Denial is a Very Strong Anesthetic

So it’s 1988... and things are happening in every which way... the scene is essentially out of hand. Quality is at an all time high and prices are as well. The business is clicking on all cylinders until... the unthinkable happens.

A courier for the hash smuggler goes to Switzerland and is picked up by Interpol. Whether he was on a list, had phony paperwork, said the wrong thing to the wrong banker... I never found out. What I did find out, though, was that he was interviewed by the US DEA and spilled his guts without seeing a lawyer. I didn’t know it at the time but when the smuggler met the courier at LaGuardia Airport that June afternoon, he was taken down by a horde of agents and carted off to a federal jail.

As soon as I heard the news, I realized this was some serious shit and there was a real possibility that I’d get drawn into this on some level. The attitude of people who knew what had happened ranged from disbelief to resignation to denial. Denial was a common reaction since having $40 million dollars makes one feel pretty damned insulated. “This can’t be serious...” and I specifically remember meeting his wife (while I was in a high state of paranoia) saying “Oh there’s nothing to worry about he’ll be out on Monday...” Me? I’m thinking there’s no way he’s getting out any time soon. First of all, he was a fugitive for over 15 years since he ran out on a court date in the early 1970s. Second, they had no idea who he was since he hadn’t ever been printed. Third, he wasn’t known under his real name. There was a fourth and fifth but the bottom line was the smuggler was not hitting the streets on Monday no matter what.  Hell, even I didn't know his real name.

And this was like a sharp knife plunged into the heart of the scene. Suddenly, all the people surrounding his schemes were vulnerable, the lawyers were circling like vultures and lots of people were in the wind. I felt a lot of anxiety but had hopes that nobody could prove my involvement. After all, I gave him the dough in person... no witnesses... and I kept this quiet at my end. I did know the courier as an acquaintance but only in passing at parties and the occasional hand-off. We weren’t tight and he didn’t know much about my business. I’m hoping that even if I’m drawn into the case, it’s as a dealer only.

Denial is a very strong anesthetic.

A few days after the LaGuardia arrest, I get a call to meet Nadamucho to ‘discuss things’. Now one thing about Nadamucho is that he never ‘discussed’ anything. That’s part of the back story of his name. He was so soft-spoken that you were never sure if he said anything you thought you heard. It was just Nadamucho's way. If you remember, he was the one who introduced me to this scene (as well as others) and he wasn’t a socializer. If he asked to see you, there was a good reason. Lots of people were taking long vacations around this disaster but I wasn’t in any position to just disappear. We owned the house, had a newborn child, had a mortgage, paid taxes, owned other houses, land in the Caribbean, commercial properties, etc. etc. We were citizens and if we were going to stand up to this, we couldn’t run.

So I agreed to meet him at a diner where Northern Boulevard overpasses the Cross Island Parkway in Queens. I get there about 45 minutes early and sit in my car in the diner parking lot, watching carefully (like all those smart guys I’d read about in books and seen in movies) to make sure he: a) isn’t setting me up; and b) isn’t being followed. Of course, this was insane because if he was setting me up, an early arrival would tell me nothing and if he was being followed, I was going to get screwed anyway. But hey... in for a dime in for a dollar and I sit there. Funny thing was I am sure I pinned several dope deals going down in the lot that morning. A good indication is when one guy drives a pickup into the lot and a different guy drives it away...

The time comes and Nadamucho pulls in alone and walks into the diner. I get out and join him, eyes everywhere and paranoia raging. We sit down at a booth and look at each other... After minimal small talk, ‘This is a big problem.’ I offer and he nods, mumbling something about he’s seen bigger but this was definitely up there. I’m straining to listen when he reaches in his jacket, takes out an envelope and sets it on the table. ‘We need to empty the big guy's boxes before the Feds get there.’ he says. ‘Boxes?’ I reply, not getting it at first. “3 Safety deposit boxes and the Zurich vault.” he explains adding patiently. I look at him, trying to absorb this information. Is he asking me to empty safe deposit boxes and a vault? Really? Me? A nice Jewish kid from Queens? He wants me to rob banks?

"What's in them?" I ask. "Everything." he answers. "If the Feds get this stuff we're all going away."

My heart is pounding and I’m trying to keep it together when he excuses himself to take a piss. Now I’m sitting there with this envelope on the table for about five minutes when it dawns on me that he isn’t coming back. I look out in the lot and his car is gone. It’s the last time I ever saw him.

 Still sitting there, I tried to absorb what just happened. To this point, I was mainly in a CYA mode... a mode I was fairly familiar with. On a handful of occasions, bad things had happened and I had escaped involvement even when things looked extraordinarily bleak. Even the dentist kept me in the clear during the Nuvia-Jamaica Bay episode. Loads had been fluke-busted and I managed to shoulder a burden but still avoided the attention of the enforcement folks. Nadamucho, however, had just put me in an awful position. How could ignore this? My mind was racing... weighing the options. If I did nothing, and the Feds got to whatever was in these boxes, I was clearly part of the ‘all’ in ‘we’re all going away.’ If I did something and things went really bad, I was probably going to be in deeper shit than I was already. Did he tell anyone else that he was giving me the envelope? And what was in the envelope anyway? I looked down at it... picked it up... felt its weight... clearly the contents were off balance and there was more than paper in it. I put it down, visualized myself opening it and knew right then that there was no way I could ignore this.

I had my own set of safe deposit boxes in various banks. What if he had a box in the same bank as me? Would they know me? Clearly, whatever I was going to do had to be done quickly. I knew the routine at the banks. You only need your key and to be a signatory. If they asked, you could show them an ID but they almost never looked at it. If you had the key and were on the paperwork, they simply opened the box-door and you pulled out your box. Some of the clerks would pull it out for you but you could circumvent that with “It’s okay, I’ll take it.” Then you’d bring it to a little closet-sized room with a desk, a chair and a lamp. Once the door was closed, you were basically good to go. The boxes came in all sizes and I remember designating them in the amount of cash you could stash in them. The smallest still would take close to $100,000. And the biggest? The big ones held close to a million dollars in hundreds. We rarely, if ever, got to that because so much of the dough was in smaller bills. But either way, in my mind, boxes meant cash and lots of it. The key thing was that Nadamucho obviously knew that there was more than cash at stake here.

As it turns out, the envelope had all the necessary information, complete with signature examples for each set of bank paperwork. The kicker was the vault... the big enchilada... at the Zurich Depository on Northern Boulevard. To get into this place, you not only had to have the key but there were also special ID documents and a secret password. I quickly conclude that this needs a quick plan that will get the job done and somehow, keep me from personally having to walk into the banks or the depository. It doesn’t take more than a few minute to figure out that there’s only one person I knew that could carry this off without freaking out. I knew someone with the balls, brains, brass and total insanity to make this happen.  I needed Pfeiffer!!

My Dear Friend Denis...

Another old friend appeared to me over the weekend and it’s worth taking a breath and remembering Denis. Back in the early days, my roommate, Tom worked at Time Magazine as a researcher. Tom’s co-worker in research, Alex, was, like most of the people in my tale, another one whose life flew off the tracks in the early 70s. He was gay when gayness began to demand recognition. There was a huge undercurrent of gender-related activity in the air. Greenwich Village was a hub. The West side cowboy/biker scene was exploding. Discos and other all-night clubs were happening in Chelsea and throughout the city. As for me, I was still accumulating outlets and sources for my newly discovered career. This connection with Alex uncovered a whole new subcultural market that seemed absolutely perfect. My connections into the scene were all honest gentlemen who, by nature, were used to doing things in the shadows.

Sadly, as the 70s drew into the 80s, the scourge of AIDS and HIV ran rampant in the gay community. It was a horror show. Lots of people were just wasting away and incredibly, the politicians refused to help, blaming the sickness on a ‘lifestyle’ rather than an illness to be cured. It was a sad time and if you’ve never seen the movie Philadelphia or Dallas Buyers Club or any of the dozens of depictions of that time, you should take an hour or a day and try to understand what it’s like to be castigated and cast out for being terminally sick. Bottom line, it wasn’t all fun and games in the New York City underworld in the 70s. People were scared out of their wits. Nobody was sure of anything except people were dying and it was obviously an infectious disease. Once people realized it was possibly blood-borne, things got out of hand quickly. Everybody felt vulnerable, whether they were gay or not. Needles were known to carry a risk. A guy I knew who had a place in the meat-packing district around 14th Street and 8th Avenue was afraid to open his windows. He believed that a mosquito bite could carry the HIV disease if the mosquito had bitten a person who was positive for the virus. And who was going to tell him to open his windows? Me? No way! The music/art/theatre scene was, as it always had been, a hub of homosexuality and people were dropping like flies. Meantime, it was hard to ignore the thought that this disease was linked to our drug-fueled, acid-laced, Be Here Now, wave of baby boomer culture.

There was no cure except complete abstinence and for many people, that was not an easy option.

Anyway, via my relationship with Tom and then Alex... and several others, I found myself interacting with a very smooth honest guy who owned a loft on 23rd Street down the block from the Chelsea Hotel. This was Denis, who was a unique cog in the invisible machine. He was always around, seemed to be connected to everyone I knew or wanted to know, and who was, in his own right, a very smart dude. He came from a card-carrying Mayflower-descendant family and was apparently the black sheep of the family due to his sexual proclivities and perhaps some other frowned-upon behaviors. I mean, here was a guy whose grandfather held the patent on the modern fire hydrant, whose uncles, John & Washington Roebling, designed the Brooklyn fucking Bridge. Denis was a story unto himself, both smart, well-read, and enterprising.

One day, in the late winter of 1969, Denis is sitting around with his friend Stan, and they pick up the Times and read an article about how the United Nations was holding some kind of conference to promote coffee in the United States. Denis was a Princeton guy and his complete package included a very smooth delivery. So he spends a day, puts together a presentation and heads up to the United Nations to propose a Manhattan club that will only serve coffee products. Six weeks later, Denis gets a grant of $250,000 to build the club and, from what I heard, that’s how the Electric Circus nightclub was born. They opened the doors and the first weekend took in $100,000 and the rest is history. Eventually the venture went public and imploded after a few disastrous openings, most notably in Toronto, but the seed of creation was sown right there in Denis’s loft on 23rd Street.

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1356&dat=19690430&id=f4ZPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=cAUEAAAAIBAJ&pg=7364,9564346&hl=en

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1499&dat=19690415&id=zE0aAAAAIBAJ&sjid=MygEAAAAIBAJ&pg=2691,4694883&hl=en

http://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2013/04/recollections-of-electric-circus-if-you.html

The Electric Circus was only one of dozens of ventures that came out of that loft. Denis was a principle in a Redwood Furniture deal, partner in numerous SRO hotel deals, had fantastic pot connections on both coasts, and never, for one New York second, did anything unethical or did not stand up to any promise he ever made. Eventually that became funny after I got popped owing him dough and he actually had the balls to take a tax deduction on it. (But, yes, that’s another entire story).

Incidentally, Denis bought that three story loft building for about $30,000 in the late 60s and the last I heard he had turned down an offer for about $3,000,000. Unfortunately, after he bought the loft, he bought the farm when he developed some terminal form of abdominal malignancy (may or may not have been HIV-related) and passed away around Y2K. Denis was one beautiful guy. I still miss him.

Vehicles Anonymous Meets Every Monday at 8PM...

Once we bought the house, lots of things changed radically.  First off, we couldn’t use our place as a stash anymore...  After all, we lived there.  Second, regardless of being secluded (which it really was), or driveway that went out of sight (which it did), or drive-through garage (which it had), or anything else, we had to maintain an image with the realization that we weren’t just moving on in a few months.  It wasn’t ‘What the hell, who cares, they’ll never know what happened here until it’s too late anyway.’   We were on the hook, so to speak, for the foreseeable future.  And this ushered in the era of house-sitting employees, additional rentals, new equipment sets for each place, etc. 

On one level, nothing changed much.  We still were renting secluded homes in very nice neighborhoods.  We were still taking in loads whenever the opportunity arose.  The network continued to grow, now expanding well beyond the New York area.  We were shipping to Idaho, Washington and the entire northwest, Kentucky, Ohio and the midwest, Buffalo continued to soak up whatever we sent, and we didn’t even have to touch the stuff that went north to Canada.  Just a phone call would get it to where it had to be and all we had to do was count.  What could be better, huh? 

Well, on another level, more people in the fold meant we needed additional insulation wherever possible.  After all, we had a house to protect and, as time went on, a ‘normal’ taxpayer reputation to live up to.  And this brings the tale back to PJ.  He had the accountant that fixed us up to buy the house but he had lots and lots more than an accountant.  One thing that was always troublesome, were the cars and trucks.  No matter how we sliced it, if a load got busted, the car was going to be traced back to someone somewhere.  NadaMucho used his parents to drive a humongous Buick.  We were always looking for the 'average' looking guy or, better yet, family that would take a leisurely drive up the coast for a grand.   We had bought Caddies and Chryslers and Dusters and other cars but in the end, we had to title them and insure them and it was a very weak link in the situation.  Any half-assed investigator could run a registration and find our vitals in about five minutes (this was pre-digital).  To this point, our luck had held but it was definitely time to stop depending on luck.

Unless, of course, your last name was Pfeiffer, and in which case, you simply didn't give a shit...  You had cash in your pocket?  You went out and bought a top of the line Caddy, totally pimped out, in your own name...  and screw anyone who cares about it.

So one day, PJ shows up on my driveway in a shiny brand new Chevy Caprice Classic...  This car was absolute perfection from my perspective.  It was a common family sedan, low key, unassuming all-American car with a very very large trunk.

So I ask PJ what’s the scoop and he just smiles and says he paid all cash and tosses the registration on my kitchen table.  I look and see that this car is registered to nobody I know.  I ask PJ who is he paying to own the car and he just smiles and beckons me to go outside with him.  Even in those days, we were hesitant to talk about serious things indoors.  The saying went, ‘If you want to read it in the newspaper, say it over your home phone or talk about it in your house.’  So I walk outside with him and learn that he’s ‘got a guy’ who can deliver brand new anonymous cars, any make or model, any set of options...  literally anything you wanted...  fully insured, registered, plated, ready to go...  for a reasonable add-on price tag.  You want a Chevy?  a Jaguar?  Plymouth Duster?  Caddy?  Benz?  No problem at all.  Just bring the dough when you want a car and the car shows up within a week or so.  My world is changing once again-and while it felt a little out of control, how do you stop something like this once it gets going?  My scene had taken on a life of its own.

Before too long, we were buying Chevys like candy.  I met the guy, developed a nice rapport and eventually turned him on to Marvin who started buying a car a week for about 6 months.  Eventually, by chance, we noticed that he was re-using phony IDs but it wasn’t all that important.  Once these cars were in use, it was nothing to fill one up, leave it somewhere, and just turn over the keys to the other guy.  He'd take the car, empty it, bring it back, and everyone was smooth.  Nobody knew where the stuff went and everybody had a car to use.  I'd drop off a carful to Marvin...  He'd give me the keys to an empty...  I'd go fill it up...  etc etc...  until I happened to look in the glovebox one day and realized that the car guy had been reusing his IDs.  We had bought more cars than he had IDs for.  And he had a connection at the DMV so this obviously went higher and deeper than I wanted to know.

In any event, the key was to be able to walk away from a car without having it lead to you.  Like everyone else, in those days, this guy was a totally legitimate luxury car guy.  If you wanted to lease a Bentley, he could arrange it.  Porsche?  No problemo.  He didn't hide or work out of a back room.  His showroom was one of the biggest wide open glass fronted luxury car places in Great Neck.  Everybody knew this guy but they didn't have a clue what went on behind the scenes.

Oh...  speaking of not talking about serious things indoors, we had taken to talking in ridiculous codes, even on the phone.  Pounds were ‘little baskets’ (aka LBs), other items and amounts were called paintings, 2x4s, tiles, chairs, tables, you name it.  The one thing you could always be sure of was that nobody ever meant what they said...  until that one time... 

I get a page from Big Al from Red Hook, go to the local payphone, and call his local payphone...  He tells me to meet him at his warehouse to check out some ‘radios’.  My eyes roll because I know that Big Al (previously described here), wants in on the bigger end of pot distribution and has been trying for a while to make it happen.  Of course I agree to go see him since his ‘friends’ are doing lots of stuff in Miami and elsewhere.  John the Beak and John the Dope are in town and seem to have lots of product so this might actually be something.  I pick up a buddy, show up at his warehouse and he walks us to a big Ryder truck that’s parked off in a dark corner.  ‘Wait till youse see dis stuff!’  he says, all excited.  And when we’re behind the truck, he calls over one of his guys, and up goes the rear sliding door...  opening on a truck filled, top to bottom, side to side, end to end with....  RADIOS!!!  The guy knew a guy who knew a guy who ‘might have’ hijacked a truck filled with radios.  It took a few minutes but I spent every second of those minutes explaining to Big Al that were weren’t really criminals, just pot dealers...  which was, of course, unimaginable to him.  ‘Youse is either in the biz or not!’  was his angry attitude.  Until I told him I’d front him 10 pounds off the top of the next primo batch I saw.

And nobody got hurt....

One Small Step Becomes a Giant Leap...

In the legal working world, success is a combination of who you are, where you are, what you know and who you know. All factor into career progress in varying degrees depending on your career. In the underworld, who you know vastly overshadows the others. Idiots often become big shots because they know someone. You could be a really smart guy but have no connections and fail terribly. There is a wall that you can't get past without the right contacts. And it was no different in our circles. Sometimes a simple introduction changed everything. And that’s what happened when I met PJ. The circle that opened up to me after I met Nada Mucho (PJ among them) made a huge difference in what was possible. Suddenly, I was in touch with an entirely fresh group of high-level distributors, wholesalers and, at the top, smugglers. I hadn’t changed a bit and I was still connected to all the same people... but adding the new circle magnified the possibilities exponentially.

First of all, PJ lived just minutes away and we knew a lot of the same people from different directions. This added complexity to the sales matrix but also became an invaluable information source. We both benefited no matter who was running the particular deal. Up till then, I was more or less of a successful wholesaler/retailer. I still saw friends and acquaintances I’d met in the beginning when I was trying to make sense of what I’d gotten myself into. I was able to sell to them at way less cost than they’d pay elsewhere and was also able to pick out the primo quality for them. It was a great connection in many ways since I was not only keeping up old relationships but I was also now paying less and selling for more.

But that isn’t what this chapter is about... This is about who you know... And the connection to PJ also opened a door to possibilities that went far beyond anything I’d imagined to that point. He wasn’t just a hippie. He was doing things in a far more traditional way than I knew existed. He had an accountant, a lawyer, and some other very interesting resources... The key to these connections was that they all knew, to some degree, what was going on and they were all in for the ride and the dough.

By 1980, we had been through a dozen places in Manhattan, several in Queens, and were well into the first dozen on Long Island. The rules in the burbs were simple... Seclusion was essential... and we were mostly steered towards houses that were upper echelon places... Up a hill, behind tall hedges... down a long driveway... anything isolated... And it was funny... our criteria and resources justified almost any rent. Couple of grand a month? Sure thing... We’ll pay in advance if you’d like... Cash even... They were mostly on the Gold Coast/North Shore... Sea Cliff, Brookville, Lloyd Point, West Hills, Huntington Bay, Halesite... All upscale and all taken with one thing in mind... a secluded, controllable environment. After a while, you could get used to that type of place...

So one day, when we were facing the end of a particular lease... and the housing scout was out scouting houses, we came across an interesting opportunity. Interest rates, under the Carter administration, had reached epic levels approaching 18%, and had made real estate virtually unsellable. These geniuses from Georgia peanut country decided they could control inflation by raising interest rates... which they did... except the plan failed miserably. So once he was out of office, rates began to fall and had hit 12% when we ran across a house on 2.5 acres that the owner was desperate to sell. Vincent Poma was a banker for UBS and he’d raised his family in the house... was looking to downsize... but was stuck there in a non-existent real estate market. The scout comes back and tells me this is a very unusual situation... the house is up a 150 foot hilly driveway that ends at a drive-through garage. I mean there was a garage that you could pull into and out of without backing up. The house itself was interesting too... It's got a pool, a cabana with a bathroom, a back yard that would accommodate a tennis court. Built in the 1950s, it was supposedly a guest house for a very wealthy guy... Guido Eckstein was the name I recall but a little research shows he was the son of highly respected restaurateur, Vincent of the same last name.

http://www.nytimes.com/1964/06/03/victor-eckstein-owned-luchows.html?_r=0

More about the amazing house later... but bottom line... for $170,000 we could own it. And although it would practically tap our cash, we could scrape together the $70,000 and hope to get a mortgage for the rest. Unfortunately, there was just one problem. I had no income... errr... no visible income that is.... no tax returns... nothing that would justify a mortgage... and frankly, I had no idea about such things. And this is where the open door comes in. In a conversation with PJ, who was also renting in the area, I managed an introduction to an accountant who, basically, for a fee (of course)... could take care of the entire mortgage application issue for us. The guy was connected to the ‘real’ world of finance in ways and with knowledge that I had absolutely no clue about. Within a week or two, I had employment records, pay stubs, tax returns, and anything else that was needed to get the mortgage. In fact, I didn’t realize it at the time but I was signing on to a whole new way of life. Buying the house was just a first step. Maintaining something in my name also meant having an ongoing income, filing taxes, and so on and so forth. The next thing I knew, I was taking an insurance exam, getting a brokers license, and cashing checks (for a fee, of course). Today, it’s what they call money laundering. In 1980, I called it a major sign of success.

Fluke of the Day

Even now, after all these years, I don’t really understand why the authorities had such a tough time finding us.  It’s not like we were master criminals...  or even sworn to the Italian omerta.  We were just a bunch of crazies with a modest amount of common sense and a little more balls than normal.  Virtually every bust that happened was a fluke.   Were there people who spilled the beans?  Sure.  Did people go down from it?  Yes again.  But it was almost always a fluke that started the ball rolling.

Frequently, someone was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.  It could be a traffic stop gone wrong or a cop inhaling a whiff of smoke that escaped from an open window.  It could be a cop mistakenly thinking you were a robbery suspect but then finding a pocket full of cash or a box of pot.  And the funny thing was that we were so damned obvious.  It got to the point where I’d pull into a diner, look at the vehicles in the lot and know instantly if a deal was going down.  You could go to a phone booth and just know that the person hanging out there was doing business.  I never quite understood how we got away with so much for so long. 

We had car phones before the cops could listen in.  The serious smuggler types had satellite phones but we were fine with payphones and beepers.  Occasionally, I’d see someone I didn’t know hanging at a payphone but managed to make eye contact with.  We’d just smile and nod, knowing that we were both in the same game.  Surprisingly, I don’t recall ever doing business with someone I met like that but it was more from paranoia than anything else.  Even though I was sure I was clean, I wasn’t sure of the other guy.  It’s tough to work with tons of contraband and rely on blind intuition.  We always thought we were vulnerable but it was almost always the fluky moments that got people busted.

I could swear I previously wrote about this incident but in re-reading the material I can’t find it.  So here’s a ‘fluke of the day’ story...  We had rented a loft-type space just north of Union Square West on 17th Street in Manhattan and were using it as a stash and central location for a while in the middle 70s.  The building was five floors with a loft on every floor.  There was an elevator that opened into each loft.  (Although it wasn’t uncommon since these loft-type areas had originally been commercial spaces, it was still pretty nice to have a private elevator with a key lock that you could turn on and off.)  Our space was on the fourth floor and the elevator opened into a relatively small office area with a desk, a few chairs and some shelving.  The main section of the space was separated by a flimsy faux wall that had a door opening onto a huge living area.

This main space was probably 40 feet long by 20 feet wide and perfect for what we were doing.  The big Ohaus scale could be covered and all our other equipment could be hidden when not in use.  In truth, it was a typically perfect spot to deal from with a locked elevator, locked staircase, storage space that was isolated from the entry, windows that only revealed the space up to the faux wall.  The streets below were always crowded and busy, but up in our loft it was an entirely different story...  the ultimate in space management...  which was something that we grew to appreciate more and more as the business expanded.  Controlled access was essential to staying out of harm’s way.  It prevented everything from rip-offs to fluke busts.  Fluke?  right...  back to the fluke...

So it’s a nice fall day and we had taken in a couple of bales of top-notch Jamaican weed.  As usual, we were breaking it down into five pound bags, weighing them on the Ohaus, making sure the mixtures were fair, and checking the overall weight to confirm what we were paying for.  A customer and his girlfriend came by early to pick up a few bags.  (They had folks that were in from out of town and had cash to spend.)  Meantime, we’re hanging out, tasting the stuff, getting high as usual.  The weed was very very good.  In those days, good Jamaican rivaled anything from South America and we loved it.  Ganga was good.  A few other friends stopped by to check out the stuff and we’re having a grand time.  This isn’t like other drugs...  You can’t smoke that much weed where it affects the overall weight.  Even a dozen joints wouldn’t change the deal...  so we proceeded to get down and get high. 

Meantime, one of them, Joey, (who it later turned out secretly had a hard drug habit), shows up and joins the party.  It’s a beautiful day...  We’re going to make some dough while hanging out and partying with friends.  The product is great and we’re having a jolly old time.  Until, that is, the elevator door opens and out steps a huge bald guy who looked very much like Kojak (Telly Savales) the tv cop.  Joey, in his state, forgot to lock the elevator door and I, in mine, had forgotten to turn it off.

We were mostly all sitting around in the front area by the elevator, smoking, laughing, having a good time and suddenly, we know we’re all going to jail.  Dead silence...  not a word...  Without thinking, I jump up and get in the open doorway to the back space to block his view of the open five pound plastic bags that are lined up on the floor.  It was like a production line of pot and there was absolutely nothing to prevent him from seeing it, smelling it, and knowing 100% that we were dealing from this loft.  I look around and nobody is laughing any more.  It’s dead silent in the loft.  And Kojak is more than big enough to see past me into the big room.  He’s got Kojak’s bald head, is wearing a Kojak trenchcoat over a suit (like lots of plainclothes cops) and I’m waiting for him to whip out handcuffs or pull his weapon or line us up against a wall.  After all, we’re just pot-dealing hippies, not violent criminal types.  Escape is impossible since the stairs are locked and there’s no running to the elevator.

I look up at Kojak and he focuses on me.  The guy is like 6’4” and 280...  I mean he seemed as wide as a truck in that small space.  But so far, he hasn’t said a word.  He just stepped into the room and slowly took it all in.  At this point, he opens his jacket and reaches inside...  I’m flinching, getting ready to present my hands for the cuffs...  He takes his hand out of his pocket and holds something up in front of me...  It looks like a pen.  I mean huh?  a pen?  And attached to the pen is a little card that says:  “Hello, I am a deaf mute.  Please buy my pen so I can support myself.”

I’m not making this up.  Not only isn’t he a cop, but he’s unable to speak or hear.  After about five poignant seconds, I’m reaching in my pocket for money and pressing a few 20s into his hand...  taking his pen...  and when he reaches back in his pocket, taking all his pens...  then giving him another $50, taking his arm and walking him back to the elevator, pressing the ground floor button...  and riding down with him.  Meantime, he’s got this confused look on his face, possibly wondering what just happened.  He hit the deaf mute pen sales jackpot but he’s not sure why.  

When I get back upstairs, we’re like ‘huh?’  and ‘did that just happen?’  and then I begin pantomiming what he could do...  like find a cop, do a charades version of smoking a joint...  pointing to our doorway...  etc. etc...  A moment later, we’re all in nervous hysterics, wondering what planet we’d landed on.  Believe me...  that Jamaican was some seriously good stuff.  And nobody got hurt.

The Mutiny Hotel in the Grove

Late yesterday, I was reflecting on Miami in the 70s... and I realized I had completely forgotten about the time Pfeiffer went viral in the mainstream media... When I collect my thoughts, I promise some entertainment that is far funnier than the Republican debates. Pfeiffer for President!!!

Miami in the early to mid 70's was Florida's version of the wild wild west.  The town was filled to the brim with outlaws, renegades, banditos, hippie drug dealers, smugglers of all types and of all things, gangsters of all shapes forms and ethnicities, CIA agents, foreign spies, wild women, fast cars, drugs of every imaginable variety (especially cocaine), and most of all...  above everything else...  money!  lots and lots of money...  unimaginable amounts of money!!!  

At the center of this scene, however, was a hotel on the beach (well...  across the street from the beach)...  The Mutiny Hotel in Coconut Grove...  Everyone stayed there when they could get a room and more deals were made in that place than anyone will ever know.  The private Mutiny Club had a membership that consisted of an incredible array of characters.

For a clear image of the atmosphere, you might want to read this extremely well-written literary piece about the Glorious and Notorious Mutiny.  And yes, Pfeiffer in the article is the same Pfeiffer.  It really happened.  I found a picture of him climbing down into the arms of the waiting authorities after freebase-induced paranoia inspired him and another guy to burn up 50 grand in a hotel hot tub.  There's isn't much I could write that would better communicate the times or the place.

That's Steve with his back to the camera after climbing down five or six floors on the outside front of the hotel on Bayshore Drive.  He and the other guy climbed from terrace to terrace, floor to floor, fleeing the hot tub fire they set while the fire department and police waited for them at the bottom on the street.  The story made the national news both television and newspapers.

Thursday, February 27, 1997 | 19 years ago

Glorious & Notorious
Casablanca had Rick's; Vegas had the Stardust; Miami's cocaine jazz age had the decadent Mutiny Hotel

By Sean Rowe
Dig the scene, little sister: Burton Goldberg, owner, standing in the back doorway of the members-only Mutiny Club, canary-yellow kerchief in his breast pocket, eyes scanning the room. At the corner booth: cocaine kingpins Ricardo "Monkey" Morales, Carlos Quesada, and Francisco Condom-Gil, drinking $90 Dom with three girls in cocktail dresses. Quesada's half out of his chair, yelling, throwing dinner rolls at Monkey. Across the blue shag carpet at a bend in the bar: Sgt. Raul Diaz, Metro Intelligence, nursing a Scotch, taking notes with his eyes. A pinlight spot illuminating one perfect orchid in the corner near the terrace. Over by the tiny dance floor: Esmeralda Ochoa playing the harp, wearing a G-string and no top, glitter mascara, long fingers working the strings.

Dig further: Barbara "Bubbles" Esposito, hostess, adjusting her hat, coming up the front stairs with Ramon Perez Llamas, reputed Puerto Rican hit man. Some Caracas oil money getting up and brushing past Llamas on the way to the john, Llamas giving him the hot eye. Ex-fed prosecutor Jerry Sanford walking in, noting the Buffalo Boys, upper New York state grass smugglers. Walter Elmore, general manager, crossing the room to speak with the maitre d', who's getting ready to send Fernando Puig, bouncer extraordinaire, out to the airport in a Rolls to pick up what's coming in from Seattle, the only place left in America tonight willing to ship 30 cases of champagne and aguardiente express freight. Pete "the Count" Baraban, dope lawyer, looking up from a baked potato wrapped in gold tinfoil, noticing the Villaverde brothers, Raul and Rafael, sitting down with CIA agent Edwin Wilson, all three men in white suits.

Dig: Upstairs in room 1020 -- the $140-a-night Bordello Suite -- two low rollers use twenties to light Q-tips dipped in alcohol and cocaine, throwing the lit bills into the Jacuzzi, onto the circular bed, up in the air at the mirrored ceiling. One man crawls across the floor, dropping his chrome-plated .44, throwing up, inching his way over the rail of the balcony, the other screaming incoherently and following on all fours. The two wackdoodles make their way down the front of the 138-room hotel, shirtless, climbing balcony by balcony, tumbling onto the second-story awning, spilling coke out of their pockets and on the head of the doorman. Upstairs and down the hall -- the Sahara Suite -- a thief kicks in the door and steals jazz star Herbie Mann's flute, solid silver. It's 10:00 p.m. on June 23, 1980, at the Mutiny Hotel in Coconut Grove.

Or it could have been. Michael Borkin and Charles Pfeiffer did in fact climb down the Mutiny's twelve-story facade on that date, leaving behind them a pile of smoldering cash, a supply of cocaine, marijuana, and magic mushrooms, and a handgun. Monkey Morales, Carlos Quesada, and Francisco Condom-Gil were habitues of the hotel's smoky, second-floor Mutiny Club, and so was Pete "the Count" Baraban. Sgt. Raul Diaz may have stopped on his way home from work and ordered Scotch, but he can't remember for sure. Someone did steal Herbie Mann's sterling silver flute from a room at the Mutiny Hotel, but it was four months earlier, October 16, 1979. The Villaverde brothers partied at the Mutiny, and they hung out with shadowy CIA man Edwin Wilson, but accounts differ as to whether they ever did both at the same time. Did a Venezuelan oil tycoon bump into Ramon Perez Llamas on the way to the bathroom on that particular night, and did Llamas glare at him? Perhaps. Llamas can't remember now because he's dead, and so is bouncer Fernando Puig, and so is Monkey Morales, all three killed by gunfire in separate incidents.

Fact always did blend with fiction at the glorious, notorious Mutiny Hotel. In its time there was nothing like it, and today it lives on in hindsight like the afterimage of a hallucination, bright but blurry. The Mississippi Delta is said to start in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis; likewise the Mutiny in its day defined Miami's psychic boundaries. It was the nerve center of the city's exploding cocaine trade, a favorite hangout of globetrotting spies, and a desperately popular watering hole for Latin America's nouveau riche. It was meant to be elegant, and was, but early on it became infamous and edgy, and reveled in the reputation. Its most decadent highs were a carnival barker's advertisement for the Seventies, and its decline was an early object lesson in America's S&L crisis.

"I did a movie called life, with actors that were real people," says Burton Goldberg, the former owner. "We had dictators, secret police, drug people, bankers, the international trade, gunrunners and celebrities: Rod Serling, Sen. Kennedy, Cher, Hamilton Jordan, Jacqueline Onassis, George Bush. Mimes and magicians! Naked dancers in very fine taste, not prurient! Music! Chairs with enormous arms!" 

Now a resident of Tiburon, California, and a publisher of alternative medical texts, Goldberg adds: "I was very proud of the rooms -- the Egyptian Suite with stained glass and hand-carved chairs, the Roman tubs. The mirrors over the beds came from a hotel in New Orleans. The amount of romance that was budding there was incredible! It was in the very center of the sexual revolution."

The Mutiny Hotel opened in 1968 and closed for good in 1989, after years of spiraling senescence. At its peak in 1979, the Mutiny Club claimed to have 11,000 card-carrying members, to gross $7 million a year in food and beverage revenues, and to consistently sell more Dom Perignon than any other venue in America.

A decade after it closed for keeps and more than fifteen years after its heyday, there's nothing left of the Mutiny but a gutted steel-and-concrete shell at 2951 S. Bayshore Dr. A real estate development company bought the property last year and intends to spend millions transforming its nondescript architecture into a snazzy modern condominium. The new owners found some hotel newsletters and brochures under the rubble near the western corner of the building, and that's about all that exists in the way of documentary evidence of its glory days. But there are ghosts, many of them still alive and walking around with their memories. Some want to forget they lived part of their lives at the Mutiny; some of those quoted below were given fictitious names to honor their requests for anonymity.

Jack, retired smuggler: "I would arrive at the Mutiny at seven in the morning, have breakfast, and talk to the girls. Each table had its own phone. You snapped your fingers and they'd bring the phone, plug it in the jack at the base of the table, and tell you what the number was. I would drink coffee till about noon, interspersed with a couple Heinekens. Then I would switch from the patio area to the glassed-in dining room for lunch. Barbara would seat me at my table and I'd meet with financiers for the films I was trying to produce.

"The afternoons were drinking martinis between one and five. Back to Scotch at five, calling assorted girlfriends, calling the front desk, ordering assorted theme rooms -- the Jungle Room for one type of girl, the Valentine's Room for another, always with a Jacuzzi. Plus ordering a nice supply of champagne and cocaine -- a gram, an eighth, whatever. The nights were basically about trading coke for sex. You plied women with coke, champagne. You would throw down 500 bucks and say buy some clothes, some nice earrings, here's my beeper number, I'll pick you up tonight.

"The Mutiny was the meeting place between North and South America. Both types of governments, both sets of dealers, both groups of spies and law enforcement people. You could conduct business, you could party -- there was really no reason to leave, and after a while I didn't. I lived there for weeks at a time. I left when I went to prison.

"Multimillion dollar drug deals were being done at the tables on any given night. The DEA was there pretending to be dealers, trying to suck in the real dealers. The girls that worked there knew the clientele; they knew the cops, DEA, and all the major players in the drug business. You would think that a place with drug dealers and cops in the same room there would be a lot of tension. There was no tension at all. The girls would say 'Jack, those four guys over there, they're heat.' But they didn't need to tell me. Those guys had the beards, the jackets, the shorts, whatever, but they always had the wrong shoes. That was the dead giveaway, always."

Mitzy, day waitress: "Being a Mutiny girl was sort of a status thing. Your makeup had to be perfect, you had your nails checked every day. We were all in our twenties, and we were all lookers in our own way. I had to go for three interviews before I got hired, and for the third interview I dressed a lot less conservatively.

"There was a lot of legitimate money -- millionaire Mexican chicken farmers, rich Venezuelans, local lawyers and businessmen -- but you also had the drug dealers throwing money around. They loved the girls, they were all showing off, and they all wanted to date us. We did very well. I can remember someone saying, 'Sweetheart, get me a pack of cigarettes' -- cigarettes were a dollar a pack then -- and they'd give you a hundred and say keep the change. To work three hours a day, three days a week, and clear $500 a week, that was a lot of money. 

"Some legitimate people liked rubbing elbows with the not-so-legitimate people. Guys like Willy Falcon, his group was in there. He liked the corner booth the best. The dealers would come for lunch and order martinis and just keep going and going. There would be huge backgammon games, a lot of serious gambling. There would be four guys on the patio doing lines off the table and no one paid any attention, you just pretended you didn't see it.

"I only worked nights a couple times. It was completely different from days, like the animals came out. I felt like I was in a jungle. A lot of leather and gold jewelry, a lot of diamond-faced Rolexes and gold coins on chains. Night was more intense, more pressure. There are some people who want to forget they even worked there. Some of the girls wound up marrying very wealthy men."

Mitchell, law enforcement consultant, ex-FBI: "I knew this Cuban immigrant, a very bright guy, he arrived in Miami and got a very menial job making about 50 bucks a week. He came upon a couple guys who asked if he knew how to use a walkie-talkie and binoculars. He says sure. They drive him to the Keys, and put him on a bridge and said if you see any police, either in cars or boats, get on the radio and let us know. He spends the whole night there scared to death and never saw a thing. No one showed up. The two guys pick him up in the morning, mosquito-bitten to no end, and two weeks later they showed up and gave him $10,000 in cash. One thing led to another, and the next thing he knows he's one of the biggest dope dealers in Miami.

"The highlight of his pissing-it-away days was this: He had a confirmation party for his daughter at the Mutiny Hotel. It cost him $30,000.

"I thought I was working real monster cases in south Philly, but boy was I wrong. For dope, Miami was the center of the universe, and the Mutiny was the center of Miami.

"Back then a kilo of marijuana cost $5 at the dock in north Colombia. So then you sell it up here for a thousand. The profit margin was so high it defied description. That was before cartels, before it became big business. What do you do with all that money? I know two dope dealers who traded cars, they were at the bar and simply swapped registrations. One was a Porsche, the other a Mercedes, and both vehicles had engine problems, so they were playing games with each other. That was their idea of a game. Colombian drug dealers really didn't understand the U.S. because they didn't live here. They relied on Cubans to do their dope importation and distribution. The Mutiny became a central point for Cubans involved in the drug business to hang out and be seen.

"These were otherwise normal human beings who all of a sudden fell into so much money it was unfathomable. It was like hitting the lottery every Saturday night. And the Mutiny just seemed like the place to be. Miami Beach had become a pit. There were no clubs for these guys in Lauderdale, because they were Cuban. There really was nothing else but the Grove.

"Drugs were relatively new to the FBI, so I said, Well if I'm in Newcastle, I'll mine coal. The first thing I saw was that it was a very fluid environment. Allegiances shifted all the time. You would be partners with three other people on a load, but the next day you weren't. If you were sitting at the Mutiny and had access to X amount of dope that was arriving, you then needed access to storage, offload spots, shrimpers, trucks; so you would hook up with your partners of the moment there at the bar."

Roger, divorce lawyer: "Miami has always had the best criminal lawyers in America. For a long time, up until the federal laws changed, the majority of the cases handled were drug cases, and 90 percent of the good criminal lawyers defended drug cases. Later the cases became much more difficult, the sentencing guidelines left less room in which a lawyer could operate. But for a period of time, the Mutiny was a very popular place for lawyers, and it wound up getting some of them in a lot of trouble. I remember there were law offices on one floor of the Mutiny, and the classical music station, WTMI, they had their studio and transmitter on another floor, which I thought was sort of funny. 

"I went there some of the first nights it was open, back when the Palm Bay Club and Jockey Club were in their heyday. It was one constant party, all the glamorous people from around the country and around the world. Then when Miami started changing, it did too. Drugs became much more prevalent and there was so much cash around that all the expensive and exclusive places started to attract the cowboys. You know: the people who now have streets named after them."

Tom, journalist: "One of my first snazzy dates in Miami was with a very glamorous rubia Cubanita who lived at Grove Isle who said, 'Gee, why don't we go to the Mutiny for a drink?' What's the Mutiny, I'm wondering? I found out. They had these humongo padded leather banquettes, these incredible private booths. What was obvious to me was that this was a perfect seduction scene for a young man unencumbered, who had recently come to Miami. It was the perfect makeout place. The decor at that time was kind of jungle-y. Those banquettes: You'd sit there and think of what might be underneath the cushions -- cocaine, bugs, cash. So here I am with this incredible Latin blonde in this incredible joint. Wow! I was in Miami! I had arrived! The only thing was, by the mid-Eighties, the cocaine cowboy days were dying down. During the Scarface era it was quite a scene, but that had kind of ended by then."

Lazaro, private detective, former Metro-Dade police undercover narcotics officer: "Miami was crazy in those days. It was fun but it was also very dangerous -- all those sensationalistic hits, the shootouts down U.S. 1. For a long time you had some local American guys involved in grass smuggling, and they were happy-go-lucky, sort of mellow types. Then the fishermen started getting into cocaine and had all of this money, and then the Colombians started coming in the mid-Seventies. After that cocaine started getting really heavy and it was a more violent type of world. The cocaine types were more vociferous, more aggressive.

"In the middle of all this mayhem, the Mutiny was like a no man's land, sort of a sanctuary. There weren't very many fights because everybody was armed. I remember Monkey Morales sitting there one night. A couple people came in who he didn't like, so he asked for a basket of bread, and in the basket of bread he had put his weapon. That's how he did it. So if the police searched him he was clean, but he had his gun close at hand."

Monkey Morales -- stocky, scary, possessed of simian features -- began his career the same year the Mutiny opened, and eventually reigned as king of a court that included such colorful top-flight drug traffickers as Rudy Rodriguez, Carlos Quesada, and Francisco Condom-Gil. In 1968, after defecting from the Cuban secret police, Morales was arrested for the first time in Miami. But instead of going to jail he became a paid FBI informant, testifying later that year against fellow anti-Castro zealot Orlando Bosch, who was caught at the port of Miami trying to shoot missiles at a Cuba-bound Polish freighter. Throughout the years, as he became one of Florida's most successful cocaine importers, Morales informed on virtually all of his Mutiny drinking buddies, who, oddly, continued partying with him.

In 1977 police bugged the phone of Morales's sometime friend and business partner Carlos Quesada, and later arrested Quesada, Rudy Rodriguez, and Morales, and seized 56 pounds of cocaine. The wiretap transcripts were ruled inadmissible as evidence, and the case began to collapse. But Quesada and Morales turned snitch and helped send Rodriguez to prison. Three years later, Morales assisted police in orchestrating the so-called Tick-Talks investigation, named for a bug placed in a wall clock at Carlos Quesada's house. Forty-eight people, including Condom-Gil, Quesada, and the Villaverde brothers, were arrested. Out on bond, Rafael Villaverde vanished while on a fishing trip in the Bahamas. Free, but running out of friends, Monkey Morales entered, then dropped out of, the federal witness protection program. In 1982 he died from a gunshot wound to the head at a bar in Key Biscayne.

Lazaro, the undercover narc: "Monkey had a table at the end of the bar, and sometimes he'd be sitting there with Carlos Quesada. I liked Monkey. Quesada, I didn't like him as much, he was less intelligent, basically a silk-shirt punk. One day he's putting vinyl on people's car tops at a joint off Le Jeune and Eighth Street, a year and a half later he's driving a Rolls and a Mercedes. He wasn't in the same class with Monkey, but then again, he's still alive. 

"Anyway, you had nights when you had the top drug dealers in town sitting with Customs, DEA, Metro, all drinking at the same bar. Beepers were a new thing back then, but sometimes you walked in there and it sounded like a symphony with all the beepers going off. There were nice ladies there from all walks of life, everything from hookers to corporate executives. Everyone was there to have fun. The worst you had in the way of violence was wives walking in on drug dealers with their girlfriends. Sometimes you'd go in the men's room and there'd be three or four guys sniffing and snorting. I never saw any selling, but I sure saw a lot of giving.

"You keep asking me, Why was the Mutiny allowed to operate so openly for so long? Let me explain. It's like in espionage, the government knows who the spies are, so they leave them in place. That way they can study them. At the Mutiny we knew who was hanging out with who. We left them alone because we wanted to study the genealogy. You did a lot of intelligence gathering at the Mutiny just by going there. You would know who just brought in a load because they would be celebrating -- it was that open. Then sometimes you'd see two guys who you thought should be at each other's throats, and instead they're best buddies now. A lot of people came from out of town to meet at the Mutiny. You got their tag number, and the next morning you drove out to the airport to the car rental office, and you would see who rented the car. If you wanted to spoil somebody's night, you'd come by and sit at their table and let everyone see you doing it.

"We had a gentleman, Rudy Rodriguez, who we arrested with about $900,000 in cash at his home. In those days there were no money laundering statutes. Rudy was on his way to the Mutiny when we came in, and here's what he was wearing: white shoes, white socks, a white frock, and a white top hat. His wife was dressed in white. There was a white Rolls Royce out in front of Rudy's house with a guy named Sunshine Sammy playing a small piano, a keyboard, in the back. Rudy used to roll his base in Marlboros and then put the cigarettes back in the cigarette boxes. It was a very antiseptic smell that you could sniff when you walked into the Mutiny. It permeated the air, and you knew Rudy was there.

"We found the dope, the money, but Rudy claimed it was income from his seafood business. The IRS eventually gave him half the money back, and he went to the Mutiny and put a bottle of Dom on every table."

Raul Martinez, assistant chief, Miami police: "We took significant numbers of people out of there at gunpoint. Sometimes you couldn't help it. One night myself and a couple other investigators were walking down the stairs and one of us bumped into Carlos Quesada. When you bumped into him you could feel the handle of a gun, so we arrested him for packing a firearm. I arrested Willy Falcon there on a 1980-81 wiretap case known as Video Canary, and he pleaded guilty, the only thing he was ever arrested for that stuck. He was a puppy then, basically. The level of dealing he was doing at the time definitely magnified over the years.

"Monkey Morales, we arrested him there on one case, and later on he became an informant for us. He testified against Carlos Quesada. The Villaverdes were involved in that one, too. That's the world of informants. They get caught and want to work off a case, or they want to hurt their competition. Today's drug dealer could be tomorrow's informant against somebody else. So there are friendships, but no loyalty. For instance, I remember George Valdes hanging out at the Mutiny back when he was Willy Falcon's supplier, then he became an informant against Falcon.

"The Mutiny was a place that you didn't go by yourself. Or at least you had to be very careful when you went there, because you could get set up. Working undercover there was exciting, dangerous, kind of foolish at times. It exposed you to false allegations by any scumbag, which could be hard to disprove. Also, there were a lot of high-level attorneys with high-level clients, which created stares across the room. The attorneys wondered if you were there maybe watching them, or their clients, and they would send over drinks and you would have to send the drinks back. I did, anyway." 

Steven, attorney, former federal prosecutor: "Usually the people with me were other prosecutors or agents, and a lot of the time we were just there out of sheer curiosity. It was the height of the cocaine cowboy era, which a lot of people have forgotten about, and from the eyes of a federal prosecutor it had sort of a sinister feel. Maybe sinister isn't the right word. It was like being in the Wookie bar in Star Wars.

"You've got to put Miami in context. You can't really understand the place unless you knew it then, and if you wanted to understand it then, you had to check out the Mutiny. The Mutiny was beyond a hangout, it was almost a cult. A lot of undercover meetings took place there. In the old days this town was loaded with informants. The U.S. Attorney's office was absolutely swamped. A lot of people came in from out of town on short-term detail to help us out, and the first place we always took them was the Mutiny.

In 1960 seven Miami men were recruited and secretly trained by the CIA to assassinate Cuban president Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, Che Guevara, and five other Cuban government officials. This so-called Shooter Team included Raul and Rafael Villaverde, who two decades later showed up at the Mutiny as regular customers. Two years after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, other members of the intact Shooter Team were reportedly caught by local police smuggling narcotics into the U.S. from Cuba, leading one CIA supervisor to worry about "problems of control" and illegal profiteering. Meanwhile, at least ten years before being observed at the Mutiny with the Villaverde brothers, Monkey Morales was also working for the CIA, and spent two years on assignment for the Agency in the Congo in 1964 and 1965.

What to make of the unmistakable odor of espionage that blew through the Mutiny some nights, as strong as the scent of freebase Marlboros? Some former patrons believe that, as late as the mid-Eighties, the hotel and its club were a hatching-house for Reagan-era covert schemes aimed at Central America, or at least a relaxing spot for mercenaries and intelligence operatives who were involved in them.

In 1977 rogue CIA agent Edwin Wilson reportedly met with Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza and offered Somoza the services of the original 1960 Shooter Team for the purpose of assassinating top leadership in the revolutionary Sandinista movement. The price: $80,000 per man, plus $250,000 in expenses for the operation. Somoza declined, but two years later Shooter Team members, along with CIA representatives, met Somoza in the Bahamas to discuss supplying weapons, aircraft, ammunition, and military equipment to Somoza's dispossessed officers, now known as the Contras. On his return to Miami, Edwin Wilson set up Orca Supply Company and later used it to ship arms from Florida to Nicaragua.

By 1983 John Hull, an American rancher with past CIA associations, was allowing his property on the Costa Rican border to be used as a base for cocaine smuggling from Colombia to Miami; at the same time it was being used as a landing strip for arms shipments from Florida destined for the Nicaraguan Contras. Two sources claim to have seen both Hull and Wilson at the Mutiny in the early Eighties.

In a 1982 interview with the Miami Herald, Raul Villaverde claimed that his by-then-vanished brother had refused to cooperate with Wilson, who had been charged with conspiring to recruit Americans to train terrorists for Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy. Villaverde said he and his brother were "set up" in the Tick-Talks case by Monkey Morales as a favor to Monkey's CIA friends.

Mitchell, ex-FBI: "You've really got to define what you mean by a CIA operative. There are agents, but then you have a lot of operatives who are contract men, paid on an ad hoc basis. Many of these people are businessmen who travel and collect a lot of mundane intelligence: crops, commodity futures, et cetera. At the Mutiny, we're talking about the latter. A substantial number of Miami Cubans were in a position to learn things about what's going on in Cuba or elsewhere. They were on the CIA payroll. They thought it was cool, so they wouldn't hesitate to let people know, to brag about it. You got laid a lot more, and people were scared of you.

"Some of the baddest asses I have ever known in Miami, guys doing intimidation and shooting, that CIA persona is what they aspired to, it's the one badge they didn't have. I called it the 'Casablanca effect.' There would be a contingent of pretty opulent dopers pissing money away with the most outrageous women. Then you'd have a contingent that everybody knew to their bones was a spy of one kind or another. Then there were pretenders and wannabes. Nobody ever knew exactly who the spies were. They were information gatherers. Hell, everyone was. I guess that's what we all had in common." 

Martinez, the assistant Metro police chief: "About the spy thing, I'm not sure if that was a reality or a myth, whether these were real CIA, were they there officially, were they wannabes, or former CIA guys now involved in the drug business. I never did find out for sure."

Burton Goldberg was known to his employees as a petty tyrant and an overbearing perfectionist, but the Mutiny's long slide indisputably began in 1984 when Goldberg decamped, selling the hotel for a cool $17 million. The next year the Mutiny's new owners defaulted on their mortgage, and a bank named Sunrise Savings & Loan repossessed the property. At the time Mutiny general manager Bob Smith acknowledged that his efforts to clean up the hotel's druggie image had been a big mistake. "It was the downfall of the Mutiny in financial terms," Smith noted. "[Drug dealers] supported the club, and the club accounted for 65 percent of the revenues of the hotel."

In 1986 Sunrise Savings & Loan declared insolvency. To avoid widespread panic in the thrift industry, the federal government took control of the bank, thereby becoming the new owner of the Mutiny. For the next few years, the hotel floundered along as the feds tried to find a buyer. In 1987 police arrested eighteen people at a cocaine-and-conch party in the Mutiny's Cappuccino and Santa Fe suites. On the surface it seemed the wild days were still on, but in fact the party was a low-rent affair and the Mutiny had lost its pizzazz.

Local developer Manny Medina and a group of British investors finally bought the Mutiny in 1989 for $8.65 million. American taxpayers paid $5 million in losses on the building via a new congressional savings and loan bailout plan. Medina spent $2 million removing asbestos and gutting the building's interior, but his scheme to create a new upscale hotel never materialized.

In 1990 the Mutiny's furnishings were sold at auction, including a ceiling mirror from the Bordello Room, the blue satin bed canopy and Roman tub from the Arabian Nights suite, and the space-ship control panel built into the bed of the Lunar Dreams room. By the following year, scuzzy bums had moved into the now-vacant hotel, and members of the Coconut Grove Women's Club next door complained of rats and opossums floating in the near-empty swimming pool.

Last year Miami-based Flagler Development bought the Mutiny for $10.2 million. Developers Ricardo Dunin and Raul Echarte say they plan to invest $17 million more to turn the structure into a British Colonial-themed luxury condominium. A sales center and model condo unit opened on the site of the old Mutiny a few months ago, and business seems brisk. Dunin and Echarte plan to completely reconstruct the building, adding all new plumbing, electrical work, interior walls, windows and roof, as well as a two-story entrance and lobby. The lobby will have sisal carpet, cane and bamboo furniture, paddle fans, and brass details.

The new owners are careful to say that their creation will bear little resemblance to the old Mutiny. They've chosen to hang onto the name, though.

Manny Medina, former Mutiny owner: "Will it carry some of the stigma? Of course. We thought about that when we took over, the idea of changing the name. But the name will carry some of the cachet, too. Let me tell you something. I remember standing in the lobby of the Tamanaco Hotel in Caracas in 1979 and someone saying to me, You want to really know who's who in the world? Go to the Mutiny Hotel in Miami. They'll still tell you, South Americans, that the Mutiny is the place they dreamed about -- a table at the Mutiny. That was it, the beginning and the end."

Duane Cross, owner of Cross Training Fitness Center: "We took over the Mutiny phone number six years ago. We still get calls from around the world. We have people from Japan calling up trying to make reservations. I had the L.A. district attorney's office contact me about telephone bills of some former drug dealers. But that was mostly a few years ago. It's pretty much died down now."

These days the ghosts of the Mutiny are almost silent, the grist, almost, of legend. Asked what she knows about the history of the hotel, condominium saleswoman Lisa Trujillo shrugs and says: "I've heard some of the stories. But really, it was before my time." 

Trujillo hands out promotional packets touting the Italian kitchens and full-length windows that will soon fill the sky-skeleton above Bayshore Drive. One promo reads: "Now, with the Grove becoming the new neighborhood of choice for a new generation, there is a new address that symbolizes everything this village by the bay is about.... the Mutiny.

The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Fear Itself...

After I made the decision, nothing unusual really happened. The hash guy left for parts unknown with my dough and I mended some damaged fences with the other guy.

The ‘other guy’ was dubbed ‘Fearless’ when, at a crucial moment, he had the balls to get behind the wheel of an open van in an Albertson’s parking lot in Fort Lauderdale. The moment was early on when we were all trying to figure out how to turn a profit out of the Florida situation. A really close friend of mine knew a couple of guys from Brooklyn who had moved up the ladder, down the coast, and were getting bales brought by boat. The boats would pick up their loads off the coast and come into the Fort Lauderdale canals... Now you might not know this by driving through a Fort Lauderdale neighborhood, since the houses aren’t all that impressive from the street, but many many of them have beautiful back yards and docks on the canals that intersect the entire town. The Intercoastal has lots of spokes that run well inland and plenty of operators were renting houses there.  I think there are more boats in Fort Lauderdale than any other city in the country.

So my really close friend gets a call from this Brooklyn guy... If we want to get involved, he’s got a move in progress and would we be down for it. Now we’re just two guys without a lot of experience at this (like none at all)... I had never been this close to a smuggle and had no clue what to do, where to do it, how to do it, or even what the consequences were if things went bad. In other words, I was scared shitless at the possibility of going to jail in Florida. So what did we do? The first thing we did was what we always did... roll up a doobie and get high. I’m not sure how much of this blog would have ever happened if I wasn’t a stone cold pothead for almost 30 years.

Now the reason we had gone south together was that we both knew people in the Miami area. He knew these guys... and I knew someone peripherally that I had met while doing a deal for someone else. Ethically, I’m not sure that it was the perfect move (asking for permission to deal with this guy) but when you think about it, how else did you get to meet anyone? So I go find a phone booth and call the guy. It turns out that he’s down on his luck. Whatever he had been doing had turned into a complete disaster and he was not only broke but in debt and trying to keep from losing the place where he was living. I didn’t know him that well at the time either but, since I had seen him several times before, I was pretty sure he wasn’t a cop or a rip-off. So I call him up, explain that we’re being offered some weight, had no place to bring it or any other equipment but would he want to get involved. After talking to us, he doesn’t hesitate and agrees to a 3 way partnership on the deal.

So now we’re waiting for the call... We wait all day and into the next... another long day... And in those days, things rarely happened on schedule and frequently didn’t happen at all. Just because someone said they were going to have something didn’t mean that they would. So many things had to go right in order for us to actually get the stuff... The mother ship had to do it’s thing and meet the smaller boats. The smaller boats had to get back to shore without being busted. Then, they had to get to the dock of the stash house and off load in darkness without being seen. And on and on and on... Things had to be moved from boat to boat, place to place, checked in, evaluated, etc etc etc... And, of course, we had nothing to do with any of that. We were just guys down the line who were going to get lucky... if we got lucky instead of unlucky (which was just as likely and in some ways even more so).

It’s the end of the third day, like 11PM and we’re close to packing it in when my friend checks in (no cellphones in those days) and is told to go to the Albertson’s in north Fort Lauderdale to pick up a van that’s loaded. We look at each other and the three of us realize that there’s still time to change our minds and back out of this. So what do we do? Roll up a doobie, get high, and drive the rental up to Albertsons. The plan is to take the van, drive it to a house in Miami (Coral Gables), and then see what we’ve got. My Florida guy says he’ll drive the van and we’re going to follow him to make sure this goes well. In the back of our minds, we knew that our job would be to crash the rental into any police car that tried to pull him over. Oops... Sorry officer...

We pull into the lot... and immediately we know this isn’t going to be easy. The lot is virtually empty. The Albertson’s is closed. And there, in the brightly lit circle beneath a huge, high, halogen parking lot light is a dirty white window van. Now when I say the van was open, I don’t mean the door were open (which they were). I mean the van had windows all along the sides and they were cranked open. We stop about 50 feet away and look around... as if we’re going to see the cops if they’re there. My friend doesn’t say a word. He just gets out of the car, walks to the van, glances back at us with a silly grin, opens the door of the van and gets in. The keys are supposed to be on the visor but we still breathe a sigh of relief when we see him reach up and then start the engine. Now he’s supposed to pull out of the lot onto I-95 (which is a couple of blocks away) and head south to Miami. Instead, he pulls up next to us and says ‘The gas gauge is on empty. I need to fill it.’ We look at each other, take a breath... and could smell the pot from the van inside our car. He just looks back at us, deadpan... and says, “I’ll do a self-serve... Do you have $20? I’m tapped out.”

All we can think of in the car is how badly we want to get the fuck out of that lot without a SWAT team descending on us. We give him $40 (in case he needs something else... like a goddamned window screen to cover the bales that you can smell and see through the untinted windows) and he proceeds to drive to the gas station near the highway. Long story short, he filled the tank, drove the van south into Miami with us trailing, into his garage... and we enjoyed a very successful adventure. There was about a half ton of pot in the van and we all made a nice piece of change.


From that day forward, though, we always referred to him as “Fearless” because, well, he was that and more.

'70s in Florida - The Sunshine State

February 2015
Been reflecting lately on how much I've left out of these posts... They were built around the players, and the stories that leaped out at me. But truth be told, there's quite a few players who I've kept out of the mix, either out of respect or because of some need to protect privacy. Nonetheless, I've decided to include some of them under pseudonyms and focus on some places instead of people for a while. Also, I've never taken this down the path of what led to the eventual, (and you might say inevitable) arrival of a dozen federal, state and local law enforcement people at my house at 6 in the morning on May 16, 1990.

Also, forgive me if I repeat any previous stuff because I'm not 100% sure what I've laid out here. For now, I don't feel like rereading to find out. I can do that later.

In terms of places, Florida in the 1970s was so totally crazy that there's no end to the entertainment. I mean, I remember one day, checking into the Doral Hotel on Miami Beach with a close friend... I’m standing at the front entrance smoking a cigarette when I look down and see a crisp hundred dollar bill at my feet. No fool, I pick it up and slip it into my pocket... I look around and incredibly, nobody is paying any attention to me. Next moment, I look and see another C Note about 5 feet away... and almost before I get to it, I see another and, now on high alert, I spy a short stack that was blown across the driveway. Before a minute elapses, I’m standing there with about fifteen hundred bucks stuffed into my jeans. I mean, this was 1970s Florida!!! Drugs and money everywhere... Just pick it up off the pavement! And I'm not kidding. It was a situation where the inmates ran the asylum. And for a while at least, we were the inmates.

Those days, we were frequently flying Samsonite luggage around the country filled with weed and with carry-on bags laden with cash. There was no security, no machines. There was even the Eastern Airlines shuttle from NY-Boston and NY-Washington DC where you could actually get on the plane without a ticket!! You could buy your ticket on the plane. And, no, I'm not kidding about this either. You could show up late, run down the corridors and if you got to the gate before they closed the doors, you made the plane. And this was what frequently happened. I remember flying to a deal in an Ohio town that was halfway between Columbus and Cleveland Ohio... A half dozen of us flew to Columbus with empty American Touristers, figuring to fill them with pot (I think it was supposed to be from Costa Rica or some such odd place) and then fly them back that night. Well, we get to Columbus, drive to the deal, only to decide that the stuff was just unsellable and we had to pass. In those days, it wasn’t unusual to be flying with suitcases AND with a carry-on filled with money. So we nix the deal and figure out that we have just enough time to get to Cleveland to make a flight back to LaGuardia. This time, however, we’re really close on time and we get there with about 5 minutes before flight time. So here we are, all six of us running for the plane without enough time to check our empty Samsonites. I’ve got a shoulder bag of cash to boot. The flight attendants (they were stewardesses in those days) greet us with happy smiles and help us stash our cases in all kinds of places... including their own closet. I mean hey, we’re the customers, right? And, if that wasn’t weird enough, about 20 minutes into the flight, one of the stewardesses comes up to me and says I look really familiar but she can’t quite figure out where she knows me from. I look closely and realize this is the same crew we had in the morning, flying into Columbus. In the course of the ensuing conversation, I find out that they flew from LaGuardia to Columbus to Dallas, back to Cleveland and were headed back to LaGuardia to complete their trip. I just smiled... and said nothing. But I’m thinking she eventually figured out that we had been on the morning flight but I also wonder if she could ever have pieced together the real story based on presence of the empty cases and the fact that we all looked like stoned out hippies. For us, it was just another day in the life.

Anyway, back to Florida... What a place! Ft. Lauderdale is basically a city of canals. Non-descript houses from the street had full dockage in the backyards with easy access to the Atlantic...

The Florida thing was a complete experience... I mean, for example, I had an acquaintance (we’ll call him “Nada Mucho” for the story), who had his parents driving up a blue Buick Electra that he would fill with weed. His dad, Irving, apparently used to be a Jewish Deli guy who claimed that Vlasic pickles stole his formula. Anyway, I think Irv was also a Kosher Nostra guy because he just had that mentality. My first wife and I were renting a house that was the only one on a short dead end street in Bayside Queens, NY. They’d show up in the middle of the night, park and disappear. Then Nada Mucho would deliver the keys to the car the next day. At first, he offered cash to just land the car and let him get the stuff. But as time went on, and they kept coming, I built a nice relationship and was able to move most everything that showed up. Looking at his folks, you’d never ever know... Never... Ever... And as it turned out, Nada Mucho would be delivering all kinds of keys to me... for a long time.

Our favorite was the Plymouth Duster.  You could buy two of them for the price of an Electra.  And the trunk was just as big.  It was like an optical illusion.

Eventually, I was driving the 1200 mile trip myself...  at first for others...  and then for myself.  It’s amazing nothing ever went totally wrong because the I-95 corridor was clearly a known drug route.  I guess there are just so many cars...  and only so many cops.  Percentages...  There were some very close calls though...  Once, we had a Coupe De Ville Caddy that we used many times for this trip...  One of the drivers, Keith (who was later murdered in an unrelated uptown Manhattan robbery when he got conked on the head with a dumbbell while protecting a friend), is heading back from Florida on another dry run when he gets rear-ended by a truck at a toll booth and the car basically bends like a hockey stick and the trunk pops open.  It was essentially totaled.

Imagine if it was a full trunk...  Note to self: The lesson here was never be overly anxious to do a deal.  You just never know what might happen in the world of illegal activity.

A Few Missing Pieces - 2009-2010

In chatting with a friend last night, I asked for an opinion of a particular passage that I recall writing...  and after a few minutes realized that the passage was never posted.  So this morning, I'm doing a little comparison to see which ones have slipped through the cracks.  So far, I am finding some from 2009 and will post them up.  If you want to think of them in order, I'll try to add a date in the subject lines...  Also, forgive me if any of this was previously posted...  And forgive me if you are someone who is in any of these stories.  The statutes have long passed...  and if you're reading this, God bless you!

July 2009
So... a very famous television journalist passed away a few days ago... which brought to mind a story from the old days. I'll leave most of the details out since they relate to a set of characters that haven't been hit yet here. But the gist of the story is a weekend when a half dozen of us descended on a small house in Cape Cod with a dock to wait for the arrival of a bunch of Lebanese hashish. The original plan involved dropping the stuff off a large ship packed in tires that were tied together and would float until they got picked up by the water guys and brought to this house. But, for whatever reason, the water and weather didn't cooperate for that plan. Plan B wound up being executed and ultimately several tons got landed and off-loaded at Walter's place. Nobody was home, nobody was around, and the landing was, at the time, quite successful.

January 2010
I wore my gold Rolex on New Year's Eve and couldn't help but remember Steve Pfeiffer... I feel bad for the way Steve died... pretty much alone up in Buffalo when a long-lasting backache was diagnosed as lung cancer. He was dead within a few months but his memory lives on...

Steve was the epitome of a 60s outlaw. He was there at the very beginning of the madness although I didn't know him that well until some years later. Back around 1968 or so, Steve went down to Mexico, bought a bunch of Mexican bricks, put together a harness, strapped it on his back, and actually swam across the Rio Grande, smuggling the stuff into the US. This was the tip of a 20 year iceberg of drug-induced madness that included free-basing, acid, heroin, coke (lots of coke), uppers, downers, booze, and just about every mind-altering substance known to man.

In terms of attitude, think Jimmy Cagney in White Heat. Steve was the whole package. He grew up in Astoria, not far from where I did (although I never knew him back then). I first met him at CCNY but we weren't more than casual acquaintances at the time. Later on, however, we got real close and he played a serious role in some of the more outrageous scenes in this story.

I remember Steve Pfeiffer stories that bridged the gamut from drug-crazed parties; renting a Lear to fly around to a half dozen cities collecting a couple of million bucks in an afternoon; to blocking the door to a pot-filled house (and by 'pot-filled' I mean rooms stacked floor to ceiling with bales and boxes), telling the cops to go fuck themselves when they said they had a complaint from a neighbor; to the discovery of the body of his main squeeze coke smuggler in Jamaica Bay who was identified by (my dentist) based on her teeth; to robbing four banks over a few day period... (He actually took the stand in his own defense during the murder trial.) Each of these and probably a hundred more stories are worth telling... I'll see if I can do them justice as time allows over the next little while...

Oh yeah... The Rolex... He gave it to me for paying up 1.5 mill minutes before a deadline so he could avoid assassination by some very angry Colombians. It has an inscription on the back "On Time"... Well... the one I wore on Thursday says "Still On Time" because the original got ripped off in Vegas and he replaced it with an exact replica.

More - January 2010 

If you read some of the earlier stuff, you'll remember the 'Glop'... well... by the time the glop was all gone, I had developed a serious circle of guys who could move crazy amounts of the worst stuff around... And Steve, being from Buffalo, was a good part of that circle (Lee out in Idaho was another)... Meantime, the Colombians began icing the competition with increasing frequency... Steve was, as usual, a wild man who really never gave a shit about consequences and offered to move a ridiculous amount of crappy pot for them. As it turned out, his plan involved my circle and he dropped a few thousand pounds of total garbage into my lap and said basically to find a price and sell it. Although he wasn't a Colombian, Steve was not the type of guy you wanted to disappoint... So I grabbed hold of a bunch of my glop experts and proceeded to moved this stuff in places like Idaho, Montana, Kentucky and other really out of the way places. As his deadline for payment drew closer and closer, I realized that he had actually promised the Colombians a $2 million payment by a certain date and was in danger of being killed unless he made the payment. The morning of the deadline he only had 500k or so and most of the rest of the bucks were in places like Pittsburgh, Philly, Rochester, Ithaca, some town in Kentucky... Another suitcase of cash was being driven across and was somewhere in Ohio... I'm like totally crazed... because once they knock off Pfeiffer, I'm going to be the one with the goods and they don't care if I promised a deadline or not... They just want the dough... or else...

But is Steve nervous? Not even a little... He's partying like crazy... rents a Lear... stocked with coke and champagne... brings a couple of babes along... tells me to meet him at 10AM at the Marine Terminal at LaGuardia and off we go on a collection tour... In one day, we hit six cities... including Columbus Ohio to meet the guy driving across... ended up having lunch in Pittsburgh... Dinner in Buffalo... And I was home in New York to watch the 11 o'clock news... He got his bucks... The Colombians got paid... and he bought me this cool watch that I wear like once or twice a year... The original got ripped off at the Cooney-Holmes fight in Vegas when someone broke into my hotel room while I was sleeping (okay... I was more like unconscious than sleeping) and took it. As it turned out, that trip to Vegas had hidden benefits when the Secret Service showed up to investigate a bank deposit with some counterfeit money... but that's another story...

 BTW, flying in a Lear is one of the craziest feelings I've ever had... The thing takes off like a rocket and goes faster than anything I've ever been on... The wings are so short that it feels like you could reach out and touch the tips... And, in those days, the pilots didn't give a damn what you were up to as long as they got paid... This, apparently, wasn't the first time they had gone on a trip like this... It was like being in an air-taxi... Steve didn't tell them the next destination until we were back on the plane at each stop. They'd just file the flight plan and off we'd go... no security... no TSA... nothing but 'Where to, Sir?'

Still More January 2010
 My teeth have always been lousy... I used to go to the dentist as a kid and find out i had a dozen cavities. So when my brother turned me on to a good dentist, it was a good thing... both for me (since I needed one) and for Dr. Ken Saltzman (who saw me as a walking goldmine). Fortunately for me he did great work. Fortunately for him, I paid in cash...

So when Max S needed a dentist, I was happy to refer him... and Ken was happy to take on any set of bad teeth... especially bad teeth that paid cash...

Max was partnered with Pfeiffer at the time and referred him to Ken as well... And Pfeiffer had a mouth that needed serious attention. And Ken managed to fix everyone's problems... Whether it was root canals, crowns, caps, cavities or any other oral deficiency, he had the skills to take care of them...

And everything went along fine... Pfeiffer was so happy that he sent his coke-smuggling, gap-toothed Colombian girlfriend to see Ken... A dentist's dream... She was a real piece of work too... Nuvia (I think that was her name) was his current squeeze. Like I said earlier, Steve was a true outlaw and over the years I knew him, he got married twice (both nice girls, if you ignored that one was an addict and the other a hooker).

To Steve, being married wasn't anything remotely resembling anything like a 'normal' marriage... He was still out there doing whatever came next... whether it was a deal, a run to or from Canada, a trip to Mexico, or just plain basing himself into oblivion. In the meantime, he had a son by his first and never failed to take care of the kid's support. With all the messed up stuff he rationalized as okay to do, he still had a set of rules to live by. He never lied, never failed to do what he said he would, would give his last penny to a friend, was incredibly generous when he was flush and impossibly arrogant when he was loaded. Did I mention he was loaded a lot of the time? He also had a ridiculous temper. If he got pissed at you, you knew it immediately and it became the most important thing in your life. It was something you'd ignore at your own risk... and the risk was substantial since Steve liked guns and knives.

A Fateful Decision

As it turned out, I wasn’t prepared to jump on both of these deals in that way. After all, I was going to get to sell the stuff whether I invested or not. If the product made it in, I was first in line whether I took part in the smuggle or not. Both teams wanted me to plunk down six figures and I wasn’t going to lay 200k out in these high-risk situations. So I had to choose. Both teams were successful, and I was really tight with each of them... It was something of a eeny meeny miney mo choice but I opted to go with the one that I’d already collected with. Plus, there’s something nice about hashish in large quantities—it’s really small and easy to move around. Hash doesn’t come with sticks or seeds. A single small box (50 pounds) commanded 75 grand and you could pretty much put most of it in an attache case. Also, most of it was being shipped north to Canada and that meant it wouldn't interfere with anything I had going on in the city.

Meantime, I had a long and terrific relationship with the west coast crowd. If their stuff made it in, I would be spending time out there in wine country. While I wasn’t in on the smuggle, I was certainly being counted on at the next levels. My guy Lee out in Idaho, had a scene that included a serious bunch of redneck drivers from Kentucky, Louisiana and other places. These guys had an invisible network of places to stay and roads that bypassed all the hot spots. We used them plenty of times to run stuff in both directions and they never lost anything or anybody doing it. These guys weren’t hippies. Most were Vietnam vets who simply didn’t give a shit. They survived hell in Asia and weren’t afraid of anything that could happen here (including getting arrested).  In fact, my main friend out there had spent his time in-country driving trucks filled with artillery shells.  So a hidden stash of contraband scared him not at all.

So I plopped down the dough on the hash and declined the second offer... and the clock began to tick on both of them. It was something new for me... knowing that specific products were on the way. Up to this point, I had only been vaguely aware of the scams that were in progress. It was a rare deal that arrived with any notice. Usually, we began to hear about this guy or that guy offering a ‘new’ product, and set out to find the most advantageous source. Experience had taught me not to jump in until I saw the bigger picture. New deals inevitably resulted in a period of jockeying for position in the deal du jour. At the highest levels, the circle didn’t have much more than a few leaders and there were probably another hundred (or two) who were always scrambling just below that level. When a deal hit, the smugglers just wanted to get paid and get laid. And that’s was usually happened.

One problem, however, was that the smugglers generally weren’t all that concerned with the quality of the product. Their main goal was to get it in without getting caught. After that, there was a lot of arguing and problems if the stuff sucked. Nobody wanted to pay up front for lousy stuff and the smugglers then had to endure a whole next project in converting the crap to money. And, when the lousy stuff was REALLY lousy, the bad things happened more frequently. People had to take more chances in who they sold to, and the result was product getting ripped off or getting busted. Even if those things didn’t happen, bad stuff was a tough sell. This was on top of the perpetual battle over price. The distributors and their wholesalers all wanted the lowest number while the smugglers naturally wanted the opposite. The most obvious factors (but not nearly the only ones) were the market situation and the quality of the merchandise. After that, politics was a factor as well. Regardless of the quality, if you bought early, you could get burned when the smugglers lowered the price. Then you were stuck until everyone who came after you sold their stuff. And sometimes this meant you were behind the eight ball for an entire season. You might be sitting with expensive product that was only worth the price during a drought. Of course, droughts happened periodically so it wasn’t a long term disaster, but definitely a setback while the market was active with better and cheaper merchandise.

Smuggling is a seasonal business in many respects. Certain times of year were traditionally dry because of harvest times, shipping conditions, weather, etc. The occasional aviation deal was never enough to impact the New York market. And in the mid 80s, when the weather got warm, the boats began descending up and down the entire east coast. Florida, which was the wild west for Colombian, Jamaican and even Mexican weed, became far less of a destination during the summer. Mother ships were dropping things off Montauk, Newport, and as far north as Maine. It’s a lot of coastline and there are a lot of boats all up and down it. The fisheries were fishing for much more than fish (and pulling in a lot more than tuna).