Pubdate: Sat, 14 Jan 2006
Source: Salon (US Web)
Copyright: 2006 Salon
Contact: http://www.salon.com/about/letters/index.html
Website: http://www.salon.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/381
Author: Oliver Broudy
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hallucinogens.htm (Hallucinogens)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

SMUGGLER'S BLUES

Before Becoming a Writer, Richard Stratton Ran Hash From the Middle
East, Making Money Hand Over Fist and Living Off Adrenaline. Until He
Got Caught.

In 1982 Richard Stratton was convicted of operating a Continuing
Criminal Enterprise under the kingpin statute of New York State. For
over 10 years he had been running an international drug smuggling
operation, bringing tons of marijuana and hashish into the United
States and arranging for its distribution. How does one become an
international drug smuggler? For Stratton it was a fluke, a chance
encounter south of the border in 1964. But what kept Stratton coming
back for more was the challenge, the adrenaline rush, and the belief
that one day he could take his experiences and put them all into a
book.

After his conviction, Stratton got his chance. His eight-year stint in
prison afforded him plenty of time to write "Smack Goddess," a novel
based on the life of notorious drug dealer Frin Mullin, which was
published upon his release in 1990. Since then, Stratton has worked as
a consultant for the TV show "Oz," co-written and produced the
award-winning feature film "Slam," and the Emmy Award-winning "Thug
Life in D.C.," and created the Showtime series "Street Time." His
first job after prison was working for Barbara Kopple, the Academy
Award-winning documentary filmmaker, who hired him to write a
treatment for a film about Mike Tyson. Kopple kept him on as a field
producer once the project got underway. "I remember running around
from phone booth to phone booth," Stratton says, "setting up
interviews, coordinating camera crews, organizing transportation
logistics, and thinking, I can do this; this isn't so different from
running a smuggling operation."

Late last year, a selection of Stratton's best nonfiction work, which
originally appeared in such magazines as GQ, Esquire and Details, was
collected in an anthology called "Altered States of America." The
subjects covered range from in-depth profiles of Norman Mailer and
Hunter S. Thompson to exposes of the CIA's covert LSD experiments, and
the FBI's complicity in a series of New York Mafia hits in the 1980s.

Salon caught up with Stratton, now 60, at his studio apartment in
Chelsea, where he stays when he has business in New York. The
apartment is windowless except for a skylight, high over Stratton's
desk. The bookshelves are lined with tomes about cannabis and crime.
On the walls hang various movie posters from projects Stratton has
worked on. Stratton himself, wearing black nylon jogging pants and a
black tee, sits at his desk in a wooden swivel chair, sipping Earl
Grey. He has the elegant, brushed-back hair of a TV preacher and the
solid build of a wrestler.

The first and most obvious question is, how does an upper-middle-class
white kid from Wellesley, Mass., become an international drug smuggler?

Well, that's a good question. I had flirted around with pot when I was
in high school. But when I got to Arizona -- I went to ASU on a
wrestling scholarship -- I started going down to Mexico with my
roommate, and that's when I made my first buy. It was $100 a kilo. I
had 300 bucks on me so I bought three kilos, hid them in the car, and
then brought it back to Boston and sold it to the cousin of this
friend of mine. I made $2,000, which was a lot of money in those days,
especially for a 19-year-old kid. I never really thought of it as
"smuggling." After that I dropped out of school, became a hippie, and
went on the backpack hippie tour of the world for two or three years.
I started doing these little scams where we'd build these false-bottom
suitcases and we'd hide hash in there, and then friends would carry it
back to the States.

What was your parents' reaction to this activity?

My parents never really knew what I was up to. Well, my father had
some suspicion because I had all this money. But I had been such a
rebellious kid. I had been in reform school and arrested so many times
that they really didn't want to know. My mother was very different;
she was supportive no matter what I did. She was one of these
overweening mothers that you could've gone to and said, Your son just
killed three people down the street and ate them, and she'd go, Well,
they must have been really bad people, otherwise he would never have
done something like that.

So how did an irredeemable delinquent like yourself end up a
writer?

I went to a prep school in western Massachusetts, because they had a
great wrestling coach. My English teacher there was a guy named Dudley
Cloud, who had been an editor at the Atlantic Monthly. And he took an
interest in me, based on essays I'd written. He said, You really have
a knack for this. You should pursue it. So when I came back from
Europe I enrolled in a summer writing program at Harvard. After that I
applied to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and got a
writing fellowship. That's when I met Norman Mailer. He was living two
houses down, across the street. There was a woman who worked for him,
his cook, who lived in the apartment below mine. She said, Oh you
gotta meet Norman, you guys will love each other. And one day he
called and invited me over to watch a football game. We stayed up the
whole night, drinking and talking. At that point he was offering to
help me any way he could. I was 22.

And did he help you?

I interviewed him for Rolling Stone. Then they hired me to write a
piece about Rochdale College, in Toronto, which was one of these
experimental colleges that sprang up in the early '70s. But it had
turned into one of the centers of soft drug distribution in North
America, largely because of Robert Rowbotham, who was like the hippie
godfather. When I went up there and started interviewing people they
all said, Oh you have to talk to Rosie. He's the flower. That was his
other nickname. He was probably in his early 20s and already had maybe
$5 million or $6 million in cash stashed away. The guy was a master
organized crime figure in the marijuana underworld. People would come
up from all over North America and buy hash from this guy, and then
smuggle it back into the United States.

So I hung out at his farm for three or four days, and we started
talking about some of the smuggles I'd done. He was not an importer,
he was a dealer. He was connected to these Lebanese people who would
bring tons of Lebanese hash into Canada. And then Rosie would sell it
to people from all over North America. So I wrote the piece, but in
the meantime he fronted me like 100 or 150 kilos. We smuggled it back
into the United States and I sold it to friends of mine who I had been
doing business with prior to that. So then with Rosie's money and
connections I went back to Europe and started sending loads of hash
back to the United States.

Why did he let you get close to him if he knew you were a
reporter?

I don't know. It was just one of those things. He's still probably one
of the closest people in my life. The guy did like 17 years in prison
in Canada, just because he refused to give up the people he was
associated with, and he was very political about it. He really saw
himself as some kind of Johnny Marijuana Seed. He had the best
reputation of anybody I've ever met in the business. You could leave
$3 million or $4 million worth of hash with him and come back in three
weeks and Rosie would have all your money. An unbelievably meticulous
businessman, and nonviolent, too. No guns, no hard drugs. He was very
strict about that.

Is that a code you adopted for yourself? Or was that just a part of
the hippie gestalt?

It was part of the hippie gestalt, but I think no one quite
articulated it as fully as Rosie did. There's a political aspect to
it. It's not just about greed. Jesse James and his brother, they were
confederate soldiers, and what happened to them made them become
outlaws. The outlaws of the hippie generation were reacting to laws,
which we thought were totally ridiculous. The outlaw marijuana growers
still see themselves as political, as doing something innately
American, by challenging laws that they feel are wrong. The problem is
that in the United States it all becomes co-opted by big business.
Which happened to the marijuana industry too: Huge amounts of
low-grade Mexican pot started coming into the country. Rosie wouldn't
touch the stuff. There was a morality to it. These guys wouldn't deal
in cocaine. When cocaine came along, it corrupted everything. People
started getting strung out, the Colombians got involved, the weapons.
It all turned ugly.

Well, Rosie would say, What we really need is Thai sticks. So I'd go
to Thailand and get them. He was the dealer, I was the smuggler.

This may be a naive question, but what are Thai sticks?

Thai sticks were these pieces of bamboo about 9 inches long. They
would take the buds and tie them to the stick with a piece of hemp. In
those days when you got a big load of pot there would be a lot of
seeds and shake. But not with Thai sticks, cannabis indica. In those
days everything was sativa. Sativa is usually from Colombia, Mexico,
that part of the world. You never saw indica. There's three basic
strains: sativa, indica and ruberalis. Ruberalis you get mostly in
places like Lebanon. So indica was virtually unknown in this country.
There were these sticks called Buddha sticks, which were supposedly
the best. The buds are really fat and juicy and stinky.

So you would travel to these places.

If there's anything that I miss about those years it's the adventure
of going way up into the mountains and meeting these people, the
farmers. There were always these shady middlemen you had to go
through, but I would always insist that I wanted to go to the fields
and buy it still on the plant. You could never trust these guys, the
middlemen. They'd show you a bale of really good pot and say, Yeah,
it's all gonna be just like that. And then you go to all this trouble
to smuggle it back to the States and maybe a third of it would be like
that and the rest would have something else thrown in. So quality
control was hugely important. You had to go there and oversee every
step of the operation. My thing was to go there and stay with these
people. For me it was material to write about.

What smuggle are you most proud of?

The one that comes to mind is this huge one we did from the Middle
East, where we almost got caught. In fact there was tremendous
pressure being put on me by my guys in New York to give it up, to just
walk away, because they thought it was hot. This was during the war
between Iran and Iraq, when you couldn't get chopped dates in this
country. Iraq was basically closed down. So I would go to Iraq and buy
these dates. Millions of pounds.

[The phone rings. Stratton talks for a few minutes with his business
manager about money that he's owed by a Hollywood studio for a draft
of a script he completed.]

It's harder to get paid by these people in Hollywood than it is to get
paid by dope dealers, I'll tell you that right now.

So start at the beginning. Before you go to Iraq.

We had set up our own trucking company in New Jersey. And we had a
bonded warehouse over there. The trucking company was owned by the
father of one of the guys that I was involved with in New York. He was
one of the biggest dealers of soft drugs in the world at that point.
He knew that I had been smuggling hash out of Lebanon for years, so he
came to me and said, Look, Bordeau Foods is having a hard time getting
dates. They need as much as they can get, for cake mix and all this
other stuff. Can you do that?

The thing is, before you even go you have to have a lot of stuff in
order. You have to have a letter of credit from Bordeau Foods, for one
thing, so you don't look like a dope dealer. So I had to read up, so
I'd know a little bit about what I was talking about. Then I met the
Bordeau people here in New York and went out to dinner with them, so
they'd think I was a legitimate importer/exporter. I had business
cards made up and the whole deal. One of the things about dates you
have to know about are the acceptable levels of infestation, because
there's always a certain level of bugs in these things, and if there's
too many they won't pass muster with the USDA. So I went to Iraq, and
I bought these dates, but then because of the war I could say, Well,
we can't ship them out of Iraq, we'll have to send them to Lebanon and
then ship them from there back to the United States.

Who does one talk to in Iraq about buying a million pounds of
dates?

Bordeau had some leads, but when you get there you just start asking
around. You go to these whole food distributors and say, I want to buy
dates. It's not that hard. The big problem is, again, quality control.
You check the infestation rate and they look pretty good, but then the
rest of them ... Well, that's part of the story. So I bought all these
dates, I have them shipped overland by truck to Beirut. There, my
contacts take the dates, put them in cartons, and then put these
sealed metal boxes of hash inside the cartons and pack the dates all
around them. That's what they were supposed to do.

How much hash?

Fifteen tons. Probably the biggest single smuggle of hashish. We used
to do much bigger loads of pot. They'd come up in these mother ships
from Colombia. But the Lebanese, see this is the thing, they never
follow instructions. I get back to Beirut, and we're right down at the
docks with the containers. I start opening up a couple of the boxes,
and I see a metal box with hash sitting right inside these cartons. I
said, Man, what the fuck are you guys doing? See, over there everybody
is paid off all the way down the line. So they assume that it's the
same way back here, like we're gonna pay customs off. But we weren't
paying customs. We were gonna get it through customs without them
knowing. Because to pay customs off over here is not so easy for a
load that big.

It took them weeks but they did it right. Out of the seven containers,
there might have been four that had hash. So I get back to the States
before the shipment gets there, and I go to my people in New Jersey
that have the trucking company and I say, When they [inspectors] come
in pick up these containers first, the ones that have the hash.
Because typically what happens is they'll look at the first couple,
but they're not going to bother with all seven, because it's a big,
well-known company.

The one problem was it was coming out of Beirut, which is flagged as a
drug source country. So when the containers get here, my friends come
to me and say, We've got a problem. Customs called the trucking
company and said that they want to accompany the containers from the
dock to the warehouse, open them at the warehouse, and visually
inspect the cartons. So what are we gonna do? They were ready to walk
away. I go, Look, if you walk away they're going to know that
something is in there. That's going to expose the trucking company,
it's gonna expose everybody. So I said, What you do is you pick up the
ones that just have the dates. You go on a Friday afternoon, late in
the day, so that you can only get two or three. Bring them back and
just let them look at those, and hopefully that will satisfy them.

So this gets communicated to my friend whose father owns the trucking
company, who then communicates it to the truck drivers, who don't even
know that there's hash in there. The communications get fucked up
along the way and they pick up a couple of the containers that have
hash in them, and the customs people accompany them back to the
warehouse. You know how these cartons have those plastic straps that
go around them? What I had done was put red straps, as opposed to
green or yellow or blue, on the cartons with the hash, so I would know
at a glance. So I get to the warehouse that night, right after the
customs guys. They brought dogs with them too. They bring the boxes
out and they put them on these big tables and they start opening them
up and looking at them. And they opened up some of the ones with the
red straps on them, too. If those guys hadn't repackaged them in
Beirut we all would've been busted.

So you were standing there when they opened them?

No, I wasn't standing there. I was at the Chelsea Hotel, sweating. But
the brother of my friend whose father owned the trucking company was
there. He saw them unloading the red ones and he knew.

But there were still two other containers that hadn't even been
opened, and both had hash in them, sitting in the fenced area of the
warehouse, waiting for the customs guys to come back on Monday morning
to inspect them. They put these special seals on them, and if you
break the seal they know that you've been in there. So one of the guys
we were working with was a welder. He came over and he cut the actual
hinges of the doors off the back of the containers. We had to get a
tow truck with a big hook on it to lift the door off the back.

How big are these containers?

Well, you've seen them. You see millions of them over in Jersey.
They're huge. They're not as big as this apartment but they're --

Like a railroad car?

Yeah. So we cut the doors off with a welder, and took out all the
boxes with the hash. It took us all weekend, working 24 hours a day,
16 guys. But now we're worried that they're going to look in the boxes
on Monday and wonder why there's 40 cartons missing. But we figured,
fuck it, at least we'll have the hash. So we put the doors back on,
reweld them, and then had to go out and buy paint to match the paint
on the containers. But we still had two containers at the docks. Then,
after all that, at like 9:30, Monday morning, the customs guy calls
and says, We're satisfied, just come get the rest of them. We'll send
someone ever there to break the seal. So in the end we got everything.
Except the dates.

The dates?

The USDA rejected the dates. The infestation rate was too
high.

How much more money would you have made if you were smuggling
heroin?

Ten times maybe. But there's a lot of other problems. For one thing, I
wouldn't know where to sell it. That wasn't my field. I probably
could've found those people if I needed to. But then there's organized
crime. You're dealing with people who are really not good people at
all. Not that everybody in the soft drug business was a good person.
But it's just a whole different world. You're dealing with people who
will kill you for whatever reason. And the other thing is, you know,
the drug gets cut, and people shoot up and die. In those days that was
considered bad karma. Even cocaine was considered bad karma. In other
words, if you dealt with bad shit, bad shit was gonna happen to you,
and invariably it did.

What about air smuggles? How does that work?

Well, you need a catch. The catch is usually with the people who work
in air freight. For a certain amount of money, they'll take your
shipment and it won't even go through customs. They'll take it off the
plane, put it in your truck, and you get it out of there. That's a
catch. They'll get rid of the bill of lading so customs doesn't even
know the load came in. There's a lot of baggage handlers who do that.
And customs people. I'm sure right now if you went out to Kennedy,
there's stuff going on. We had one in Logan, we had one in Kennedy,
and we had one at LAX for a while.

How do you set them up?

Usually somebody comes to me, knowing that I have the overseas
connections, and they'll say, I know these guys at the airport and
they want to make some money. They've done it before. They know how to
do it. Are you interested? Usually we'd send a trial, 35 or 45 kilos,
and make sure it went through.

How much do you pay these guys?

That's negotiable. There's always a problem, though, once they start
making money. I was paying these guys at Logan $30,000 every time we
brought a load in. Which was reasonable. There were three of them and
they each got 10 grand, for one weekend of work. So I'm paying them 30
grand I'm giving my Lebanese connection a third, and the next thing I
know it starts to come in, every three weeks. But then these guys
started talking to the Mafia, and next thing I know I'm being called
in to have a sit-down with the Mafia guys. And they're like, What are
you doing? They were looking to kill me at one point. Because I
refused to knuckle under. I said I can't do that. I had this Lebanese
guy that I was working with at the time in Boston, who knew organized
crime people really well. So I went to him and explained the
situation, that if I knuckle under I'm not going to make any money. So
he calls Raymond Patriarca, the boss of the whole New England family
at the time. And word came back from Patriarca that I had to do
whatever the Mafia guys said. And I was like, fuck that, you know? I
had a load at the airport at the time and I got it out of there. I
just took it. And two days later they called me up and said, What the
fuck are you doing? We're going to put a contract out on you. It was
hairy. That was the first time I started carrying a gun.

Did you even know how to shoot it?

I'd done some target shooting. But it leads to another story. I was
going through Logan on my way back to New York with like $250,000 in
cash in a suitcase. So I put my briefcase on the conveyor belt that
goes through the X-ray machine. And just as it started to go in I
thought, Oh shit. I left the gun in there. Now Massachusetts had this
really strict gun law. If you got caught with a gun it's a mandatory
year in jail. So I see the thing go through the metal detector, and I
go to grab the briefcase. So of course they see the gun and call the
state cops and they arrest me on the spot. They put me in a holding
cell in Logan airport. My suitcase with the money had already gone, I
had checked it. It's gone to New York. So I called this friend of
mine, a lawyer, and explained the situation. And at the time I was
carrying this false I.D., from Texas. So he comes in, we go to court
that very afternoon, and he gets up in front of the judge and says,
This man's from Texas. In Texas they carry guns, and so on. And
ultimately the judge fined me, and they kept the gun and they let me
go. So, I get on a plane. I fly to New York. I get to LaGuardia, and
here is my suitcase, six or seven hours later, still going around on
the baggage claim.

He's from Texas. They carry guns in Texas. They bought
that.

And that's how I stopped carrying a gun.

What do you do with all the money?

It comes to you over a period of time. You never get it all at once.
You have to wait till these guys sell it, and a big load could take
six months to sell. People are going to get busted. The DEA and the
local narcotics cops know a big load of hash came in. So they start
watching individuals that they know are involved. Then they start
arresting. And we hear about it, we lost a thousand pounds here or we
lost 500 pounds there. So this shit happens. But what I did with it
was spend it. I bought a ranch in Texas. I bought boats, I bought
airplanes. I reinvested a lot of it into the business. But I was so
addicted to the adrenaline rush that I just kept going and going and
going. I would have five or six different things going on at any given
moment. And maybe two or three of them would make it. I managed to
save some of the money. I bought my parents a house. I bought land in
Maine. I bought property in the Bahamas. I was big on real estate. I
started doing all kinds of crazy things. I started a magazine. We put
money in High Times magazine.

You helped start High Times?

Tom Forcade was the founder. But I was part of the original brain
trust.

So you didn't have any of those overseas bank accounts?

I did. I had money in the Bahamas, I had money in the Cayman Islands.
I had money all over Europe for a while there.

And did any of that survive the prison years?

Some of it.

Enough?

One person that I trusted dearly had saved some money and had set some
properties aside. I had a house in Hawaii that they never found. But
the government found a lot of it. The IRS began what they call a net
worth study. They spent years tracking all my assets, going around to
every place that I did business. They don't care how long it takes.
And then when the DEA finally arrested me they seized everything. They
got the ranch in Texas; they got the property in Maine. They got
vehicles. They got airplanes. They got bank accounts.

And that's just gone.

Yeah. It's gone.

So what happened when they finally caught you? What was your
defense?

In the Maine case, my defense was that I was doing it to write about
it. At that time there were all these unusual defenses going on.
Vietnam vets had the post-traumatic stress syndrome defense. They came
back from Vietnam such action junkies that the only thing they could
find that would fill that need was smuggling pot. The other group on
trial up there was the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church, a bunch of white
Rastas from Florida. Their defense was they were bringing it back as
sacrament for the church. And this all in front of this same federal
judge up in Maine, who was a very good judge actually. Judge Edward T.
Ginoux. And that was my defense. I was a writer and I was just doing
this to gather material.

You imported tons of illegal drugs into the United States in order to
gain material to be a writer.

Yeah.

These days most people settle for an MFA.

There was actually a lot of publicity about it at the time because
people found the defense amusing.

And then later they charged you again, in New York.

They said, Well, we're going to bring more charges, unless you're
willing to cooperate with the government. Because in the Maine case
they didn't have the big hashish trip that we did. They didn't really
have that much. So they brought the New York case and that's when they
charged me with Continuing Criminal Enterprise, and charged me under
the kingpin statute. That's when I started really getting into the
law, because I was like, Wait a minute -- how can they try me twice?
So my defense there was, Yes, I did it, but I've already been tried
and convicted, and this whole case has been concocted just to get me
to rat out my friends, Norman Mailer particularly.

What was prison like? You've described it elsewhere as like living in
the men's room at Penn Station.

The interesting part of it is the inner trip. How it tests your
character.

Did you finally find the time to do some writing when you were in
there?

Yeah, I wrote "Smack Goddess." I wrote a whole bunch of short stories.
But they don't make it easy for you. I would write longhand on legal
pads and then go to the law library and say that I was writing briefs.
A lot of time I was actually doing legal work but in between I would
be typing up a short story, or whatever else I was working on. You're
not allowed to run a business from prison. So you can't get paid for
being published. But in my case I never did get paid for anything
until after I got out.

You mentioned somewhere in your book that you have a few regrets but
ratting isn't one of them. But what regrets do you have?

What I regret more than anything are the days and weeks and months and
years that I spent sitting in hotels, waiting for people, partying,
living this high life that was really pretty empty when you get right
down to it. I wasn't writing, I wasn't doing anything creative, I was
living for this adrenaline rush. I used to go through these periods
where I would put everything aside and just try to focus on my
writing. But when a deal comes along, it's too good to pass up.

And I regret the people that as a result of my activity got sucked in,
the people who ended up in prison or dead. It's a dark, ugly world and
the criminality of it seeps out, and infects everybody. So I regret
that. And I also regret that I didn't take 10 million and put it aside
somewhere where they could never find it, so that I could make movies
with it now. Laundering it is a huge problem.

So do you feel that the dictum you inherited from writers like
Hemingway, that you should have wild experiences so that you can write
about them, has served you well?

Overall I'd say it has served me well. I certainly have a wealth of
material that I can tap into. But it comes at a price. Hemingway paid
for it. He had to keep tempting death, and ended up killing himself as
a result. I think what I was able to do with the prison experience
saved me. Because it forced me to examine my character and say, Wait a
minute, what are you doing with your life? I use it as a touchstone
now. To try to keep me grounded. I think of my apartment as my
high-tech prison cell. If they told me you're going to have to spend
the rest of your life in prison but you'll be able to design your own
cell I would design something like this. So when I saw this place I
was like, Oh yeah, this is my ADX, my maximum-security prison cell.
Fortunately, though, I can still go out and buy the paper.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake