Prohibition Creates Wealth

It was 1986 when things began to get really out of hand. I had been living the life for over 15 years despite all the obvious and not so obvious warnings. Greed is a funny thing in that it frequently overrules common sense. Sadly, I had little common sense to begin with so that made anything possible and, in several particular cases, problematic.

As I mentioned earlier, things had grown immensely from the original quest to raise money for an engagement ring. How innocent that all seemed! Buy a pound of pot for $125, weigh it into ounces, and pick up a profit of $175 by selling 15 of them at $20 each. It seems funny now but I was just as thrilled to get the 16th ounce to smoke as I was to make the dough.

By 1986, we were practically on top of the New York pot scene. The network stretched to all the boroughs and suburbs... Any shipment of any size hit our radar and most of the time, we knew who was in charge of it. Our track record was solid in that (from our way of thinking at the time), we weren’t greedy. We bought and sold the pot at fair prices and were both honest and reliable. We became skilled at all the things that go into a successful illegal business, including having all the equipment (finding and maintaining secluded houses, warehouses, scales, untraceable cars & trucks, bags, boxes, storage spaces, counting machines, etc.). It got to a point where people who came to town were hoping to connect with us rather than the other way around. I remember sitting at the Nassau Coliseum thinking we had just sold enough pot to put a pound under every seat in the arena.

Today, it’s hard to wrap my head around the mindset at the time. Some decisions just went all wrong and for all the wrong reasons. It’s not that I was completely in la-la land. You don’t forget that this thing is illegal. The expectation was that things could and would go wrong but the hope was that when it happened, it wouldn’t be unfixable. For example, if someone got ripped off, I wouldn’t pursue any payback. It was all part of the deal. Insurance from Lloyds of the Universe isn’t cheap but the premiums are small when you consider the coverage and benefits. If someone got in trouble, you got them a lawyer... you made sure their bills were paid... and you kept them on the books for as long as it took. On the other hand, it’s very easy to tell yourself that laws are being broken and there’s a price that may have to be paid. Unfortunately, that thinking didn't include the possibility that I myself might become a target...

It wasn't as if I didn't know that my 'cover' wouldn't withstand a serious investigation. It was more of a renegade bandido attitude that believed it would never happen. If someone happened to take a look at me, they'd see a 'normal' suburban guy who had a successful business and paid his taxes. The cover was enough to stand a cursory glance. It was never intended to stand up in court. It was intended to cover me if a fluke occurred. And it actually did that a few times.

A year earlier, I had given one of the smugglers about 25 grand as an investment in a hash scheme. The deal was successful and my $25k became $150k, turning the world into a very different place financially afterwards. It suddenly seemed crazy to be delivering 5 pound boxes or to be fronting someone else’s product to the entire circle or sending it across the country. It’s not like I stopped doing it, but I definitely took a step back.

And now, a year later (these guys only worked once a year at best), I was approached with another, larger opportunity. In fact, things were so good that I was approached for two different (and larger) investments, by two different smugglers. One was a hash smuggle from the usual sources and the other involved Asian pot that was to be run into Alaska and then down to the west coast.

Old Cape Cod... And That's The Way It Is...

Another moment came to mind the other day... It was a summer in the early 80s (I don’t precisely remember the year and it isn’t all that important anyway.) and I get invited by the Long Island people to spend a weekend ‘on the Cape’. I want to hang with these people and I've never been on the Cape with any of my new friends.

That means driving up to Cape Cod with the gang and hanging out in a house they rented on the beach with a dock. It was a high old time and I don’t even remember exactly where the house was. In fact there’s a lot about this particular weekend that I don’t precisely recall. It may have been Edgartown or it may have been Makonikey but again, none of that matters. What does matter is that I didn’t realize that this was all a ruse for a smuggle that was being run there. Apparently, the original intent was to pick up a few tons of hashish at sea and land it at or near the house where we were staying/partying.

Looking back, I probably should have realized that all the pick-ups and other vehicles were heavy-duty equipped and that there were a lot of faces I didn’t recognize moving about. I’m not sure either how I didn’t pick up on what was happening at the time but these were the days of Asian Stupid Weed and I pretty much dedicated my brain to Vietnamese weed that summer.

So we’re hanging at the house on Sunday morning, and it’s kind of quiet. I’m thinking the folks went to breakfast somewhere or something when, around 11AM, everyone comes back, says it’s time to go, and the next thing I see is everyone grabbing their stuff and all the pick-ups, cars and even a Chevy El Camino are either gone or going. I mean, it was an eerie feeling watching everyone take off and then being alone in a house in a place I’m unfamiliar with. I remember that happening to me in Florida once but that’s whole other story and I think I’ve already told it. Bottom line, in those days, when everyone started leaving, the smart thing to do was leave as quickly as possible, no questions asked.

We get moving and head out back down to Long Island. The next day I find out what happened. It turns out they were smuggling hash from Lebanon into the Cape. The product was sealed into tire linings, which were roped in a line, then dropped into the ocean by a mother ship, to be picked up by the smaller one or smaller two and then landed.

Now hash isn’t like pot in that it’s really heavy. I mean a fifty pound box of black hash is very small (not much bigger than a Manhattan phone book in the days when such books were a resource). A block with the dimensions of a piano bench would weigh a ton or more. Now Lebanese hashish came in sacks with string ties at the top. It was often red, but sometimes more yellowish like Kif. The high was light and the product wasn’t nearly as dense as the Afghani or Paki or Kashmiri varieties. Those were an entirely different product with a heavier high and a high density. A pound of black hash was about 4 inches x 3 inches x 1/2 inch. By contrast, the Lebanese sacks were oval and about 35% larger.

What apparently happened was the floating tires were either missed on the first few passes or dropped too early. By the time they were collected, it was too late to bring them in at the pre-planned location (I’m glad I slept through this.) so they executed a Plan B that involved landing the boats at Walter Cronkite’s house in Edgartown. Yes, they brought the load in on Walter Cronkite’s dock and had it loaded into vehicles and gone within 30 minutes. That was around the ‘time to go’ signal.

This was, as it later turned out, kind of an acid test of me by the importer group. I passed the test and quickly became eligible for the ‘really big’ prizes yet to come. Looking back, failure would have been the best result that weekend but who knew?