‘But once you see the other side – once you think: They’ve got my number – then you’re into all sorts of problems in your head. It’s all a question of what you see when you look in the mirror. Do you see a young business woman importing goods for a Sausalito boutique, or do you see a cocaine mule pissing in her pants with fright?
‘I swore off it right there and then. Chick tried to persuade me. I said, “It’s OK for you.” Chick was always very cool. He spread everything around: different bank accounts, a couple of apartments, different phoney company names when he sent the money drafts down to Bogotá. Always have a back door open, that was Chick’s motto. I said, “That’s fine when you’re dealing the stuff. But when you’re running it,” I said, “that’s when there aren’t any back doors. You just got to keep on going forward: one way out, no way back. I’ve had enough.”’
Chick and Rosalita lay low for a while after that. But smuggling is like a drug itself, it gets in your blood, and after a while they were craving for action. Rosalita didn’t want to do the simple Bogotá run any more. ‘It’s just statistics,’ she said. ‘No matter how good your cover, you can’t keep coming in from Colombia without the customs turning you over once in a while.’ She’d drawn a rum card on the last run, and got away with it. Next time not so lucky, perhaps. By the mid-seventies the heat was really on for travellers from Colombia. Dope and coke were pouring into the US. Every scam in the book was being tried by smugglers of every shape and size.
Rosalita didn’t travel to Colombia any more, but she did still visit Guatemala regularly. Why not get someone else to ferry the merchandise from Bogotá to Guatemala City? she suggested. She could then relay it on from there into the States. A Guatemalan stamp in your passport was perfectly cool. There wasn’t much worth smuggling out of Guatemala, nothing you could carry on your person, anyway. This time it was Chick who demurred. It meant cutting someone else in, relying on someone else’s cool. ‘Put another link in the pipeline,’ he said, ‘and at the very least you’re doubling the risk of a screw-up.’ It was against their hitherto so successful creed – Small is Beautiful.
Then, in the summer of ‘75, they found their new move. It answered both their objections: Rosalita didn’t have to fly in with Colombian stamps in her passport, but Chick didn’t have to lose sleep over the risks of additional mules. This was a scam that wasn’t in the book. They called it the Magic Eraser move.
One day Chick brought a stranger back to their Sausalito apartment. He was an Englishman. He had blond hair scraped back and tied in a bunch, and little wire-rim spectacles. He wore an expensive suit.
‘He was something like a smart hippie, something like a professor. Chick introduces him. “This is Dr Richard,” he says. “Dr Richard’s in plastics.” Jesus, I thought – plastics, I’m really excited. But Chick was. He was really wired up, on to something new. He said, “Dr Richard’s got something to show you, Rosalita.”’
‘So the guy opens up his briefcase. He takes out a piece of paper, a rubber stamp and two aerosol cans. The cans were unmarked: one plain black, one plain white. The way he put the things on the table, it was like a conjuror we used to see in Oviedo at Christmas, and that’s what Dr Richard called himself. A technological conjuror.
‘He took a can, the black one, and sprayed something over the paper. It smelt like new car seats. It made a sort of sheen over the paper, but after a few seconds it dried, and the paper looked just the same as before, except if you picked it up it was stiffer, perhaps, heavier. Then he inked his stamp and put a stamp on the paper. It said, “Downstream Enterprises”. That was Dr Richard’s company: it did all sorts of weird clever things with plastics. Chick kept pacing around and grabbing me, and saying: “Baby, isn’t it beautiful, you ain’t seen nothing yet.” Then Dr Richard took the other can and sprayed that over the paper. A different smell, bleachy. In a moment all the surface of the paper went a white colour, sort of frosted, like a smashed windscreen. He shook the stuff in shreds off the paper, and with a little knife he very carefully scraped the rest. When he had finished, the paper was blank. No stuff on it, and no stamp on it: it looked just like it had before he’d started.
‘Dr Richard explained. It’s simply a very thin, transparent film of plastic. It’s something called linear low-density polyethyline laminate. He’d been doing research for years. Breaking the micron barrier, he called it. Getting down to really small molecular thicknesses. A lot of technical stuff I didn’t understand. He was offering Chick the spray-cans at $5,000 a piece. I hadn’t really sussed. Then Chick said, “Baby, think about it. Think what you could do with that stuff sprayed on your passport!”’
Chick and Rosalita took a long weekend and made a trial run. They motored down to Mexico with the magic eraser sprayed on the pages of their passports. They got stamped at the border, going in and coming back out. The customs also turned them over on the way out, looking for grass or heroin. They were clean, of course. This pleased Chick enormously.
Everyone has a few falls waiting for them, and this one hadn’t hurt them at all. They were even more pleased when, in a motel outside El Paso, they sprayed the white can of solvent on to their passports. The plastic skin frosted up into view, they scraped it off, and – eureka! – there was absolutely no visible record left of their visit to Mexico.
This was the basic premise of the Magic Eraser runs. Rosalita was able to move in and out of Colombia without any record remaining in her passport. Passport stamps aren’t everything, but a Colombian stamp undoubtedly multiplies the likelihood of getting pulled. She would fly down to Guatemala City, in the course of her legitimate business. There she would buy a round-trip ticket to Bogotá and back. She sprayed on the magic eraser before she left Guatemala City, peeled it off when she got back with the cocaine, supplied as usual by the ruana man. There was never any problem getting through customs when coming back into Guatemala. They were really slack. When she flew back into the States there was no evidence she’d been anywhere near Colombia. She had a bigger suitcase now: it carried 10lb. Chick had a new dealing network. The Huila Dealer had moved off to LA, and now Chick was knocking it straight out to dealers. There was a Chinaman called Jack up in North Beach, others in Berkeley and Oakland. It was more hassle, but the profits were bigger. They were making $50-60,000 a run now.
The magic eraser was cumbersome. For a start Rosalita had to spray all the pages of her passport every time – you can never be quite sure where the immigration people are going to put the stamp. There was also a slight risk because she was filling in immigration and emigration forms every time she moved between Guatemala and Colombia. She had a little side-scam on this, one of the mule’s regular tricks. Every time she filled in a landing card or suchlike she made two deliberate errors. She put her first name where her family name should be, and vice versa – her family name was Amparo, which is a fairly common female Christian name. She also transposed two of the digits in her passport number. If anyone noticed on the spot, which they never did, it would be easily explained away as a mistake. It was just another bit of insurance, another spanner in the official works. If anyone started running checks, there was a chance that Amparo Rosa, passport number 1234, wouldn’t get connected with the real Rosa Amparo, passport number 1324.
The magic eraser worked like a dream for half a dozen runs. But Dr Richard’s invisible laminate had one major flaw: it was susceptible to heat. He had told them to keep the passports clear of any heat source, otherwise the film would crack apart, as it did when the solvent in the white can was applied.
One day in Bogotá, staying as always in the Tequendama hotel, Rosalita made one of her rare mistakes. She had to leave her room in a hurry – there’d been a change of rendezvous with the ruana man – and she left the passport on a window-sill. It was unseasonably hot, the window faced south, and when she returned, the passport was well and truly baked. The magic plastic film was crinkling off the pages, but not coming off neatly like it did with the solvent. The pages look
ed like eggs beginning to fry. She hadn’t got the solvent with her, to make a proper job of it. It was back in Guatemala – the last thing she wanted to do was to remove her Colombian entry stamp before leaving Colombia.
She had to ditch the passport, go to the Spanish embassy – she still travelled under a Spanish passport – and get a temporary replacement. She flew back to San Francisco empty-handed, and they laid the Magic Eraser move to rest.
The Fruit Palace, 1985
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men
Matthew Arnold
John Lightfoot
The Spanish Connection
I QUICKLY LEARNT a lot about drug smuggling: who was doing what, what the risks were, how packages were wrapped and prepared for shipment to the UK and all the rumours about who had been busted. I noticed that the professional smugglers had commercial vacuum-packing machines and used vast quantities of heavy food-grade plastic bags of varying sizes, of the type in which frozen meat joints are packed in supermarkets. These were the smugglers’ main weapon against the sniffer dogs.
First, two cannabis soaps are wrapped together in several layers of cling film. Then other layers are added, one of black pepper and another of coffee grains. After a final wrap of cling film the whole soap is placed in a plastic bag and sealed in a vacuum machine. The air is sucked out, and the bag shrink-wrapped around the contents in that familiar squashed-up look. The sealed bag is then cut to size and the open edge heat-sealed by the wrapping machine. The entire process takes about two or three minutes per soap for the experienced wrapper.
A consignment of a hundred kilos of cannabis contains on average four hundred soaps, and the whole lot will be wrapped and stored within a full day. Cannabis resin is a dense product and doesn’t take up much room: 50kg can easily be hidden in an average family saloon such as a Ford Sierra.
The packers and wrappers are masters of misdirection and deceit. The wrapped cannabis is secreted under the back seat and in the door panels, not too much there though as the windows need room in the well of the door frame to retract when wound open.
More product is hidden within the spare wheel itself and sometimes under the front bulkhead up in the heater area. The heaters are removed, the pipes sealed off and the hot-air blower motors are taken out. At a casual glance the bulkhead looks identical to any other car, but it is only a metal and plastic shell covering. Cannabis replaces the guts of the heating system.
I have even seen cannabis placed in windscreen-washer bottles and air-filter boxes. Storing it in the engine compartment is tricky, though, because if the car breaks down then the drug could well be unearthed by a mechanic. There are the tales, jokingly passed around, of smugglers whose car engines have overheated and ignited the slow-burning resin. The resultant clouds of blue smoke have passed through the ventilation ducts and into the passenger compartment, affecting everyone in the car. Pleasantly stoned, presumably no one cared about being arrested until the next day’s sober realisation of their predicament.
There are specialists who live on the Costas who professionally fix up cars just for the smugglers. The way in which they work is to obtain a vehicle, usually one on UK plates that hasn’t been stolen, and doctor it. They remove the rear seats and sometimes the front ones too, the cloth facings and the padding, and fit in as much cannabis as possible into the seat frames. The padding is cut down and refitted, and then the facing material is also refitted and stitched back in place. It is a professional job, and it is hard to distinguish a cannabis-laden seat from one that has not been tampered with. If the model of car has a steel partition between the boot and the rear-seat back then that steelwork is carefully cut away. This reveals an open space, which is filled with cannabis. Later the steel is welded back into place and then resprayed in a colour match. Finally the joints are sealed with mastic that exactly replicates the manufacturer’s so as to end up with a perfect-looking concealment job. Sometimes a fire extinguisher or first-aid kit is screwed on to the steelwork to add a touch of authenticity.
These cars are driven back to the UK by experienced operators who charge anything up to £10,000 per trip. The drivers apply for new papers for the car from DVLA in Swansea, take out motor insurance and buy a green card for European travel. Their documents are complete and accurate in every detail and will stand up to any check. Then they recruit passengers for the journey. There are husband-and-wife teams who, along with their children, regularly do the run between the Spanish Costas and the Channel ports.
In 1994 I heard about an English man and woman in their late fifties who were stopped and searched by French customs officers on the Hash Highway in the South of France. They had their two young grandchildren in the back of the car who were found to be sitting on forty kilos of high-quality cannabis resin. The grandparents were arrested, and the children taken into state care, until their parents travelled down from England to collect them. The grandparents are still in prison, serving a six-year sentence in addition to a massive customs fine or the option of another two years inside. I do not feel sorry for such people. They are not just naive old grannies caught up in a web of deceit but professional and experienced smugglers who carefully weigh up the risks before getting involved. They don’t just walk into a bar in Spain and say, ‘Hi, does anybody want me to smuggle some cannabis back to England for them?’ That’s an unlikely scenario. No, these people make a career of it and have probably already successfully netted thousands of pounds from previous trips.
For the experienced packer other great concealment opportunities are offered by camper vans and towed caravans. Cassette toilets are emptied, and the heavy plastic waste receptacles cut in half. They are filled with cannabis and sealed with plastic welding machines. This effectively forms a tank within a tank, after which the chemical toilet fluids are poured into the top tank. The cannabis-charged cassette unit is refitted into the caravan, and hey presto! there is both a usable toilet and a cache of hidden drugs. It’s a brave customs officer who rakes around in the shit tank just for a quick look-see. The only way to be sure whether or not there are concealed drugs is to weigh the empty cassette unit and measure the depth of the cassette from the exterior as opposed to the interior. This is a nasty, smelly job that, for obvious reasons, will not be undertaken unless the authorities have a very strong suspicion that there are drugs on board the caravan.
Calor gas and propane gas bottles are also used for concealment purposes. A bottle is completely emptied of gas and carefully cut around the middle seam weld into its two component halves. The bottom half of the bottle is filled with 10kg of cannabis and then a sheet of light-gauge tin is welded over the top. Finally the two halves of the tank are welded together again and spray-painted before the gas bottle is refilled.
The usable and partly filled bottle is placed in the caravan stowage compartment and connected up to the gas supply. The bottle now functions correctly, and if a customs officer were to light the gas stove it would work. Alternatively, if the official were to disconnect the gas bottle from the small regulator and open the handwheel valve, he would get a blast of high-pressure butane gas in his face, another classic trick that is frequently used.
In touring caravans the whole of an interior wall may well be stripped out and the interior foam and polystyrene-type insulation removed. Packets of wrapped cannabis are carefully packed inside the outer skin and secured by tapes stapled to the wooden strengthening supports. The inner wood-grain or pastel-shade veneers are refitted very carefully, and all the accessories wired back into place. Both sides of a caravan receive the same treatment so that it sits levelly on the suspension. If experienced interior fitters are used it is impossible to tell that the walls have been disturbed in any way, although there can easily be 100kg of cannabis, worth £300,000, concealed within an average family-size caravan.
Professionals don’t stash cannabis in cupboards or on shelves under clothes or in biscuit tins or coffee or sugar jars. They hide the gear in such a way that no casual check could eve
r uncover it. These packers secrete the gear in such a fashion that damage must be done to the fabric of the storage vehicle, be it car, van or caravan, before the cannabis is revealed.
Bear in mind that the gear is wrapped so carefully no sniffer dog would discover the cache and lead his handler to a location. It is a brave customs officer, therefore, who would systematically remove the wall from a caravan or cut open a toilet cassette or remove the welded plastic fascia of a caravan fridge or the plastic panelling in a shower enclosure just on suspicion that there may be drugs stored on board. Normal border or port inspection consists of a sniffer-dog inspection of the interior while a couple of customs men open drawers and check shelves and cupboards.
A classic piece of misdirection is to secrete ten or so cartons of cigarettes in a remote, inaccessible cupboard which are invariably found during an inspection. The surprised smugglers then offer to pay duty on their uncovered tax-free haul of tobacco, while the customs men are satisfied that they have found a family bringing back some extra duty-free goods. The offenders either pay the extra duty or escape with a stern lecture about the correct use of green and red customs zones before shamefacedly driving through the inspection sheds and out to deliver the caravan full of cannabis a couple of days later to their colleagues in crime.