Blow

by Bruce Porter

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  Although flying in and out of the mountain landing strips meant there was less chance of getting caught, the runways themselves were shorter, three thousand feet rather than five thousand, and the jungle growth at the edges made landing and taking off a little more hairy, which was not appreciated by Here-We-Go Bob, who raised a constant lament over George’s new style of operation. Some of the fields were so closed in by trees that the planes had to be “sling shot” into the air, a maneuver that required a half dozen guys to hold on to the tail while the pilot revved the engine. Then they released their hold of the plane abruptly so it would catapult forward with enough speed to achieve liftoff before exhausting the runway. Another problem was the general lumpiness of the landing sites, which were nothing but cornfields, after all. This created a dangerous condition for some of the planes George had been using that had tri-cycle landing gear, with one wheel under the nose and the other two attached to the wings. This sort of plane came in hard, nose down, and if it struck a rut or any kind of a hole, the impact could shear off the front landing gear. Much more suitable for the mountains were any of the “tail-dragger” models, which touched down on the rear wheel first, then settled gently onto the pair of wheels under the wings, like a duck landing on a pond.

  Since Manuel had access to more growers than Ramón did, the new level of business demanded more frequent flights, and so George needed additional planes and pilots. Rather than cutting other people in on the operation, he began contracting with Cliff Guttersrud back in Manhattan Beach, the handsome blond pilot with the FLYBOY license plates, who supplied him fliers for a fee. Cliff had his own Lockheed Lodestar, the same twin-tailed model used to fly Ingrid Bergman away in the farewell scene in Casablanca, but Guttersrud didn’t much fancy taking it into the mountains and setting down on one of George’s cornfield-cum-runways. Indeed, he didn’t like to get his hands too dirty in any regard, preferring to supervise the pilot operation from a distance. He’d fly down to the Mazatlán airport, dressed in his usual blazer and polo shirt, sometimes bringing along his girlfriend, even his mother and father on one trip, asking George to show them the sights of the city. Cliff leased the planes for the drug flights through a dummy corporation in Manhattan Beach, then changed the markings so their origin would be hard to trace. But as George needed more and more planes—and he now wanted strictly twin-engine jobs with a greater range, ones that could reach the dry lakes without all the rigmarole of stopping on the way for refueling—he was suddenly struck with an idea.

  “You know what’s the easiest thing to steal in the world?” he asked over lunch not long ago at a harborside restaurant in Plymouth, Massachusetts, looking around to see who was listening, his voice dropping to a whisper. “An airplane,” he said. “I can take you around the country and show you hundreds of little airports, and you’d sit in the car all day and no one would show up. Millions of dollars’ worth of aircraft just sitting there, and nobody around, not even a watchman. Sometimes these owners don’t fly them for weeks, so they don’t even know they’re gone. So, suddenly it came to me: Why go through all this insanity of trying to buy and lease planes under phony names or corporations that they could trace eventually anyway, when we could just take one—get a nice hundred-thousand-dollar Beechcraft or Cessna, twin-engine, with tip tanks and a fourteen- or fifteen-hundred-mile radius? For free! We were breaking the law anyway. So why leave a trail?”

  To try out his scheme, on the occasion of his next trip East in the summer of 1971 George brought along Here-We-Go Bob, rented a car in Amherst, and the two took a little driving trip out to Cape Cod. For two weeks on and off they monitored the traffic at the tiny airport in Chatham, a well-to-do town located at the elbow of the Cape, notable for its nineteenth-century shingled cottages trimmed in hazy blue. A few planes used the airport on the weekends, but on weekdays the place was usually deserted, and always so at night. Landing or taking off after dark, you turned on the runway lights yourself by calling in on the proper radio frequency; no airport personnel was needed. On the final evening of their vigil, George took along a bolt puller normally used to remove corroded fittings from engine blocks and yanked out the ignition system of a sleek twin-engine Cessna with blue striping. He screwed in a new ignition unit, one that had its own key, and reconnected the wires. Bob fired up the plane, set it loose down the runway, and they were off. It took a day and a half of leisurely flying to cross the country, stopping at a couple of local airports to gas up. Reaching the West Coast, they landed at a little field, Hawthorne Airport, near Manhattan Beach, where they stored the plane a few days before Bob made the run south. In what became a routine, after using the planes a few times, George would park them at the Santa Monica Airport, tie them down to the tarmac, and go off to get another one. In this fashion he secured the loan of about fifteen aircraft from airports at Plymouth and at Sandwich and Barnstable on the Cape, from one outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, and another near Mammoth Lakes in California.

  The only drawback to this plan was that there was no way of knowing if the borrowed planes had any mechanical problems or how well they’d been serviced. “As long as the engine started up, we figured it was okay,” says George. And it was, at least most of the time. George did experience a slight brake problem once with a twin-engine Cessna he’d procured from Santa Fe, which was being flown by one of Cliff’s rent-a-pilots named Donny. Coming in to the dry lakes, both George, who was sitting in the copilot’s seat, and Donny had to stand up heavily on the pedals to bring the plane to a halt before it got to the end of the salt flat. Donny argued for leaving it there and driving back with Pogo in the camper, but George had other uses for the plane and told him to fly them on to Santa Monica. It was a bad mistake. When they hit the runway at Santa Monica, Donny reversed the props to slow it down and applied pressure to the brake pedal, gradually at first, then with increasing desperation as he saw his effort producing no discernible effect. “‘Georgie, they’re gone,’ he says, we’re whizzing down the runway at about a hundred and ten miles an hour and there’s nowhere to go—planes are all lined up to the left of us, incoming traffic on the right. Straight ahead I could see a big ditch they’d dug for a storm drain.” Before they figured out what to do, the plane had run out of runway and plunged into the ditch, ramming its nose into the dirt and gravel, its tail jerking up into the air.

  The first sound after the crunch was the keening of a siren, then men in silver suits were darting about spewing the area with foam. The police were reported to be on the way. Oh, great, George was thinking. “The pilot took off immediately, just ran away. I’m collecting the maps of Mexico and the lake beds, the guns, the pistols, into a bag and I’m trying to get the hell out of there also. One of the silver suits is asking, ‘Who the hell are you? Where’s the pilot?’ ‘I don’t know, I hitched a ride from Santa Fe. Maybe the pilot’s in shock, wandering around somewhere. Why don’t you look for him? I don’t feel too well myself, I gotta go and throw up.’” George hobbled over to the executive part of the airport, his football knee bothering him now. He saw a young woman coming out of the office and getting into a car. “‘I got an emergency, sweetheart. Do you think you could take me to Manhattan Beach?’ She said she was only driving as far as halfway. ‘That’s just where I’m going,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’”

  Stealing airplanes wasn’t the only innovation George brought to the smuggling business. He also pioneered the art of the road landing. This practice not only proved useful during the rainy season, June through October, when the fields turned into mudholes, but it also kept the flights clear of regular airports. He didn’t have to worry about the police, who were thoroughly paid off. But pressure from the Nixon administration to stem the drug tide continued to mount in the early 1970s, so much that the Mexican government had gotten the army involved. Military authorities put out the word that money could be earned in exchange for information about anyone who was landing planes at night or buying gasoline for unclear purposes. In this
connection, Mexican soldiers came uncomfortably close to nabbing George and Manuel on one occasion, when someone at the Mazatlán airport apparently leaked word that a large amount of airplane fuel and hand-operated pumps were being transported up into the mountains. They thanked their escape on the fact that Manuel always had scouts stationed along the lower trails to monitor the presence of hostile parties in the area. Thus, when the army actually sent up a troop of men to investigate the reports, word was rapidly passed on up to the airstrip, just in time for the plane to get in and out and for the farmers and banditos to fade into the jungle. With the soldiers firing away aimlessly into the trees, Manuel led George down a hidden series of trails back toward Mazatlán, spending a night on the way in the thatched hut of a friendly campesino.

  The highway landings obviated the problem of spies, since George moved them around to various roads in the northwestern part of the country. Greg was brought in to fly these jobs, because landing an airplane on a strip of road pocked with potholes and barely wide enough for two cars to pass did not hold much appeal for Here-We-Go Bob. The last and the most memorable of the landings occurred right on Route 15, the main highway from Mazatlán to Culiacán in late August of 1972, about when President Nixon was making a campaign speech in Kentucky promising “peace with honor and not peace with surrender” in Vietnam. Greg had flown down to the Mazatlán airport, and George drove him out to inspect the highway. To keep cars away during landings, George customarily blocked off the road with vehicles at both ends of a few-thousand-foot length, while a couple of Manuel’s banditos stood around holding guns and staring in an unfriendly manner at anyone who approached. About ten miles north of town they found a smooth-enough stretch, but Greg didn’t like all those high-tension power lines strung alongside the northbound lane. Given the slightest miscalculation on his part, his wing tip could nick into a pole or hit a wire. Noting that the poles were wood, George told him not to worry about the power lines. They wouldn’t be there when Greg came in for the landing.

  It was a little misty that day, with a light rain falling, when George and the bandits pulled up at the landing site with a Winnebago full of pot. The men blocked the southern access of the road, and George stood by the van at the north. Suddenly, down the highway came a station wagon. It bore Arizona plates, a middle-aged man and woman in front and a couple of boys, twelve or thirteen years old, in the back, and suitcases strapped on top—an American family on vacation. George, his cowboy hat lowered over one eye and a cigar in his mouth, stood in the road and put up his hand for them to stop. They did as he bade, probably because he was carrying an M-16 semiautomatic rifle, as well as having a revolver tucked in his belt. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, leaning over to see into the car. “We’re just doing a little drug operation, and you’ll have to wait here a minute. Just be patient and you can go on your way very shortly, after the plane leaves.”

  Just then, Greg called in on the radio to say he’d be touching down in a few minutes and remember the power lines, George. With the vacationers staring in wonder, George ran over to the camper and withdrew a McCulloch chainsaw he’d gotten in a Mazatlán hardware store, ripped at the starter cord, and one by one he lopped off a half-dozen or so of the poles. He made sure to cut them on a 45-degree angle, right to left, so they would topple over away from the road. Radioed the all-clear, Greg then brought down the plane. Quickly the banditos helped load it up, Greg spun the craft around in a 180-degree turn, gunned the motor, and took off whence he came, soon appearing as just a receding dot in the distant sky.

  George waved the station wagon on through before climbing into the camper and heading back to town. It was dusk when he reached the city limits, and strangely dark. For some reason the streetlamps seemed to be out. Traffic signals weren’t working either. When he got to the bar at the Shrimp Bucket, the place was illuminated with the eerie glow of candles, and Gordo, the bartender, was passing out free Cocos Locos. Gordo said he didn’t know what it was, but something had happened a little while ago and the lights died suddenly, all over. It was only then that it dawned on George, and was confirmed by a page-one story the next day in the newspapers, that for the sake of providing Greg a safe place to land he’d succeeded in knocking out the power to the whole northern half of the city of Mazatlán.

  FIVE

  Danbury

  1974–1975

  Nothing was meant to be. You are the designer of your life. If you want something, you can plan and work for it. Nothing is easy, but nothing is impossible either.

  —FROM A PLAQUE OUTSIDE THE COUNSELING CENTER AT THE FEDERAL CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION, DANBURY, CONNECTICUT

  ONLY TWO MONTHS ELAPSED BETWEEN GEORGE’S lights-out highway landing in Mazatlán and his equally memorable encounter with the hooker who looked like Britt Ekland—and his arrest—in the Chicago Playboy Club later in the fall of 1972. It would be still another eighteen months, and after the collar by Agent Trout in his childhood bedroom, before the federal marshals would finally get George to a Chicago courtroom to face the music.

  Technically, he could have been sentenced to up to five years for the bail jumping alone, plus another fifteen on the marijuana charge. But with his lawyer’s nudging, the hugely overburdened U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago proved amenable to going along with a term of three years. This meant George would actually do only twelve months in a federal prison if he behaved himself, and that in a low- or medium-security facility, where time passed more or less agreeably.

  At 6:00 A.M. on March 14, 1974, federal marshals picked him up at the Cook County Jail and escorted him into the holding pen in the U.S. District Court building, where his lawyer again went over the deal worked out with the U.S. attorney and coached George on the little speech he should make before Judge James Austin, who would be presiding. Tell him you’re sorry, the lawyer said. Tell him you made a mistake and you’re going to change your life. Describe your plans for the future. Whatever you tell him, be sure you do it in a way that convinces him you’re contrite, repentant. The marshals who brought George over also tried to be helpful. This judge was a son of a bitch, but fair, they said. The best way to deal with him was not to give him any shit and not to talk too long.

  At midafternoon George finally found himself standing before the bench. A man in his sixties with glasses and a gray, balding head was looking down at him in an impassive manner. The assistant U.S. attorney reviewed the case and said the bond-jumping charge would be dropped and that a term of three years on the marijuana sale was acceptable to the U.S. government. George’s lawyer confirmed the arrangement and larded in some details about Mr. Jung’s plans for going back to college after prison, taking some business courses, maybe getting into advertising. The judge then turned his gaze to George and asked him what he had to say for himself, which was when the whole thing slid off the track.

  It was the old problem George had when it came to authority figures. George didn’t tell his lawyer, but he had a feeling right when he entered the courtroom and saw the federal judge sitting up there that he wasn’t going to do the speech they’d agreed on. “I had it all planned, what to say, but when I got in there, something came over me,” he recalls. “Suddenly I got this feeling, I became very hostile, because I really didn’t believe that what I did was wrong. I mean I was selling stuff that people wanted, it wasn’t hurting anyone, people were calling it ‘God’s herb,’ and it was all going to be legal anyway someday.” What he actually told the judge was: “Your Honor, I realize I broke the law, but I want to tell you in all honesty that I don’t feel it’s a crime. I think it’s foolishness to sentence a man to prison, for what? For crossing an imaginary line with a bunch of plants?” George found himself expressing other general thoughts as well. He mentioned the Vietnam War, and something about how none of the real criminals in the world ever end up behind bars, a little distillation from the oral philosophy of Bob Dylan. You say that I’m an outlaw, you say that I’m a thief. Well, where’s the Christmas dinner for the peopl
e on relief?

  There might have been more, but what he remembers next is his attorney giving him a stamp on the foot, which the judge couldn’t see, and the eyes of the court officers lifting up to search the ceiling. George remembers Judge Austin smiling down at him in a way that made him think at first he might just have pulled it off, said things that had gotten through to the old man. “That’s an interesting concept you have, Mr. Jung. Very interesting,” he recalls the judge saying. “Unfortunately for you, the imaginary line you crossed is real, and the plants you brought with you are illegal, and what you did constitutes a crime.” And after hearing the speech, he told George he just might also have a little attitude problem, in view of which the judge didn’t think he was of a mind anymore to go along with the three-year deal. Mr. Jung was now going away for four.

  * * *

  As a Level 2 facility—federal prisons are rated on a scale of 1 to 6, 6 being the designation for an end-of-the-line joint, such as the one in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, or Marion, Illinois—Danbury was designated as a “correctional institution” rather than a “penitentiary,” which meant that its inmates had been given relatively low sentences for crimes that entailed no violence. From a quick look at the celebrity roster, they also promised to afford engaging company. George just missed the two Father Berrigans, Dan and Philip, who had been released after doing a year each for pouring bottles of blood plasma over Selective Service records in Baltimore as a protest against the war. But Clifford Irving was around, the author who had made the headlines for his hoax biography of Howard Hughes. From the world of sports came Johnny Sample, the defensive back for the New York Jets whose terrorizing of would-be pass receivers helped his team to victory in Super Bowl III back in 1969. He was now working off his sentence for cashing some fifteen thousand dollars in stolen U.S. Treasury checks as a prison recreation aide, laying down the lines for the ball field, making sure the weight racks were set up properly. Representing the Nixon administration was G. (for George) Gordon Liddy, the unrepentant Watergate defendant, who at the time George arrived was awaiting sentencing on two counts of burglary, two of intercepting oral communications, and one of conspiracy. From his first day, Liddy had made a big hit with the other inmates for the way he turned prison conditions on end and in general made life more difficult for the administration. In the crowded orientation dorm, for instance, where there were only three toilets for one hundred inmates, he succeeded in reserving one for his exclusive use by putting up a fake memo on the bulletin board informing inmates about the myriad of ways they could catch venereal disease, then posting an official-looking sign over one of toilets announcing V.D. ONLY. Using his knowledge of surveillance techniques, he actually managed to bug the administration’s telephone lines and drove the guards crazy by spreading the word among prisoners about which guards were sneaking around having affairs with other guards’ wives. He also won a lawsuit against the warden that forced guards to honor due-process rules before putting prisoners into solitary for disciplinary infractions. George would encounter Liddy at the weight rack now and then, where he could outpress Liddy by about twenty-five pounds. He determined against trying to make friends with him, however, after Liddy announced one day that in any country given over to him to run he’d put a quick end to drug smuggling by categorizing the offense as a capital crime and doing away with the bastards.