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CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
Arnold was still fighting the government over importation
charges and couldn't leave Orange County let alone the country, so Doc returned
to the Beqa’a Valley to work with the Ma’ahad family while the Little One
kept the money transfers between the different people flowing, packed false
compartment devices with cash, coached runners, got them to their destinations
on time, and found new stash houses in rural San Diego County. I took care
of the financing, finding crews, making contacts for devices needed to conceal
and transport large amounts of cash through customs to the Middle East, and
stayed in close communications with Marty, Rob, and Doc in an effort to keep
things organized and running smoothly. Marty needed a five-ton load in order
to pay his overhead and make a profit after the split with our group; so eleven
thousand pounds of some of the finest, red Lebanese hashish in the country
was being pressed, packaged, and overseen by Doc to be delivered to the boat.
Since we were doing business with one of the most powerful
hashish growing families in the country, our prices were rock bottom. Most
smugglers after product cost and transportation payoffs paid anywhere from
one hundred to one hundred fifty thousand
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dollars a ton out of Lebanon, especially
if working with Christians. Our cost was seventy five thousand dollars a ton
delivered, with a front of half as much bought, which our group turned down
this time since the money was available for the first attempt and in order
to check out how together Marty and Rob's flow was before getting too financially
involved. They were practically paying top dollar at one hundred thirty-five
thousand dollars a ton from their Christian connects, so we turned them for
one hundred thousand dollars, made a ton, bought the other portion to make
a full five for the boat, and everybody was happy and better off than they
had been before.
The protocols of doing
business and the smuggling routes in Lebanon had ancient roots like most things
in that part of the world. The majority of the people are Muslim, and the
religion views alcohol as the demon's tool, a lot like America's dominant
Christian society views marijuana, but hashish has been used for cooking,
medicines, religious rituals, preparation for war, bartered with, and marketed
for thousands of years by the hookah smoking Muslims in the Mideast, especially
in the Beqa’a Valley where irrigated, openly cultivated fields of hashish
plants are grown for as far as the eye can see, making it the main cash crop
in the area. Consequently, there are no moral judgments coming from the local
habitants and like in the days of the distant past, as long as certain people
are dealt with and shown respect, proper agencies are paid, and sequence of
events are followed, everyone happily joins in to ensure that the ancient
ritual of the smuggling trade, some say historically created by the Arabs,
has a successful outcome.
Our people loaded foreign smuggling boats out of the port
of Tripoli. There were no back roads from the Beqa’a Valley or hidden compartments
necessary because the elders of the family, their fathers, and their father's
fathers going back many generations have been negotiating with the powers
that be for centuries to grow, transport, and export their product out of
the Valley and into the world markets. Their deep-rooted ties allowed them
to travel unharmed and protected on the few main routes leading to Lebanon's
Northern Coast. Nothing was hidden; it was all out front and a matter of timing,
waiting
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for the right person's shift, circumstances,
and time of day or night, but other than that it was no secret that tons of
hashish were being trucked to the coast daily upon main highways to local
entrepreneurs and foreign smugglers. Except for a few life-threatening
inconveniences brought about by the war, smuggling out of Lebanon was like
working with a well-oiled, finely tuned machine, and unless hit by an
untimely bomb or caught in the middle of a long-standing feud between
families over business or religious matters, things usually went pretty smoothly.
Truckloads of hash leaving the Beqa’a Valley for Tripoli were usually escorted
by heavily armed family members, soldiers of the Lebanese Army, and at least
one high ranking Syrian army official to handle Syria's peacekeeping forces,
road blocks, or any other political security matters that might be encountered
along the way. The trucks were driven to docks in the harbor where boats owned
by family members or friends of theirs were loaded for the run out to the
mother ship. From there, the paid Syrian army turns a blind eye towards the
transactions happening just offshore from Lebanon's coastline, while the transfer
of thousands of pounds of hashish between boats takes place. Doc would be
in constant radio communication with the captain of the mother ship throughout
the whole process from an apartment in Tripoli owned by a Ma’ahad family member,
making sure things were going as planned. The packaging of the hash was also
a reflection of the logical but simplistic, professional wisdom of the Arab
hashish suppliers in Lebanon. About a half kilo of loose Indicus marijuana
resin pollen is poured into small, usually white, cheese cloth bags and then
tied shut with a piece of string at the open end. It is then put on a rack
over hot water and steam heated until the bag of pollen is moist and pliable,
and before cooling off, is lightly pressed by a hand made, manually operated,
vice press into approximately a 1 lb. 1 oz. solid, uniform, block of hash
ready for the international market. If a large load is to be taken to a boat
out at sea the cheese cloth sacks are packed into tire inner tubes, thirty
to forty pounds per tube, and then resealed water tight making them moisture
proof during the on-loading, crossing, and off-
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loading of the hash. The lightweight,
pliable, circular shaped inner tubes also made the bags of hash easier to
handle and without having to worry about water damage, thousands of pounds
could be transferred from one boat to another fairly quickly with the right
amount of manpower and teamwork. The whole operation from start to finish
was as sophisticated and professional as any James Bond movie plot, only real,
and it was always a pleasure doing business with the honorable hashish growing
Arabs and their colleagues in Lebanon.
Six weeks after Doc began working on the five tons it was
ready to load on the boat. We had been sailing it slowly east into position,
synchronizing the boat's movements with Doc's time schedule for the offshore
meeting and to shake any heat or suspicion the crew or vessel might have picked
up docked in Greece for the three months while waiting for their connections
to get it together. From Athens we island-hopped the boat to Crete,
and then timed the sail from Crete to Cyprus so that the crew and boat would
be at the island for no more than a few days before the on load of the hash
took place.
When the boat arrived in Cyprus, Doc flew to Limassol for
a brief meeting with the captain to coordinate positions and establish radio
contact they would be having with each other before, during, and after the
offshore rendezvous with the hash to ensure things went as planned. When Doc
returned to the apartment in Tripoli and gave the okay, one of the family
members contacted the stash house in the Beqa’a Valley and signaled the load
to begin its trip to the coast. After reaching the harbor and transferred
to the on load boats, Doc radioed the Captain in Limassol and in code directed
him to begin his sail to the predetermined coordinates of the meeting spot
in between Cyprus and the Lebanon Coast, just offshore from Tripoli. The transfer
of the hash and the sailboat's exit from the Mediterranean Sea into the Atlantic
went flawlessly, as it made its way through the Straits of Gibraltar towards
the Boston coastline, and now it was time for us to regroup for the catch
on this side of the Globe in “GROUND ZERO” of the government's drug
war, the United States of America, "Land of the Free."
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From experiences of handling bulk loads out of Colombia,
it came to my realization that because of the different law agencies' growing
intelligence of our lifestyles and modes of operations coming from informants,
new modem technology being used for surveillance and detection, and billions
of U.S. tax dollars poured by politicians into the many fronts fighting against
the counter-culture revolution going on, it was becoming obviously apparent
that working in large, unmanageable groups only increased the chances of being
detected by unfriendly forces. Not only were large groups becoming harder
to disguise during a scam but the federal government had the power to gather
information and indict participants five years after the last illegal, overt
act had been committed, which gave agents plenty of time to threaten people
after the fact with long prison sentences in order to scare information out
of them about other suspected or targeted smugglers that weren't as easily
infiltrated by normal investigative methods. Although the information gathered
by this technique wasn't always truthful and motivated people to create stories
and lie in order to avoid Iong prison terms, the government's tactic had its
desired negative effects, and since most people are unpredictable under that
kind of pressure, the less loose cannons on deck the better. So with those
dangers in mind, Doc, Arnold, the Little One, and myself decided to drive
our portion of the five tons from Boston back to California ourselves.
Arnold's karma had been good enough to keep him out of jail
because his lawyer was able to discredit one of the snitches testifying against
him that ultimately forced a plea bargain out of the prosecutor for a fine
and three years probation. He couldn't leave the country or state of California
legally, but devised a way to discreetly slip away from the confines of his
restrictions for the trip back east to pick up the stash. Since hash is so
compact, only taking up about an eighth or less as much space as its counterpart
marijuana, and because the thin, narrow, uniformed cheese cloth sacks packed
tightly and evenly together, we were able to use small vehicles for the transportation
of our cargo cross country and back to the west coast. Doc drove a four wheel
drive truck with a custom made camper on It containing false compartments
built into the floor, ceiling, and walls that
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were designed by a friend of his
and Arnold's to conceal large quantities of Mexican marijuana he had been
supplying and delivering to customers in the Midwest. The Little One drove
a second four wheel drive truck but this one had a camper shell on it and
a hidden compartment under a plywood structure that served as a bed complete
with mattress, pillows, blankets, and curtains over the side and back windows.
We touched them up with a few fishing and hunting decals to capture and fit
in with the summer-tourist/vacationer look
we would be trying to blend in with while driving on the main highways.
I drove a back up car for the purpose of a lead and scout vehicle and for
chasing down parts or a tow truck in case of a mechanical breakdown on the
road. It was also used for transportation around town once arriving at our
destination in order not to expose our trucks and campers while going to meetings
and conducting business. The shell, camper, and all of the vehicles were under
anonymous names that couldn't be traced back to anyone in case we somehow
picked up heat or needed to walk away from them to escape and arrest. Doc,
the Little One, and myself caravanned on Interstate 70 to Massachusetts in
order to refamiliarize ourselves with the route for the return trip back to
California. After arriving we called Arnold, who had stayed behind to tie
up loose ends with his probation officer and to avoid being out of state any
longer than was necessary, and arranged to pick him up at the airport in Boston
the next day.
After he arrived the following afternoon, we drove to Hyannisport
to meet with Marty and Rob. They were stoked while explaining everything was
on schedule and the hash was to be unloaded in a couple of days just south
of Martha's Vineyard, then brought to shore in trailerables under the cover
of summer weekend recreational boating traffic. They took us to the stash
house where the five tons were to be delivered after the load hit land, and
we arranged to meet there the coming Sunday morning to weigh and divide it
up. Marty gave his assurance he and Rob would be at the house early, but if
by chance we arrived before they did, he showed us a spot where a key would
be hidden so we could get in and wait without having to hang around outside.
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Sunday morning came and we drove from our hotel room to the
stash house located in the area between the towns of Maltapoisett and Marion,
near Buzzard's Bay. We pulled our trucks and car into the large yard in front
of the house and went to go find Marty and Rob. Our knocks went unanswered
so I went to the spot where the front door key was supposed to be hidden so
we could get in and out of sight while waiting for someone to show up. The
key wasn't where it was supposed to be, and after searching several other
places I gave up looking and went back to report the news to Doc, Arnold,
and the Little One. While standing around debating on what to do about the
situation we heard a vehicle coming up the driveway, thinking it was Marty
and Rob finally arriving. The closer it got the louder the engine sounded
and it seemed obvious to us that Marty and Rob were leading a truck full of
hash to the house as expected, so we got ready to go to work.
It was a large U-Haul rental, and a lone driver pulled
up to the front of the house and parked. The guy sitting in the truck wasn't
Marty, Rob, or anyone else we knew, and obviously by the way he was scoping
us out and hesitating, he didn't recognize us either, and we were all frozen
in place, staring at each other while vibing the circumstance out before anyone
made a move. Finally the driver jumped out of the cab wide eyed, asking where
Marty and Rob were. When we told him what was going on, that we were waiting
for them, too, he got a little pissed off. They were supposed to have met
the brother earlier to lead him to the house. The driver explained he had
only been here once before, and when no one showed, began looking for it by
memory and his search had taken him twice as long to find the house than it
would have had Marty and Rob been at the meeting spot as planned to escort
him in. You could tell the brother was just off the front lines of the operation
and still shell shocked from the activity, and in his mind, thinking he was
going far beyond the call of duty for what he had signed up for with all of
the extra running around and exposure he was getting because of Marty's and
Rob's failure to stick with the game plan. The driver was irritated for being
placed in jeopardy, and for one who has been in that position many times before
it was easy to relate to where he was coming from. The
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brother was so jacked he didn't want
to wait another second and opened the back of the truck and started throwing
the inner tubes of hash on to the driveway.
It was obvious to everyone there would be no changing his
mind, so we had the Little One break into the house any way he could and I
jumped into the truck and began helping the brother toss inner tubes so we
could get him unloaded and on his way. As soon as the Little One figured out
how to get into the house he opened the front door and him, Doc and Arnold
started clearing the driveway by taking the tubes of hashish inside. We were
throwing them out of the truck faster than they could be stacked inside the
different rooms of the house, so by the time the truck was emptied there was
still a mountain of inner tubes left standing in the middle of the driveway,
almost hiding the small beach cottage from view. The driver was relieved;
happy just to get this gorilla off his back that he had obviously been working
with and tied to for the last couple of days as part of the offload crew.
He'd done his job and wanted to leave, so we shook hands and he jumped into
the cab of the truck and took off.
Marty or Rob still hadn't shown, but our main concern for
the moment was to get the inner tubes out of plain sight and hidden before
any more unannounced guests drove up and caught us with the stash sitting
in the middle of the driveway. In spite of the danger of being busted, we
were determined not to lose the load and began transferring the hash into
the house as fast as possible. During all of the commotion, we had become
pretty focused on the task at hand and let our guards down a bit, but fortunately,
our collective karma was good, and the timing perfect. Just as the last inner
tube was taken into the house a UPS truck drove up without us even noticing
because of our preoccupation with getting the stash hidden.
We were caught completely off guard and until re-entering
from shock, everyone just stood around trying to look cool, waiting for the
deliveryman to make his move. There was electricity in the air, and it felt
like being in the middle of an acid trip because of all the high anxiety and
activity that had just taken place at the house, heightened all the more by
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our concern for the guy sensing something
illegal going on. If he did get suspicious we could abandon the load, and
the other alternative would be to chance it and possibly go down with it.
Neither of the prospects were very appealing, so when the driver stepped out
of the truck I got it together and walked over to greet him. My survival instincts
were at an all time high while forcing myself to act as calm as possible,
trying to come off as a group of fishermen to diffuse some of the tension
in the air and disguise our real purpose. While approaching I looked the driver
straight in the eyes, searching for a clue to his true motive for coming to
the house. In my mind I was asking, is he really what he seems to be or did
the driver of the U-haul dump the load off to set us up, or had he unknowingly
been under surveillance and followed, leading the delivery man, who is in
reality a disguised FBI or DEA agent, to our location with back-up not
far away ready to rush us when the signal was given? It was all very possible,
and the timing of the truck's arrival had been too critical for us not to
be suspicious of a trap, which had everyone watching for signs of danger while
dealing with the situation.
We met, shook hands, and I immediately picked up he wasn't
a cop and had no clue as to what was going on at the house. The driver said
he had a package for the resident and just needed someone to sign for it.
I had no idea who the owner was but didn't let on to the deliveryman and signed
the receipt. As he was rummaging through the back of the truck I looked through
the front room window and saw the black inner tubes lying all over the floor,
put there in our haste to get them off the driveway and hidden. To someone
knowing what was going on their appearance seemed obvious and a bust, but
to our advantage, a hash scam being done right under his nose was the last
thought in the UPS man's mind and he didn't pick up on anything out of the
ordinary. In a matter of seconds circumstances went from code red to situation
under control, and the rest of the time was spent acting as normal as possible
while constantly, discreetly, diverting his attention away from the window
at every opportunity. Fortunately it wasn't an important enough package to
require ID, so I signed a phony name on the delivery sheet, he handed me the
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box, wished us good luck with our
fishing trip, then headed down the driveway.
It all lasted just a few minutes but we were on such an adrenaline
rush that time had stopped for us during the whole experience, making every
event seem to be moving in slow motion and taking more time than it really
had.
We went into the house and smoked a couple of oilers to get
re-centered and our hearts out of our throats, and then began weighing
our portion of the load and packing it into the trucks. Marty and Rob still
hadn't shown, and we were starting to feel a lot like the brother who had
brought the load to the house and could see no advantage in waiting around
for any more mishaps or surprises. It was a weird feeling as if the whole
trip was on automatic pilot whether Marty or Rob made an appearance or not,
and seemed self determined and karmically destined to succeed on its own.
I had worked on a lot of smuggling trips before, and they are all different,
but had never been on one when principle partners didn't show to pick up their
cut, which was strange in itself, giving us all the more reason to get the
hash in the trucks, hide the rest of the stash, secure the house the best
we could, and for safety's sake put as many miles in between us and the area
as soon as possible.
We had just finished packing the trucks when Marty and Rob
finally pulled up. They wanted to sit around and bullshit but by that time
we had seen too many little fuck-ups that could have potentially caused major
damage and just wanted to get out of the state of Massachusetts in case there
were any more unexpected surprises we weren't aware of. It was common knowledge,
learned from my own and others' experiences in this business, that it was
usually the little mistakes that brought down big scams, and we had seen commitments,
meetings, and methods continually overlooked and neglected which made me a
little nervous because I had paid the price for ignorance too many times in
the past and had finally learned my lesson. We stayed at the house long enough
to describe what had gone down while they were away, gave a weight count,
then wished them luck and got on the road.
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The trip across country went smoothly, and about five or
six days later we pulled into one of our new safe houses in Pauma Valley.
We unpacked the hash, split the load, and from there Doc and Arnold took their
portion to a stash pad in the San Bernardino mountains, and the Little One
and I stored ours at an old avocado ranch we rented in North San Diego County.
After our group was secured, contact was made with Marty to make sure he and
Rob had made it safely out. He relayed to me everything was cool and that
they were taking their hash to Canada to sell. That was good news because
we wouldn't flood the west coast market and have to compete with each other,
which would cut down on the amount of time we'd have to sit on the hash, increasing
our chances of success. Within three weeks the eleven thousand pounds was
literally inhaled and absorbed into the flow without a trace or trail, turning
out to be the smuggler's ultimate dream scam.
After the hash was sold and the stash pads were cleaned,
we all took much needed vacations to mellow out and re-energize ourselves.
Doc and Arnold went to Park City, Utah, to do some snow skiing and my family
and the Little One flew to Maui, Hawaii to get some sun and surf. After spending
a couple of months on the Islands we returned to San Diego where the Little
One and I had been living for the past year and a half, because Laguna and
Orange County were beginning to get too crowded for comfort. Over the past
twelve years the beach areas had changed quite a bit, and most of our brothers
and sisters were migrating to outlying areas away from cities, into other
states, or even out of the country to escape the relentless pursuit of the
brain police and suburban sprawl that was on the rise during the seventies.
It was late November 1979, and we had been back from our
vacation for about a week when Marty called and wanted to get together for
a meeting. He came to my house in San Diego to spend the night and began telling
me what was on his mind. He went on to say that him and Rob were stoked on
the quality of the hash and how smoothly the on-load in Lebanon had gone.
There were no problems turning it in Canada, and their market wanted more.
Marty said everything went well, finally coming to the point that he and Rob
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wanted to do another one. At first
there was a feeling of hesitation until he started running down what they
had together, and then I began to get interested. Rob was a workaholic, and
Marty just kind of flowed with him, so while we were kicking back they hadn't
missed a beat and went right in to setting up another transatlantic crossing
and off load, hoping we would work with them again in the coming summer. They
had a friend who had been island hopping in the Mediterranean for the past
year and was now docked in Portugal on a seventy-foot ocean-going
yacht, broke, and looking for work. They hired the brother and were putting
him up in Portugal, paying his bills until everything came together to keep
him committed to them. They had been turned on by another brother to an area
with a lot of coastline and boat traffic that, if done right, would absorb
our illegal activities coming into U.S. territory.
Ironically, the stretch of water we would secretly try to
infiltrate lay directly under the gaze of Annapolis, the nation's most prestigious
naval academy, and the shores we would attempt to invade were only a thirty
minute car ride from the Beltway of Washington D.C., the nerve center for
the most powerful nation on earth and its U.S. drug war policies. Quite a
karmic confluence for two such opposite forces, but Maryland would be the
target of our psychedelic invasion in peaceful retaliation against the attempts
of our government's psyche and physical suppression of society, and its disrespect
and disregard for victimless, non-threatening personal rights that millions
of people at the time chose to exercise in their lives and were being persecuted
for.
Marty and Rob already had several stash houses rented around
the Chesapeake Bay and four, thirty-foot-plus cabin cruisers docked
in the area. The only piece to the puzzle missing at this point was that the
brother in Portugal didn't want to take his million dollar yacht anywhere
near the Lebanon coast. He had been in the vicinity long enough to know the
war there was only escalating and a lot of international and U.S. political
and military attention was being focused on the region at the time. He didn't
want to jeopardize himself and the boat by possibly picking up heat or being
mistaken for a gunrunner or terrorist by
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either side and getting blown out
of the water with the "take no prisoners, shoot first ask questions later"
mentality and tactics being used by fanatical Jews and Arabs. He had no problem
with making the Atlantic crossing but wanted no part of the Mediterranean
leg of the journey or sailing through the narrow, twelve-mile stretch of water
between the Straits of Gibraltar. It just so happened that before Doc left
for home after loading the five tons, the family told him they had access
to a two hundred fifty foot tramp steamer that could be loaded with hashish
and sent to us. With that in mind I told Marty we had a possible solution
to the problem and would get back to him in a few days after meeting with
my partners and taking things over.
I called everyone together and laid out what Marty wanted
to do. Since the last scam ended well, except for a few minor glitches, we
felt pretty good about going for it again. There was also a certain amount
of shared satisfaction in the idea of sticking it to the heartless bureaucrats
who had been so relentlessly out to destroy the counter-culture for so many
years by putting a load of hash right in their backyard and past billions
of dollars of the latest security devices and drug war tactics used by the
government in their political assault against the youth movement to demonstrate
that no place can be shielded from, and nothing can stop the "FORCE"
behind and stirring within the youth, the young at heart and all other cosmic
warriors of the sixties who were "ITS", messengers
of change. This was going to be our personal blow to the Beast, and
the more we talked, the more stoked we got about pulling it off.
The feeling among us was that this particular scam wasn't
just about money and good stash; we had already accomplished that. It was
to be a challenge and statement made to those trying to control our lives
that no matter how much political muscle the government uses, the number of
people it kills, or the millions of its nonviolent citizens and their families
lives its immoral law enforcement policies destroys, there was no chance of
them winning what amounted to be a cultural genocide over the God-given
right and freedom to pursue responsible, personal enlightenment, (meaning
without harm to others), or of altering by
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force the will of mankind's instinctive
purpose and natural progression away from politically influenced societies
geared to systems mainly preoccupied with greed, selfish pride, and violence
to a more spiritually oriented way of life, dedicated above all else to the
nurturing of loving, compassionate, accepting attitudes toward each other
as brothers and sisters of the human race who are related offspring, and without
question molded from the same primal spiritual energy emanating from the eternal,
cosmically intelligent, self perpetuating, truly original, unconditional loving
"SOURCE” that is the "CREATOR" and "SUSTAINER" of
everything with or without form.
While discussing the logistics of the scam it became obvious
that a rust bucket tramp steamer sitting off the coast of the "one world
order” capitol of the planet would definitely be a bust, but as a working
boat in the Mediterranean it would be the perfect vessel for transporting
the hash from Lebanon to the yacht in Portugal waiting to make the Atlantic
crossing. Marty and Rob had their
off loads set up to do twice as much as we had done before, so our goal was
to secure ten tons of the kind red Lebanese hash for the trip back. After
our meeting, I contacted Marty and told him we were on.