Doing Time (39 page)

The stink of prison is converted into a gift of pure imaginative transcendence in a sequential pair of stories by J. C. Amberchele. He traces a victim's ongoing quest to understand and master what has happened to her. A sensitive and idiosyncratic loner, Melody hardens, after her brush with murder, into Mel, a woman driven to recover her life by reinventing it. The very creation of this remarkable figure is a gesture toward redemption, extending imaginatively as it does to the other side of crime. Mel's preoccupation with her would-be murderer, speechless as a result of childhood trauma, makes her in some way his double, seeking a way to master, by encountering again, their shared horrific past.

Mrs. Hennessy is getting a manicure
No matter her husband loves her no more
Been vain and spoiled so long
Can't leave these comforts now
Love is the only sacrifice it seems
Now she finds it in her dreams.

Sarah was to be a great artist
Her talents were noticed years ago
The street life smothered her dream
Now she lives in the could-have-been
Wonders each night if it should-have-been
Too afraid to think of the would-have-been.

Harry reaches for the bottle
Can't get through the night without it
Colorful pictures dangle before him
Floating in unison with the sounds in his head
Can't turn the music off now
It starts and stops without him.

Little Mary is hiding in the cellar
Doesn't want her daddy to find her
Still hurting from last night's beating
Can't figure yet why it happened
Plans to run away as soon as she's grown
Like Big Sister who works for Big Eddie.

We stand alone in the prison of our space.

1995, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility
Bedford Hills, New York

The brutal midday Caribbean sun beats down on the two men sweltering in their cockpit that long ago turned into an oven. Sweat drips down the captain's chin as he patiently waits for the ground crew to finish loading his cargo. His eyes scan all quadrants of the sky, looking for unfriendly visitors. The rear cargo door slams shut with a dull
thunk.
The chief of his loading crew moves out to the left wing and smiles a shy grin as he passes a thumbs-up, a slight salute to the captain.

The pilot gently, smoothly pushes the throttles forward to their stops while firmly holding the brakes. His eyes make a quick pass over the engine gauges in a final check. His partner, occupying the right seat, makes a hurried, nervous sign of the cross. Glancing at him out of the corner of his eyes, the pilot cannot prevent a slight look of disdain from crossing his features.

Takeoff is always the critical point in these flights. Off to the side of the runway lie the crumpled remains of the planes that almost made it. This runway would never qualify for any I
^;
AA safety awards. The pilot doesn't even want to think about what happened to the crews of the mangled pieces of aluminum. He releases the brakes abruptly. Slowly, almost too slowly, the airplane starts its takeoff roll. Time seems to stretch to eternity. Rumbling and bouncing slightly, the aircraft accelerates down the narrow dirt strip hacked from a long-forgotten jungle. Infinity passes as the far end of the runway grows more distinct.

No flight manual covers takeoff in 100-degrees Fahrenheit heat with an overburdened aircraft powered by long-past-prime twin engines. The airspeed indicator limps clockwise a knot or so at a time. Flying speed may just be a few knots past eternity. Mentally the pilot prays the load is far enough forward in the cabm to still be within the aircraft flight envelope. He will know for sure in a few seconds.

As the end of the runway passes beneath the nose of the plane, he smoothly eases the yoke back. Fie rolls a smidgen of elevator trim then quickly pops the landing gear handle upward. It isn't worth his time to snatch a quick peek at the airspeed indicator. Hither he has flying speed or not. A slight increase in drag from the gear doors open ing causes the aircraft to settle slightly.

The aircraft climbs upward a few inches at a time. As it bounces through slight turbulence, the stall warning horn bleeps its sound of terror. Flying a plane under these conditions is a lot like making love to a lady gorilla. The pilot eases his aluminum chariot into a gentle turn to the north. He sets the cowl flaps to the trail position and gently pulls the props back to climb power. Just to be safe, he turns the transponder switch to the left one more time and rechecks that the circuit breaker has been pulled. It wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to get caught because the transponder somehow was left on.

Another planeload of drugs is on its way into the United States.

When the plane finally reaches cruising altitude cool enough to ride in comfort but low enough to evade radar, he sets the power to the maximum endurance setting. A few thousand feet below, the haze layer ever present over the ocean marks the boundary between turbulence and smooth air. The pilot turns to his still nervous assistant. “Reach in the back and see if any of the soda is still cold.” As his partner turns to the rear of the plane to complete his assignment, the pilot muses to himself. Wonder if that bozo realized how dumb it is to distract a pilot during a takeoff like that? Now and again he scans the engine gauges. The left engine runs pretty hot but at this weight it isn't the critical engine any longer. Each engine is critical. If one quits or sputters, his aluminum butterfly will turn rapidly into a submarine. The pilot comforts himself with the thought of paper bags filled with cash. The hard work, the dangerous work has all been left behind at the jungle strip.

WANTED; PILOT —
Low time okay, we train. Smoker okay; drinker okay; no medical required. We supply aircraft, fuel, some expenses. Should be able to navigate, land on remote strips.
No
fringe benefits; possible government supplied food, lodging, retirement. Some risk. Pay $50,000~$500,000 per trip.

Trade-A-Plane never printed this ad. It never showed up in the
Miami Herald.
But it's correct. Openings exist. The ad is perhaps a little misleading. The real truth about drug smuggling is a lot like picking at an artichoke. You have to pull off a lot of cover to get to the heart.

Neither
Forbes
nor
Fortune
magazine publish any special editions about the size and extent of the illegal drug industry in the U.S. They should. If they did, the figures would show the business of selling illegal drugs to be far and away the biggest and most profitable business in the country. No one knows the total number of players, but if you estimate the employment figures for occupations we track on the “ami” side we can gauge employment totals. We have eight hundred thousand lawyers, eight hundred thousand police, six hundred thousand jailers and fifty thousand employed in the judicial system. If almost half the people imprisoned in this country were charged only with drug crimes, easily a million Americans draw legal employment strictly because of the prohibition laws. Lots more Americans sell drugs. Total employment: in the millions. The drug trade generates somewhere between $100 billion and $300 billion per year in gross revenues. Somewhere between the total sales of AT8cT, IBM, McDonnell Douglas, and the total sales of the entire auto industry.

This massive flow of illegal drugs into the U.S. continues for only one reason. It's big business with big profits. The government refuses to admit it, but spending $50 billion a year on the “war on drugs” only makes the situation worse. Illegal drugs remain a problem primarily because someone defined them as illegal. The prohibition of drugs creates a
99
percent profit margin, encouraging people of all ages and occupations to enlist.

Wars may be hell for the victims, but they do create jobs. No one — not the dopers, certainly not the government — wants the public to recognize what really goes on behind the screen of smoke. Figures divulged by Charles B. Rangel (D), Chairman of the House Select Committee on Narcotics and Drug Abuse, suggest that in 1985, some eighteen thousand flights carrying illegal drugs entered the United States. That's about one flight every thirty minutes of every hour, every day, every week, every month of the year. Once every twenty hours, a planeload was captured — a humiliating 3 percent of the total flights. How can a “war on drugs” be so ineffective? As Congressman Rangel said, “It is so easy to smuggle drugs into our country by air that it would take an absolute idiot to get caught.” A brief history of the drug trade may help put the picture in perspective.

Marijuana forms, and always has formed, the foundation upon which the house of drug smuggling was built. To a certain extent, the polarization of the body public caused by the seemingly endless slaughter in Vietnam played a part in the expansion of the drug trade. Young people, tired of cynical government claims of victory after bloody victory, listened to prophets like Dr. Timothy Leary. They “tuned in, turned on, and dropped out” at a record rate. If the pow-ers-that-be lied about Vietnam, was it not also possible that the government lied about the demon weed, marijuana? They tried it, liked it, and purchased record amounts.

Tractor-trailerloads by the hundreds and thousands passed from Mexico into the southern border areas of the U.S. through the late 1960s. Customs inspectors equipped with bulging wallets and very dark tinted sunglasses somehow missed most of these loads. As demand increased, a few World War II and Korean War vintage DC-4s, DC-6s, Convairs, and Martins made clandestine trips into long-abandoned Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona landing fields.

In 1970, the retail price for an ounce of grass ran about five dollars— “a nickel bag.” A plane of Iocoweed might be worth $100,000 wholesale; hardly worth risking the value of an airplane. The still minimum value of the illicit cargo demanded low-cost ground transportation. Then the federal government stepped into the act, increasing not only the profit but also the demand for drugs.

Up until 1970, drug crimes actually fell under violation of tax laws, the Harrison Tax Act of 1914 and the Marijuana Tax Act of 1938. During the campaign for governor of New York in 1966, Nelson Rockefeller began using the term “war on drugs” to great political benefit. Never one to miss a political trick, Richard Nixon pressed Congress for sweeping new drug laws initiating the concept of mandatory sentencing for what had been in the past relatively minor violations of tax laws. By 1971, Nixon had slammed the door on the trailerloads of grass. The massive flow of reefer into the border states stopped — for about three and a half seconds.

In economics as in politics, nature abhors a vacuum. As long as demand exists, supply must follow. The price of grass shot up to fifteen dollars an ounce. When first turned back at U.S. border stations, the Mexican truck drivers shrugged a sigh of resignation and headed for the nearest airport. The fledgling bands of more-or-less amateur smugglers entered what would prove to be a golden age of aviation lasting years. What had been a tiny trickle of cargo planes across the border turned into a flood. As the price of grass went up, so did the price of planes. A DC-3 cost $50,000 in 1970 and $150,000 in 1985. You could track the price of either grass or airplanes just by knowing the price of the other.

From 1971 well into the middle 1980s, much of the Mexican crop crossed the border via airmail. The sophistication of the dopers increased as the efforts of the state and federal authorities increased. Larger profits allowed new investment in the latest transportation and communication equipment. As the price of illicit drugs continued to climb, the size of an aircraft necessary to fly a profitable load decreased as well. By 1985, a $30,000 Cessna 206 could easily carry a cargo of grass worth $400,000 wholesale and an ancient DC-3, costing $150,000, could deliver a $10 million load,

Meanwhile, the increase in price of grass had attracted new growers in all the Caribbean basin countries, and the center of gravity of the drug trade had shifted gradually eastward several hundred miles. The history of drug smuggling efforts in the Caribbean closely followed the Mexican model. Rather than tractor-trailers, at first fishing trawlers, then full-size oceangoing freighters carried marijuana north from the reefer-producing countries around the Caribbean basin. By 1985, the increased Coast Guard patrolling of the few natural ocean smuggling routes put a halt to the freighterloads of Colombian weed. A few trawlers tried to pick up the slack, but suffered unacceptably high losses. As the price escalated, cargo aircraft carried an ever increasing share of the contraband haul. The cost of an aircraft could be recovered perhaps tenfold with one successful trip. Decaying, well-worn, used and abused large cargo planes flew load after load of pot until every airstrip in the Caribbean was dotted with a fleet of worn DC-3s and other cargo planes. As their presence began to draw unwanted attention, a fleet of smaller, less conspicuous Cessnas and Navajos equipped with high-performance engines and long-range tanks started to converge on every airfield in South Florida and the Bahamas.

As the drug runners became increasingly slick, well-heeled, and experienced, the nature of the business started to change. Reacting to the natural laws of supply and demand, drug traffickers and smugglers realized that aircraft capable of carrying a load of grass worth perhaps $100,000 wholesale, could carry a load of coke worth $20 million wholesale. The traffickers started carrying trickles of cocaine from Colombia and heroin from Mexico to the primary drug markets of Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, and New York. The smugglers sort of figured that they might as well be hung for sheep as for lamb. Because of its increased availability, the much more dangerous cocaine and heroin continued to drop in price, thus increasing demand. So we traded a minor marijuana problem for a major hard drug problem,

During the 1970s and well into the early 1980s, a few well-financed, well-organized groups controlled most of the flow of drugs into the United States. On a clockwork basis, the DEA or Customs would make a highly publicized bust of a “major drug-smuggling ring.” Much to their dismay, they found that every time they smashed one “drug-smuggling ring,” ten more sprang up from the remains of the group. Maintaining an accurate account of the number of “major drug-smuggling rings” busted would require IBM's biggest and latest mainframe.