Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories

by Howard Marks

  HILIFE: Do you have a college degree?

  FORCADE: No, I don’t have a college degree. In fact, I don’t even have a high-school diploma, but I’ve always been a heavy reader, and I have information and knowledge which is worth far more than a college degree. The kind of education I have can only be gained by experience, and is worth more than any college degree. I’m sure there are many people who would trade a college degree for what I know.

  I’m as successful within my field as a movie star or a rock star is in their field. I’m at the top of my profession and I’m wealthy. I mean I’m potentially wealthy. Admittedly, right at the moment I’m broke, but a lot of movie stars and rock stars have had as much money go through their hands. I’ve done just fine.

  HILIFE: Do you consider yourself a connoisseur of dope?

  FORCADE: I think almost anybody who can hoist a joint to their mouth thinks they’re a connoisseur of dope. But I’ve had much wider experience with dope and much more access to it and I’ve had a variety of experiences so I might be a connoisseur.

  HILIFE: What are your favorite smokes?

  FORCADE: I feel about dope the way I feel about music. I’m constantly looking for a new song, you know. Colombian is heavy, overwhelming and stupefying. I kind of like the lightness of Mexican. And the smell of Mexican. It’s always very nostalgic to me, you know, because it was what I first started with. One thing I miss is the Vietnamese. You know, I once had some buddies who were involved in this Vietnamese smuggling, and it was one of my early successes in smuggling. And I really wouldn’t mind getting some Vietnamese once the country gets stabilized.

  HILIFE: Are there more profitable things to smuggle than dope?

  FORCADE: Well, it’s interesting that you say that, because a few years ago when they had the sugar shortage some smugglers found it infinitely more profitable to be smuggling sugar across the Caribbean than dope. I’ve come in contact with people in Florida who are third- and fourth-generation smugglers. Marijuana is their gig now. Their fathers smuggled rum and Scotch and their grandfathers were smuggling gunpowder and slaves. It’s one way for somebody who’s smart, and ambitious, to raise themselves up out of obscurity and inequality. For the hippies of today, it’s like it was for the Irish and the Italians of the twenties and thirties. It’s a way to get a foothold in society. Smuggling is something that’s been going on for several thousand years and it attracts a certain type of mentality, in the same way that there have always been musicians and there’ve always been prostitutes and there’ve always been politicians. There’s a certain segment of the population that will probably always be attracted to smuggling.

  HiLife, vol. 1, no. 12 & vol. 2, no. 1, 1979

  Robert Davies

  Perfection She Dances

  THE HASH,WHEN it arrived, was supposed to have come from a village somewhere between Sandra Kou and Asku to the north of Kashgar, but I doubted if the Germans really cared. Their relief was visible, and they could now get to work pressing and packing and preparing to leave. The hash had been sent in muslin bags, ten kilos of olive-green sticky pollen, freshly shaken from the bush and moulded by hand into balls the size of grapefruit. It smelt beautiful, but smoking it in its current state was useless.

  The THC (tetrahydrocannabinol, the active constituent of marijuana) had not been activated or released and, without that, there was no getting stoned. Its pollen state also meant that it was extremely bulky, and thus difficult to conceal. To release the THC it was necessary to put it under pressure, to create an internal heat that broke down the walls which trapped the drug’s potency. This process consequently reduced its volume and turned it black, making it look like the stuff everybody’s familiar with.

  The Germans all but disappeared from our late-night drinking sessions, preferring to use the hours of darkness to do their work. The pollen had an incredibly sweet and pungent odour that stank their room out, so it was best to be busy when there was less likelihood of the room girls barging in unannounced. Marius and Gerhard liked to press by foot. They would pack a bag with about half a kilo at a time and tie it tight. Then, while one of them sat down and turned the bag over and over and over again, the other would tread on it repeatedly, putting as much weight on it as he could. Every so often the dope was packed tighter and the bag retied. If the room was warm, about an hour of constant turning and pressing would cause the pollen to go really tacky and solid, sticking to the bag and behaving like putty. This was then turned out into a prepared tray of the size and thickness that was required which had been lined with a sheet of cling film. Another sheet was placed over the top, and it was then rolled out, using a bottle, until it was a flat, uniformly thick plaque of hash.

  The Germans had each bought holdalls with removable bottoms from stiff card that gave the bags their shape. These bases were covered in a plastic which, with care, could be taken off without damage, and the board removed. A new board was made with a compartment in the centre. Hash was pressed out into the shape and size of the compartment, heat-sealed using cling film and a lighter, wrapped in tape and inserted into the space. Another piece of card was glued over the top, and the whole thing put back into the plastic. Carefully resealing it, the whole thing was then slipped back into the holdall, virtually identical to the original and unlikely to be discovered by nosy custom bods. Or at least that was the idea. It was always said that if they were intent on catching you, it didn’t matter where you put it.

  The problem was that these boards could only take about 250g at most, so other hiding places had to be found. Marius, Gerhard, Don and Arno had been doing this for years, and were well rehearsed in the art of concealing dope. They had been busy for a long time buying books around town – in particular, nice books with hard covers made out of thick card.

  New books were much better than old ones, because it was easier to match up new materials than old stained ones. Back at the hotel these were painstakingly taken apart, using damp cottonwool and a scalpel. The card was removed and a new one was made, capable of stashing 100g or so.

  Another efficient ploy was the Campbell’s soup tin method. Many a traveller would at some time or another resort to eating canned foods so it was not unusual for customs officials to see bags containing cans of sardines or cooked ham and the like. The good thing about cans was that they could hold anything from 300g up to a kilo, and were relatively quick and easy to work on. The required tools were a fine-toothed file and superglue. The lip on one end of a can is actually a tongue-and-groove joint and when the lip is filed down evenly, it eventually releases the joint and the top pops out. The contents could then either be eaten or thrown away, depending on taste, and a lump of hash put in its place, nicely sealed up in cling film. The top would then be glued back in place and sanded down to take away any residue and tell-tale marks. Nothing could be simpler.

  Perfection She Dances, 2001

  Charles Nicholl

  The Fruit Palace – 2

  SHE WAS OVERWEIGHT, tired and puff-faced, with a mouth turned down by the way things had gone. She wore glasses, and slacks that were too tight at the thighs. Somewhere behind it all you could see she had been pretty once, and the sharpness still flashed in her eyes like a zoo animal’s memory of the jungle. Her eyes were sunk in sallow, mauvish shadows. She lived in a half-finished modern apartment out in Quinta Paredes, towards the airport. It smelt of plaster and oil-paint. The new doors had warped and wouldn’t close properly.

  I gave her the perica. This seemed to be my act at the moment: a notebook in one hand, a little package of powder in the other. I explained that I was writing a book about the cocaine trade. She said, ‘Sure.’ She followed the first stiff hit of coke with a small chaser, and by the time she was laying out the third rail the sloth had gone from her face and hands, and she wasn’t slurring her words any more. She spoke fluent English in a Spanish-Yankee accent. Her voice was lovely. If you closed your eyes she was beautiful, tough and titillatingly foreign. She was Rosalita the Mule, the best in t
he business, who had walked cocaine through the US customs forty-three times and never got caught. Then you opened your eyes and you saw a pale faded woman in a woollen cardigan, huddled beside a single-bar electric fire. I suppose in the smuggling business that’s what you call good cover.

  She was from Oviedo, a small town in the Cantabrian mountains of northern Spain. Her father was a local lawyer. She had come to the States in the 1960s. A cousin had made it big in San Francisco, importing clothes from Mexico. He came back to Oviedo once a year, trailing the scent of success, bearing huge vulgar toys for the children. It had always been his promise that one day Rosalita would come and work for him in ’Frisco (as he persisted in calling it), and she would see the cable cars and bridges and deep blue bay of la ciudad mas hermosa en el mundo. And one day that’s what happened. Cousin Bartolomeo wrote to say he could get her papers, she could come and work as an assistant in one of his Mexican boutiques. She landed in San Francisco in 1967, two days short of her seventeenth birthday. This made her in her early thirties now: she looked ten years older.

  The cable cars were fine, and the Golden Gate Bridge was too, even if it was shit-brown rather than gold, but Cousin Bartolomeo did not come up to expectations. ‘He was all big talk and shiny suits, but he was real mean. He wanted me because I was cheap. For a year he didn’t pay me at all, only room and board. I was just cleaning, and doing odd jobs for him. He called me his china. He tried to get me to do other things too, you know, dirty things . . .’ She raised an enquiring eye at me. My pen hovered foolishly over the notebook. ‘I was pretty then,’ she said, fixing me with a hard look that dared me to mumble that she still was.

  She was also sharp, and it soon came to her notice that Cousin Bartolomeo had other interests besides peasant-style Mexican dresses. For one thing he was dealing in ‘wetbacks’, illegal Mexican immigrants, so-called because the traditional way of crossing the border was by swimming the Rio Grande. He was selling passage into the US, selling false documentation – that was probably how he’d got papers for Rosalita – and he was setting up cheap illegal labour for his business friends. The other iron, the one which really opened Rosalita’s eyes, was pornography: cheap, inventive hard-core material produced in Tijuana, smuggled in along Bartolomeo’s supply routes, and sold under the counter down Broadway, San Francisco’s sex street. ‘I’ve seen some things,’ said Rosalita, ‘but this was really filthy.’ Her voice curled like a tendril round the word ‘feelthy’.

  ‘So one day I went to Bartolomeo. I said, “I want a job and a salary.” And before he could say no, I said, “If you don’t I tell the family back home about the porno.” He couldn’t believe I’d sussed him. It’s like he didn’t even think I had a brain.’

  The following Monday morning she was behind the counter in one of Bartolomeo’s Mexican clothes shops, the one up in chic Sausalito, across the Golden Gate. She got her own apartment, lived smart. She despised the pot-heads and the acid-freaks, the Haight-Ashbury flower people, the love-ins and be-ins, all the stuff which made San Francisco a byword in the late sixties. ‘I kept right away from all that shit. I was so straight. Like they say, straight as a suicide falling.’

  She was good at her job, and a couple of years later, when Bartolomeo was expanding his legitimate business front, he put her in charge of a new store. This was selling clothes, weavings and upmarket tipicos from Guatemala. From now on she travelled regularly to Guatemala City, to buy from the local shops and dealers and from the Indian markets nearby.

  Up to now she was 100 per cent legitimate. ‘OK, I knew the money behind the Guatemala shop was dirty, but I was clean. Everything declared, everything above board, every cent of import tax paid.’

  Then, in the fall of 1970, she met Chick. Chick was a Colombian boy, a paisa from Medellin. His real name was Ernesto – ‘just like Che’ – but his family had always called him Chico, and he had effortlessly Americanized this into Chick. ‘That was Chick all over,’ she said. ‘He could fit like a glove over any scene. That’s why he was one hell of a smuggler.’ Not that Rosalita knew anything about that when this young, handsome, dandified boy came into the shop. They got talking. He became very interested when she told him about her trips to Guatemala. He said he had very good contacts in Colombia, who could supply her with the kinds of goods she sold in the shop. The next week he came back with business cards, addresses, lists of arts and crafts shops, the whole bang shoot. He really did seem to have good connections. Rosalita was in love, Cousin Bartolomeo was agreeable, and a couple of months later she made her first trip to Bogotá. The night before she left, Chick gave her a beautiful leather travelling case. For good luck, he says, and kisses her sweetly on the cheek.

  She flew down to Bogotá, met Chick’s contacts, bought an impressive selection of moderately priced ruanas, dresses, wall-hangings, etc., and flew back into San Francisco. As usual she carried as much as possible as personal baggage, and the rest she air-freighted back. When she got back Chick plied her with questions. How had it been, getting through customs? Had there been any problems clearing the stuff she’d freighted? And so on. In fact, Rosalita said, there had been rather more questions than there were when she came back from Guatemala. This was late 1970: there was only a trickle of cocaine coming up from Colombia, but there was already a lot of marijuana, and Colombia was undoubtedly on the customs list of suspicious provenances.

  But they didn’t search you? Chick asked. No, of course not, said innocent Rosalita. As a matter of fact she knew the customs man quite well.

  Chick danced around, and kissed her, and said, ‘You’re perfect, baby! You’ve just made us millonarios! He picked up the travelling case he had given her. The four little rubber studs on the bottom unscrewed, the base came away, and there was a neat little compartment inside. For a moment she thought she’d been set up. But there was nothing in it. Chick said, ‘You just carried thin air into the States from Colombia. Next time, baby, you carry in $25,000.’

  ‘You want me to carry in money?’

  ‘Plata de polvo,’ Chick laughed. Powder money.

  Rosalita was shocked. She could just about handle dope: some of her upmarket friends smoked. But cocaine. That was on the outer periphery of the drug world, something she vaguely associated with junkies, blacks, jazz musicians. Chick said, ‘Trust me,’ and he also said, ‘Try some.’ Rosalita did both. Two months later she flew in from Bogotá with 31b of Huanaco White cocaine packed in a long thin wedge in the underbelly of her travelling case. It was Rosalita’s first run, and it went like a dream. ‘And, you know, I’m not sure which got me higher. That first hit of perica Chick gave me, or that first run through customs.’

  It was a very tight operation. The supplier in Bogotá was one of the clothing wholesalers Chick had introduced her to. He had a warehouse full of ruanas and he had a regular supply of high-grade cocaine. Rosalita wouldn’t tell me anything about him: ‘He’s still active, you’d better not know about him.’ The cocaine was packed by him, at his warehouse, in the course of their legitimate business. No money changed hands then: it was sent by Chick from San Francisco, a perfectly straight-up money draft. As soon as Rosalita brought the cargo in, Chick buffed it lightly with mannite, and laid it off as 41b to a wholesaler in San Francisco, another Colombian, who hailed from the southern department of Huila. The ‘Huila Dealer’, as Chick called him, paid $8,000 a pound. Chick was buying it in Bogotá for $4,000 – a highish price in those days, but it included the packing and no-hassle facilities. ‘It was nothing huge,’ Rosalita said. ‘We weren’t greedy. It was the simple, classic run – buy, carry, sell: minimum people, maximum cover.’ And it may not have been huge, but over a couple of years Rosalita did that run ten times, clearing about twenty grand each time. Overheads were zero, of course. All the expenses of the trip were picked up unwittingly by Cousin Bartolomeo. He for his part was happy with the profits from his Colombian shop, ‘Andes’, and on the first floor above the Guatemala shop in Sausalito.

  Sometimes,
for luck, she varied the run. ‘Sometimes I carried in el conejo.’ I looked up in surprise. In a rabbit? She laughed and pouted. ‘Si, hombre. El conejo. I brought the stuff in up inside me.’ Of course – conejo is the South American equivalent of ‘pussy’. She was referring to what the customs boys call ‘vaginal caches’. I refrained from asking her how much she brought in on these occasions. Not, I imagine, 3lb. She also carried it sewn in ribs in her bra.

  These, like the false-bottomed case, were the simplest kind of mule work there is. You just hide the stuff in the last place they’ll look. If they bring out the screwdrivers and the torches your number’s up, but any lesser degree of searching and questioning you can get away with. This kind of mule work is only worth it with high-density, high-profit merchandise, like precious jewels and cocaine. A pound of grass is hardly worth it, and you’d look pretty conspicuous with it stuffed up your bra.

  They contemplated broadening their horizons. The other method obviously available to them was to import the cocaine in one of the crates of woollens and weavings which Rosalita air-freighted from Bogotá. The plus of this was that you could bring in much higher volume. The minus was that crates from Colombia were routinely searched before clearing customs, mainly because freight traffic was the main smuggling mode for marijuana. It was just too risky, they decided. Then the ruana-man in Bogotá came up with a bright idea. Impregnating the ruanas with a solution of cocaine. When the solution dried, the cocaine deposit nestled invisibly in the deep woollen pile of the ruanas. At the other end the ruanas were soaked once more and the cocaine recovered in solution.

  But before they could put this into effect, Rosalita had her first near miss. She had the cocaine in the false-bottomed case, and she got a real going-over at customs. ‘He had all my stuff out of the case, and he was pushing and prodding. Luckily we’d just put new rubber studs in the bottom, and they were real stiff. They didn’t bust me, but they sure scared the shit out of me. You know, running drugs is all up here in your head, it’s all good attitude. You convince yourself, you’re three-quarters there to convincing the customs man. I was good, there’s no doubt. I knew the ropes, I’d brought in legitimate imports for years. I felt right. When I started wearing glasses I felt even better. Not too smart, not too ragged. Just be what I am. That’s the secret of smuggling, one big lie with lots of little truths around it.