Monday, May 13, 2013
Still Alive... Yay!
Yes... I'm still alive... A few years older and now eligible for Medicare (which, so far, is the best health insurance I've ever had). Some new friends had a bunch of questions so I've decided I need to add to the original blog. After all, I never touched on what happened to bring it all to an end for me. And, needless to say, things change as time goes on... people leave this world... Patti is gone... Gary too... but I'm still here and I think this needs to be taken further. Watch for some new old stuff coming soon.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
John the Beak
So it's the 1970s and pot is everywhere. Unlike the 1960s, there is no transition from alcohol. Pot is the drug of choice and the baby boomers are pretty much all smoking it. And... as it turns out, any time the baby boomers do anything en masse, the world changes. Some facts:
When World War II ended, and soldiers returned home to the US, there was a huge increase in conceptions.
There are 78 million Americans who are classified as baby boomers.
In the 1950s, when they were in primary school, more schools were built in a five year period than in any ten year period before or since.
In 1964, baby boomers represented 40% of the overall US population.
In 1965, 36% of the population was under the age of 18.
Today, only 18% of the population is under 18.
Today the boomers make up 28% of the population.
Regardless of what the boomers did, the impact was huge. Education, music, housing, investments, travel, workout regimens, medicine... huge fortunes were made catering to the boomers. And this was no less true on the underbelly of society as it was out in the open. Back in the 60s (and for quite a while before), the Italians pretty much cornered the market on organized crime in the US. They were known as 'crime families'... And, like any family, they had children... and those children were just as likely to be baby boomers as the rest of the generation. So now, unlike my growing up in a middle class law-abiding culture, these kids grew up in something that was quite a bit different. When my train rolled off the tracks and into the world of dope-dealing, these kids weren't far behind in recognizing the opportunities they had. Where my college buddies and I had to build a network, these guys (and girls) were exposed to networking in illegal activities from day one.
Now as things began to get more serious for me, I was getting introduced to more and more dealers and wholesalers. (The way the scene worked, the dealer today could be a wholesaler tomorrow and vice versa.) And it was kind of inevitable that eventually, I'd get introduced to a few serious baby boomers who were mobbed up. This is a bit different from Big Al (who I wrote about early on in this thread) since Al was quite a bit older.
Anyway, this all comes to mind because John the Beak was a mobbed up baby boomer. When I started out trying to grow a business with this stuff, it was all about finding customers and connections... I think I explained a lot of that dynamic earlier in the thread. Well, there comes a point in the process when they are trying to find you and you're trying to only be found by the right people. I've always had a weakness in over-intellectualizing things that I shouldn't. It's probably why I didn't get laid until I was 20 or so. Well now... where was I? ummm...
So one of the other guys in the story was connected to John and was sort of pushed away by John and his crew so they could deal directly with me. And this kind of thing doesn't happen in one moment. It kind of develops into a situation. Like I moved weight to the guy between us... who moved it either directly to John's crew or indirectly through someone else. Meanwhile some principals in each deal are trying to keep their distance... while others are trying to cut out the middle guys. I usually felt it was worth having the middle guy there. (a tactic that was double-edged but effective... until I got truly nailed)...
If this story doesn't seem truly coherent, I might be out of practice... but another element of John the Beak was the difference in how the players saw the business. Some of them were into quality at any price and didn't care about much else. Others didn't care at all about quality but wanted cheap stuff. And others (like me) cared about both and could move both high and low quality material in different directions. Last time I wrote about this, I think I mentioned Steve in Buffalo and Lee in Idaho as guys who were spectacularly efficient in moving lousy stuff. Well, John the Beak was pretty good at it too but for different reasons. If John gave you something, you were simply scared shitless to tell him it wasn't any good. The flip side of that was that you could sell anything to John as long as it was cheap. Only rarely, probably by accident, did John come into anything of true quality.
Visiting John's spot was memorable for a few reasons. First, it was in a quiet residential area of Lindenwood Brooklyn. What I didn't know at the time was that John (or his family) had the whole area sewn up. As time went on, though, I got the picture. We'd be hanging out and guys would show up with reports about what was happening in the neighborhood... who got his face broken... was it okay to go after someone... who had the tape players... the speaker systems... etc etc... it was about much much more than pot.
On arriving at the Beak's spot, the first thing you heard were the Dobermans... There were a couple right there and you basically prayed that they were tied up. To get to his joint, you had to walk down a long driveway between two houses... then knock on a door that was like something out of Being John Malkovich... It was like 4 feet high, thick heavy wood and bolted tight as any door you've ever seen. You could hear the growling and barking way before you got to knocking... And once you knocked the dogs went bananas... clawing at the door... louder... deeper... real scary shit... But if you wanted to get paid, or if you wanted to deliver the goods, you had to deal with it.
It's not like John the Beak was a super key player in the overall scene... but his world was different enough from anything I was used to that it makes for some great material.
Like the time he sold me a bunch of bales that came straight from Florida. They got weighed... I paid... And John and his guys left to go back South. It was only a couple of days later, when we were breaking down the bales that I came across a few things that really pissed me off. The stuff wasn't great but it wasn't horrible either. But one bale had an 8 pound fucking rock in the middle of it. This rock cost me over 2 grand. So I went about trying to get my money back... which was never going to happen because John the Beak wasn't the kind of guy you told what to do. Weeks went by and his crew is still in Florida (supposedly waiting for a boat that never came)... He says he'll return the rock to the Columbians but it's not going to be easy... I pack up the rock and head over to National Airlines cargo, sending off my 'mineral sample'... Bottom line, the rock never gets picked up in Florida... I never see a dime... And I'm too chicken-shit to start making demands of these guys. If John's guys don't get pissed at me, the Columbians, who are totally and outrageously insane, might take offense and wipe out my entire family over a $2,000 rock.
There are a lot more John-type stories... He was actually a pretty cool dude when you ignored all the rest of this stuff... which I can say about most everyone in the saga... Lots of laughs... lot of absurdities... but it was impossible to forget that he was as connected as anyone in the Sopranos. I never found out exactly which family he was with but I know he and his cousin (John the Dope) were both heavyweights. and John the Dope was no dope. Feel free to speculate about John's Beak...
When World War II ended, and soldiers returned home to the US, there was a huge increase in conceptions.
There are 78 million Americans who are classified as baby boomers.
In the 1950s, when they were in primary school, more schools were built in a five year period than in any ten year period before or since.
In 1964, baby boomers represented 40% of the overall US population.
In 1965, 36% of the population was under the age of 18.
Today, only 18% of the population is under 18.
Today the boomers make up 28% of the population.
Regardless of what the boomers did, the impact was huge. Education, music, housing, investments, travel, workout regimens, medicine... huge fortunes were made catering to the boomers. And this was no less true on the underbelly of society as it was out in the open. Back in the 60s (and for quite a while before), the Italians pretty much cornered the market on organized crime in the US. They were known as 'crime families'... And, like any family, they had children... and those children were just as likely to be baby boomers as the rest of the generation. So now, unlike my growing up in a middle class law-abiding culture, these kids grew up in something that was quite a bit different. When my train rolled off the tracks and into the world of dope-dealing, these kids weren't far behind in recognizing the opportunities they had. Where my college buddies and I had to build a network, these guys (and girls) were exposed to networking in illegal activities from day one.
Now as things began to get more serious for me, I was getting introduced to more and more dealers and wholesalers. (The way the scene worked, the dealer today could be a wholesaler tomorrow and vice versa.) And it was kind of inevitable that eventually, I'd get introduced to a few serious baby boomers who were mobbed up. This is a bit different from Big Al (who I wrote about early on in this thread) since Al was quite a bit older.
Anyway, this all comes to mind because John the Beak was a mobbed up baby boomer. When I started out trying to grow a business with this stuff, it was all about finding customers and connections... I think I explained a lot of that dynamic earlier in the thread. Well, there comes a point in the process when they are trying to find you and you're trying to only be found by the right people. I've always had a weakness in over-intellectualizing things that I shouldn't. It's probably why I didn't get laid until I was 20 or so. Well now... where was I? ummm...
So one of the other guys in the story was connected to John and was sort of pushed away by John and his crew so they could deal directly with me. And this kind of thing doesn't happen in one moment. It kind of develops into a situation. Like I moved weight to the guy between us... who moved it either directly to John's crew or indirectly through someone else. Meanwhile some principals in each deal are trying to keep their distance... while others are trying to cut out the middle guys. I usually felt it was worth having the middle guy there. (a tactic that was double-edged but effective... until I got truly nailed)...
If this story doesn't seem truly coherent, I might be out of practice... but another element of John the Beak was the difference in how the players saw the business. Some of them were into quality at any price and didn't care about much else. Others didn't care at all about quality but wanted cheap stuff. And others (like me) cared about both and could move both high and low quality material in different directions. Last time I wrote about this, I think I mentioned Steve in Buffalo and Lee in Idaho as guys who were spectacularly efficient in moving lousy stuff. Well, John the Beak was pretty good at it too but for different reasons. If John gave you something, you were simply scared shitless to tell him it wasn't any good. The flip side of that was that you could sell anything to John as long as it was cheap. Only rarely, probably by accident, did John come into anything of true quality.
Visiting John's spot was memorable for a few reasons. First, it was in a quiet residential area of Lindenwood Brooklyn. What I didn't know at the time was that John (or his family) had the whole area sewn up. As time went on, though, I got the picture. We'd be hanging out and guys would show up with reports about what was happening in the neighborhood... who got his face broken... was it okay to go after someone... who had the tape players... the speaker systems... etc etc... it was about much much more than pot.
On arriving at the Beak's spot, the first thing you heard were the Dobermans... There were a couple right there and you basically prayed that they were tied up. To get to his joint, you had to walk down a long driveway between two houses... then knock on a door that was like something out of Being John Malkovich... It was like 4 feet high, thick heavy wood and bolted tight as any door you've ever seen. You could hear the growling and barking way before you got to knocking... And once you knocked the dogs went bananas... clawing at the door... louder... deeper... real scary shit... But if you wanted to get paid, or if you wanted to deliver the goods, you had to deal with it.
It's not like John the Beak was a super key player in the overall scene... but his world was different enough from anything I was used to that it makes for some great material.
Like the time he sold me a bunch of bales that came straight from Florida. They got weighed... I paid... And John and his guys left to go back South. It was only a couple of days later, when we were breaking down the bales that I came across a few things that really pissed me off. The stuff wasn't great but it wasn't horrible either. But one bale had an 8 pound fucking rock in the middle of it. This rock cost me over 2 grand. So I went about trying to get my money back... which was never going to happen because John the Beak wasn't the kind of guy you told what to do. Weeks went by and his crew is still in Florida (supposedly waiting for a boat that never came)... He says he'll return the rock to the Columbians but it's not going to be easy... I pack up the rock and head over to National Airlines cargo, sending off my 'mineral sample'... Bottom line, the rock never gets picked up in Florida... I never see a dime... And I'm too chicken-shit to start making demands of these guys. If John's guys don't get pissed at me, the Columbians, who are totally and outrageously insane, might take offense and wipe out my entire family over a $2,000 rock.
There are a lot more John-type stories... He was actually a pretty cool dude when you ignored all the rest of this stuff... which I can say about most everyone in the saga... Lots of laughs... lot of absurdities... but it was impossible to forget that he was as connected as anyone in the Sopranos. I never found out exactly which family he was with but I know he and his cousin (John the Dope) were both heavyweights. and John the Dope was no dope. Feel free to speculate about John's Beak...
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Dollar Bill
It was in the late 70s that everything changed. I'm not clear on the exact year but I do remember we had a top floor walk-up on Greenwich Street in the shadow of the World Trade Center. The Franklin Street loft wasn't ruling my scene since I had widened my circle and now, instead of getting my product there, I was occasionally seen as a connection. And, to be sure, occasionally wasn't a problem since it didn't have to be that often to be extremely lucrative. Plus, for some odd reason, I always seemed to find the really powerful pot. Up to that point, the loads were measurably modest. A few hundred pounds was ordinary. 500-1000 was a lot. And most of it was arriving in Florida... Sometimes it got air-dropped... other times it got floated in... and then, suddenly there were mother ships and the loads were immediately jumped up to tonnage instead of poundage. It was the wild west down in Florida... The Florida folks, though, are elsewhere in the cast... This is about Dollar Bill.
One day, a gal I knew introduced me to another gal and that gal knew a guy who had 25-35 pound boxes of pressed Colombian. The stuff was, I soon discovered, stupidly perfect. It wasn't seedy; was wonderfully fragrant; had a rich gold color, not a lot of wood or seeds, and was perfectly cured and fresh. I took a couple of boxes, brought them around, and found out that nobody else was as directly connected as I was. This meant I had the best price... or at least a very very good price on the New York scene.
So I took a few boxes down to Franklin Street and found that nobody else had these things... And that they were priced in the low 300s... Normally Colombian was, in my circle, priced close to $400 a pound. I had a widespread 'retail' circle and was easily marking this stuff up $50 a pound and that meant each box was turning into about 2 grand in profit... and there seemed to be an unlimited supply... No matter how many I moved, there was no end... a few boxes... then 5 boxes... then 10 boxes... Now keep in mind that 10 boxes were like 400-500 pounds... and nobody knew where they were coming from. The gals in the middle were taking a small commission and the guy I was introduced to was amazingly low key... like this was nothing special. For whole boxes, I was adding $25 a pound and making a grand a box. It wasn't unusual to move 10 or 15 boxes in a week. I wasn't big time in the deal but I was making more money than I could keep track of.
At this point, I had no idea but the entire shebang was engineered by Dollar Bill. The guy was invisible but his product was everywhere. The deal lasted for months and at the end, anybody who touched the stuff was rolling in dough. The pot was extremely potent and amazingly, I can't remember any of it getting busted. The boxes were like 24 inches wide and deep and 36 inches high. Everything was logistically perfect. It was like the boxes were mass produced to fit the mold of the pressed packages. The boxes were numbered and I remember seeing numbers that were 2000 and higher. Simple math told me there was at least 90,000 pounds in the load. The numbers were mind-boggling. I mean we were suddenly facing unusual problems. My friend suddenly showed up with bill-counting machines and the next thing I knew we were running counting sessions that lasted for hours. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlQSwPhiKz4
Instead of counting 10 or 20 grand, each box was 10+ grand... and suddenly the cash amounts were crazy. 15 boxes was roughly $175,000 and this was happening every few days for 10-12 weeks. Anyway, once the machine showed up, it was less tedious and a lot more fun to count the money. And the logistics were always very business-like... From the cataloging of the boxes to the counting machine to the money bands that were pre-gummed and used to wrap piles of different denominations and in different amounts. It was a totally different approach. This was no longer a bunch of hippies turning on the world. It was a business. And, in a crazy but misguided young mindset, I felt incredibly lucky to be there at that moment in time. I suppose I still get off on the events, the people and the experiences but things were constantly changing. When you're using counting machines and have an endless supply of product, it's easy to feel invulnerable. I saw it happen again and again over the years. Millions of dollars in cold hard cash has an absolute corrupting quality that makes you believe anything is possible. For some, like Dollar Bill, it was.
Anyway, after a few months, the boxes petered out and the market stabilized. But for those who were suddenly rocketed up the flow chart, it wasn't the end but was a new beginning. I was one of those. After the box deal, I had proven that I could handle pretty much anything that came along. And as the weeks and months went by, all kinds of things started showing up. There were Jamaican bales, all varieties of Colombian pot, modest amounts of Lebanese and darker hashish, and then a new product showed up... Thai sticks... And the Thai sticks weren't just extraordinarily powerful, they created a whole new price category. The Thai weed came as seedless buds that were wrapped around slim wooden sticks and, at retail, they were priced by the stick and not by weight. This justified per pound prices at between $1,200 and $2,000 depending on who was paying the bill. Even so, buying a pound of sticks generated close to $3,000 when sold at the stick level. An ounce had 8-10 sticks and if a stick was $20 bucks, that was $200 per ounce and $3,200 per pound. By contrast, ounces of Jamaican were $25 and Colombian was around $40. Pounds of Jamaican were usually around $250 and Colombian pounds went for $400 at the pound level. However, when you had something of really high quality, you could price it higher than anything else that was out there. Just because it was Jamaican or Colombian didn't make it worth the money if it sucked.
Back to Dollar Bill... A year later, he did it again with one major difference. The load came in and it was complete garbage. There wasn't any way to make it better.. You just can't turn shit into gold. Except those of us who had played when times were good were all pretty much locked into having to move it. The stuff was nicknamed 'The Glop" and there was a never-ending supply of it. Prices dropped to $200 and below and it still took forever. Any time anything else showed up, the Glop stopped selling and could only be moved when the other stuff was depleted. We had some long discussions about exactly what went wrong with this load...
For example, once the product was harvested, it had to be 'cured' before it was packaged. This usually meant laying it out in the sun or in special curing houses for a period of weeks. Well, after the previous year's load generated stupid amounts of money, greed kicked in and they didn't cure it long enough before it was pressed. This meant a lot of it was wet and when you press pot laden with moisture, you get all kinds of problems. Some of it rotted... Some of it was pressed into solid rocks that could hardly be pried apart. And there were other reasons too. They harvested a few weeks too soon so there was a ridiculous amount of leaf and not nearly as potent as it would have and should have become a few weeks later. Also, leafy pot tastes very harsh so it didn't even make for a happy moment when you were smoking it, regardless of how high it did or didn't get you. Also, if that wasn't enough, moisture is heavy. The 'normal' 25 pound loaf was tipping the scales at closer to 30 pounds. This not only meant that you were paying for moisture but if you attempted to dry it out, you lost that weight. So... let it suffice to say that this was no easy movement.
And to top it all off, there is another danger when you have crappy product. We started hearing about boxes getting busted. While next to nothing got busted the year earlier, this, on reflection, was kind of a natural turn of events. Who is the one customer who doesn't give a crap about the quality or conditions? The man only cares about one thing... giving you the money and then arresting you!! While I wasn't among the unfortunate bustees, I did end up sending out a bunch of stuff that never came back.
As it turned out, there was a whole lot of other things that were happening at the same time... Dollar Bill was real tight with my guy and due to the nature of my circle, I was one of the few people who was able to move the Glop. I had a lot of relatively small customers who would take 10 pounds at a clip... and most of them didn't have anyplace else to get frontable merch... So no matter what happened, I was always in the game. And Bill was anything but stupid. In the beginning, he was under tremendous pressure to make the pay-offs... (That's how those major moves worked... The transportation was pretty much paid up front but the nobody could pay for that much product up front)... And the Colombians are not famous for either their patience or for their peaceful nature. So if you owe millions to the Colombians, you did whatever it took to pay them. Bill lowered the prices until the stuff could be sold... and then he didn't force payment for the unsold amounts... so basically it was like running a second-hand consignment shop... With, of course, the ever-present but often ignored potential set of dangerous outcomes.
We had boxes that were so bad there was just no way they could be sold without some 'incentive'... so for months, anytime anything good came around, we cut package deals... you can have one of these if you take one of those... We'd actually mix the Glop in with better stuff (in small amounts because any serious blend would be horrible)... And the deal went on... It took the better part of a year to get done and we didn't make all that much dough... Towards the end, there was a complete drought and, to our shock, people were actually asking for Glop. It was kind of funny since these were the same people who wouldn't touch it at any price not too much earlier that year... And, as in any capitalist market, the price rose accordingly. In the end, Dollar Bill got it done and my role was increasing with each move...
So another year goes by and the Colombians are screwing up a good thing. Cartajena Gold is just a memory and the feds are cracking down hard on the product being grown in Jamaica... The Colombians pretty much begin to rule the scene in Florida but it's not about pot... Coke is the product that is generating the most profit and the Colombians and other Latinos (Cubans, etc.) are totally wild in the streets. They would rather kill you and your entire family than think about collecting on late payments. This wasn't a big problem for me since I made a rules decision early on that I was only going to deal in smoke... Grass and Hash were okay with me... Pills, powders and other chemicals weren't my thing. I'd take them for myself but there was no way I was going to do business with them. It just didn't feel right and personally, I was a true pothead.
The scene changed almost overnight. The cool dudes evacuated Florida and started doing things all up and down the east coast. I mean loads started coming straight into eastern Long Island, the capes of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, etc etc. Nobody wanted to deal with the Florida scene. The feds were all over the area and it was like the wild wild west. Between the Colombians, the cops and the coke, the action became way more than I was prepared to deal with. And, it's not like we hadn't done our share of numbers. We had houses in Coral Gables, Fort Lauderdale, Sunrise, North Miami, etc... There were fleets of cars (all registered to non-existent owners, but that's another whole story), cigarette boats, package trucks, crews galore... but in the end, the scene came apart down there. People died and it just became too dangerous.
Ummm... So.... to get back to Dollar Bill, he split the Florida scene way before it all came apart and kind of disappeared... for about a year and a half. Until one day....
I was sitting in a stash house on Long Island and my box connection (the link to Bill) shows up with something totally different. He's got a six pound super heavy duty foil package... vacuum-packed... shot with nitrogen to prevent fermentation or other biological deterioration... and it's filled with the most fragrant, gooey, intense, bright gold pot. I find it hard to smoke more than a few hits before I practically pass out. And, I wasn't like a normal pothead. By this time, it was an occupational thing. Every time I brought something to someone, part of the ritual included an official tasting. So I wasn't a cheap head. Except this product was so far and away the strongest, most pleasant smoke I had ever had, I had a hard time believing it wasn't treated with a chemical. I look at my friend (yeah, we were good friends by that point) and ask him if this was something I could get my hands on. He says there's a lot of it... and I knew instantly that a 'lot' to him meant something extraordinary was about to happen.
As it turned out, Dollar Bill had brought American ingenuity and technology and married it to the best pot from Thailand that anybody had ever seen. Somehow, while everyone else was caught up in the Colombian, Jamaican and Mexican smoke, Mr. Bill managed to move his operation to Southeast Asia and moved at least five tons of the foil packs from the jungle to the good old USA. The packs immediately became known as the 'Silver Bullets" and they commanded $1500 a pound from day one. My friend was putting them in my hands at $1200 or so and the game was on.
We pretty much found the market at every level imaginable. We were selling 5-10 bullets at $1300 each and doing singles at $1400. There were dozens of different variations and each one was of spectacular quality. There were some that were actually purple... some were brown... most were gold... and some were on sticks. To that point, virtually all the Thai product was wrapped on sticks. But, for the most part, this removed the stick element and delivered the goods in small perfectly cured and pressed packages that became an instant legend.
While we were still doing all the other stuff, this added a whole other level to the market. In New York, they became a status symbol among the echelons of smokers and dealers. If you had this stuff, your rep skyrocketed. Of course, at the time, all I was thinking about was how fucking high (and rich) I was getting... Each five or six pound Bullet was adding $600-$1000 to the ledger and there were plenty of them. The situation was relatively out of control but nothing next to what came next....
I was reflecting on the silver bullets overnight and realized a few things. First, I was so damned high from this stuff that some of the details got mixed together on them. There were two major moves that happened. Nothing I've remembered was inaccurate but there were quite a few other factors that are relevant. Couple of quick items... There came a point where I learned that my connection to Bill had an ongoing problem with heroin and was running through all his dough at a ridiculous rate. I want to say that he was making money hand over fist but was shooting five to ten grand a week into his bloodstream. His problem didn't start with the arrival of the bullets but was something that he had been doing even during the first boxed Colombian move. I only realized it when he started becoming more and more unreliable. For a heroin addict, he was amazingly functional. (Although I also realized why the dude was so fucking mellow all the time in the face of some really hairy goings-on.) Second, I didn't move crazy amounts during the first bullet deal... that came later... Third, my reputation was growing with each deal and it came to a place where I finally got to meet Bill. He was in an old loft down in the meat-packing district of Manhattan... I remember going into his place and being crazy intimidated... He was a tall guy with fairly long gray hair... listening to some dissonant jazz... with a big pistol on his table... and he wasn't big on small talk... I also remember his paranoia about AIDS. The meat-packing district was a strange place and his loft was upstairs from a gay club. He rambled on about how he was getting ready to move because he was nervous about mosquito bites. People were dying from AIDS and he had a fear that a mosquito would bite an infected person at the club and then bite him, transferring the germs.
The details are a bit fuzzy here but I remember my friend introducing me to a few of Bill's infrastructure guys... mostly drivers and other outlets... and as my friend started to become less and less functional, I was given opportunities to provide storage and facilities... sort of like a back-office arrangement...
A lot of the key people in this tale are still untouched on the original list of characters but they were all tied into Bill's operation on different levels. I had one friend who had a bust-out operation going on Long Island. He started a company called Great American Liquidators and had a warehouse from which he was distributing 'regular' merchandise at crazy low prices. He was filling his place with truckloads of shampoo, soap, food, batteries, beach chairs, radios, televisions, etc... For a visual, think of a small Costco without the retail part of the operation... with rows and rows of 12 foot high metal shelves... loading docks... and a constant movement of merchandise in and out... For those who aren't familiar with a bust-out, it worked like this... The deal was mobbed up... Some of these guys would buy truckloads of merchandise from manufacturers... get them shipped to various locations... then re-truck them over to my friend's warehouse... and stiff the manufacturers and distributors... making their cost close to zero... and giving them the ability to sell the stuff at any price they wanted, regardless of anything. Eventually, it all came apart and they got popped but for a year or so, they were rolling in merchandise and dough.
So a year after the first bullet move, I get contacted by one of Bill's guys, asking if we had access to anyplace where they could unload a semi and do a transfer. I meet with my bust-out bud (who was also in the 'biz' on a pretty high level) and ask him if he'd let his place be used for a one-time, one day operation. He thinks for about 30 seconds, realizes that I'm not one to ask idle questions, and agrees to do it for 25 grand plus access to however much of the merchandise he can pay for. I go back to my guy... and after a few days of investigation, the arrangement was struck... We were going to get a couple of days notice and they were going to have complete use of the warehouse for one morning and half an afternoon. They would need skid-lifts, four bays and would supply the workers. We just needed to make it available and keep everyone else away... Part of my job was to meet the semi at six in the morning and lead the driver into the place...
One day, a gal I knew introduced me to another gal and that gal knew a guy who had 25-35 pound boxes of pressed Colombian. The stuff was, I soon discovered, stupidly perfect. It wasn't seedy; was wonderfully fragrant; had a rich gold color, not a lot of wood or seeds, and was perfectly cured and fresh. I took a couple of boxes, brought them around, and found out that nobody else was as directly connected as I was. This meant I had the best price... or at least a very very good price on the New York scene.
So I took a few boxes down to Franklin Street and found that nobody else had these things... And that they were priced in the low 300s... Normally Colombian was, in my circle, priced close to $400 a pound. I had a widespread 'retail' circle and was easily marking this stuff up $50 a pound and that meant each box was turning into about 2 grand in profit... and there seemed to be an unlimited supply... No matter how many I moved, there was no end... a few boxes... then 5 boxes... then 10 boxes... Now keep in mind that 10 boxes were like 400-500 pounds... and nobody knew where they were coming from. The gals in the middle were taking a small commission and the guy I was introduced to was amazingly low key... like this was nothing special. For whole boxes, I was adding $25 a pound and making a grand a box. It wasn't unusual to move 10 or 15 boxes in a week. I wasn't big time in the deal but I was making more money than I could keep track of.
At this point, I had no idea but the entire shebang was engineered by Dollar Bill. The guy was invisible but his product was everywhere. The deal lasted for months and at the end, anybody who touched the stuff was rolling in dough. The pot was extremely potent and amazingly, I can't remember any of it getting busted. The boxes were like 24 inches wide and deep and 36 inches high. Everything was logistically perfect. It was like the boxes were mass produced to fit the mold of the pressed packages. The boxes were numbered and I remember seeing numbers that were 2000 and higher. Simple math told me there was at least 90,000 pounds in the load. The numbers were mind-boggling. I mean we were suddenly facing unusual problems. My friend suddenly showed up with bill-counting machines and the next thing I knew we were running counting sessions that lasted for hours. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlQSwPhiKz4
Instead of counting 10 or 20 grand, each box was 10+ grand... and suddenly the cash amounts were crazy. 15 boxes was roughly $175,000 and this was happening every few days for 10-12 weeks. Anyway, once the machine showed up, it was less tedious and a lot more fun to count the money. And the logistics were always very business-like... From the cataloging of the boxes to the counting machine to the money bands that were pre-gummed and used to wrap piles of different denominations and in different amounts. It was a totally different approach. This was no longer a bunch of hippies turning on the world. It was a business. And, in a crazy but misguided young mindset, I felt incredibly lucky to be there at that moment in time. I suppose I still get off on the events, the people and the experiences but things were constantly changing. When you're using counting machines and have an endless supply of product, it's easy to feel invulnerable. I saw it happen again and again over the years. Millions of dollars in cold hard cash has an absolute corrupting quality that makes you believe anything is possible. For some, like Dollar Bill, it was.
Anyway, after a few months, the boxes petered out and the market stabilized. But for those who were suddenly rocketed up the flow chart, it wasn't the end but was a new beginning. I was one of those. After the box deal, I had proven that I could handle pretty much anything that came along. And as the weeks and months went by, all kinds of things started showing up. There were Jamaican bales, all varieties of Colombian pot, modest amounts of Lebanese and darker hashish, and then a new product showed up... Thai sticks... And the Thai sticks weren't just extraordinarily powerful, they created a whole new price category. The Thai weed came as seedless buds that were wrapped around slim wooden sticks and, at retail, they were priced by the stick and not by weight. This justified per pound prices at between $1,200 and $2,000 depending on who was paying the bill. Even so, buying a pound of sticks generated close to $3,000 when sold at the stick level. An ounce had 8-10 sticks and if a stick was $20 bucks, that was $200 per ounce and $3,200 per pound. By contrast, ounces of Jamaican were $25 and Colombian was around $40. Pounds of Jamaican were usually around $250 and Colombian pounds went for $400 at the pound level. However, when you had something of really high quality, you could price it higher than anything else that was out there. Just because it was Jamaican or Colombian didn't make it worth the money if it sucked.
Back to Dollar Bill... A year later, he did it again with one major difference. The load came in and it was complete garbage. There wasn't any way to make it better.. You just can't turn shit into gold. Except those of us who had played when times were good were all pretty much locked into having to move it. The stuff was nicknamed 'The Glop" and there was a never-ending supply of it. Prices dropped to $200 and below and it still took forever. Any time anything else showed up, the Glop stopped selling and could only be moved when the other stuff was depleted. We had some long discussions about exactly what went wrong with this load...
For example, once the product was harvested, it had to be 'cured' before it was packaged. This usually meant laying it out in the sun or in special curing houses for a period of weeks. Well, after the previous year's load generated stupid amounts of money, greed kicked in and they didn't cure it long enough before it was pressed. This meant a lot of it was wet and when you press pot laden with moisture, you get all kinds of problems. Some of it rotted... Some of it was pressed into solid rocks that could hardly be pried apart. And there were other reasons too. They harvested a few weeks too soon so there was a ridiculous amount of leaf and not nearly as potent as it would have and should have become a few weeks later. Also, leafy pot tastes very harsh so it didn't even make for a happy moment when you were smoking it, regardless of how high it did or didn't get you. Also, if that wasn't enough, moisture is heavy. The 'normal' 25 pound loaf was tipping the scales at closer to 30 pounds. This not only meant that you were paying for moisture but if you attempted to dry it out, you lost that weight. So... let it suffice to say that this was no easy movement.
And to top it all off, there is another danger when you have crappy product. We started hearing about boxes getting busted. While next to nothing got busted the year earlier, this, on reflection, was kind of a natural turn of events. Who is the one customer who doesn't give a crap about the quality or conditions? The man only cares about one thing... giving you the money and then arresting you!! While I wasn't among the unfortunate bustees, I did end up sending out a bunch of stuff that never came back.
As it turned out, there was a whole lot of other things that were happening at the same time... Dollar Bill was real tight with my guy and due to the nature of my circle, I was one of the few people who was able to move the Glop. I had a lot of relatively small customers who would take 10 pounds at a clip... and most of them didn't have anyplace else to get frontable merch... So no matter what happened, I was always in the game. And Bill was anything but stupid. In the beginning, he was under tremendous pressure to make the pay-offs... (That's how those major moves worked... The transportation was pretty much paid up front but the nobody could pay for that much product up front)... And the Colombians are not famous for either their patience or for their peaceful nature. So if you owe millions to the Colombians, you did whatever it took to pay them. Bill lowered the prices until the stuff could be sold... and then he didn't force payment for the unsold amounts... so basically it was like running a second-hand consignment shop... With, of course, the ever-present but often ignored potential set of dangerous outcomes.
We had boxes that were so bad there was just no way they could be sold without some 'incentive'... so for months, anytime anything good came around, we cut package deals... you can have one of these if you take one of those... We'd actually mix the Glop in with better stuff (in small amounts because any serious blend would be horrible)... And the deal went on... It took the better part of a year to get done and we didn't make all that much dough... Towards the end, there was a complete drought and, to our shock, people were actually asking for Glop. It was kind of funny since these were the same people who wouldn't touch it at any price not too much earlier that year... And, as in any capitalist market, the price rose accordingly. In the end, Dollar Bill got it done and my role was increasing with each move...
So another year goes by and the Colombians are screwing up a good thing. Cartajena Gold is just a memory and the feds are cracking down hard on the product being grown in Jamaica... The Colombians pretty much begin to rule the scene in Florida but it's not about pot... Coke is the product that is generating the most profit and the Colombians and other Latinos (Cubans, etc.) are totally wild in the streets. They would rather kill you and your entire family than think about collecting on late payments. This wasn't a big problem for me since I made a rules decision early on that I was only going to deal in smoke... Grass and Hash were okay with me... Pills, powders and other chemicals weren't my thing. I'd take them for myself but there was no way I was going to do business with them. It just didn't feel right and personally, I was a true pothead.
The scene changed almost overnight. The cool dudes evacuated Florida and started doing things all up and down the east coast. I mean loads started coming straight into eastern Long Island, the capes of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, etc etc. Nobody wanted to deal with the Florida scene. The feds were all over the area and it was like the wild wild west. Between the Colombians, the cops and the coke, the action became way more than I was prepared to deal with. And, it's not like we hadn't done our share of numbers. We had houses in Coral Gables, Fort Lauderdale, Sunrise, North Miami, etc... There were fleets of cars (all registered to non-existent owners, but that's another whole story), cigarette boats, package trucks, crews galore... but in the end, the scene came apart down there. People died and it just became too dangerous.
Ummm... So.... to get back to Dollar Bill, he split the Florida scene way before it all came apart and kind of disappeared... for about a year and a half. Until one day....
I was sitting in a stash house on Long Island and my box connection (the link to Bill) shows up with something totally different. He's got a six pound super heavy duty foil package... vacuum-packed... shot with nitrogen to prevent fermentation or other biological deterioration... and it's filled with the most fragrant, gooey, intense, bright gold pot. I find it hard to smoke more than a few hits before I practically pass out. And, I wasn't like a normal pothead. By this time, it was an occupational thing. Every time I brought something to someone, part of the ritual included an official tasting. So I wasn't a cheap head. Except this product was so far and away the strongest, most pleasant smoke I had ever had, I had a hard time believing it wasn't treated with a chemical. I look at my friend (yeah, we were good friends by that point) and ask him if this was something I could get my hands on. He says there's a lot of it... and I knew instantly that a 'lot' to him meant something extraordinary was about to happen.
As it turned out, Dollar Bill had brought American ingenuity and technology and married it to the best pot from Thailand that anybody had ever seen. Somehow, while everyone else was caught up in the Colombian, Jamaican and Mexican smoke, Mr. Bill managed to move his operation to Southeast Asia and moved at least five tons of the foil packs from the jungle to the good old USA. The packs immediately became known as the 'Silver Bullets" and they commanded $1500 a pound from day one. My friend was putting them in my hands at $1200 or so and the game was on.
We pretty much found the market at every level imaginable. We were selling 5-10 bullets at $1300 each and doing singles at $1400. There were dozens of different variations and each one was of spectacular quality. There were some that were actually purple... some were brown... most were gold... and some were on sticks. To that point, virtually all the Thai product was wrapped on sticks. But, for the most part, this removed the stick element and delivered the goods in small perfectly cured and pressed packages that became an instant legend.
While we were still doing all the other stuff, this added a whole other level to the market. In New York, they became a status symbol among the echelons of smokers and dealers. If you had this stuff, your rep skyrocketed. Of course, at the time, all I was thinking about was how fucking high (and rich) I was getting... Each five or six pound Bullet was adding $600-$1000 to the ledger and there were plenty of them. The situation was relatively out of control but nothing next to what came next....
I was reflecting on the silver bullets overnight and realized a few things. First, I was so damned high from this stuff that some of the details got mixed together on them. There were two major moves that happened. Nothing I've remembered was inaccurate but there were quite a few other factors that are relevant. Couple of quick items... There came a point where I learned that my connection to Bill had an ongoing problem with heroin and was running through all his dough at a ridiculous rate. I want to say that he was making money hand over fist but was shooting five to ten grand a week into his bloodstream. His problem didn't start with the arrival of the bullets but was something that he had been doing even during the first boxed Colombian move. I only realized it when he started becoming more and more unreliable. For a heroin addict, he was amazingly functional. (Although I also realized why the dude was so fucking mellow all the time in the face of some really hairy goings-on.) Second, I didn't move crazy amounts during the first bullet deal... that came later... Third, my reputation was growing with each deal and it came to a place where I finally got to meet Bill. He was in an old loft down in the meat-packing district of Manhattan... I remember going into his place and being crazy intimidated... He was a tall guy with fairly long gray hair... listening to some dissonant jazz... with a big pistol on his table... and he wasn't big on small talk... I also remember his paranoia about AIDS. The meat-packing district was a strange place and his loft was upstairs from a gay club. He rambled on about how he was getting ready to move because he was nervous about mosquito bites. People were dying from AIDS and he had a fear that a mosquito would bite an infected person at the club and then bite him, transferring the germs.
The details are a bit fuzzy here but I remember my friend introducing me to a few of Bill's infrastructure guys... mostly drivers and other outlets... and as my friend started to become less and less functional, I was given opportunities to provide storage and facilities... sort of like a back-office arrangement...
A lot of the key people in this tale are still untouched on the original list of characters but they were all tied into Bill's operation on different levels. I had one friend who had a bust-out operation going on Long Island. He started a company called Great American Liquidators and had a warehouse from which he was distributing 'regular' merchandise at crazy low prices. He was filling his place with truckloads of shampoo, soap, food, batteries, beach chairs, radios, televisions, etc... For a visual, think of a small Costco without the retail part of the operation... with rows and rows of 12 foot high metal shelves... loading docks... and a constant movement of merchandise in and out... For those who aren't familiar with a bust-out, it worked like this... The deal was mobbed up... Some of these guys would buy truckloads of merchandise from manufacturers... get them shipped to various locations... then re-truck them over to my friend's warehouse... and stiff the manufacturers and distributors... making their cost close to zero... and giving them the ability to sell the stuff at any price they wanted, regardless of anything. Eventually, it all came apart and they got popped but for a year or so, they were rolling in merchandise and dough.
So a year after the first bullet move, I get contacted by one of Bill's guys, asking if we had access to anyplace where they could unload a semi and do a transfer. I meet with my bust-out bud (who was also in the 'biz' on a pretty high level) and ask him if he'd let his place be used for a one-time, one day operation. He thinks for about 30 seconds, realizes that I'm not one to ask idle questions, and agrees to do it for 25 grand plus access to however much of the merchandise he can pay for. I go back to my guy... and after a few days of investigation, the arrangement was struck... We were going to get a couple of days notice and they were going to have complete use of the warehouse for one morning and half an afternoon. They would need skid-lifts, four bays and would supply the workers. We just needed to make it available and keep everyone else away... Part of my job was to meet the semi at six in the morning and lead the driver into the place...
So the day arrives and sure enough, a bright and shiny full-sized 18 wheel semi arrives at the designated place at the designated time... just like clockwork and we pull it into the loading dock at my friend's place. I watched in amazement as a bunch of smaller trucks (Ryder rentals and 'throw-aways') pull into the other docks. Within 15 minutes, there were pallets being off-loaded with forklifts from the semi and it looked like a professionally run stock-checking operation. Each pallet was shrink-wrapped, listed on a master inventory and as soon as they were checked off, the pallets were re-loaded onto the smaller trucks and were gone in no more than 30 minutes from start to finish. It was like something out of the movies when a professional crew executes a perfectly planned operation. It was obvious that this wasn't a maiden voyage for all the players since each guy knew his job and didn't have to ask any questions. Each pallet had boxes stacked 10X5 and there were 5 bullets in each box. I'm there doing math in my head and I figure out that each pallet has about a quarter mill in product. They load a half dozen trucks with 8-10 pallets each and, in a flash, they're gone. Now it's like 10 in the morning and my warehouse friend and I are looking at each other, wondering if we really saw what we saw. Meantime, my other friend, who was the original source of the boxes, somehow doesn't even show up. I soon learned that I had missed all the signs and he had a serious heroin habit. No wonder the guy was always relaxed and never panicked under any circumstances. He was in another dimension most of the time. But that's another story... Back to Dollar Bill... Bill was like a field general during this operation, walking around with a clipboard, whispering quietly a few times, totally in control of himself and the operation. And as soon as he had checked in the semi, he didn't even wait for the smaller trucks to load and leave. He just walked over to me, gave me the bag of cash for my buddy, asked if I had seen the other guy, got into a non-descript Chevy and was gone.
As for the product, it was once again totally incredible. There were gold bullets, purple bullets, red bullets, green bullets and all manner of sticks. Each variety had its own unique taste and, if you focused, its own unique high. The stuff was so potent and fresh, it was even a bit gooey... And for the next 4 or 5 months, we were totally in charge of the eat coast market. I didn't know it at the time but a bunch of the trucks had taken off for Boston and points north. I managed to get a few pallets dropped to my stash house and we moved the stuff everywhere. It was a pretty amazing time since I can't remember a single bullet getting lost or busted. It all got paid for and we all made a serious bundle. By the wintertime, I was pretty tight with Dollar Bill and his crew. He actually invited me to his Island house on Montserrat and I spent a short fun time in an old converted hurricane-proofed sugar mill. As you might imagine, my recollections of that place are a bit foggy but then I guess I was totally jolted out while I was there.
Bill's scene continued to have a lot of influence at different times and in many different ways through the years... But he was always major mojo in my universe. At the end of the day, I learned economy of scale from his operation and why big trucks and big truckers were a very useful option... and... oh yeah, I learned that technology was coming to the business...
As for the product, it was once again totally incredible. There were gold bullets, purple bullets, red bullets, green bullets and all manner of sticks. Each variety had its own unique taste and, if you focused, its own unique high. The stuff was so potent and fresh, it was even a bit gooey... And for the next 4 or 5 months, we were totally in charge of the eat coast market. I didn't know it at the time but a bunch of the trucks had taken off for Boston and points north. I managed to get a few pallets dropped to my stash house and we moved the stuff everywhere. It was a pretty amazing time since I can't remember a single bullet getting lost or busted. It all got paid for and we all made a serious bundle. By the wintertime, I was pretty tight with Dollar Bill and his crew. He actually invited me to his Island house on Montserrat and I spent a short fun time in an old converted hurricane-proofed sugar mill. As you might imagine, my recollections of that place are a bit foggy but then I guess I was totally jolted out while I was there.
Bill's scene continued to have a lot of influence at different times and in many different ways through the years... But he was always major mojo in my universe. At the end of the day, I learned economy of scale from his operation and why big trucks and big truckers were a very useful option... and... oh yeah, I learned that technology was coming to the business...
Thursday, May 28, 2009
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...
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.
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
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
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