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.

A Fateful Decision

As it turned out, I wasn’t prepared to jump on both of these deals in that way. After all, I was going to get to sell the stuff whether I invested or not. If the product made it in, I was first in line whether I took part in the smuggle or not. Both teams wanted me to plunk down six figures and I wasn’t going to lay 200k out in these high-risk situations. So I had to choose. Both teams were successful, and I was really tight with each of them... It was something of a eeny meeny miney mo choice but I opted to go with the one that I’d already collected with. Plus, there’s something nice about hashish in large quantities—it’s really small and easy to move around. Hash doesn’t come with sticks or seeds. A single small box (50 pounds) commanded 75 grand and you could pretty much put most of it in an attache case. Also, most of it was being shipped north to Canada and that meant it wouldn't interfere with anything I had going on in the city.

Meantime, I had a long and terrific relationship with the west coast crowd. If their stuff made it in, I would be spending time out there in wine country. While I wasn’t in on the smuggle, I was certainly being counted on at the next levels. My guy Lee out in Idaho, had a scene that included a serious bunch of redneck drivers from Kentucky, Louisiana and other places. These guys had an invisible network of places to stay and roads that bypassed all the hot spots. We used them plenty of times to run stuff in both directions and they never lost anything or anybody doing it. These guys weren’t hippies. Most were Vietnam vets who simply didn’t give a shit. They survived hell in Asia and weren’t afraid of anything that could happen here (including getting arrested).  In fact, my main friend out there had spent his time in-country driving trucks filled with artillery shells.  So a hidden stash of contraband scared him not at all.

So I plopped down the dough on the hash and declined the second offer... and the clock began to tick on both of them. It was something new for me... knowing that specific products were on the way. Up to this point, I had only been vaguely aware of the scams that were in progress. It was a rare deal that arrived with any notice. Usually, we began to hear about this guy or that guy offering a ‘new’ product, and set out to find the most advantageous source. Experience had taught me not to jump in until I saw the bigger picture. New deals inevitably resulted in a period of jockeying for position in the deal du jour. At the highest levels, the circle didn’t have much more than a few leaders and there were probably another hundred (or two) who were always scrambling just below that level. When a deal hit, the smugglers just wanted to get paid and get laid. And that’s was usually happened.

One problem, however, was that the smugglers generally weren’t all that concerned with the quality of the product. Their main goal was to get it in without getting caught. After that, there was a lot of arguing and problems if the stuff sucked. Nobody wanted to pay up front for lousy stuff and the smugglers then had to endure a whole next project in converting the crap to money. And, when the lousy stuff was REALLY lousy, the bad things happened more frequently. People had to take more chances in who they sold to, and the result was product getting ripped off or getting busted. Even if those things didn’t happen, bad stuff was a tough sell. This was on top of the perpetual battle over price. The distributors and their wholesalers all wanted the lowest number while the smugglers naturally wanted the opposite. The most obvious factors (but not nearly the only ones) were the market situation and the quality of the merchandise. After that, politics was a factor as well. Regardless of the quality, if you bought early, you could get burned when the smugglers lowered the price. Then you were stuck until everyone who came after you sold their stuff. And sometimes this meant you were behind the eight ball for an entire season. You might be sitting with expensive product that was only worth the price during a drought. Of course, droughts happened periodically so it wasn’t a long term disaster, but definitely a setback while the market was active with better and cheaper merchandise.

Smuggling is a seasonal business in many respects. Certain times of year were traditionally dry because of harvest times, shipping conditions, weather, etc. The occasional aviation deal was never enough to impact the New York market. And in the mid 80s, when the weather got warm, the boats began descending up and down the entire east coast. Florida, which was the wild west for Colombian, Jamaican and even Mexican weed, became far less of a destination during the summer. Mother ships were dropping things off Montauk, Newport, and as far north as Maine. It’s a lot of coastline and there are a lot of boats all up and down it. The fisheries were fishing for much more than fish (and pulling in a lot more than tuna).

Prohibition Creates Wealth

It was 1986 when things began to get really out of hand. I had been living the life for over 15 years despite all the obvious and not so obvious warnings. Greed is a funny thing in that it frequently overrules common sense. Sadly, I had little common sense to begin with so that made anything possible and, in several particular cases, problematic.

As I mentioned earlier, things had grown immensely from the original quest to raise money for an engagement ring. How innocent that all seemed! Buy a pound of pot for $125, weigh it into ounces, and pick up a profit of $175 by selling 15 of them at $20 each. It seems funny now but I was just as thrilled to get the 16th ounce to smoke as I was to make the dough.

By 1986, we were practically on top of the New York pot scene. The network stretched to all the boroughs and suburbs... Any shipment of any size hit our radar and most of the time, we knew who was in charge of it. Our track record was solid in that (from our way of thinking at the time), we weren’t greedy. We bought and sold the pot at fair prices and were both honest and reliable. We became skilled at all the things that go into a successful illegal business, including having all the equipment (finding and maintaining secluded houses, warehouses, scales, untraceable cars & trucks, bags, boxes, storage spaces, counting machines, etc.). It got to a point where people who came to town were hoping to connect with us rather than the other way around. I remember sitting at the Nassau Coliseum thinking we had just sold enough pot to put a pound under every seat in the arena.

Today, it’s hard to wrap my head around the mindset at the time. Some decisions just went all wrong and for all the wrong reasons. It’s not that I was completely in la-la land. You don’t forget that this thing is illegal. The expectation was that things could and would go wrong but the hope was that when it happened, it wouldn’t be unfixable. For example, if someone got ripped off, I wouldn’t pursue any payback. It was all part of the deal. Insurance from Lloyds of the Universe isn’t cheap but the premiums are small when you consider the coverage and benefits. If someone got in trouble, you got them a lawyer... you made sure their bills were paid... and you kept them on the books for as long as it took. On the other hand, it’s very easy to tell yourself that laws are being broken and there’s a price that may have to be paid. Unfortunately, that thinking didn't include the possibility that I myself might become a target...

It wasn't as if I didn't know that my 'cover' wouldn't withstand a serious investigation. It was more of a renegade bandido attitude that believed it would never happen. If someone happened to take a look at me, they'd see a 'normal' suburban guy who had a successful business and paid his taxes. The cover was enough to stand a cursory glance. It was never intended to stand up in court. It was intended to cover me if a fluke occurred. And it actually did that a few times.

A year earlier, I had given one of the smugglers about 25 grand as an investment in a hash scheme. The deal was successful and my $25k became $150k, turning the world into a very different place financially afterwards. It suddenly seemed crazy to be delivering 5 pound boxes or to be fronting someone else’s product to the entire circle or sending it across the country. It’s not like I stopped doing it, but I definitely took a step back.

And now, a year later (these guys only worked once a year at best), I was approached with another, larger opportunity. In fact, things were so good that I was approached for two different (and larger) investments, by two different smugglers. One was a hash smuggle from the usual sources and the other involved Asian pot that was to be run into Alaska and then down to the west coast.

Old Cape Cod... And That's The Way It Is...

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?

And The Beat Goes On...

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.

A Christmas Morning Ghost

So...  as fate would have it, Pfeiffer's ghost reappeared on Christmas morning in my house...

Mrs. R mentioned a rug that she thinks we ought to sell and I realized that it was one of many gifts that Steve bestowed on us.  (I believe this particular one is worth about 5k.)  One thing I didn't say in the previous post was that Pfeiffer was one of the most generous, stand-up, and funny guys you'd ever meet.

Lots of people say they'll do anything for a friend.  You hear it all the time.  "Oh, he'd do anything for a friend." or "There's nothing he wouldn't do for a friend in need." or "He was the one person I'd ask and know the answer before I asked."  But...  there's the generic 'anything' and the real renegade bandito outlaw version of 'ANYTHING'.

So, when the thought of selling the rug came around, I looked on the wall of our living room at the Erte 'S' and 'R' lithos that hang there (also Pfeiffer gifts), and thought about the Presidential Gold Rolex in a safe deposit box (inscribed 'On Time' on the back) that he gifted after a particularly important and cash delivery (avoiding negative consequences from some angry Colombians).  In the business, there are lots of different types of connections.  Some are cool and understanding.  If something goes wrong, they'll either chalk it up as a business expense (if they trust you or the evidence you present), or front more material to help you get back on your feet.  And some are not so understanding.  The Colombians are almost always in that category.  Once you take the stuff, you are paying for it.  And they don't care what happens, whether someone gets popped, or the stuff is unsellable or the market collapses or if the sky falls.  You are paying.  And they don't care if you have to rob a bank to do it.  The penalty for not paying is serious. Death is a possibility and you aren't the only possible victim.   So Steve was extremely grateful when my guy from Idaho showed up with the dough for some particularly lousy product.  He flew us around in a Lear that day to pick up the dough and you could see the relief on his face when he realized he wasn't going to have to face these guys empty-handed.

He was generous in a dramatic sense and wouldn't blink at gifting things of great value.  In the years I knew Steve, he lived life like a roller coaster.  He'd accumulate a quarter million and be broke six months later.  It happened lots of times.  Either he'd snort it, shoot it, spend it, get busted and have it seized or find a totally new way to diminish the pile.  Gifting was almost like saving to him because gifts don't go away.

And, when the time came in 1989 that some very dangerous things needed doing, and there was almost nobody willing to take the risks, I asked Pfeiffer to step up and he never hesitated.  I'm grateful to this day because his bravery (or madness if you see it that way) gave me the ability to avoid a really long stretch.

So...  we still might sell the rug but there's no way I won't shed a tear when it happens.

Triggers... and Nuvia

Life is filled with triggers and sometimes I get surprised.  There are the usual triggers like an aroma that can take me back to Mom’s cooking or a song that sticks in my head for a week or two.  Then there are the unusual triggers, like a word you haven’t heard in a while or a memory that just jumps out of nowhere and you can’t figure out why.

Well, this happened to me last evening at the dentist.  I’m sitting in the smallish waiting area, when the receptionist says ‘Hold on Nuvia’ into the phone.  I hear the name and in an instant, I’m back in the 1980’s lost in a memory about my dentist, a coke smuggler named Nuvia, and as crazy a situation as any I’ve put into this story.

In a previous post, I mentioned Steve from Buffalo who lived life as much on the edge as anyone I ever met.  He was given to excess, whether it was a heroin habit, free-basing coke, drinking, smoking two plus packs a day, or dealing in tons of weed.  Steve Pfeiffer was the prototypical outlaw, living on the run, facing down all dangers, and basically as confrontational as you’d ever imagine being. 

For example, I remember a house rental in Brookville, NY where we had a big delivery of bales that were chock filled with seeds and shake.  And by big, I mean there were rooms with bales piled to the ceiling.  So we put together a tight crew and began carefully mixing the shake, buds and seeds into bags and boxes that were destined to be shipped out to the northwest or up to Buffalo or just sold locally.  This kind of operation took weeks and there came a morning when I was there with Steve and suddenly, the local hamlet cops were at the door, knocking after a report from a neighbor that some strangers were seen coming and going at odd times and with high frequency.  I’m like, well this is it, we’re getting popped and it’s been a good run and what was I thinking and I knew Steve was trouble all along and how could I have been so dumb as to be here this morning...  Pfeiffer, on the other hand, isn’t in the least bit fazed.  Without ever opening the door, he waits until they knock another few times and then yells loudly , ‘Who the fuck is knocking on my door this early in the morning?’  And when the cops say ‘It’s the police, open up.’ he replies angrily, ‘I’m sleeping, come the fuck back after twelve if you want to talk to me.’  And when a beat passes without an answer, he adds, ‘And bring a fucking warrant because I ain’t letting you in and this is the last thing I have to say to you.  Now get the fuck off my property before I charge you with trespassing!’ Long story short, the local cops left and never came back.  This is a very wealthy area and he actually faced them down.  People who live in Brookville are entitled to live however they want because they’re all set.  The sick thing was that this was totally typical of him.  Yes, he was given to excess, but he always kicked whatever habit he got caught up in.  He got into some very crazy situations but he always found a way out of them.

So, to get back to the Nuvia trigger...  At the sound of the name, I’m transported back in time to the late 1970s and early 80s.  Pfeiffer is on the scene in Manhattan, living in a downtown loft.  While I called him Steve from Buffalo, that came later.  He actually grew up in Astoria (not far from me although we didn’t know each other at the time) and went to City College.   We grew close primarily as part of the social scene that was typical of the drug-dealing subculture.  He was always on the periphery of things that I was doing until one day, we got together and decided to deal directly with each other.  That happened a lot, and this particular time, it changed a lot of things for me, my circle, and my sensibilities.  Even today, I look back to Steve and remember him walking into my house one day in the early 80s and saying, ‘You really have to get a personal computer.  These things are going to change everything and if you don’t get one, you’ll be left behind.’  Yup, Pfeiffer was my launch into the digital world.

Nuvia...  right...  so Pfeiffer isn’t only living downtown, but he’s taken up with a Colombian coke smuggler named Nuvia.  She was, in a lot of ways, a perfect fit for him -- totally fearless, completely insane, and with an incredibly loud mouth that never stopped spewing obscenities.  And, oh yeah, she also had beaver style front teeth, which takes me back to the trigger. 

So, back around the time when I was working at the Times, my brother returned from an Asian stint in the Air Force with a wife from Oklahoma and took an apartment in Rego Park’s Lefrak City.  I had a short but happy affair with a neighbor of his who recommended a dentist in the area, Ken S.  I hadn’t seen a dentist in quite a while and was happy to connect with Ken, and as things go, we became arms-length friendly.  I shared with him when I left the Times and began my ‘other’ career.  He was an interesting guy, a talented dentist, and I always liked to spend time with him.  At one point, I bought a 14 foot sunfish sailboat on a trailer from him but that’s another story for another time.  So...  time goes on and one day, Max S (who at the time was partnering with two other guys—Jerry S and Pfeiffer) asks me if I know a dentist.  I recommend Ken.  Max sees Ken, likes the result and tells a friend who tells a friend who tells Steve.  Before you know it, Ken has a growing client base of pot dealers who are paying him in envelopes filled with 10s and 20s.  Now Pfeiffer, after his heroin and coke things, had awful teeth and by the time he finished with Dr. S, he had laid out more than 10 grand (which was a LOT of dough before the current stupidly expensive dental pricing happened).  His mouth was fixed and he was happy as a clam.  Next thing you know, he sends Nuvia to see Dr. S and for another 10 grand, he rebuilds her mouth too.  Unfortunately for her, he only rebuilt the teeth and not the bad-tempered, foul-language spewing nature of her madness.  It was pretty funny to hear her curse people out with her Colombian accent...  or at least it seemed funny until one day, she just disappeared.

Steve was around but Nuvia was gone.  No goodbyes, no farewells, no Nuvia.  Did I mention that they fought?  Steve and Nuvia were two of a kind.  Loud, profane and in each other’s face.  And, oh yeah, they both weren’t afraid of owning guns. 

Until, about six months later, I get a freaky call from Dr. S, ‘I’m calling you from a payphone near my office...  The cops were just here...  Homicide cops...  and they’re asking me to identify a set of teeth they found in a burlap sack in Jamaica Bay along with a full set of bones.'

So Ken, being more or less a ‘straight’, tips the cops to Max, Max’s girlfriend, Jerry, Steve, and ID’s the choppers as belonging to Nuvia.  Although he didn’t include me in the mix, the shit hits the fan and about six months later, Pfeiffer gets indicted for murder.  Yes, murder.

Defended by Stanley Siegel (RIP by Alzheimers in 2002), Pfeiffer pleads not guilty.  Siegel puts on a spectacular case, proving Nuvia was smuggling coke for the Medellin cartel, and denying that Steve had anything to do with her disappearance or subsequent reappearance in the sack in the bay.  The government put on a case with neighbors testifying about frequent fights, loud verbal abuse and Nuvia often displaying facial bruising and black eyes.  They covered Steve’s record, from time in prison to his dozen felony arrests that never went to trial to his paying the dentist for her dental rebuild.  After they rest, Pfeiffer actually takes the stand and testifies on his own behalf.  Talk about having a brass set of balls!!  He testifies and gets acquitted because they can’t rule out a possible role of the cartel that she smuggled for.

And this all just popped into my head last night after hearing ‘Nuvia’ for the first time in about 30 years.  BTW, Pfeiffer passed away about ten years ago in Buffalo, the victim of lung cancer.  Perhaps another time, I’ll share some more Pfeiffer stories because there are LOTS of them.  From him flying us around in a Lear to pick up cash, to him swimming the Rio Grande with a bail of Mexican on his back, to him playing the key role in a bank robbery that ‘sort of just happened’ a few years later.  And he never... ever... told me if he did it or didn't do it. Whenever her name came up, which was not frequently, he just smiled and shrugged.

Happy holidays Everybody!!