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.
Thursday, September 17, 2015
'70s in Florida - The Sunshine State
February 2015
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.
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.
A Few Missing Pieces - 2009-2010
In chatting with a friend last night, I asked for an opinion of a particular passage that I recall writing... and after a few minutes realized that the passage was never posted. So this morning, I'm doing a little comparison to see which ones have slipped through the cracks. So far, I am finding some from 2009 and will post them up. If you want to think of them in order, I'll try to add a date in the subject lines... Also, forgive me if any of this was previously posted... And forgive me if you are someone who is in any of these stories. The statutes have long passed... and if you're reading this, God bless you!
July 2009
So... a very famous television journalist passed away a few days ago... which brought to mind a story from the old days. I'll leave most of the details out since they relate to a set of characters that haven't been hit yet here. But the gist of the story is a weekend when a half dozen of us descended on a small house in Cape Cod with a dock to wait for the arrival of a bunch of Lebanese hashish. The original plan involved dropping the stuff off a large ship packed in tires that were tied together and would float until they got picked up by the water guys and brought to this house. But, for whatever reason, the water and weather didn't cooperate for that plan. Plan B wound up being executed and ultimately several tons got landed and off-loaded at Walter's place. Nobody was home, nobody was around, and the landing was, at the time, quite successful.
January 2010
I wore my gold Rolex on New Year's Eve and couldn't help but remember Steve Pfeiffer... I feel bad for the way Steve died... pretty much alone up in Buffalo when a long-lasting backache was diagnosed as lung cancer. He was dead within a few months but his memory lives on...
Steve was the epitome of a 60s outlaw. He was there at the very beginning of the madness although I didn't know him that well until some years later. Back around 1968 or so, Steve went down to Mexico, bought a bunch of Mexican bricks, put together a harness, strapped it on his back, and actually swam across the Rio Grande, smuggling the stuff into the US. This was the tip of a 20 year iceberg of drug-induced madness that included free-basing, acid, heroin, coke (lots of coke), uppers, downers, booze, and just about every mind-altering substance known to man.
In terms of attitude, think Jimmy Cagney in White Heat. Steve was the whole package. He grew up in Astoria, not far from where I did (although I never knew him back then). I first met him at CCNY but we weren't more than casual acquaintances at the time. Later on, however, we got real close and he played a serious role in some of the more outrageous scenes in this story.
I remember Steve Pfeiffer stories that bridged the gamut from drug-crazed parties; renting a Lear to fly around to a half dozen cities collecting a couple of million bucks in an afternoon; to blocking the door to a pot-filled house (and by 'pot-filled' I mean rooms stacked floor to ceiling with bales and boxes), telling the cops to go fuck themselves when they said they had a complaint from a neighbor; to the discovery of the body of his main squeeze coke smuggler in Jamaica Bay who was identified by (my dentist) based on her teeth; to robbing four banks over a few day period... (He actually took the stand in his own defense during the murder trial.) Each of these and probably a hundred more stories are worth telling... I'll see if I can do them justice as time allows over the next little while...
Oh yeah... The Rolex... He gave it to me for paying up 1.5 mill minutes before a deadline so he could avoid assassination by some very angry Colombians. It has an inscription on the back "On Time"... Well... the one I wore on Thursday says "Still On Time" because the original got ripped off in Vegas and he replaced it with an exact replica.
More - January 2010
If you read some of the earlier stuff, you'll remember the 'Glop'... well... by the time the glop was all gone, I had developed a serious circle of guys who could move crazy amounts of the worst stuff around... And Steve, being from Buffalo, was a good part of that circle (Lee out in Idaho was another)... Meantime, the Colombians began icing the competition with increasing frequency... Steve was, as usual, a wild man who really never gave a shit about consequences and offered to move a ridiculous amount of crappy pot for them. As it turned out, his plan involved my circle and he dropped a few thousand pounds of total garbage into my lap and said basically to find a price and sell it. Although he wasn't a Colombian, Steve was not the type of guy you wanted to disappoint... So I grabbed hold of a bunch of my glop experts and proceeded to moved this stuff in places like Idaho, Montana, Kentucky and other really out of the way places. As his deadline for payment drew closer and closer, I realized that he had actually promised the Colombians a $2 million payment by a certain date and was in danger of being killed unless he made the payment. The morning of the deadline he only had 500k or so and most of the rest of the bucks were in places like Pittsburgh, Philly, Rochester, Ithaca, some town in Kentucky... Another suitcase of cash was being driven across and was somewhere in Ohio... I'm like totally crazed... because once they knock off Pfeiffer, I'm going to be the one with the goods and they don't care if I promised a deadline or not... They just want the dough... or else...
But is Steve nervous? Not even a little... He's partying like crazy... rents a Lear... stocked with coke and champagne... brings a couple of babes along... tells me to meet him at 10AM at the Marine Terminal at LaGuardia and off we go on a collection tour... In one day, we hit six cities... including Columbus Ohio to meet the guy driving across... ended up having lunch in Pittsburgh... Dinner in Buffalo... And I was home in New York to watch the 11 o'clock news... He got his bucks... The Colombians got paid... and he bought me this cool watch that I wear like once or twice a year... The original got ripped off at the Cooney-Holmes fight in Vegas when someone broke into my hotel room while I was sleeping (okay... I was more like unconscious than sleeping) and took it. As it turned out, that trip to Vegas had hidden benefits when the Secret Service showed up to investigate a bank deposit with some counterfeit money... but that's another story...
BTW, flying in a Lear is one of the craziest feelings I've ever had... The thing takes off like a rocket and goes faster than anything I've ever been on... The wings are so short that it feels like you could reach out and touch the tips... And, in those days, the pilots didn't give a damn what you were up to as long as they got paid... This, apparently, wasn't the first time they had gone on a trip like this... It was like being in an air-taxi... Steve didn't tell them the next destination until we were back on the plane at each stop. They'd just file the flight plan and off we'd go... no security... no TSA... nothing but 'Where to, Sir?'
Still More January 2010
My teeth have always been lousy... I used to go to the dentist as a kid and find out i had a dozen cavities. So when my brother turned me on to a good dentist, it was a good thing... both for me (since I needed one) and for Dr. Ken Saltzman (who saw me as a walking goldmine). Fortunately for me he did great work. Fortunately for him, I paid in cash...
So when Max S needed a dentist, I was happy to refer him... and Ken was happy to take on any set of bad teeth... especially bad teeth that paid cash...
Max was partnered with Pfeiffer at the time and referred him to Ken as well... And Pfeiffer had a mouth that needed serious attention. And Ken managed to fix everyone's problems... Whether it was root canals, crowns, caps, cavities or any other oral deficiency, he had the skills to take care of them...
And everything went along fine... Pfeiffer was so happy that he sent his coke-smuggling, gap-toothed Colombian girlfriend to see Ken... A dentist's dream... She was a real piece of work too... Nuvia (I think that was her name) was his current squeeze. Like I said earlier, Steve was a true outlaw and over the years I knew him, he got married twice (both nice girls, if you ignored that one was an addict and the other a hooker).
To Steve, being married wasn't anything remotely resembling anything like a 'normal' marriage... He was still out there doing whatever came next... whether it was a deal, a run to or from Canada, a trip to Mexico, or just plain basing himself into oblivion. In the meantime, he had a son by his first and never failed to take care of the kid's support. With all the messed up stuff he rationalized as okay to do, he still had a set of rules to live by. He never lied, never failed to do what he said he would, would give his last penny to a friend, was incredibly generous when he was flush and impossibly arrogant when he was loaded. Did I mention he was loaded a lot of the time? He also had a ridiculous temper. If he got pissed at you, you knew it immediately and it became the most important thing in your life. It was something you'd ignore at your own risk... and the risk was substantial since Steve liked guns and knives.
July 2009
So... a very famous television journalist passed away a few days ago... which brought to mind a story from the old days. I'll leave most of the details out since they relate to a set of characters that haven't been hit yet here. But the gist of the story is a weekend when a half dozen of us descended on a small house in Cape Cod with a dock to wait for the arrival of a bunch of Lebanese hashish. The original plan involved dropping the stuff off a large ship packed in tires that were tied together and would float until they got picked up by the water guys and brought to this house. But, for whatever reason, the water and weather didn't cooperate for that plan. Plan B wound up being executed and ultimately several tons got landed and off-loaded at Walter's place. Nobody was home, nobody was around, and the landing was, at the time, quite successful.
January 2010
I wore my gold Rolex on New Year's Eve and couldn't help but remember Steve Pfeiffer... I feel bad for the way Steve died... pretty much alone up in Buffalo when a long-lasting backache was diagnosed as lung cancer. He was dead within a few months but his memory lives on...
Steve was the epitome of a 60s outlaw. He was there at the very beginning of the madness although I didn't know him that well until some years later. Back around 1968 or so, Steve went down to Mexico, bought a bunch of Mexican bricks, put together a harness, strapped it on his back, and actually swam across the Rio Grande, smuggling the stuff into the US. This was the tip of a 20 year iceberg of drug-induced madness that included free-basing, acid, heroin, coke (lots of coke), uppers, downers, booze, and just about every mind-altering substance known to man.
In terms of attitude, think Jimmy Cagney in White Heat. Steve was the whole package. He grew up in Astoria, not far from where I did (although I never knew him back then). I first met him at CCNY but we weren't more than casual acquaintances at the time. Later on, however, we got real close and he played a serious role in some of the more outrageous scenes in this story.
I remember Steve Pfeiffer stories that bridged the gamut from drug-crazed parties; renting a Lear to fly around to a half dozen cities collecting a couple of million bucks in an afternoon; to blocking the door to a pot-filled house (and by 'pot-filled' I mean rooms stacked floor to ceiling with bales and boxes), telling the cops to go fuck themselves when they said they had a complaint from a neighbor; to the discovery of the body of his main squeeze coke smuggler in Jamaica Bay who was identified by (my dentist) based on her teeth; to robbing four banks over a few day period... (He actually took the stand in his own defense during the murder trial.) Each of these and probably a hundred more stories are worth telling... I'll see if I can do them justice as time allows over the next little while...
Oh yeah... The Rolex... He gave it to me for paying up 1.5 mill minutes before a deadline so he could avoid assassination by some very angry Colombians. It has an inscription on the back "On Time"... Well... the one I wore on Thursday says "Still On Time" because the original got ripped off in Vegas and he replaced it with an exact replica.
More - January 2010
If you read some of the earlier stuff, you'll remember the 'Glop'... well... by the time the glop was all gone, I had developed a serious circle of guys who could move crazy amounts of the worst stuff around... And Steve, being from Buffalo, was a good part of that circle (Lee out in Idaho was another)... Meantime, the Colombians began icing the competition with increasing frequency... Steve was, as usual, a wild man who really never gave a shit about consequences and offered to move a ridiculous amount of crappy pot for them. As it turned out, his plan involved my circle and he dropped a few thousand pounds of total garbage into my lap and said basically to find a price and sell it. Although he wasn't a Colombian, Steve was not the type of guy you wanted to disappoint... So I grabbed hold of a bunch of my glop experts and proceeded to moved this stuff in places like Idaho, Montana, Kentucky and other really out of the way places. As his deadline for payment drew closer and closer, I realized that he had actually promised the Colombians a $2 million payment by a certain date and was in danger of being killed unless he made the payment. The morning of the deadline he only had 500k or so and most of the rest of the bucks were in places like Pittsburgh, Philly, Rochester, Ithaca, some town in Kentucky... Another suitcase of cash was being driven across and was somewhere in Ohio... I'm like totally crazed... because once they knock off Pfeiffer, I'm going to be the one with the goods and they don't care if I promised a deadline or not... They just want the dough... or else...
But is Steve nervous? Not even a little... He's partying like crazy... rents a Lear... stocked with coke and champagne... brings a couple of babes along... tells me to meet him at 10AM at the Marine Terminal at LaGuardia and off we go on a collection tour... In one day, we hit six cities... including Columbus Ohio to meet the guy driving across... ended up having lunch in Pittsburgh... Dinner in Buffalo... And I was home in New York to watch the 11 o'clock news... He got his bucks... The Colombians got paid... and he bought me this cool watch that I wear like once or twice a year... The original got ripped off at the Cooney-Holmes fight in Vegas when someone broke into my hotel room while I was sleeping (okay... I was more like unconscious than sleeping) and took it. As it turned out, that trip to Vegas had hidden benefits when the Secret Service showed up to investigate a bank deposit with some counterfeit money... but that's another story...
BTW, flying in a Lear is one of the craziest feelings I've ever had... The thing takes off like a rocket and goes faster than anything I've ever been on... The wings are so short that it feels like you could reach out and touch the tips... And, in those days, the pilots didn't give a damn what you were up to as long as they got paid... This, apparently, wasn't the first time they had gone on a trip like this... It was like being in an air-taxi... Steve didn't tell them the next destination until we were back on the plane at each stop. They'd just file the flight plan and off we'd go... no security... no TSA... nothing but 'Where to, Sir?'
Still More January 2010
My teeth have always been lousy... I used to go to the dentist as a kid and find out i had a dozen cavities. So when my brother turned me on to a good dentist, it was a good thing... both for me (since I needed one) and for Dr. Ken Saltzman (who saw me as a walking goldmine). Fortunately for me he did great work. Fortunately for him, I paid in cash...
So when Max S needed a dentist, I was happy to refer him... and Ken was happy to take on any set of bad teeth... especially bad teeth that paid cash...
Max was partnered with Pfeiffer at the time and referred him to Ken as well... And Pfeiffer had a mouth that needed serious attention. And Ken managed to fix everyone's problems... Whether it was root canals, crowns, caps, cavities or any other oral deficiency, he had the skills to take care of them...
And everything went along fine... Pfeiffer was so happy that he sent his coke-smuggling, gap-toothed Colombian girlfriend to see Ken... A dentist's dream... She was a real piece of work too... Nuvia (I think that was her name) was his current squeeze. Like I said earlier, Steve was a true outlaw and over the years I knew him, he got married twice (both nice girls, if you ignored that one was an addict and the other a hooker).
To Steve, being married wasn't anything remotely resembling anything like a 'normal' marriage... He was still out there doing whatever came next... whether it was a deal, a run to or from Canada, a trip to Mexico, or just plain basing himself into oblivion. In the meantime, he had a son by his first and never failed to take care of the kid's support. With all the messed up stuff he rationalized as okay to do, he still had a set of rules to live by. He never lied, never failed to do what he said he would, would give his last penny to a friend, was incredibly generous when he was flush and impossibly arrogant when he was loaded. Did I mention he was loaded a lot of the time? He also had a ridiculous temper. If he got pissed at you, you knew it immediately and it became the most important thing in your life. It was something you'd ignore at your own risk... and the risk was substantial since Steve liked guns and knives.
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