The Thirty-Caliber Roach Clip

Montego Bay. The tires of the 707 squeal and burn. Seat-belt buckles click. Pass immigration. Customs. Get a complimentary rum drink. Shuffle and mumble and evade the crowd at the door, the hustlers, cabdrivers, baggage handlers. The cars are European. Traffic is on the left. It is hot. Sugar cane. Runaway slaves. Pirates. Mountains. Tropical fertility. Captain Blood. Jamaica--the island where the ganja grows up to 20 feet high. A lid costs two bucks. A pound costs 20.

During Easter vacation, they come pouring off the planes--freaks, heads, Space Flowers, the children of McLuhan, moon walks, nuclear fission, Yoo-Hoos and Slurpees, a generation hooked on daytime-TV serials. They land in this tangled garden of exotic 60-foot philodendrons, ferns tall as houses, flowering trees like science-fiction bouquets, their branches covered with monstrous bromeliads, vines and orchids. They arrive in their leathers, purple suedes, fringed vests, beards, hair, beads and sandals, tote bags, tikis, cowboy hats and tank tops. By nightfall, they are settled into the cheap guesthouses a few blocks up in the hills. They sit on the verandas smoking sclifs instead of joints--big conical cigars rolled in bread paper. They get it off with true righteousness. They don't just get high. It is zowie all the way. Life is suspended. All movement, energy, anxiety, commitment, risk, feeling, involvement is gone, blown away in the smoke.

Below them, on the edge of the sea, the rows of blue lights mark the runway. Red lights flash. White lights glow. The moon supervises. And one more jet taxis to the end, locks its wheels and tests the thrust of the engines. Six freaks sit on a veranda. For ten minutes, no one has moved. Mouths are slack. Eyes stare. Shoulders slump. As the jet begins its run, a kid without a muscle in his body, without a flicker in his face, without a wrinkle in his brain finally gets it all together. His hand slowly leaves the edge of the chair and creeps up to his chest, where his fingers hesitate, hover and then finally scratch once, twice, stop and hang there, reluctant, undecided, as the hand gradually sinks away. The engines roar and the plane gathers speed, challenging the sea and the mountains, roaring at the sky. As it climbs at a quivering, passionate angle up toward the moon, there is a whisper on the veranda, hushed, exhaled, awed, hoarse and overwhelmed by the fuzzy, hot weight of the poetry--

Wo-ooo-owww!

But on that same veranda are two people who did not arrive by Pan American. They flew down from Florida in a four-passenger, single-engine Cessna 172, which they rented for $51 a day, fuel included. They are in their early 20s. They went to college. They come from comfortable middle-class homes. They are white. They are smugglers--not tourists who mail home a few souvenir gift packages or who go home with a few pounds of pot in the false bottom of a suitcase, stuffed into a hollow, carved wooden head, a native basket, a polished conch shell, hidden in a stuffed alligator, wrapped around their bodies, kept under their hats or taped under their crotches. Nor are they the cool professional couriers who bring in cocaine and heroin in specifically designed jackets and corsets and are met by armed operators who use codes, passwords, limousines, secret hide-outs and numbered Swiss bank accounts. Theirs is not a syndicate of ethnic immigrants fighting their way out of a ghetto. They are the new smugglers--hip, handsome, hairy and young. They are in it not just for bread; they are in it for the trip. They are nonviolent, romantic and revolutionary. Every day more and more of them are running around setting themselves up in business.

Never mind Hollywood. Forget channel seven. Crooks are never caught as a result of scientific criminology. Deductions are never made. Clues are not assembled. Laboratory analyses of scraps of material, earth samples, fingerprints, voiceprints, specks and grains, smears, stains and shapes of impact indentations do not lead the intrepid detective directly to the transgressor. Hell, no. You get ratted out. Some fink sings to the fuzz. You get infiltrated. Your chick gets pissed off and snitches or your crime partner gets religion or somebody wants to eliminate the competition or you get bum-rapped by phony evidence. Or you yourself go out and get juiced up or stoned and shoot your mouth off in a flashy discothèque or maybe somewhere in a line, waiting for a McDonald's Big Mac.

This is truer of smuggling than of any other field of criminal endeavor. The United States Customs Agency Service has an entire network of undercover agents who sweep floors at the major airports, who pass the bottle with winos down on the docks, who tend bar, who deal drugs, who visit people out on bail, who approach people badly strung out and bribe them, cajole them, threaten them. The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs does the same thing. And the FBI and the town pigs and the sheriff's department and the state highway patrol. So getting caught in the act is one thing. So is fighting the laws of probability, delaying as long as possible that inevitable moment when a tire blows out, when a battery goes dead, when a package drops and breaks open, when some old lady with insomnia looks out the bedroom window and sees something you wish she hadn't.

Until then, you dummy up. Whatever it is, you do it yourself. Cut nobody in unless it's necessary. Learn to fly your own plane. Learn to navigate. Get a small, ordinary, one-man boat with an automatic pilot. Go slow. Take the long way around. Change techniques. Change routes. Dress very square. Drive an old car. Live in an ordinary pad. Have nothing to do with people who are too loud, too fast, too daring and too hip. Avoid the juicers and avoid the heads. And never have any friends.

This is the style of the professional. But this isn't the way it's done by the new entrepreneurs. Because money and security are only part of it. These people use pot themselves, use it ceremoniously, philosophically, in the middle of a score, while sneaking past a Customs guard, while loading up or making a delivery. They know that Cannabis sativa is the weed of truth sprouting through the cracks in the establishment wall. To them, smuggling is a movie. They are their very own Late, Late Show. They eat cookies to satisfy the munchies. They shiver from the chill of their own high and their own daring as they watch themselves break the law.

• • •

Mary is a nice little girl who lives in a nice little town. She looks like she should be selling tulips by the side of a country road. She is 19. She has freckles and blue eyes. She wears her hair in pigtails on the sides done up with rubber bands. She has embroidered several butterflies and a few stars on the legs of her blue jeans. There are big patches of red velvet on the knees and on the seat. One day some dude named Randolph went over to her house at ten o'clock and said, "Hey! You wanna go to Jamaica and smuggle a little pot?" He gave her 50 bucks to buy some straight clothes and at six o'clock they took off for Miami. That night they were in Montego Bay, staying at the Holiday Inn.

Randolph, a local dealer in Mary's home town, handled almost any kind of dope. He had saved his money for this trip and had already lined up all the customers he needed to get rid of the load. The trouble was, Randolph liked to have a lot of company around. It was nice to have somebody to rap with, somebody to share his trip. Because he wasn't terribly competent. Once he discovered that all his bags ot heroin were short weight. He flipped completely and ran around accusing all his friends of ripping him off. It turned out that he had done it to himself. Randolph didn't know how to use the scales properly and had put the counterweight on the wrong notch.

Meanwhile: Two other couples in a rented six-passenger plane with two seats removed were flying directly over Cuba on their way to Jamaica; the pilot was an Air Force veteran of Vietnam. The three couples met at the Holiday Inn and the girls stayed by the pool while the guys renewed their contacts made during a previous trip.

Then the two couples in the rented plane flew it to a secret airstrip that had been built by the CIA for the Bay of Pigs operation and afterward abandoned. Since then, it had become a major base for smuggling operations. They taxied the plane to the end of the field, where a scattered group of contact men wearing different-colored shirts were waiting. They were supposed to meet a man with a purple shirt who had 650 pounds for them. But instead they contacted a man in a violet shirt who had 550 pounds for someone else. The price was ten dollars per pound.

One of the kids opened the valve on the fuel tank to drain off any condensed water. But he didn't close it properly. They loaded up with 11 crocus sacks, each one stuffed with 50 pounds of loose, unpressed pot, the cabin so full the bags were stacked up around their heads. The plane took off with its four passengers. But it took three tries to get it off the ground.

Randolph and Mary flew back to Miami by commercial airliner and met the other segment of the gang. Mary (continued on page 104)Thirty-Caliber Roach Clip(continued from page 98) stayed at a house in Fort Lauderdale while Randolph and two other guys rented a boat that they were going to use for a transfer of the cargo. But it was near the end of the hurricane season and the weather was very rough. They went too fast and pounded the boat so hard the transom opened up and started to leak. So they went back to the marina and rented another boat. The rain was heavy and continuous. The visibility was poor. The crew got seasick; Randolph was suffering from an attack of hepatitis, the result of using dirty needles. To cheer themselves up, everybody got stoned, the boat drifting and wallowing in the trough of the short, heavy seas, the prearranged signal of recognition stretched out on the deck--a large Japanese battle flag.

Rapidly leaking gas, the plane was forced to land in the Bahamas to refuel. There was no way to hide their cargo, so they bribed the customs agent with $900 to keep quiet. He accepted the money and promptly radioed ahead to the U. S. Customs.

By the time the plane reached the rendezvous point, the gang in the boat had given up and gone in, leaving the plane alone, unable to make radio contact, circling forlornly, the crew completely freaked out, arguing with one another, the pilot and his chick wanting to dump the whole load into the ocean, the other couple screaming about the fantastic value of it all.

It was getting dark. They had flown over the Florida coast and were somewhere near Boynton Beach when they spotted an orange grove and decided to drop the stuff there. They circled. They lost altitude, lowering the flaps and easing back on the throttle. But when they pushed the door open, the wind slammed it up against the guy's face and cut a gash in his mouth. On the second attempt, he almost fell out of the plane. But his girlfriend fastened her belt to the back of his and she held on with both hands.

They should have been smiling. All this time, they had been on candid camera: first the radar screens and then the telescopic lenses in the helicopter that trailed them at a discreet distance, getting excellent close-ups of the kid as he was dumping the pot out the door.

They shoved out all 11 bags and jubilantly flew off to Palm Beach, where the Customs and Immigration people gave them no trouble at all, politely ignoring the snarls in the flight plan, casually flashing a light inside the plane without noticing the two or three pounds of loose pot spilled on the floor.

They rented a car and checked into a motel, happy and victorious. But before going to bed, one of the guys called up two buddies in Gainesville, pleading with them to come down immediately and help him locate the missing pot. In his hysteria, he began shouting into the telephone, "If you don't come down and help me, there's gonna be a dead body out there at the airport."

The kid was using a public telephone. The motel office was small and the landlady was listening. He didn't know that President Nixon was due to land at Palm Beach airport that very night. He didn't know that the landlady thought he was an assassin and called the FBI.

Not only that, he didn't know that only eight of those 11 bags of pot had actually landed in the orange grove. One of them had landed in the middle of a road intersection, causing an automobile accident. Another landed in the back yard of a Florida highway patrolman. Yet another hit some high-tension power lines. It burst into flame and plummeted to the ground in a smoking heap.

Meanwhile, the boat crew was frantic, Randolph telephoning everywhere and finally renting a car to go looking in every airport in southeast Florida. At two o'clock in the morning, they found the plane and left a note on the windshield before checking into a motel. At six o'clock, there was a phone call and at last the gang was reunited, all eight of them, plus the two fresh arrivals who had come down from Gainesville to help search for the lost treasure. Two girls stayed behind in the motel. Three guys went up in the plane to scout the area, returning when they had located the orange grove. The two cars took, off, several joints of good Jamaica ganja passed around until everyone was cheerfully high. Mary was the only chick on the hunt and the only person who kept worrying about the funny helicopter that kept fooling around everywhere they went.

Both cars drove right into the grove, circling among the trees but managing to find only one bag of pot. It was decided that the three guys should drive back to get the plane for another look. But when they drove out of the grove, they were suddenly surrounded by six squad cars. Up in that private helicopter, directing operations, was the sheriff himself.

The rest of it was Keystone Cops. Everyone screamed. The bag of pot was dumped. Mary climbed a tree to hide. The four guys ran in circles, yelling, tearing up phone numbers, stumbling, wild-eyed, scared. They were all too stoned to think clearly, but finally they got straight enough to form a plan. Prepared to claim they had just been balling in the grove, Mary and Randolph boldly drove out in the car while the others split on foot. Miraculously, no one stopped them. They were free. But they picked up the others out on the road and then decided to drive innocently by the pack of police cars and their captured partners to see what was happening. The fuzz was busy and they got away with that, too. But when they went back to the motel to rescue the two other girls, they were picked up. All of them were handcuffed together in a chain and taken to the city jail.

From there, it was just routine. Questioned in separate rooms, one chick started laughing uncontrollably from the joyous insanity of it all. But the other went hysterical and confessed everything, signing a long and detailed statement that implicated everyone. She was granted immunity from prosecution and released immediately on ten dollars bail. The chick was a sweet, innocent, Barbie-doll type. The fuzz didn't know that at the age of 24, she was also an experienced abortionist who made house calls with her own home operating kit.

Everyone else got his bail reduced after a few days, hired lawyers and got sprung. Mary spent three and a half months in the county jail. But the public defender got her off with two years' probation, adjudication being withheld. That means no criminal record. She pleaded guilty to a charge of violating the public-health laws.

The others will not be tried until the end of 1972. They face a possible sentence of five to 20 years and/or up to $20,000. The 550 pounds of pot would have been worth about $82,500 at the current local wholesale price. But they face a possible Federal tax of $100 per ounce, which would come to a total of $880,000.

• • •

In one of those marinas scattered along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of Florida, there lives a man who calls himself Miles Valiant. Back when he was a salesman in Ohio, his name was David Rosenblat. His friends drop in on him at almost any hour, his head popping out of the hatch of his 40-foot ketch in answer to their yells from the dock. After they go aboard, they sometimes sit and watch him clean a few pounds of pot, packing it in small plastic sandwich bags. Or he plays his guitar. Or he feeds his two cats.

Captain Valiant wears a wrinkled white shirt and white-duck pants with the bottoms rolled up. He wears sandals and a very wide belt with a huge brass buckle. He has a beard, a hooked nose, eyes that squint with constant amusement. On his head is an incredibly wide-brimmed planter's hat of woven straw, the flat crown circled by a brightly colored sash. Captain Valiant's conversation is flavored with four separate accents that drift in and out, the basic Ohioan (continued on page 214)Thirty-Caliber Roach Clip(continued from page 104) overlapped with Deep South, with a singsong calypso tone from the Bahamas and some remote edge of European precision, a lilt of Lithuanian or Serbian or Flemish. Captain Valiant is a generous host and always rolls a few Js for his guests; his favorite papers are those miniature replicas of $100 bills. He often holds a joint in one hand, a straight cigarette in the other, smiling, his accents gently maneuvering for dominance.

He is very fatalistic about the twists and kinks in his fortunes. His last voyage left him $8000 in the hole simply because his contacts refused to pay off. It wasn't exactly a double cross. It was a fumble job. The financing was bizarre, everyone fronting for everyone else, each party handling merchandise and making arrangements on credit and on consignment. And then things came unglued. Bales of pot simply got lost. Money went astray. People wandered into the deal to serve no particular function and then wandered out again. Captain Valiant's boat needs to be hauled out to have the bottom scraped. The topsides need painting, the brightwork revarnishing. The running rigging needs to be overhauled and the boat could use a new suit of sails. Down below in a hammock of netting, the crew's supper--a large Bermuda onion and three frostbitten oranges--swings with every pitch and roll of the boat.

The crew on his boat is in a constant flux. People come aboard to spend a night. They make a voyage or stay a month. Women come aboard to visit or to live, sometimes to be exclusively his, sometimes to be shared with his mate. Once there was a reshuffling and his own woman became exclusively the mate's. She got pregnant and they went off to Nebraska together, to settle down and get it happily straight forever.

Captain Valiant was off one day when a lady in residence became uncomfortable in the heat and disturbed by the constant wake of speedboats, Chris-Crafts and sightseeing cruisers that came around the bend, blowing whistles, churning the water, rocking the boat up against the fenders and the pilings. To shut it all off, she went away, dropping a little acid to speed her trip, stripping off her clothes to enjoy the breeze. Later she rolled up a little something and got out a piece of paraphernalia, a bullet engineered to serve as a roach clip, the powder removed, the primer exploded. The projectile was loose in the cartridge. To the bottom was attached an adjustable clip of brass. When removed, reversed and inserted backward into the cartridge, it made a very adroit holder for the joint. The bullet was .30 caliber, the size used in the obsolete M-1 rifle. The apparatus is called a Kent State Special.

Feeling thirsty, the lady went ashore, strolling through the boat yard, buttocks and breasts quivering with a languid ecstasy. She was humming to herself, gracefully holding the roach clip in two fingers, raising it to her mouth for an elegant toke, eyelids fluttering, lips puckered into an elongated kiss. The men in the workshops paused in their labors. Short-hairs, every one, they silently watched her progress, their fingers perilously close to table saws, band saws, drill presses and planers. Leisurely, she meandered along, passing the graceful bows of sailing yachts, as though she herself had just come unattached from beneath the bowsprit of an ocean voyager. She reached the vending machine next to the supply room, dropped in a dime and a nickel, removed a can of Fresca and musingly strolled back to the vessel of dreams from whence she came.

• • •

Dotty lives in an ordinary house in a suburban development of Coral Gables. She is a tough, plump woman in her mid-40s who has managed to close the generation gap completely. Her talk is hip and obscene. She trips and shoots it up and blows grass right along with her son and daughter. Her house is a center for underground intrigue. Kids crash on the sofa, on the floor, in sleeping bags, out in the car. They eat there and they ball and they watch TV. For a long time, the house has been under surveillance. But one day the narcs on duty were looking through their binoculars and were startled to see several pairs of binoculars staring right back at them, from a tree, from a Venetian blind, from the center of the drapes. Some time later, five people ran out of five doors to jump into five cars to burn rubber in five different directions, none of which was the right one. Still later, Dotty came home and found a crocus sack full of pot lying by the back door. Some friends in another gang, being followed by other narcs, had decided to drop it off at her place for safekeeping.

• • •

Snorkel Joe speaks with a loud, hoarse voice that clearly indicates his cynicism about the world, his anger with it, his frustration. He still wears a full beard as part of his protest against the establishment. But to show his disgust with hippies and with drugs, he has shaved his head clean. Snorkel got his nickname while in the Marines, having been given intensive training as a member of an underwater demolition team. He is currently employed as a yacht captain in Palm Beach, his main occupation baby-sitting with a 20-year-old multimillionaire.

But Snorkel was once a dealer in Coconut Grove, his chick formerly an active member of the SDS while at the University of Florida. There was music. Drugs. Parties. They told all their business to all their friends, trusting, believing, very high on revolution and very high on themselves. But gradually Snorkel became disillusioned with the lack of discipline, the lack of initiative, the utter disregard for personal responsibility. His own friends ripped him off. He got stood up, put down, badmouthed and fucked over. One friend accepted $4000 in advance to make a run with a boat and then disappeared. Another got in an argument with Snorkel about the proper course to steer and then settled the question by pulling a gun. It was capitalism. It was ego. It was cops and robbers. It was Popeye the Sailor.

Snorkel Joe arranged many trips while he was in the business. He solicited financing, recruited personnel, worked out problems of logistics. He arranged bail, provided shelter, counseled and commiserated. One of his planes was observed by clandestine FBI and Customs agents. They took telescopic pictures while the loading was in progress, the serial numbers clearly visible on the fuselage. The plane was tracked by radar during its trip through the Windward Passage and through the Bahamas. North and west of Andros Island, it disappeared over the Gulf Stream. An hour later, it appeared again, heading straight for Miami International. When it landed, an army of agents fell upon it, only to find it absolutely clean.

The pilot flew jets for one of the major airlines. He was an Air Force veteran of both Korea and Vietnam and knew all about flying beneath a radar cover. Rather than take a chance on the possible inaccuracy of the altimeter and that indeterminable question of the floor of the Air Defense Identification Zone, he brought the plane all the way down to ten feet above the water.

He landed at the simple, isolated airstrip on South Bimini Island. Like most of the fields scattered through the Bahamas, there is no control tower and there is no radio, just a single runway laid down in the scant, rocky underbrush. Unobserved, the plane taxied to the far end. Two men appeared out of the scrub, quickly unloading the pot, their small boat anchored nearby just beyond the mangroves. The plane taxied back to the fuel truck, filled up with gas and took off.

Another of Snorkel's friends is still in jail, serving three years in the General Penitentiary at Kingston. He was loading up at an old airstrip abandoned after World War Two when the pigs started coming out of the woods blowing whistles and yelling through bullhorns. He grabbed as much pot in his arms as he could carry, ran to the plane and jumped in, screaming to the pilot, "Let's go! Take off! Let's get out of here." But the pilot just sat there, perfectly relaxed, looking at him without moving, his face glowing with the aloof beatitude of fate itself.

The Jamaica fuzz wanted a confession. The guy refused. They fired their pistols repeatedly right next to his head until both eardrums ruptured and were bleeding. After he signed a statement, they were perfectly proper, cordial, full of humor, even kind. They had only been playing a game. He just happened to be "it."

Snorkel Joe has had only a few hours of flying lessons himself. But he is an expert in a sailboat. The biggest deal he ever handled involved the use of boats, one of them a large luxury custom-built power yacht owned by a very rich personal friend of Richard Nixon's. Without the owner's knowledge, the captain left Jamaica with a full load of pot, headed for Miami. His wife was supposed to telephone ahead, giving his time of departure and expected arrival. But she didn't.

Coconut Grove was hysterical. Days went by. No one could guess that the glorious monster of a boat was suffering from generator trouble. For days the yacht just drifted, the captain taking everything apart and putting it back together without success. Finally, he decided to run the boat on its batteries, bringing it right into the middle of Nassau harbor, brazenly ignoring customs, backing her into a prominent slip in the poshest, most exclusive marina, revving the twin engines like a Hell's Angel, steering with the controls, varooming the port engine and then the starboard, tying up, plugging in the power connection, the water supply and also a private telephone.

Messengers were sent over from Coconut Grove, a square-looking couple to meet the captain in a dark, quiet bar. But when he showed up, you could smell him as he entered the door, his clothes reeking with the strong, organic stink of dried pot. When he took them into the marina, the yacht could be smelled two blocks away, sacks of ganja heaped in cabins, in closets, stuffed into the bilges, carelessly tossed into lockers, the dinghy and the wheelhouse.

A rendezvous was set up. Snorkel Joe was to meet the yacht at Great Isaac rock. But Joe was so uptight about the whole deal that he had a few joints on the way out of the channel from Dinner Key. By the time he reached Key Biscayne, he had really got it off. So turned on by the idea of his very own President living right over there, in that very house, he took no notice of the wind and the current and ran aground, practically in Richard Nixon's back yard.

He was overwhelmed by an angry swarm of FBI agents, CIA agents, T-men and city police. They shook him down, searched his boat and questioned him, dreaming of plots, insurrections and treason. But Snorkel played it cool. They towed him back to the channel and let him go. With no more fooling around, he sailed over to Great Isaac, picked up the stuff and sailed back in again, right past Nixon's compound, docking at a house not two miles away.

From there it was carried up to Memphis in a U-Haul trailer. And that's how Tennessee got turned on last winter.

• • •

Does art rip off life? Or does life rip off art? In the discothèques of south Florida, at the rock concerts, in the boat yards and airports, the coffeehouses, the communes, the head shops and leather stores, the university cafeterias and organic restaurants, you can hear the whispered rumors, tales, reports and legends about the pot smugglers, their daring and their ingenuity. A plane flies from Bogotá every week with a full load of Colombia Red. But the pilot's brother flies an identical plane with the same colors and the same identification numbers. They stay within a few feet of each other, forming a single blip on the radarscopes of the ADIZ. Just before landing, one splits off at low level and heads for a secret airfield. The other lands at Miami International. But this same gimmick was used not long ago on The Name of the Game.

You hear about the stuff flown in from Europe and dropped on ice floes off Newfoundland. It is picked up by dog team. You hear about the kids who swim around the Mexican border with waterproof packages around their waists and then come zooming in to the beach on their surfboards. You hear about the narc who infiltrated a smuggling gang but then made the mistake of dropping acid. It changed his head completely. He sent his badge back to Washington and now he himself is dealing in nickel bags.

Paranoia is a favorite word these days. Yet you must think big if you are to survive in the smuggling game. You must like yourself. You must be calculating and bold. You must be very logical. But you must never forget that the world really is out to get you.

You might even operate a little counterespionage just to check up on what the opposition is doing. Provide yourself with a forged letter of introduction and present yourself as a journalist working on an assignment. Telephone Lieutenant Peart of the Broward County Sheriff's Department. He won't meet you. He won't let you see his face. He won't even talk to you without prior permission from the assistant sheriff. Because Lieutenant Peart works as an undercover agent for the narcotics squad. Except they don't like to call themselves that. Ring the number and a voice will answer, "Selective Enforcement."

Go to the Customs agency in Miami. Sit in the front office of John H. Moseley, the special agent in charge. Be nonchalant. Appear absent-minded as you eavesdrop on the telephone conversation in the next office. Listen to the long recitation of personal qualities of one of the agents. He is described as an excellent man who works 20 hours a day and is very competent. But he "is about the most disorganized man in the world." He can never get his reports out. He does marvelous undercover work, but he just won't put anything down on paper.

John Moseley is an old-timer, smooth and tough. With perfect politeness, enthusiasm and willingness, he tells you absolutely nothing. Over and over again, he maintains that the Customs men are doing a good job, claiming to stop ten percent of the drug traffic. Only as you are making your goodbye does he admit that the job is like bailing out the ocean.

The public-information officer is Jim Dingfelder. Solemnly, he gives you all the statistics. In the Miami area during 1970, 90 percent more marijuana was seized than in 1969. Hashish went from three pounds to 94-1/2 pounds, which is an increase of exactly 3050 percent. Dingfelder will describe the dogs they now have that were trained at Lackland Air Force Base. The graduation exercise consists of their locating a pot stash sealed in a Mason jar and buried under a road. A demonstration was given on the White House lawn late in 1970. A mixed sample of mail included a planted package of marijuana. The dog promptly found it, to great applause. Then he wouldn't leave, sniffing at yet another package that, quite by accident, contained hashish.

But Dingfelder won't tell you much. He can't tell you much. If they knew what was happening, they would stop it and it wouldn't happen anymore. If it is really happening now, they don't know about it. Or if they do know, it's a secret and they can't tell you anything.

But you know they are catching on to the tricks. People are getting busted every day and sentences are getting stiffer. The Florida area now has radar picket planes. The Customs has its own scout plane and a helicopter. And one of these days, it is all going to get violent. There are stories around of kids standing by with M-16s while big transfers are taking place. The Bahamian government has four new patrol boats mounted with machine guns. Two guys were recently caught in Great Inagua. They grabbed a rifle and forced their way out of jail, making the police load up their plane again and refuel it.

It is already too late for that old trick of stopping at Georgetown, Exuma, for fuel and dumping the pot in the bushes. They are getting wise. The customs officer there is called Bullet. He is very glum and suspicious and once he even tried to stop a plane by running out onto the strip. But the smugglers revved up both engines and went right at him.

Beware of Cuba. You can get official permission to fly over their territory only by sending a cablegram to Aerocivil in Havana. Send them all the details of your flight plan and send them the money for a reply. You must allow not less than 48 hours. But remember: The Cubans are death on drugs of any kind.

A trimaran sailed out of Jamaica with 1000 pounds of marijuana, seriously overloaded, because the load line is very critical with this type of boat. It hit rough weather in the Windward Passage and tried to duck under the lee of eastern Cuba. It was caught by a Cuban gunboat, towed in and the two kids were promptly accused of being CIA agents plotting to defame the revolution by planting drugs. They were put on death row and threatened with a firing squad. One of the kids was Canadian and the ambassador intervened in his behalf. The Cubans finally released them both. But first they built a bonfire on the beach and burned the pot. They went aboard the trimaran with brushes and buckets and smeared tar all over the boat, the decks, the hull, the sails, the beds, the cooking pots, the food, the mirrors--towing it outside the territorial limits and setting it adrift.

Haiti is just as bad. Some guy tried to land at Great Inagua one night. But there is no control tower there and no landing lights. Nassau radio advised him to continue on to Port-au-Prince. They would notify the port by cable of his expected arrival. But in true island fashion, they forgot. The plane was making its landing approach when it was suddenly fired on by an ack-ack battery. The pilot was hauled off to a dungeon and was to be shot as a spy when the message arrived from Nassau the next day. They patched his plane up and he went on.

You can't land at the American Navy base on Guantánamo Bay unless it is an emergency. If all you want is to buy a little gas, you'll have a lot of explaining to do when those intelligence officers take all of you into separate rooms to check your I. D.s and your story. Other than a tongue-lashing about safety from some gung-ho fighter pilot and the boredom of red tape and delay, you'll be treated simply but well. But when they put you up for the night in the bachelor-officers' quarters, don't go wandering around. Right behind the building, there is a fence that goes around the entire perimeter of the base. The Cubans have their own fence around that. The whole area is mined. Every night flares are set off. There are explosions triggered by deer and birds. Marines nervously blast away at shadows.

Back up in the hills of Guantánamo, the marijuana grows wild and is sometimes even cultivated. Gitmo is counted as hardship duty. It takes months to get a phone call through to the States. There is nothing to do and nowhere to go. So everybody gets drunk and everybody turns on. Periodically, the Marines send flame-thrower teams around the fence to burn the weeds and brush off the mine fields. Occasionally, they are sent off to destroy a new field of marijuana. Everybody makes sure he stands downwind.

Jamaica. The north coast is for the tourists: Montego Bay, the Americans; Port Antonio, the British. At the extreme western tip, there is a hippie colony at Negril. There are beaches nearby for skinny-dipping. Houses are shared by college kids. Sometimes a yacht will anchor offshore. The freaks stay at local houses such as Miss Ruby's, where they can get a bed for two dollars. There will be a toilet and running water. But at night there are only kerosene lamps. There are no screens on the windows and you will see several rats, some of which will run across your bed. Presidente is the local honcho, a very short man, almost a dwarf, who will teach you how to roll a sclif and who might be persuaded to take you with a party of freaks to the local caves--muddy, strewn with old tin cans, the few impressive stalactites illuminated by a Coke bottle filled with kerosene, a twisted rag for a wick.

You can score anywhere in Jamaica. Every street corner has a hustler. The waiter at the Holiday Inn in Montego Bay will whisper out of the side of his mouth, "Ganja?" On remote roads in the interior, wild-eyed cats will yell out as you drive by, "Hey, hippie! [pronounced ee-pee] Want some grass, mahn?" At any of the grandest, poshest hotels on the beach, you only have to cross the road to where the taxis are lined up waiting.

Everyone insists the ganja grows wild, but you can drive all over the island and never see a Cannabis plant. The police patrol constantly and the courts still use the old British style of handing out fast, no-nonsense sentences--a minimum of 18 months. The clandestine gardens are kept in mountain areas where even the crude, rocky, tortuous roads don't exist and where the police just do not venture. There are several major regions of uninhabited mountains, the east end of the island covered with tropical rain forests where the Blue Mountains reach a peak of 7402 feet. The Cockpit Country is roughly 150 square miles in size. There are no roads. One section is called the District of Look Behind. It is wild and rough, covered with strange, even, humpbacked peaks. It is drier here and perhaps more ideally suited for Cannabis cultivation. All these areas were once impregnable hide-outs for runaway slaves who warred against the British for over 100 years, raiding the sugar estates and ambushing patrols so successfully that the British finally asked for peace. The descendants of those maroons are still up there, back in the hills.

And so are the Ras Tafari brothers, a religious sect that uses ganja as a holy plant, the instrument of peace, tranquillity and love. They cultivate it as much to disseminate God's will as to turn a profit. They worship Haile Selassie as their god.

They are pretty weird cats, their beards and their hair long and done up in small, tight braids that are plastered with red mud. Stoned wherever they go, they carry their walking staffs, talking to themselves, ranting, quoting the Old Testament, mumbling about Saint John the Baptist. Some of them are old men, toothless and ragged, who get busted and harassed by the local pigs when they become a nuisance. But some of them are younger, neater and very cool. No one knows how many of them live up there in their shacks in the hills, tending their gardens.

And no one knows how many factories are up there where the dried ganja is pressed into bricks of one, five, ten, 25 or 50 pounds. The kitchen trash masher doesn't work up there--there is no electricity. Instead, hydraulic-jack assemblies are used, although one factory has a small steam engine. An expert can tell you the source of any brick just by its style and size. One Rasta always wraps his "herbs" in paper and even imprints his signet ring on the wax seals.

Some Ras Tafarians believe in reincarnation. Many are fully aware of their former lives, revelation having come to them through ganja and through meditation and through reading the Scriptures. When the turned-on American hippies started arriving in their fleets of roaring silver birds, wearing their savage costumes and their beards and their long hair and their peace symbols, displaying their scorn for governments and police and war and modern materialism, it was obvious to the Ras Tafarians that they were actually soul brothers, not foreigners at all but a lost tribe of their own people not yet enlightened enough to understand their heritage but coming to join them nevertheless in their struggle against the Babylon of Kingston, and who were coming in love, who were coming in peace, who were coming home at last.

But all that has changed. The garden has been defiled, the brothers betrayed. The Ras Tafarians are no longer so tolerated, because the criminal element from Kingston has adopted their style. The mountain bandits also wear long hair and beards and braids smeared with mud. And these are mean mothers. They hold up cars at night. They kidnap, they rape and they kill. They have taken over the ganja trade, organizing it, corrupting it. until now anybody who even looks like a Rasta is hassled by the fuzz.

And the flower children?

Robert attends a large party for academic and literary types. He is high. He is the most highest. In the middle of a crowded room, people constantly excusing themselves to pass between him and his audience, he goes on and on, giggling, speeding, repeating the word groovy 1132 times, not at all afraid of getting busted because "nobody could prove anything." Besides, he could always have them rubbed out first. A contract would cost him only $2000.

He is 19. He has organized and directed and bank-rolled all kinds of deals to Mexico, to Canada, to Jamaica, to Colombia--coke, hash, pot, pills. As his goofy friend grins and nods like a beatific metronome, Robert goes on with his head trip, his eyes flashing with every flick of the 24 frames per second being projected against the inner wall of his skull.

He says he was one of the backers of the 11-lost-bag caper, but he always stays in the background, several connections removed. He mentions by name a very high and very improbable official in Jamaica whom he paid off "to do business." He describes the secret airstrip that exports 3000 pounds of ganja every day. It is like Marijuana International Airport, swarming with Rastas and hustlers in coded-color shirts and ringed by 16 machine-gun nests. The serial numbers on any incoming plane have to match those on a prearranged agreement. When Robert himself landed there to make a deal, a knife was put to his throat; he was threatened with immediate death if it should turn out that he "wasn't groovy."

There is $300,000 in cash buried, he says, in the ground on a farm where he once lived. His next operation will involve a shrimp boat, "because they don't get checked by Customs." If anybody wanted to go along for the ride, like, you know. Groovy. Robert writes his name on a scrap of paper but very cunningly puts down only his last initial. Then he writes down two phone numbers where he could be reached.

Knees bouncing, eyes strobing, he describes his start in the drug business. It all began when he helped out his buddy whose father was a Mafia figure involved in the smuggling of 200 pounds of heroin. But his buddy's father was killed, run over by a garbage truck. The kid wanted his father's share of the loot. When nobody would pay off, Robert and his buddy went up to New York and put a gun against the head of a family capo, kidnaping him to Florida and holding him for a ransom of $2,500,000. The kid split for Canada but gave Robert $20,000 for his help.

He isn't worried about the mafiosi. There's a contract out on him, all right, but they are looking for a blond with a mustache who is 6'4" tall. Robert is actually one foot shorter than that. You see, when they pulled their heavy number, he was wearing 12-inch stilts that were covered by the flare of his bellbottoms.

Like, man, it's a crazy groove. You know?