Smuggler's Blues Read online

  ALSO BY RICHARD STRATTON:

  Smack Goddess

  Slam: The Book (editor, with Kim Wozencraft)

  Altered States of America: Outlaws and Icons, Hitmakers and Hitmen

  Copyright © 2016 by Richard Stratton

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First Edition

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Stratton, Richard (Richard H.), author.

  Title: Smuggler’s blues : a true story of the hippie mafia / Richard Stratton.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Arcade Publishing, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015044060 (print) | LCCN 2015047957 (ebook) | ISBN 9781628726688 (hardback) | ISBN 9781628726701 (Ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Stratton, Richard (Richard H.) | Drug traffic—United States. | Drug dealers—United States. | Organized crime—United States. | Hippies—United States. | BISAC: TRUE CRIME / Organized Crime. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Criminals & Outlaws. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs.

  Classification: LCC HV5805.S797 A3 2016 (print) | LCC HV5805.S797 (ebook) | DDC 363.45092—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044060

  Cover photo: iStock

  Printed in the United States of America

  A smuggler works from inclination, from passion. He is on the one side an artist. He risks everything, runs terrible dangers; he is cunning, invents dodges and gets out of scrapes, and sometimes acts with a sort of inspiration. It is a passion as strong as gambling.

  —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  1 • Northern Exposure

  2 • The Good Samaritan

  3 • Fool’s Paradise

  4 • Top of the World

  5 • General Marijuana

  6 • Don’t Mess with Texas

  7 • Flower of Bekaa

  8 • City of Death

  9 • A Date with Ten Million Dates

  10 • Doctor Lowell, I Presume

  11 • Money Changes Everything

  12 • Better than Sex

  13 • Island Universe

  14 • End Game

  Epilogue: In Custody

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Smuggler’s Blues is based on my fifteen-year career as a player in the so-called hippie mafia, importing and distributing marijuana and hashish. Some of the names, locations, and the timeline of events have been altered to protect the identities of those who were never captured and may still be active in the marijuana underground.

  This book is dedicated to those unjustly tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison for trafficking in a God-given plant. Free the prisoners of the War on Plants.

  1

  NORTHERN EXPOSURE

  Phillips, Maine, April 1980

  DAWN COMES EARLY this time of year. Particularly up here in the North Country. It’s four in the morning. Bright stars still visible in deep velvet skies tinged crimson along the eastern horizon. Red sky in morning, smugglers take warning.

  The GMC dually rumbles into motion down the gravel driveway. I love this truck; with the plush, roomy crew cab, it’s like driving along the road in your living room. I always buy American, patriot that I am, and my motto is: When in doubt, buy a truck. Hit the play button on the stereo. Neil Young’s “Powderfinger”: Look out, Mama, there’s a white boat comin’ up the river blasts from six speakers. I substitute my own lyrics: Look out, Mama, there’s a big bird comin’ up the river…

  Or maybe not. You never know how real anything is in this business. Be prepared, that’s the Boy Scout motto. Not that I was ever a Boy Scout; got kicked out of Cub Scouts. The pack leader was a pervert, and I called him on it. None of the adults believed me. Still, my Yankee WASP work ethic, drilled into me by my maternal grandmother, Ethel Lowell Burnham—Ba Ba, we called her—demands that I do my job to the utmost of my ability even if everyone around me is fucking up. “Anything worth doing,” Ba Ba would tell me, “is worth doing right.” And she was always right, lived long enough to know.

  It’s a short drive from the farm down Wheeler Hill and along Toothaker Pond Road to the river. My big white Alsatian shepherd, Karamazov, doesn’t like rock music as much as I do. He sticks his head out the window and lets the soft spring air fold back his ears. I need the music loud. Most people in this part of the world are still asleep and I’ve already taken a couple of hits off the oily, resin-soaked roach I left in the ashtray on the kitchen table back at the farm. To say I’m high and nervous doesn’t come close to describing how I feel. I’m plagued by fear. Terrified. Freaked-the-fuck-out. Just the way I like it.

  Not simply fear of arrest, though that is always with me. Not fear of failure, either. No, it is a deep-seated dread that everything they have always said about me is true: You’re a bad kid, Rickie Stratton. A troublemaker. A juvenile delinquent. You may even be a sociopath. And that shit you smoke, that music you listen to, is only going to make you worse. They being the Authorities: adults, teachers, principals, probation officers, cops, judges, and shrinks. Lawyers. My big fear is that I am proving them right. I am a failure at everything except crime. The only way I know to soothe this runaway fear is to keep assuring myself they are wrong and what I am doing is right.

  My ground crew is bivouacked at the lodge, set on a low hill beside the trout pond a stone’s throw from the river. Who would have expected that a place like this exists only a few miles down the road from the horse farm I own with the novelist Norman Mailer? Yes, that Mailer. The enfant terrible of American literature. Who lately has been calling himself Aquarius. One could argue it’s all his fault. When I read his work in college, I sensed he was writing about me. Mailer bought the farm with Channing Godfried, a former Kennedy speechwriter and whiz kid who quit the Johnson administration over the Vietnam War. That was ten years ago. They paid twenty grand for the house,

  ramshackle barn, and 160 acres of land on the side of a rocky hill with a view of Mount Blue across the valley. I was living in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with Anaïs, my wife, renovating a home, waiting for a load. There I met and became friends with Mailer. He heard I had access to good weed. Mailer and Godfried hired me to fix up the farm. When I began to make serious money, I bought them out.

  My mouth is cotton dry from nerves and reefer. There is a spring beside the private road that leads into the lodge. I stop the dually. Karamazov and I get out. He laps up the water with his long pink tongue, and I fill a jug, take several cool swallows to soothe my throat and drown the butterflies in my belly. This is the best water I have ever tasted, gurgling up from deep in the ground, fresh, clean, full of minerals, and uncontaminated by human technology. It’s Mother Earth offering up her vital liquid to wash clean the stain of civilization.

  The lodge was vacant and run down when we took it over. A relative by marriage, fellow scammer—I call him by his nickname, Jonathan Livingston Seagull—a pilot, disco
vered this place while out trail-riding on a motorcycle. He came back to the farm and said, “You’ll never guess what I found down by the river.” Local lore has it that the lodge and airstrip were built back in the 1940s by John Fox, a self-made millionaire from South Boston, former owner of the long defunct Boston

  Post newspaper. Fox was a friend and business partner of Joseph P. Kennedy, father of JFK. Gloria Swanson supposedly stayed at the lodge occasionally while she was having her affair with Joe Kennedy. At one point Fox owned 7,000 acres of land in this valley. He carved out the mile-long airstrip in the woods beside the river so he could fly up from Boston on weekends. Across the river he built a fourteen-room lodge on a spring-fed pond he stocked with trout. When we discovered the place, it was owned by a shady New Jersey developer who had fallen on hard times and wanted to sell. My partners and I bought the property in the name of a company that is wholly owned by a shell offshore corporation. Amascontee Lodge and Flying Club we call it, named after the Native American tribe that hunted these woods before the white man came.

  I suffer from agoramania—an uncontrollable urge to acquire real estate. Property. Land. Homes. Buildings. As if anyone can really own any part of God’s creation. We lease it at best. But it gives me some assurance that I actually exist. I bought a 6,000-acre ranch in the Texas Hill Country where I stride around the boundary like James Dean in Giant and lie to myself: This is mine. Knowing it was all paid for with black market money, knowing the IRS is already hot on my trail, poised to take it all away. It’s a fool’s paradise I live in, but I tell myself it beats a life of quiet desperation.

  The ground crew for this operation consists of two ex-Marines, Vietnam vets. Father Flaherty, who looks like a priest, got his nickname while driving a motor home we bought from a Texas outfit known as Global Evangelism Television. We left the logo—a picture of a camera and a cross—painted on the outside of the motor home and posed as evangelists while transporting loads of reefer up from the ranch in Texas. Father Flaherty’s partner has been working with me for years. I call him JD or Jimmy D. He’s as loyal as Karamazov but with some strictly human habits that are in evidence as I walk into the front room of the lodge: empty bottles of tequila, beer bottles, a Ziploc bag of weed, roaches, and cigarette butts. JD got smashed in the mouth with a rifle butt during a fight with a fellow Marine and has never bothered to have his front teeth replaced. He’s passed out on the sofa, though there are plenty of bedrooms upstairs. Karamazov pads over and nuzzles him with his wet snout.

  “Rise and shine,” I say when JD rolls over and looks up. He grunts in response.

  Jimmy D and Father Flaherty have enlisted a couple of rookie helpers. One is a local guy, a carpenter who did much of the finish work up at the farm and has been renovating the lodge—call him Mild Bill. He’s quiet, bearded, looks like Abraham Lincoln. The other guy is JD’s old lady’s brother, nicknamed Dangerous Dan, who’s been in and out of jail a few times but is known to hold his mud. The fifth wheel is Cal, a big, laid-back dude from San Diego who came with the scam. He works for a rich neophyte dope dealer out of Kansas City who is attempting his first importation—five tons of primo Colombian gold reefer.

  The men load into two big Ryder box trucks. We caravan across the bridge and along the road beside the town dump to the airstrip. Father Flaherty has set up a VHF-AM ground-to-air radio in the log cabin beside the runway. The trucks park midfield beside the wind sock—hanging limp in the early morning lull. JD and I get out and walk the length of the field. Karamazov bounds along beside us, or he takes off into the woods in pursuit of deer.

  “It’s soft,” I say as my boots sink into the sod. “Way soft. I don’t know about this.” Jimmy D grunts in response, flicks the butt of a Camel into the wet grass. He has never had much faith in the reality of this trip.

  The strip is situated beside a long bend in the river, which makes it easy to spot from the air, and is positioned to take advantage of prevailing winds. But it’s mushy after the winter thaw and spring rains. We’ve been using a single-engine Cessna to smuggle small loads of weed and hash to our northern neighbors. The Canadian border is only fifty miles away by air. We can deliver a three- or four-hundred-pound load into Quebec, drop it off, and be back with a bag full of money in a couple of hours and on one tank of fuel. On any given day, I might make ten grand before lunch. Not bad work if you can get the merchandise. That’s always the problem in this business: merchandise; supply, also known as product. America consumes upwards of ten tons of weed a day. Canada smokes another two tons of pot a day and at least half a ton of hash. It’s an importer’s bonanza. With a five-thousand-foot airstrip in a state that has a long coastline pocketed with deepwater coves and a sparsely populated foreign border, we are well situated in a smuggler’s paradise. During Prohibition rumrunners made use of these same routes and methods. I have an air freight catch at Logan Airport in Boston, known in the trade as a patch, where we smuggle in regular shipments of high-quality hashish from Lebanon. At the ranch in Texas, we land planeloads of Mexican and Jamaican reefer, ship it back east in motor homes and horse trailers for distribution in New York, Boston, Toronto, and Montreal. Meanwhile my partners and I are putting together a mega-load of hash, the mother lode that will make us all seriously wealthy.

  The past few weeks have been one of those insane periods in the business. It’s either feast or famine. At times we may be sitting around for months on end waiting to bring in a load that never materializes, or three trips happen at once. We sometimes subcontract loads for scammers who need our services. A smuggler named Jimmy Chagra, a heavyweight Lebanese American out of El Paso, Texas, has a Panamanian freighter loaded with thirty tons of Colombian pot off the Maine coast. Chagra’s off-load fell apart after the ship had already set sail. For the past ten days, I’ve been organizing lobstermen and fishing boats, lining up tractor trailers and drivers, renting stash houses, hiring people to sit on the load. For this Chagra has agreed to pay me a fee of five dollars per pound.

  Before the offload goes down, I get a visit from a pilot I call by his radio handle: Yogi Bear. He shows up at the farm with the Kansas City Kid, a gentle, good-looking greenhorn dope dealer in his twenties feeling the first flush of free money. Yogi looks like his nickname. He’s big and burly, with a potbelly, a beard, and bushy black hair. These guys claim they have a plane, a DC-6 they bought in Kansas. The reefer is somewhere on the Guajira Peninsula in Colombia. Yogi Bear is going to fly the weed in using the DC-6. What they don’t have is a place to land the load.

  It’s hard to tell how serious this trip is at the time of their visit. These guys are party animals. Yogi is a good pilot, but smuggling is a sideline. He’s a gadget freak who runs a successful business setting up live video feeds for high-profile events. He informs me the trip has to happen quickly as he’s preparing to shoot some big beauty contest in Atlanta—maybe even the Miss America pageant—so he only has a small “window of opportunity” in which to make this happen. I get the feeling Yogi may be trying to move the Kansas City Kid for some down-payment money.

  We ride down in my four-wheel-drive pickup to take a look at the strip. Yogi doesn’t even get out of the truck. After we drive the length of the field, clock it at just over a mile, he pronounces it “perfect.” I warn him that even though there is a deep gravel base under the sod surface, and drainage into the river is adequate, the field can be soft this time of year. We’ve never landed anything close to the size and weight of a DC-6 carrying 10,000 pounds of weed and who knows how much fuel on this field.

  Yogi says, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll be fine.” The kid from Kansas City wants to know if I can supply a ground crew and trucks to deliver the weed to his distributors in Chicago.

  “Sure,” I say, “for a fee.” We work out the deal over shots of tequila, joints, and lines of coke. Kansas City gives me fifty grand in cash, tells me his man, Cal, will show up in a week or so with more money and a timetable. We party into the wee hours; they split the next da
y. I hear nothing from them for a week. Meanwhile, I’m meeting with Chagra’s people to facilitate the offload. I’ve almost forgotten about Yogi and his pal when I get a call from Kansas City. I make the fifteen-minute drive from the farm to the nearest pay phone and call back.

  “My man is checked into room 122 at the Holiday Inn in Augusta,” Kansas City tells me. In his room at the hotel, Cal has got more money and a brand-new ground-to-air radio he has no idea how to operate. He tells me Yogi is supposedly in Santa Marta, but no one has heard from him in a few days. There is some concern he may have split with the money he was supposed to give the Colombians for the pot. This whole scheme seems harebrained to me, but I’m committed. Besides, this is what turns me on—a new adventure. I call in JD and Father Flaherty, who were staying on the coast helping set up the offload. Father Flaherty figures out how to operate the radio. We hire the rest of the ground crew, rent trucks, and wait.

  Now it’s on. Or not. No one seems to know for sure. Communication with Colombia has been sketchy. Yogi is either in the Guajira with the load ready to go or he is MIA with the money. We have been preoccupied with the Panamanian freighter off-load, which I know for certain is happening. Big Cal, who has been staying at the Holiday Inn in Augusta, drives over to the farm and tells me the DC-6 left Colombia and will be here at dawn—at least, that is what he heard from his friend in Kansas City.

  There are parts of the field where the gravel has been exposed that feel pretty solid. If Yogi follows the river and comes in low over the trees, near the east end of the field, and drops in tight, he should be all right. And he’ll be light going out, so that shouldn’t be a problem. Father Flaherty is monitoring the radio. Everyone is tense.

  As the sun breaks in the east, low clouds scud in over the mountains. The wind is light, right down the runaway. To the north, a darker mass of clouds looks ominous. There is an undercurrent of feeling this whole thing may be a fool’s errand. JD is convinced Yogi Bear scammed the Kansas City Kid and in a couple of hours we’ll drive out of here empty and pissed.