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?
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
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