Nick Reding (7 page)

One day in May 2005, Roland Jarvis sat in the living room of his mother’s tiny new two-bedroom house in a wobbly three-legged
La-Z-Boy covered in what looked like orange and brown carpeting. Outside, the world was fairly ecstatic with the first temperate,
blue-skied day of spring following so much rain in northern Iowa. Nonetheless, Jarvis was watching TV with his back to the
windows, the heavy curtains drawn tight against the warm sun. His face was thin beneath the baseball cap that he wore over
his short blond hair. Visible in the semidarkness were fine bones and bright, shining blue eyes around which Jarvis’s skin
had liquified and reset in swirls. He rubbed at where his nose had been and coughed violently. Jarvis had just smoked a hit
of meth by holding the glass pipe with his rotted teeth. Using what was left of his right hand, he jostled the lighter until
it wedged between the featureless nub of his thumb and the tiny protrusion of what was once his pinkie, managing somehow to
roll the striker of the red Bic against the flint. Suddenly, his eyes were as wildly dilated as a patient waiting in the low
light of an ophthalmologist’s office.

At thirty-eight, Jarvis had become a sort of poster boy around Oelwein for the horrific consequences of long-term meth addiction.
Like Boo Radley, he hardly ever ventured out, though his was nonetheless a heavy presence in town. In two months, Jarvis was
going back to jail, this time for possession of drug paraphernalia. (His sixty-year-old mother would be joining him in the
lockup for the same offense.) He wore warm-up pants and wool socks. He was always cold, he said, and hadn’t slept more than
three hours at a time in years. His skin was still covered in open, pussing sores. He had no job and no hope of getting one.
The last time he “went uptown,” as he calls going to a Main Street bar, was eighteen months earlier. That night he was in
his old hangout, the Do Drop Inn, when another customer hit Jarvis in the face because he wanted to know what it was like
to slug a man with no nose.

“That,” says Jarvis, “kind of put a damper on my Saturday night fever.”

Nowadays, the one thing that could get him up and moving were the weekly visits he was allowed with his children, two girls
and two boys, ages sixteen to nine. For the most part, he would accompany them to the town lake, out past the Country Corner
Café, on the way south to Hazleton. There, weather permitting, Jarvis and his kids would fish for a few unsupervised hours,
hoping to catch some bullheads and bluegills to fry for supper. Sometimes he would accompany the kids back to their mother’s
home for that purpose. He and his ex-wife were, he says, still on pretty good terms, given what he’d done to their lives.

Jarvis speaks in a metaphorical language of addiction, honed over decades of repeating the same scenes in his mind like tapes
on interminable loops. Tweakers are rats, crank is cheese, cops are cats. At the end of each story, all three end up in the
same house, the same motel, or the same barn, where invariably something either very bad or very funny, or both, has just
occurred. The venues for these stories are small towns and middling cities, from Oelwein to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Often
the stories are compendiums of rural kitsch that, though they unfold over the course of many years, appear to stretch the
year 1987 into several decades. In them, everyone drives a Corvette or a Trans Am and wears Porsche driving glasses. For Jarvis,
it’s the memory of the cars, more than that of the days at a time spent having sex with teenage girls, or of the houses he
bought and sold, or of the thrill of outwitting the cats, that remains the enduring emblem of how once—a long time ago, and
however briefly—he’d finally arrived.

Jarvis’s mother has been listening from the kitchen as he speaks. Seen through a pall of cigarette smoke, backlit by the rays
of sun pouring through the kitchen window, with her greasy black hair worn back off her steep, leather-brown face, she looks
like a nineteenth-century Apache in a sepia-tone portrait. For the past few hours (if not the past few years), she and a neighbor
have been playing gin rummy and drinking cans of Hamm’s beer. Looking at her son now, she calls out, “Tell the man the truth,
Roland.”

Summing up his years as a batcher, Jarvis says dutifully, and loud enough that his mother can hear, “It was all a big mess.
I lost everything of any value.” His face, however, tells another story. For, as he remembers, it’s the first time in hours
that he has smiled.

CHAPTER 3

THE INLAND EMPIRE

A
s the weeks that I traveled around the Midwest, the Southeast, and California turned to months in the summer and fall of
2005, I was beginning to see meth in America as a function not just of farming and food industry trends in the 1980s and ’90s
but also of changes in the narcotics and pharmaceuticals industries in the same period. It would take a few more years of
watching what happened in Oelwein, and in the United States at large, before I completely understood what I was seeing. That,
for instance, as economies had dwindled throughout the Great Plains and the Midwest, they had aligned a certain way in Southern
California, and that the electrical current sweeping between these two increasingly unrelated American places, the coast and
the middle, would presage what came to be called the “meth epidemic” thirty years later. So, too, would it take a while to
see that the changes that linked Long Beach and Los Angeles with Oelwein were in fact changes tied to the emergence of the
global economy. And that meth, if it is a metaphor for anything, is a metaphor for the cataclysmic fault lines formed by globalization.

Back in 2005, these things were just coming into focus as I went to Ottumwa, a town in southeast Iowa. It was in Ottumwa that
the Midwest’s principal meth wiring had been installed, and to which the drug’s early advancement into Oelwein could be traced.
If Oelwein was shaping up to be the face of meth in modern America, and an indicator of life in modern, rural America in general,
then in Ottumwa there was a picture of Oelwein’s skeletal forebears. And eventually a picture of Oelwein’s future, though
that part of the story was yet to evolve.

Like Oelwein, Ottumwa had for most of its history been a very prosperous place. Also like Oelwein, Ottumwa was a kind of economic
outpost, a wealthy waypoint on the trade routes running between St. Louis, Chicago, and Omaha. Thanks to the Des Moines River,
which runs right through the middle of Ottumwa, industry and transportation came quickly to the area once it was settled by
a land rush in 1843. In 1850, John Morrell and Co. opened a flag-ship, state-of-the-art meat-processing plant in the center
of town. By 1888, there were 10,500 miles of railroad track in Wapello County. Fifty-seven passenger trains on seven lines,
the Burlington Railroad being the most famous, crossed the county every day. By the turn of the twentieth century, factories
in Ottumwa made everything from boxcar loaders to cigars, and corn huskers to violins. By 1950, Ottumwa was home not only
to over fifty thousand people but also to the largest air force base in the Midwest. Almost half the working-age men in town
were in the employ of Hormel (the modern incarnation of John Morrell’s packing plant) or John Deere, the farm-equipment manufacturer,
where workers could hope, at a minimum, to maintain a lower-middle-class existence.

By 1980, though, Ottumwa’s fortunes had, like Oelwein’s, begun to decline. The story was much the same. The railroad’s demise
was followed by the closing of the air force base and then, in 1987, by the sale of Hormel to Excel Meat Solutions, a subsidiary
of Cargill. Along with layoffs, wages, as they did a few years later at Oelwein’s Iowa Ham plant, fell by two thirds. Like
the shrinking workforce, the population of Ottumwa itself dried up like a prairie pothole in a drought, falling by an astounding
50 percent in just twenty-five years. Soon the town, starved of tax revenue and disposable income, was verging on bankruptcy.
And, as had happened in Oelwein, methamphetamine moved into the new economic gap. The difference was that Ottumwa, more than
any other place, defined the development of the modern American meth business in the Midwest. Meth from Ottumwa first helped
to create, and then to sustain, the market not just in Oelwein but also in towns all over Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas,
and the Dakotas.

How this happened depended in several trends and events that merged seamlessly into one another: emigration routes from the
Midwest to California as working-class men and women headed to the coast in search of employment; immigration routes into
the heartland as increasing numbers of Mexicans worked against the human tide in order to take low-wage jobs at meat-packing
plants; the rise of industrial meth production; the increased lobbying power of pharmaceutical companies; and finally, government
apathy, if not disregard, for the very drug war that at the time had been newly declared by First Lady Nancy Reagan.

At the center of it all, back in Ottumwa, stood a woman named Lori Arnold. It was she who was able to weave together these
various political, sociological, and chemical threads into the Midwest’s first and last bona fide crank empire, the official
moniker for which was the Stockdall Organization, so named for Lori’s second husband, Floyd Stockdall. Lori’s contribution
to what at the time was not yet referred to as a “drug epidemic” was that she essentially wrote meth’s gene tic code in the
Midwest. With her, the very concept of industrialized meth in places like Iowa was born, and it flourished in relative anonymity
for the next ten years. The irony is that, while Lori worked, the Drug Enforcement Administration fruitlessly lobbied for
laws that, had they passed, would have prevented Lori from ever going into business.

Lori Kaye Arnold is Ottumwa, Iowa’s most famous daughter. Ottumwa’s most famous son is Lori’s brother, the comedian Tom Arnold,
who is perhaps better known as the ex-husband of Roseanne Barr. Lori is forty-five years old, with shoulder-length light-brown
hair and a longish, blunt nose, like a skinning knife. With Tom, she shares a toothy, crocodilian smile and the low center
of gravity and powerful legs of a middleweight wrestler. Since 2005, I have corresponded with Lori, who’s in federal prison—coincidentally,
at the medium-security women’s work camp in Greenville, Illinois, just a few hundred yards from where I met Sean and James
during November 2004.

One of seven step-and half-siblings, Lori was born and raised in Ottumwa in a family that she describes as studiously normal
and benign. Despite this, Lori dropped out of high school as a freshman and began living in an Ottumwa rooming house where,
in the evenings, there was a running poker game. The landlady was also a madame. In exchange for room and board, Lori and
her young cohorts could either agree to sleep with the men who played cards or deliver illegally prescribed methedrine pills,
an early form of pharmaceutical meth, to the landlady’s clients. Lori chose the latter; thus her career (along with her legend)
was born.

Lori kept herself housed by delivering and selling “brown and clears,” as pharmaceutical meth was called during the 1970s,
when it was prescribed by the millions as a weight-loss aid and antidepression drug. The landlady got most of Lori’s profits,
though, and to make ends meet, Lori still had to work six days a week at a local bar. (In Iowa minors can serve alcohol despite
being legally unable to buy it.) By fifteen, Lori was married. By sixteen, she was divorced and was attending high school
once again. By seventeen, she had dropped out for good; her peers, she says, seemed to her like children. By eighteen, she
was married to Floyd Stockdall, who had come to Ottumwa from Des Moines in order to retire, at the ripe old age of thirty-seven,
as the president of the Grim Reapers motorcycle gang.

Lori and Floyd moved into a cabin along the Des Moines River outside Ottumwa, where their only child, Josh, was born. Left
alone to raise a son while Floyd pursued his retirement hobbies of drinking, playing pool, and selling cocaine, nineteen-year-old
Lori became suicidally depressed. The bar, she now realized, had been her lifeline. In addition to the money she made, the
people there were her people, the only family of which Lori ever felt a true part. Without the bikers and the factory workers
with whom she had all but grown up, Lori felt horribly lost and alone; her life had become an interminable slog. Worse yet,
Floyd was an alcoholic, and beat her whenever he drank.

Then one day Floyd’s brother stopped by the cabin. He, too, was a Grim Reaper, and he had with him some methamphetamine, a.k.a.
biker dope, which had been illegally synthesized at a lab in Southern California. This was 1984, and the Reapers were just
beginning to sell meth whenever they could get it from Long Beach. There, according to DEA, former Hells Angels had gone into
business with maverick pharmaceutical company chemists in order to produce saleable quantities of highly pure, powdered methamphetamine.
Lori’s brother-in-law cut her two lines on the kitchen table inside her run-down shack on the Des Moines River on a sunny,
clear Saturday afternoon. Of the experience, Lori, who was no stranger to narcotics, says simply that she had never felt so
good in all her life. The singularity of that feeling is what would soon connect Ottumwa to a nascent California drug empire.
In doing so, a major piece of the meth-epidemic puzzle would fall into place.

The first day Lori got high, she went to the bar. She says she’d been given a little meth to sell because Floyd’s brother
wanted to see what kind of a market Ottumwa might prove to be. Lori gave away half the meth, knowing intuitively that this
would help hook her customers. The other half quickly sold out. In the process, she made fifty dollars. What she found, though,
was worth millions, for Lori Arnold knew almost immediately that dealing meth was what she’d been born to do. It was the answer
not just to her prayers, but to Ottumwa’s, which for three long years had been pummeled by the farm crisis into a barely recognizable
version of its former proud self. Thanks to meth, says Lori, the workers worked and played harder, and she became rich. Within
a month, Lori was selling so much Long Beach crank in Ottumwa that she went around her brother-in-law and dealt directly with
the middleman in Des Moines. A month after that, she was buying quarter pounds of meth for $2,500 and selling them for $10,000.
Unsatisfied with the profit margin, she began dealing directly with the supplier in Long Beach, dispatching Floyd to California
once every ten days with instructions to return from the 3,700-mile round-trip with as much meth as he could fit in the trunk
of the Corvette Lori had bought him. Lori, meantime, stashed money in the wall of her cabin. Only six months after she had
met Floyd’s brother, the wall held $50,000—nearly twice the median yearly income in Ottumwa today.

By the late 1980s, people like Jeffrey William Hayes and Steve Jelinek of Oelwein were buying massive amounts of dope from
Lori and establishing their own meth franchises in Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas by selling to the likes of Roland
Jarvis, who, yet to start making his own meth, would take what ever he could get in order to work extra shifts at Iowa Ham.
Lori, in turn, was dealing directly with what she calls the Mexican Mafia, a somewhat loose group of traffickers who manufactured
large amounts of that era’s most powerful dope: P2P. Made predominantly in Long Beach and Orange County, California, in large,
clandestine laboratories, this stronger form of meth was more addictive, cheaper, and easier to produce than any other form
of the drug available at the time. As such, it increased Lori’s already burgeoning sales manifold.

The so-called Mexican Mafia with whom Lori dealt was built on the vision of two brothers, Jesús and Luís Amezcua, who’d been
born in Mexico and lived in San Diego. For years, according to DEA, the Amezcuas had been nothing more than middling cocaine
dealers. Until, that is, they perceived the convergence of two seemingly unrelated events. One was that, aided by former pharmaceutical
engineers, the Amezcuas could access an enormous, completely legal, and unmonitored supply of the necessary ingredients to
make P2P: ephedrine and phenyl-2-propanone. The Amezcuas’ second insight was that they could move large quantities of the
drug throughout California and the West, thanks to the increasing numbers of Mexican immigrants who picked fruit in the Central
Valley, cleaned homes in Tucson, Arizona, or built roads in Idaho. Furthermore, the brothers could access the Midwest via
the ballooning population of Midwesterners who had been chased off their farms, all the way to Southern California.

During the 1980s, large numbers of people from the corn belt left in what sociologists call out-migration. Within the space
of just a few years, many Iowa towns, Ottumwa and Oelwein included, lost from 10 to 25 percent of their residents, many of
whom headed for the booming labor markets of Los Angeles and San Diego. Family and social connections became business connections
as Iowan, Kansan, Dakotan, and Nebraskan laborers in Orange County, eager to get rich, sent loads of the Amezcuas’ meth back
home. Or, like Jeffrey William Hayes in Oelwein and Lori Arnold in Ottumwa, either drove out to get it themselves or sent
someone in their stead.

Throughout its hundred-year history, meth has been perhaps the only example of a widely consumed illegal narcotic that might
be called vocational, as opposed to recreational. The market for meth in America is nearly as old as industrialization. Poor
and working-class Americans had been consuming the drug since the 1930s, whether it was marketed as Benzedrine, Methedrine,
or Obedrin, for the simple reason that meth makes you feel good and permits you to work hard. Thanks to the Amezcuas and Lori
Arnold, these same people no longer needed to rely on expensive prescriptions and were able to get a stronger form of meth
at a much better price—this at a time when the drug’s effects were arguably more useful than ever. That’s to say that as meth’s
purity rose, its price dropped. So too did meth become much more widely available at exactly the moment that rural economies
collapsed and people left. Under those circumstances, says Clay Hallberg, those who remained felt they needed the drug most.

By 1987, if you wanted meth and you lived in southern Iowa, or northern Missouri, you went to the bar that Lori Arnold now
owned, the Wild Side. There, the increasingly beleaguered Ottumwa police, whose numbers were shrinking alongside county and
city tax revenues, had little chance of interrupting Lori’s exorbitantly profitable crank business. At that point, says Lori,
in addition to Floyd, she had a dozen runners going back and forth to Long Beach to buy meth from multiple so-called superlabs,
which could produce up to twenty pounds of meth every thirty-six hours—an astounding amount of crank in those days. Because
the cars that Lori’s runners used were a drain on her profits (imagine the mileage accrued by driving nearly four thousand
miles every ten days, month after month), Lori bought a car dealership. That way, she could have access to as many vehicles
as she needed; she could also have her runners trade the cars and their tags with car dealers in any state along the way,
thereby making themselves harder to follow. Then, to house her employees and further launder the money she was making, Lori
bought fourteen houses in Ottumwa.