Everything was logistically perfect. It was like the boxes were mass produced to fit the mold of the pressed packages. The boxes were numbered and I remember seeing numbers that were 2000 and higher. Simple math told me there was at least 90,000 pounds in the load. The numbers were mind-boggling. I mean we were suddenly facing unusual problems. My friend suddenly showed up with bill-counting machines and the next thing I knew we were running counting sessions that lasted for hours. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlQSwPhiKz4

Instead of counting 10 or 20 grand, each box was 10+ grand... and suddenly the cash amounts were crazy. 15 boxes was roughly $175,000 and this was happening every few days for 10-12 weeks. Anyway, once the machine showed up, it was less tedious and a lot more fun to count the money. And the logistics were always very business-like... From the cataloging of the boxes to the counting machine to the money bands that were pre-gummed and used to wrap piles of different denominations and in different amounts. It was a totally different approach. This was no longer a bunch of hippies turning on the world. It was a business. And, in a crazy but misguided young mindset, I felt incredibly lucky to be there at that moment in time. I suppose I still get off on the events, the people and the experiences but things were constantly changing. When you're using counting machines and have an endless supply of product, it's easy to feel invulnerable. I saw it happen again and again over the years. Millions of dollars in cold hard cash has an absolute corrupting quality that makes you believe anything is possible. For some, like Dollar Bill, it was.

Anyway, after a few months, the boxes petered out and the market stabilized. But for those who were suddenly rocketed up the flow chart, it wasn't the end but was a new beginning. I was one of those. After the box deal, I had proven that I could handle pretty much anything that came along. And as the weeks and months went by, all kinds of things started showing up. There were Jamaican bales, all varieties of Colombian pot, modest amounts of Lebanese and darker hashish, and then a new product showed up... Thai sticks... And the Thai sticks weren't just extraordinarily powerful, they created a whole new price category. The Thai weed came as seedless buds that were wrapped around slim wooden sticks and, at retail, they were priced by the stick and not by weight. This justified per pound prices at between $1,200 and $2,000 depending on who was paying the bill. Even so, buying a pound of sticks generated close to $3,000 when sold at the stick level. An ounce had 8-10 sticks and if a stick was $20 bucks, that was $200 per ounce and $3,200 per pound. By contrast, ounces of Jamaican were $25 and Colombian was around $40. Pounds of Jamaican were usually around $250 and Colombian pounds went for $400 at the pound level. However, when you had something of really high quality, you could price it higher than anything else that was out there. Just because it was Jamaican or Colombian didn't make it worth the money if it sucked.

Back to Dollar Bill... A year later, he did it again with one major difference. The load came in and it was complete garbage. There wasn't any way to make it better.. You just can't turn shit into gold. Except those of us who had played when times were good were all pretty much locked into having to move it. The stuff was nicknamed 'The Glop" and there was a never-ending supply of it. Prices dropped to $200 and below and it still took forever. Any time anything else showed up, the Glop stopped selling and could only be moved when the other stuff was depleted. We had some long discussions about exactly what went wrong with this load...

For example, once the product was harvested, it had to be 'cured' before it was packaged. This usually meant laying it out in the sun or in special curing houses for a period of weeks. Well, after the previous year's load generated stupid amounts of money, greed kicked in and they didn't cure it long enough before it was pressed. This meant a lot of it was wet and when you press pot laden with moisture, you get all kinds of problems. Some of it rotted... Some of it was pressed into solid rocks that could hardly be pried apart. And there were other reasons too. They harvested a few weeks too soon so there was a ridiculous amount of leaf and not nearly as potent as it would have and should have become a few weeks later. Also, leafy pot tastes very harsh so it didn't even make for a happy moment when you were smoking it, regardless of how high it did or didn't get you. Also, if that wasn't enough, moisture is heavy. The 'normal' 25 pound loaf was tipping the scales at closer to 30 pounds. This not only meant that you were paying for moisture but if you attempted to dry it out, you lost that weight. So... let it suffice to say that this was no easy movement.

And to top it all off, there is another danger when you have crappy product. We started hearing about boxes getting busted. While next to nothing got busted the year earlier, this, on reflection, was kind of a natural turn of events. Who is the one customer who doesn't give a crap about the quality or conditions? The man only cares about one thing... giving you the money and then arresting you!! While I wasn't among the unfortunate bustees, I did end up sending out a bunch of stuff that never came back.

As it turned out, there was a whole lot of other things that were happening at the same time... Dollar Bill was real tight with my guy and due to the nature of my circle, I was one of the few people who was able to move the Glop. I had a lot of relatively small customers who would take 10 pounds at a clip... and most of them didn't have anyplace else to get frontable merch... So no matter what happened, I was always in the game. And Bill was anything but stupid. In the beginning, he was under tremendous pressure to make the pay-offs... (That's how those major moves worked... The transportation was pretty much paid up front but the nobody could pay for that much product up front)... And the Colombians are not famous for either their patience or for their peaceful nature. So if you owe millions to the Colombians, you did whatever it took to pay them. Bill lowered the prices until the stuff could be sold... and then he didn't force payment for the unsold amounts... so basically it was like running a second-hand consignment shop... With, of course, the ever-present but often ignored potential set of dangerous outcomes.

We had boxes that were so bad there was just no way they could be sold without some 'incentive'... so for months, anytime anything good came around, we cut package deals... you can have one of these if you take one of those... We'd actually mix the Glop in with better stuff (in small amounts because any serious blend would be horrible)... And the deal went on... It took the better part of a year to get done and we didn't make all that much dough... Towards the end, there was a complete drought and, to our shock, people were actually asking for Glop. It was kind of funny since these were the same people who wouldn't touch it at any price not too much earlier that year... And, as in any capitalist market, the price rose accordingly. In the end, Dollar Bill got it done and my role was increasing with each move...

So another year goes by and the Colombians are screwing up a good thing. Cartajena Gold is just a memory and the feds are cracking down hard on the product being grown in Jamaica... The Colombians pretty much begin to rule the scene in Florida but it's not about pot... Coke is the product that is generating the most profit and the Colombians and other Latinos (Cubans, etc.) are totally wild in the streets. They would rather kill you and your entire family than think about collecting on late payments. This wasn't a big problem for me since I made a rules decision early on that I was only going to deal in smoke... Grass and Hash were okay with me... Pills, powders and other chemicals weren't my thing. I'd take them for myself but there was no way I was going to do business with them. It just didn't feel right and personally, I was a true pothead.

The scene changed almost overnight. The cool dudes evacuated Florida and started doing things all up and down the east coast. I mean loads started coming straight into eastern Long Island, the capes of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, etc etc. Nobody wanted to deal with the Florida scene. The feds were all over the area and it was like the wild wild west. Between the Colombians, the cops and the coke, the action became way more than I was prepared to deal with. And, it's not like we hadn't done our share of numbers. We had houses in Coral Gables, Fort Lauderdale, Sunrise, North Miami, etc... There were fleets of cars (all registered to non-existent owners, but that's another whole story), cigarette boats, package trucks, crews galore... but in the end, the scene came apart down there. People died and it just became too dangerous.

Ummm... So.... to get back to Dollar Bill, he split the Florida scene way before it all came apart and kind of disappeared... for about a year and a half. Until one day....

I was sitting in a stash house on Long Island and my box connection (the link to Bill) shows up with something totally different. He's got a six pound super heavy duty foil package... vacuum-packed... shot with nitrogen to prevent fermentation or other biological deterioration... and it's filled with the most fragrant, gooey, intense, bright gold pot. I find it hard to smoke more than a few hits before I practically pass out. And, I wasn't like a normal pothead. By this time, it was an occupational thing. Every time I brought something to someone, part of the ritual included an official tasting. So I wasn't a cheap head. Except this product was so far and away the strongest, most pleasant smoke I had ever had, I had a hard time believing it wasn't treated with a chemical. I look at my friend (yeah, we were good friends by that point) and ask him if this was something I could get my hands on. He says there's a lot of it... and I knew instantly that a 'lot' to him meant something extraordinary was about to happen.

As it turned out, Dollar Bill had brought American ingenuity and technology and married it to the best pot from Thailand that anybody had ever seen. Somehow, while everyone else was caught up in the Colombian, Jamaican and Mexican smoke, Mr. Bill managed to move his operation to Southeast Asia and moved at least five tons of the foil packs from the jungle to the good old USA. The packs immediately became known as the 'Silver Bullets" and they commanded $1500 a pound from day one. My friend was putting them in my hands at $1200 or so and the game was on.

We pretty much found the market at every level imaginable. We were selling 5-10 bullets at $1300 each and doing singles at $1400. There were dozens of different variations and each one was of spectacular quality. There were some that were actually purple... some were brown... most were gold... and some were on sticks. To that point, virtually all the Thai product was wrapped on sticks. But, for the most part, this removed the stick element and delivered the goods in small perfectly cured and pressed packages that became an instant legend.

While we were still doing all the other stuff, this added a whole other level to the market. In New York, they became a status symbol among the echelons of smokers and dealers. If you had this stuff, your rep skyrocketed. Of course, at the time, all I was thinking about was how fucking high (and rich) I was getting... Each five or six pound Bullet was adding $600-$1000 to the ledger and there were plenty of them. The situation was relatively out of control but nothing next to what came next....

I was reflecting on the silver bullets overnight and realized a few things. First, I was so damned high from this stuff that some of the details got mixed together on them. There were two major moves that happened. Nothing I've remembered was inaccurate but there were quite a few other factors that are relevant. Couple of quick items... There came a point where I learned that my connection to Bill had an ongoing problem with heroin and was running through all his dough at a ridiculous rate. I want to say that he was making money hand over fist but was shooting five to ten grand a week into his bloodstream. His problem didn't start with the arrival of the bullets but was something that he had been doing even during the first boxed Colombian move. I only realized it when he started becoming more and more unreliable. For a heroin addict, he was amazingly functional. (Although I also realized why the dude was so fucking mellow all the time in the face of some really hairy goings-on.) Second, I didn't move crazy amounts during the first bullet deal... that came later... Third, my reputation was growing with each deal and it came to a place where I finally got to meet Bill. He was in an old loft down in the meat-packing district of Manhattan... I remember going into his place and being crazy intimidated... He was a tall guy with fairly long gray hair... listening to some dissonant jazz... with a big pistol on his table... and he wasn't big on small talk... I also remember his paranoia about AIDS. The meat-packing district was a strange place and his loft was upstairs from a gay club. He rambled on about how he was getting ready to move because he was nervous about mosquito bites. People were dying from AIDS and he had a fear that a mosquito would bite an infected person at the club and then bite him, transferring the germs.

The details are a bit fuzzy here but I remember my friend introducing me to a few of Bill's infrastructure guys... mostly drivers and other outlets... and as my friend started to become less and less functional, I was given opportunities to provide storage and facilities... sort of like a back-office arrangement...

A lot of the key people in this tale are still untouched on the original list of characters but they were all tied into Bill's operation on different levels. I had one friend who had a bust-out operation going on Long Island. He started a company called Great American Liquidators and had a warehouse from which he was distributing 'regular' merchandise at crazy low prices. He was filling his place with truckloads of shampoo, soap, food, batteries, beach chairs, radios, televisions, etc... For a visual, think of a small Costco without the retail part of the operation... with rows and rows of 12 foot high metal shelves... loading docks... and a constant movement of merchandise in and out... For those who aren't familiar with a bust-out, it worked like this... The deal was mobbed up... Some of these guys would buy truckloads of merchandise from manufacturers... get them shipped to various locations... then re-truck them over to my friend's warehouse... and stiff the manufacturers and distributors... making their cost close to zero... and giving them the ability to sell the stuff at any price they wanted, regardless of anything. Eventually, it all came apart and they got popped but for a year or so, they were rolling in merchandise and dough.

So a year after the first bullet move, I get contacted by one of Bill's guys, asking if we had access to anyplace where they could unload a semi and do a transfer. I meet with my bust-out bud (who was also in the 'biz' on a pretty high level) and ask him if he'd let his place be used for a one-time, one day operation. He thinks for about 30 seconds, realizes that I'm not one to ask idle questions, and agrees to do it for 25 grand plus access to however much of the merchandise he can pay for. I go back to my guy... and after a few days of investigation, the arrangement was struck... We were going to get a couple of days notice and they were going to have complete use of the warehouse for one morning and half an afternoon. They would need skid-lifts, four bays and would supply the workers. We just needed to make it available and keep everyone else away... Part of my job was to meet the semi at six in the morning and lead the driver into the place...

So the day arrives and sure enough, a bright and shiny full-sized 18 wheel semi arrives at the designated place at the designated time... just like clockwork and we pull it into the loading dock at my friend's place. I watched in amazement as a bunch of smaller trucks (Ryder rentals and 'throw-aways') pull into the other docks. Within 15 minutes, there were pallets being off-loaded with forklifts from the semi and it looked like a professionally run stock-checking operation. Each pallet was shrink-wrapped, listed on a master inventory and as soon as they were checked off, the pallets were re-loaded onto the smaller trucks and were gone in no more than 30 minutes from start to finish. It was like something out of the movies when a professional crew executes a perfectly planned operation. It was obvious that this wasn't a maiden voyage for all the players since each guy knew his job and didn't have to ask any questions. Each pallet had boxes stacked 10X5 and there were 5 bullets in each box. I'm there doing math in my head and I figure out that each pallet has about a quarter mill in product. They load a half dozen trucks with 8-10 pallets each and, in a flash, they're gone. Now it's like 10 in the morning and my warehouse friend and I are looking at each other, wondering if we really saw what we saw. Meantime, my other friend, who was the original source of the boxes, somehow doesn't even show up. I soon learned that I had missed all the signs and he had a serious heroin habit. No wonder the guy was always relaxed and never panicked under any circumstances. He was in another dimension most of the time. But that's another story... Back to Dollar Bill... Bill was like a field general during this operation, walking around with a clipboard, whispering quietly a few times, totally in control of himself and the operation. And as soon as he had checked in the semi, he didn't even wait for the smaller trucks to load and leave. He just walked over to me, gave me the bag of cash for my buddy, asked if I had seen the other guy, got into a non-descript Chevy and was gone.

As for the product, it was once again totally incredible. There were gold bullets, purple bullets, red bullets, green bullets and all manner of sticks. Each variety had its own unique taste and, if you focused, its own unique high. The stuff was so potent and fresh, it was even a bit gooey... And for the next 4 or 5 months, we were totally in charge of the eat coast market. I didn't know it at the time but a bunch of the trucks had taken off for Boston and points north. I managed to get a few pallets dropped to my stash house and we moved the stuff everywhere. It was a pretty amazing time since I can't remember a single bullet getting lost or busted. It all got paid for and we all made a serious bundle. By the wintertime, I was pretty tight with Dollar Bill and his crew. He actually invited me to his Island house on Montserrat and I spent a short fun time in an old converted hurricane-proofed sugar mill. As you might imagine, my recollections of that place are a bit foggy but then I guess I was totally jolted out while I was there.

Bill's scene continued to have a lot of influence at different times and in many different ways through the years... But he was always major mojo in my universe. At the end of the day, I learned economy of scale from his operation and why big trucks and big truckers were a very useful option... and... oh yeah, I learned that technology was coming to the business...