Blow (12 page)

Ramón saw it as part of his job to increase awareness among the farmers that those female plants had to be kept deprived; that way, he told them, they could charge more for their pot. “If you're a good farmer, you go out every morning and every male plant you spot in the field you rip that fucker up,” says Ramón, whose English was refined in the 1960s and qualifies as landmark-status hippiespeak, littered with “chicks,” “old ladies,” and “bummed out, man.” “Those fuckers sneak in and they hide, they seem to know when you're looking for them, but you see those little seed buds poking up, and you get that fucker right out of the ground and put him in a plastic bag, so they won't reseed, and you have more and more. You have to be on top of it to get good grass.”

On his trips into the hills at harvest time, Ramón would travel up alongside the Cuale River, past its waterfalls and rapids, then branch off, following the trails leading into the farms. He'd bring along six men to help and a team of twelve donkeys, spend a day going in, a day assembling the load, and a day coming out. The animals carried fifty to eighty kilos each in burlap bags, a total of five or six hundred kilos a trip. The trail was narrow and in many places ran along deep ravines. More than once even one of the sure-footed burros would go over the edge, Ramón recalls; he would hear it crashing down through the forest, then silence, no time to stop and search. Ramón's personal record load on a single trip was five thousand kilos, eleven thousand pounds, which he brought out during a particularly good harvest in 1969. It took fifteen days and thirty donkeys to get the job done.

For premium-grade marijuana, Ramón paid the farmers a high of one hundred pesos, equivalent to about eight dollars back then, for each kilo. This added up to a lot of money, compared to the twelve hundred dollars a year that a family of six might otherwise earn off its small holding and a few animals. With three to four hundred marijuana plants to an acre, each plant producing up to a kilo of pot, and two harvests a year, the farmer could make with a single acre of marijuana three to five times what he could on all ten acres of corn and beans, and still have the corn and beans. For this reason, Ramón's appearance in the hills above Puerto Vallarta became for the
campesinos
an increasingly significant event. “We'd go to many fields and the farmers would say, ‘Take my pot, take my pot,'” he recalls. “The farmers would have their kids and old ladies helping out. Sometimes the farmer that had the littlest field had the best shit, man, because he takes care of it more. Sometimes they go even into the higher places, where there is nobody's land, although sometimes a farmer would go on somebody else's place and there would be a little discussion over it, you know.”

As the marijuana business became large-scale and serious, it was not advisable for a gringo, or a nonindigenous human of any persuasion, to wander about up in the hills around Puerto Vallarta. The farmers found it difficult to imagine what a stranger would be doing there were he not an informer or someone out to steal their money. And then there were the
banditos
to watch for, especially if you were an American. “The Americans,” says Ramón, “sometimes they would be in town asking for someone to take them up into the hills, maybe they want to buy something. They would be taken this way and that way, and pretty soon they are way, way up there with all their money, away from everything, and all around are only the
banditos.
Or you buy something from a farmer in the hills and they put rocks in it, and you don't know until you get down here, and then it is too late. One year an Italian who was buying loads had come with a lot of money, and they took him to one of the fields and buried him in the field and took his money. His mother came down looking for him, but it took a long time. He had to be identified by a dentist.”

*   *   *

Late in the summer of 1968, George arrived in Puerto Vallarta on a commercial flight with Sam the Bartender and Frank Shea, ready to put their grand scheme into play. The word had been out in Manhattan Beach about Puerto Vallarta being the place to get marijuana in large quantities, but for all their talk and planning, George and company had almost no idea of how to make a connection. None of them spoke more than pick-up Spanish. They knew nothing about the city or where to go. They had no names or contacts to start with. For days that stretched into weeks, they wandered about the beaches and the hotels and bars, chatting up strangers, leaving behind veiled queries about whom they might talk to regarding the possibility of scoring some dope. Sloshed on beer and Cocos Locos, they'd lie down under the palm trees at night and pass out on a deserted beach, deaf to the crash of the surf, to rise the next day in shaken condition and resume the quest. “There were Americans down there, and you could tell what they were doing,” George says, “but everyone wanted to keep it to himself. No one wanted to involve us.”

The center of the city still retained much of its old charm, particularly in the categories of recreation George liked to pursue. At four o'clock in the afternoon, across the street from the
malecón
in the Oceana Bar, where the old wooden ceiling fans pulled in the sea air through open windows, he'd meet up with Richard Burton and Liz Taylor. The three became friendly, putting away large quantities of Scotch and ruminating on the ironies of life as the waves flopped languorously along the beach. George had seen
The Night of the Iguana
several times, putting the defrocked minister, Shannon, on his list of icons. Liz would disappear on shopping trips with her retinue of thin-waisted males. “Here comes the queen with her six little sissies,” Burton would taunt on her return. One night the three attended a traveling circus, during which one of the clowns nearly drowned when he lay underneath the elephant and was inundated with several gallons of steamy urine. To George's consternation, Liz stepped into the ring and let the Mexican knife-thrower hurl near-misses all around her body. Back at the Oceana, when Richard was off in the men's room, George leaned over and kissed Liz on the mouth. “‘I've always wanted to do that,' I told her. ‘I think you're the most beautiful woman in the world.' She said, ‘You're cute, but you don't have what Richard has. And you don't have his money either.'”

They'd heard the scary stories of Americans rotting in Mexican jails, so George and his cohorts were somewhat chary of announcing their quest too openly, lest they fall into the hands of undercover policemen. “Finally, it was the fourth week,” says George, “and everyone was getting really pissed. We couldn't find a connection, we were running out of money. They wanted to go back home. ‘Fuck this, we can make more doing what we were doing, it's never gonna happen.' Then one afternoon we were coming out of the Oceana, and this little yellow VW bug pulls up in front and this girl with straight blond hair pokes her head out the window, a hippie type, and says, ‘Get in the car, you guys. I know what you're up to.'”

She drove them up into the foothills, where the cobblestones turned into a rutty dirt track running past tin-roofed shanties, with naked children playing in the street and junk cars sitting under poinciana trees in the yards. Eventually she parked, and they walked up a hillside and through an archway that opened onto a large stucco villa with jutting balconies and a red-tiled roof. She left them for a minute and returned with a couple of pounds of pot. “It was beautiful stuff, I mean like nothing we'd ever seen before,” says George. “She said she worked for some people who'd been watching us in town for several days and wanted to see if they could do business.” Inside the house, where it was dark and cool, she introduced them to a thin, wiry young man with long, jet-black hair, whose name was Ramón.

When Sanchez showed up soon thereafter, George told him they had a plane and asked if he could provide them with two or three hundred kilos to fly to California. “Sanchez said he could get us as much as we could carry away, a thousand kilos, whatever we could handle.” The deal they worked out was that George would pay $25 dollars a kilo, which because of its high quality he knew he could turn over for as much as $150, maybe more, in Manhattan Beach, and twice that easily if he took it to Amherst. The expense of staying the month in Puerto Vallarta, however, had drained their finances, so Sanchez agreed to front them three hundred kilos, taking payment only after it was sold. In exchange for the favor, George agreed to sell an additional hundred kilos for Sanchez himself at the prevailing price in the United States. This deal meant not only that George got the pot for no money, but since it was Sanchez's load now mixed in with his, in effect he'd also acquired a Mexican partner, created a relationship. “If he was in a partnership with you, he wouldn't fuck you around with the quality or the delivery or the price.”

Sanchez also saw it as a much better way to go. For his own pot, which George would sell on Sanchez's behalf, and for the pot he sold George, he would get a total of $37,500, as opposed to the $10,000 from selling the whole four hundred kilos to George straight out. Ramón would get $2,500 of this for the trip into the hills, and another $2,500 went to the farmers. Other expenses came up, too. But getting along in Mexico was so cheap—the weekly paycheck, for instance, of a government worker came out to just over $8—that Sanchez figured he could earn a small fortune here. George wouldn't do so badly either. Every four-hundred-kilo shipment he took to Amherst netted about $80,000, or nearly twice what his gang was doing buying it through Richard Barile in Manhattan Beach. If he could do this once a month, he thought, he could soon retire.

*   *   *

An elated George flew back to Manhattan Beach to get the airplane, while Sam and Frank stayed down to work out the mechanics with Sanchez and Ramón. Moving 880 pounds of anything is not an inconsequential task, and especially when it had to be done in secrecy. The city police in Puerto Vallarta, the
policianos,
prompted no worry in this regard, since all they did was direct traffic and enforce local ordinances. What you watched out for were the Federales, or Federal Judicial Police, a sort of Mexican FBI, which had outposts in all the important cities and acted as the country's main dope hunters (only later would the Mexican army get into the act). But in Mexico, as George soon learned, the authorities chose to do their duty or didn't, depending on how much they got paid, which meant that in the marijuana business you always gave some of your proceeds over to the Federales. In Puerto Vallarta this meant a deputy chief, who went by the name of Candy Man, for his readiness to take extracurricular pay. Sanchez gave Candy Man the equivalent of four hundred dollars every time one of Ramón's donkey trains came down from the hills; in return he would find police business for his men to attend to in some other part of town.

The pot was wrapped in one-kilo packages, twenty-five kilos to an army duffel bag, a total of sixteen bags. The Cherokee could take a lot more weight, but this was about the bulk limit that would fit into its cargo space. The load would be assembled in a shed at the back of Sanchez's house and be trucked down at night—the police were paid off, but there was no sense alerting the whole town—and transferred to one of Sanchez's sportfishermen at the marina. The boat would transport it over water to a lonely spit of land called Punta de Mita, on the northern tip of Banderas Bay, eighteen miles out from Puerto Vallarta. A desolate, wind-swept point of land, with breakers piling in over a long stretch of shallows, the point is visible from the city on a clear day, but when the low-lying fog rolls in, all you can make out are the vague peaks of its mountain range riding like ghost ships on top of the mist. The airstrip consisted of a flat piece of grassland just back from the beach, which offered plenty of landing room for a small plane, as long as Ramón and his men were given time to chase out the Brahman bulls that used it for grazing. The isolated landing strip at Punta de Mita was used also by the three other marijuana-smuggling operations in Puerto Vallarta, which meant that at times it took a little coordination to avoid congestion in the area.

The plan called for George to fly into the commercial airport at Puerto Vallarta, stay overnight, take off again the next day, land at Punta de Mita to pick up the dope, then fly back. Once over the border in the United States, he would head for the dry lake beds, where Pogo would be waiting with a camper truck to unload the plane and drive the pot back to Manhattan Beach. There it would be repacked into the bathtub compartment of the Winnebago and trucked east to the students of the Five-College Consortium.

There was one complication. The Cherokee's cruising range was only about 600 miles, half the distance from Punta de Mita to the California desert. Down and back, George needed to refuel somewhere, and somewhere secluded, since on its return the plane would be stuffed to the ribs with marijuana. For this purpose they found a rarely used airstrip near the city of Guaymas, approximately halfway up the coast. It was built on a deserted marsh a little way out of town and used mainly for flying out loads of shrimp, Guaymas being the shrimp capital of Mexico. On his way down, George would take along Orlando, the helicopter gunner, and drop him off at Guaymas, together with twenty or so 5-gallon jerry cans filled with airplane fuel. Orlando would hide the fuel, sit tight for a day, and gas George up on the way back.

Considering the primitive nature of George's flying skills, the most remarkable feature of that first trip was that he made it alive. “Taking off was easy enough,” he recalls of his thirty hours' worth of flying lessons. “You get it up to speed, pull back on the stick, and you're gone. And the flying-around part was no problem either. You just have to watch out where you're going so you don't run into anything. The landing, though—that was where I got a little insecure.” Like many lefties, George had minor problems with hand-eye coordination under any circumstance, and more so now that he had to keep in mind the several operations needing to be performed simultaneously to bring the plane down successfully: adjusting the fuel mixture, setting the flaps properly, compensating for crosswinds, keeping the prop at full RPM in case he blew the thing and had to get airborne again. It had taken quite a few attempts, with the instructor aborting a number of landings, before George got anywhere near having the hang of it. On the flight down to Mexico, however, he figured he'd get in a little practice before having to land the thing on the floor of an ex-lake in the middle of the California desert.