Matt Taibbi - The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing

2021 Matt Taibbi

Published by OR Books, New York and London
Visit our website at www.orbooks.com

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.

First printing 2020

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset by Lapiz Digital Services. Printed by BookMobile, USA, and CPI, UK.

paperback ISBN 978-1-68219-403-4 ebook ISBN 978-1-68219-404-1

CONTENTS

AUTHORS NOTE

This is a work of fiction, inspired by truth.

In real life, there is a person like Huey Carmichael. He keeps rules. I knew this person for a while before I learned about his other life.

The real Huey knows more than a thing or two about the weed business. The part about him always having a square job is also true. There are some employers who would be shocked to learn that one of their own has a hobby this extensive.

I should say, had. Huey is out of the game now.

Many of the observations and thoughts described in here are real. Everything else is fictionalized. We wanted to preserve his voice and point of view without delving too deeply into real events. Any resemblance to real people in this story is coincidental.

Matt Taibbi

PREFACE

You gotta have a code.

There has to be stuff you wont do. Like: I wont sell anything that doesnt grow out of the ground. If you make it in a lab or a trailer that might explode, I dont want shit to do with it.

Most dealers, no joke, learn their jobs from movies. They watch and re-watch Paid in Full or Blow or The Wire or New Jack City or a half-dozen other films. Now with Netflix there are more, from Ozark to Justified to Narcos. Theres some influence from music, too, from songs like Ten Crack Commandments by Biggie, to others by Berner, Young Dolph, Cyhi the Prince, and even Jay-Z.

But when I was younger, there was almost nothing for guidance. And this bothered me. I thought, There has to be a better way to learn this game.

So I made it my business to create rules. I kept them all in my head, hundreds of them, and added to and tweaked them over the years.

Im only writing them down now.

Like: Get your money and get out. Time is not on your side. Sooner or later, your run is going to end. Youll be dead or in jail, as the clich goes.

You have to be perfect 100 percent of the time. The police only have to get lucky once.

They werent lucky with me.

I got out.

CHAPTER 1

Keep your spot to yourself.

As soon as I pull into my driveway, I see Brutus coming.

Yo, Huey! he says, starting to cross the street.

Oh, shit. Brutus will talk your fucking head off if you let him.

Hes an OG, maybe sixty to sixty-five years old, Blood-affiliated. Hes bald, swole, has muscles on muscles, and is terrifying to look at. His bodys ripped, with tats crawling up his neck and face, but he walks with a limp.

Hes waiting for settlement money after getting hit by a city bus. Hes always bitching about it. He thinks his lawyers are fucking him on the deal and always wants to tell you all about it. You can lose an hour if you let him get started.

I step out of my ten-year-old Toyota Corolla, a nothing car you wouldnt notice. Thats the point: nobody looks at it twice. The minute I put my first fifty pounds in its trunk, that Toyota paid for itself. I turn around.

Brutus, I say. Whats up?

Nothing, blood, I just havent seen you. How you been?

When Brutus talks, every third word out of his mouth is blood. Its always, Listen, blood, Im telling you, blood... A few times Ive had to actually cut him off with that. I dont want there to be a misunderstanding, for me to get blessed in by mistake, like Im a Blood too just by him saying it so many times.

Also, just to make an observation, Brutus does not wear a shirt 100 percent of the time hes out of his house. Hes not wearing one now.

Brutus, man, I say, I dont mean to be rude, but I just came back for a minute. I dont have time for a conversation. Whats going on?

You got my text?

I do have one phone I use, although rarely, and never for business.

Anybody who uses phones, theyre going down. Phone tapping is the most basic technique cops use. What theyre not on is the encryption. I havent used phones since Obamas first term. We were using BlackBerries back then.

Having Brutus as a neighbor is a relationship that cuts both ways. He keeps an eye on my place. If he sees anyone creeping around he doesnt recognize, hell text me. But it took a long time to get him to stop asking for weed on the phone. Now if he wants something, hell text me an asterisk. Not much of an improvement, but a step in the right direction.

I look at my phone. There, a few days old, is an asterisk.

Gonna take me a day, I say.

Thats cool, blood, thats cool.

He reaches over and slips fifty in my pocket. I dont look down. The man is older than me, so I dont like to count money in front of him. I dont disrespect him like that. I dont like that power dynamic.

All right, I say, eyes forward. Let me get with these white boys. Ill be back tomorrow.

I could give him an ounce right then, but I want him thinking Im broke, or near it. He thinks Ive got a square jobwhich I do, I always do, thats one of my rules, always have a joband that I have some white friends I buy from. Close to the truth, but not quite.

In reality, in my house, just a dozen or so yards away, Ive got a Tupperware cabinet thats just full of weed. Out in the big, West Coast city where I live, you buy what they call growers pounds, and growers pounds are always over a half an ounce to an ounce.

A traditional East Coast pound is 448 grams. A growers pound might be 456, something like that. Its a heavy pound. But I just take the extras off all those growers pounds, and thats what I give to him.

But I wait a day. I let Brutus go back to his house. I let night fall. I go out for a drive in the morning. I come back. I see him, like he often is, on his front steps doing jailhouse push-ups on a diagonalfeet on the sidewalk, hands on the stoop. I let him look up and see me pull into the driveway. He gets up from his porch and limps over again with that same big smile on his face.

Now I hand him the ounce or whatever.

Yo, blood, thank you, blood, thank you, he says, and starts to cry.

Brutus cries every time I see him, because he gets so emotional about how happy he is that I help him.

Thats all right, Brutus.

No seriously, Huey, bloodlook at me, dog, Im tearing up.

Its okay. Well talk later, all right?

He waves, still sniffling, and drags his massive body back to his stoop.

And thats every time I come home, too, because Brutus is always home, every single day. Hes got shit else to do. He used to sell crack, big time. He went to prison a while back, because he got caught with a couple ounces of it. But he convinced the prosecutor that he was a user and not a seller, so they reduced his time.