Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (60 page)

But sometimes you’re wired so high that you can smoke a lot of marijuana and not feel much at all. The adrenalin in your blood is so extremely high it really doesn’t affect you, and you smoke it more out of habit than anything else.

You know, if you’re really good at smuggling you can make far more money than Mick Jagger can make. The strange thing about it is, the bigger you are, and the heavier you are, the less known you are. So it’s sort of like you’re the mirror image of a successful pop figure like a novelist, rock star, or sports figure. Just like a rock star gets a kick out of turning on the radio in his car and hearing one of his songs being played, a smuggler gets a kick out of going over to some friend’s house and lighting up some dope and realizing that through seven hands he’s now smoking the same dope that he smuggled in two months ago. You know your dope; you recognize your own dope.

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IFE
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Have you ever smoked dope with a narc?

FORCADE
: Yeah, a couple of times, unfortunately.

H
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Did you enjoy getting high with him?

FORCADE
: In retrospect, no. It was extremely unpleasant to think that I had been, you know, in their presence and at ease and really conversing with them and being, as I found out later, tape-recorded by them.

H
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:
Oh, you didn’t know they were narcs at the time?

FORCADE
: Oh, no. You mean knowingly with a narc? No. I would never pal around with such people. Some people think that you can outsmart them, but I would never be chummy with them because they don’t have to be smarter than you to bust you. They are also very inclined to grossly distort what you might say and do under such circumstances. It’s best to stay away from them.

H
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Who is the toughest lawman you ever met?

FORCADE
: I never met the toughest lawman that I ever heard of because I was a little tougher and I managed to evade him. But I was once involved in a manhunt wherein the police were quite persistent. We had a plane which was spotted coming in and making a landing, and the police moved into the area, surrounded the plane and swooped in. We went off into the desert and hid out for about a week.

H
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What’s the most amount of bail you ever put up?

FORCADE
: $100,000 per person for five people.

H
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Any of them jump bond?

FORCADE
: Yeah, all of them jumped bond. Occasionally that’s what you have to do. I never let anybody rot in jail. Nobody’s ever been abandoned in anything I’ve been involved with.

H
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Did you ever break out of a jail?

FORCADE
: Yeah. I’ve broken out of jail. I’ve broken other people out of jail.

H
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What was your most dramatic jailbreak?

FORCADE
: Some friends of mine were transporting some dope in the southwest, and they got nabbed in Texas in a small town. They got pulled over for a traffic violation, and they searched the truck and found a thousand pounds of marijuana. Naturally there was a car following the truck to make sure nothing happened. They saw the truck get busted and so an operation was mounted. There were two guys. We were able to bail one guy out because he didn’t have any previous arrests, but the other person had some previous raps that he had jumped bail on, so they were holding him. He pretended to get sick and they put him in the local county hospital and chained him to the bed with handcuffs. We went in, pretending to be visitors, and sawed the chains and the handcuffs and brought him clothes and he walked out with us.

H
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What was the largest bribe you ever paid?

FORCADE
: $10,000. I’ve also given them my own guns, my watch, my passport. In one case we gave them our plane – not voluntarily, but, you know, you give them anything they want. Once you get back to the States you can always make it back.

H
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Any suggestions to someone who finds themselves in a foreign prison?

FORCADE
: Don’t expect any justice, you know. Get somebody to buy out. Don’t be a wise ass either. You’re in serious trouble once you fall into the hands of the authorities. Proclaiming your rights and stuff is very irrelevant to these people. Buy your way out, if possible. Get to someone with political power.

H
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Have you ever seen anyone tortured by DEA agents in foreign prisons?

FORCADE
: I’ve heard of this happening, but it’s never happened to me. In smuggling circles there are stories of DEA agents shooting down planes, of planes being shot down in the course of smuggling, of people caught in the process of smuggling being executed summarily, down on the other end. They don’t do it up here, but down there they feel fairly free to pull a lot of shit that they would never dream of doing inside the United States.

H
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What do you think will happen to you if dope is decriminalized?

FORCADE
: Decriminalization would make my business better than ever. But legalization, I don’t know. But smugglers tend to be very international by nature, and although there may be legalization in some countries there won’t be in others. Marijuana use is spreading very widely. People have a greater need for psychological stimulation and mind expansion, and the worldwide appetite is growing.

If wheat was brought into this country the same way that marijuana is brought in, the price of bread would be very high. And in the future our economy won’t be able to support this kind of economic waste. If 20 percent of our imports were taken out to the city dump and burned under armed guard as they do with one-fifth of the marijuana, our country would be in even worse economic shape than it is now. As our balance of payments gets worse and our dollar gets devalued, the cost of doing this is going to be more and more.

H
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Have you ever flown or taken a boatload of your stuff across the Bermuda Triangle?

FORCADE
: It’s a weird area, there’s no question about it. You’re sailing along one minute and everything is groovy, and the next minute you’re upside down.

H
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Do you believe in an afterlife?

FORCADE
: I hope to come back as a marijuana plant, over and over and over again.

H
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Have you ever deliberately sold bad dope and made an immoral profit?

FORCADE
: I’ve sold a lot of bad dope, but that’s because it’s so hard to take it back. But I’ve also been involved in actually smuggling dope back across the border because it was so bad. In Mexico. You don’t do this with Colombian. Although we’ve actually sent back boatloads of Colombian dope that was bad. It occasionally happens, but it’s very rare. If you send back a boatload of Colombian right off a freight it’s going to take a lot of smoothing over with the connection. But bad dope moves so much more slowly. Everyone’s more dissatisfied. You may not get your money back. It leaves a bad feeling all the way along the line, whereas good dope melts away instantaneously. I’ve had to sell it. I felt bad about it, but it still gets you high and no one is being forced to buy it. It’s a pretty open market and people apparently found it more desirable than the alternative, which is no dope at all or more expensive dope. To some extent you’re measured by the quality of dope you smoke, so people are loath to have bad dope. But it still gets you high, you know, and that is what it’s about, isn’t it? Isn’t that more important than the false ego consideration?

H
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Have you had much trouble with organized marijuana-smuggling syndicates that make huge payoffs at high levels in order to bring in huge amounts of very mediocre dope?

FORCADE
: I’ve encountered these people’s representatives down in Colombia paying bribes and I’ve been aware of their operations up here, but hopefully one would no more cross these people than one would cross the police. It’s sort of like the same thing. I think that on a few occasions we fell foul of these people at the other end and they fingered us. It’s more a phenomenon you see at the other end than at this end, but we lost dope as a result. But it’s certainly a factor. They don’t like what we’re doing because our dope is better and usually cheaper for its quality, so we tend to undermine the market a bit. But it’s such a wide open market that it’s not that much a factor. The problem is that since the government’s paid off not to touch the big guys, they’re then free to bust the little guys. That’s the nature of government corruption.

H
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Did you find it necessary to take extreme measures?

FORCADE
: I can afford to drop $10,000 on somebody and lose it. I’m not going to turn a $10,000 debt into a murder rap. I’m not into dropping bodies in the bay and stuff. Other people who are more bitter and can afford such losses less will catch up with those people soon enough and I’m always happy to pass along their address. I think that when you’re in a scene like this you’re protected by your circle of friends; they’re your wall against the outside world. And if no one cares that you get busted you’re in bad shape and if you’ve been so unrighteous that people want you to get busted, it won’t be long before you will get busted or killed.

H
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Does this mean that there’s a chance a smuggler such as you might find it expedient to snitch on somebody at some time?

FORCADE
: You mean, if someone’s a rat, do you drop a dime on them? Yeah, I’ve heard of that. I’ve heard of people being fingered, because they were rotten people and they had done terrible things and they betrayed the trust of everyone around them and they deserved to be taken off the set and the police were the best people to do it. But usually one avoids this because the rotten person, once they get in jail, will then turn around and finger everyone they know.

I think I’ve gotten this far and I’ve stayed out of jail this long because I try to be as honest as possible. I mean, by the standards of the industry I’m very honest. I wouldn’t claim to be 100 percent honest. That would be dishonest.

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Have you always wanted to see just how much you could get away with?

FORCADE
: In smuggling circles, to some extent one’s prestige is based on the amount of marijuana that one has brought in, or is bringing in, or is involved with. But there’s also a tendency to keep going and going until you get caught, until you get hit so hard that you’re just knocked out real good. You get addicted to the rush of doing it. Smuggling is addictive, definitely addictive. It’s more addictive than heroin. It’s the heaviest game around.

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What’s the most you’ve ever been ripped off for?

FORCADE
: About a million and a half dollars. I got cut out of my share of a smuggling run.

H
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Is it possible to net a million dollars on a score?

FORCADE
: It’s common, but it’s no more common than getting busted. You know, the two things can often follow each other. I think (having done it a number of times) that it takes a lot out of you. Psychologically you feel utterly and completely drained after a run. Someone who’s done five or six big runs is like a seventy-year-old person. It’s all combat conditions; it’s all battlefield psychology. You can end up with shell shock. You can end up punchy from it. Any little incident, chance, can wipe out months of work and millions of dollars.

I don’t think that most smugglers are into it full time, because I don’t think most people could really take the pressure of being into it full time, and I think one of the purposes of smuggling is to make enough money to lay back for a while. I also think the nature of smuggling is an orgiastic kind of thing where you build up to it, you do it, and you know, you lay back for a while.

H
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:
How do you feel about the sexual options that your charisma as a smuggler offers you?

FORCADE
: The nature of this business works against sexual satisfaction in that you really don’t want to get involved in a one-night stand because you can’t afford to get involved with strangers. They get in the way of your activities and so on. Or maybe I’m just telling myself that.

On the other hand, long-term involvement is also difficult because you can’t really promise someone you’re not going to be busted or killed tomorrow. It’s not the kind of life a woman wants to settle down with. What I’m really looking for is a lady smuggler to share my life with me, but I haven’t found anybody like that.

H
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:
Is smuggling pretty male-dominated?

FORCADE
: It’s very male-dominated. The skills smuggling entails are taught mostly to males, but more and more women are getting into it. Women have played critical roles, of course, in coke smuggling. There’s a certain type of male who psychologically gets off on the idea of using women to smuggle coke.