The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time

by Hunter S. Thompson

  Believe me, our city streets would be a lot safer if every beat cop in the nation carried a Nutcracker Flail. . . So why is this fine weapon no longer advertised in PC? I'll tell you why: for the same reason they no longer advertise the .44 Magnum or the fantastically efficient Stoner rifle that can shoot through brick walls and make hash of the rabble inside. Yes. . . and also for the same reason they won't advertise The Growler, a mobile sound unit that emits such unholy shrieks and roars that every human being within a radius of ten city blocks is paralyzed with unbearable pain: they collapse in their tracks and curl up like worms, losing all control of their bowels and bleeding from the ears.

  Every PD in the country should have a Growler, but the PC won't advertise it because they're afraid of hurting their image. They want to be LOVED. In this critical hour we don't need love, we need WEAPONS -- the newest and best and most efficient weapons we can get our hands on. This is a time of extreme peril. The rising tide is almost on us. . . but you'd never know it from reading The Police Chief. Let's look at the June 1970 issue:

  The first thing we get is a bunch of gibberish written by the police chief of Miami, Florida, saying "the law enforcement system [in the U.S.A.] is doomed to failure." Facing this is a full-page ad for the Smith & Wesson "Street Cleaner," described as a "Pepper Fog tear smoke generator. . . loaded with a new Super Strength Type CS [gas] just developed by Gen. Ordnance." The "Street Cleaner" with Super CS "not only sends the meanest troublemakers running. It convinces them not to come back. . . You can trigger anything from a 1-second puff to a 10 minute deluge. . . Do you have a Street Cleaner yet?"

  In all fairness, the Pepper Fogger is not a bad tool, but it's hardly a weapon. It may convince trouble-makers not to come back in ten minutes, but wait a few hours and the scum will be back in your face like wild rats. The obvious solution to this problem is to abandon our obsession with tear gas and fill the Street Cleaner with a nerve agent. CS only slaps at the problem: nerve gas solves it.

  Yet the bulk of all advertising in the PC is devoted to tear gas weapons: Federal Laboratories offers the 201-Z gun, along with the Fed 233 Emergency Kit, featuring "Speed-heat" grenades and gas projectiles guaranteed to "pierce barricades." The AAI Corporation offers a "multi-purpose grenade that can't be thrown back." And, from Lake Erie Chemical, we have a new kind of gas mask that "protects against CS." (This difference is crucial; the ad explains that army surplus gas masks do well enough against the now-obsolete CN gas, but they're virtually useless against CS -- "the powerful irritant agent that more and more departments are turning to and that's now 'standard' with the National Guard.")

  Unfortunately, this is about as far as The Police Chief goes, in terms of weapons (or tools) information. One of the few interesting items in the non-weapons category is a "scrambler " for "police-band" car radios -- so "the enemy" can't listen in. With the "scrambler," everything will sound like Donald Duck.

  The only consistently useful function of the PC is the old faithful "Positions Open" section. For instance: Charlotte, N.C., needs a "firearms identification expert" for the new city-county crime lab. Ellenville, N.Y. is looking for a new chief of police, salary "10,500 with liberal fringe benefits." Indeed. And the U.S. Department of Justice is "now recruiting Special Agents for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs." The ad says they need "a sizeable number" of new agents, to start at $8098 per annum, "with opportunity for premium overtime pay to gross up to $10,000."

  (In my opinion, only a lunatic or a dope addict would do narc-work for that kind of money. The hours are brutal and the risks are worse: I once had a friend who went to work as a drug agent for the feds and lost both of his legs. A girl he was trusting put LSD in his beer, then took him to a party where a gang of vicious freaks snapped his femurs with a meat-ax.)

  Let's face it: we live in savage times. Not only are "cops" called pigs -- they are treated like swine and eat worse than hogs. Yet the PC still carries advertising for "P.I.G." tie-clasps! What kind of two-legged scumsucker would wear a thing like that?

  WHY ARE WE GROVELING? This is the rootnut question! Why has the once great Police Chief turned on its rank and file?

  Are we dupes? Do the Red Pansies want to destroy us? If not, why do they mock all we believe in?

  So it should come as no surprise -- to the self-proclaimed pigs who put out The Police Chief -- that most of us no longer turn to that soggy-pink magazine when we're looking for serious information. Personally, I prefer the Shooting Times, or Guns & Ammo. Their editorials on "gun control" are pure balls of fire, and their classfied ads offer every conceivable kind of beastly weapon from brass knuckles and blowguns to 20 mm. cannons.

  Another fine source of weapons info -- particularly for the private citizen -- is a little known book titled, How to Defend Yourself, Your Family, and Your Home -- a Complete Guide to Self-Protection. Now here is a book with real class! It explains, in 307 pages of fine detail, how to set booby traps in your home so that "midnight intruders" will destroy themselves upon entry; it tells which type of shotgun is best for rapid-fire work in narrow hallways (a sawed-off double-barreled 12-gauge; one barrel loaded with a huge tear gas slug, the other with Double-O buckshot). This book is invaluable to anyone who fears that his home might be invaded, at any moment, by rioters, rapers, looters, dope addicts, niggers, Reds or any other group. No detail has been spared: dogs, alarm wiring, screens, bars, poisons, knives, guns. . . ah yes, this is a wonderful book and highly recommended by the National Police Officers Association of America. This is a very different group from the police chiefs. Very different.

  But why grapple now with a book of such massive stature? I need time to ponder it and to run tests on the many weapons and devices that appear in the text. No professional would attempt to deal lightly with this book. It is a rare combination of sociology and stone craziness, laced with weapons technology on a level that is rarely encountered.

  You will want this book. But I want you to know it first. And for that, I need time. . . to deal smartly with the bugger on its own terms. No pro would settle for less.

  -- Raoul Duke (Master of Weaponry)

  Scanlan's Monthly, vol. 1, no. 7, June 1970

  PART 4

  The Great Shark Hunt

  Four-thirty in Cozumel now; dawn is coming up on these gentle white beaches looking west at the Yucatan Channel. Thirty yards from my patio here at Cabañas del Caribe, the surf is rolling up, very softly, on the beach out there in the darkness beyond the palm trees.

  Many vicious mosquitoes and sand fleas out here tonight. There are 60 units in this rambling beach-front hotel, but my room -- number 129 -- is the only one full of light and music and movement.

  I have both my doors and all four windows propped open -- a huge bright magnet for every bug on the island. . . But I am not being bitten. Every inch of my body -- from the soles of my bleeding bandaged feet to the top of my sun-scorched head -- is covered with 6-12 Insect Repellent, a cheap foul-smelling oil with no redeeming social or aesthetic characteristics except that it works.

  These goddamn bugs are all around -- settling on the notebook, my wrist, my arms, circling the rim of my tall glass of Bacardi Añejo and ice. . . but no bites. It has taken about six days to solve this hellish bug problem. . . which is excellent news on the one level, but, as always, the solution to one problem just peels back another layer and exposes some new and more sensitive area.

  At this stage of the gig, things like mosquitoes and sand fleas are the least of our worries. . . because in about two hours and 22 minutes I have to get out of this hotel without paying an unnaturally massive bill, drive about three miles down the coast in a rented VW Safari that can't be paid for, either, and which may not even make it into town, due to serious mechanical problems -- and then get my technical advisor Yail Bloor out of the Mesón San Miguel without paying his bill, either, and then drive us both out to the airport in that goddamn junk Safari to catch the 7:50 Aeromexico flight to Mérida and Monte
rrey, where we'll change planes for San Antonio and Denver.

  So we are looking at a very heavy day. . . 2000 miles between here and home, no cash at all, ten brutally expensive days in three hotels on the Striker Aluminum Yachts credit tab, which just got jerked out from under us when the local PR team decided we were acting too weird to be what we claim to be -- and so now we are down to about $44 extra between us -- with my bill at the Cabañas hovering around $650 and Bloor's at the San Miguel not much less -- plus 11 days for that wretched car from the local Avis dealer who already hit me for $40 cash for a broken windshield, and God only knows how much he'll demand when he sees what condition his car is in now. . . plus about $400 worth of black coral that we ordered up from China: doubled-thumbed fist, coke spoons, sharks' teeth, etc. . . and that $120 18-kt.-gold chain at the market. . . also Sandy's black-coral necklace. We will need all available cash for the black-coral deal -- so things like hotel bills and car rentals will have to be put off and paid by check, if anybody will take one. . . or charged to Striker Aluminum Yachts, which got me into this goddamn twisted scene in the first place. But the Striker people are no longer with us; extreme out-front hostility. Bruce, Joyce -- even the bogus lecher Eduardo. How did we blow the image?

  "Dear Mr. Thompson. . . Here's some background information on the Cozumel cruise and international fishing tournament. . . Regarding the cruise schedule, about 14 Strikers will leave Fort Lauderdale on April 23, arriving iin Key West that night, leaving Key West midday on the 25th, to assure skirting the Cuban coast in the daytime, and arriving in Cozumel midafternoon on the 27th or 28th. In addition to the proven sailfishing, there will be a Marlin Only Day on Saturday May sixth, in the initial attempt on any volume basis to determine how good the blue-marlin fishing is. . . Each night during the tournament, there are cocktail parties with over 250 people attending, mariachi and island music, etc. . . We are happy you can make the trip. . . Flights leave Miami daily for Cozumel at 2:45 p.m. You will need a Mexican tourist card, which you can pick up at the Mexican Tourism Department, 100 Biscayne Boulevard, Room 612 Miami. There are no shots required.

  Sincerely,

  Terence J.Byrne

  Public Relations Representative

  Striker Aluminum Yachts

  Fort Lauderdale, Florida

  Indeed. . . no shots: just a tourist card, plenty of Coppertone, a new pair of Top-siders and a fine gringo smile for the customs officers. The letter called up visions of heavy sport on the high seas, mono a mono with giant sailfish and world-record marlin. . . Reeling the bastards in, fighting off sharks with big gaffs, strapped into a soft white-Naugahyde fighting chair in the cockpit of a big power cruiser. . . then back to the harbor at dusk for a brace of gin and tonics, tall drinks in the sunset, lounging around in cool deck chairs while the crew chops up bait and a strolling mariachi band roams on the pier, wailing mournful Olmec love songs. .. .

  Ah, yes, I was definitely ready for it. Sixteen months of straight politics had left me reeling around on the brink of a nervous breakdown. I needed a change, something totally different from my normal line of work. Covering politics is a vicious, health-ripping ordeal that often requires eight or nine shots at once -- twice or three times a week in the peak season -- so this unexpected assignment to "cover" a deep-sea-fishing tournament off the Yucatán coast of Mexico was a welcome relief from the horrors of the campaign trail in 1972.

  Right. Things would be different now: hot sun, salt air, early to bed and early to rise. . . This one had all the signs of a high-style bag job: Fly off to the Caribbean as a guest of the idle rich, hang around on their boats for a week or so, then crank out a left-handed story to cover expenses and pay for a new motorcycle back in the Rockies. The story itself was a bit on the hazy side, but the editor at Playboy said not to worry. Almost everybody unfortunate enough to have had any dealings with me since the campaign ended seemed convinced that I was in serious need of a vacation -- a cooling-out period, a chance to back off -- and this fishing tournament in Cozumel looked just about perfect. It would pry my head out of politics, they said, and force me off in a new direction -- out of the valley of death and back toward the land of the living.

  There was, however, a kink: I had just come back from "vacation." It was the first one I'd ever attempted, or at least the first one I'd tried since I was fired from my last regular job on Christmas Day in 1958, when the production manager at Time magazine ripped up my punch card in a stuttering rage and told me to get the fuck out of the building. Since then I had been unemployed -- in the formal sense of that word -- and when you've been out of work for 14 years, it's almost impossible to relate to a word like vacation.

  So I was extremely nervous when circumstances compelled me, in the late winter of '72, to fly to Cozumel with my wife, Sandy, in order to do nothing at all.

  Three days later I ran out of air in a rip tide, 90 feet down on Palancar Reef, and I came so close to drowning that they said, later, I was lucky to get off with a serious case of the bends. The nearest decompression chamber was in Miami, so they chartered a plane and flew me there that same night.

  I spent the next 19 days in a pressurized sphere somewhere in downtown Miami, and when I finally came out, the bill was $3000. My wife finally located my attorney in a drug commune on the outskirts of Mazatlan. He flew immediately to Florida and had the courts declare me a pauper so I was able to leave without legal problems.

  I went back to Colorado with the idea of resting for at least six months. But three days after I got home, this assignment came in to cover the fishing tournament. It was a natural, they said, because I was already familiar with the island. And besides, I needed a change from politics.

  Which was true, in a way -- but I had my own reasons for wanting to go back to Cozumel. On the evening before my near-fatal scuba dive on Palancar Reef, I had stashed 50 units of pure MDA in the adobe wall of the shark pool at the local aquarium next to the Hotel Barracuda -- and this stash had been much on my mind while I was recovering from the bends in the Miami hospital.

  So when the Cozumel assignment came through, I drove immediately into town to consult with my old friend and drug crony Yail Bloor. I explained the circumstances in detail, then asked his advice.

  "It's clear as a fucking bell," he snapped. "We'll have to go down there at once. You'll handle the fishermen while I get the drugs."

  These were the circumstances that sent me back to Cozumel in late April. Neither the editor nor the high-powered sport-fishing crowd we'd be dealing with had any notion of my real reason for making the trip. Bloor knew, but he had a vested interest in maintaining the cover because I was passing him off, on the tab, as my "technical advisor." It made perfect sense, I felt: In order to cover a highly competitive situation, you need plenty of trustworthy help.

  When I got to Cozumel, on Monday afternoon, everybody on the island with any clout in the tourism business was half-mad with excitement at the idea of having a genuwine, real-life "Playboy writer" in their midst for a week or ten days. When I slumped off the plane from Miami, I was greeted like Buffalo Bill on his first trip to Chicago -- a whole gaggle of public-relations specialists met the plane, and at least three of them were waiting for me: What could they do for me? What did I want? How could they make my life pleasant?

  Carry my bags?

  Well. . . why not?

  To where

  Well. . . I paused, sensing an unexpected opening that could lead almost anywhere. . . "I think I'm supposed to go to the Cabañas," I said. "But --"

  "No," said one of the handlers, "you have a press suite at Cozumeleno."

  I shrugged. "Whatever's right," I muttered. "Let's roll."

  I'd asked the travel agent in Colorado to get me one of those VW Safari jeeps -- the same kind I'd had on my last trip to Cozumel -- but the PR crowd at the airport insisted on taking me straight to the hotel. My jeep they said, would be delivered within the hour, and in the meantime, I was treated like some kind of hig
h-style dignitary: A few people actually addressed me as "Mr. Playboy" and the others kept calling me "sir." I was hustled into a waiting car and whisked off along the two-lane blacktop highway through the palm jungle and out in the general direction of the American Strip, a cluster of beach-front hotels on the northeast end of the island.

  Despite my lame protests, they took me to the newest, biggest and most expensive hotel on the island -- a huge, stark-white concrete hulk that reminded me of the Oakland city jail. We were met at the desk by the manager, the owner and several hired heavies who explained that the terrible hammering noise I heard was merely the workmen putting the finishing touches on the third floor of what would eventually be a five-story colossus. "We have just ninety rooms now," the manager explained, "but by Christmas we will have three hundred."

  "Jesus God!" I muttered.

  "What?"

  "Never mind," I said. "This is a hell of a thing you're building here: No doubt about that -- it's extremely impressive in every way -- but the odd fact is that I thought I had reservations down the beach at the Cabañas." I flashed a nice shrug and a smile, ignoring the awkward chill that was already settling on us.