Long Way Home

by Cameron Douglas

  Now I’m fully committed to my criminal lifestyle. I carry a real gun. I have a purpose and a plan and a willingness, probably, to fire the gun. I need money, but I’m also pragmatic. I don’t try to go after Pablo Escobar. I go after people who have something I can use, but who I think will put up minimal resistance, like a guy I know named Karl. A friend and I drive to his house in Hollywood, do a bump of crystal in the car, put on ski masks, and come in the door brandishing guns. I feel kind of shitty doing this to Karl, who’s a peaceful guy, but that’s what makes him an easy target, and if you’re in the drug game, these are the things that come with it. It’s as simple as that. Drug dealers can’t call the cops on you. That’s why that world is so violent. You’re on your own, and you take care of yourself. If you present yourself as a target, you’re going to get targeted, eventually. Where you’re weak, that’s where you’re exposed. And there are plenty of drug dealers out there making a lot of money who don’t take very many precautions. That emboldens me. We tie Karl up and take all his shit, which is a relatively modest haul: two ounces of crystal, half an ounce of heroin, and $2,000 in cash.

  Next, a buddy and I hit a dealer who lives in an apartment building in Hollywood, and who stiffed me on an ounce of heroin. My friend Lisa texts me that she’s partying with him, and she leaves the garage door open for us. We come up through the elevator and walk into the apartment. Half a dozen people are sitting around a coffee table getting high. We tell them to lie down on the floor, then I go into the bedroom, where Lisa has told me the guy keeps his drugs and money. The haul is about twice the cash of our last hit, and includes an unregistered Glock 27. Money isn’t my only motivation: I also just want to see if I can pull these things off.

  With our meth network blown, the pal and I decide to start shipping coke instead. It will be to an entirely different set of customers, through an old Dominican friend of mine in New York. This business takes off fast, too. We’re soon shipping two, then four, then six to eight kilos a week. We make $7,000 in profit per kilo. But my coke customers are harder to deal with than my meth customers. The crystal guys were club users grateful for the vastly superior, cheaper crystal I was sending them and happy to front the money. My coke customers are street-savvy, expect me to front the product, and are less forgiving of logistical snafus and delays. They’re also more demanding about the quality of the product.

  I figure that if the DEA has me in its sights, they’ll lose interest now that I’m done selling meth and their leads have gone quiet, but I become more careful. I pay a guy at the airport to load the coke right onto the plane for me. And I hire Leo, an old friend of Dad’s in Santa Barbara, to help me improve on my shipping methods. Leo is a Vietnam vet who wears graduated-lens sunglasses morning, noon, and night. He’s an amazing machinist, a garage tinkerer and beach guy who’s made the legal portion of his living inventing and fabricating things like ride plates for Jet Skis. I drive up to meet with him and give him $10,000 to see what he can come up with. Soon, Leo is modifying stereo equipment to contain hidden compartments and experimenting with different X-ray-proof linings. He makes me a stamp with a double-diamond insignia, which I plan to use to brand the keys I’m selling.

  I also get serious about countersurveillance. Having spent years associating with drug dealers, I have some familiarity with the cat-and-mouse measures they take to keep from getting caught, but I now spend hours browsing websites that sell espionage and counterespionage equipment. I mount cameras outside the house on Cole Crest. I buy a bug detector and white-noise makers, which generate a cone of silence with a five-foot radius. I get a malware program that lets me text someone, and when they open the text I instantly have full access to their phone. I come close to buying a paramotor: a propeller-powered paraglider that fits in a suitcase, and that I could wear on my back if I ever need to escape quickly from the Cole Crest house. I spend hours at the Hollywood Spy Shop on Sunset Boulevard. Erin takes to calling me Inspector Gadget.

  I now have her hire people who don’t know me to do pickups and drop-offs at the P.O. boxes, and I monitor the couriers by hiding tiny digital trackers in both drug shipments and stacks of money, which transmit their speed, altitude, and location. I have half a dozen prepaid Virgin phones, each dedicated to a single supplier or customer and coded with a different-colored star sticker: gold for Emmanuel, green for Gabriel. I insist that anyone I do business with do the same, communicating on phones they use only with me. All of this—the evolution in my approach, my tactics, my technology—is really just an effort to make me feel like I’m going to be okay, when I know, deep down, that I’m not going to be okay.

  I’m now making more money than I need. I set some of it aside but spend most of it, living extravagantly and buying a Ducati motorcycle and a 1962 Chevy Nova, which I spend tens of thousands of dollars to soup up. Displays of material wealth are a tightrope, since Dad knows I don’t have regular work. I don’t want to come off as too flashy, which would spark his suspicions, but I want to show that I can survive and even thrive. Erin and I still have his BMW, but during his trips out west from New York, I make a point of displaying the Ducati and the muscle car and the glass-walled luxury rental perched in the Hollywood Hills. He has no idea they’re the spoils of drug money.

  * * *

  —

  My anxiety about a possible federal investigation intensifies. One day, I’m circling the BMW with my bug detector, and it lights up like a Christmas tree. In the wheel well, I find a GPS locator. I get an adrenaline rush from the spy-versus-spy, but my paranoia is constant and mounting. Erin starts to worry about my mental health. She catches me standing on the roof of the house wearing tighty-whities, holding a handgun, and doing bug sweeps.

  I’m being watched. I’m being followed. One afternoon, I leave a newsstand I frequent on a corner near Fairfax and Beverly, and to avoid traffic I turn into a parallel alley that goes toward Laurel Canyon. A car is parked at the alley’s entrance, in view of the newsstand, and as I roll slowly past it, threading the narrow alley, I see two big guys with cop mustaches in the front seat. They look furtive. We make eye contact, and there’s a moment of mutual understanding: they’re here to watch me, and I know it.

  Soon after, I’m on my way to a club with Jay, and we pull into a gas station; Jay waits in the car while I go to buy water, passing a homeless guy who asks me for money. Inside, I stop to browse the magazine rack. Through the window, I can see Jay and the car, still at the pump.

  Suddenly, the homeless guy is standing next to me.

  “Nice wheels,” he says.

  I ignore him.

  “Hey can you help me out? I’m trying to find a place to stay. I’m waiting for my friend.”

  Crickets from me.

  “Yeah, because I’m waiting for him to take me to the meth house.”

  I look at him. “What?”

  “Yeah, the meth house, where they make it.”

  I give him a closer look. His eyes have the aviators’ tan line shared by every cop in California, from wearing sunglasses all day.

  I say, “Dude, I don’t know what you’re talking about or why you’re talking to me.”

  “I can get good prices.”

  “Get the fuck away from me.”

  * * *

  —

  I decide that we should have better guns for protection. Erin and Gabriel and I go to a shop in Burbank, off Ventura Boulevard, and I buy a Glock 17, a Special Forces–style Desert Eagle handgun, and a Mossberg shotgun with a pistol grip. My criminal record could pose a problem, so I have Erin put two of them in her name and Gabriel put the third one in his name.

  I keep the Mossberg, loaded with six 12-gauge shells, under my bed, within easy reach if I’m ever attacked while sleeping. I have a battle plan. If someone comes for me, I’ll get behind the bed and start firing.

  * * *

  —

  Soon after buying the guns, Erin and I go to get the one Gabriel’s holding, and he says he sold it for cash. It
emerges that he has secretly been harboring a grudge toward me. A few months earlier, the guy who’d gotten us involved in the Stereo nightclub deal in New York fell out with his partners; since Gabriel and I never had paperwork documenting our investment, we’ve stopped receiving dividend checks and no longer get our calls returned by the partners. Gabriel claims I assured him he’d make his money back from the nightclub. He borrowed the money he invested, he says, and now he’s getting heat from his lenders.

  I’m already concerned about Gabriel’s increasing flakiness. He has always impressed me by saving money, but his lifestyle has begun to change. He has become friends with a party kid, going out to nightclubs and doing Ecstasy and GHB, a drug that comes in clear plastic water bottles. You pour out a cap and drink it. If you don’t do too much, you feel great, but drink one cap too many and you’re pissing in your pants and passing out. At three-thirty one morning, Gabriel is arrested at Avalon, a club at Hollywood and Vine, with dealer-level quantities of crystal, coke, pot, and Ecstasy; a pipe; and $2,130 in cash. He’s slipping as a business partner, too. He’s not coming through reliably with coke, and my East Coast customers make it clear to me that this could become a problem. I tell Gabriel he’s putting me in a bad position, and that I’m going to find a new supplier. I start buying directly from Gabriel’s source, a slight, older Mexican guy I know as Nero.

  * * *

  —

  A month later, I’m still unsure about Nero, whose product can be uneven, and one evening I meet with two Mexican guys at the Cole Crest house as potential alternative suppliers. I made the mistake of mentioning the meeting to Gabriel, and I’m in the middle of it when he shows up drunk. “What the fuck are they doing here?” he says, staggering toward me.

  “Take it easy, Gabriel.”

  “Where’s my fucking money?” He’s slurring. Wherzhmyfuckinmoney? He’s standing right in front of me now.

  My backpack is next to me, and he knows that’s where I keep my cash. He reaches into it and pulls out $30,000. “I’m going to take this,” he says, and turns away. I reach into the backpack, pull out my Glock, and point it at him. He embarrassed me. He chumped me. I want to shoot him. But he’s my friend and I love him, even now.

  “This one time, Gabriel, I’m going to let you get away with this. I could shoot you dead right here, and you’d be a lowlife who came into my place drunk and tried to take my money. I think I’d be okay.” If this is what it takes for me to be done with him, then so be it. I’ll write it off as a loss.

  The two Mexican guys don’t seem equipped to meet the demand of my customers. I stick with Nero as my supplier.

  * * *

  —

  Two days later, Erin goes to one of the P.O. boxes where I keep cash and finds it empty. I had a little more than $150,000 in it, and it’s gone. It wasn’t all my money. Most of it was cash from my New York customers for kilos of blow.

  Gabriel. In the past, I’ve sent him to pick up money from the box, and he’s the only person with access to it besides me and Erin. My customers in New York are serious people, and when I tell them what happened, they want to go to Gabriel’s house and deal with him directly.

  “You can’t do that,” I say. “He’s there with his children and brothers and mother and father. I’ll go talk to him.”

  I drive to the Garcias’ house.

  “Dude, that’s not all my money, you can’t take that. You know how this shit works. These people are really upset about this. They want to come here and get the money and deal with you. You’ve got to give that money back.”

  “Fuck you,” Gabriel says, “and fuck them.”

  I end up covering the loss myself, which really puts me in the hole.

  * * *

  —

  During this period, when I’m comfortably in my heroin addiction, and my business is keeping me busy, my relationships with family and old friends are distant but stable. Even Amanda has pulled back. She’s got a new boyfriend, and she and I are now able to have a friendly relationship without all the drama. She’ll come over to Cole Crest and we’ll sit down and talk, while Erin stays in another room.

  Periodically, the Douglases get together for a family portrait, and in the fall the extended clan gathers for one in Montecito, at the beautiful home of my uncle Peter, Pappy’s first son with Oma. Peter’s whole family is here. Pappy and Oma are here. Dad is here with Catherine and their kids, Dylan and Carys, who are seven and four. Jojo comes with his girlfriend, Jo Ann. I come with Erin.

  It’s been a real production getting everyone here, and there’s a makeup artist.

  Carys gives me a big hug. “Hi, princess,” I say.

  With Dad on Lake Shasta.

  Peter is always on the cutting edge of technology, and he has a new marijuana vaporizer, the first one Dad and I have ever seen. It’s a big, cone-shaped, tabletop thing called the Volcano. It fills a balloon with smoke, which you then inhale. Dad and I take a couple of good rips, then kick back, taking in the scene and laughing.

  I love getting together with my family, and though I haven’t been seeing Dad often, it feels great to be hanging out with him and getting along.

  * * *

  —

  I’m shipping four to six kilos of cocaine a week now, and in general Nero doesn’t want to screw me, since I’m a source of regular business. But at least once, my New York customers have sent coke back to me, leaving me sitting with trash, and Nero was difficult about reimbursing me. So I become more demanding, getting to know coke like some people know wine. I gauge quality by look, taste, touch, and sometimes chemical reaction, dropping a piece into a cup of bleach and watching for the telltale tracer as it spins to the bottom, which indicates purity. There are a lot of ways to disguise poor coke quality, and a key might have been “re-rocked”—reconstituted into a brick after being cut with other chemicals—twice but still look shiny and fluffy. A high-quality surface layer might conceal a shitty core. My tried-and-true method for detecting manipulation is to slit open a kilo, dig into the middle of it, put a small piece on my tongue and hold it to the roof of my mouth. The more smoothly it dissolves, the better. Buttery is good, grainy bad. Since getting into kilos, the best coke I’ve seen is super oily and creamy. I call it the Cheese, because if you took a slicer to it you’d peel off something that looks like a shaving of Parmesan. Someone could fake that consistency, but the chemicals used to do it would have a giveaway sweetness.

  Nero doesn’t always get his coke from the same source, and anytime he brings me product with a stamp I haven’t seen before, I’ll test it myself by injecting it. Sometimes I’ll mix it with heroin for a speedball. I’m not worried about relapsing, because my coke addiction shook me up to such a degree that it really doesn’t appeal to me anymore. But my heroin addiction is up to around a gram and a half a day, which should last an average person three to five days.

  I’m starting to have visions of kingpin grandeur. Maybe this is what I’m meant to do, and if so, taking it to the next level will probably mean moving out of the country, possibly to Europe. Drug enforcement is laxer there, and it’s easier to run an illegal narcotics business. The officials you need to corrupt to carry on as a drug trafficker seem more corruptible there than in the U.S.

  In July 2007, as my coke business is ramping up, Erin and Jay and I drive to Carpinteria with the dogs to try to open up a new distribution channel, which will involve shipping kilos to Europe in scuba tanks custom-fabricated by Leo. I like coming up here to see old friends. Jay and I are at the Palms Bar late one night, and we decide to go back to the place where we’re staying with Erin, the Sandyland Reef Inn, to do a shot. By the time we’ve both found veins and shot up, it’s after 2 a.m., but our plan is to return to the Palms. As soon as we come out of our room, a police car comes into the parking lot. I say to Jay, “Just keep walking.” The moment we get in the Beemer, the cruiser pulls up behind us, blocking us in.

  One of the cops says we’re parked illegally. He shines his fl
ashlight into our car. He sees blood on my hand and arm. I say it’s from playing with my dog. I say that my girlfriend is staying at the motel. The cops notice a syringe on the back-seat floor. I say I’m a Type A diabetic. They arrest me (a rude way for me to find out there’s no such thing as Type A diabetes), and Jay and drive us away as Erin watches from the balcony of our room. We’re booked at the Santa Barbara County Jail, where I spent four months when I was nineteen. The cops test the syringe and find that it contains 0.25 milliliters of liquid cocaine. I’m charged with possession.

  I’m freaked out mainly because I’m going to have to go through heroin withdrawal. After forty-eight hours in jail, I can feel the symptoms coming on, and I know it’s just going to keep getting worse. Finally, my friend Jesse’s mom, Mary, cosigns a bail bond for me, putting up her house as collateral. Mary has always been there for me. She bought me the bus ticket when I was in Minnesota. She loves me. I think she has sympathy for me because of my unusual childhood, and she doesn’t blame me for my choices. She wants to help, to be there for me if she can, and I’m grateful. I don’t subscribe to the tough-love philosophy. It didn’t end well for Uncle Eric, and it hasn’t worked too well for me either. It’s not to say I don’t believe in structure and discipline, but if you love someone, you’re there for them. That’s how I see it. But I guess it’s a hard line to walk.