So it’s 1980 or so... and we’d been moving around from house to house...
renting some great places. Some are on hills, some with long driveways, one was
completely overgrown by surrounding shrubbery and trees... another had a
drive-through garage that let you park a car in the basement... yet another was
waterfront at Lloyd Point in Lloyd Harbor... They were expensive, short term
rentals... always furnished... and all with one thing in common... They
afforded the privacy and privilege to do our thing without being observed or at
least without being questioned. The neighborhoods were exclusive and the
presumption was that you were entitled to the privacy if you could afford it.
And, in a nutshell, we could... and did.
Meanwhile, Nada Mucho realized that we had been at this for about ten years
without a problem, and began to integrate us more and more into his plans. At
first, we were landing his big Buicks and Oldsmobiles. But then RVs began
showing up... and vans... usually chock full with product. Time went on and,
in the course of events, I met a fair number of his people, some workers...
some customers... and some connections. And all the while, we kept
accumulating people, connections, customers and all the things that pile up as
you go down a career path.
For example, there came a time when we were moving so much stuff in so many
directions that I was both buying and selling to and from the same people all
the time. Nobody complained and everybody made out. The people with Jamaican
weed wanted Colombian... There was great stuff from all over, Panama, Cambodia,
Thailand, Vietnam, etc etc... There were so many different kinds of Mexican
that they were called by whatever state they were grown in... Michoacan,
Sinaloan, Yucatan, etc etc... We *never* sold powder or pills as a rule.
Inevitably, though, they would show up in various places and cause various
issues. Coke, heroin, qualudes, sopers, seconols (reds), tuinols (blue &
orange), nembutols (yellows), etc etc... It was all part of the culture but we
didn’t let it become part of the business. Hash? well that’s another story
entirely. Hashish was no big deal. It was smokable, edible, and came in lots
of varieties. Lebanese, Pakistani, Kashmiri, Afghani, Moroccan, Nepalese, etc
etc... All had different tastes and smells and effects.
Sorry to digress but I haven’t spent much time on the products... They
were, after all, the reason many of us were getting high and getting rich
simultaneously. Of course, not everyone came out the other side in great
shape. But that’s still to come.
So we’re selling pot everywhere... Every month or so, we’d go down to
Wolf’s Corrugated on Broadway in Manhattan and load up on boxes and tape and
bags and markers. I remember the box sizes... 32, 34 and 36 were fine for 15
pounds or so but then the sizes went into the 40s and even 50/52 for whole
bales. We always went for the heavy duty boxes because you didn’t want these
things falling apart and specifically not at the wrong time. After all, we just
treated them like boxes of ‘anything’ when we went about delivering. People
deliver boxes all the time and who could tell that these were any different.
The only limitation was that they had hard dimensions. It was pretty funny at
times, walking up to a brownstone with 3 or 4 boxes piled high in your arms,
balancing them while waiting to be buzzed in, eyes darting everywhere, hoping
you weren’t going to get ripped off, busted, or scammed. And, amazingly, it
almost never went bad. Of course, the ritual delivery and sharing of a joint
was a customary thing... guaranteeing that by the time I’d made my last
delivery, I was totally blitzed. After all, we did have the best stuff
around.
And this is going on and on... Nada Mucho introduces me to some of his
people that live nearby... one thing leads to another... and suddenly, there’s
another little sub-circle that is created. And this one is interesting because
it crosses all the usual lines of connectivity by adding a geographic
element... The way things normally worked, people met and acquired connections
in the course of doing business. People pop into the scene for a while... then
drop out for one reason or another... They’d move, get busted, get ripped off,
become rip-offs, violate the ‘code’ of proper conduct, semi-retire (nobody ever
really retired... they just said they did). The scene was like an amorphous
blob of quantum physics. Every deal was different. Whoever was the source this
week might be the low man next week. And this made it virtually impossible for
the enforcement folks to come up with any kind of tree that would enable them to
predict who was on top at any given time. But this little sub-circle crossed
all those lines. Suddenly, I was at the top of a pyramid that I had been in the
middle of. Just by knowing when things were arriving. Remember, everyone who
touched anything marked it up. Eventually, just by hearing a price, you could
figure out how far away the seller was from the true source. Knowledge was
power in this scene.
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