spot that was very interesting. It was right in the middle of Ascarate Park—a high population area that was close to the river. That was a place we could only use at night. There was an apartment building right up against the levee. It was maybe a hundred units, two stories with a parking lot that backed right up to an irrigation ditch that stayed dry most of the year. We rented an apartment there. We would take a couple of trucks with camper shells and back ’em right up to the ditch at the edge of the parking lot—close to the levee. Hector would go about a quarter-mile down the levee one way and I’d go the other way. We’d make sure it was clear and signal with our radios.
It was like natives in a jungle movie marching down the ditch with bales on their heads. You could barely see them throwing bales into the trucks up above. Fifteen minutes, done. We’d fill up the trucks with bales of pot and just leave them there until morning. Then a couple of our guys would come out wearing hardhats and carrying lunchboxes, get in their trucks and drive off with the regular morning traffic. We’d go and unload it somewhere, and that’s how that was done.
JACK STRICKLIN
By now we were starting to make some real money doing 2,000 or 3,000 pounds at a time—three trucks. What we needed was a place to put it. Our stash houses weren’t big enough or private enough, and every load had to be weighed and graded before we could send it out. So I went and talked to Bill Holt about using one of his barns.
Bill was a big farmer in the Upper Valley—I knew him through his son Doug. It was his basement where I smoked my first joint. Bill owned a lot of land, but he was cash poor and I knew it. So I went over one day and said, “Bill, I need a place to store some pot. I’ll pay you $500 a month for the use of a barn.” That was good money in those days. He jumped on it. Bill was a farmer, but he wasn’t a dumb farmer. After a while, he saw all that pot going through his barn and started adding it up in his head. It didn’t take long before he came to me and said, “Jack, I want to make more than $500 a month.”
I said, “What do you want to do?”
“Why don’t I set up a deal and we’ll split it 50/50?”
I said, “Okay.”
Bill knew this pilot who had a hunting ranch down around Chihuahua—a Mexican pilot who would fly hunters in and out. The guy occasionally flew loads and had his own source, but not enough buyers, so Bill came to me about doing something with him.
That guy turned out to be one of the best pilots I ever worked with. He did exactly what he said he would do. He never cheated you. If he told you the load was 576 pounds, it was 576 pounds. And the weed was incredible. It came in square bricks that were wrapped in heavy red and blue paper—our customers called it Christmas wrapping. They couldn’t get enough of it.
Bill had his own landing strip out there in the Valley, so this guy would fly in from Chihuahua, and land right there. He flew a Cherokee 6, which could carry anywhere from 600 to 800 pounds. It was an easy deal. We’d run 2,000 or 3,000 pounds across the river in the morning, and that afternoon we’d go unload an airplane.
Our Nashville connect was going strong. I had a guy in Colorado and another one in Florida who were starting to move some weight. We had the best connect in Northern Mexico. Of course, Hector’s idea of selling pot was to fucking drown us in it. What are you gonna do? You tell him to stop and he’ll find another buyer. Gotta keep feeding the monkey.
I think we were paying about $50 a pound in those days. Selling it for a $100. Had to pay the crew and the drivers out of that, but it still left a decent profit. You’re not going to make that kind of money bringing it over on your back—and you’d be facing the same kind of time if you got busted.
You know, my goal was to make $10,000 and then get out. Shit, that was just walkin’ around money. I couldn’t quit if I wanted to. I was like the dog that finally caught the car. I didn’t know exactly what I’d do with it, but I wasn’t about to let go.
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