Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (58 page)

Over the cockpit radio the smugglers heard MacDill tower trying to raise them on the override frequency.

‘. . . Douglas eight-six-four . . . ordered to exit military . . .’

The tower eventually gave up. And then, over their UHF receiver, the smugglers heard the F-4 reporting to MacDill.

‘Looks like just another smuggler to me. And this is not our business. Tango flight is departing the area.’

No threat to national security, just some dumb, severely stoned citizens flying a planeload of drugs. The F-4 pilots raised their gear, hit the burners and were gone.

Long raised his Heineken in a farewell salute: ‘God bless America.’

‘The arsenal of democracy,’ volunteered McBride.

‘Let’s have some more of that coke.’

Just before sunset, as the shadows below were lengthening and house lights were switching on, Hatfield took over. Running up the Smoky Mountain valleys, he dropped the aircraft to 1,000 feet, and disappeared from radar for a while. They were about five hours from touchdown when darkness fell, and the plane came out of the mountains dying with no lights. All three men were exhausted. It was time to shave and clean up. At some point the pilots would have to step off the plane to face the personnel of some general aviation facility. By then the plane itself would have to be cleaned up. There was still a lot of work to do.

The DC-3’s extended range, thanks to the auxiliary tanks, was of significant advantage to the smugglers, enabling them as it did to land as far north as Virginia and the Carolinas. The distance between Colombia and the US border was a good piece of what put so much heat on Florida. And made Darlington such a good bet.

They were a hundred miles out when they raised J.D. Reed on the radio. He and Long, over an air-to-air frequency, gave the impression of two pilots shooting the breeze, Long transmitting not from Douglas 86459, but Cessna 4603 Zulu, on a putative flight from Hilton Head to Spartanburg.

‘Yeah, we can see you over there, what are you flying?’ said Long.

‘This is Piper Cherokee four-six-seven-three India,’ responded Reed, transmitting from the dragstrip. ‘I see your lights. You at about eight-thousand?’

‘I’m at eighty-six hundred, descending into Spartanburg now. Golfing was neat at Hilton Head. Are you the guy that operates the fleet of planes out of Middleburg, Virginia?’

‘Affirmative,’ said Reed.

‘What was the weather like over Spartanburg?’

‘Everything was just fine, you’re going to have a fine landing, shouldn’t be any problems.’

‘Fine. That’s an A on that then?’

‘Yes,’ Reed said. ‘That’s an A. I’d give conditions there an A.’

Meaning Darlington, coded Landing Site A, was secure.

Hatfield navigated visually, carefully studying the landmarks below. As he closed in on the dragstrip, he started looking for a signal.

‘I hear you. Yeah, I see your lights,’ said Reed. ‘I sure can. I see your lights. Can you see mine?’

The headlights on the pickup trucks flashed at the end of the dragstrip. Hatfield in response flashed the landing lights of the DC-3. Hatfield buzzed the runway, came back around to land, and Long was working the cargo doors when the airplane hit the ground. The trucks pulled up, Reed secured the hatches and Long started throwing bales. McBride, eager to be airborne, stepped back into the cargo bay and heaved bales along the fuselage, throwing them in the direction of the door. It was then, as the rhythm picked up, that one of Reed’s crew, a guy named Billy, took a bale in the side of the head, momentarily knocking him cold. Reed, without missing a beat, picked the unconscious crewman up and threw him into the back of the truck along with the cargo as if he were one of the bales. ‘Don’t say it.’ ‘I wasn’t going to say it.’ ‘Yes you were,’ said Reed. ‘I could tell.’ ‘I wasn’t,’ said Long. ‘Yes you were.’ ‘Can I say it later?’ ‘I’ll think about it.’ After a quick consultation with the pilots, in which McBride confirmed that he could clear up the Visqueen by himself, Long decided that there was no need for him to go on with the airplane. The DC-3 took off without him. The plane lifted off in one direction and the trucks took off in the other. Before jumping aboard the blue Chevy Suburban in which they would follow the pot to Ann Arbor, Long and Reed, both patting themselves down for a match, looked at each other and simultaneously asked: ‘Got a joint?’

There are three ways out of the dope business, the most dramatic of which will always be dying on the job. Of the other two, quitting while you are ahead or going to jail, the second is by far the more common. Those who have chosen the former – you have eaten in their restaurants, worn their sportswear, listened to music on their record labels, or maybe you have rented their real estate – are admittedly difficult to count. Those who have suffered the latter – they and their customers – have provided fifty percent of the population of the nation’s prisons over the last decade.

Smokescreen
by Robert Sabbag, first published in Great Britain by Canongate Books, February 2002

Samuel Pepys

T
HOMAS
K
ING
F
ORCADE
died by his own hand one year ago. Although he had set aside a promising career in marijuana importing to establish and build
High Times
magazine, he never ceased to perfect his skills in the business that remained his first love. Torn between journalism and smuggling, his twin careers fertilized each other and enabled him to broaden each with an eye trained by his vast experience in the other.

In 1974, Forcade was asked whether starting
High Times
would be an alternative to smuggling dope in the never-ending struggle to turn America on.

‘On the contrary,’ he replied, ‘it’ll be a front for it.’

H
I
L
IFE
:
How did you get started in smuggling?

FORCADE
: Well, I actually got started in high school. I was living in Tucson, Arizona, and I had an advantage over most people who might want to get started in smuggling: I lived fairly near the source of supply.

We all used to get high in high school, and we wanted to get ’55 Chevies (this was in the mid-sixties and a ’55 Chevy was the thing to have) and it soon occurred to us that we could go down to Mexico and score some dope and run it back across the border, and make some money on it. We could buy it across the border for about $30 a key in those days.

We were very careful. I think we stuffed it up underneath, between the gas tank and the trunk, and drove across with it. Very scared. They searched the whole car but they didn’t find anything. So we did it again from time to time. Then we moved on to a larger scale where we would take a sack and throw it across the fence. They have a fence that runs across the border. You just drive up next to the fence, take a sack, swing it a couple of times and toss it over full of grass and pick it up on the other side. Later there was actually a spot in the fence that had a hole in it you could drive through. And then later we got into another place along the border where you could drive across with whole truckloads of marijuana.

H
I
L
IFE
:
What was your first big run?

FORCADE
: The first big one was when we brought a planeload across.

H
I
L
IFE
:
This side of the border?

FORCADE
: Yeah. What they did was, they flew over, and they dropped it out of the plane. Unfortunately, we never found part of the dope. Part of it fell on the highway; some car came along, found it, picked it up and took it in. It was in the newspaper the next day, how they found this dope. (We were very paranoid about it, that they might have found our fingerprints on the wrappers or something, but nothing ever happened.)

Later, in subsequent reenactments of this same style we lost full loads on the desert. (It may still be sitting out there, you know, ‘the treasure of the Sierra Madre’ or something. It might be a little dry by now.)

One time the plane landed and we were surrounded by cops. Everybody got away except one person who was nabbed and of course took the rap for everybody. It was small-scale; in retrospect it was incredibly disorganized and foolish. But that was when we got on to what I would call a professional level. That was around ’68.

H
I
L
IFE
:
And at that point were you flying?

FORCADE
: I did fly some then, but I could usually find someone else to do it. I’m more of a professional kingpin than a technician in these things. I have other people to do the hard parts and dangerous parts. But once, this person suddenly couldn’t make it. We’d already bought the weed down in Mexico, and it was my money backing the operation, so I had no choice but to do it myself.

I’d been over the route in the daytime, but I’d never flown it at night. At night you’re looking for lights and the silhouettes of mountains, and you’re flying by the moon, by the stars and so on, whereas by the day, you just follow the highway or the railroad tracks. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t use things like compasses and stuff like that. Too complicated. We don’t use them that much.

H
I
L
IFE
:
Do you have a pilot’s license?

FORCADE
: Not only do I have a pilot’s license, but I have dozens of pilot’s licenses. I have about 300 hours in the air, but all the licenses that I have are phoney.

H
I
L
IFE
:
How much money . . 
.

FORCADE
: On that particular run? About $25,000. But aren’t you going to ask me why it was so hair-raising? Funny you should ask me. Well, I was flying alone and got lost because, as I said, I’d never been down there at night before. They had the place lit up with bonfires and so on, so I landed, but it wasn’t the smuggling place where I was supposed to be. It was some other smugglers’ landing strip. They were quite upset. They had machine guns on me. They thought maybe I was a narc or something. They were expecting another type of plane and another person, and another code word and everything, and I was having quite a bit of trouble explaining myself. Also, I was out of gas.

So, what I did was, I convinced these people that, quite honestly, no one would be flying around in Mexico in the middle of the night and landing in a bonfire-lit dirt strip in the mountains unless they were also smugglers. So I parked my plane there overnight and I gave those people quite a bit of money. And their plane came in, picked up their weed, and flew out. And the next morning, I got down to a phone, called up my connection, and had him set everything for the next night, and that night I flew out to the right place and picked up the weed.

But unfortunately, on the way back up I had quite a bit of trouble because I had run the plane off into a ditch and the propeller had gotten a little bent and it was a little unbalanced, so it was making this very heavy vibration that caused the oil seal in the front of the engine to start leaking and all the oil was leaking out. By the time I got back to the United States the windshield was all covered with oil and I couldn’t see, so I had to open the side windows and stick my head out of the side window and I came in that way. The engine was completely shot by then because it has two parts bolted together, and the halves of the crankcase were all vibrated to pieces. We had to put in an entirely new engine.

That type of thing is more or less typical. It seems like nothing ever goes smoothly. I don’t know why it is, but there seems to be something about smuggling that causes a very high mortality rate among both the people involved and the equipment involved. You have to have incredible resources and resourcefulness.

H
I
L
IFE
:
Do you prefer smuggling by boat?

FORCADE
: Well, you see, one thing about the air is that they can’t pull you over. I mean, there’s not much they can do if they see you. On the other hand, in a plane, if your engine stops running you don’t just come to a stop in the water like you do on a boat.

Out at sea your chances of getting stopped are about the same as your chances of getting stopped by the highway patrol as you’re going down the highway. In other words, not very high, but it is possible, especially if you’re doing something wrong or if you look suspicious. Generally, they don’t stop anybody. Your chances of even seeing anybody out on the ocean are very small, the same as in the air. But if you see somebody in the air it ain’t no big thing because there’s not much they can do about it unless they want to chase you down. In the sixties they didn’t have anybody to chase you down. The ship thing required a whole different technology, but it was still technology, and I’m good at technology.

H
I
L
IFE
:
And freighters
 . . .

FORCADE
: Yeah, freighters are a very common way for dope to make it up now because the runs are getting bigger and bigger, and a two-hundred-foot freighter can obviously bring up a lot more dope than a forty-foot sailboat. They rendezvous offshore outside the twelve-mile limit. And hopefully, you meet up with them.

I must note in passing that every means I’m discussing here is very well known to the DA, and the newspapers are filled with accounts of various ways that smuggling takes place and gets busted, so I’m not blowing anything for anybody. The DA is quite aware of how dope gets in. They’re also quite aware that they have almost no chance of stopping it. You rendezvous offshore with these boats in a fast speedboat.

H
I
L
IFE
:
Do they have the capacity to outrun a modern coast guard . . .?