Smoky Joe's Cafe (15 page)

It turns out Nam Tran has been setting up a seedling nursery for about three months. When we get there he has nearly a thousand healthy marijuana seedlings ready for planting out.

I can't help wondering what Shorty would have done if we'd turned down the idea. I mean, would you burn a fortune's worth of healthy marijuana seedlings? He must have been pretty confident that we'd go along with the scam. Better not think about that one too much, hey?

Sharing accommodation and working all day together isn't all sunshine and happy smiles. As one of the platoon section commanders and the biggest bloke among us, I'm sort of elected the peacemaker in the group. This takes up a fair bit of my time as getting along with others don't come natural to most of us any longer.

Planting out seedlings is back-breaking work and if one of the boys is malingering the others get cranky as hell. They forget we all have our off days. Also, being told what to do don't go down too well neither. Most nights it's something that one of the boys has said to another and which has been took the wrong way and caused a bit of aggro that needs sorting.

Privately we all dread the nights. That's when we can get out of control. With no grog or dope to calm the nerves each of us is secretly scared of the nightmares that we know sooner or later must surely come.

But we're so physically clapped out that sleep becomes a necessity and, as a mob, we seem to be generally less spooked than usual. I know I am.

Gazza, though, has two real crook nights during the month and both times we have to pour a bucket o' cold water over him to bring him out of his half-awake berserk state o' mind. It's bloody scary seeing it happen with someone else and knowing you've done the same
yourself. I now see what Wendy's been through and I'm ashamed of meself. Most nights one or another of the boys wakes us up screaming out and thrashing around, trying to escape their sleeping bag.

Knives and clubs, the very things that give us the confidence to go to sleep, have to be stashed so that there won't be any serious accidents. It's my job to go around last thing to kick at every sleeping bag, see that no one has a four b' two he's placed inside it in case they get spooked in their dreams and half wake up and go on the attack. It took six of us to hold Gazza down, even without a weapon.

The point is, we've all been there before, so an incident during the night don't get talked about or a fuss made. It's almost like being back together in the jungle. You know somehow, even in your nightmare, that your buddies are there with you and they're not going to desert you in a crisis. Maybe I just invented that, but I know I was better in the citrus shed than at home.

We get through the ploughing and planting and setting up the irrigation pumps and piping and fencing the area. After a month or so of hard yakka we're fitter than we've been in quite a while and a few of the bellies around are considerably flattened, mine included.

The crop is planted and the spring rains come on
time and we're feeling pretty damned pleased with ourselves with all the little dope plants standing up straight in long rows, like they're on parade.

Shorty draws up a roster system where each of us will come back for a period of two weeks during the growing season, two blokes at a time. Our job is to guard and tend the crop until harvest time. We throw a bit of a party where we all get pissed for the first time in a month before the rest of us go back home.

The easy part is over. Detection is now the big worry, though the crop is in a secluded little valley which you can only approach through a dense stand of brigalow and then a six-foot-high fence. Shorty assures us it's hard to see from the air, though anyone flying low over it ain't gunna mistake what's growing down there for next season's rice crop.

We've got one thing good going for us, marijuana isn't really being grown on a commercial scale in Australia yet. Or if it is, there's never been a major bust. Mostly it's hippie communes growing small batches in the bush for their own use and as a bit of a cash or trade crop on the side. The fuzz won't be out looking at the daily doings of your basic farmer, nor will they ever suspect it is to be grown in a big way in the middle of the rice-rich Riverina.

Almost all the weed and hash sold in Australia is still imported from Asia. The cops and various State drug squads are mostly into making busts on the street, in airports and at the docks.

We've got six months before we harvest and then sell our product and so every Wednesday arvo the two warriors on roster and the six locals, Shorty, Spags, Lawsy, Nam Tran, Wendy and me, have a meeting at Smoky Joe's to discuss the operation. In this way everyone is eventually updated and briefed.

It is over this period that Wendy comes into her own. She's the forward scout and it's her responsibility, with Lawsy, to organise the selling and legal-protection arm of the operation. I dunno how she fits it in, I don't get back to help in the cafe for the first two months and she has to run it alone except for the weekends when I get home.

Unfortunately little Anna is back at the Children's Hospital for another bout of chemotherapy and so weekends Wendy flies down to Sydney and back to see her. She gets other stuff done while she's there, but when I ask her about this she laughs, then says, ‘Secret women's business, Thommo.' She's working her butt off and I've never seen her better, she seems to be thriving on the challenge she's been given.

One evening I'm standing with Shorty at the edge of
Weed Valley, the plants are now about three feet high. ‘It's like looking at a vault full of money,' I say, then I point to a weed plant near me, ‘Every one of them little buggers are worth a fortune.'

‘Only 50 per cent of them,' Shorty says.

‘How come?' I ask.

‘Half of those plants are male, and when they come into bud we're going to have to weed them out.'

‘Shit, hey? You can't tell the sex when they're seedlings?'

I shouldn't have asked. Shorty goes into this technical explanation which I won't repeat. But it seems there are male and female marijuana plants and the males must be gotten rid of before pollination.

The crop comes along a treat and, apart from the insects which are always having a go at it and keeping the weeds down, it's not hard to look after. This is how you can tell they're male, the buds have these little balls that hang off a bit of a stem and they don't have these little white hairs coming out of them like the female buds.

The female buds are called sinsemilla. I don't suppose you need to know this, but with the male pollen missing, the females use all their energy to grow thick with unfertilised flowers. In a few more weeks these
unfertilised flowers are the real McCoy, they produce the resin called THC, the stuff that dreams are made of.

It's a shit of a job getting the male plants out, you have to be real careful not to shake the plant in case some early female buds open and you cause fertilisation.

Harvesting comes at last and the boys begin arriving. Shorty and Spags pick them up in Griffith at night and bring them in. For several days Nam Tran has been going around smelling the crop and one morning I go with him.

‘You smell, Thommo,' he says and points to a flower. I take a sniff and it smells sort of musky sweet. Then he shows me the resin that has formed on each of the tiny buds that have turned from white to amber. ‘Tomorrow okay,' he says, grinning at me, then he waves his arm to indicate the whole of Weed Valley. ‘Special this one, very, very good for oil.'

We work at dusk and into the night using torches. This is not to conceal our activities, but the best time to harvest is after sundown. In nine nights we've cut the stems holding the mature heads and carefully transported them to a waiting truck. I drive the truck to the wine shed and Nam Tran, Shorty and myself hang the stems for drying in the ceiling.

There's over ten tons of good heads and we can't
believe we've got away with it. Nam Tran and Shorty calculate there's potentially three million bucks' worth of hash oil at current retail prices. If we convert the oil into hash honey, Christ alone knows what it will be worth.

Lawsy gives us a talk about being ‘caught in possession'. Suddenly it becomes very real to us all that we're not just playing a game, we are back in the jungle, only this time we're the bad guys.

‘Okay, let me give you a few facts,' Lawsy begins. ‘In the past few months I've been keeping a watch on drug convictions and there's one or two things you ought to know,' Lawsy begins. ‘The first and most important is, tell the police your name and address and nothing more. Understand? Nothing! Bugger all else.

‘If they come with a warrant, don't let them into your house until you've read it very carefully and very slowly, so you can get your wits together and hopefully your wife or girlfriend is busy out the back flushing the toilet for disposal. Get the idea?'

We all nod and he continues, ‘Just remember, 98 per cent of people charged with possession are convicted on their own statement. Shut yer gob. Name and address, nothing else. If you are arrested, you must accompany the cops to the police station. If you are not under
arrest, don't volunteer to accompany them or agree if they ask you to do so for the sake of cooperating.

‘The police have only one objective, to get a conviction, and they'll do that a damn sight better when you're on their territory.

‘Now, if they get you to the cop station and they're interrogating you, no matter what they do, give you a backhand, threaten you, use heated language, insult you, your mother or your wife, make you accidentally on purpose fall off a chair and injure yourself, just cop it sweet. A few bruises are better than twelve months in the clink. Just keep repeating, “I have nothing to say, I wish to see my lawyer.”

‘Now, there's something else, there's other means of getting stuff out of you. They may ask questions that seem real innocent, like, “Where do your parents live?” Well, you can't see much harm in answering so you tell them. Now you have answered a direct question and if you refuse to answer other directly related questions, this means you are answering selectively and the judge is likely to frown upon this and you may cop a sentence or a fine.'

Lawsy shoots out his arm, pointing at us, ‘Now, remember, boys, you are
only
exercising your right to say
nothing
.

‘Okay, one last thing. If there's two of you caught, the cops will separate you, sooner or later a cop will come into the room and whisper to the fuzz who are drilling you. They will then look elated and tell you your mate has confessed, that he or she has come clean. Ignore this, even if they tell you they now have enough evidence without your cooperation to prosecute. Whatever evidence they've got, you can't make things worse for yourself by remaining silent, keeping your trap shut.'

Shorty then talks to us about never giving away the location of the farm, not even to our wives or girlfriends, and he says Wendy is going to brief us on what he calls ‘Operation Civilian Jungle' or OCJ.

Wendy is dressed like she was the day we accepted her as our forward scout, it's the boots and the skintight jeans but because it's like well into summer she's wearing a pale pink shirt with the top four buttons not being put to work, so that the rise and fall of her breathing is very bloody apparent. Her hair is like a halo around her head and she's so pretty I want to cry, but I also want to do up them buttons.

I'm also scared. Suddenly it's all gunna happen and my little darling is the boss of the dangerous part. Old Thommo is out of his depth, the person I love the most
in the world is now beyond my protection. She's the general and I'm the grunt. I can tell ya, it don't feel good and I can't help thinking, ‘Shit, there's nothing in it for us, for Anna, why are we doing this?'

I
t's time to take a bit of a leap forward. Nam Tran's hash honey is about as good as hash can get, super-refined oil four times stronger than any other form of weed. Wendy has a plan for getting it out to the public that works pretty well from day one, though at first we think she's crazy. She calls it ‘infiltration into the market'.

‘In any market,' she explains, ‘you've got to get your first users, the early adopters of your product, they lead the way for others.'

‘What's wrong with just flogging it down the pub?' Killer wants to know. ‘Blokes there will try anything once.'

‘Too expensive, hash honey isn't for your regular pub crowd. We've got to make it fashionable, the drug of choice with the beautiful people, where the fact that
it's very expensive adds to its appeal. If we can do this, then we achieve several things.'

‘Like what?' Flow Murray asks.

‘Well, firstly, we keep it away from school children. It's too expensive and the method of distribution prevents them obtaining it. Secondly, the cops are not going to be all that interested in a designer drug that doesn't add to the crime statistics, nobody is going to mug a citizen or rob a house to pay for it.'

‘What about being found in possession?' Lawsy asks. Even though he knows the answer, he wants us all to hear it from Wendy.

‘What cop is going to bust a well-known socialite or a big-time businessman? It's not the sort of crime-busting headline they're looking for. What's more, hash honey is not something your average policeman knows about. You can easily recognise weed and if it's being used when they make a bust you can smell it. Hash honey isn't like that.

‘On the other hand,' Wendy adds, ‘if we're caught flogging it, as Lawsy explained, that's another matter. Dealing is definitely different, but then you all know the drill, the way we've set things up. If you follow procedure and never deviate you're unlikely to be caught dealing.'

I'm amazed at all this. I knew Wendy worked in an advertising agency but she's never talked about this kind of thing to me before. I guess the problems with Anna sort of took care of what was on her mind. There's no doubt Wendy's done her homework and this is what she's done.