Blow (16 page)

In mid-November, after George had been there about three months, Alfonso, faithful to his word, pulled up in a car at the prison gate with the bail bondsman, Esposito, and Esposito's cousin, the Federale from Mexico City, and told the warden to bring him out. They took him into Durango, to a small office up a set of rickety back stairs where a circuit judge, an older man with a suit and a gray mustache, was sitting at his desk. “Esposito handed him the briefcase,” says George. “He opened it, counted the money, then took a piece of paper out of his briefcase and a little seal and he stamped it. ‘Jorge,
suelto,
' he said. ‘George is free.' Then he took out some more pieces of paper for the warden and stamped them. We took them back to the prison and Alfonso gave them to the warden, and that was it. I was gone. Alfonso seemed sorry to see me go. He wanted to talk about forming some kind of relationship. I told him that seemed like a good idea and I'd call, but that was just because I didn't want to offend him. I already knew where I was going.”

*   *   *

Whereas Ramón was little more than a boy, Manuel was a man in his forties, and he was connected to the Mexican Mafia in Mazatlán. This meant for George that very serious consequences would now attend his failure to produce whatever he promised. The deal he worked out with Manuel was that the two would be straight partners. Manuel would furnish the pot, and George would transport it across the border, sell it in the United States, and return to Mazatlán to split the proceeds fifty-fifty, minus expenses. Manuel's farmers were guarded by heavily armed members of the Mafia, referred to simply by its initial,
Eme,
or “Ehmay,” a vast criminal enterprise engaged in the same range of activities—drugs, gambling, extortion—as its Italian counterpart in the States. The Mafia ruled through fear and intimidation, and in the mountains, if you were caught where you shouldn't be, there would be trouble. As connected as he was, Manuel, for instance, never ventured north of the Rio Tomazula, which runs down from up in back of Culiacán, from the region of the Espinazo del Diablo, or Devil's Backbone. The marijuana grown in that territory was intended for someone else. There used to be a sign along one of the trails off the Durango road, near a place called Buenos Aires, that, loosely translated, said, “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.” Right beyond the sign was where the charred bodies of Cosme and the Mazatlán police chief were found, a couple of years after George had left Mexico. For some transgression against the
Eme,
they'd been burned alive and left hanging from a tree.

Even by Mafia standards Manuel was a tough customer, someone George saw good reason to emulate. About George's height, tall for a Mexican, he was a classy dresser with a small, neatly clipped mustache. He could just about out-carouse George, a large piece of work for any healthy man, especially when it came to downing the Cocos Locos that Gordo, the bartender at the Shrimp Bucket, would whip up—two ounces each of tequila, vodka, gin, Grenadine, and 150-proof Mexican rum, poured into the hacked-off shell of a fresh coconut and filled with ice and coconut water. Manuel was also an exceptional baseball fanatic, and after a night in the bars and the whorehouses of Mazatlán he'd be up the next morning to field the semiprofessional baseball team he both owned and pitched for as a southpaw sidearmer—the same delivery as George, the Weymouth Little Leaguer. After the game he'd take off in his truck to arrange his business in the mountains. He had read Hermann Hesse and spoke French and English. His hand-tooled boots came from Durango; he wore a broad-brimmed white Stetson. Except when he pitched ball, he kept an automatic pistol tucked into his belt underneath his shirt, a small .32 caliber Beretta for in-town occasions, but when he went into the hills, where he didn't mind if people saw the bulge, he brought his bull-stopping 9-millimeter Llama. Like Manuel, George started sticking a big pistol in his own belt, a nickel-plated .357 Smith & Wesson. He smoked long cigars like Manuel and bought a big white hat. On one occasion he posed for a snapshot with
bandoleras
filled with cartridges criss-crossed over his chest—that was the big bad
bandito
that FBI agent Trout saw in the snapshot in George's bedroom while George was on the run. Nobody fooled with Manuel, and he lived long enough to die of cancer in 1982 in a hospital bed in San Diego, California.

Because of the need to pay Manuel his half of every deal, George now arrived in Mazatlán from Amherst with a considerable amount of cash on him, sometimes fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars. Carrying all that money made him more than a little nervous—he hid it in the battery compartments of large road-service flashlights—and it didn't ease his mind when Manuel invariably reserved a room for him at Rosa's, which was a combination whorehouse and hotel four blocks back from the beach. Manuel had a financial interest in the place, and it was a favorite haunt of many of the
banditos
when they came down from the mountains. George would often have to wait there a day or two for Manuel to show up, during which it didn't fail to strike him that he was literally sleeping in a den of thieves and cutthroats. The bandits would show up in the morning and hang around in the courtyard, George looking out at them from behind a curtain in his room. “There would be ten pick-ups out there, with all these guys with big mustaches, drinking beer and tequila, with pistols in their belts. These guys were very serious people. Killers. Some of them, just to look at them scared the shit out of me. They made me think of the old story about the swan and the scorpion. Where the scorpion asks the swan to take him across the river and the swan says, are you crazy, you'll sting me in the neck, and I'll be dead. I wouldn't do that, the scorpion replies, because then we'd drown and both be dead. So the swan finally agrees, and they start across. But in the middle of the river the scorpion stings him anyway. Why'd you do that? Now we're going to die, the swan says. And the scorpion answers: Because it's my nature.”

*   *   *

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.