Smuggler's Blues

WITH THE FEDS ON HIS TAIL, A CAREER DOPE SMUGGLER SETS UP THE SCORE OF A LIFETIME.

A TRUE STORY |

BY RICHARD STRATTON

Hotel Chelsea, New York City, April 1982

Concordia Venus, the Greek freighter carrying my goods, is at sea, headed for the port of New Jer­sey. Using a clean set of phony ID, I fly from Maui, Hawaii to New York. There I check into a suite in the funky Hotel Chelsea to wait for my ship to come in.

This is the biggest load my part­ners and I have ever attempted: 15,000 pounds—seven and a half tons—of the best quality blond and red hashish available in all of Lebanon, plus 50 gallons of primo hashish oil. The hash and oil are concealed in a million and a half pounds of pitted Iraqi dates packed in cardboard cartons and loaded into seven 40-foot orange sea/land containers. The load is worth $50 million retail, $15 million wholesale. My end alone is upward of $5 million. Cash. Tax free. All I have to do is get the load past U.S. Customs without getting busted.

A creature of habit, I stay at the Chelsea when I am waiting for a load. Once the load is in and the cash starts to flow, I will move to the Plaza, where I'm known as Dr. Lowell. I hand out $100 bills and pose as a psychiatrist to explain the odd guests coming and going from my room at all hours.

What I like about the Chelsea pre-load is that cops and feds will not go unnoticed. The staff knows me and my aversion to agents of the law. Freaks, artists, writers, musi­cians, dope fiends and dope dealers live at the Chelsea. The place has history. Dylan Thomas was stay­ing here when he drank himself to death, in 1953. Sid Vicious killed his old lady here, in 1978. The Beat

poet Gregory Corso wanders the halls, talking to himself. I fit in. The desk clerk will tip me off if anyone comes around asking questions. The Chelsea is a place of good luck for me, and I am as superstitious as a medicine man.

No one knows my real name. I am already a fugitive wanted by the DEAand the U.S. Marshals Ser­vice, having jumped bail and gone on the lam from a pot-smuggling case in Maine. I have three sets of false ID and have to remind myself each morning who I am dial day. I do not make calls from my room. To stay in touch widi my people I use a pay phone at the rear of Ell Quijote, the Spanish restaurant adjoining the hotel. I come and go, drink tequila at the bar, make my calls and wait for word that the load has arrived. In die room I smoke joints and watch TV—repeat epi­sodes of Get Smart—and listen to Bob Dylan's "Sad-Eyed Lady of die Lowlands," which he wrote for his wife Sara while staying at dais hotel. Years later I will name my firstborn son Maxwell, after Maxwell Smart and the Beatles song "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," and my daughter Sarah—residual memories from my days waiting at die Hotel Chelsea.

A rule of thumb in the dope-smuggling business is, Shit happens. Rare is the trip when everything goes according to plan. At my pay phone in the rear of El Quijote, between drinks, I get die call.

"Bro, we got a problem."

It's S., my partner, whose father owns bodi the New Jersey trucking company diat is to pick up die con­tainers at the docks and the bonded warehouse in Jersey City where die

5. to hear about

our problem. Customs flagged the load of dates. Agency offi­cials called S.'s father at the trucking company and told him that, after a cursory look, they had sealed the containers at the docks and were going to escort diem from the port to die ware­house, where they would conduct a thorough inspection.

"Shit.... Why?" I ask.

"I don't know. Could be because the load was shipped out of Lebanon. It's known as a source country for narcotics."

True, though with the war between Iraq and Iran lots of goods from the Middle East are being rerouted through Beirut.

"Maybe they were tipped off," S. muses aloud.

"By who?" I say. "No one knows about this trip except me, you and the Lebs—and they're not about to dime out their own load."

"What if Customs ran dogs around the containers and diey picked up the scent?"

"No way. Not the way it was packaged. And if that were die case, they'd hold the shipment at the docks and wait for us to pick it up, then bust us."

"I don't know, bro. It's fuckin' crazy. But we can't pick up that load."

"What're you talking about?"

"We gotta just... leave it there."

"How can we do that? If we don't pick it up, diey'll know we know it's hot."

"But they won't know who to bust," he argues. "We can say we don't want to touch it if they think there's contraband in it. Put it back on diem.. .whatever. I can't let my old man take a fall. He'll lose die business."

"Brother, if this load goes down, we're all out of business."

I want to discuss it with S.'s father. Refusing to pick up the containers seems to me like a clear admission of complicity. Picking up the containers and playing the hand out seems to me the only reasonable, albeit risky, plan. The bold way is the best way. Just act as though nothing is wrong and we know what we're doing.

S. and I drive across the river to meet his father at a diner in Paramus. We sit in the car in the parking lot and discuss what to do. S.'s father is in favor of picking up the containers. He agrees that to refuse to pick them up is as good as admitting guilt.

"There's too much at stake here," he says. "We've worked too hard for this to just let it go."

"Fifteen million dollars' worth of goods," I remind them.

"Yeah, and we can get 15 years if they bust us," S. says.

"That's the nature of the business," I say. "We wouldn't be making this kind of money if it were legal."

S.'s father and I look at each other. "What do you want to do?" he asks. "This is your play."

"I say we go for it."

Of the seven containers, three contain hash and dates; four contain only dates.

"Here, these are the identification numbers of the contain­ers that have only dates," I say. I write the numbers down on a slip of paper and give it to S.'s father. "Call Customs; tell them you're backed up and you can't get down to the docks to pick up the shipment until late tomorrow. Friday afternoon the agents will all be thinking about going home for the weekend. We pick up two or three of the clean containers. Let Customs inspect those. Maybe that way we'll be able to finesse it."

S.'s father agrees. He says he doesn't think Customs has been tipped off; he feels it's a routine secondary inspection.

So we have a plan. A hairy plan, but still it's some­thing. I go back to the Hotel Chelsea. The waiting now becomes 10 times as intense. Not even Maxwell Smart and the kind bud can take my mind off the possibility of losing all that beautiful hashish. S. and I have dose to $300,000 invested in this trip. All that work, (continued on page 134)

SMUGGLER'S BLUES

(continued from page 114) months of risking my life in Lebanon put­ting together the load. Going to Baghdad to buy the dates, shipping them overland to Beirut. If we make it, if we get the load in and sold, I'll have enough money to stash in some offshore bank accounts and live the high life in the wind.

All day Friday at the Chelsea I pace and watch the news. No reports of massive loads of hash busted at the port of New Jersey. I try to read, but I can't concen­trate. I go out and walk the streets.

Just let me get this load in, dear Lord; let this one through and 1 swear I'll give it all up and—what? What would I do? How could 1 ever get the same rush I get from doing this?

Friday evening S. shows up in front of the hotel in a rental car.

"You're not going to believe this," he says when I get in and we drive off toward the Holland Tunnel.

"Try me.'

But I can't believe it. I have to see it with my own eyes—and smell it with my nose. Three containers were trucked to the warehouse from the port, the con­tainers Customs would be inspecting. When I walk into the warehouse in Jersey City, I can smell hashish. Yes, unmistak­able. Fresh hash mixed with the syrupy-sweet smell of chopped dates. One of the containers I told them not to pick up is backed into the warehouse and half unloaded. There are the cartons with red plastic strapping that contain hash sitting out on the loading dock.

I look at my partner and his father. Brace yourselves. We are all about to be busted. I suffer an intense rush of fear and paranoia. The warehouse is surrounded by Customs and DEA agents just waiting for me to appear before they make their move.

This has to be a setup. My one over­whelming urge: Turn and run, motherfucker.

BEIRUT, LEBANON. MARCH 1982

A month earlier. I had been inside for weeks, a virtual prisoner holed up in a luxury penthouse in West Beirut. The entirety of Lebanon pitched and heaved in the throes of civil war. Soldiers and spooks were everywhere: Syrian troops, the sev­eral armies of the various warring factions in the holy war—Marines, Iranian Revo­lutionary Guard units, Hezbollah, PLO, CIA—but no drug agents. The airport in Beirut was under siege. Israel's formidable army was rallying at the southern border. F-15 and F-16 fighter jets streaked across rain-washed blue skies and announced their presence with sonic booms.

My girlfriend and partner, V., had been trapped in Beirut when the airport was closed just days after she arrived with a suitcase full of money. The concrete walls of the bedroom where we slept and made love were gouged with gray bullet holes from stray machine-gun fire. Americans and Europeans were snatched off street corners to be held hostage by the armies of

the jihad. The Holiday Inn where we had been staying was reduced to a blown-out shell and massive rubble heap. The streets of what was once known as the Paris of the Middle East were a battleground stinking of death and something alive: fear.

Our daily routine consisted of drinking rich Turkish coffee; eating endless meals of hummus and kibbe, the national dish; drink­ing arrack; smoking hash; reading; listening to tapes of Fairuz, the enchanting Lebanese chanteuse; watching Dallas on TV,J.R. yam­mering away in Arabic; and getting it on with bombs and rockets exploding outside.

At last the day arrived. I stepped alone from the dim vestibule of the building, slipped on a pair of Arafat-style sunglasses, pulled the checkered kaffiyeh close around my pale Yankee face and ducked into the rear of a waiting Mercedes.

Crouched on the floorboards for the dash across the Green Line, I heard sirens and mortar fire over the racing Mercedes engine and the humming of tires. Nasif drove; my bodyguard, Saad, rode shotgun—or I should say machine gun, as Saad carried his ugly black Uzi everywhere he went.

"You okay back there, M-r. Richard?" Nasif called.

Nasif and Saad ranted on in Arabic. Nasif prided himself on being able to outmaneu-ver the shooters poised along the verdant no-man's-land separating East from West Beirut. Yet bullet holes pocked the trunk and rear quarter of the Mercedes.

Everything was ready—or so Moham­med, Nasif s father and the chief of cus­toms in Beirut, told me. He urged me to remain in the relative safety of the pent­house and take his word that he and his men had followed the precise, detailed instructions I had given them for prepar­ing the shipment.

But my word and my New York part­ners' freedom, as well as $15 million worth of hashish, were on the line. Years of working with Arabs, Mexicans, Jamai­cans and Colombians had taught me they just didn't understand the lengths to which North American law-enforcement agents were willing to go to bust our loads and lock us up.

"This is serious business," I reminded them. "People go to prison."

Maybe not in Lebanon, not if you were chief of customs.

My Yankee WASP ethic demanded dependability and attention to detail. In more than 15 years in this business I had never lost a load because of carelessness. As my grandmother Ethel Lowell used to tell me, "Anything worth doing is worth doing right."

S., my New York partner, had acquired a copy of the U.S. Customs manual from a bent Customs agent. S. instructed me on which red flags in a foreign shipment's profile tripped the computer and moti­vated agents to give the goods a thorough inspection. The cover merchandise—in this case a million-plus pounds of Iraqi dates—must not be paid for with cash. I bought the dates in Baghdad using a letter

of credit from Bordo Foods, a legitimate import company with vears of corporate history. During the war between Iran and Iraq, dates from the Middle East—the soft brown ones used in cake mixes and pre­pared foods—were difficult to obtain and in demand. Mohammed arranged to have the dates shipped overland by truck from Baghdad to Beirut. Now they were stored in a warehouse at the port and repack­aged with seven and a half tons of hashish from Lebanon's Bekaa Valley.

Once we crossed the Green Line into East Beirut, we were out of immedi­ate danger of sniper fire. I sat up in the rear seat but kept the kafliyeh wrapped around my head. Here in the Christian section of the city, the war was not as intense. The warehouse was under guard by four bearded Uzi-toting heavies in green fatigues. Half a dozen orange sea/ land containers were stacked on the dock beside the warehouse, a seventh backed up to a loading platform. Nasif pulled up out front, and I was quickly hustled inside. As soon as I walked through the door I was met with the perfumed odor of premium-grade hashish mixed with dates. Hundreds of brown waxed-cardboard car­tons labeled khistawi dates in English and Arabic were piled along the rear wall. The rest of the load had already been packed into the containers on the dock, waiting to be hoisted aboard a Greek freighter expected to arrive in Beirut in a few days. As Mohammed had told me, everything was ready. Or so it appeared.

"Check the cartons yourself, Richard. Make sure they do it right," I could hear S. admonish me.

It had taken me months of negotiating to acquire the goods. With Abu Ali, the godfather of the Bekaa Valley, I drove around buying bulk hashish from growers on plantations outside the ancient town of Baalbek. In the evening we would sit in his office above a heroin-processing lab and drink arrack.

"Mr. Richard," Abu Ali would say, "why don't you take some of the other, the white?"

"No, no," I protested. "No heroin."

"But why? It is so much easier to hide. And worth so much more."

"Bad karma," I would tell the Leba­nese, though I don't think they under­stood the concept.

Lebanese hashish is graded by num­ber: number one, top commercial grade; zahara, or zero, above the best; and double znhara, dealer's choice, the fine, dusty, res­inous nodules shaken and gathered from freshly harvested female plants. Finally we came up with the quality product my buyers back in the States and Canada demanded. The hashish needed to be prepared, pressed into 500-gram slabs, packaged in canvas sacks, labeled and stamped with our seal: rose of bekaa.

It would take all seven sea/land con­tainers full of cartons packed with dates and hashish to conceal the load. The cardboard cartons containing the hash

were wrapped with red plastic straps to distinguish them from the ones with only dates, which had green, blue or yellow strapping. The hash was packed into sealed tin boxes. According to instructions I had given Mohammed, the tin boxes full of red­olent hashish were supposed to be packed into the cardboard cartons, then covered top and bottom with a thick layer of dates within those cartons.

I walked to the rear of the warehouse and took down a box with red straps. It didn't feel right—too hard. I snipped the plastic bands and tore open the carton. Inside was a sealed tin box and no dates. I looked at Mohammed.

"Where are the dates?"

"In the other cartons," Nasif answered, "as you wanted."

I shook my head. I was beginning to feel dizzy; I couldn't believe what I was see­ing. After I'd waited weeks to get this load packed and shipped, they fucked it up. I took down another red-strapped carton and ripped it open. Again they had simply shoved the tin box with the hashish inside the cardboard box without packing it in layers of dates on the bottom and top as they had been told maybe 10 times.

"No good," I said, struggling to control my anger. "You've got to unload all these containers, repack the cartons and cover the boxes of hash with dates. Thick layers of dates! On the bottom and top, the way I showed you."

As Nasif translated, I could see Moham­med starting to turn purple with rage. Did he think I wouldn't check the load? That I would just let it go and trust in Allah to get it past Customs?

"But, Mr. Richard, that will take days. Maybe more than one week," Nasif pro­tested. "We'll miss the ship. It could be weeks before we can arrange new trans­port. And the war------"

"You tell your father I'm sick of this shit. It doesn't matter how long it takes. I told

you how I wanted the cartons packed." I was yelling now. The dudes with the Uzis were getting tense. "It's got to be done right or I'll take every one of these fucking boxes of hash and throw them into the sea!"

There was a lengthy discussion in Ara­bic between father, son and one of the men guarding the warehouse. They gave me a look that said. Forget about it, pal. The shipment's going the way it is.

To break the impasse, I grabbed one of the cartons I had opened, took it out onto the dock and heaved it into the murky Mediterranean.

"Every fucking one!" I yelled and headed back inside. "I'll go home with nothing. I don't give a fuck. I don't want to go to prison. Can't you understand that?"

Finally Mohammed relented. The men fished the box of hash from the sea and laughed at me. Crazy American! I could feel my grandmother's spirit swelling with pride.

He may be a dope smuggler, but at least he's a conscientious dope smuggler.

After all, hadn't some of our forebears made their fortune smuggling opium and God knows what else? It was a Yankee tradi­tion to thumb one's nose at the government and break the laws that were perceived as wrongheaded. One of my heroes, Henry David Thoreau, taught me that in his essay "Civil Disobedience." Governments and their picayune laws were for the uninformed masses, the sheep. Fuck that noise. Every great fortune is founded on a crime; Balzac said that. As a New Englander, I was brought up with rumors that Joe Kennedy had made his fortune smuggling booze during Prohibi­tion—and his son went on to become presi­dent. The laws against pot were stupid and unenforceable. It was just a matter of time before pot prohibition was repealed. In the interim, fortunes would be made. I had paid my dues. No reason I should not be a mari­juana millionaire. Or so I believed.

Back in our penthouse prison one after­noon as we lay in bed, V. said she was going

Mii-cia/y. i vc goi 10 gei oui 01 mis piate. i don't care how fucked-up it is out there."

She showed me an ad in the English-language newspaper. The Shining, starring Jack Nicholson, was playing at a movie the­ater on Hamra Street.

"Take me to the movies or I'll walk."

We went to a matinee. "How's the war today?" I asked Nasif when he and Saad came to collect us. It was like asking about the weather.

"So-so," he shrugged. "Lots of metal in the air."

The movie was in English with Arabic subtitles. The audience loved it. So did V. After the show we went to dinner at a res­taurant owned by rogue CIA agent Frank Terpil and drank Johnnie Walker.

"I want to go home," V. said, clutching my hand beneath the table. "I mean home home. Enough of this place already."

"Soon, baby."

"Soon.... Sheesh! You sound like Mohammed."

We were both a little tipsy on the ride back to the apartment. V. rested her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes. When we turned down our street, I saw flashing red-and-blue lights. Ambulances and emer­gency vehicles were parked outside the apartment building.

The neighborhood had been struck by heavy rocket fire. Stunned, I got out and looked up at a gaping hole in the skyline where our bedroom had once been. Half of the top three floors of our building had been blown away. Rescue workers searched through the rubble for a family who lived on the floor beneath us.

In time we would joke that Jack Nichol­son had saved our lives.

We spent the night at the Commodore Hotel. V. begged me to leave the country with her.

"You know I can't go, baby. Not until the load is safely on its way to New York. We've come this far. I can't quit now."

"You're crazy. You're not thinking straight. These people are all insane. They won't stop until everyone is dead."

The next day Nasif arranged for V. to be driven across the border to Israel, where she caught a flight from Tel Aviv to JFK, then back to her home in Hawaii.

Our freighter carrying the load of dates and hash was one of the last ships to leave the harbor before Israeli gunboats block­aded the port.

I fled east. Back to the Bekaa, where I was certainly not safe. Syrian and Iranian warriors were encamped there. All Ameri­cans had a price tag on their head. So I kept traveling cast into Syria, to Damascus, where I boarded a plane for Dubai. From Dubai I flew to New Delhi to rest for a few days—a stranger in a strange land, the only real peace I knew. On to Hong Kong and a long flight to Honolulu. Then a short hop to Maui, where V. waited for me in a house by the sea on the slopes of a volcano.

NEW YORK AND NEW JERSEY, APRIL 1982

Haifa world away at the port of New Jer­sey, where thousands of huge containers arrive on ships every day, something spooks

Customs. Instead of giving our orange con­tainers a cursory look at the docks, agents secure the hinged doors with lead self-locking seals. It will take seven trucks to get the seven containers to our warehouse. Our guys show up with three trucks and pick up three. The only problem: Customs agents choose which three. The agents pile into two cars and escort our containers from the port to our warehouse in Jersey City.

When S. and I arrive at the warehouse, S.'s father is there. So is S.'s brother and Fat Bobby, our stash man. They are all smiling at me. I'm waiting for the doors to come crashing in and the place to be swarmed with federal agents sticking guns in my face and screaming, "Down on the floor, motherfucker!'

Nothing happens.

"Are you guys fucking nuts? What're you smiling at?"

I walk to the rear of the loading dock, grab one of the canons with the red plastic straps, plunk it down on a table and rip it open.

"Red straps," I say. "What does that mean?"

S. says, "It means, bro, we got the load. Or part of it, anyway."

"It was a crapshoot," his father says. "They wouldn't let us choose which con­tainers we were gonna pick up. They told us which ones to take. If we insisted, that would've looked suspicious."

He takes me to the rear of the warehouse and points out two more 40-foot containers in the fenced-in yard. One of them, I know by the numbers painted on the outside, also contains hash and dates. "They opened the container inside and started inspecting the cartons," he says. He tells me they had examined a dozen cartons, all of them con­taining only dates.

Right next to one of the cartons they opened and inspected is an unopened car­ton with red straps.

"Finally, like we figured, it was late Friday

afternoon. They got tired and went home, said they'd be back Monday morning to fin­ish the inspection."

"And," S. says, "they had dogs."

"Get the fuck out of here!"

"Yeah, bro. Dope dogs. They came in here and sniffed around."

"I can smell hash," I say.

"They must've been junk dogs," Bobby says. "They get 'em strung out on junk so they go nuts when they smell heroin. But they don't give a fuck about hash."

We all laugh—giddy, nervous laughter.

"Here's the problem," S. runs it down. "We can take all the cartons out of this con­tainer and remove our goods, but when they come back here Monday morning this container will be light by about a third. So we've got to take out the hash and replace it with something that weighs about the same and put all the cartons back in and hope they don't open one."

"That's only two thirds of the load," I say. The rest of the containers are still at the port.

"Better than nothing."

Outside the warehouse, S. shows me the U.S. Customs seals on the container doors—no way to open the doors without breaking the seal. Fat Bobby is a welder by trade. The next day, Saturday, he brings his torch to the warehouse and cuts the hinges holding the doors on the rear of the containers. We borrow a tow truck from a friend and winch the doors off the contain­ers without breaking the Customs seal.

It takes us all weekend, working well into Sunday night, to remove all the cartons with the red straps and replace them with boxes of sand. The hardest part is finding paint on a Sunday to match the orange color of the containers so we can weld the doors back on and make it look as if they'd never been opened. The paint is still sticky by early Monday morning.

We have 10,000 pounds of hashish and

50 gallons of honey oil safely stored in a stash house out on Staten Island. There is still the Customs inspection to get through. If they find the remaining 5.000 pounds in the container at the docks or the sand in the containers we unloaded, we'll be nailed. But at least we'll have the income from the hash to provide for our families while we ride out the bust.

Monday I am asleep in my suite at the Chelsea when S. calls.

"Relax, bro. Sleep in and hug yourself. You're a rich motherfucker."

He goes on to say that first thing Monday morning they got a call from Customs. The agents were satisfied with their inspection; we can go ahead and break the seals on the containers in the yard and come down and pick up the rest of the shipment.

It is time for Dr. Lowell to check into the Plaza.

ULUPALAKUA. MAUI, HAWAII. JUNE 1982

I stir from a nightmare of being trapped in a crumbling, besieged city. When I open my eyes V. is asleep beside me. At the foot of the bed the curtains undulate in the morning breeze. There is no loud machine-gun fire, no bombs exploding. Ah, Maui. Not Beirut.

But then fear grips me. Will this be the day they find me and lock me in a cage? And the regret. Is this all there is? Wasn't 1 meant to do more with my life?

I am still wanted for skipping bail on a Maine bust, and there's no telling when this whole Lebanon deal could go wrong. One guy gets busted and he could rat everyone out to save his own ass.

No one in the world except the woman lying beside me knows where I am. Each day in paradise I busy myself coordinating the collection of millions of dollars of dope money and distributing it to the different partners—the Arabs in Beirut, the Jews in New York, the Mexicans in Texas—doing it all from afar, in the wind, blowing from pay phone to pay phone with only a sack full of quarters to keep me from blowing away.

At night V. and I smoke Hawaiian herb and make love. Some days we play on the beach. Not a bad life as long as I can keep myself anesthetized from the fear and nagging regret. V. has been managing the whole deal. She is the public face, traveling to Anchor­age, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto. She picks up money and delivers it.

Lately, though, V. has begun to worry me. Her antidote for the craziness I brought into her life is cocaine and booze. On a recent trip to the mainland, when she stopped in Los Angeles to see her mother, she got a visit from a couple of deputy U.S. marshals with the fugitive unit asking about me. She handled them with the cool of someone used to living outside the law.

"Sure, I know him," she told them, "but I haven't seen him since he got popped in Maine."

A deputy marshal handed her his card: James Sullivan, out of the Boston office. He reminded her of the laws against harboring a fugitive.

"When do things get normal?" V. once asked me.

"What's normal?" I asked, though I

knew what she wanted or what she thought she wanted: a home in her own name—her own name, for that matter—and a man who wasn't on the lam.

"There's no such thing as normal," I said. "Not for us." I told her what she already knew. "It's not going to happen with me. 1 run from normal. The house in the suburbs, the station wagon, shopping trips to the mall. All that depresses the shit out of me."

Some part of her wants normal, but I am unwilling or unable to quit. I'm hooked on the rush I get from beating the Man—that's my narcotic.

One night I leave V. at the house in Ulu-palakua, fly to Honolulu and check into a hotel. I can feel the heat closing in. I want no one, not even V., to know where to find me.

At a bar in the hotel lobby I make a call from a pay phone to my answering service in New York and pick up a message to call the Captain in Texas. The Captain is one of the more clandestine characters in my life. He is Lebanese and a captain in the U.S. Army. He told me he was a member of Delta Force, as well as some supersecret subunit known as Army Support Intelli­gence Activity, or ASIA, made up of hand-picked individuals from different countries who were trained to become part of an elite black-ops antiterrorist team.

He is also the son of Abu Ali, the patron of Bekaa Valley hash growers and a rising force in the emerging Lebanese junk trade.

It was through Abu Ali and Mohammed

that I was introduced to the Captain. He is stationed at Fort Hood, midway between Austin and Waco. 1 met him at a restaurant in Austin, where he briefed me on his mis­sion: He was determined to find an American smuggler who had ripped off his father.

"I found him," the Captain tells me when I reach him from Hawaii, pay phone to pay phone. "1 spoke to him. He doesn't know it, but 1 have his address."

"Where is he?"

"Near Los Angeles. He says he will pay, but he wants to meet only with you."

"Why me?"

"He's afraid I'll kill him. He says he wants to meet with you, give you the money and let you deal with me, my father and Abu Nasif."

Abu Nasif, which means "father of Nasif " in Arabic, is Mohammed.

"I have a plan," the Captain continues. "While he is meeting with you to give you the money, I'm going to blow up his house, create a vacant lot." He laughs. "That will teach him a lesson."

We make plans to meet in Los Angeles. I say I'll call him with a location. That after­noon I leave for the mainland. I don't even question the Captain's proposal to blow up this dude's house. It seems like a good idea at the time. Normal.

The Captain and I are to meet in the lobby bar at the Sheraton Senator Hotel at LAX. I arrive two hours before the appointed time and sit in the mezzanine with a view

of the front doors, through which 1 know the Captain will enter. This is the level of my paranoia. He arrives on time, walks in carrying a bulky black leather briefcase. He is short, maybe five-seven, wiry, in great shape, with thick horn-rimmed glasses and dark hair. He looks more like an accoun­tant than a highly trained warrior.

I keep an eye on the front doors to see if he has been followed. No shadv-looking characters who may be agents come in after the Captain. Satisfied he is clean. I go down the escalator and walk over to where he is sitting. Since our last meeting I have grown a beard and dyed my hair. When I approach his table, he doesn't recognize me at first.

"Ah, Richard," he says and stands. We shake hands. "You look different."

"Let's take a walk. My car's out back."

He leaves a bill on the table and picks up his black bag. We start back through the lobby toward the rear doors. When we are in the middle of the lobby, near the front desk. I look over and see what looks like hotel employees vaulting over the counter. Bellmen are drawing weapons. Desk clerks are running toward us with guns pointed at our heads. It's as if the entire staff of the hotel is made up of agents. 1 freeze and raise my hands. But the Captain, a serious martial artist, drops his bag and goes into a karate stance.

"He's got a gun!" I hear someone yell, and I think. Oh shit. They're going to blow us away.

"Take it easy!" I yell. "No guns!"

Three agents leap on the Captain and wrestle him to the floor. A stocky, well-built blond stands before me, flashing his badge.

"U.S. Marshals," he says. "You're under arrest."

They tuff me and lake me to an I.APD satellite station at the airport and lock me in a small room. After about an hour the blond marshal comes in and introduces himself: James Sullivan, the deputy U.S. marshal with the fugitive unit who ques­tioned V. at her mother's. Now I'm begin­ning to wonder if she set me up.

"You can call me Sully," he says. "I'm from Boston, like you. I've been tracking you for a long time now, pal, and I gotta tell ya, I'm sorry to see it end. You had a good run." He smiles. "Where's your girlfriend?"

"Who?"

He mentions V., but he doesn't say V. He uses her real name. "She's pretty cute. Smart kid. But 1 knew she was lying. I knew she knew where you were." He pauses and looks me over. "Who's the other guy?"

"What guy?"

"Your friend A." He uses the Captain's real name. "Fuckin' guy thinks he's Bruce Lee. He coulda got you both killed."

Sully sits down next to me. "You know what he had in that black bag?"

"What bag?"

"Plastic explosives," Sully says. "Rich, what's up? So now you're a terrorist?'

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"No? Let me tell you. Not only do we have you on the fugitive warrant for the Maine case, but you and your little pal there, Bruce Lee, are facing new charges: illegal posses­sion and transportation of explosives. That can get you another 15 years."

I say nothing. Sully shrugs, stands and leaves me alone to wonder who set me up.

V.? No way. I haven't spoken to her since 1 left her in Maui. She had no way of knowing where I was meeting the Captain. Then I figure it has to be the Captain. He's the only person who knew where we were going to meet. But (hen why the karate and explosives? Maybe they have his phone tapped, but I'm sure we never discussed where we were to meet over his phone; we made plans pay phone to pay phone. The agents had to have known the location well in advance in order lo posi­tion their people at the hotel as desk clerks and bellmen.

I am bewildered. Oddly relieved but totally perplexed.

About an hour later Sully returns.

"All right. Rich,' he says, "now I really want to know who the fuck that guy was."

"I can't help you."

"Seriously. Rich. Off the record. One Irish guy from Beantown to another. Who was that masked man?"

"I'm not Irish."

"Fuckin' limey then. C'mon. tell me. I won't give it up."

"If I knew, I'd tell you."

"You're lying, but that's okay. You know where he is now? Your friend? The kung fu master?"

"No."

"Not here. He's gone."

"Gone?"

"Yup. As in, he left. Some brass from the DOD came down here and waltzed him out. Generals. Fuckin' scrambled eggs on their shoulders, know what I mean? Big­wigs. Just like that. They even took his little bag of tricks. No charges. Like it never hap­pened. Like the guy doesn't exist."

I don't know what to say. "Sometimes the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing" is all I can come up with.

Sully laughs. "I'll say one thing for you, Rich. You've got big balls."

"Or," I say, "maybe I'm just crazy."

METROPOLITAN CORRECTIONAL CENTER, NEW YORK CITY

I get a crook's tour of our vast federal prison gulag as I am transported across the coun­try. This is the real Gon Air, known among convicts as diesel therapy. They truss me up in cuffs, leg irons and a device known as tin- black box—a hard plastic casement fit­ted over the handcuffs and linked to a belly chain that makes it impossible for me to move my hands. It takes three weeks, riding for hours on a slow-moving prison bus or on a desultory (light to some joint not necessar­ily on the way to where I am supposed to be going. Finally we arrive in New York.

There are jails—bad jails and not-as-bad jails—and then there is the Metropolitan Gorrectional Genter in downtown Man­hattan, otherwise known as the Criminal Hilton. Here is where the outlaw elite are summoned to face the almighty rule of the American criminal-justice system. It's a high-rise full of unregenerate dealers and squeal­ers, crooked correctional officers, flimflam artists and white-collar crooks, bank robbers, IRA soldiers, international arms dealers and professional assassins. Spies, Mafia bosses, Colombian drug lords, rogue CIA agents, Wall Street cowboys, international confi­dence men, Black Panthers, Weathermen. Every player of any stature in the world of international crime eventually does a stint at MCC in New York.

At first I am intimidated by the joint, but after a few weeks I fit right in.

One night I'm awakened in the early hours when the graveyard-shift cop opens my cell door and installs someone in my cell. I go back to sleep. A few hours later I am awakened again, this time by agonizing groans coming from my new cell mate as he sits on the toilet a foot from my head, sweating, moaning, taking what appears to be the most painful crap of his life.

It turns out not to be shit at all but rather shit: a plastic cylinder filled with Sicilian heroin he had shoved up his ass. He tells me he was busted at |FK on an old warrant, and they never found the stash of junk in his rectum.

I'm stunned. Here we are in jail, sitting on a huge stash of quality junk. In the words of the great prison novelist Edw ard Bunker, possession of that tube of smack gives me and my new cellie the power of the gods. A tiny match head in each nostril, and I am ready for whatever the feds have in store for me.