Excerpts
This is a true story—true down to the sentence level. The many coincidences, close calls, and ironies I describe all happened. At times I relate events told to me by others. While I have no reason to doubt their accounts, there could be inaccuracies. I have changed some names as well as a few minor details to protect people’s privacy.
This book is dedicated to the many people who appear in it as characters,
even the bad guys—people who stole from me or betrayed me—for they all in their own way helped make this a fascinating story.
PROLOGUE
The first time I ever heard of marijuana was in Miss Russell’s class in third grade. This was in 1955. Miss Russell showed us a black-and-white clip of two black youths smoking reefer on the steps of a paintless wooden shack set in a weed-choked field in what could have only been the Deep South. Then she showed us a clip of a young couple getting arrested as they tried to bring drugs back from Mexico in their car. Either the actors were very good or the clip was footage of a real bust because the couple looked so genuinely miserable and repentant that my eight-year-old’s heart went out to them. I didn’t want them to go to jail. Maybe this story could have a different ending, I thought to myself. I raised my hand.
“How did the police know they had drugs in their car?” I asked Miss Russell.
She seemed unprepared for my question and didn’t answer for a long moment.
“Because of their eyes,” she said finally. “Drug addicts have red eyes.”
CHAPTER ONE
I could write about the Big Time, when I drove an Aston Martin DB5 convertible, maintained a Swiss bank account in the Bahamas, carried a .45 semiautomatic pistol I didn’t really know how to use, and was bringing in tons at a time remotely—that is, without having to go anywhere near the stuff. One of my biggest runs was six tons and all I ever saw of it was a brick a trusted distributor brought by to complain there was shake in the load. The brick was unopened.
“I just picked one at random.”
I opened it and indeed there was a small amount of shake mixed in with what was otherwise good quality pot.
“They’re all like that . . . Don’t get me wrong now. I can sell this stuff. Only it’s going to take time. Now if you could drop the price a nickel—or better yet a dime—I could probably off my share in a week.”
I went out to a pay phone, called the Mexicans, and told them the load had shake in it and was going to take time to sell, but if they wanted it to go faster, they could drop the price by ten dollars a pound. The grass was partly fronted and they jumped at the chance to get their money back sooner rather than later. A week later the load was gone and my cut remained the same, netting me a six-digit figure in 1975 dollars.
During the Big Time I spent long hours going from bank to bank changing small bills into hundreds. By the late sixties the American hundred-dollar bill had solidified its position as the smuggler’s currency of choice. With hundreds the payment for a load took about a half hour to count and fit in a briefcase. With smaller bills it would have taken hours and required a suitcase.
Whenever a shipment came in, there was pressure to offload it as quickly as possible before something bad happened, and my distributors would spend their days driving all over the Bay Area and points beyond with no time to change the many fifties, twenties, and tens given to them by the smaller distributors they were supplying. That job fell to me and I made a science of it. Small bills went into the left door panel of my pickup, and after they were changed to hundreds, they went into the door panel on the right. I wore cowboy boots and could fit $3,500 in small bills into the left and right side of each boot for a total of $14,000 at a time. I especially liked dense financial districts where there were three or four banks within walking distance of one another. Upon entering a bank, I would remove small bills from my boot and upon leaving, I would tuck back in hundreds. Thirty-five hundred, I had learned, was close to the upper limit you could change before the teller would be required to call over a manager or make out a report to the IRS. Many of the tellers changed my money in a bored, mechanical fashion, but if they seemed at all curious, I would excitedly tell them how I was going to see a used Porsche for sale and wanted to flash hundred-dollar bills in front of the owner as I made my offer.
“New ones if you’ve got ‘em.”
Most of the mistakes I made in the business could be filed under the heading of forgetting what I was about. I had changed fourteen grand in small bills one day and was headed back to my truck when I happened to pass a store window with the exact model of Adidas basketball shoes I had been looking for. I swerved right in. The clerk found my size to try on and without thinking I yanked off my boot—only to see a shower of hundred-dollar bills flutter across the shoe store floor.
“Oh, I just went to the bank,” I blurted truthfully as I scrambled to gather them up.
The clerk never said a word, just averted his eyes till I had picked them all up, as though my bills were somehow obscene.
Anyway, I could write about the Big Time and I will. And not just Mexico but Colombia too with a Beechcraft D-18 picking up loads under cover of darkness and dropping bales into the lee of a deserted atoll off the coast of Florida to be recovered by waiting speedboats and brought in to Miami harbor the following morning complete with water-skiers in tow to make everything look cool. I’ll write about all that. And Morocco and Afghanistan too. But for me the best times, and what I’m going to write about most, were the early small-time days when everything seemed so lighthearted and romantic, and all of us in my crowd were still friends with no jealousies or betrayals, and I truly and wholeheartedly believed that flooding the country with pot was the most wonderful thing I could do.
EXCERPT TWO: A CLOSE CALL
A close call occurred on the fifth run. By now we were carrying a half ton at a time, which was the maximum load for a Cherokee Six. A half ton took up thirty-three suitcases, which meant that the entire cabin of the plane, including the copilot’s seat, was stacked floor to ceiling with suitcases. Bruce wasn’t even visible from the starboard side of the plane. On this particular run he flew across the border with no problem, but as he homed in on the crop duster strip out of Escondido, he saw there was a tractor parked right in the middle of it. Looking around, he saw no sign of Harold’s van.
I think most smugglers would have turned around and headed back to the safety of the Mexican desert at this point, but that wasn’t Bruce’s style. He flew on and landed at Palomar, which was a controlled strip with a tower and people around. After parking the plane at the far end of the strip, he hurried into the terminal, found a small car rental agency and rented a car, sped into town, and arrived at the local U-Haul center just as they were closing. All their trucks were rented and he had to settle for an open trailer. After hitching it to the car, he sped back to Palomar, drove out to the plane, and unloaded the thirty-three suitcases in broad daylight. Speeding back to town again, he accidentally clipped a Cadillac. Before the driver could get out of his car, Bruce was at the man’s window thrusting hundred-dollar bills at him.
In town he got a motel room and transferred the thirty-three suitcases to his room. Meanwhile, I had just flown back from Culiacán. I walked into my cottage as the phone was ringing. It was Bruce and it was the first time I heard him sound less than composed.
“Where the bloody hell is Harold? I’ve got to find some way to get rid of this shit! Do you realize I’m three hours late on my flight plan already? They’ve probably got the air-sea rescue service out looking for me! I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to tell them. Listen, I’m at a pay phone. I’ve got to get back to the room. The old bat who runs the motel saw me unload all those suitcases and she’s suspicious as hell. Locate Harold and have him contact me ASAP!”
I was in a sweat as to how to find Harold. I figured he saw the tractor parked in the middle of the strip and panicked. My only chance was that he was holed up in a nearby motel. I got a friendly operator, told her this was an emergency, and she spent the next half hour phoning every motel, hotel, and inn in the Escondido-Ramona area asking person-to-person for Harold. Clerk after clerk said there was no one there by that name. Why would he register under his own name? I thought to myself. I should hang up and leave my phone line open, I was thinking, when a clerk said, “Harold Westover? Just a moment.” I could hardly believe my luck! He had registered under his own name!
He came on and I told him what Bruce had told me and gave him the name of Bruce’s motel. He drove there, but balked at loading all those suitcases in his van, what with the bright lights of the motel and the landlady looking out her window every couple of minutes. Bruce told me later he had to load most of them himself. Harold then took off, but was back in a few minutes, looking white. Just north of town he had nearly run into an impromptu Border Patrol checkpoint. These checkpoints were set up to catch undocumented aliens, but the officers were hardly likely to ignore thirty-three Mexican-made suitcases stacked in the back of a van. In order to avoid the checkpoint, Harold had had to make a sudden U-turn across two double yellow lines.
Bruce then set out in the rental car with Harold following as they tried to find another route out of town. Three quick taps on the brake light was Bruce’s signal to Harold there was danger ahead. They found Border Patrol checkpoints on every highway. Evidently the Border Patrol had set up a net around the area. At last, they found a small farm road that led to Route 15 and Harold took off, melting into the safety of the well-trafficked freeway. By now it was two in the morning. Bruce headed back to his motel, wondering what he was going to do about his flight plan, now ten hours late. An air-sea rescue search was undoubtedly underway. He was exhausted. An idea occurred to him.
He caught a couple of hours’ sleep and was at Palomar at dawn. Using a piece of wire, he shorted out each of the plane’s fuses across the battery, then put them back in place. He flew to San Diego, where he made a low pass in front of the tower and rocked his wings—the aviation signal that he intended to land but did not have radio capability. Once on the ground, he closed out his flight plan, telling the authorities that he had been forced down by a freak thunderstorm over the Sonoran desert and had to spend the night there. The reason he didn’t contact them was that lightning had knocked out all his fuses.
The lower level officials seemed satisfied with this story but before he could get away, two senior customs officers showed up accompanied by two officials from the FAA. They didn’t like Bruce’s story one bit. They went out to inspect his plane and were appalled to see that the seats had been removed when all Bruce had in the way of luggage was a small travel bag. When they checked his Flight Log and saw this was his fifth trip to Mexico in as many months, they were aghast. They proceeded to go over every square inch of the plane, even vacuuming it and emptying the vacuum bag in order to examine the debris but found nothing. The plane was clean and in the end they had to let him go. The FAA officials were especially angry for having mobilized a search and rescue mission for an evident smuggler.
This near catastrophe caused us to make several changes to our protocol. Harold was too shaken to continue driving the van and I offered this job to The Bub. This seemed like an ideal opportunity to repay him for introducing me to Bruce; for a minimal amount of risk he could make a quick three grand. He surprised me by hesitating to accept.
“Why?”
“That guy Bruce is such an asshole.”
“Are you kidding? I think he’s ultra-cool.”
“He’s always ordering everyone around and stuff. He thinks he’s Mr. Big Shot.”
I convinced him Bruce would treat him well and he accepted.
Another change was to buy walkie-talkies so that Bruce could communicate with The Bub. We checked our favorite strip and the tractor was now gone, but in case it returned, we found two other deserted strips in the area that we could use as backups. And in case the walkie-talkies failed, we worked out some visual signals to be used between the plane and the ground. Also, The Bub would bring the plane’s seats with him in the van and he and Bruce would install them in the plane after unloading the grass, for the benefit of customs. I forget why we didn’t worry that Bruce had become hot from the previous incident, but for whatever reason that didn’t happen—surely a gross failure on the part of law enforcement.
EXCERPT THREE:
RUNNING THE RIO GRANDE
Miguel finally made it to the border, Les flew in, and the run was set. At two in the morning, Les and I set out in a van rented under his name and headed east on Interstate 10. Les nodded as I reviewed the details of the run one more time. No one was behind us and we turned off at Fabens exit and killed our lights. I crawled to the back of the van and disconnected the brake lights. Anyone watching would have seen us abruptly vanish. Les could see just well enough to make out the road thanks to the light from a fingernail moon—a “smuggler’s moon.” The darkness tended to distort things and some of the landmarks I remembered looked smaller while others loomed larger. I put on hip waders. We came to the levee road and Les parked the van in the cleft in the bushes as planned. I walked up over the levee road and down to the river and gave two short whistles. Two short whistles responded from the darkness on the Mexican side. I waded in and felt the water press up tight against the waders. The footing was solid and there were no rocks. On the other side Miguel and I traded abrazos. He had seven costales lined up along the bank and I began hauling them across the river one by one, slung over my shoulder. On the other side I would double over, letting the costal fall off my shoulder into the hollow. But when I crossed the fifth one, I saw there were only three left in the hollow. Les must have removed one. This wasn’t the plan.
I scanned the darkness and called softly, but there was no sign of him. I crossed the remaining two and now there were only five in the hollow. I got up on the levee road, looked around, and saw something white swinging in the darkness: Les’s cast. He approached, saying, “You gonna help me with these sacks?”
“But you’re supposed to bring the van up here so I can load it!”
“I ain’t bringing the van up here in the open.” He said it as though it were unthinkable, as though we hadn’t already agreed on it and gone over it a half dozen times.
“I found a better place for the van. Back in them bushes.” He pointed.
“But I’m not supposed to be carrying sacks on the American side. I’ve done my part.”
Les grabbed a sack by the neck with his good arm and leaned forward to begin dragging it. “You gonna give me a hand with these sacks or not?”
I grabbed a sack and followed him to where he had parked the van. I didn’t like being on the American side one bit. If a Patrol came, I would have to lose myself in the bushes. But unless I could get back to the river and then Mexico, they could call in other agents with dogs and flush me out.
We got all the sacks loaded and I wished Les good luck and waded back through the river. Miguel was waiting on the other side, wondering what had taken me so long. He lit up a Raleigh con filtro, and despite having quit smoking, I allowed myself one exception. I wanted to savor the Mission Accomplished feeling you get when a run works out and wanted to dream a little too about what this new method of crossing could lead to.
We stood there on the bank, smoking and staring out over the inky ribbon of water shining faintly in the moonlight. The night was dead quiet, the only sounds being the sounds we made ourselves. Halfway through our cigarettes we heard a faint, high-pitched whine coming from the American side and froze, cocking our ears. It stopped—only to start again a short while later. It stopped and started again. My heart sank and I turned to Miguel.
“I’ve got to go help him. Wait for me no matter how long it takes, OK?”
“Wait! I’ll go with you!”
I stared at him, taking in his street clothes. “How will you get across?”
“On your back!”
“OK, let’s go.”
“Wait! Let me get the jack out of the car.”
He got the jack and I carried him piggyback through the river. He was a good 180 pounds, too. We hurried up the dirt road and found Les dragging a sack over to some bushes where he already had half of them stashed. It was going to be a perfect reenactment of his brother’s bust: the Patrol would find a stuck vehicle and a pile of grass hidden nearby. In his unemotional way Les seemed glad to see us. “Give me a hand with these last sacks!” The van, I noticed, was a good twenty feet off the road. Why Les would have driven off the road here, I couldn’t imagine but wasn’t going to waste time asking.
“Fuck the sacks! Which tire is spinning?”
He indicated the right rear and Miguel slapped his jack up to the bumper and began pumping while I grabbed branches and rocks to throw underneath the tire. I remembered a tarp in the van and threw that underneath, too. On the word “Go!” Les eased forward on the accelerator while Miguel and I threw our weight behind the van. The van moved forward about a foot or two before losing traction. Meanwhile, the stars were beginning to fade.
We kept jacking the right rear tire up and throwing rocks and branches underneath, each time gaining one or two feet. The road was another fifteen feet away and by now it was light enough that a Patrol passing by would probably see us. Miguel and I traded back and forth on the jack, our arms aching, our hands smarting from grabbing vegetation with stickers. With enough time we were going to reach solid ground, but with each attempt, the van was sliding to the right toward a gully, following the natural contour of the slope. We got the van about ten feet from the road, but now it was right next to the gully and we didn’t dare try anymore. We racked our brains what to do.
“There is only one way!” cried Miguel. “We must jack the back of the van up and then push it over to the left!”
I didn’t like this idea. I was afraid the jack might break and the hydraulic jack that came with the van was useless. I couldn’t think of anything else, though, and told him to go ahead. He slapped the jack up to the middle of the van’s back bumper, began pumping, saw the van start to tilt to one side and let the jack down to center it better before starting over again. By now it had dawned. I felt sick with fear. The back end of the van began to rise and I steadied it to keep it balanced. Miguel kept pumping. The jack began to curve precariously and he held his face away from it, cringing as he kept on pumping till he got it all the way to the top. As he backed away, I pushed the side of the van and felt its bulk swing slowly away from me at which point the jack sprang out with a tortured metal cry that sounded as though it could be heard clear across Texas. I ran to grab it. It was OK! We jacked the right rear tire up several times more and made it to solid ground.
We grabbed the sacks Les had hidden and threw them into the van and Les took off. Miguel and I ran back to the river and I carried him through again piggyback. We left, following the levee road on the Mexican side, Miguel driving. I let my body go limp with relief.
“We never would have made it if you hadn’t helped,” I told Miguel. “Or if you hadn’t thought to bring the jack.” Praise always embarrassed him and he blushed.
“God watches over me,” he laughed, quoting a common Mexican saying I knew he didn’t believe.
I had $300 in emergency money on me and offered it to him. He didn’t want to accept it and I pressed him.
“Well, actually, I could use the money for my wife and daughter.”
And if he hadn’t had a wife and daughter, I doubt he would have taken it—that’s the kind of saint he was.
We rode for a while in silence and I stared out at the gray mist rising from the river on our right. The hip waders! I suddenly remembered them and began peeling them off. They were just evidence now. I tossed them out the window and watched them flap down the embankment like a pair of shot crows.
“Some wetback will find those and say God watches over him too,” I told Miguel.
EXCERPT FOUR:
A HEAVY CONVERSATION
Roger and I made plans for the next run. He wasn’t the type to have heart-to-heart talks, but he did acknowledge his brother’s mistake in not staying on plan and said it wouldn’t happen again. This time we decided to bring back 800 pounds, a reasonable limit for wading through the river. After that we would get a truck.
While waiting for Jesus to get the grass up, I spent a lot of time at Roger’s house. Roger was often in his darkroom, and I passed the time talking with Dinah. People were always dropping by and there was the feel of things happening. A girl named Carrie began living there and I paid no attention to her until Dinah happened to mention she was part of our next run. Carrie was quite pregnant, spoke with a drawl, dressed slovenly, and generally looked and acted like a hick. “What’s she doing in the run?” I asked Dinah and she shrugged.
“I think she’s going to ride back with Les and pretend to be Les’s wife. You better ask Roger.”
I went upstairs and found Roger handling a pistol while talking to some guy with long hair. “I’ll take a .38 any day,” he was saying. “Ever seen the trajectory on a .45? . . . Sinks like a fuckin’ stone.” He made a diving motion with his free hand. “Pfffft!”
The longhair left and Roger tossed the gun on his desk, sat down, and propped his feet up. “What’s up?”
“What’s this about Carrie being part of the next run?”
“Oh, she’s going to ride back in the van with Les, you know, to make things look cool. They’re gonna pretend to be married and all.”
“Cool for what? You said yourself once Les makes it to the Interstate, he’s home free.”
“Well, there’s them agricultural checks.”
“But we never worried about them before.”
“People get busted in ‘em. I’ve heard of it.”
“Let’s find a way around them then. There’s no sense in risking an extra person.”
“But Carrie could use the money. She’s pregnant, don’t you know. It’s a chance for her to make a thousand dollars. Anyway, I owe my partner a favor.”
So that’s what this was all about—returning a favor.
“Why not just give her the thousand dollars then?”
Roger put his feet down and sat up. “Why Carrie’s a proud person. She would never accept charity like that. She wants to earn the money. Besides, I’m the one who’s paying her, so why don’t you quit worrying about it?”
“Because I don’t like having an unnecessary person along. As far as I’m concerned she’s just one extra witness and one extra person to get busted.”
Roger stood up and approached me. He had a good four inches over me and let me know it. “It seems to me when we first got together, we made a deal. You were going to take care of the Mexican side and I was going to take care of the American side. Them’s two separate things. You just see to it that the Mexicans do their part and let me handle the rest, OK?”
“Well, if you want to look at it that way, the American side didn’t go too well last time. If I hadn’t gotten involved, your brother would be sitting in a west Texas jail cell right now."
“Well, the Mexican side didn’t go too well either. Look how long it took those guys to bring that shit up!”
I had a bad feeling about Carrie and quit spending time at Roger’s place. I didn’t want her to learn my last name or anything about me. I was also thinking this would be my last run with Roger. Now that I knew his method, I could replace both him and his brother.
BUY NOW!
BUY NOW!
