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.