Читать книгу Folly Cove - Kermit Schweidel - Страница 19

DOWN MEXICO WAY

I’m not sure Mike and Jack ever took note of the specific moment they crossed the line from ambitious potheads to successful traffickers. But once the dominos began to fall, they quickly found themselves rising to the pinnacle of the border pot trade—though they hardly had time to enjoy the view. They had graduated to tonnage and were opening new markets in the Northeast. They still hadn’t found the consistent multi-ton buyer they were looking for, but they were moving better than a ton a week in the high season.

In the early days, the business of pot was all about Mexican sativa, a greenish brown plant with little white seeds that provided an excellent high. The only drawback was the incredible exploding seeds. If you didn’t remove them, you were in for a surprise that never failed to amuse. But it was great tasting pot with a nice clean high. Not overpowering, but assertive enough to command your full inattention. And the square bricks with the Christmas wrapping coming out of Chihuahua were even better. Mike and Jack got the message: quality matters, presentation sells, customers can be fickle.

Working in his own machine shop, Mike Halliday engineered a faster, easier way to compress loose pot into uniform five-pound bricks. He introduced plastic into the process to preserve freshness and cover the smell. He and Jack sent tools and supplies to Mexico whenever they could. But Mike Halliday couldn’t wait to get into the growing fields and launch himself into a process that could benefit from a little of his fine-tuning.

MIKE HALLIDAY

The first time Jack and I went to the interior, we didn’t know what to expect. When I told a smuggler friend of mine we were going down there he asked me how my Spanish was. “Not too good,” I told him. “Why?”

He said, “Just remember the phrase, ‘No disparrar a pagar.’” What’s that mean? He said, “Don’t shoot, I’ll pay.”

We flew to Mazatlán where we were picked up and taken to Cosala, a little town between Culiacan and Mazatlán, high up in the mountains. The last twenty-five miles is up a windy mountain road that gets you to Cosala. From there, you go on rocky roads barely wide enough for one vehicle. I would ask the guys, “God, doesn’t anybody ever die on these roads?”

“Oh, sí, the Gonzalez family, last month they fell off over here and over there.”

Jack and I thought we were big-time shit and here we were bouncing around in the back of this old piece-of-crap truck in the dark of night—and I mean dark. By then, we were both pretty pissed off about the whole thing.

We came around one of many hairpin turns where the side of the truck scrapes against the mountain. All of a sudden the truck just stops. The first thing the driver did was kill the lights. I knew what he was going to do—the truck didn’t have a starter. He was going to clutch start it in reverse. Not with my ass in it. I put one hand on the rail and got ready to jump off. Jack just looks at me and says, “Mike?”

I said, “WHAT, JACK!” I was pissed.

And he said, “How do you know there is anything down there?”

Sure enough, the driver let it roll backwards just a little bit, got it started and turned the lights back on. I looked over the side, then I looked at Jack and all I said was, “I’d still be falling.”

We spent the night in sleeping bags in the back of the truck. Once the sun came up, we got the full picture of how primitive it was. The workers had nothing but the clothes on their backs—no tools, no trucks—a lot of ’em didn’t even have shoes. They moved that shit with homemade handcarts and donkeys. And it was a lot of shit.

Everywhere we looked we saw pot. I mean you can’t even comprehend the size of these fields. We’d look at one, and then we’d walk over another hill, and there’s another field just as big. It was like wheat in Kansas—it was everywhere. We would buy it by the field. We would go down there and we would just say, “We’ll take this field, and that one, and the one over there.”

These plants were like fourteen feet high. It was at the end of the growing season—October’s the cutting time and these plants were huge. So we were walking along, and all of a sudden our heads turned at the exact same time. About four rows in, there was a plant that looked like nothing else we had ever seen. First of all, the leaves were much darker green. They were obviously the same leaves and everything, but this particular plant had blood-red veins—it was a natural sin semilla (without seeds).

It was the most beautiful pot plant we ever saw. We told the guys that were there, “We want this plant kept separate from everything else, and we’ll give you $100.” We gave him the $100 right then and there, “Keep this plant separate. I want it taken care of.”

When it finally got up to Juarez and Hector saw it, he wouldn’t give it to us. He gave us a little bit of it, but he told us, “Fuck no. I ain’t giving you this plant.”

And I told him “Hector, we paid for it. That’s our plant.”

He just flat said, “I ain’t never seen nothing like this, and I don’t care what you want. This is my plant.” He did give us some of it, and it was very, very good.

You might think doing business with a Mexican drug lord was something akin to a rattlesnake massage. Not true. If you kept your word, paid your bills, and refrained from cheating, the Mexicans would not only be loyal and generous, but totally invested in keeping you alive. On the other hand, if you didn’t deal with them squarely, they would not hesitate to punch your ticket. It was a simple code.

Just as Mike and Jack had been feeling their way along, learning on the job, so had their supplier on the Mexican side, Hector Ruiz-Gonzales. The bloodshed that would mark the ascension of the brutal cartels was still a few years away. Actual violence was surprisingly rare. Hector, in fact, ran his empire without much in the way of competition. He owned the biggest fields and was untouchable—the grandson of la Nacha and heir to the first family of Sinaloa. It’s good to be the King.

Mike Halliday spent most of his time in Juarez with Hector. El Paso in the 1970s was not what you’d call cosmopolitan. But the difference made by crossing a river was like riding a time machine twenty years into the past. On the streets of Juarez, law was a rumor, order was an accident, and violence a way of life. On the U.S. side of the border, Mike was just another dealer, living in a modest rental home and blending in with the crowd. But on the wide-open streets of Juarez in the company of the King, he was Don Miguel, the powerful jefe who resided beyond the reach of law and walked with the swagger of a pistolero.