Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (62 page)

She flew down to Bogotá, met Chick’s contacts, bought an impressive selection of moderately priced
ruanas
, dresses, wall-hangings, etc., and flew back into San Francisco. As usual she carried as much as possible as personal baggage, and the rest she air-freighted back. When she got back Chick plied her with questions. How had it been, getting through customs? Had there been any problems clearing the stuff she’d freighted? And so on. In fact, Rosalita said, there had been rather more questions than there were when she came back from Guatemala. This was late 1970: there was only a trickle of cocaine coming up from Colombia, but there was already a lot of marijuana, and Colombia was undoubtedly on the customs list of suspicious provenances.

But they didn’t search you? Chick asked. No, of course not, said innocent Rosalita. As a matter of fact she knew the customs man quite well.

Chick danced around, and kissed her, and said, ‘You’re perfect, baby! You’ve just made us
millonarios
! He picked up the travelling case he had given her. The four little rubber studs on the bottom unscrewed, the base came away, and there was a neat little compartment inside. For a moment she thought she’d been set up. But there was nothing in it. Chick said, ‘You just carried thin air into the States from Colombia. Next time, baby, you carry in $25,000.’

‘You want me to carry in
money
?’

‘
Plata de polvo
,’ Chick laughed. Powder money.

Rosalita was shocked. She could just about handle dope: some of her upmarket friends smoked. But cocaine. That was on the outer periphery of the drug world, something she vaguely associated with junkies, blacks, jazz musicians. Chick said, ‘Trust me,’ and he also said, ‘Try some.’ Rosalita did both. Two months later she flew in from Bogotá with 31b of Huanaco White cocaine packed in a long thin wedge in the underbelly of her travelling case. It was Rosalita’s first run, and it went like a dream. ‘And, you know, I’m not sure which got me higher. That first hit of
perica
Chick gave me, or that first run through customs.’

It was a very tight operation. The supplier in Bogotá was one of the clothing wholesalers Chick had introduced her to. He had a warehouse full of
ruanas
and he had a regular supply of high-grade cocaine. Rosalita wouldn’t tell me anything about him: ‘He’s still active, you’d better not know about him.’ The cocaine was packed by him, at his warehouse, in the course of their legitimate business. No money changed hands then: it was sent by Chick from San Francisco, a perfectly straight-up money draft. As soon as Rosalita brought the cargo in, Chick buffed it lightly with mannite, and laid it off as 41b to a wholesaler in San Francisco, another Colombian, who hailed from the southern department of Huila. The ‘Huila Dealer’, as Chick called him, paid $8,000 a pound. Chick was buying it in Bogotá for $4,000 – a highish price in those days, but it included the packing and no-hassle facilities. ‘It was nothing huge,’ Rosalita said. ‘We weren’t greedy. It was the simple, classic run – buy, carry, sell: minimum people, maximum cover.’ And it may not have been huge, but over a couple of years Rosalita did that run ten times, clearing about twenty grand each time. Overheads were zero, of course. All the expenses of the trip were picked up unwittingly by Cousin Bartolomeo. He for his part was happy with the profits from his Colombian shop, ‘Andes’, and on the first floor above the Guatemala shop in Sausalito.

Sometimes, for luck, she varied the run. ‘Sometimes I carried in
el conejo
.’ I looked up in surprise. In a rabbit? She laughed and pouted. ‘
Si, hombre. El conejo
. I brought the stuff in up inside me.’ Of course –
conejo
is the South American equivalent of ‘pussy’. She was referring to what the customs boys call ‘vaginal caches’. I refrained from asking her how much she brought in on these occasions. Not, I imagine, 3lb. She also carried it sewn in ribs in her bra.

These, like the false-bottomed case, were the simplest kind of mule work there is. You just hide the stuff in the last place they’ll look. If they bring out the screwdrivers and the torches your number’s up, but any lesser degree of searching and questioning you can get away with. This kind of mule work is only worth it with high-density, high-profit merchandise, like precious jewels and cocaine. A pound of grass is hardly worth it, and you’d look pretty conspicuous with it stuffed up your bra.

They contemplated broadening their horizons. The other method obviously available to them was to import the cocaine in one of the crates of woollens and weavings which Rosalita air-freighted from Bogotá. The plus of this was that you could bring in much higher volume. The minus was that crates from Colombia were routinely searched before clearing customs, mainly because freight traffic was the main smuggling mode for marijuana. It was just too risky, they decided. Then the
ruana
-man in Bogotá came up with a bright idea. Impregnating the
ruanas
with a solution of cocaine. When the solution dried, the cocaine deposit nestled invisibly in the deep woollen pile of the
ruanas
. At the other end the
ruanas
were soaked once more and the cocaine recovered in solution.

But before they could put this into effect, Rosalita had her first near miss. She had the cocaine in the false-bottomed case, and she got a real going-over at customs. ‘He had all my stuff out of the case, and he was pushing and prodding. Luckily we’d just put new rubber studs in the bottom, and they were real stiff. They didn’t bust me, but they sure scared the shit out of me. You know, running drugs is all up here in your head, it’s all good attitude. You convince yourself, you’re three-quarters there to convincing the customs man. I was good, there’s no doubt. I knew the ropes, I’d brought in legitimate imports for years. I felt right. When I started wearing glasses I felt even better. Not too smart, not too ragged. Just be what I am. That’s the secret of smuggling, one big lie with lots of little truths around it.

‘But once you see the other side – once you think: They’ve got my number – then you’re into all sorts of problems in your head. It’s all a question of what you see when you look in the mirror. Do you see a young business woman importing goods for a Sausalito boutique, or do you see a cocaine mule pissing in her pants with fright?

‘I swore off it right there and then. Chick tried to persuade me. I said, “It’s OK for you.” Chick was always very cool. He spread everything around: different bank accounts, a couple of apartments, different phoney company names when he sent the money drafts down to Bogotá. Always have a back door open, that was Chick’s motto. I said, “That’s fine when you’re dealing the stuff. But when you’re running it,” I said, “that’s when there aren’t any back doors. You just got to keep on going forward: one way out, no way back. I’ve had enough.”’

Chick and Rosalita lay low for a while after that. But smuggling is like a drug itself, it gets in your blood, and after a while they were craving for action. Rosalita didn’t want to do the simple Bogotá run any more. ‘It’s just statistics,’ she said. ‘No matter how good your cover, you can’t keep coming in from Colombia without the customs turning you over once in a while.’ She’d drawn a rum card on the last run, and got away with it. Next time not so lucky, perhaps. By the mid-seventies the heat was really on for travellers from Colombia. Dope and coke were pouring into the US. Every scam in the book was being tried by smugglers of every shape and size.

Rosalita didn’t travel to Colombia any more, but she did still visit Guatemala regularly. Why not get someone else to ferry the merchandise from Bogotá to Guatemala City? she suggested. She could then relay it on from there into the States. A Guatemalan stamp in your passport was perfectly cool. There wasn’t much worth smuggling out of Guatemala, nothing you could carry on your person, anyway. This time it was Chick who demurred. It meant cutting someone else in, relying on someone else’s cool. ‘Put another link in the pipeline,’ he said, ‘and at the very least you’re doubling the risk of a screw-up.’ It was against their hitherto so successful creed – Small is Beautiful.

Then, in the summer of ‘75, they found their new move. It answered both their objections: Rosalita didn’t have to fly in with Colombian stamps in her passport, but Chick didn’t have to lose sleep over the risks of additional mules. This was a scam that wasn’t in the book. They called it the Magic Eraser move.

One day Chick brought a stranger back to their Sausalito apartment. He was an Englishman. He had blond hair scraped back and tied in a bunch, and little wire-rim spectacles. He wore an expensive suit.

‘He was something like a smart hippie, something like a professor. Chick introduces him. “This is Dr Richard,” he says. “Dr Richard’s in plastics.” Jesus, I thought – plastics, I’m really excited. But Chick
was
. He was really wired up, on to something new. He said, “Dr Richard’s got something to show you, Rosalita.”’

‘So the guy opens up his briefcase. He takes out a piece of paper, a rubber stamp and two aerosol cans. The cans were unmarked: one plain black, one plain white. The way he put the things on the table, it was like a conjuror we used to see in Oviedo at Christmas, and that’s what Dr Richard called himself. A technological conjuror.

‘He took a can, the black one, and sprayed something over the paper. It smelt like new car seats. It made a sort of sheen over the paper, but after a few seconds it dried, and the paper looked just the same as before, except if you picked it up it was stiffer, perhaps, heavier. Then he inked his stamp and put a stamp on the paper. It said, “Downstream Enterprises”. That was Dr Richard’s company: it did all sorts of weird clever things with plastics. Chick kept pacing around and grabbing me, and saying: “Baby, isn’t it beautiful, you ain’t seen nothing yet.” Then Dr Richard took the other can and sprayed that over the paper. A different smell, bleachy. In a moment all the surface of the paper went a white colour, sort of frosted, like a smashed windscreen. He shook the stuff in shreds off the paper, and with a little knife he very carefully scraped the rest. When he had finished, the paper was blank. No stuff on it, and no stamp on it: it looked just like it had before he’d started.

‘Dr Richard explained. It’s simply a very thin, transparent film of plastic. It’s something called linear low-density polyethyline laminate. He’d been doing research for years. Breaking the micron barrier, he called it. Getting down to really small molecular thicknesses. A lot of technical stuff I didn’t understand. He was offering Chick the spray-cans at $5,000 a piece. I hadn’t really sussed. Then Chick said, “Baby, think about it. Think what you could do with that stuff sprayed on your passport!”’

Chick and Rosalita took a long weekend and made a trial run. They motored down to Mexico with the magic eraser sprayed on the pages of their passports. They got stamped at the border, going in and coming back out. The customs also turned them over on the way out, looking for grass or heroin. They were clean, of course. This pleased Chick enormously.

Everyone has a few falls waiting for them, and this one hadn’t hurt them at all. They were even more pleased when, in a motel outside El Paso, they sprayed the white can of solvent on to their passports. The plastic skin frosted up into view, they scraped it off, and – eureka! – there was absolutely no visible record left of their visit to Mexico.

This was the basic premise of the Magic Eraser runs. Rosalita was able to move in and out of Colombia without any record remaining in her passport. Passport stamps aren’t everything, but a Colombian stamp undoubtedly multiplies the likelihood of getting pulled. She would fly down to Guatemala City, in the course of her legitimate business. There she would buy a round-trip ticket to Bogotá and back. She sprayed on the magic eraser before she left Guatemala City, peeled it off when she got back with the cocaine, supplied as usual by the
ruana
man. There was never any problem getting through customs when coming back into Guatemala. They were really slack. When she flew back into the States there was no evidence she’d been anywhere near Colombia. She had a bigger suitcase now: it carried 10lb. Chick had a new dealing network. The Huila Dealer had moved off to LA, and now Chick was knocking it straight out to dealers. There was a Chinaman called Jack up in North Beach, others in Berkeley and Oakland. It was more hassle, but the profits were bigger. They were making $50-60,000 a run now.

The magic eraser was cumbersome. For a start Rosalita had to spray all the pages of her passport every time – you can never be quite sure where the immigration people are going to put the stamp. There was also a slight risk because she was filling in immigration and emigration forms every time she moved between Guatemala and Colombia. She had a little side-scam on this, one of the mule’s regular tricks. Every time she filled in a landing card or suchlike she made two deliberate errors. She put her first name where her family name should be, and vice versa – her family name was Amparo, which is a fairly common female Christian name. She also transposed two of the digits in her passport number. If anyone noticed on the spot, which they never did, it would be easily explained away as a mistake. It was just another bit of insurance, another spanner in the official works. If anyone started running checks, there was a chance that Amparo Rosa, passport number 1234, wouldn’t get connected with the real Rosa Amparo, passport number 1324.

The magic eraser worked like a dream for half a dozen runs. But Dr Richard’s invisible laminate had one major flaw: it was susceptible to heat. He had told them to keep the passports clear of any heat source, otherwise the film would crack apart, as it did when the solvent in the white can was applied.

One day in Bogotá, staying as always in the Tequendama hotel, Rosalita made one of her rare mistakes. She had to leave her room in a hurry – there’d been a change of rendezvous with the
ruana
man – and she left the passport on a window-sill. It was unseasonably hot, the window faced south, and when she returned, the passport was well and truly baked. The magic plastic film was crinkling off the pages, but not coming off neatly like it did with the solvent. The pages looked like eggs beginning to fry. She hadn’t got the solvent with her, to make a proper job of it. It was back in Guatemala – the last thing she wanted to do was to remove her Colombian entry stamp
before
leaving Colombia.