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.
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