Marching Powder

by Rusty Young

  Suddenly, I heard someone call my name. From out of the corner of my eye I saw two policemen approaching me quickly.

  ‘Thomas McFadden!’ they called again.

  Once more I pretended not to have heard. I continued studying my boarding pass. But when one of the policemen tapped me on the shoulder, I couldn’t ignore it.

  ‘¿Es usted Thomas McFadden?’ he asked. I hardly spoke any Spanish at that time, but I couldn’t pretend not to know my own name.

  ‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘Why?’

  ‘Sígame, señor,’ he said, indicating with his hand that I should follow him. I thought about arguing, but the other passengers in the line were beginning to look around. I wasn’t sure what was going on yet, but I kept my cool.

  I followed the policeman who had spoken to me, and the other one walked behind me. There was no point in trying to escape; I wouldn’t have made it to the terminal door. Besides, I had only just checked in my bags. There was no way that they could have found the drugs already and then traced them to me. As we walked along, I asked them what the problem was, but they couldn’t speak English. They kept repeating the word ‘perros’ and touching their noses.

  I was still quite relaxed at that stage. I didn’t yet know what ‘perros’ meant, but I had dealt with airport police before and had always outsmarted them. I had been doing this drug business since I was a boy. When I was younger, I was like an action man – I could go anywhere in the world with merchandise and never get caught. Sometimes I worked out of India with hashish or heroin, sometimes from Pakistan, but the last few times had been out of South America with cocaine. I would fly over, buy a few kilos through my Bolivian contacts, and then fly back and sell to my contacts in Europe. I never got caught, because I was smart. This time would be no different. I also had a friend in a high place in case things went wrong.

  The two policemen led me through a door, down a set of stairs and then along a dimly lit corridor that ran under the airport terminal. Finally, we stopped outside an office and the policeman in front knocked. A plaque on the door read, ‘Colonel Toro Lanza’.

  ‘Pase,’ ordered a voice from inside. The policeman opened the door. Behind a large desk sat a stern-looking officer with a well-decorated uniform indicating his rank of colonel. He had a commanding presence, and the policemen who had escorted me were obviously afraid of him. They pushed me forward. The colonel looked at me fiercely.

  ‘Siéntese, señor,’ he demanded, indicating the seat in front of his desk. ‘Su pasaporte, por favor.’ I handed him my passport. He inspected my photo and then looked back at me to make sure it matched.

  ‘¿Señor Thomas McFadden, sí?’ he asked, reading my name from the passport.

  I nodded.

  ‘Do you speak Spanish, Señor McFadden?’

  ‘No. Only English.’

  I waited for an explanation of what was going on, but the colonel didn’t look up. He continued flipping through the pages of my passport. I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes before my flight had originally been due to leave. I knew it wouldn’t leave without me – there is a security rule that planes cannot take off with the passenger’s luggage onboard if the passenger isn’t also on the plane. I asked the colonel what was going on, but he ignored me. He began writing down some of the details from my passport on some kind of report.

  The colonel’s office was only partly underground – at the top of the back wall was a window that was just above ground level. Through it, I could hear a plane engine starting up outside. I wasn’t sure if it was my plane, but I started to feel a little worried.

  ‘Please, señor. Is something wrong?’ I asked, and finally, he answered.

  ‘They have found something in your bags, Señor McFadden.’

  ‘Who has?’

  ‘Los perros,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘The dogs. They have detected something in your suitcases.’ I felt my heart sink. But I didn’t panic.

  Just then, the other officers left the room. I leaned forward and put my hands on the colonel’s desk.

  ‘What’s going on, Mario?’ I asked.

  2

  CHANGE OF PLANS

  The colonel’s full name was Colonel Mario Toro Lanza. I had met him through a friend of mind named Tito in Santa Cruz, a city in Bolivia where I had a lot of contacts in the trafficking business. Tito was my best contact – he worked in customs at Santa Cruz Airport. He was an expensive friend, but he always got me through airport security without any problems. Before I did this last run, we met up at our usual spot – the bar at the Continental in Santa Cruz.

  Tito looked exactly the same as when we had been introduced years before. Out of work, he always wore loose-fitting casual clothes because of the tropical heat, as well as gold bracelets and a nice watch. However, you could still tell that he was a cop by his short hair and moustache, which made him look slightly Arabic. All the cops in Santa Cruz had moustaches and wore gold in those days. It was almost part of the uniform. You could spot them a mile away.

  ‘What you are doing back in Santa Cruz again?’ he asked me in his broken English, which was still better than my terrible Spanish. I signalled to the barman to pour a beer for Tito.

  ‘I’m working,’ I answered, refusing a beer myself. Tito raised his eyebrows and smiled. ‘No. I’m serious.’

  The barman stayed out of earshot while I gave Tito my routine about the new fruit juice company I was managing. The previous time I had done a run out of Santa Cruz, I had a lot of spare cash and was looking for ways to expand my operations. I set up a fruit juice business as a front. As company manager, I would be required to travel in and out of South America frequently. The Bolivian Fruit Juice Company S.A. never sold so much as a glass of orange juice. Nevertheless, I had an office, a temporary secretary and faxes from all over the world to prove that it was a very successful business. Tito probably guessed it was a front – he knew I hadn’t called him out to our meeting spot to discuss pineapples and papayas – but that was the way you had to talk to these people. It was all a game; I gave him some nice stories and he pretended to go along with them.

  ‘Show me your passport, please,’ he requested when I’d finished my sales pitch. He flipped through the pages and then said something I hadn’t expected after all the deals we had done together: he wouldn’t be able to help me this time.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The yanquis.’

  ‘The what?’ The way he pronounced the word made it sound like ‘junkies’, but he meant the Yankees. Tito explained that the US government was now heavily involved in fighting its ‘war on drugs’ in Bolivia. It had finally decided to clean up Santa Cruz Airport, which had a very bad reputation for trafficking because of people like himself and me.

  ‘Too many stamps in your passport, my friend. You understand?’ Apparently, things were now a lot stricter and Tito couldn’t guarantee that I would get through safely when customs agents saw how many times I’d been in and out of the country that year.

  At first I thought this was Tito’s way of asking for more money. I offered him an extra fifty per cent. Then I offered him double. When he refused again, I knew it wasn’t about the money. There must have been a real problem with the Americans. I felt my stomach starting to float. Without Tito’s help I was lost. I had already bought the stuff, packed it, pre-sold it and was ready to fly.

  The coke had been sealed up and hidden using a technique that I had thought of myself and that no one else was using at the time. You have to be smart and creative in this business, because whatever new way to smuggle drugs you might hear about, the drug police have already seen it a year ago. They have specially trained personnel whose job it is to think about these things all day, and they have technology for detecting drugs that the public don’t even know about yet, so the only way to get through is to be smarter than they are. The three most important factors in transporting merchandise are the amount you take, disguising the smell, and where you
hide it.

  You should never strap it to your body; that went out in the 1980s. It’s very obvious, even to the untrained eye, when people are loaded up with drugs under their clothes. As soon as an official suspects something, or even if the police do a standard security pat down for weapons, they’ll catch you straight away. If that happens, there’s no way that you can deny the drugs are yours. What judge is going to believe that you don’t know how ten bags of cocaine got taped around your body?

  Swallowing the stuff, known as body packing, is still OK. All sorts of stories go around about the horrible death you die in the airport if one of the capsules bursts in your stomach or gets caught in your intestines, but if the job is done properly, then there’s almost no chance of that happening. If you don’t know how to do it yourself, there are people in the industry who specialise in compressing the cocaine into tight balls and wrapping them so that there’s no way they will accidentally break open. The bigger operators even have special industrial machines that do the job perfectly – a hydraulic press that compacts the merchandise into a cylindrical mould and another machine to seal the product with several layers of the latest-technology plastics that aren’t affected by stomach acid.

  The optimal-size package for swallowing is ten grams. It’s not a pleasant task, but you get used to it after a while. It can take several hours to get the whole lot done – the first few go down OK, but once your stomach starts to get full, it becomes more and more difficult. If you force yourself, then you want to vomit. The packets can be swallowed with water to make it easier, but that also fills your stomach up faster. The best thing to do is to prepare your body by eating lots of fibre in the days before. After swallowing the packets, you mustn’t eat anything that might raise the acid levels in your digestive system or push the packets through too quickly.

  Obviously, as with body strapping, if the police find merchandise inside your body there is no way to deny it’s yours. But there is a lot less chance of the authorities finding it in the first place. The first check they do at an airport, if they suspect that you are body packing, is to press your stomach with their hands. They can usually feel any hard objects with their fingers, so it’s best to swallow the packets two days before flying so that by the time you reach the terminal they are in your intestines, where they are more difficult to detect. The packets will still show up on an X-ray machine, or the police can detain you until your body expels them, but they have to be pretty certain for it to get to that point. Aside from the physical discomfort, the main disadvantage of swallowing is that you can only transport a small amount; six or seven hundred grams each run, or a kilogram at the very most.

  At the same time, you shouldn’t get too greedy in this business; the more stuff you carry, the more space it takes up and the harder it is to hide. I learned that lesson the hard way when I lost forty-five kilos of cocaine in Brazil. But for this run I had exactly five kilos, which was the perfect amount; it was enough to make good money, but I had compressed it so that it was very small and almost impossible to find.

  I had done this by dividing the five kilos into four equally sized lots and wrapping them in a layer of cling plastic – the type people use for keeping sandwiches fresh. I then placed each of these bundles in a friend’s machine press, which had a handle that you turned in order to screw the top down against the base. I tightened it with all my strength, and then re-tightened it at five-minute intervals. The press completely flattened everything in between, so that the cocaine was as thin as cardboard. After half an hour, I unscrewed the press and folded these sheets over a few times and trimmed them with a knife so that the dimensions were exactly right for the compartments they would go into. Then I pressed them for another half an hour. There were about seventy grams left over at the end. I decided to make them into balls for swallowing. It wasn’t much of an insurance policy – that amount would hardly cover the expenses of my trip, let alone the cost of the five kilos – but if I got caught and was sent to prison, I figured I could use it to bribe my way out.

  The next thing to consider is the smell. Sniffer dogs have a sense of smell a hundred thousand times stronger than humans do. And not only are they taught how to find the merchandise, they actually want to find it. The way they train those dogs in South America is by getting them addicted to cocaine. Dogs aren’t used in every airport, and there aren’t enough of them to check every single bag on every single flight in every single hour, but if there is a coke-addicted hound with a big, sensitive nose anywhere near your merchandise, you can be sure it will smell even a tiny molecule of the stuff. So, you have to do absolutely everything you can to stop the smell getting out, just in case.

  After the first layer of plastic cling wrapping, I added a thick coating of chilli powder. Chilli has a powerful smell that throws the dogs off the scent. Then I added another layer of cling film and then another thin layer of chilli powder. The next layer was the completely airtight one made by placing each package between two plastic sheets, which were then melted together along the edges. I did this using my friend’s special machine that they use in Bolivian restaurants for making meatfilled pastries called salteñas. All those layers should have been enough, but for good measure, I wrapped one more layer around, with ground coffee underneath. I mixed the coffee granules with a little water first. When it dries, it sticks evenly around the outside of the plastic like strong glue, forming another airtight layer. Coffee also has a very strong smell that confuses the dogs if they happen to get close enough.

  The final question was where to hide the packages. I now had four compressed, airtight loads of slightly less than one-and-a-quarter kilograms. I hid them very cleverly in my two custom-designed suitcases. You should never use the false-bottom suitcases that you can buy in any flea market in South America; they also went out in the ’80s. I had my cases manufactured in England to my own specifications. They had cost me a lot of money, but they were worth it.

  The secret compartments were in the actual spines of the suitcases, next to the hinges. The spines of the suitcases were so thin that no one would ever think of looking there. The packages fitted exactly, with not an inch to spare. If the police searched me, they would be too busy tapping other parts of the suitcase listening for the hollow sounds that indicate a false bottom to even think that the merchandise might be hidden in the spine. My suitcases could be used only once. After the merchandise had been wedged into place and the spine glued down, no one could get to it without damaging the case. The cops would need to be one hundred per cent certain that they would find something, if they were going to start destroying my luggage.

  As always, I took special care to leave no traces whatsoever when handling the merchandise and the suitcases. The whole operation was performed wearing rubber gloves, and I also wore a shower cap to stop any stray hairs falling into the cases. Afterwards, I threw away the clothes I was wearing. Even a single fibre from your sweater can be matched to you.

  I usually packed and hid the coke so well that I didn’t need to worry about getting caught. I simply paid Tito as an extra precaution. He always put my suitcases on the plane for me so that I didn’t have to check them in or even touch them. And if ever anything were to go wrong, he would have sorted it out for me. However, this time Tito scared me with his talk of the yanquis and by refusing to accept my money. After what he had said, I was convinced that inside help wasn’t merely an extra precaution; it was an absolute necessity.

  ‘I very sorry, my friend,’ Tito repeated. ‘Is too dangerous for both of us. The Americans catch a lot of people with their new drug law Mil Ocho.’

  When he saw my expression, I knew he felt bad for me. He took a long sip of his beer. Tito always did that when he was trying to decide on something. Then he nodded slowly to himself and put down the beer. I knew he had made a decision. ‘OK, wait. There could be solution. But you must go to La Paz.’

  I waited for Tito to continue.

  ‘I have a good contacto for you there. He is
colonel. He is head of airport security in El Alto Airport. Good amigo. We make business together many times. I can call to him. He will help you. Is good, no?’

  I hesitated before answering. As a rule, I never worked with people I didn’t know. It’s too risky. Also, I didn’t know the layout of the airport at La Paz. In fact, I’d never even been to La Paz. However, I had no choice, really. If there were US agents everywhere, I couldn’t do anything without inside help.

  ‘How much would I need to pay him?’

  ‘Is better you decide yourself. That way to avoid the problems.’ Eventually, I nodded my agreement. Tito patted me on the back when he saw that I was still anxious.

  ‘Tranquilo, Thomas,’ he said, writing down the colonel’s number on the back of one of his business cards. He ran a car dealership on the side with his brother. ‘I am ringing him tonight. He will expect you when you have arrived.’

  Tito had never let me down before and it was a good sign that he knew the colonel’s number by heart, but I was still uncertain. He continued to reassure me. ‘No problem, Thomas. No pasa nada. This is Bolivia. OK?’

  I caught a bus that night. The journey to La Paz was seventeen hours and the first part, to the city of Cochabamba, was over a dirt road filled with potholes. During the night, we stopped at several military checkpoints. At one of them, armed soldiers led sniffer dogs through the cabin and over the luggage stowed in the compartments beneath. I pretended to be asleep. My baggage-claim tickets were screwed up tightly in my pocket. There was nothing else linking me to the suitcases; however, I was still a little worried that the dogs might find my merchandise. But they didn’t; the job was perfect.

  After dawn, the bus began its ascent towards La Paz. As we climbed higher and higher up the Andean mountain range, the windows steamed up and the other passengers pulled out blankets they had brought with them. I sat there shivering until we arrived at the terminal just before midday.