Richard Stratton - Smuggler : A True Story of Marijuana, the Hippie Mafia and One of America’s Most Wanted International Drug Traffickers

ALSO BY RICHARD STRATTON:

Smack Goddess

Slam: The Book (editor, with Kim Wozencraft)

Altered States of America: Outlaws and Icons, Hitmakers and Hitmen

First published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin in 2016

First published in the United States as Smugglers Blues in 2016 by Arcade Books, a division of Skyhorse, Inc.

Copyright Richard Stratton 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

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Australia

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Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

from the National Library of Australia

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ISBN 9781760293468
eISBN 9781952534348

A smuggler works from inclination, from passion. He is on the one side an artist. He risks everything, runs terrible dangers; he is cunning, invents dodges and gets out of scrapes, and sometimes acts with a sort of inspiration. It is a passion as strong as gambling.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

CONTENTS

Smuggler is based on my fifteen-year career as a player in the so-called hippie mafia, importing and distributing marijuana and hashish. Some of the names, locations, and the timeline of events have been altered to protect the identities of those who were never captured and may still be active in the marijuana underground.

This book is dedicated to those unjustly tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison for trafficking in a God-given plant. Free the prisoners of the War on Plants.

Phillips, Maine, April 1980

DAWN COMES EARLY this time of year. Particularly up here in the North Country. Its four in the morning. Bright stars still visible in deep velvet skies tinged crimson along the eastern horizon. Red sky in morning, smugglers take warning.

The GMC dually rumbles into motion down the gravel driveway. I love this truck; with the plush, roomy crew cab, its like driving along the road in your living room. I always buy American, patriot that I am, and my motto is: When in doubt, buy a truck. Hit the play button on the stereo. Neil Youngs Powderfinger: Look out, Mama, theres a white boat comin up the river blasts from six speakers. I substitute my own lyrics: Look out, Mama, theres a big bird comin up the river...

Or maybe not. You never know how real anything is in this business. Be prepared, thats the Boy Scout motto. Not that I was ever a Boy Scout; got kicked out of Cub Scouts. The pack leader was a pervert, and I called him on it. None of the adults believed me. Still, my Yankee WASP work ethic, drilled into me by my maternal grandmother, Ethel Lowell BurnhamBa Ba, we called herdemands that I do my job to the utmost of my ability even if everyone around me is fucking up. Anything worth doing, Ba Ba would tell me, is worth doing right. And she was always right, lived long enough to know.

Its a short drive from the farm down Wheeler Hill and along Toothaker Pond Road to the river. My big white Alsatian shepherd, Karamazov, doesnt like rock music as much as I do. He sticks his head out the window and lets the soft spring air fold back his ears. I need the music loud. Most people in this part of the world are still asleep and Ive already taken a couple of hits off the oily, resin-soaked roach I left in the ashtray on the kitchen table back at the farm. To say Im high and nervous doesnt come close to describing how I feel. Im plagued by fear. Terrified. Freaked-the-fuck-out. Just the way I like it.

Not simply fear of arrest, though that is always with me. Not fear of failure, either. No, it is a deep-seated dread that everything they have always said about me is true: Youre a bad kid, Rickie Stratton. A troublemaker. A juvenile delinquent. You may even be a sociopath. And that shit you smoke, that music you listen to, is only going to make you worse. They being the Authorities: adults, teachers, principals, probation officers, cops, judges, and shrinks. Lawyers. My big fear is that I am proving them right. I am a failure at everything except crime. The only way I know to soothe this runaway fear is to keep assuring myself they are wrong and what I am doing is right.

My ground crew is bivouacked at the lodge, set on a low hill beside the trout pond a stones throw from the river. Who would have expected that a place like this exists only a few miles down the road from the horse farm I own with the novelist Norman Mailer? Yes, that Mailer. The enfant terrible of American literature. Who lately has been calling himself Aquarius. One could argue its all his fault. When I read his work in college, I sensed he was writing about me. Mailer bought the farm with Channing Godfried, a former Kennedy speechwriter and whiz kid who quit the Johnson administration over the Vietnam War. That was ten years ago. They paid twenty grand for the house, ramshackle barn, and 160 acres of land on the side of a rocky hill with a view of Mount Blue across the valley. I was living in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with Anas, my wife, renovating a home, waiting for a load. There I met and became friends with Mailer. He heard I had access to good weed. Mailer and Godfried hired me to fix up the farm. When I began to make serious money, I bought them out.

My mouth is cotton dry from nerves and reefer. There is a spring beside the private road that leads into the lodge. I stop the dually. Karamazov and I get out. He laps up the water with his long pink tongue, and I fill a jug, take several cool swallows to soothe my throat and drown the butterflies in my belly. This is the best water I have ever tasted, gurgling up from deep in the ground, fresh, clean, full of minerals, and uncontaminated by human technology. Its Mother Earth offering up her vital liquid to wash clean the stain of civilization.

The lodge was vacant and run down when we took it over. A relative by marriage, fellow scammerI call him by his nickname, Jonathan Livingston Seagulla pilot, discovered this place while out trail-riding on a motorcycle. He came back to the farm and said, Youll never guess what I found down by the river. Local lore has it that the lodge and airstrip were built back in the 1940s by John Fox, a self-made millionaire from South Boston, former owner of the long defunct Boston Post newspaper. Fox was a friend and business partner of Joseph P. Kennedy, father of JFK. Gloria Swanson supposedly stayed at the lodge occasionally while she was having her affair with Joe Kennedy. At one point Fox owned 7,000 acres of land in this valley. He carved out the mile-long airstrip in the woods beside the river so he could fly up from Boston on weekends. Across the river he built a fourteen-room lodge on a spring-fed pond he stocked with trout. When we discovered the place, it was owned by a shady New Jersey developer who had fallen on hard times and wanted to sell. My partners and I bought the property in the name of a company that is wholly owned by a shell offshore corporation. Amascontee Lodge and Flying Club we call it, named after the Native American tribe that hunted these woods before the white man came.