Blow (14 page)

*   *   *

By its very nature, drug smuggling is marked by movement rather than stasis. Getting the loads from one place to another is how smugglers earn their living. And moving around reduces the chance of discovery by the police. No one moved farther and faster than George's Yaqui Indian friend, Ramón, who almost overnight was jerked out of a landscape of burros and swinging bridges and set down in a world peopled by creatures with strange possessions and exotic habits. Although he had never traveled more than three miles out of town, it now became routine, if the Rolling Stones were playing in Albuquerque, for Ramón and the gang to charter a plane, fly up there for the concert, have a limo waiting at the airport. Or the guys would stop off in New York City on the way back from Amherst, take Ramón in to get a bite at the Four Seasons, where the fucking maître d' had an attitude problem about Hawaiian shirts. He didn't understand that in California you could get served dressed as a Camperdown Elm if you had fifty thousand dollars in your pocket; he still brought out jackets for them to put on and made them wear these stupid little bow ties.

Or Ramón would board the Winnebago in Manhattan Beach, where it was 80 degrees in the California shade, and when the door opened in Amherst, at the Lord Jeff—well, he'd heard about snow, but he'd never seen it. “I never knew it could be so fucking cold, man. And they have these snowmobiles. I thought to myself, ‘What the fuck is this?' The guy there, one of George's friends, said, ‘Hey, get in one of these babies, Ramón.' So I had mine cranked up as fast as that fucker would go, and you know how they clean the roads and they make the big piles of snow on the side? So I come up to one of these and I think it's just a little hill of snow, so I was flooring it, man, and suddenly, Bang! I'm in the middle of the fucking road, and the snowmobile, she's all wrecked. But the guy just said to get another one, Ramón. Watch where you're going.”

By 1970 the group seemed to be close to cracking under the general strain. The first one to go was Sanchez, Ramón's boss, who went berserk one afternoon after Annette gave him some LSD. Inspired by visions, Sanchez barricaded himself with Annette and the other women inside his house on the hill, informed them he'd received a message that “God is coming to dinner,” and began firing random shots out the window with a shotgun to keep the local police at bay. Someone finally summoned Sanchez's father, the general, who showed up and took his son off to a mental hospital, which meant that Ramón now had charge of the business.

For Sam the Bartender and Greg, all the money pouring in allowed them to fulfill long-harbored fantasies on the Great White Hunter line. Thousands of dollars' worth of expensive gear began piling up in the beach house—Mannlicher Schoenauer hunting rifles from Austria, engraved Purdy shotguns from England, thermal jackets and boots you could do a moon walk in, the ultimate in tents, outdoor cooking gear mail-ordered from Abercrombie & Fitch, infra-red scopes for night sighting, longbows and crossbows for quiet hunting. They also ordered brochures on expeditions to the Northwest, to Alaska, where guides would take them up mountains and into the bush for brown bear, black bear, elk, mountain goat, Dahl sheep, moose, mule deer, antelope, and caribou. They asked Ramón if he wanted to come along on a trip to northern Montana to see what was worth shooting up there. Sure, he said. Montana, why not? Where was that? They have any armadillos up there? Ramón's grandmother knew just how to cook armadillo so you'd think you were eating roast pork.

“It was in the winter and we got warm clothes and our own plane and we fly up somewhere near Canada,” Ramón recalls. “This kid is waiting for us, a guide, and he also does the cooking. I have a gun, very super-powerful rifle with a scope. We start walking, then on horses, then walking, then horses again, and finally we make camp, sitting up in the mountains and the snow, fucking freezing like a motherfucker, man, so whatever you cook it was freezing by the time you get it to your mouth. But the worst was going to the bathroom. That was bad. You have to take your pants off in the middle of the night, it was cold, man, your balls were like
pasas,
man, you know, prunes.” The guys were going for moose, which meant two days more of trudging through waist-deep snow, uphill and down, until they spotted one on the side of a mountain and Sam brought it down with a couple of shots. “But then they couldn't carry it back, it was bigger than a cow. So they just took the horns and left the rest. They just leave it there. I think, you know, you kill something, you eat it, something like that. But they were measuring the horns with their rifles so they can nail it to the wall and put their rifles on it. They wanted it for that.”

Sam and Greg were now thinking of themselves as apart from the group, which disheartened George considerably. He was the one who'd tried to mold them into a tight band of outlaws. After seeing
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
he'd even christened their drug plane
The Hole in the Wall Gang,
in honor of Cassidy's outfit. But despite his efforts, the organization was fraying at the margins. “I kept telling them, ‘If we stay together, we'll be like a fist and have power. Every man contributes to the fist, and the fist is forever, like a brotherhood.' That's the way I felt, even afterward, with Carlos. But I got tired. Everybody was making money, and the money changed everything.”

Then their paid-off police honcho, a deputy chief in Puerto Vallarta, got weird and demanded the guns off the wall. It happened when George and the other guys were off in Guadalajara on business, and the women were alone in the beach house. The deputy, a short Mexican with close-cropped black hair and a bushy mustache, had been receiving a handsome retainer from Sanchez and then from Ramón to make sure the flights went off without interference. Nevertheless, he showed up one day and made a great to-do with Annette and the two Wendys, threatening to arrest them all if they didn't give him the hunting rifles. Frightened, the girls handed over the guns. George returned from Guadalajara ahead of the others and invited the deputy to the villa for a talk. To encourage an open discussion, George broke out the Johnny Walker Black Label he'd had flown down from Manhattan Beach, and the two of them proceeded to put away about a bottle apiece. Based on body volume alone, the deputy stood little chance against George in this realm. He got himself so cross-eyed drunk that it came as a complete surprise when George suddenly picked him off the chair on the balcony, slammed him against the wall, and pinned him there by his neck for the time it took to inform the deputy that he was an insignificant piece of shit, that he was going to bring back those fucking rifles forthwith, and that if he wanted to keep doing business and making his money, he was to keep the fuck away from the house and stay the fuck away from the girls. He then carried the deputy over to the doorway and threw him down the flight of wooden stairs out into the cement courtyard.

But that wasn't how George came to be arrested.

FOUR

Mazatlán

1970–1973

If you're going to make a start, keep on going—if you know what you're doing. But if I were you, I'd think it over.

—
LOOSELY TRANSLATED FROM A SIGN POSTED ALONG A TRAIL IN THE
S
IERRA
M
ADRE

T
HE POLICE DEPUTY, FOR REASONS HE KEPT TO HIMSELF
, chose not to pursue the matter, and shortly afterward one of his men appeared at the door with Sam and Greg's guns, and the household heard no more of it. Nevertheless, George and Ramón questioned the wisdom of continuing to use the landing strip at Punta de Mita. Perhaps it was time to shift the landings to a different airfield, one far away, in another state and jurisdiction. Given their run-in, it might be even better to seek out another connection altogether, and eventually move the whole operation out of Puerto Vallarta. It was at this juncture that Ramón introduced George to a colleague of his named Cosme, who supplied marijuana out of Mazatlán. Located 270 miles up the coast from Puerto Vallarta and two states away in Sinaloa, Mazatlán featured the same palm-lined beaches and strips of hotels, but it was three times the size, a real port city. Most of its 290,000 people were packed into a dense urban section south of the tourist hotels, a maze of red-dirt streets crowded with squalid one-and two-story brick and cinder-block houses where gringos rarely ventured. Spanish galleons had put in at Mazatlán four centuries ago and sailed away laden with gold bullion taken from the mines back in the hills.

Taller than Ramón, with a neatly trimmed mustache, Cosme had connections with farmers who grew pot in the Sierra Madre east of the city. But he was much more the city boy. Always sharply dressed in a white guayabera shirt and crisply pressed black slacks, he had light skin and a few more Spaniards than Indians in his ancestry. Cosme was crazy about hot American cars, particularly the Shelby-designed, four-on-the-floor, fast-backed Mark I Mustangs, powered by a 429-cubic-inch Cobra engine and dual quad carburetors. The Shelbys hit 60 miles an hour in 6.5 seconds and, laid down on the red line, could top out at about 140.

George saw here a chance to help Cosme out. He consulted an acquaintance of his back in Manhattan Beach named Alberto, who lived with his brother in an apartment directly overlooking the beach. The brothers had achieved fame for their weekend parties, where the women danced topless and guests ladled drinks out of a crystal punch bowl brimming with 200-proof grain alcohol laced with LSD. For George's purposes, the useful thing about Alberto was that he worked as a sales manager of a car lot owned by Ralph Williams, then one of the largest dealers in the state, whose bleating TV ads were regularly skewered by Johnny Carson. The lot covered eight acres, and the sales force ferried customers around in golf carts to look at all the cars, among which were a good number of Mark I Mustangs by Shelby. Furthermore, according to Alberto, the accountants for Williams did an inventory of the place only twice a year, which meant that during any particular six-month period no one had the slightest idea whether a certain Shelby was sitting on the lot waiting for someone to come around in a golf cart and buy it or was proceeding rapidly along the Avenida del Mar down in Mazatlán, its driver lowering his sunglasses and giving a wave to the girls as he thundered on by. Even when the accountants came around, Alberto said, the dealership did such a high-volume business that it was possible to fiddle the records in such a way as to cover the fact, at least for a while, that several cars had just upped and vanished.

Alberto was driven to larceny by his addiction to the dice tables and the need to keep himself flush for regular trips to Las Vegas. Thus he agreed once a month to sell one of the Shelbys for one-fifth the sticker price of six thousand dollars, and in the bargain he would hand-deliver it to George's place in Manhattan Beach, complete with California registration and ownership papers. In turn, George had Pogo, his wheel man, drive the vehicle down to Mazatlán, where it would be traded to Cosme for three hundred kilos of marijuana. In this fashion George managed to turn a twelve-hundred-dollar investment into ninety thousand dollars. Over time he became such a good customer that Alberto began urging bigger deals on him, using more and more cars. One morning George stepped out his front door to discover that his view of the houses across the street was being blocked by an eighty-foot-long, double-decker car carrier loaded up with eight brand new Shelbys driven by Alberto himself. “Get that fucking thing out of here, are you crazy?” George yelled at him. “We're doing this one at a time. That's it! One at a time.”

In any event, that was how George's operation changed, in the fall of 1970. They now trucked the pot from Cosme's farmers near Mazatlán 200 miles up into the Sierra Madre, to a tiny paved landing strip just outside the mining city of Durango, 6,197 feet above sea level. This was high-desert country, filled with mesquite and cactus, land formations carved into mesas and buttes by centuries of weather action and erosion, arroyos running down into flowing riverbeds. For the way in which the terrain resembled parts of the American West, Durango had gained popularity among Hollywood movie companies, John Wayne's among them, as a location for shooting westerns on the cheap and avoiding certain U.S. corporate tax laws. As a result, a portion of George's marijuana-for-a-Mustang loads, the part he couldn't get into the airplane, often got trucked back across the border secreted inside movie trailers filled otherwise by camera equipment.

The drive from Mazatlán to the landing strip just outside of Durango involved negotiating one of the more singular engineering phenomena in the Western Hemisphere, the Mexican mountain road. Barren of guardrails, shoulders, streetlights, and any other safety features of modern highway construction, the road to Durango writhes through the mountains like a serpent in heat. Around its hairpin turns one can expect to confront anything from short-haul Mexican buses, whose drivers whip them into the curves in a manner defying the known laws of physics, to an assortment of free-ranging farm animals, including pigs, donkeys, cows, chickens, dogs, goats, and occasionally a dour-looking bull. Flower-strewn crosses dot the roadside to mark the spot where some unfortunate soul, perhaps a little slow to notice his side of the road had washed out in a deluge, had plunged to his death. The scenery almost anywhere in the mountains can be pretty distracting—lofty peaks all around, waterfalls cascading down the sides of cliffs, thousand-foot ravines—but the prudent driver allows it only stolen glances, eyes fixed for signs of danger ahead. One of the more familiar is
PAVIMENTE RESBALOSO
, announcing a stretch of very serious potholes, wide and deep enough to be easily mistaken for an excavation project. There are also little picture signs advising drivers that, depending on when God wants it to happen, at any minute they can be struck on the roof by a large boulder and other debris. Drivers resolve to take the warnings very seriously every now and then when they run into an unruly pile of splintered wood and rubble that shortly before had been a rock formation and a tree anchored somewhere on higher ground. Once having reached Durango, George and his men buried the pot near the landing strip in a deep hole roofed over by plywood planking and camouflaged with a covering of sod. There it awaited the arrival of the
The Hole-in-the-Wall Gang
airplane, which these days was being piloted in tenuous fashion by the knight of the white-knuckle landing, Here-We-Go Bob.