Smuggler's Blues

by Richard Stratton

  “Does her old man know?”

  He nodded. Jimmy D reminded me of Kris Kristofferson, long hair, close-cropped beard, long and lean, a twinkle in his eye, and a face etched with experience. “Yeah. He moved out. He’s cool with it.”

  “So, does this mean that you want to bow out?”

  He belted back another shot of tequila and waved to the bartender to refill his glass. “Hell, no,” he said. “What gave you that idea?”

  We agreed to exercise all caution even as we skirted out on the edge of peril. The next day, I dropped JD off down the road from the airfreight terminal at JFK. He walked in to pick up the loaded truck containing the first 1,500 pounds of hash in the rear in two large crates. I stayed behind the wheel in a rental car parked along the access road leading to the airfreight terminal. There were two men with me: the guy who owned the farm in Orange County where we would stash the load—another ex-Marine, Vietnam vet—and Peter, a former editor at a publishing company, who became enamored of the outlaw life reading articles in High Times magazine and quit his straight job to join our ranks.

  After a ten-minute wait, we saw JD drive out of the fenced-in terminal yard and onto the access road. We watched as not one but several vehicles—some beat-up looking junkers, other muscle cars, a big white Lincoln Continental, all bristling with antennae and peopled with bearded, long-haired thugs who could only be undercover narcotics agents—drove out in tandem behind our truck. We had Heat. Serious Federal Heat, of that there was no doubt. Peter, the editor turned would-be outlaw, was ready to flee. Drive off and let JD take the fall alone. There is always some guy who wants to run. I offered to let him walk, but he calmed down and actually got more excited and less afraid as we took off in pursuit of the followers.

  Once we were out on the highway, headed northwest from the city, I pulled up alongside JD in the loaded truck. Peter, riding shotgun, signaled to JD; he pointed behind him to alert him that he was being followed. JD grinned his toothless grin and jerked his thumb to the rear of the truck, indicating he had the crates. “No… you’re hot!” Peter yelled, and we sped on ahead.

  Traffic was heavy. I didn’t want the DEA agents to notice us and connect us with the truck. Soon we were driving into hilly country and onto back roads. The new plan was to get far enough in front of JD and the truck, with the parade of DEA cars following, then drop off the guy who owned the farm, leave him by the side of the road where we knew JD would be traveling. JD would see him and stop to pick him up.

  The weather turned stormy, dark clouds and then rain the farther we got from the city. This, we would learn later, worked to our advantage, as DEA had a surveillance plane in the air following the truck, guiding the chase cars, and the weather forced the pilot to turn back. Once the truck JD was driving reached the winding back roads and hills of Orange County, the DEA could no longer pick up the signal from the tracking device planted in the crates. JD lost the followers long enough to pick up the guy we left standing on the road and continue on without being seen.

  They drove into an apple orchard and dumped the crates. JD found the DEA’s tracking device and ripped it out, smashed it, killing the signal. He left the guy who owned the farm to guard the crates, came back and picked me up near the village of Warwick, New York. I got in the truck with JD. Peter drove off in the rental car to pick up the guy in the orchard and secure the load.

  “Are you serious?” JD said. “Did we really just steal a load of hash from the DEA?”

  “No. They stole it from us,” I said. “We stole it back.”

  As we drove around the corner into a parking lot, DEA, local, and state cop cars swooped in from all sides and converged on the truck.

  We were surrounded. “Come out with your hands up!” one of the agents called to us over a bullhorn.

  I turned to JD. “Here we go,” I said. “Just like on TV. Tell ’em you’ve got nothing to say. You want to call your lawyer.”

  We got out, hands in the air.

  “Go around to the back of the truck!” the agent ordered.

  We did as we were told. At least twenty agents and cops all with guns trained on us stood at the ready. They made us stand with our backs to them and our hands on the rear of the truck.

  “Open the left door!” came the order over the bullhorn.

  I opened the door. Nothing inside but empty space.

  “Open the right door!” There was a trace of panic in the agent’s amplified voice. But that was nothing compared to the freak-out when the agents discovered they had arrested an empty truck. They couldn’t believe it. They threw us down on the parking lot, shoved our faces in the pavement, and stuck their guns to our heads.

  “Where’s the fucking load?”

  They were ready to wail on us right there, but there were too many witnesses. Civilians had come out of the shops to watch the excitement. I had a face full of blacktop, grit in my mouth—but I was smiling. One of the agents screamed at another agent, a techie working the controls on their tracking device. “You better get a fucking signal! You better locate that fucking equipment!”

  No signal. No crates. No contraband. No evidence. We were taken into custody, held incommunicado at a state police barracks for ten hours while the frantic agents scoured the area trying to find their crates. They beat JD, I heard them slapping him around and kicking him in the next room. They never laid a hand on me. I gave them a phony name, but a Royal Canadian Mounted Police narcotics agent, who was coordinating the operation for the Mounties, recognized me and told the DEA agent-in-charge that I was a principal, not merely a grunt.

  “Asshole Number One,” was how the agent-in-charge referred to me. He was a stocky little guy, a martial artist. He called JD, “Asshole Number Two.” I listened to him on the phone talking with headquarters in the city, trying to explain to his supervisor how the truck was empty when they busted us, how they still had not been able to locate the crates, the load of hash or their tracking device, and after he hung up, I said, “I guess that makes you Asshole Number Three.”

  He pulled me aside and told me the Mafia was going to kill me. So I better tell them who owned the load. “Why would the Mafia want to kill me?” I asked.

  “For losing their fucking load, asshole!”

  “Then I guess it must be the Mafia’s load.”

  “Listen,” he said, playing the good cop role. “You know what we were doing while we waited for you to pick up that truck?”

  “No, what did you do?”

  “We sat around smoking joints and snorting coke. This is all a big game,” he instructed me. “If you’re smart, you’ll start playing both sides. Otherwise, you’re the loser.” Then he gave me some free legal advice. “Here’s what’s gonna happen when this goes to trial,” he said. “We’re gonna get up there and tell our lies. Then you’re gonna get up there and tell your lies. It’s just a matter of whose lies the jury believes. Guess what. Juries always believe the cops’ lies.”

  Two black agents in the white Lincoln Continental drove JD and me into the city to DEA headquarters. They wanted to know, off the record, how much JD was going to get paid for driving the truck. JD asked me, “Should I tell ’em?”

  “What truck?” I said.

  “C’mon, man,” the agent driving said. “It won’t leave this car.”

  “Promise you won’t take it as some kind of admission of guilt,” I said.

  “Man, what’re you talking about? There was nothing in the truck when we busted you.”

  “So why are we being arrested?” I asked.

  “It’s just a formality,” the driver said, and we all laughed.

  “If I was driving that truck, and I’m not admitting I was,” JD told them. “And if there was hash in that truck, and I’m not saying there was, but, you know, if there was hash in it, I wouldn’t do it for less than thirty grand.”

  “Damn, man, we’re in the wrong business,” the agent said to his partner.

  Maybe not, as it turned out. But they were with
the wrong crew. When they stopped to get gas, I joked that we should start yelling to the gas station attendant that we were being kidnapped, two white guys in handcuffs in the back of a Lincoln driven by two black guys; there had to be some mistake. At the old DEA headquarters on Fifty-seventh Street, we were booked, fingerprinted, had our mug shots taken, and were asked again if we had anything to say. Finally, we were given an opportunity to make a phone call. I called my lawyer and close friend, Hef.

  Late that night we were removed downtown and locked up in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, MCC, the federal holding facility next to the courthouse in Foley Square. There we spent a tense weekend. What did the cops have? Nothing. An empty truck. Yet the TV news played it as a multimillion dollar drug bust with two suspects in custody. Before court Monday morning, they took us to meet the assistant United States attorney who would be handling the case. Her name was Rhonda something, an attractive young black woman. When JD and I were brought to her office, she asked if we wanted to make a statement, perhaps cooperate with the government. We looked at each other and broke into song. “Help me Rhonda, help, help me Rhonda.” She smiled and threw us out of her office.

  In court, Hef told the magistrate, “These men are not criminals. They are men of the earth, farmers from Maine.” The magistrate released us on our own recognizance pending the outcome of a grand jury investigation. Some weeks later we were back in court for a hearing. “Wait a minute,” the judge said to Rhonda. “You’re telling me DEA agents put the hashish on the truck. But when these men were arrested driving the truck, there was no hashish.”

  “That’s correct, Your Honor. It was a controlled delivery.”

  He shook his head. “You’re not answering my question. Was there hashish? And, if so, where is the hashish?”

  “Well, actually, the agents removed the hashish and replaced it with sand,” Rhonda explained.

  “Let me repeat my question: Where is the hashish? These men are charged with possession with intent to distribute hashish. Defense counsel has made a motion to have the government produce the evidence. I need to know where the hashish is, how much hashish there is, and how and in what circumstance these defendants were in possession of it.”

  Rhonda and the agent who had called me Asshole Number One had a quick, hushed conference. “Ah, I will have to get back to you on that, Your Honor,” Rhonda told the Court.

  At that point, Hef produced evidence that the hashish had actually been distributed on the streets of New York. He showed the judge some empty sacks I got from my friend Brendan. “Judge, these are wrappings from the hashish my clients are alleged to have possessed. I submit to you that the hashish in question was never in their possession. It remained in the possession of federal agents, who somehow lost or… misplaced it.”

  We had learned from a corrupt DEA source that the agents sold the load. Months later I read a Jack Anderson column in the Washington Post that told how rogue DEA agents had stolen the load, turned it over to their snitches, then tried to arrest the guys the load was intended for—us. Our crates contained mostly sand with a cover layer of hashish, about 200 kilos, which barely covered my expenses.

  The judge dismissed the case. “These are men of the earth,” he told Rhonda, referring to JD and me, recalling Hef’s words. “Farmers. Let your agents go out and arrest the real criminals who are infesting the streets of New York City with heroin.”

  “We’ll meet again,” Asshole Number Three said to me as we left the courtroom.

  * * *

  BETWEEN DRINKS, AT my pay phone in the rear of El Quijote, I get the call.

  “Bro, we got a problem.” It’s Sammy Silver, whose father owns both the New Jersey trucking company that is to pick up the containers at the docks and the bonded warehouse in Jersey City where the containers are to be delivered. “Meet me at our spot under the West Side Highway in an hour.”

  My stomach is in knots. Fuck. Now what? What the fuck? After all I’ve gone through to bring in this load—no, please don’t tell me it’s busted.

  It is Thursday night when I meet Sammy to hear about our problem. He tells me that even though everything had been done following his explicit instructions, for some reason Customs flagged the load of dates. They called Sammy’s father at the trucking company and told him that they had sealed the containers and were going to escort them from the port to the warehouse, where they would conduct a thorough secondary inspection.

  “Shit… why?” I ask.

  “I don’t know, bro. Could be because the load was shipped out of Lebanon. It’s known as a source country for narcotics. Not dates.”

  True, although because of the First Persian Gulf War, beginning in 1980, lots of goods from the Middle East were being transshipped through Beirut.

  “Maybe they were tipped off,” Sammy muses aloud.

  “By who?” I say. “No one knows about this trip except me, you, and the Lebs—and they’re not about to rat out their own load.”

  “Val?”

  “Please. Be serious.”

  “What about Biff?”

  “He knows nothing.”

  “So maybe Customs ran dogs around the containers and they picked up the scent,” Sammy speculates.

  “Not possible. Not the way it was packaged. And if that were the case, they’d hold the shipment at the docks and wait for us to pick it up, then bust us.”

  “I don’t know, bro. It’s fuckin’ crazy. But we can’t pick up that load.”

  I’m stunned. “What d’you mean we can’t pick it up?”

  “We gotta just… we gotta leave it at the docks.”

  “How can we do that? If we refuse to pick it up, they’ll know we know it’s hot.”

  “But they won’t know who to bust,” he argues. “They won’t have any evidence. We can say we don’t want to touch it if they think there’s contraband in it. Put it back on them. Whatever… I can’t let my old man take a fall. He’ll lose the business.”

  “Brother, if this load goes down, we’re out of business.”

  I want to discuss it with Sammy’s father. To refuse to pick up the containers seems to me like a clear admission of complicity. To pick up the containers and play out the hand seems to me the only reasonable, albeit a risky, plan. The bold way is the best way. Just act like nothing is wrong and we know what we’re doing: picking up a load of dates consigned to a major food importation company. Business as usual and as planned.

  We drive across the river to meet Leo, Sammy’s old man. At a diner in Paramus, we sit in the car in the parking lot and debate what to do. Leo is in favor of picking up the containers. He’s a tough old Brooklyn Jew, a former boxer who doesn’t believe in giving up without a fight. He agrees that to refuse to pick up the containers is as good as admitting we know they contain controlled substances. “There’s too much at stake here,” Leo says. “We’ve worked too hard to let it go.”

  “Fifteen million dollars worth of goods,” I remind them.

  “Yeah. And we’re looking at fifteen years in the joint if they bust us,” Sammy says.

  “That’s the nature of the business,” I say. “We wouldn’t be making this kind of money if it were legal.”

  Leo and I look at each other. “What do you want to do?” he asks.

  “I say we go for it.”

  I go over the details again. Of the seven containers, three contain hash and dates; four contain only dates. “These are the numbers on the four containers that have only dates.” I write the figures on a slip of paper and give them to Leo. “Why don’t you call Customs, tell them you’re backed up, you can’t pick up the shipment until tomorrow afternoon or first thing Monday. We show up late Friday afternoon. Weekend’s coming. The agents are thinking about going home for the weekend.”

  Leo is nodding. So far he likes it.

  “Then, first we pick up two or three of the clean containers with only dates. Let Customs escort those and inspect them at the warehouse. Maybe… you never know, maybe we’ll b
e able to finesse it. It’s risky. But I don’t see what other chance we have.”

  Leo agrees. He says he doesn’t think Customs has been tipped off; he feels it’s a routine secondary inspection because of all the heroin coming out of Lebanon. So we have a plan. A hairy plan but still it’s something. I go back to the Hotel Chelsea to wait. Now the waiting becomes ten times as intense. Sammy and I have four hundred grand invested in this trip. All that work, the months of risking my life in Lebanon putting the shipment together. Going to Baghdad to buy the dates. Shipping them overland to Beirut. The upheaval with Mohammed, Abu Ali, and that thieving Wizard. Holed up for weeks and then months in the Bekaa and Beirut. Nearly getting blown up in the war. No, I can’t just walk away.

  And if we make it, if we get the load in and sell it all without getting busted, I’m all done. That’s it. Retirement time. I’ll have enough money to stash in some offshore bank accounts and live on the interest, spend the rest of life in the wind. Or at least until they legalize this plant and give amnesty to all former pot smugglers.

  All day Friday at the Chelsea, I pace. I’m so nervous I can’t sit still. I watch the news. No reports of massive loads of hash busted in New Jersey. I try to read but I can’t concentrate. I go out and walk the streets. Not even the lovely New York ladies in their skimpy summer outfits can distract me from my date with ten million dates. Stratton, I tell myself, you’re a fucking lunatic. It’s way past time you quit this insanity. Just let me get this load in, dear Lord, let this one through and I swear I’ll give it all up and—what? What would I do? How could I ever get the same rush I get from doing this?

  I call Biff and tell him to meet me. We go for a walk in the park beside Riverside Drive. “You wanted to get more involved. This is it. We’re going to need your help.”

  He blanches. “Me? What can I do?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what any of us can do. But we need you to be here in case… whatever happens. This is what it all comes down to: hanging in, trying to figure out what to do,” I tell him. “Let’s see how big those balls of yours really are.”