Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories

  Now Boujma was stuffing the kif into a goat bladder, which with all the kif inside swelled to the size of a fist. The work completed, he smoothed out the wrapping papers and put them with the sardine can and knife and stone and board into a cupboard. During the whole process not one grain of kif or tobacco, not even one kif seed, had fallen to the ground, and even the barren kif stalks were wrapped carefully before being thrown away.

  Tangier Buzzless Flies, 1972

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CRIMINALISE IT

  Howard Marks

  Nature Talks

  A million centuries ago, plants said ‘high’ to animals. Roots and seeds seduced tongues and stomachs. Vine, leaf and resin interplayed with hand, heart and mind. Drinking, smelling and sucking were the order, but never the regulations, of the light and the night.

  And Nature said, ‘Higher.’

  A pyramid here and a pyramid there. Gargling, sniffing, smoking, puking and starving for God, Siva and the Sun. Who’ll have the booze? Who’ll have the blow? Who’ll have a line? Who gets the fun?

  ‘I’ve got the dope. But stick to my brand. Use any other dope, and I’ll kill you. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. That fruity stuff is verboten.’

  Nature asked, ‘Why?’

  So pluck yew, and let’s smuggle cider into the Garden of Eden. Adam’s apples are shite. Eve’s cool. SCAM: Some Cocaine Alcohol & Marijuana. But is the Snake in the Grass a grass? Is the slimy serpent a snitch, a snake, a chivato, a turner, a rollover, a stool-pigeon, a squealer, a rat, a traitor, a wrong ’un? Or is he the meaning of her life? Half in heaven, half in hell, half a double helix, denying his deity, demanding her DNA.

  Help me, you murderous priests, you psychopathic megalomaniacs, you bloodthirsty colonialist rapists, you sadistic puritans, you non-inhalers. Help me, you manifestations of sinister and pure evil. Why have you ensured that my chemically induced changes of mind are rewarded by imprisonment and other socially acceptable forms of torture? You’ll do your bird in time.

  Nature said, ‘Try.’

  How can we get the leaves we want, the herbs we want, the grapes we want.

  Nature said, ‘Lie.’

  And it came to pass that the world became full of scammers. Never before have so many laws been broken without a single pang of conscience. False names, forged passports, phoney driving licences, money-laundering, tax evasion, customs dodging, stolen vehicles, illegal planes, false documents, lies, lies and lots more new lies. Who cares? It’s all for the cause. It’s not our fault they won’t let people get high. Anyway, the world of international dope dealing is fun. It’s fucking great!

  Beware of the weak, for the strong can take care of themselves

  Kakuji Inagawa

  Robert Sabbag

  Smokescreen – 1

  ONE OF THE distinguishing features of the marijuana business, as pursued by Americans like Allen Long – one of the attributes that distinguished the marijuana business from other fields of criminal endeavor – was a conspicuous and, to those who thought about it, rather consoling absence of gunplay. This can be explained by the fact that, for many of the industry’s pioneers, the marijuana came first, in both time as well as importance. The industry was created by pot smokers, a casual brotherhood of aficionados, loosely associated, relatively young, usually stoned, united around little more than a near-religious passion for the noble weed. A characteristically (and understandably) merry band of outlaws, who pledged at least passing allegiance to the values of the counterculture to which they and their customers belonged – ‘Peace and Love’ being prominent among them – these people were accomplished pot smokers long before they were professional criminals. Prohibition would have gone down pretty much the same way if alcohol had been new in the roaring twenties and Al Capone had been one of a loose affiliation of drunks who had discovered bootleg whiskey in college.

  The final briefing took place in a motel room in northern Virginia about ten miles from CIA headquarters. While Hathaway handed out copies of his booklets, Long read aloud from a list he had prepared. It had been decided that public relations would be well served if the Americans landed in Colombia not only carrying the money they owed, but also bearing gifts. Loaded onto the plane with the $6,000 in cash, he announced, would be Levi jeans, Nik Nik brand polyester shirts, Adidas running shoes (what seemed to Myerson to be sufficient supply to outfit the entire Indian population of the Guajira), four cases of Heineken, a case of Marlboro and a gross of Swiss Army knives.

  This variation on the American CARE package, which seemed like a good idea at the time, would set a regrettable precedent, leading to ever longer lists of requests on the part of its Colombian recipients. Subsequent flights would carry patent medicines, tape players and Seiko wristwatches. On one flight down Long carried a twenty-three-hundred-dollar gold Pulsar watch to be presented to the commander of the local military garrison. A later flight arrived in Colombia carrying a seventeen-foot inflatable Zodiac with a seventy-horsepower Johnson outboard. Still another carried a brace of pedigree German-shepherd puppies.

  It was flights such as these and those of other smugglers that accounted for the proliferation on the Guajira of the Sony Trinitron as a status symbol – in homes which received no television signal and many of which enjoyed no electricity. Within three years of Long’s arrival, one could visit the most humble adobe in the smallest of villages there, cut off from power and running water, and find the latest in high-end audio equipment stacked steep against a wall inside and a late model four-by-four, its high-gloss paint reflecting the sunshine, parked on the hardscrabble outside. Within that time, impoverished local Indians would come to occupy dwellings assembled with parts salvaged from out-of-commission airplanes, a wing here, part of a fuselage there, a tail number over the door. (On a trip to Perico in 1979, an elder of the nearby village reintroduced Long to his DC-3, the nose cone, complete with windshield glass, serving as a makeshift solarium on his humble sheet-metal home.) By then, with America’s appetite for dope as well established as its appetite for coffee, Colombia would account for more than 70 percent of the marijuana reaching the United States from abroad, and between 30,000 and 50,000 farmers along the coast would have come to depend directly on its cultivation for their livelihood. Another 50,000 Colombians would make a living from it. Local food production would decline as tens of thousands of hectares were converted to marijuana farming, producing unprecedented prosperity and a degree of economic stability never before enjoyed on the Guajira.

  The plane entered the United States in daylight, at about five in the afternoon, with all the air traffic from the Bahamas. On radar screens that were lit up like the Milky Way, it showed up as just one more aircraft, an unidentified blip. It entered US airspace not at 25,000 feet, not at 300 feet, but at 5,000 like all the others. It came in at Palm Beach, Florida, but its crew, unlike those of other flights, would not report to customs upon landing.

  Coming out of the Bahamas, homing in on the Palm Beach directional beacon, Hatfield had known that within fifty miles of the Florida coast he was going to get a call from air-traffic control instructing him to switch on his radar transponder.

  They had been calling for half an hour when Hatfield flew directly over the airport. He could not have been more conspicuous had he come in upside down.

  ‘Unidentified aircraft, you are requested . . .’

  The smugglers maintained radio silence.

  ‘Please turn on your transponder and switch to . . .’

  They did none of it. The tower ordered them to land.

  ‘. . . execute a turn to the south, descend to twenty-one hundred feet and prepare to . . .’

  They just kept flying.

  ‘Please announce your intentions . . .’

  They were overloaded, fighting a slight headwind, and Long, who spent no measurable stretch of the trip not stoned, had become fascinated by the movement of automobile traffic below. The cocaine, acting chiefly as a motor drug, did not interfere with th
e immaculate marijuana buzz he managed to maintain. He took note of the fact that many motorists were in fact traveling faster than he. The plane had been holding even with one red car that continued to occupy his attention until, finally overtaking the DC-3, it disappeared out of sight.

  Hatfield climbed to 12,000 feet, picked up an airway, and headed northwest, pushing through central Florida. They were sucking oxygen again, and the cockpit was cold, when, over Lake Okeechobee, Long took the left seat, relieving Hatfield, who needed to rest up for the landing later that night. Exhausted now by twenty-four hours of flying, Hatfield, unlike his second officer, had not been shoveling cocaine for the past eight.

  The plane was on a heading for north Georgia, where the Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains converge. The smugglers planned to disappear from radar for a while, running in and out of the valleys there, and check to see if anyone was following, before swinging around to Darlington. They were about fifty air miles north of the Everglades when in the top-left quadrant of the windshield they picked up a massive storm front coming their way.

  ‘What do you think?’ said Long.

  ‘Hey, Frank?’

  ‘Where are we?’ said Hatfield, leaning into the cockpit.

  ‘I think I saw Sebring back there,’ McBride said.

  ‘Give me the map.’

  Moving southeast, and moving fast, the thunderstorm presented the DC-3 with fewer options than enjoyed by other aircraft. The storm was too heavy, it was carrying too much turbulence, to go through or attempt to go under, and the DC-3, with a service ceiling of about 20,000 feet, was unable by design to achieve the necessary altitude to go over it. Going east would get the smugglers safely around the formation, but constituted a collateral risk Hatfield was unwilling to take. Advancing in that direction, the storm could very well push them back out over the Atlantic.

  ‘We can’t gamble that kind of fuel,’ he said.

  And there, even with sufficient fuel, they would have to beat the US border a second time. The odds on doing so were not prohibitive, but considering that and considering what the move might cost them in fuel, Hatfield figured why go up against the percentages. To circumnavigate the storm, the smugglers took the better odds, choosing the only course left to them. They went west, into the clear sky over Tampa. And into the restricted military airspace surrounding MacDill Air Force Base.

  ‘Cool,’ said Long.

  ‘Wake me when it’s over.’

  Allen Long’s equanimity at this point in the trip could be explained quite conveniently by the parts-per-milliliter of dope in his blood. But viewing it that way would ignore the very elements of his personality that accounted for his being where he was in the first place. The trip was far from over, the deal was far from done. With Reed in charge of the ground crew, there was reason to be confident that the offload would go smoothly, but as source of potential danger it still could not be ignored. All that lay between Darlington and Ann Arbor, not to mention what still lay between Florida and Darlington, could be evaluated quite rationally in the light of how much could go wrong. And yet, as he sailed around the thunderstorm, Allen Long was way past worrying about anything. Whatever is gonna happen is gonna happen, he reasoned. Now he was just having fun.

  If one examines the overworked principle that cops and criminals are flip sides of the same constitutional coin, one might arrive at an appreciation, if only superficial, of Long’s nonchalance. The average well-adjusted individual is programmed by nature to recoil from danger, to avoid it, and, failing that, to flee. Cops are trained to run in its direction. Their fitness reports, like those of firemen and military officers, measure their ability and their eagerness to do so. Their careers thrive on confrontation and their willingness to initiate it. Allen Long and other outlaws come by this trait not by formal training, but by a combination of natural temperament and experience. Crime’s rewards reinforce their antisocial behavior. The syndrome sometimes expresses itself as an addiction to action. J.D. Reed described himself as an ‘adrenalin junkie,’ and readily admitted that in the absence of confrontation, he felt the need to scare it up: ‘I got to go wrestle a mule or have somethin’ thrown at me to keep that life going.’

  There is nothing particularly profound in this. It is nothing new, or even strikingly novel, and it is not unique to outlaws. The same character trait can be found in a variety of law-abiding soldiers of fortune and, to one degree or another, in the typical downhill skier. It is a quality that propels certain people to become cops and firemen in the first place. Indeed, in Allen Long’s case it was one of the more innocent manifestations of a psychological profile the darker side of which revealed itself in other ways. But it helps explain why in the air over Florida, facing a constellation of negative prospects, probably the least of which was a prison stretch, Long could ignore everything but the up-side of the proposition and all the fun he was having. He was high on reefer and luxuriating in an almost unlimited supply of coke, he had an oxygen hose stuck in the left side of his mouth, a cigarette stuck in the other, he was holding a Heineken between his legs, he was flying that airplane and he was having the time of his life.

  That is what makes guys like Allen Long different from you.

  ‘Hey, what do you think those are?’ he said, turning to McBride.

  He directed the co-pilot’s attention to four black dots, appearing like pencil points in the distance, forming a diamond in the sunlight off to the west. In the time it took Long to turn his head back, the fighter jets had closed the gap, coming in on the smugglers at about 200 knots. They made a deafening pass over the DC-3, roughing it up. Air Force F-4 Phantom jets. The cockpit shook as the tactical fighters roared by, the explosion of jet wash, hitting the fuselage, rocking in with the shock of a breaking wave.

  ‘Hmm,’ said McBride, ‘were you speeding?’

  The fighters came back around, and the formation pulled alongside.

  ‘License and registration.’

  A traffic stop in the wild blue yonder.

  Throwing on all the brakes – gear down, flaps down, flying at a high angle of attack – the Air Force pilots were unable to slow their craft sufficiently to pace the DC-3 for more than seconds at a time. One of the fliers, hanging on the edge of the stall envelope, holding for as long as he could on the smugglers’ left wing, looked Long and McBride over and checked out the cockpit. The weapons system officer, flying rear seat, tapped the edge of his helmet, over his ear, signaling Long to get on the radio.

  Long raised his mike with a shrug and a series of idiotic gestures understood by international standard to mean: ‘Radio’s busted.’

  Total platform kill. Sorry, man.

  Over the cockpit radio the smugglers heard MacDill tower trying to raise them on the override frequency.

  ‘. . . Douglas eight-six-four . . . ordered to exit military . . .’

  The tower eventually gave up. And then, over their UHF receiver, the smugglers heard the F-4 reporting to MacDill.

  ‘Looks like just another smuggler to me. And this is not our business. Tango flight is departing the area.’

  No threat to national security, just some dumb, severely stoned citizens flying a planeload of drugs. The F-4 pilots raised their gear, hit the burners and were gone.

  Long raised his Heineken in a farewell salute: ‘God bless America.’

  ‘The arsenal of democracy,’ volunteered McBride.

  ‘Let’s have some more of that coke.’

  Just before sunset, as the shadows below were lengthening and house lights were switching on, Hatfield took over. Running up the Smoky Mountain valleys, he dropped the aircraft to 1,000 feet, and disappeared from radar for a while. They were about five hours from touchdown when darkness fell, and the plane came out of the mountains dying with no lights. All three men were exhausted. It was time to shave and clean up. At some point the pilots would have to step off the plane to face the personnel of some general aviation facility. By then the plane itself would have to be cleaned
up. There was still a lot of work to do.

  The DC-3’s extended range, thanks to the auxiliary tanks, was of significant advantage to the smugglers, enabling them as it did to land as far north as Virginia and the Carolinas. The distance between Colombia and the US border was a good piece of what put so much heat on Florida. And made Darlington such a good bet.

  They were a hundred miles out when they raised J.D. Reed on the radio. He and Long, over an air-to-air frequency, gave the impression of two pilots shooting the breeze, Long transmitting not from Douglas 86459, but Cessna 4603 Zulu, on a putative flight from Hilton Head to Spartanburg.

  ‘Yeah, we can see you over there, what are you flying?’ said Long.

  ‘This is Piper Cherokee four-six-seven-three India,’ responded Reed, transmitting from the dragstrip. ‘I see your lights. You at about eight-thousand?’

  ‘I’m at eighty-six hundred, descending into Spartanburg now. Golfing was neat at Hilton Head. Are you the guy that operates the fleet of planes out of Middleburg, Virginia?’

  ‘Affirmative,’ said Reed.

  ‘What was the weather like over Spartanburg?’

  ‘Everything was just fine, you’re going to have a fine landing, shouldn’t be any problems.’

  ‘Fine. That’s an A on that then?’

  ‘Yes,’ Reed said. ‘That’s an A. I’d give conditions there an A.’

  Meaning Darlington, coded Landing Site A, was secure.

  Hatfield navigated visually, carefully studying the landmarks below. As he closed in on the dragstrip, he started looking for a signal.