The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  3.

  Now in the story your father and Ben are telling you, it is June 20, 1996, the day your father went on the run, leaving you in a hotel bedroom on Wall Street. Okay, and for me, too, it is that day. Only it is later, three o’clock in the afternoon, West Coast time. More or less. You want to know exactly, go get the Coast Guard’s log of their activities that afternoon: it’ll tell you the precise time they hailed the Evelyn II, a Pearson 49 in a racing suit of sail—a half-million-dollar yacht—practicing for the Catalina Cup some two miles off the coast of Big Sur.

  A high, pale blue sky of wispy cloud was overhead, moving in southerly air at nine knots or so. When it hit the warm mass of land, it defined itself as a cloud bank at the coast, through which showed an occasional glimpse of Big Sur. We stood hove-to in, maybe, three foot of sea, waiting. Four points off the port bow at perhaps a quarter mile’s distance a freighter tossed little balls of smoke into the sky.

  At the Coast Guard’s radioed orders, I, captaining the yacht, had hove to and waited for them to cross my bow on their way to board the freighter. At the same time a young man called Aaron, one of the Evelyn’s crew of six, surreptitiously gaffed the last shrink-wrapped bale of marijuana, bobbing gently in the chop, a satellite beacon made from a doctored EPIRB gently flashing orange. Aaron held the bale against the boat’s side with the gaff while I spilled wind out of the mainsail, balancing the backed jib against the rudder to keep us as still as possible until the Coast Guard boat had disappeared on the portside of the freighter. Then Aaron hauled in the bale and muscled it belowdecks while the rest of us waited for the Coast Guard to let us go.

  If they decided to board us, they’d find a crew of seven sailors, four men, three women, in matching red Gill Atlantic coveralls practicing for a yacht race in a million-dollar boat. The boat belonged to Mark “Mac” McLeod, an obscenely wealthy resident of Big Sur, and the crew were semiprofessionals, with thousands of hours of yacht racing between us, including America’s Cup experience.

  If, however, they went belowdecks, they’d find in the place of the number two and three suits of sail, and life raft, and personal flotation devices, and extra gear, and all the other equipment that any racing boat carries, twenty-five shrink-wrapped bales of marijuana, grown on McLeod’s holdings in Costa Rica, carried through the Panama Canal on the Troy, and dropped into the ocean, marked by doctored EPIRBs that bounced signals off of a satellite to allow the crew of the Evelyn II, using a GPS receiver, to pick them up, casually, while practicing for the Catalina Cup. And if they found that, the whole fragile structure I called my life would come tumbling down, one lie after another after another, until they got to the big lie, the lie at the center of my existence. Standing there, staring out to sea as the Coast Guard cruiser reemerged from the stern of the freighter and began to approach us, that lie seemed all there was.

  But that’s fear. That’s the tired, familiar, hackneyed face of fear, like a cackling demon in a children’s book. Fear: ridiculous, corrosive, debilitating fear. It rots the soul, Fassbinder said, and in my life I have had ample occasion to reflect on that truth. I am one of the few people practiced enough to know, for example, how to distinguish fear from its kissing cousins, panic and excitement. Excitement is what comes at the awesome possibility of joy. And panic, well, panic was what came to me when the Coast Guard came into view and I saw that they meant to board us, and my heart launched into a tattoo inside the walls of my chest, pounding, as I felt the periphery of my field of vision disappear.

  Ah, panic. Intimate like an old lover, probing deep into your body. I wanted to confess before they accused me; in fact, I had physically to restrain myself from doing so by tightening all the muscles of my stomach, chest, neck, and jaw. The calculus of my terror plateaued in an endless series of unbearable nanoseconds, each more unbearable than the one before, as a liquid regret poured through me: my disguise was weak, my ID was no good, my game plan sucked, I had made mistakes, mistakes, mistakes a beginner would have made, mistakes an idiot would have made, a whole lifetime of mistakes culminating in the mistake of where I was, right now, right here.

  And only slowly, through a vast fog, did I realize that all they wanted, the Coast Guard, was a visual inspection, which they conducted without even coming aboard, and then, with a warning to stay out of the shipping lane, they were gone.

  See, it is always like that, panic. In the old days, there were those who seemed immune, but I always wondered about that. Myself, I have never, not once in the hundreds of times I have risked capture, failed to feel it go through me like a fire, putting everything I had ever believed into question.

  The only progress I had ever made was to learn not to show it.

  And I knew I had not shown it. I knew I could have taken tea with the Coast Guard captain and his aunt, and they would never have known a thing.

  That, you must see, is why I am paid so highly for what I do, and why I do it so well.

  4.

  We delivered to Deetjen’s Cove, a portion of the California coast invisible from the highway and which you have never seen unless Mac McLeod has given you permission, which he has not. No one ever goes there except the Evelyn II, when she delivers, and it is the single place McLeod—with Billy C, the last of the old-time smugglers for whom marijuana was a social cause, not the business it has become today—would use a gun. He had to: the L.A. gangs to the south had considerable Colombian connections, and San Francisco, to the north, was all mobbed up. McLeod, you could say, was an anachronism, and there was no knowing how much longer his way of doing business was going to be tolerated by those who had, since the days of the Brotherhood, taken it over.

  We used a Zodiac to offload to a shack at the water’s edge—Kerouac stayed there once, the story goes, having strayed, half mad, from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s neighboring property. Later, the bales would be winched up the cliffside under armed guard and trucked one by one to a processing location. And from there, we would use a big variety of methods to deliver the product to thousands and thousands of Americans for whom smoking dope was a part of their lives: young kids, old folk, Republicans, Democrats, politicians, musicians, doctors, construction workers, cancer patients, lawyers, insomniacs, secretaries, parents, glaucoma sufferers, children. And though they didn’t know it, all of those people, all over the country, would be smoking good, pure, chemical-free bud, whose production never supported a terrorist, or a dictatorship, or a revolution, or a fundamentalist, or a violent criminal of any sort.

  Okay. And if, an hour later, you were on the Monterey Pier, you’d have seen a middle-aged woman in jeans and a jean jacket, a black shirt, and a blond ponytail coming out the back of a Bermuda Race cap climbing out of a Pearson 49 and heading for the street. Maybe if you came close, you’d have thought her a pretty well-kept woman, for forty-five, with a slim waist and a strong bearing, and you’d have thought, There’s the wife of a very rich man, coming in from a day’s cruising in the Pacific. Then you’d have gone on to whatever you were doing, without ever dreaming that you had just seen Mimi Lurie, the last surviving fugitive from the Weather Underground, and even more remarkably, you had seen her on the last normal day of her very abnormal life.

  As for me, I can remember every detail of that day. As if the long Pacific sun had burned it into my optic nerve. As if I knew, already, how drastically everything was about to change. A midsummer’s day in 1996. Walking out of Monterey port, the light-drenched sidewalk along the bay, cars passing busily, tourists in their sportswear with brand names on their chests, and hats, and shoes.

  As always after being outside the law, I felt from a different dimension. Partly that was the way criminals think of regular people as civilians, like carnival workers consider customers rubes and hookers their clients johns. When you live illegally, it is like being in a hidden world, where the rules by which the normal lived, the rules of offices and schools, simply do not hold, and often as I passed through the real world I felt invisible.

  And
partly it was the fact that the real world, for me, still wore crew cuts and thin black ties, or tie-dyed shirts and bell-bottoms, and drove Dodge Darts and VW Bugs, still watched Hootenanny and Laugh-In and Get Smart—as if the world I’d left twenty-two years before, frozen in time, was still there, somewhere, setting all the standards for normalcy. These people around me, I did not fully understand the references of their lives, the rules, the objects. Once I tried to watch an episode of Seinfeld. It was like a different language.

  My car was in the parking lot, a Jeep Cherokee. I drove out of town right away, down to Carmel, where I parked in the lot behind the supermarket on the Valley Road intersection and waited for my go-ahead. There was not much danger: I was a known person here, Tess Sanders, one of the people who lived up on Mark McLeod’s ranch in Big Sur, some kind of personal assistant, usually traveling for Mr. McLeod. About McLeod himself there were quite a few theories: a dot-commer grown absurdly rich from some start-up company; an inventor of the Macintosh; an early investor in Microsoft. None of it mattered: around Carmel Valley in the nineties, it was harder to explain an income under six figures than one over seven, and people treated the wealthy with self-conscious indifference. In time, Gail pulled up next to me in her own Jeep and gave me the thumbs-up: she’d been following me from Monterey to be sure I was clean. I nodded and pulled out and onto the 1, down to Big Sur, and up the road to the ranch.

  Now, Isabel, I understand the point of this exercise, and I know I have to be telling you the truth, and so I will tell you how I met McLeod and all that. But you will have to excuse me if it does not come easily. It is hard to tell someone the truth, after so many years of hiding it. It is harder if that person is a complete stranger, even if you feel that long bonds of love unite you. But love is not trust—believe me. If you believe me on nothing else, still, try to listen to that. You cannot live as I have a lifetime deprived of both love or trust and not come to understand them both very well indeed. Love, Isabel, is not trust. Many, many people have come to trouble by confusing them.

  I learned of McLeod in 1970, when he approached the Weather Bureau through an intermediary. McLeod was part of a group of Mendocino dope growers who were known, then, as the Brotherhood, which was short for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Timothy Leary had just been arrested, and they offered to finance us if we could get him out of prison in San Luis Obispo. The short answer was, we could, and indeed we did, breaking him out of lockup and eventually moving him right out of the country to the Black Panther compound in Algeria. There’s a secret for you. I was one of the team that got Dr. Leary out. I won’t tell you, of course, who the others were. But I will tell you this: when you hear about how Weather was a bunch of spoiled brats who survived only by the grace of the FBI’s incompetence, you just think about how we got Dr. Leary out to Algeria. If, that is, you’re not thinking about how we put a bomb in the U.S. Capitol, and in the Pentagon, and how I had in 1996 eluded capture for twenty-six years, despite having been on the FBI’s most-wanted list for five years and featured thrice on America’s Most Wanted.

  But here’s the point. When later, after Bank of Michigan, I was on the run—seriously on the run, in a way that made everything we did in Weather look like a game—I knew I could not go to anyone in the aboveground network of people who had ever helped us. Helping Weather was one thing; helping the Marion Delgado Brigade, after the murder, another altogether. It was not—repeat, not—fashionable to help us after the robbery. So where I went was to McLeod, whom I had never actually met. I found him by tracking him through the two degrees of separation that he had put between himself and Weather. I won’t tell you who they were; perhaps your father will. They helped me, I found McLeod in Mendocino. It was the right choice.

  Mendocino in 1974. Probably no better place in the world to hide. Every resident had a hybridized plant somewhere, and if a stranger came up off of Route 1, phones started to clang all the way up to Fort Bragg. The first thing McLeod does is, he lays out a big sheet of white drawing paper from his kid’s art set on the living room floor and graphs all the possible connections that could be made to each of the three “clean” identities I had on hand. There in the middle of the floor, on a winter’s day in Mendocino with rain running down the windows, he chose Tess Sanders for me. The second thing he did was tell me he’d help me. And the third thing he did was tell me I had to turn in Vincent Dellesandro.

  I remember his exact words. First watching me with that blank gaze he has when he’s thinking. Then, in the total certainty of his decision: “And, furthermore, it’s time to turn that good ole boy in, M. Dellesandro’s no revolutionary. Get that lunatic off the street before he kills some other poor asshole.”

  I knew that was true. I had known it for days, days when the sound of his gun in the marble lobby of the Bank of Michigan branch had been echoing, again and again, in my head. So I told McLeod where he had gone. Three days later the FBI arrested Vincent Dellesandro in Louisiana, where he was hiding on a shrimp boat run by the brother of one of his childhood friends. And as if I had been waiting only for that, the life I was to live for the next quarter century—the life that ended on that day in June 1996—suddenly began.

  McLeod hid me, there in the Mendocino Hills, right through that winter, while the FBI manhunt raged. He hid me through Vincent’s trial, through the following year, when Vincent was killed during the Attica prison rebellion, all the way through to the following year, when the story had died out of the papers. He helped me change, plastic surgery in Mexico to take off a beauty mark; hair color, accent, details of underground life that made me think my survival, up to then, had indeed been as much incompetence on the part of the FBI as skill on ours, so careful was he as a professional criminal, so expert. He gave me new papers on Tess Sanders, papers so clean I could file taxes on them, which I did—in fact, I was using the same identity I used when I stepped off the Evelyn II in Monterey in 1996. And he gave me work: the next year when his second child was born, as his live-in au pair, which in any case was a job I’d taken for myself, caring for his first.

  But always he bore in mind that by the time I came out to Mendocino, I had been living as a federal fugitive since the town house explosion in 1970, and I knew a great deal about living underground. How to use a disguise, how to clean a room, how to lose a tail, how to deal with some of the people that, inevitably, one meets in criminal circumstances. Above all, he knew that I knew how to handle fear, because it is fear, more than anything else, that makes criminals crash and burn. And finally, one day, he gave me ten kilos of weed to deliver to Washington, D.C., and when I returned, two weeks later, with $25,000 in cash, he gave me $5,000 to keep.

  And now I want you to know something, Isabel. It’s something that only McLeod knows, no one else. Not even your father. But if you are going to decide what to do, you need to know.

  I want you to know that I may have been a self-styled revolutionary for some of my life and a marijuana smuggler for the rest, but that I have never broken any other law, ever. Not traffic, not tax. And when McLeod gave me that five thousand in fifty-dollar bills, I held it in my hand for less than a second before I gave it back. I gave it back, and I told him I’d read that the Ann Arbor police had a fund for the family of Hugh Krosney—the guard Joey killed. And I said that when each of Krosney’s kids had their college paid, and graduate school, and Mrs. Krosney’s nursing home had been paid for, and each of her future grandchildren had their inheritance arranged, then, and only then, could Mac pay me.

  What I meant, of course, was that I never wanted to be paid, ever. Run weed? Sure, why not? This was clean, good product, grown in McLeod Seas of Green in California or Oregon or Costa Rica, or by his partner, Billy Cusimano, out east. No guns, no crime, no corrupt politicians. Just good, high-quality dope from a crew of unrepentant hippies. McLeod and Cusimano had a profit-sharing scheme for their employees. When Big Billy came out west sometimes, you thought you were looking at the Ben and Jerry of dope dealers.

 
; McLeod did what I asked with the money. At least, most of it. The rest he put in the market, with his own. And, needless to say, no one could ever have predicted what would happen with that. By 1986 our position in Microsoft alone was more than enough to satisfy each and every demand I made for the Krosney family, and that was when I began to grow rich myself.

  As for who the Krosneys thought was the source of the money that came their way, I don’t guess we’ll ever know.

  But we may get a hint, if they show up at the parole hearing.

  That day, however, not knowing how much money we were to make, and how easily, McLeod, his blue eyes on mine, took my five thousand back, then counted out another two-point-five.

  “Employee matching plan, M. You get health insurance and retirement, too.”

  It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

  5.

  All through the eighties I ran weed for Mark McLeod and paid money to the Krosneys. I did runs east, posing, among many others, as a San Francisco lawyer’s wife, following her husband to his new Wall Street job with the furniture (we bought an entire house from a department store in San Francisco); as a new Ph.D. going to take a teaching job at NYU (a forged job offer signed by Brademas and a lease on a West Village apartment in the glove compartment); and as a UPS cross-country truck driver (a straight job for which I took a tractor-trailer driving course advertised on late-night TV in the identity of a male).

  But my great breakthrough came in 1985, when a run went bad. Mark’s forger was arrested in Sausalito, and among his papers was the license I was running east on, as the male proprietor and driver of Bicoastal Movers. Our routine was to check in on a pay phone every two hundred miles or so, and my tipoff came as I approached Chicago. It was pure luck; I doubt if the DEA was more than a half hour away when I turned north. I abandoned the truck in Milwaukee, carrying thirty keys in two garbage bags, and caught a ferry to Muskegon. Then I bought a backpack, shoes, and a sleeping bag in an Army-Navy, and packed the full weight across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan on foot. And on the other coast, I chartered a Jay 29 and single-handed it to Cleveland.