by Joe Field
At the end of the tour, the director shuttled me into a small group room, where five patients were sitting in a semi-circle facing a single empty chair. The director introduced me as Mr. Cooper Smith, a radio reporter from MPR news. They greeted me warmly, and I thanked them for their time and their courage in sharing their stories with me. The director stepped out, leaving just the six of us.
I gave them some additional background information about myself, and told them how the interview would flow. Once all the administrative details were settled, I placed my voice recorder on a table in the middle of the room. I extended my thumb up to see if everyone was ready. Once all five of their thumbs were up, I hit the record button.
“I’m sitting here today at the Plymouth Drug Addiction Rehabilitation Center with five courageous people. They come from different parts of Minnesota, but they share a common story. This is a story of their addiction to the drug known as heroin. Could everyone please say your first name, age, and where you are from?”
“Aaron, 24, and I’m from Saint Cloud.”
“Patrick, 45, from Crookston.”
“Elizabeth, 33, and I’m from Eden Prairie.”
“Steve, 21, from Moorhead.”
“Kelly, 28, and I’m from Rochester.”
“Thank you all for agreeing to meet with me today. I know you have all suffered through difficult addictions, and I’d like to ask you a few questions so our listeners can understand the true effects of using heroin.”
“First question: how bad is the heroin problem in Minnesota right now?”
“It’s crazy.” Aaron sat up straighter from his slouched position as he answered. He wore a St. Cloud State University t-shirt and had a tattoo on his inner forearm of the outline of the state of Minnesota.
“It’s everywhere,” added Elizabeth. She was wearing all black, and had long, black hoop earrings. Although she was thirty-three, she looked like she could have been in her mid-forties.
“You wouldn’t believe the people who are using it,” said Steve.
“What type of people?” I asked.
“Regular people. The kind you might run into at the grocery store or post office. People from good families,” replied Steve.
Steve also wore a university t-shirt, this one for the Dragons football team of Minnesota State University of Moorhead. I wondered if he had been a lineman, given his stout build. He wore a massive sports watch on his left wrist.
“What led you all to heroin? Is there a gateway drug?”
“Prescription pills,” said Kelly.
“Which ones?”
“Vicodin for me,” Kelly replied, chewing her gum. Her frizzy bleach blonde hair shot out in all directions.
“OxyContin,” said Patrick. The others nodded their heads.
Patrick looked like he had just come in from plowing the fields. He wore a John Deere trucker hat and cowboy boots.
“How do you go from prescription pills to heroin?”
“People think prescription pills are harmless, and that they make you feel calm and relaxed,” said Elizabeth. “Then, they either become too hard to get, or too expensive. At that point, I switched to dope.”
“I started by taking Vicodin every day,” said Aaron. He looked down at the tattoo on his arm while he spoke, refusing to make eye contact. “Then, I needed more so I tried taking OxyContin. When that was no longer sustainable, someone offered me heroin. I was reluctant at first, because I am from a good family, and I’m no junkie. But, I couldn’t say no. I was already physically addicted to the opium, and I couldn’t stand to face the withdrawal.”
“One of my friends in high school had serious medical problems,” said Steve. “The doctors gave him all sorts of pain medicine. He shared OxyContin with me, and that’s how I got hooked.” Steve began twisting the watch on his wrist.
“Elizabeth, you said the prescription pills got too expensive, but how much does heroin cost?” I asked.
“As cheap as five dollars a bag,” she replied.
“The same price as a pack of Marlboro Reds,” said Patrick.
“Heroin is as easy to find as weed. People deal it all across Minnesota in the parking lots of every Walmart and Dairy Queen,” said Aaron.
“The best product on the market can go up to twenty dollars for a bag,” said Steve.
“What is the best product out there right now?”
“Brown Sugar,” replied Steve.
“What makes it the best?”
“People say it’s the purest product you can find. It gives you the best high.”
“How do you usually consume it?”
“Everyone starts by snorting it,” said Aaron. “It’s in a powder form, and you snort it like cocaine. After that, most people switch to injecting.”
“Why injecting?”
“The rush you get when it hits your veins is euphoric,” said Kelly.
“Once you shoot it, there is no going back to sniffing it,” said Patrick. He took his trucker hat off and set it on his lap, revealing a pasty white forehead that clashed with his tan cheeks and nose.
“Nothing in the whole world feels as good as injecting heroin, especially the first time,” said Aaron.
The group fell silent. Most of them had a faraway look in their eyes, as if they had all gone back to that first big high. I shifted in my chair uncomfortably.
“How much were you doing per day?” I asked, breaking into their reminiscences.
“With the cheaper bags, the five-dollar variety, I could do up to forty bags per day. A 200-a-day habit,” said Kelly.
“With the better product, like Brown Sugar, you end up doing around ten hits per day,” said Aaron. “At twenty dollars a pop, that is still a 200-a-day habit.”
“What did a normal day look like for you when you were using it?”
“My whole day was a quest to find the drug or to find money to buy more of it,” said Steve.
“The only thing in life that mattered was the drug,” said Patrick.
“What does the high feel like?”
“It’s incredible,” said Elizabeth. She fiddled with her earrings while she talked. “I can’t explain how good it felt.”
“Nothing comes close to it. Not prescription drugs, alcohol, or even sex,” added Aaron.
“What about the low?”
“Worst feeling in the whole world,” said Kelly.
“When I’m low, I just want to die,” said Steve.
“There is an unbelievable physical craving,” said Patrick. He started tapping the heel of his right cowboy boot on the floor.
“At a certain point, you don’t use it to get high – you use it just to function and survive,” said Elizabeth.
“I used to fall asleep high, and in the middle of the night when the high would go away, it would wake me up,” said Aaron. “I would have to inject again to get back to sleep.”
“What about your families and friends? How did your addiction impact your relationship with them?”
“I had to lie to them constantly,” said Steve. “I would inject in some random place like a city park in the afternoon. By the time I woke up, it would be dark and I would stumble home to my family.”
“Stealing money from my family was the only way I could support my habit,” said Elizabeth.
“My six-year-old daughter found my needles and my spoon,” said Kelly. She munched harder on her chewing gum. “She showed them to my mother, who tried everything she could think of to get me to stop. She kept telling me I was a terrible influence on my daughter, but I just didn’t care. I mean, I loved my daughter, and I obviously still do, but I needed the physical high.”
“One of my closest friends overdosed while shooting up with me,” said Patrick.
“I talked one of my friends into trying heroin,” said Aaron still not looking up. “He ended up sharing a needle with someone who had HIV. Now my friend has AIDs, and it’s all my fault.”
“Why did you stop?”
“I was arre
sted,” said Aaron.
“To regain custody of my daughter,” added Kelly.
“What about the treatment? Why come to this Center here in Plymouth for help?”
“To save my life,” said Patrick.
“To reduce my sentence, and possibly avoid jail,” said Aaron.
“Was the high worth it?” I asked.
“No,” said Patrick. “What is the point of ruining my life over a high you get one day, followed by sickness the next?”
“I never, ever, thought I would be a junkie,” said Steve. “It’s depressing.”
“Will any of you use it again once you are out?”
“I pray every day that I won’t go back to that life,” said Patrick.
“I can’t use it again,” said Elizabeth. “If I did, it would kill me.”
“What would you tell someone listening who is thinking about trying prescription pills or heroin for the first time?”
“Don’t do it!” Kelly yelled as she tightly balled up a handful of her hair.
The room grew absolutely silent. Everyone nodded in agreement, and I could see the pain in their eyes.
Kelly let go of her hair and her arms fell to her lap. “Just don’t ever do it,” she repeated, softer this time, with tears in her eyes.
Chapter 10
Minneapolis, MN
Jimmy chewed on a toothpick as he drove his Cadillac south down Hennepin Avenue. He crossed Thirty-Sixth Street West and entered the Lakewood Cemetery. The cemetery grounds were open for another thirty-two minutes, and he was instructed to meet Agent Sosa behind the Memorial Chapel in exactly two of those minutes. Things hadn’t gone according to his plan recently, and Jimmy knew Sosa would not be happy about it.
Jimmy spotted the large chapel on his left; Sosa said he couldn’t miss it with all its red domes. Those red domes were fading to black with the setting sun. Jimmy turned behind the chapel, and sure enough, the same Ford Crown Victoria he was detained in at the Wisconsin Dells was parked right there. Sosa was sitting in the driver’s seat by himself. Jimmy pulled up. As instructed, he turned off the vehicle and got into the passenger seat next to Sosa.
“Jimmy, what happened?” asked Sosa as soon as he closed the door. “You said you would give us the whole network on this last shipment. Not only did you fail in that part of the operation, but now at least two kilos of heroin have entered the market, and I have nothing to show for it.”
“No, man, you have it wrong.” Jimmy took his toothpick out of his mouth. “I never said I would give you the whole network on this last shipment. I said I would try to convince Smokey to send two guys, one to each reservation with a kilo of Brown Sugar. As we discussed in the Dells, I went straight back to Smokey from Wisconsin and told him to send two drivers instead of one for security reasons. He thought about it, but made other plans to send Tank by himself. I wasn’t involved, so Smokey never shared the details with me.”
“I thought you were his most trusted man. What happened to that?”
“Look, Smokey trusts me completely, but sometimes he just does things without consulting me. What am I supposed to do?”
“You botched this. Things could get a lot worse for you now in the eyes of the federal government,” Sosa said.
“Wait a second. There is some good news – two things, in fact. First, Tank was pulled over by a state trooper up on Highway 59 after he was heading north out of Mahnomen. Tank gave the trooper some lip, and his vehicle was searched. Tank said the trooper nearly found the hidden compartment where he was hiding the product. He had his gun ready to waste the guy. Then, Tank saw there was backup coming. When Tank told Smokey about the incident, Smokey called me into his office and told me on the next shipment he would implement the two-man rule. He wants Marcus and I to make the deliveries. That is your chance to do it.”
“This is good news,” said Sosa, relaxing a bit. “When is the next shipment?”
“Smokey told me the guys in Chicago are running behind on getting the product up from Mexico. Captain told Smokey we won’t be able to get the next shipment until the third or fourth week of August, a little over a month from now.”
“I want the exact date and location of the deliveries as soon as you find out about them,” said Sosa. “Now, what was the second piece of good news?”
Jimmy pulled the recorder out of his pocket and handed it to Sosa.
“I got Smokey on tape talking about his supplier, Captain, in Chicago. He also confirmed his relationship to his two biggest dealers. Their names are Jason Red Eagle on Red Lake, and Jonathan Mason on White Earth. From those two men, the entire Indian nation in northern Minnesota is supplied with Brown Sugar. It’s all on the tapes. Smokey even bragged that no police officer could ever touch him now because there is no way anyone would care about the drug problem on those reservations.”
“Good job, Jimmy. At least you got the recording part right, that’s a step in the right direction. Now that we have this, the primary thing we need you to do is deliver the next shipment with Marcus. We can’t wait any longer than next month, nor can we tolerate any additional heroin out on the market.”
“Got it, man. Just make sure you come through on your end so I don’t end up six feet under in that empty burial plot I passed on the way in.”
“Don’t worry. As part of the resettlement package, Uncle Sam has thrown in a pre-paid burial plot for you up near your new home in Anchorage, Alaska,” Sosa said with a snicker. “It’s redeemable at any time, but I personally hope you don’t have to use it until you are a prune of an old man. Just make sure that when you do pass away, you go in the summer. The ground is frozen solid up there in the winter, and it would be hard to dig you a proper hole.”
“Are we done here?” Jimmy said.
“Sure. We’re done. Just come through this time, and I’ll see what I can do to get you somewhere warm, like California or Florida. How do those states sound to you?”
“Okay, man, you get me Florida and I’ll get you Smokey’s whole network. Similar to Alaska, Florida has no state income tax. And, if I’m going to lose my life over your take-down, I’d rather go down dreaming of beautiful women in bikinis on a tax-free Miami beach instead of Eskimos in parkas up in Alaska.”
“I’ll make some calls and see what I can do on Florida for you. Just get me Smokey and his network.”
“I will,” said Jimmy, getting out of the car.
He started to head toward his Cadillac when he heard Sosa roll down his window and call for him.
“Hey, Jimmy. I got something for you,” said Sosa.
When Jimmy turned back to the car, Sosa handed him a small piece of tan leather.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a classy toothpick holder, made by Leather Works in Saint Paul. I thought you should start carrying your toothpicks around in style.”
Jimmy put it in his pocket, shaking his head as he turned away from Sosa. That was all the fun he could take for one night.
He watched Agent Sosa drive his vehicle away. The cemetery was about to close in a few minutes, and it was getting dark and a bit unsettling to be among the dead at night. Once Sosa was out of sight, Jimmy jumped into his Cadillac and turned on the interior lights. He grabbed the toothpick holder out of one pocket and fished some toothpicks out of his other one. He put a new toothpick in his mouth and placed a few others in his new holder. He held the new toothpick holder under the light. Not bad, actually. I can work with this.
Except, that toothpick holder would be a constant reminder that he would soon have to help take down Smokey and the whole crew. Was he conflicted? Maybe he had been before now – but staying out of prison and getting a new life in Florida? Well, Jimmy could get used to that.
Sorry, Smokey. You’re going down.
Chapter 11
Saint Paul, MN
A few weeks had passed since Jesse said he would try to get Roy Cloud for an interview, but he had yet to deliver. It was early August already, and although I had a dece
nt overview of Smokey and his network, I still needed a well-placed source to make the story complete. Roy Cloud was the man who could map out the flow of the drugs from Jason Red Eagle on down throughout the entire reservation. Where is Roy Cloud? Is he on the run? Is he dead in a ditch somewhere?
I was pondering these questions while enjoying a warm caramel roll and a black cup of coffee at Keys Café on Roberts Street, a few blocks away from MPR headquarters. I was scheduled to meet with Bill in his office later today to talk about the story, but I knew I needed more for him. I couldn’t stomach another Wild Bill blow-up today.
My mind had now shifted from Roy Cloud to Agent Sosa, who I hoped would be more willing to share details with me about the case. I had not talked to him since he told me I was on Smokey’s list. I knew he wasn’t excited about my involvement, but I wanted to show him I could be a force multiplier for his investigation.
I fished my iPhone out of my pocket and scrolled through my contacts down to Sosa. Before I could push the call button, my screen lit up with an incoming call – from none other than Jesse himself.
“This must be my lucky day,” I said answering on the first ring.
“Why, yes, Coop. As a matter of fact, you are in luck,” said Jesse. “I finally got in touch with Cloud, and he agreed to meet with you. I told him if he cooperated with you, I would see what I could do about easing up on him for a while.”
“Jesse, that’s such good news. Thank you.”
“Before we go any further, you must understand that Cloud demanded absolutely no police involvement with the interview. He said if he even sees one cop on patrol in the same town you meet in he will leave immediately. That means this all has to happen under the radar. It also means I won’t be involved in the actual meeting. It’ll just be you and Cloud and whoever else he decides to bring.”
“Are you saying I’ll be in danger?”
“Cloud will likely come by himself, because there is no point in him highlighting his relationship with you to anyone else in his tribe. However, Red Eagle and Smokey have guys everywhere, and I mean everywhere. You have to be very careful about where and when you meet.”
