Gary Yukon and Prince Michael

Gary Yukon was a Kansas City dude who, along with his partner Carl, showed up on the Franklin Street scene in the very early 1970s. These guys started out driving bricks of Mexican smoke from KC to New York and Gary was a Machiavellian type of guy whose goal was to climb the ladder on Franklin Street. He began on the first floor with the Mexican pot and worked diligently at trying to get Kenny and Brandy into a financial situation where they had to let him move in with them. After a few runs, Gary was living on the first floor and was trying to jump everyone's connections in the city so he could become a New York middleman.

He did, in the end, make it happen. As things developed, the second floor wound up in the hands of a transvestite queen, Prince Michael (see the original list)... The second floor scene kind of morphed from hash to bash. Every Friday and Saturday, there was a crazy procession of crossdressers and flaming queens that assembled on the second floor for extended parties. I mean these events were like gala balls with live music and a seemingly endless supply of pharmaceutical-grade coke... As an example, there was one guy who was called the 'archbishop' and wore the costume to match, hat and long flowing robe... major catholic bling... breast plate included... While I never had the urge to participate in these things, they were, from all accounts, pretty spectacular events.

So one day, Gary meets Prince Michael and cuts a deal to buy his ride... which was an awesome two-toned blue 1954 R-Backed Bentley... complete with the mid-door turn-arms that lowered and extended while blinking. I mean this was an awesome chick-magnet of a car. So Gary grabs me and suggests that between a few of us, we can buy the car from him and share the use of it. I grab Tom (my Astoria roommate) and a Japanese dude from Philly named Lloyd... We pool our cash and do the deal. Now we're tooling around Manhattan in this thing on a regular basis... I cannot believe we didn't get popped because we actually made some deliveries with this car... Remember, though, that this was real early on in the story and it wasn't like we were doing major moves or anything... This was just a stoned-out adventure thing.

I remember cruising down 7th avenue one afternoon, seeing a hot babe waiting at the front of a crowd to cross the street and hitting the turn signal and laughing madly when the arm came down and hit her left tit... then offering to drive her wherever she was going... and, sick as it sounds, she just smiled and jumped in. The late 60s are hard to describe without feeling warm and fuzzy.

Anyway, a couple of months later, it's my turn to have the ride (which was all the rage when I parked it on the street outside my middle-class apartment house in Astoria). I ask Al Seigal who was the Foreign Copydesk Editor at the Time to come take a cruise downtown to grab a bite at an Italian joint. Al, although he was totally straight and an intellectual giant, was also a physical one at 350-400 pounds. He never refused a meal, free or otherwise. So we head downtown, enjoy a great meal... and come out to find that the car was towed away by the repo company. It turns out that Prince Michael never really owned it and once the payments lapsed, the truth came out. Unfortunately, Al had left his attache case in the back seat and it was filled with important New York Times stuff. After a tremendous three-day hassle, I managed to retrieve his stuff but the car was gone forever... and as it turned out, so was Prince Michael... who turned out to be a guy from Brooklyn named Michael Goldberg (no relation to Charlie).

Gary used this turn of events to try to take over the second floor loft. But in that crazy time, in that crazy place, Ken and Brandy had seniority so they got the second floor and Gary wound up on the first. In a funny kind of way, this made complete sense since Gary was a pot connection and Ken and Brandy were connected in the hashish circles.

Eventually, smooth-talking Gary talked to the wrong guy, got popped and ended up in jail in the mid-west.
Although this was the Gary Yukon post, I just realized I left out a serious piece of the Prince Michael story... When we went up to the second floor to find Prince Michael, the place looked like a serious violent crime scene. The furniture was all smashed and broken, artwork slashed, and the place looked like it had been the host to a fatal bloodbath. I mean there was blood everywhere... puddles on the floor, spatters on the walls and in the kitchen... no bodies... and this was the first of many ignored crimes that occurred through the years but couldn't be reported because of the obvious incriminating circumstances that were always happening. Who was going to even begin to try to explain this to the cops?

Underneath all these stories, there are a few unifying themes... drugs of course... and money... among others... I remember hanging out one night with Ken and Brandy doing some serious intake... and sitting around trying to predict the future... (which, considering the amount of acid everyone was doing, wasn't all that farfetched)... And somewhere late in the conversation, I remember Brandy looking around during a pause... and saying "I can see a future for the people in this room... Some of the people here, because of the time and place and luck, are going to become very rich." Although we just kind of laughed at the time, I can still hear her saying those words...

Charlie G

Charlie's role in my scene was more of a peripheral one as a driver and helper than as a main player. He was an over-sized guy who came from the alphabet city part of Manhattan where he grew up on Grand Street and was something of a gentle giant. He was into downers and booze and had a tendency to blow up to weights in excess of 300 pounds. These were fat pounds as opposed to the more popular weed pounds.

But, as was the case with most of those on the list, Charlie had presence. By presence, I mean he didn't panic in extremely tense situations. For example:

We owned a huge official-looking black Sedan DeVille Caddy that was one of the vehicles we used for the Florida-New York run. This one time, Charlie and a (very special) gal drove down, picked up a trunk full (350-400 lbs) of Columbian pot from the connection and set off on the drive north. This drive, if you went straight through normally took about 22-26 hours. One common decision was what to do with the spare tire... since usually, every part of the trunk was jammed with merch. Often, the tire would be moved into the back seat and covered with a blanket... and that was the case on this trip. So about 18 hours into the ride, Charlie decides he has to call his girlfriend to let her know he's safe... They pull into a rest stop on the road in Pennsylvania at like 4 in the morning and when they pull out, they get pulled over by a trooper. Now the gal was driving at this point and was breaking just about every rule there was. She's even driving without shoes... and when the cop pulls them over and asks for her license, they realize that her pocket book must have fallen out of the car at a stop in Georgia. The cop is not happy and heads back to his cruiser to check the plates. Charlie, in a moment of balls and brilliance, gets out, walks over to the trooper and shows him ID that identifies Charlie as a cop from Hunter, an upstate New York ski town. He tells the cop that the girl is the daughter of a US Senator and that he was hired to get her and the Senator's staff car back to NYC... and to please give them a pass because it was sure to cost him his job. Well... our hero, Charlie, pulled it off and they got back on the road and delivered the goods. The cop never asked about the tire in the back seat, never checked the trunk... and never even wrote up a ticket. P.S. This was the last time that (very special) gal ever drove for anyone.

As a sidenote, drivers usually got paid a grand each for a trip. It wasn't bad pay for 24 hours of driving... assuming your 24 hours didn't turn into time in jail.

I heard recently that Charlie has some kind of very serious liver problem and isn't going to last much longer.

Yeah, this stuff is hard to believe...

By the way... in case anybody is wondering, it's been 20+ years since I even thought about doing any funny business... and any thoughts I have these days are those of shock that I did any of these things. I must have been very very high for the whole time... Who in their right mind would do this stuff?

Lee L

One day, a couple of years after Bobby Mountain took off for points west, I get a call from him asking me if I want to meet a friend of his from Idaho. I say sure and about a week later, a guy pull in driving an old beat-up pick-up with a cap. The guy gets out and introduces himself as Lee. Now Lee stood about 5'6" with a mountaineer's face and an attitude to match. The guy had served the country in Vietnam driving supply trucks on the front lines, watched a lot of guys bite the bullet, and had an impossible time re-adjusting when he got back. He was a fly fisherman, deer hunter, back-woodsman type of guy and despite his hick town image, was a pretty savvy guy. Being recommended by Bobby was all I needed to have a level of trust that justified giving Lee whatever he wanted (within reason) and wait for however long it took him to move it and get back with the cash. Also, I was very aware that a pick-up truck had a much larger capacity than a car. Another motivating factor was that Lee could move most anything and I had found those types of distributors to be invaluable in securing the bigger loads.

Lee would show up about once every six weeks and you never knew what he was bringing with him. Once he showed up with a crazy beautiful German Shepherd puppy that he had brought as a gift for us. Another time he gifted a spectacular piece of scrimshaw that I still have today. Not only was he moving things back out west, but he had a solid circle down in Kentucky and another one in the Dakotas. This added another dimension to the possibilities since he'd show up from places that nobody had a clue about, take on major projects, and be gone until the deal was done.

On top of that, a few years into the relationship, I got connected out on the coast and was able to call on Lee to drive major weight coast to coast with the promise of him getting a decent chunk. He did it quite a few times and did it flawlessly. It was easy to see why too... After driving army trucks under fire, there wasn't much that would rattle Lee. He was as solid as they came.

Unfortunately, as was sometimes the case, he took on a big load that was just too lousy to get sold and we spent almost 18 months getting him enough decent shit to mix it with. In the end, I had to lower the price to just about anything the market would bear just to recoup anything at all. I think he actually buried some of it just to make it go away...

After a few years, Lee bought a convenience store in his small town and seemed to be on the road to a mellow retirement. That never happened because his Kentucky friends got in trouble, implicated him and he spent some time in a serious facility. When he got out, his business was shot and he didn't have many skills to do much else so he started all over again. This one time, he showed up unexpectedly during a drought and instead of wanting stuff, he's got a file drawer of Lebanese sacks. When I brought them around to my people, I was something of a hero since nobody had anything whatsoever and this stuff was both high-quality and priced low. The usual connections were all over me to find out where the shit had come from but I kept Lee as a secret and there was no way I was getting cut out.

Sadly, when I was beset by misfortune, Lee never paid me the hundred fifty grand that I'm figuring he owed me. On one hand, I was hot as a firecracker and on the other hand, Lee was probably driven by a combination of fear and greed when he didn't finish the deal. At least as sad was what happened to him back around 2002 when his whole scene collapsed and they found a million in cash buried on his Idaho property. He fought long and hard but ended up getting a stiff sentence under the guidelines. By the way, the sentencing guidelines changed the entire picture for those in the business... In November of 1987, sentencing flexibility was taken out of the hands of the judges and was reduced to a mathematical formula. Instead of serving 20% of the sentence, most convictions were mathematically stupidly stiff. Even with good behavior, there was no way around having to serve 85% of the sentence. And the sentence itself was predetermined by more mathematical formulas. Unfortunately, the formula meant that you could go away for life if you got nailed with enough weight. Up till then, nobody went away for 30 years for a load of pot. It was just unthinkable. Thank you Ronald Reagan.

http://www.famm.org/UnderstandSentencing/WhatAreMandatoryMinimums.aspx

http://www.famm.org/UnderstandSentencing/WhatAreMandatoryMinimums/HistoryofMandatoryMinimums/HistoryTimeline/The1986AntiDrugAbuseAct.aspx

I looked last night and it appears that Lee became pretty popular with the feds over the last few years...

http://www.justice.gov/usao/id/public_info/pr09/may/jones05152009.html

http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/states/newsrel/seattle091306.html

http://www.lakeoswegoreview.com/news/story.php?story_id=115818201930926500

Howie & Ronnie

One day early on, when I was hanging in the city and living in Astoria, I got into a taxi with a small box and gave the driver my address... We start talking and the next thing I know, he's passing a hash pipe back to me. He had some dynamite black kashmiri smoke and by the time we got to Astoria, we were best friends.... lol... I invited him up to my apartment and opened the box... next thing we got totally loaded between his hash and my jamaican pot. His name was Howie and he had a younger brother, Ronnie.

Howie was a bit too spaced out for the business I was growing but his brother, Ronnie, was modestly more focused... Ronnie had a really funny voice. When he spoke, he sounded a lot like the cartoon character Goofy. Anyway, we did a lot lot of moves and Ronnie was totally dependable when you absolutely had to have someone to depend on....

Example: We're in a rented house... One of many but this one in particular happened to have a drive-in garage... I mean you could drive right through the garage and into the basement... And, I always wondered about the guy who owned it... But before I get distracted, try to imagine this...

We had about a ton of weed in the basement and it was a mixed load... The thing about moving a whole load was that it often included a percentage of really excellent bud, a bunch of really good stuff, some bales that were picked late and had way too many seeds, some that had gotten wet off the boat, and some that was picked early and had a low bud count but lots of leaf. Also, fairly frequently, there were bales that had gone to dust. So when we weighed in a load, we'd classify it and if the percentages really sucked, we'd even things out to make it all salable. We had a cardboard and plastic connection and we'd be weighing and mixing and creating boxes and boxes... In the process, the dusty stuff got into the air and most of the time everything ended up with a coating of pot. This meant that we also had a cleaning crew to make sure we would be able to move out eventually without getting nailed.

So one afternoon, we had just finished weighing and mixing and bagging and boxing and we get a call from the real estate agent who says she's got a potential buyer in town for a few hours who knows that owner and that they are coming over in an hour so they can see the house. We tried every excuse in the book but to no avail. She is coming over in 90 minutes and that's that. Thrown into full fire-drill mode, we break out the full assortment of vacuums (we had every vacuum cleaner known to man... There was everything from wet-dry vacs to hoover uprights, Electrolux cannisters, a half-dozen dustbusters, etc)... We're into filling up trunks and moving boxes to another house as fast as possible but it's a losing battle. The next thing that happens is the power goes out and we're totally fucked. Now, although we have the benefit of pitch blackness, the place smells like a pothouse and there is pot dust coating everything in the basement.

I call Ronnie, who isn't far away and has a big old empty van... He shows up and we decide that the best we can do is save the load. This is important since, after all, we had the load on the arm and the fronters aren't going to care about the real estate problem. They are going to want to be paid. So the first priority is to get the shit out of there. Ronnie, who is, like me, either absolutely fearless or totally fucking stupid, rushes over with his van and we begin to load it up, end to end, floor to ceiling. Hearts are racing, backs are breaking, the house-sitters are totally freaked out... and we get virtually everything that was left into Ronnie's van. We lock it up and are debating where we can take it and whether it might actually be safer sitting on the driveway, ready to roll if the situation becomes dire.

Bottom line, the real estate lady calls about five minutes before post-time and says the buyer-friend decided to leave town early and they weren't coming.

Ronnie was another super stand-up dude who was always ready to jump in when asked. There are more Ronnie stories but I remember this one vividly because I was on the verge of a heart attack and he was totally cool through the whole drama. I am not sure where either Howie or Ronnie are today... It might be fun to look them up...

Update:  Ronnie is alive and well.  

Jesse Torres, Schmoo & Foot...

When Tom and I were living together, Tom had a wide circle of neighborhood buds... and as the older folks began moving out of our building, one by one, the apartments were taken by younger single-types... one of Tom's friends, Jimmy C took the apartment directly across the hall from us and was sharing it with another guy, and that was Jesse... More on Jesse when I have time... but Jesse was Cuban and provided the direct connection into that culture.

As for Schmoo and Foot, I became friendly with a dude, Paul, who worked in the New York Times Sports department and he was getting his smoke from Schmoo & Foot. I laid some really special stuff on Paul and before I turned around, he had turned them onto it and they wanted to meet me. Schmoo was a gambler-type, who was into the track and poker... Foot was more of a laid-back doper who was a basically just a real nice guy... But these guys became a connection with yet another circle of 'involved' people...

So... Without getting too deep into it, just take it from me, Jesse was a serious dude with a serious business model. He wasn't the usual hippie-type dealer but was more of a 'do what you say or i'll do what i say' type of guy. In other words, you did not fuck with Jesse. But, on the other hand, he was 100 percent dead-on honest. He always did what he said. He also was one of the most careful people I met in the biz... He was never easily found except when he called you and set up a meet. There was no easy way to reach him so everything was done on faith. And, like most of the characters in this story, he was both a connection and a customer depending on the deal and the situation. He also wasn't a stranger to weapons... I remember him going on trial for murder and getting convicted for some lesser crime. When he came out, about a year later, he had taken on some odd religion and wore only white clothing for the next few years. Did he do it? I never asked him but I never doubted it for a moment.

Schmoo was a big dude. He was probably 6'4" and weighed in around 275. He had a Jewish afro, meaning his hair was red, overgrown and frizzy. Over the years, we made a lot of moves. I remember flying up on National Airlines out of Miami into LaGuardia with Samsonites filled with Columbian Gold. I'd land, get picked up, get dropped off to his place, get paid on the spot and get driven back to LAG with empty suitcases for another run. Now, there was a serious risk involved in these moves and the profit was sort of justified by the risk. I'd be buying the stuff for like $250 a pound down south and getting $325 or $350 up in NY. A suitcase would comfortably hold about 60 pounds so each trip with two suitcases would jump up the cash stash by anywhere from 10-12 grand. When the loads were happening, I could make these trips a couple of times a week. Schmoo & Foot were a real easy exchange both financially and geographically. The place was 10 minutes from the airport. The math worked real well since suddenly, it seemed like the only limit was on the size of the cases.

This was nothing remotely like what happens in an airport today. Back then, you could show up at the airport like 5 minutes before a flight, literally run to the gate and they would practically hold the plane for you. There was no security whatsoever. You didn't even have to show ID. You could pay in cash... Hell... I remember actually not having time to check the bags a few times and the stewardess put them in the front closet of the plane. It was nuts. One time, we were doing something in a small town in Ohio... I put together a group of about 5... spent a grand on luggage, crashed the gate at JFK about 15 minutes before flight time... flew into Dayton, drove to the town which was halfway between Dayton and Columbus... found out the stuff had been sold before we got there... got back in our cars, drove to Columbus... crashed a gate there too... and got on another plane... this was a weird one that I remember because we were 5 people with a bunch of empty suitcases... The flight attendants were all smiles, and possibly knew what was going on... but the cases were empty... we were all flying with phony names... and they just stored them in the closet and off we went. I do remember this particular trip though because one of the stewardesses stopped at my seat about 20 minutes into the flight and seemed all confused... She was like "I could swear I've seen you on one of my flights today but it would have had to have been in Dayton... How could that be?" I just smiled and told her that stewardesses weren't the only people who got around.

Later on, before flying became undoable, but after they started using dogs, we had to be much more careful about how we packed the bags... using dozens of layers of plastic and talcum powder or corn starch... and roll on deodorants between each layer... But eventually, the limitations of suitcases forced the move to cars, trains... and eventually, trucks...

Schmoo had a long-time kidney problem and passed away one night when his only remaining one failed unexpectedly. It was a real lousy ending for a really gentle and beautiful guy. Foot, whose real name was Seth, wound up with MS and I don't know if he's still alive today. It's been 25 years since I heard from him.

Russ

Russ was a real close friend and driver for the rather successful set of F brothers. All went well until he was sent on a drive to pick up a load in upstate New York. Unfortunately, I broke a rule and allowed my people to take part in this project. At the end of the day, it was a very poor decision since the load was a sting by federal agents and the whole crew got busted. They were all 'stand-up' however and I managed to skate past this disaster. Skating, however, was relative. I did pay my guys their full due (and support their families) for the entire two years they were in the can. It was a really lousy situation but the vehicles were all untraceable and the problem was contained.