Blow (11 page)

George kept up this routine for five or six months more, until May or so, the mud season in Amherst, when the spring grass gets thick and the ground spongy and the lilacs and apple blossoms appear. Then he started making more calculations concerning the future of his booming business. The main thing he was thinking now was, why spend money on the middlemen in Manhattan Beach—the wholesalers who bought the pot that was shipped over the border, the smugglers who did the shipping—when you could go down into Mexico yourself and buy the stuff directly, from the growers? He'd heard prices like twenty-five dollars, fifteen, even ten dollars a kilo down there; he could sell that for three hundred dollars in Amherst, net out the whole difference himself. “We were making a lot of money, but I knew we could make a hell of a lot more,” he says. “So Frank and I started thinking, why can't we get our own fucking airplane and go down to Mexico and get it ourselves? Then we can make this into something
really
good.”

It was sometime around then, in early summer 1968, that the people in Manhattan Beach began referring to George Jacob Jung by a title more befitting a character of his stature, success—and accent. They started calling him “Boston George.”

THREE

Puerto Vallarta

1968–1970

I kept telling them, “If we stay together, we'll be like a fist and have power. Every man contributes to the fist, and the fist is forever, like a brotherhood.”

—G
EORGE
J
UNG

T
HERE WERE VARIOUS WAYS TO SMUGGLE MARIJUANA
into the States from Mexico. The quickest, easiest way, but also the riskiest, was simply to drive the stuff across the border hidden somewhere in a VW camper or a pick-up truck. Boats were pretty good, as long as they stayed at sea; the difficulty lay in locating a part of the coastline to put ashore at that was deserted enough so a cargo could be discharged without attracting attention. The safest method was just to walk the load in—lugging duffel bags over a desert crossing point at night and stashing them on the U.S. side to pick up later with a camper or jeep. But although this technique served well when a few pounds were involved, it required a considerable amount of schlepping as the load approached a half ton or more, which was the scale George was thinking on. And it just didn't fit well with those visions of Hemingway running with the bulls in Pamplona or Jack London shooting down the Whitehorse rapids on the Yukon. (George had been three or four times up to the Valley of the Moon, north of San Francisco, to see the shell of London's burnt-out house that Mr. Horrigan used to talk about back in high school.) No, the way to go here was definitely the air route. George would fly the stuff in by plane, and he would do it himself.

The choice certainly recommended itself as the best way not to get caught. Charter companies weren't yet in the habit of asking many questions about what the plane might be used for or where it was going. There were no such things as AWACs monitoring the skies over the border, and it was easy to stay below radar range to avoid random detection. Flying was also fast and efficient: You could land at a deserted airstrip or in a field somewhere, transfer the load to a waiting truck, and be back in the air within minutes.

As George shortly found out, learning to fly was the easiest part of the scheme. Within a month, after thirty hours of instruction at the Santa Monica Airport, George had qualified to fly solo by “VFR,” or visual flying rules. This meant no fancy aeronautics; he could fly only in the daylight, and could not do anything that required an instrument rating or knowledge of radar. He'd learned just enough to get a single-engine plane moving fast down the runway and into the air, navigate by dead reckoning, put the thing back on the ground in one piece, and turn off the engine. As for the airplane, he planned on chartering a single-engine Piper Cherokee Six. It was known as a coffin plane, not for the danger it posed but for its long fuselage and double garage-style doors that allowed you to load it with bulky cargo, coffins included, a feature that soon made it a favorite of marijuana smugglers.

The plan was to fly the pot across the border and land on one of the dozen or so dry lake beds that lay on the desert floor around Twentynine Palms, in the southwest part of California. The lakes measure anywhere from two to fifteen miles long, and except for the forty-mile-long Salton Sea, which is filled with twenty feet of water leaching in from the Colorado River, they haven't been very wet since the glacier receded ten thousand years ago. At most they get a little muddy during the rainy season in the winter months, when the runoff flows down from the surrounding mountains—albeit muddy enough so battle tanks from the U.S. Marine base at Twentynine Palms have been known to roll out on them and get hopelessly stuck. The rest of the year, when the salt from the runoff dries out and binds itself with the clay in the soil, the lakes provide a surface that is as smooth as concrete and hard enough to take the weight of a one-hundred-ton space shuttle. Dirt roads come and go in all directions, and except for sporadic salt-mining operations, the dry lake region has about as many people hanging around as does the face of the moon.

By now George had built up a tight collection of dependable friends and operators, a regular little band of beach characters, who furthered the enterprise in various capacities. There was his girlfriend, Annette, who lived with two other women, both named Wendy. All three worked as stewardesses for United Airlines or TWA and were known to the crowd as “Annette and the two Wendys.” There was Earl “the Pearl,” a computer programmer for a hospital in L.A. who would soon put his organizational skills to use in the wholesaling end of the business, and “Pogo,” a graduate of USC who had left his job as a stockbroker as well as his wife and a house in Bel Air to embark on the pot trade. Pogo would drive the loads back from the dry lakes for George; he also served as the radio ground controller for the incoming flights. General chores were handled by other beach habitués: Junior, a roustabout who had gotten George his job on the pile driver; Sam the bartender, with a bandito mustache, who was a friend of Frank Shea's from Massachusetts; Orlando, the son of a wealthy curtain-rod family in the Midwest, who had been a door gunner on a helicopter in Vietnam; Randy, who worked in the oil refinery next door in El Segundo. Along with Frank Shea, who knew how to fly, the pilots included Greg from Arizona, who had flown for the airlines, and Cliff Guttersrud, stylish and handsome, the son of a well-off Chicago family who paraded around in blue blazers and white polo shirts and sported a license plate on his Porsche that read
FLYBOY
. Then there was a pilot known as Here-We-Go Bob, for the unnerving habit he had of gripping the yoke with feverish intensity as he brought his plane in for a landing, announcing in a voice quivering with apprehension and self-doubt:
“Heeeeeeeere we go!”

*   *   *

Located about halfway down the western coast of Mexico, the city of Puerto Vallarta sits at the head of the Bahía de Banderas, a parabola-shaped bay eighteen miles deep and twelve miles wide, which from an airplane looks as if God had taken a big bite out of the shoreline. Ramón Moreno grew up in Puerto Vallarta in the mid-1950s, when it was just another sleepy coastal town of cobblestone streets and modest frame and white-stucco dwellings poking out from the jungled foothills of the Sierra Madre looming in the background. Ramón's great-grandfather, a Yaqui Indian, came to the town in the late 1800s and began growing bananas, corn, and tobacco, which were shipped out on coastal steamers and sailing vessels. He had been driven out of Sonora, in the north, when the government confiscated the Indians' land and turned it over to wealthy farmers, leaving them with nothing to tend but the meanest holdings. Ramón's grandfather become a well-to-do store owner in town, and his father a schoolmaster and a famous local soccer player. You couldn't get to Puerto Vallarta by automobile until after World War II, and even then, when Ramón was little, the roads stopped short at the rushing waters of the Cuale River, which split the town vertically down the center, spanned only by a pair of swinging bridges. A broad jetty, or
malecón,
ran along the oceanfront, where on Sunday evenings the young people joined the
paseo
by the sea, as their elders sat on the benches watching the ungainly pelicans dive for fish and the large orange sun disappear slowly into the Pacific.

Because of its charm, its deserted beaches, and its great marlin fishing, word started spreading slowly in the late 1950s that Puerto Vallarta was an undiscovered paradise. Americans and Canadians arrived, hotels started going up to the north and south, and Ramón joined the flock of young men who earned money furnishing services to the
turistas
on the beach—selling souvenir hats, sodas, and a coconut-oil suntan concoction he mixed up at home. Eventually his grandmother staked him to an inboard speedboat, which he used to take people skin diving and exploring along the coast. One day in 1963 he was hired to provide water-taxi service for an American actress with a sensuous mouth and a raucous laugh, to deliver her regularly to Mismaloya, a tiny beachfront village south of town, inaccessible by car, where they were filming Tennessee Williams's
The Night of the Iguana.
Ramón, of course, had never heard of Ava Gardner. “She would give me a list of the things she wanted on the boat. Always it was a lot of ice, and plenty of beer, and tequila, and gin—a lot of gin. Sometimes she would drink it with an olive, or mix the gin and the tequila and pour it into a coconut with ice and stick in a straw. Sometimes early in the morning I would take her to an empty beach. She could take her clothes off and swim and lie on the sand.”

With publicity from the movie, the town quickly became overrun by tourists and actors from Hollywood. John Huston, the movie's director, built himself a house just below Mismaloya, still reachable only by boat. The Oceana Bar in the center of town, whose windows open out onto the ocean, became the boozy haunt of Richard Burton and his new wife, Elizabeth Taylor, as well as Robert Mitchum, Marlon Brando, and his pal John Barrymore, Jr. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper hung out there after making
Easy Rider,
along with Groucho Marx's son, Fred, whose motorcycle starred in the movie as Fonda's bike. A permanent population of North Americans, including Richard and Liz, settled into a section of expensive houses and condominiums overlooking the center of town and known as Gringo Gulch. The population of Puerto Vallarta jumped from 12,500 souls to 82,000, with 200,000 more descending on the place at the height of the tourist season.

Retired by now from being a beach boy and chauffeur, Ramón was looking to get into something substantial. On the beach he had run into a wealthy young man from Mexico City named Sanchez, the son of a Mexican army general, who owned several sportfishermen he chartered out for marlin fishing. As a sideline, Sanchez was also helping to fulfill the increasing demand by Americans for pot, and he needed someone to liaise with the farmers in the hills, who had been persuaded by the law of economics to take a portion of their ten-acre plantations of corn and beans and turn it into a more lucrative tillage. Ramón became his man. Then in his late teens, fluent in English, Ramón wore his hair long, straight down to the center of his back. Like other Indians, he possessed a pair of penetrating, heavy-lidded eyes that betrayed a distant ancestry somewhere in East Asia but gave away little else, a distinct advantage in the marijuana business. Sinewy, tough, and quick, Ramón had already earned the nickname Garavato. Strictly speaking, the word translates into “hook” or “sickle,” but carries many subtler meanings, among them a darting movement, a piece of scribble, or an entwining action—a tree that wraps itself around another tree is called a
garavato.
It was Ramón's father's nickname, too, for the way in soccer he seemed to be all over the field at once.

Brought to the New World by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century—the word
marijuana
comes from the Spanish word for “intoxicant”—the cannabis plant particularly appreciates life in high mountain valleys because of its exposure to the sun and the protection from harsh weather afforded by the surrounding peaks. It likes warmth and humidity, which Puerto Vallarta, at 250 miles below the Tropic of Cancer, has in abundance the year round, and in the 1960s the growers liked the relative secrecy the foothills afforded. The weather there also enabled farmers to reap two crops a year: one harvested in October, at the end of the rainy season, and the second in March, which had to be irrigated in the dry winter months by a network of hoses feeding water to the fields from the springs and streams higher in the hills. The plantations were small, a half acre to an acre and a half, tucked away in ravines and at the back of canyons, difficult to find if you didn't know the way. The only access was over a maze of donkey trails that wound through the mountain villages, ensuring that snoopers and others who didn't belong there were quickly discovered and discouraged from venturing further.

At first the pot farmers of Mexico, faced with little of the competition that came later on from Jamaica, Colombia, and parts of Asia, carried on their job pretty crudely by current standards, leaving the plants to grow however they would, expending little effort to thinning them out or providing fertilizer. In addition, the growers sold the whole plant—flowers, leaves, seeds, and stems—chopped into bits, pressed into brick-size kilos, and shipped off to California. All in all it was a pretty raggedy product, providing only a weak buzz, and a harsh smoke in the bargain. Gradually, however, the pot culture improved. Although the plant will grow plentifully almost anywhere—hence the nickname weed—its quality can be boosted dramatically through the use of certain cultivation techniques. The most significant one, reportedly developed in the second millennium
B.C
. in India, involves culling all the male plants out of the field before they have a chance to release their pollen and fertilize the females; it's during this period, while they're waiting to be fertilized, that the female plants achieve the most potency. To snare the pollen wafting around in the air, they produce a sticky resin compound in their buds. Once pollination occurs—they get their guy, as it were—the girls shut down the factory. For pot smokers, that's bad, since it's the resin that contains the highest concentration of THC, or delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, the element you need to get good and blasted. In concentrated form, the resin and the buds become hashish. Boiled in solvent and extracted further, the mixture is turned into hash oil, the most powerful pot there is, with a THC content ten to one hundred times greater than what's found in ordinary marijuana. This is the stuff that calls forth visions.