Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (67 page)

Normally, all the pews to the left of the aisle are reserved for reporters, sketch artists and the public. This morning the first three rows have been cleared. Alone in the front row sits a slender, muscular man, in gray suit, black tie, knees crossed. Beneath a thick mat of black hair is a face white as a Mexican sugar skull, with alert black eyes. Rudolph Giuliani, thirty-nine, is United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Giuliani is the composer of this entire opera. He has arranged and rehearsed this morning’s rousing overture. He will be the mostly invisible maestro of the whole show to come.

Prosecutor Stewart grips the microphone tightly, runs his finger around a too-tight shirt collar, and in a flat voice, with minimal gestures, begins to tell a story. It is really a simple tale, he says: one single commodity bought, shipped, sold, replenished. But the numbers are huge. Stewart mentions ‘over a ton of pure heroin worth over $333 million, a third of a billion dollars, in the space of little over a year.’

A group of individuals in the New York-New Jersey area formed a joint business venture, Stewart continues. They then got together with a friend overseas and asked: Can you provide us with this commodity? The overseas friend called his friend and said he wanted to buy a certain raw material, then manufacture it into a commodity and transport it to America, where it would be sold to customers. No checks, no bank accounts; the business was to be all cash.

‘That’s all that happened, ladies and gentlemen, month in and month out. But the commodity’ – he pauses for as long as he can bear – ‘the commodity was massive amounts of contraband. And all the individuals engaged in the enterprise were members of the Mafia, or associates of Mafia members, both in Sicily and in the United States.’

The business venture, says Stewart, came about in this fashion. After the breaking of the French Connection, in the late 1960s the Zips gradually took over heroin distribution in the United States. American Mafiosi did not touch drugs, not directly; it was too dangerous. They left that to the lean, hungry newcomers.

Mountains of cash earned from the drug trade were collected and boxed by a subsidiary group of restaurant and pizzeria owners in New Jersey. These men, also recent Sicilian immigrants, used their contacts in Italy and Switzerland to set up a money-laundering operation that moved millions of dollars into the secret Swiss bank accounts of the Sicilian Mafia warlords.

Such, according to Stewart, is the case the government will prove. The evidence, he says, has two themes. One deals with the mechanics of smuggling: how you get the drugs in, the money out. He promises that the government will show in detail how these defendants moved more than $40 million in cash to Sicily alone. This does not include money sent to Brazil, he adds with a thin smile.

‘The second theme involves the dynamics of the Mafia . . . the secret criminal organization which provided the cement which held this conspiracy together.’ The Mafia is extremely disciplined, Stewart explains. These men had no ability to enforce their contracts under law. But they had a secret criminal society, and Mafia discipline is so strict it enables a man to walk down a dark alley with $1 million in cash and fear no ambush.

The leader was Gaetano Badalamenti, of Cinisi, a small town west of Palermo, Sicily. He supplied the men in New York and New Jersey with heroin between 1978 and 1980, ‘when he was compelled to relocate to Brazil.’ Hearing this, Badalamenti worms his big head around to the left to gaze mildly upon the prosecutor and jury. He has pebbly ivory skin, a grim mouth, eyes like lumps of coal; the unreadable visage of a Pharaoh.

The Pizza Connection
, 1988

CHAPTER SIX

WITH IT

Before commencing with my story in its proper order, I will say a few words about the drug habit generally.

During the thirty years in which I was a constant user of drugs of many kinds, various people, including some doctors and chemists, have asked me how it was that I was able to continue in the habit for so long a time, and use such large quantities of drugs, and still remain in good health.

This true story of my experiences will explain the reason, and also may show the drug habit in an entirely new aspect.

It is now many years since I gave up using all drugs, but during the thirty years with which this story deals, I have used morphia, cocaine, hash, opium, and a good many other drugs, both singly and in combination.

The doses which I became able to take, after so many years of the habit, may seem almost impossible, yet it is a fact that I have increased my dose gradually, until I could inject eighty grains of pure cocaine a day; sufficient to kill many persons, if divided among them.

At other times, when I favoured morphia, I have injected as much as ten grains per day, although the medical dose is a quarter of a grain.

My arms, shoulders and chest are a faint blue colour, which, if magnified, reveal the marks of thousands of tiny punctures; hypodermic syringe marks.

Many years I have searched the jungles of the Far East for new drugs; testing strange plants, bulbs and roots, making extracts, and then testing them first on animals, and in some cases on myself; and I will describe later some of the strange effects produced, particularly in the case of one drug, which I will call ‘The Elixir of Life’.

If some of the things I describe are horrible, they are nevertheless true. What strange sights may a man not see during seven years in a country like China, if he goes to look for them below the surface? It is a country of camouflage and hidden ways. Innocent-looking junks, quietly floating down the rivers and canals, may be really sumptuously furnished gambling dens and drug haunts, where orgies of many kinds are carried on. No European, unless he is introduced by a trusted Chinese, will ever have entry to these places.

The life of a drug taker can be a happy one, far surpassing that of any other, or it can be one of suffering and misery; it depends on the user’s knowledge.

The most interesting period will only be reached after many years – and then only if perfect health has been retained – using several kinds of drugs (for one drug alone spells disaster), and increasing the doses in a carefully thought-out system, a system which was first made known to me by the Indian doctor who initiated me into the drug habit.

Waking visions will then begin to appear when under the influence of very large doses, and it is these visions which are so interesting.

I have sat up through the night taking drugs until the room has been peopled with spirits. They may be horrible, grotesque, or beautiful, according to the nature of the drugs producing them. Strange scenes have been enacted before my eyes; scenes which were very real and lifelike, and which I will describe later.

When the Dangerous Drugs Act came into force I gave up using all drugs, because the danger and risk of obtaining them was too great. The paltry quantities, about which the authorities make such a fuss, were of no use to me, and I was able to give them up without any trouble or suffering, owing to my experiments and discoveries.

This story will be as a message of hope to all drug addicts. The cure is easy, but not by the method generally adopted, that of gradually reducing the dosage: a method which will only cause intense suffering, and sometimes even death.

Underworld of the East
, 2001

H
OW DOES ONE
go about discovering the action, the nature of the effect on the central nervous system, of a chemical which has just been synthesized, but not yet put into a living organism? I start by explaining that it must be understood, first of all, that the newborn chemical is as free of pharmacological activity as a newborn babe is free of prejudice.

At the moment of a person’s conception, many fates have been sealed, from physical features to gender and intelligence. But many things have not been decided. Subtleties of personality, belief systems, countless other characteristics, are not established at birth. In the eyes of every newborn, there is a universality of innocence and godliness which changes gradually as interactions take place with parents, siblings and the environment. The adult product is shaped from repeated contacts with pains and pleasures, and what finally emerges is the fatalist, the egocentric or the rescuer. And the travelling companions of this person during his development from undefined infant to well-defined adult, all have contributed to and have been, in turn, modified by these interactions.

So it is also with a chemical. When the idea of a new substance is conceived, nothing exists but symbols, a collage of odd atoms hooked together with bonds, all scribbled out on a blackboard or a napkin at the dinner table. The structure, of course, and perhaps even some spectral characteristics and physical properties are inescapably pre-ordained. But its character in man, the nature of its pharmacological action or even the class of the action it might eventually display, can only be guessed at. These properties cannot yet be known, for at this stage they do not yet exist.

Even when the compound emerges as a new substance, tangible, palpable, weighable, it is still a
tabula rasa
in the pharmacological sense, in that nothing is known, nothing can be known, about its action in man, since it has never been in man. It is only with the development of a relationship between the thing tested and the tester himself that this aspect of character will emerge, and the tester is as much a contributor to the final definition of the drug’s action as is the drug itself. The process of establishing the nature of a compound’s action is synonymous with the process of developing that action.

Other researchers who taste your material will include some (most, you hope) who make separate evaluations; and it will then appear that you defined (developed) the properties accurately. Other researchers (only a few, you hope) will disagree, and they will privately tend to wonder why they failed to evaluate the material more accurately. You might call this a no-lose situation, and it is the reward for personally following all three parts of this process, namely conception, creation and definition.

But it must be kept in mind that the interaction goes both ways; the tester, as well as the compound being tested, is molded by it.

Phenethylamines and Other Things I Have Known and Loved: A Chemical Love Story
, 1991

R
EED WAS A
head who, at length and unapologetically could provide poetic discourse on ‘the energy, the magic, the beauty of the herb.’ And mean it. He was a smoker who had started smuggling pot because he got tired of looking for it. Feeling quite emphatically that ‘it should be in hand when you need it,’ he was religious on the subject. Literally. Marijuana was not an article of faith, it was the Faith itself, and Reed was its Defender. All the money he made smuggling herb he reinvested in smuggling more. The millions never caught up with him, he was always working. Reed, like other smugglers, lavished disposable income on cars and boats, but only on those in which he could haul marijuana. Where another scammer might seek joy in the extravagance of a platinum Rolex, an indigo-blue Maserati or a house with eight bathrooms on the rim of Red Mountain, Reed would be quite happy, he argued, ‘if I could keep enough smoke around me.’

It was smoke, no doubt, that had led J.D. Reed to his appreciation of the transmigration of souls. Reed believed that he had been a great warrior in a previous life. ‘Many lifetimes I had to be a warrior,’ he reasoned – ‘I got the build for it, I got the instincts’ – and he took pride in the fact that, after coming of age in his present life, he had never inflicted harm on anyone. ‘With my body-strength and knowledge,’ he explained to Long, ‘I manipulate ‘em, I don’t hurt ‘em. That’s what marijuana did for me. It turned my warrior-ness into peace.’

Reed was a warlord who had established his kingdom securely in the realm of the ethereal, and to achieve the celestial precincts thereof, he followed his very own
camino real
. The journey began with his laying hands on the highest-grade ganja any man could possibly score, and rolling a joint the size of a prairie dog. He would soak the joint in Afghani hash oil, a bottle of which he always kept handy, and hang it in the sun to dry – he would clothespin the oiler to the laundry line outside the kitchen of his ranch. Picking it at just the right moment, Reed would fire it up and smoke it until nothing but ash remained.

That was how he started his day. For anyone smoking with him, it signaled the end of the day.

Smokescreen
by Robert Sabbag, first published in Great Britain by Canongate Books, February 2002

Miguel Cervantes

Beautiful places in the tropics, I have heard, are often unhealthy, and this, I found, was one of them, and it was not long before I got a touch of malaria.

Malaria causes an absolutely rotten feeling, with headache and all the rest of it, so one day when I had an attack rather worse than usual, I sent over to the hospital for the Indian doctor or ‘babu’, who was in charge there.

He was a fat and jolly Hindu of about forty years of age. After feeling my pulse and taking my temperature, he said, speaking through his nose like most babus do, ‘Yes, sir. You have a little fever, but I will soon cure you.’