Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (59 page)

FORCADE
: Well, the coast guard cutter things make about twenty-five knots or so, maybe more. And a freighter can make maybe ten or twelve knots. But a good smuggling operation usually has four or five thirty-foot boats, usually with two engines, American V-8 engines. One of these boats can make fifty or sixty miles an hour even in fairly rough weather, can outrun anything the coast guard has and can carry a ton or so. It draws maybe two and a half to three feet, and gets over waters that the coast guard can’t get over, a lot of shoals and reefs and stuff down in Florida. A boat that doesn’t draw very much is quite advantageous in getting near the shore and getting to the off-loading spots that would not be considered viable by the coast guard and are therefore not watched. And you’ve got to learn how to run these boats, be ready to outrun the coast guard if necessary. We’ve done it.

H
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IFE
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Have you ever considered smuggling with a submarine?

FORCADE
: I’ve heard of a couple of fairly well-documented cases of submarines being used, but it would seem to me that because of the unique noises that are given off by submarines and the fact that the US government spent billions wiring the whole ocean, supposedly to keep track of every submarine in the world, that a submarine would be the most dangerous way possible to smuggle. The minute you set out you would be being tracked by every navy electronic sonar device possible. Also, a submarine takes a lot of knowledge to run, and where do you get parts for it?

H
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IFE
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Does the idea of a blimp appeal to you?

FORCADE
: You know, I think if you had the ability to get together a blimp you wouldn’t get into smuggling. The blimp field is so promising.

These are the kind of conversations you can get into on stoned evenings. They’re a lot of fun, but they’re rarely productive. The best ways are the most straightforward ways. When you’re sitting around scanning these things out, all kinds of James Bondian ideas come forth, but when it gets down to the reality of it, the simplest and most straightforward way is usually the best and the way that attracts the least attention. Also, pouring gasoline on the water and lighting it like James Bond doesn’t work either.

H
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IFE
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How do you know that?

FORCADE
: They tried it during prohibition. Being the systematic type of person that I am, I have made a thorough study of the literature of prohibition smuggling, slave smuggling, and all other types of smuggling, and they used to do it. The Italian and Irish smugglers of the twenties and thirties were about as crazy and as foolish (and in their case drunk, in our case stoned), and the fact that they would try things didn’t mean that they would work.

H
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IFE
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What is the simplest way?

FORCADE
: I think the most common way is to pay someone off down in Colombia so you can load it up right on the dock, or come in close at night and load it up off smaller boats. Some people are very happy to smuggle five hundred pounds hidden inside the hull of a sailboat, or load a sailboat down with five tons, and other people don’t really feel like it’s worth doing unless they bring in twenty-five tons on a freighter. I think twenty-five tons is a bit much to load off of small boats. At that point it becomes worthwhile and more practical to pay off someone at a dock. But if you don’t know a place where you can pay off a dock, you do it at night. People who know about planes tend to plane things from Colombia.

At this end, when it gets up to twenty-five tons or so, you get to the point where you have forklift trucks and trucks with hydraulic tailgates and conveyor belts and so on and so forth. This is what we have now. We don’t use this all the time, but it’s available. A forklift truck is very expensive, but, like, one trip pays for it and you can just keep it in the warehouse and use it when you need it.

H
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IFE
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When you actually make your runs, is there any opportunity or any effort to have quality control?

FORCADE
: I think that when you get up into mass quantities it’s very difficult to have much control over the quality, because it’s enough to get twenty-five tons. If you know the province you get it from and the connection you get it from, you know they’ll be farmers who are geographically located in a place that’s producing better marijuana. I’ve done high-quality runs, where we were going down to specifically get the very best gold or wacky weed or something like that, but very high-quality dope is very perishable and can often become garbage by the time it gets up here.

H
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IFE
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About how many people are involved in your average run?

FORCADE
: We might have about twenty people or so. I mean, let’s say you’re unloading five tons or so; that’s a lot of work. You don’t want it to take hours and hours. You need five or ten people to quickly unload a boat. You don’t want to have so many people that you can’t keep track of them. It depends on the operation.

H
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What’s the scale of payment?

FORCADE
: Well, I would say it depends on the deal you have with your suppliers. If you finance it in advance, you can buy it in the field and you can get it much cheaper, but then it might get busted in the field, it might get busted on its way down, or it might get ripped off and so on. Usually, the more profit you’re in a position to make, the higher risk you take, so the scale of payment varies. But I would say a captain gets like maybe $50,000 and up, a crewmember gets $25,000 and up, a handler gets a few thousand dollars. The prices are very high for the amount of work being done, but, of course, the time you’re facing is quite a bit.

H
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How do you get the people?

FORCADE:
First of all, you have to know them for a long time. I think five years is a good time period, the industry standard, but I would say one year is a minimum no matter how together they are. Somebody’s got to have known them for one year. Somebody that you trust.

Second, they have to be cool; they have to be discreet. They can’t brag to their girlfriends; they can’t brag to their buddies. They can’t run off at the mouth in bars because the word gets around, and they can’t give interviews to magazines.

This is a real problem because anyone who’s doing something desires recognition, and you seek the esteem of your friends. If you’re a smuggler, people say ‘What do you do?’ and you don’t want to say you work in a gas station. The tendency is to impress your friends. I mean, it’s a very chic thing, a very glamorous thing to do, and the tendency is to tell them and ask them to keep quiet. But of course, they don’t keep quiet either. You go over to their house, sit around and get high with them, and after you leave they whisper to their friends.

The other part of being cool is to have the nerve to do it, and this is a hard thing to judge. Sometimes you make a practice run somewhere and see how everybody gets along. Some people can’t hack it, they don’t work well together, and ego conflicts develop. When the pressure’s on the ego conflicts multiply a hundredfold and everyone’s armed, and you don’t want people whipping out guns on each other in the midst of a heavy run because it’s very disruptive and unpleasant. But usually, by the time you get to a smuggling run you’ve already been through some hairy things together. I mean, usually you work somebody up, you don’t take them right into a run. If they do well as a lookout, or as a transporter, or as a loader or something like that, you can use them in a more critical role. But you can never really tell for sure because people who seem really together will suddenly crack, and people that you would never expect to have the moxie to keep it together turn out to be silver-star winners when the chips are down.

I think that someone running a dope operation is a sort of minor guru, or even a major guru, a charismatic figure. I think, generally, the nature of a smuggling operation is closer to that of a Far Eastern religion than it is to a corporation. There’s a guru (who provides the spiritual strength) and his followers. Everyone down below is going on faith. They have to believe in the person at the top because everything you’ve ever been taught, everything you read in the papers, every rumour, story, anecdote and so on that comes along is a deterrent to smuggling. You have to consciously psych yourself up to think that you can make it. The paranoia in a smuggling run is extremely thick, and it’s like sand in the machinery. You don’t know at the time whether it’s psychological warfare or real warfare. But mostly it’s psychological warfare, and it’s psychological warfare that’s very effective.

The value of a bust is 10 percent to take those people off the set temporarily, and the other 90 percent is to scare other people out of it.

H
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IFE
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What makes people transcend the fear?

FORCADE
: Money motivates people to be there. But the choice to be in smuggling is not made because of the money; it’s due to other factors which are social and psychological in nature. I think that people who go into smuggling are for the most part social misfits and non-conformists, antisocial people.

H
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IFE
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Smugglers are antisocial?

FORCADE
: They’re not compliant to society’s rules. They’re opposed to society, they’re viruses in society. I know that this sounds something like the government’s own view, but after ten years, I’ve concluded that this is true. I don’t think it’s bad. I think it’s very good. I think that bringing in dope is very socially valuable, and I believe the other people who are involved in it feel the same way. The middle-class smuggler has a very keen sense of the social value of what he’s doing, that it’s something very worthwhile. But the money is the bottom line motivation to overcome the paranoia.

H
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Can money buy protection from arrest?

FORCADE
: There are so many young people getting high in the coast guard that there are many good opportunities to buy somebody off. Sometimes they’ll even do it for free. But on the other hand, some people who will tip you off on a marijuana thing can’t be bought on a coke thing. It’s a lot more serious. For myself, I’ve dabbled a little in cocaine, but the overall level of paranoia is so extremely high that I prefer to stay away from it. Once you get it in you still have to sell it, and if anybody down the line gets busted that bust is going to domino right back up to you. Everyone down the line may crack because the penalties are so great. With marijuana the penalties aren’t that great, the stigma isn’t great, the pressure isn’t that great and it just tends to stop at the point where the person gets busted. With cocaine, the guy who gets busted with a gram may knock it all the way back to the guy who brought in ten pounds.

H
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We’ve heard rumors of smugglers warehousing
.

FORCADE
: This is an old story, and I can understand how the average American consumer with a quite legitimate paranoia about big business would be concerned about this. But the reality is that big quantities of dope have a tendency to get busted and if there’s one thing a smuggler or a ton dealer wants, it’s to get rid of this stuff and convert it to cash as quickly as possible. Marijuana smugglers, dealers, will stay up two or three nights just to get rid of it. I think that ton dealers and smugglers are subject to a lot of nervous breakdowns just because they’re worrying about having a million dollars’ worth of marijuana sitting in a garage or warehouse where a curious mailman, or a guy coming to check the water meter, or an accidental fire, or a nosy neighbour or anything like that could blow a million dollars. One would want to get rid of it as quickly as possible. Whether you’re talking about the country of origin or the United States, absolutely nobody would warehouse it for a minute longer than possible, and I’d say generally the time from entry into this country to being sold to the consumers is almost always less than a month.

H
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I’ve heard stories of smugglers who have gambled away much of their fortunes sitting around with their friends, snorting lots of cocaine and playing poker for days on end
.

FORCADE
: I’ve been to a few of these gatherings, but one of the reasons I’ve survived is that I’m more conservative than some of these people. These people are like meteors, skyrockets; you know, they come fast and they go fast. They have short, happy lives. I’m not like that. I come in contact with people like that, but when it all comes down, it’s very depressing. It’s a real occupational hazard for smugglers because they have access to large amounts of very pure cocaine. Most people would never be able to develop the kind of usage patterns a wealthy smuggler could develop; they couldn’t afford it; they couldn’t get access to that level of quality.

H
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IFE
:
Do you think doing marijuana leads to doing cocaine?

FORCADE
: No. It’s two different value systems, two different worlds. There’s a tendency among smugglers and marijuana dealers to stay away from it, because it’s a lot of additional heat.

H
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Do you get high when you’re making a run?

FORCADE
: Yeah, you get very high. One thing about marijuana, you know, is that it’s calming and it’s good to smoke marijuana and keep mellow. I also think that when you’re doing a run, there’s a certain psychological satisfaction to smoking the dope that you’re importing. It’s sort of an impetus to go on with it. There’s nothing more satisfying than smoking dope that you have smuggled in yourself. Nothing gets you higher.