Smuggler's Blues

by Richard Stratton

  He stammers, looks down at the ground, breaks weak. “I… I can’t. Listen, I have a family. I’m… I have to go away. I’m going out to Amagansett for the weekend.”

  FRIDAY EVENING SAMMY is out front of the hotel in a rental car.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” he says when I get in and we drive off toward the Holland Tunnel.

  “Try me.”

  But I can’t believe it. I have to see it with my own eyes—and smell it with my nose. When I walk into the warehouse in Jersey City, I can smell hashish. Yes, unmistakable—at least to me—fresh hash, mixed with the smell of the dates, but hashish nevertheless. It’s the same smell that greeted me when I walked into the warehouse at the port in Beirut—an odor as thick as perfume on a cheap French whore. How can this be? It’s like a dream. I’m having an out-of-body experience, walking into this thick aroma of contraband.

  And there are the cartons! The ones with red plastic strapping. The ones containing hashish that we agreed not to pick up. But there they are, sitting out on the loading dock. And there is one of the containers we agreed we would not pick up. But here it is, backed into the warehouse and half unloaded. Something is definitely wrong. This is a setup!

  I look at Sammy and Leo. Brace yourself, I’m thinking. We are all about to be busted. I have a sudden intense rush of fear and paranoia so powerful that for a moment I cannot move. I can’t think. The warehouse is surrounded with Customs and DEA agents just waiting for me to show up before they make their move. This has to be a setup. My one overwhelming urge is to turn and run, motherfucker! Get the fuck out of here. Now! We are all about to get cracked, caught red-handed in a warehouse full of hash. Caught with the goods, a fugitive from another bust—I’m looking at decades in a federal penitentiary.

  Sammy and Leo smile at me. They don’t understand what is about to happen. Sammy’s brother is there, and Bobby, Sammy’s stash and wheelman. I wait as though in some state of stop-time for the doors to come crashing in and the place to be swarmed with federal agents sticking guns in my face and screaming: Down on the floor, motherfucker! And these guys are smiling.

  Nothing happens. Nothing… happens. Moments pass and there is no bust. The guys are still grinning at me with these goofy looks on their faces like I’m the only one who doesn’t get it. “Are you guys fucking crazy? What’re you so happy about? You picked up the wrong container!” In a daze, I walk to the rear of the loading dock, grab one of the cartons with the red straps, plunk it down on a table and rip it open. “Red straps! What does that mean?”

  Sammy, still smiling at me, says, “It means, bro, we got the load. Or part of it anyway.”

  I dig under the layer of dates. There is the tin box full of hash.

  “It was a crap shoot,” Leo says. “They wouldn’t let us choose which containers to pick up. They told us what ones to take. If we insisted, it would’ve looked suspicious.” He takes me to the rear of the warehouse, points out three more containers parked outside in the fenced-in yard. One of them, I know by the numbers on the outside, also contains hash. “Three carloads of Customs inspectors. They put seals on the containers and escorted them back here.” Leo shakes his head, smiles at me. “Go figure.”

  We go outside, Sammy and Leo show me the US Customs seals on the locked container doors. “They opened the one container and started inspecting the cartons. They musta opened a dozen, maybe twenty cartons, all with nothing but dates.”

  “Pure dumb fucking luck,” Sammy says.

  Right next to one of the cartons the agents opened and inspected is a carton with red strapping.

  “Finally,” Leo tells me, “like we figured, it’s late Friday afternoon. The agents’re tired, they wanna go home, maybe stop by the local bar, have a few beers with the boys. So they left, said they’d be back Monday morning to finish the inspection.”

  “And,” Sammy says when we are back inside, “you’re not gonna believe this, bro. They had dogs.”

  “Get the fuck out of here!”

  “Serious, bro. Dogs. Dope dogs. Two of ’em.”

  Leo nods, shrugs. “Luck.”

  “They came in and sniffed around. We figured we’re going down for sure,” Sammy goes on.

  “I can smell hash,” I say.

  “They must’a been junk dogs,” Bobby says. “They get ’em strung out on junk so they go nuts when they smell heroin. But they don’t give a fuck about hash.”

  “They just walked around wagging their tails, happy as could be,” Sammy says. “We were freaked the fuck out. You believe this?” He points to the sky. “Tell me someone up there isn’t looking out for us.”

  We are all silent for a moment, praising God, and then we laugh, giddy, nervous laughter. It still seems unreal. I expect agents to storm the place and lock us all up. Each moment that passes seems like a gift.

  “Here’s the problem,” Sammy breaks it down. “We take all the cartons out of this container, right? We remove our goods, okay? But when Customs comes back here Monday morning this container is going to be light by about a third. What we gotta do is take the hash out and replace it with something that weighs about the same, and then put all the boxes back in, way in the back of the container. And hope they don’t open one of the boxes and see there’s no dates in there.”

  “Or maybe we buy dates and put ’em in there,” Bobby offers.

  “Please, there are no dates. That’s the point,” Sammy says. “No, we’ll use sand.”

  “That’s only a third of the load,” I say.

  “Better than nothing.”

  We go back outside to one of the sealed containers and look it over. No way to break the seal without Customs knowing. Bobby is a welder by trade. As my grandmother Ba Ba used to say: Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

  Early the next day, Saturday, Bobby brings his acetylene torches to the warehouse. He cuts the hinges holding the locked and sealed doors on the rear of the container. Leo borrows a tow truck from a friend, we use the rear winch and hook to lift the sealed door up and off the back of the container, guiding it by hand, and then set it on the ground without breaking the Customs seal.

  It takes all weekend—working through the night Saturday and well into Sunday night and early Monday—to remove all the boxes with the red straps containing hash from two containers and replace them with boxes of sand. It’s a grueling task, working against the clock, sweating our asses off, in fear of being busted at any moment. But there is the thrill and satisfaction of finding tin box after tin box of hashish and loading our goods into a rental truck to be hauled off to the safe house. The hardest part of the whole operation is locating paint on a Sunday to match the orange color of the container so we can replace the door, weld the hinges back together and make it look like it had never been touched. The paint is still sticky early Monday morning.

  By dawn Monday we have ten thousand pounds of hashish and fifty gallons of honey oil safely stored in a stash house on Staten Island. There is still one more container to pick up and the customs inspection to get through. If they find the remaining five thousand pounds in the container left at the docks, no doubt they will go back and look through all the cartons and find the sand. We will be busted. But at least we’ll have the income from ten thousand pounds of hash to pay the lawyers and provide for our families while we ride out the bust.

  I’m asleep in my room at the Chelsea Monday morning when the phone rings. Every muscle in my body aches. I wake in a panic. What now? It’s Sammy, calling from a pay phone down the street from the warehouse. “Relax, bro… go back to sleep,” he says. “Give yourself a big hug. You’re a rich motherfucker.”

  “What happened?”

  “Customs just called. The supervising agent said they’re satisfied with the inspection. Told us we should go ahead and break the seals on the containers in the yard and come down and pick up the remaining the containers.”

  “No shit?”

  “Serious… after all that,” he says and we both laug
h.

  Later that day, I meet with Sammy for a walk-talk along Twenty-third Street. He tells me the dates were rejected by USDA. The infestation rate is too high. “Fuckin’ A-rabs,” he says. “Can’t do anything right. But it’s no big deal. The old man says we can ship ’em to Canada or England, where the bug count isn’t as tight. Sell ’em there.”

  He hugs me. “How does it feel to be a millionaire?”

  “We still gotta sell the load.”

  “From what I’ve seen so far—shit, man, it’s primo. We’ll own the market. C’mon out to the island. We’re doing the inventory.”

  “Give me a day or two to decompress,” I say. “I’m exhausted.”

  Back at the Chelsea, I pack my bags. Time for Dr. Lowell to check in to the Plaza.

  10

  DOCTOR LOWELL, I PRESUME

  THE LOAD IS in. We did it, against all odds, snatched seven metric tons of hashish from under the collective noses of half a dozen Customs officers and two dope dogs. The mother lode has landed and is safely stashed. Finessed through a secondary Customs inspection. It hardly seems possible, and yet it happened. For two days I wander around the city in a mental bubble, barely able to comprehend the magnitude of our good fortune. Surely, the hashish gods are smiling. Now the real challenge begins: to turn 15,000 pounds of hash and fifty gallons of honey oil into $15 million in cash without getting popped.

  I’m trying to act like none of this happened. It still feels too good to be real. There was a time not even a week ago when it looked like we would lose everything and wind up in prison. Sammy was ready to leave the load at the docks. Biff fled to Amagansett. Sammy and Bobby are so pissed at him for bailing on us they want to cut him out of his end. But I’m feeling benevolent. Let the good karma of this trip prevail. As I move about the city, I feel a strong urge to fade into the background and disappear. My job is done. The merchandise has been delivered. Now it’s up to Toranaga, Rosie, Val, Benny in Wellesley, and whoever else to cash it out. I have to assume Wolfshein and the Feds are actively seeking to find me and lock me up for jumping bail in Maine. It would be foolish to draw my Heat to the trip. So I ride the subway down to Bowling Green and take the ferry to Staten Island—not a potentially wealthy fugitive outlaw, just another straphanger commuter blending into the multitudes.

  Bobby picks me up at the ferry landing. He’s still riding the adrenaline rush from the weekend. Talks nonstop, still in awe of how we managed to pull this off and how our lives have been changed virtually overnight. He offers me a bag of Sammy’s top-of-the-crop indoor hydroponic homegrown, but I’m saving my head for a bowl of the Double Zahara. That’s the real reason I’ve come out here, to visit the load, see it safely stashed stateside, and get my share of the dealer’s choice—ten kilos of the very best slabs for my personal stash.

  The safe house is a three-bedroom rental in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood. It has never been used to hold any contraband until now. Bobby has been living here for the past six months, since we embarked on this trip, and paying his rent on time, keeping a low profile. He has his welding business as a front; he comes and goes with tools and torches at regular hours. Sammy purchased a fully tricked-out, heavy-duty camper van and outfitted it with a built-in hidden compartment that can hold up to 200 kilos. We have dealers coming into the city from the West Coast, the Midwest, and Canada to look at samples and place their orders. I contacted Mohammed, through Nasif, to let the Lebs know the load made it into the country. They are already making plans to meet me and collect the $4.5 million that is their end: a third for Sammy and his father; a third for me; and a third for the Lebanese—minus what they’ve already been paid.

  I walk in the front door and down the stairs to the basement where Sammy sits on a stool before a small table on which he has placed an adding machine that prints out little slips of paper with the totals of the figures he’s entered. He has a baseball cap on his head and is hunched over like an accountant in a sweatshop. The whole basement is filled with cardboard cartons—not the date boxes, new boxes. This is the first time I have been present in one room with the entire load, and it is massive. Boxes are stacked from floor to ceiling; it’s a room full of hashish. There is one whole wall of slabs that have not been packed in boxes and yet have very little odor. Sammy has an industrial vacuum sealer with heavy-duty plastic bags he uses to seal the slabs. He wipes down each sealed bag with alcohol, then seals it in a second bag. He’s been at it for days, immersed in his work, weighing and inventorying the entire load.

  Sammy defies the stereotype of the lazy, sloppy, spaced-out pothead. He’s a workaholic who happens to stay high, a fanatic for details and organization. Clean, a neat freak, and always well groomed. A family man, he lives in a mansion in the exclusive Todt Hill section of Staten Island. His wife is also a stoner. She has a good job and looks and acts like a straight person—until you get to know her. The only thing that gives them away is their appetites: the best cannabis; fine wines and gourmet foods; loud rock music. They’re undercover freaks. What I love about working with this guy besides the energy he brings to everything he does is the pride he takes in a job well done.

  He takes me for a tour of the load, grins, and says, “You did this.”

  “No, bro. We did this.”

  Here are the cartons containing the Double Zahara. The Zahara and the Number One—whole sections of the basement devoted to the different grades. Each carton has a little plastic envelope stuck to the outside that reads Packing slip enclosed. Sammy has tallied the weights of the different grades and divided the load evenly. Half for him and half for me. We will split expenses and each contribute to Mohammed’s end.

  “It’s a beautiful thing,” he says, marveling at the load.

  I am flashing back to the Bekaa, the days and weeks of riding from one plantation to another with Abu Ali in an effort to amass all of this hash, and now here it is, sitting in the basement of a home on Staten Island. The hairy weeks and months of captivity in Beirut. Eating, fucking, arguing with Mohammed. Val and I narrowly escaping getting blown up in the war. All that risk—and it worked. Now it’s time for the payoff.

  “How’s your old man feeling?” I ask Sammy.

  “Well, listen… he’s fucking relieved, man. Are you kidding? He was about to lose his business. This trip saved his ass.”

  SAVED MY ASS too. Yet Dr. Lowell doesn’t seem capable of swallowing his own medicine. The doctor will become the patient. Instead of receding into the shadows and keeping a low profile, I live like a rock star, or some combination of rock star and fugitive outlaw dope smuggler. I move into a three-room suite in the upper reaches of the Plaza and begin spending money with guilty abandon. In the shops and bars and restaurants I hand out hundred dollar bills. My assortment of guests and I are treated like royalty.

  “Dr. Lowell.” The maitre d’ in the Oyster Bar rushes up to seat me. “How many for dinner this evening?”

  “There will be two. Possibly four. Or more. You never know.”

  I order oysters, a vodka martini, and a bottle of champagne. Biff has insisted on an appointment. He arrives with a screenwriter and two women, sisters I met briefly in LA some years before. The older of the two, in her early thirties, is an actress who has a role in a film the screenwriter wrote and directed—his directorial debut—which is about to be released. So they are in party mode as well. The younger sister immediately gets my undivided attention. I fixate on her. She has green eyes, straight, lustrous reddish-blond hair to her waist. She reminds me somewhat of my older sister—also a strawberry blonde—with fine features dappled with freckles.

  As we move to a larger table, Biff whispers that the screenwriter would like to buy an ounce of cocaine. “I don’t have any cocaine. You know that. What have you been telling these people?”

  “See what you can do. Make some calls. You won’t regret it.”

  I met the older of the sisters, the actress, at a party during an extended stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel when Mailer hired
me to do research on the circumstances surrounding Marilyn Monroe’s death. We became friends, the actress and I, never lovers, though had I been single at the time it might have gone that way. Her sister, the redhead, I saw only briefly at the home of a friend in the Hollywood Hills. But she made an impression then, as now.

  After dinner at the Plaza we move our party to Elaine’s on the Upper East Side. I call my friend Goofy John, who always has blow, and tell him to meet us at Elaine’s with an ounce to sell—hypocrite that I am, facilitating a coke deal with the ulterior motive of getting into the redhead’s pants. Goofy John is the guy who traded me his Toronado for my four-wheel-drive pickup he and his friends loaded up with Colombian pot in Maine and drove back to the West Coast. In town to buy hashish, John’s been partying heavily and shows up at Elaine’s with four other people and the ounce of coke he sells to the director in the men’s room after we all do a couple of lines.

  Biff keeps talking obliquely about the hash trip, like he wants to brag in front of these citizens, impress them and possibly interest the writer/director in doing a movie about smuggling dope out of the Middle East during a war. I act like I don’t know what he’s talking about. What hash? What smuggling venture? Beirut? I prefer to stay focused on the redhead. She says she knows me; I’m trying to figure out exactly what she means by that. She’s a strict vegetarian, a vegan, wears no makeup, a willowy whole earth mama with strong looking haunches. She says she’s into hiking and horseback riding. I’m thinking of hiking up her skirt, mounting from the rear, and riding her bareback.

  By this point in the evening I have no scruples whatsoever and almost no inhibitions. Pure lust. The alcohol and cocaine have dissolved my conscience. I’m quiet, secretive about my desires, though they shine through the gleam in my eye. My plan is to dispatch the film director with the bag of nose medicine and scoop up the sisters, carry them back to my suite for a threesome. As we leave Elaine’s, I slip my arm around the redhead’s waist. She looks up at me as if to say, How presumptuous of you. But she does not move away.