‘I hear you. Yeah, I see your lights,’ said Reed. ‘I sure can. I see your lights. Can you see mine?’
The headlights on the pickup trucks flashed at the end of the dragstrip. Hatfield in response flashed the landing lights of the DC-3. Hatfield buzzed the runway, came back around to land, and Long was working the cargo doors when the airplane hit the ground. The trucks pulled up, Reed secured the hatches and Long started throwing bales. McBride, eager to be airborne, stepped back into the cargo bay and heaved bales along the fuselage, throwing them in the direction of the door. It was then, as the rhythm picked up, that one of Reed’s crew, a guy named Billy, took a bale in the side of the head, momentarily knocking him cold. Reed, without missing a beat, picked the unconscious crewman up and threw him into the back of the truck along with the cargo as if he were one of the bales. ‘Don’t say it.’ ‘I wasn’t going to say it.’ ‘Yes you were,’ said Reed. ‘I could tell.’ ‘I wasn’t,’ said Long. ‘Yes you were.’ ‘Can I say it later?’ ‘I’ll think about it.’ After a quick consultation with the pilots, in which McBride confirmed that he could clear up the Visqueen by himself, Long decided that there was no need for him to go on with the airplane. The DC-3 took off without him. The plane lifted off in one direction and the trucks took off in the other. Before jumping aboard the blue Chevy Suburban in which they would follow the pot to Ann Arbor, Long and Reed, both patting themselves down for a match, looked at each other and simultaneously asked: ‘Got a joint?’
EPILOGUE
There are three ways out of the dope business, the most dramatic of which will always be dying on the job. Of the other two, quitting while you are ahead or going to jail, the second is by far the more common. Those who have chosen the former – you have eaten in their restaurants, worn their sportswear, listened to music on their record labels, or maybe you have rented their real estate – are admittedly difficult to count. Those who have suffered the latter – they and their customers – have provided fifty percent of the population of the nation’s prisons over the last decade.
Smokescreen by Robert Sabbag, first published in Great Britain by Canongate Books, February 2002
But it is pretty to see what money will do
Samuel Pepys
Ed Dwyer and Robert Singer
Tom Forcade on Smuggling
THOMAS KING FORCADE died by his own hand one year ago. Although he had set aside a promising career in marijuana importing to establish and build High Times magazine, he never ceased to perfect his skills in the business that remained his first love. Torn between journalism and smuggling, his twin careers fertilized each other and enabled him to broaden each with an eye trained by his vast experience in the other.
In 1974, Forcade was asked whether starting High Times would be an alternative to smuggling dope in the never-ending struggle to turn America on.
‘On the contrary,’ he replied, ‘it’ll be a front for it.’
HILIFE: How did you get started in smuggling?
FORCADE: Well, I actually got started in high school. I was living in Tucson, Arizona, and I had an advantage over most people who might want to get started in smuggling: I lived fairly near the source of supply.
We all used to get high in high school, and we wanted to get ’55 Chevies (this was in the mid-sixties and a ’55 Chevy was the thing to have) and it soon occurred to us that we could go down to Mexico and score some dope and run it back across the border, and make some money on it. We could buy it across the border for about $30 a key in those days.
We were very careful. I think we stuffed it up underneath, between the gas tank and the trunk, and drove across with it. Very scared. They searched the whole car but they didn’t find anything. So we did it again from time to time. Then we moved on to a larger scale where we would take a sack and throw it across the fence. They have a fence that runs across the border. You just drive up next to the fence, take a sack, swing it a couple of times and toss it over full of grass and pick it up on the other side. Later there was actually a spot in the fence that had a hole in it you could drive through. And then later we got into another place along the border where you could drive across with whole truckloads of marijuana.
HILIFE: What was your first big run?
FORCADE: The first big one was when we brought a planeload across.
HILIFE: This side of the border?
FORCADE: Yeah. What they did was, they flew over, and they dropped it out of the plane. Unfortunately, we never found part of the dope. Part of it fell on the highway; some car came along, found it, picked it up and took it in. It was in the newspaper the next day, how they found this dope. (We were very paranoid about it, that they might have found our fingerprints on the wrappers or something, but nothing ever happened.)
Later, in subsequent reenactments of this same style we lost full loads on the desert. (It may still be sitting out there, you know, ‘the treasure of the Sierra Madre’ or something. It might be a little dry by now.)
One time the plane landed and we were surrounded by cops. Everybody got away except one person who was nabbed and of course took the rap for everybody. It was small-scale; in retrospect it was incredibly disorganized and foolish. But that was when we got on to what I would call a professional level. That was around ’68.
HILIFE: And at that point were you flying?
FORCADE: I did fly some then, but I could usually find someone else to do it. I’m more of a professional kingpin than a technician in these things. I have other people to do the hard parts and dangerous parts. But once, this person suddenly couldn’t make it. We’d already bought the weed down in Mexico, and it was my money backing the operation, so I had no choice but to do it myself.
I’d been over the route in the daytime, but I’d never flown it at night. At night you’re looking for lights and the silhouettes of mountains, and you’re flying by the moon, by the stars and so on, whereas by the day, you just follow the highway or the railroad tracks. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t use things like compasses and stuff like that. Too complicated. We don’t use them that much.
HILIFE: Do you have a pilot’s license?
FORCADE: Not only do I have a pilot’s license, but I have dozens of pilot’s licenses. I have about 300 hours in the air, but all the licenses that I have are phoney.
HILIFE: How much money . . .
FORCADE: On that particular run? About $25,000. But aren’t you going to ask me why it was so hair-raising? Funny you should ask me. Well, I was flying alone and got lost because, as I said, I’d never been down there at night before. They had the place lit up with bonfires and so on, so I landed, but it wasn’t the smuggling place where I was supposed to be. It was some other smugglers’ landing strip. They were quite upset. They had machine guns on me. They thought maybe I was a narc or something. They were expecting another type of plane and another person, and another code word and everything, and I was having quite a bit of trouble explaining myself. Also, I was out of gas.
So, what I did was, I convinced these people that, quite honestly, no one would be flying around in Mexico in the middle of the night and landing in a bonfire-lit dirt strip in the mountains unless they were also smugglers. So I parked my plane there overnight and I gave those people quite a bit of money. And their plane came in, picked up their weed, and flew out. And the next morning, I got down to a phone, called up my connection, and had him set everything for the next night, and that night I flew out to the right place and picked up the weed.
But unfortunately, on the way back up I had quite a bit of trouble because I had run the plane off into a ditch and the propeller had gotten a little bent and it was a little unbalanced, so it was making this very heavy vibration that caused the oil seal in the front of the engine to start leaking and all the oil was leaking out. By the time I got back to the United States the windshield was all covered with oil and I couldn’t see, so I had to open the side windows and stick my head out of the side window and I came in that way. The engine was comp
letely shot by then because it has two parts bolted together, and the halves of the crankcase were all vibrated to pieces. We had to put in an entirely new engine.
That type of thing is more or less typical. It seems like nothing ever goes smoothly. I don’t know why it is, but there seems to be something about smuggling that causes a very high mortality rate among both the people involved and the equipment involved. You have to have incredible resources and resourcefulness.
HILIFE: Do you prefer smuggling by boat?
FORCADE: Well, you see, one thing about the air is that they can’t pull you over. I mean, there’s not much they can do if they see you. On the other hand, in a plane, if your engine stops running you don’t just come to a stop in the water like you do on a boat.
Out at sea your chances of getting stopped are about the same as your chances of getting stopped by the highway patrol as you’re going down the highway. In other words, not very high, but it is possible, especially if you’re doing something wrong or if you look suspicious. Generally, they don’t stop anybody. Your chances of even seeing anybody out on the ocean are very small, the same as in the air. But if you see somebody in the air it ain’t no big thing because there’s not much they can do about it unless they want to chase you down. In the sixties they didn’t have anybody to chase you down. The ship thing required a whole different technology, but it was still technology, and I’m good at technology.
HILIFE: And freighters . . .
FORCADE: Yeah, freighters are a very common way for dope to make it up now because the runs are getting bigger and bigger, and a two-hundred-foot freighter can obviously bring up a lot more dope than a forty-foot sailboat. They rendezvous offshore outside the twelve-mile limit. And hopefully, you meet up with them.
I must note in passing that every means I’m discussing here is very well known to the DA, and the newspapers are filled with accounts of various ways that smuggling takes place and gets busted, so I’m not blowing anything for anybody. The DA is quite aware of how dope gets in. They’re also quite aware that they have almost no chance of stopping it. You rendezvous offshore with these boats in a fast speedboat.
HILIFE: Do they have the capacity to outrun a modern coast guard . . .?
FORCADE: Well, the coast guard cutter things make about twenty-five knots or so, maybe more. And a freighter can make maybe ten or twelve knots. But a good smuggling operation usually has four or five thirty-foot boats, usually with two engines, American V-8 engines. One of these boats can make fifty or sixty miles an hour even in fairly rough weather, can outrun anything the coast guard has and can carry a ton or so. It draws maybe two and a half to three feet, and gets over waters that the coast guard can’t get over, a lot of shoals and reefs and stuff down in Florida. A boat that doesn’t draw very much is quite advantageous in getting near the shore and getting to the off-loading spots that would not be considered viable by the coast guard and are therefore not watched. And you’ve got to learn how to run these boats, be ready to outrun the coast guard if necessary. We’ve done it.
HILIFE: Have you ever considered smuggling with a submarine?
FORCADE: I’ve heard of a couple of fairly well-documented cases of submarines being used, but it would seem to me that because of the unique noises that are given off by submarines and the fact that the US government spent billions wiring the whole ocean, supposedly to keep track of every submarine in the world, that a submarine would be the most dangerous way possible to smuggle. The minute you set out you would be being tracked by every navy electronic sonar device possible. Also, a submarine takes a lot of knowledge to run, and where do you get parts for it?
HILIFE: Does the idea of a blimp appeal to you?
FORCADE: You know, I think if you had the ability to get together a blimp you wouldn’t get into smuggling. The blimp field is so promising.
These are the kind of conversations you can get into on stoned evenings. They’re a lot of fun, but they’re rarely productive. The best ways are the most straightforward ways. When you’re sitting around scanning these things out, all kinds of James Bondian ideas come forth, but when it gets down to the reality of it, the simplest and most straightforward way is usually the best and the way that attracts the least attention. Also, pouring gasoline on the water and lighting it like James Bond doesn’t work either.
HILIFE: How do you know that?
FORCADE: They tried it during prohibition. Being the systematic type of person that I am, I have made a thorough study of the literature of prohibition smuggling, slave smuggling, and all other types of smuggling, and they used to do it. The Italian and Irish smugglers of the twenties and thirties were about as crazy and as foolish (and in their case drunk, in our case stoned), and the fact that they would try things didn’t mean that they would work.
HILIFE: What is the simplest way?
FORCADE: I think the most common way is to pay someone off down in Colombia so you can load it up right on the dock, or come in close at night and load it up off smaller boats. Some people are very happy to smuggle five hundred pounds hidden inside the hull of a sailboat, or load a sailboat down with five tons, and other people don’t really feel like it’s worth doing unless they bring in twenty-five tons on a freighter. I think twenty-five tons is a bit much to load off of small boats. At that point it becomes worthwhile and more practical to pay off someone at a dock. But if you don’t know a place where you can pay off a dock, you do it at night. People who know about planes tend to plane things from Colombia.
At this end, when it gets up to twenty-five tons or so, you get to the point where you have forklift trucks and trucks with hydraulic tailgates and conveyor belts and so on and so forth. This is what we have now. We don’t use this all the time, but it’s available. A forklift truck is very expensive, but, like, one trip pays for it and you can just keep it in the warehouse and use it when you need it.
HILIFE: When you actually make your runs, is there any opportunity or any effort to have quality control?
FORCADE: I think that when you get up into mass quantities it’s very difficult to have much control over the quality, because it’s enough to get twenty-five tons. If you know the province you get it from and the connection you get it from, you know they’ll be farmers who are geographically located in a place that’s producing better marijuana. I’ve done high-quality runs, where we were going down to specifically get the very best gold or wacky weed or something like that, but very high-quality dope is very perishable and can often become garbage by the time it gets up here.
HILIFE: About how many people are involved in your average run?
FORCADE: We might have about twenty people or so. I mean, let’s say you’re unloading five tons or so; that’s a lot of work. You don’t want it to take hours and hours. You need five or ten people to quickly unload a boat. You don’t want to have so many people that you can’t keep track of them. It depends on the operation.
HILIFE: What’s the scale of payment?
FORCADE: Well, I would say it depends on the deal you have with your suppliers. If you finance it in advance, you can buy it in the field and you can get it much cheaper, but then it might get busted in the field, it might get busted on its way down, or it might get ripped off and so on. Usually, the more profit you’re in a position to make, the higher risk you take, so the scale of payment varies. But I would say a captain gets like maybe $50,000 and up, a crewmember gets $25,000 and up, a handler gets a few thousand dollars. The prices are very high for the amount of work being done, but, of course, the time you’re facing is quite a bit.
HILIFE: How do you get the people?
FORCADE: First of all, you have to know them for a long time. I think five years is a good time period, the industry standard, but I would say one year is a minimum no matter how together they are. Somebody’s got to have known them for one year. Somebody that you trust.
Second, they have to be cool; they have to be discreet. They can’t brag to their girlfriends; they can’t brag to
their buddies. They can’t run off at the mouth in bars because the word gets around, and they can’t give interviews to magazines.
This is a real problem because anyone who’s doing something desires recognition, and you seek the esteem of your friends. If you’re a smuggler, people say ‘What do you do?’ and you don’t want to say you work in a gas station. The tendency is to impress your friends. I mean, it’s a very chic thing, a very glamorous thing to do, and the tendency is to tell them and ask them to keep quiet. But of course, they don’t keep quiet either. You go over to their house, sit around and get high with them, and after you leave they whisper to their friends.
The other part of being cool is to have the nerve to do it, and this is a hard thing to judge. Sometimes you make a practice run somewhere and see how everybody gets along. Some people can’t hack it, they don’t work well together, and ego conflicts develop. When the pressure’s on the ego conflicts multiply a hundredfold and everyone’s armed, and you don’t want people whipping out guns on each other in the midst of a heavy run because it’s very disruptive and unpleasant. But usually, by the time you get to a smuggling run you’ve already been through some hairy things together. I mean, usually you work somebody up, you don’t take them right into a run. If they do well as a lookout, or as a transporter, or as a loader or something like that, you can use them in a more critical role. But you can never really tell for sure because people who seem really together will suddenly crack, and people that you would never expect to have the moxie to keep it together turn out to be silver-star winners when the chips are down.
I think that someone running a dope operation is a sort of minor guru, or even a major guru, a charismatic figure. I think, generally, the nature of a smuggling operation is closer to that of a Far Eastern religion than it is to a corporation. There’s a guru (who provides the spiritual strength) and his followers. Everyone down below is going on faith. They have to believe in the person at the top because everything you’ve ever been taught, everything you read in the papers, every rumour, story, anecdote and so on that comes along is a deterrent to smuggling. You have to consciously psych yourself up to think that you can make it. The paranoia in a smuggling run is extremely thick, and it’s like sand in the machinery. You don’t know at the time whether it’s psychological warfare or real warfare. But mostly it’s psychological warfare, and it’s psychological warfare that’s very effective.