Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories

by Howard Marks

  The drive to the jail is short; everything is very close in La Paz. The jail, or Edificio M. Sobarzo, is an old hospital with thick walls and a lot of police hanging around outside. They take us out of the car at gunpoint, it is around four o’clock now, and I scream for Andrew to come with me. He is dragged away and the district prosecutor takes my purse and finally looks through – stops and takes out my makeup case, now empty of drugs. He then looks over my diary and I get weak in the knees – all my notes about methedrine madness and heroin. He confiscates it and I am led to a cell isolated from the rest of the jail. There are at least thirty male eyes following me – the cell they lead me to looks very small – perhaps it is a single cell for me alone. I start to panic as they open up the huge barred door and push me into a dark hole – goodbye sunlight, goodbye dark-eyed girl, you were so free so free, and the door swings shut with me wondering what in the fuck is going on.

  From: Shaman Woman, Mainline Lady: Women’s Writings and the Drug Experience, eds Cynthia Palmer and Michael Horowitz, 1982

  Poor Mexico, so far from God and so near to the United States

  Porfirio Diz

  Howard Marks

  Disappearing Dope Dealers

  SERIOUS DOPE DEALERS occasionally need to disappear, to evade the forces of law and order, to become fugitives from injustice.

  Disappearance, generally, is simple: jog over a Balkan minefield. Even if cheating mortality is neither permitted nor desired, most potential vanishers can still take the hardcore option of checking into any Third World prison under a false name. One might have to forget heterosexuality, good nosh and breathtaking vistas; but there’s plenty of dope, libraries and gymnasiums. Most dope dealers, however, prefer freedom, so serious thought is necessary when determining to scarper from the Old Bill.

  The two most important parameters relating to successful disappearance are where one is and what one looks like. At a location where you’ve never been and where no one who knows you ever visits, it doesn’t matter what you look like; if you don’t look like yourself, it doesn’t matter where you are. Of course, if escaping the criminal injustice system, there might not be that much time available to travel elsewhere, unless on bail. And it’s always a mistake to make a dash for the ports or airports. To disappear, just rent a bedsit and stay inside until your appearance is completely altered by growing (or shaving) a moustache and beard, adopting a radically new hairstyle, and varying the takeaway diet. Bedsits can be boring, so fill those idle moments by applying to the DVLC in Swansea for a few provisional driving licences. Use any names that come to mind. I once obtained one in the name of Elvis Presley. The Swansea computer didn’t bat an eyelid; it didn’t remember the 1950s. Get loads of junk mail in different names. Join cheesy clubs and get bits of plastic that look like credit cards. Get real. Get a life. Get a few lives.

  Different clothes will be necessary but are easily acquired later, as are walking-sticks, crutches, eyepatches, scars, wigs and shades. Wheelchairs and regular glasses are a bit harder. Walk into an optician, and he’ll say you need glasses. He makes money that way. The scientific community has apparently established beyond doubt that marijuana causes everything from sterility to crazed nymphomania, including long sight. So when I was on the run I smoked several more and stronger joints than usual and had my eyes tested. A special pair was made. Although they made things rather blurry (except when I was stoned), they dramatically changed my appearance from dope dealer to geography teacher.

  Take a driving test with one of the provisional licences, get a Post Office savings account with the full licence as identification, then get a bank account. This can be a little difficult as bank managers are nosy bastards, but it should be possible to wing it with some bullshit about having lived abroad all one’s life, or being brought up by drop-out hippie parents in the Scottish Highlands. There’s nothing to lose. The bank manager is worried that he’ll lose money through you, nothing else. He believes you to be the person named in the driving licence, especially if inside the plastic cover you have a photograph of the wife and kids (someone else’s, of course).

  One normally associates disappearing with getting false passports, and they are handy. Various ones are available in the criminal marketplace, but ideally, one wants a passport actually issued by one of the passport offices (so that it withstands today’s sophisticated border checks) and one wants as few people as possible to know the name (so friends can’t grass up).

  Dress up as a cool clairvoyant and sit alone in a village pub reading weird colourful literature. Initiate a conversation with someone about your age and let him know you’re an astrologer, palmist and numerologist, capable of telling his fortune for nothing. You’ll need a few details, of course: date and place of birth, mother’s maiden name, and his travels or travel plans. (Some, you’ll find, will have no intention of going abroad because they don’t trust foreign beer). Go to St Catherine’s House, London, get the birth certificate, and fill in the passport application form. The tricky bit is getting it countersigned by someone who exists. It’s much easier to get it countersigned by someone who doesn’t exist. So rent another bedsit in another name and become a referee. Fill out the passport application forms in your own handwriting (immigration authorities of any country can easily and remotely check with British authorities the handwriting on the passport application form and compare it with your current handwriting). In appropriately different handwriting and ink, fill out the referee’s bit on the form and on the back of the photograph. Post it to the Passport Office. The only check the Passport office is likely to make is to telephone the referee and ask if he’d countersigned the application and photograph, so just sit in the bedsit for ten days waiting for either the call or the passport. The only conceivable future worry is that the person in whose name the passport was would suddenly apply for a passport himself or mess things up in a different way. This can be overcome by using someone very trustworthy who knows you are going to use what should be his passport, will never apply for one, and will back you up in whatever way might be needed.

  Your friend truthfully fills in a passport application form and takes a photograph of himself. He gets his local doctor to sign the photograph and application form as being authentic, then gives the signed form and photograph back to you. Fill in an identical application form in your own handwriting, substitute your own photograph, copy the doctor’s rubber stamp and handwriting as best you can, and fill in the appropriate bits. The passport office might check with the doctor by phone, but his answers will be okay, and you don’t have to rent another bedsit.

  If there’s enough time beforehand to plan a disappearance, some added precautions are sensible. Warn your friends of your intention of visiting somewhere remote for a long time. Then go somewhere else. If you’re pretending to be killed or kidnapped, then remember to first deposit some money (not much) in a bank account and make lots of appointments. Do whatever you can indicate you had no idea what was coming.

  Finally, if in a really tight spot, always remember that no one is bothered by your wearing an outrageous mask (obtainable from any kids’ toyshop) unless you are actually robbing a bank at the time. Wearing an obvious disguise implies you don’t need one.

  James Mills

  The Underground Empire

  DONALD STEINBERG WAS the Henry Ford of the international marijuana industry. He had taken an idea in its infancy, tested it, refined it, reinvented it, applied daring and imagination, and ended up setting standards that would endure through the decade. Barely thirty years old, he was making more money each day than the President of the United States made in an entire four-year term, more than old-time criminals like John Dillinger and Willie Sutton made in a lifetime. In one year alone he grossed more than was taken in all armed robberies throughout the United States. He spent $2 million a year just renting jets, sometimes three at a time, to ferry his money around the country – so much cash he had time only to count the suitcases, figuring roughly a half-million doll
ars per Samsonite.

  When it came to money, no idea was too wild, too impossible, too grand. If the human mind could dream it up, Donald Steinberg could make it work. When he was smuggling 100,000-pound loads of marijuana (worth $20 million dockside) from Colombia on other people’s freighters, he asked, ‘Who needs other people’s freighters?’ And when he had his own freighters, he asked, ‘Who needs Colombia?’ His executives, shippers and horticulturists branched out to Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Africa, Holland, Panama, teaching everyone how to grow their product, how to fly it, ship it, sell it.

  A genius of organization and logistics, Donald Steinberg was importing marijuana up and down both coasts, as many as four freighterloads a day, distributing it through a complex network spanning the North American continent, masterminding a system of procurement, importation, warehousing, shipping and wholesaling that would have been the envy of Sears Roebuck. And he was doing it all in secret, under the noses of police on four continents. He was also doing it without resorting to violence. He prided himself on that. He told himself that what he did was clean crime, hardly crime at all. But somehow, inexplicably, unfairly, violence pursued him. There were beatings, kidnappings, million-dollar ransoms, deaths.

  Dark-haired, skinny, with soft deep-set eyes, Donald Steinberg lived the life of a rock star – private planes, limousines, groupies, weekend parties in Frank Sinatra’s suite at Caesar’s Palace. And he was learning some hard lessons, about himself, about his friends, about deception and dreams. Dennis Dayle hoped to continue the education.

  The most remarkable thing about Donald Steinberg was not his success, extraordinary as that was, but the charismatic spell he appeared to cast over everyone who met him, and many who did not. Every cop, agent or intelligent analyst who had had even a glance at Steinberg’s files came away with awe and the same compelling dream. ‘What I wouldn’t give for just one hour to talk to that guy.’

  The Underground Empire, 1974

  Shana Alexander

  The Game

  Thursday, October 24, 1985. The Courtroom.

  A courtroom is laid out like a cathedral. Members of the public are the congregation, and they are always divided from the clergy by a railing. The jury box takes the place of the choir stalls. In this trial, the jury box is on the left, and opposite it, on the right, is another box, the soundproofed translators’ booth. The raised altar at the back is the province of the judge. Or is he high priest, or grand rabbi? No matter. The question is: Who, and what, is being worshiped here?

  The government calls it the biggest drug and Mafia case ever to come to trial in the United States. The press calls it the Pizza Connection. The trial about to begin here in the United States Courthouse in Manhattan will attempt to prove the existence within the nation’s midst of a conspiracy to import and distribute more than one and one-half tons of pure heroin. The street value of this much heroin, the government has said, is one and two-thirds billion dollars. A small amount of the loot was discovered at the Palermo international airport in a suitcase shipped from New York City. The cash was wrapped in pizzeria aprons, which made the tabloid title almost inevitable.

  The defendants are twenty-two Sicilian-born men, all of them Mafia members or associates, and nearly all of them in the food and pizza business. They will be represented here by twenty-two trial lawyers, members of the criminal defense bar.

  The man whose luck it is to be presiding here is the Honorable Pierre N. Leval. At forty-nine, just off the lengthy and difficult General Westmoreland libel case, the blond, bespectacled, deep-voiced, Roman-faced judge is a richly admired and respected jurist, a man at the height of his powers.

  He indicates the chief defendant, a small, grizzled man seated in the front pew just to the right of the aisle, his back to the room. ‘Gaetano Badalamenti is represented by Mr. Michael Kennedy.’

  A tall, slender man with red-gold hair and gold-wire glasses stands up and tenders the jury a slight bow. ‘Good morning.’ A row of counsel tables has been placed in front of the first pew, just inside the altar rail, and Kennedy occupies the aisle seat, directly in front of his client.

  The evidence in this massive case has taken the government five years to assemble. It includes 55,000 wiretaps, few of them in English. The Sicilian-born defendants arrived only rather recently in the United States, in the 1960s and 1970s. Earlier Sicilian immigrants refer to these newcomers as ‘Zips,’ not an admiring term.

  All but three of the twenty-two defendants are charged with being part of a RICO (Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) conspiracy, a relatively new law that allows the government to charge that apparently unrelated criminals are in fact acting together to further the aims of an overall criminal enterprise. Organized crime itself, or the Mafia, can be deemed such an enterprise. RICO convictions carry very severe penalties.

  The person chosen to deliver the government’s opening statement is Department of Justice Attorney Robert Stewart, forty-nine, a man who has spent his life in law enforcement in New Jersey, and has accumulated an encyclopedic knowledge of this case. Stewart is an austere figure with pale, angular features, black-rimmed glasses, a black suit, and the voice and manner of an undertaker. He stands at a little oak podium that has been wheeled to face the jury box.

  The first four front-row defendants are considered flight risks, too dangerous for bail, and the government has insisted that, for security reasons, they sit together, guarded by marshals. Gaetano Badalamenti, sixty-two, is said to be the most wanted narcotics fugitive in the world, and one time Boss of Bosses of the entire Sicilian Mafia. In short, he is the real Godfather. His elder son, Vito, twenty-eight, sits one seat away to his right. Father and son have been extradited from Madrid. Between them sits Badalamenti’s Number One nephew, Vincenzo Randazzo, extradited from Zurich. The fourth jailed defendant is no relation. Salvatore Salamone, scrawny and pale, in T-shirt and rose-colored glasses, is a small-time hood who has been brought here from federal prison where he is serving a twenty-year sentence for illegal gun possession.

  Normally, all the pews to the left of the aisle are reserved for reporters, sketch artists and the public. This morning the first three rows have been cleared. Alone in the front row sits a slender, muscular man, in gray suit, black tie, knees crossed. Beneath a thick mat of black hair is a face white as a Mexican sugar skull, with alert black eyes. Rudolph Giuliani, thirty-nine, is United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Giuliani is the composer of this entire opera. He has arranged and rehearsed this morning’s rousing overture. He will be the mostly invisible maestro of the whole show to come.

  Prosecutor Stewart grips the microphone tightly, runs his finger around a too-tight shirt collar, and in a flat voice, with minimal gestures, begins to tell a story. It is really a simple tale, he says: one single commodity bought, shipped, sold, replenished. But the numbers are huge. Stewart mentions ‘over a ton of pure heroin worth over $333 million, a third of a billion dollars, in the space of little over a year.’

  A group of individuals in the New York-New Jersey area formed a joint business venture, Stewart continues. They then got together with a friend overseas and asked: Can you provide us with this commodity? The overseas friend called his friend and said he wanted to buy a certain raw material, then manufacture it into a commodity and transport it to America, where it would be sold to customers. No checks, no bank accounts; the business was to be all cash.

  ‘That’s all that happened, ladies and gentlemen, month in and month out. But the commodity’ – he pauses for as long as he can bear – ‘the commodity was massive amounts of contraband. And all the individuals engaged in the enterprise were members of the Mafia, or associates of Mafia members, both in Sicily and in the United States.’

  The business venture, says Stewart, came about in this fashion. After the breaking of the French Connection, in the late 1960s the Zips gradually took over heroin distribution in the United States. American Mafiosi did not touch drugs, not dire
ctly; it was too dangerous. They left that to the lean, hungry newcomers.

  Mountains of cash earned from the drug trade were collected and boxed by a subsidiary group of restaurant and pizzeria owners in New Jersey. These men, also recent Sicilian immigrants, used their contacts in Italy and Switzerland to set up a money-laundering operation that moved millions of dollars into the secret Swiss bank accounts of the Sicilian Mafia warlords.

  Such, according to Stewart, is the case the government will prove. The evidence, he says, has two themes. One deals with the mechanics of smuggling: how you get the drugs in, the money out. He promises that the government will show in detail how these defendants moved more than $40 million in cash to Sicily alone. This does not include money sent to Brazil, he adds with a thin smile.

  ‘The second theme involves the dynamics of the Mafia . . . the secret criminal organization which provided the cement which held this conspiracy together.’ The Mafia is extremely disciplined, Stewart explains. These men had no ability to enforce their contracts under law. But they had a secret criminal society, and Mafia discipline is so strict it enables a man to walk down a dark alley with $1 million in cash and fear no ambush.

  The leader was Gaetano Badalamenti, of Cinisi, a small town west of Palermo, Sicily. He supplied the men in New York and New Jersey with heroin between 1978 and 1980, ‘when he was compelled to relocate to Brazil.’ Hearing this, Badalamenti worms his big head around to the left to gaze mildly upon the prosecutor and jury. He has pebbly ivory skin, a grim mouth, eyes like lumps of coal; the unreadable visage of a Pharaoh.

  The Pizza Connection, 1988

  CHAPTER SIX

  WITH IT

  James Lee

  I Learn to Inject Morphia

  Before commencing with my story in its proper order, I will say a few words about the drug habit generally.