Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer Read Online Free PDF Page B

standing by, as one of them flashed his airport police badge at Bishop and me. Our apprehension was a surprisingly civilized affair, involving no handcuffs. The other passengers in the terminal paid little if any attention as the detectives marched us back to a small room off a corridor in the terminal, where they opened our suitcases. The police officers seemed unsurprised as they discovered the weed. They removed it and carefully stacked the red-wrapped bricks on the desk. They interrogated us for a while, until they determined that the weed was destined for Canada rather than the U.S. At first they seemed certain that we had an inside contact working at JFK , who had put the bags on the wrong baggage turnstile. When satisfied that we had no inside contacts, the airport police consulted amongst themselves with resigned shrugs and came to the same conclusion that I did. An airport worker had spotted our bags and had tried to reroute them for a later pickup.
    Bishop and I were charged with possession of narcotics with intent to traffic, trafficking, and interstate transportation of fruit, the latter charge relating to the limes we had placed in the suitcases to cover any smell. The cops found the remainder of a gram of coke in my wallet that the nice folks at Ali Baba had laid on us. The boys at Ali Baba did not deal in blow but had copped the coke for me as a favour. But the American cops wanted to know all about that coke. The cops played the usual head games to get Bishop and me to talk. They threatened us with five years in jail. They told us that our suppliers had set us up in order to take the heat off themselves, while they smuggled off another load. It did not take long to figure out that the cops were not at all interested in pursuing the marijuana trail. They were, however, keenly interested in the half gram of blow in my wallet that they later told me was one hundred percent pure cocaine. They offered Bishop and me a deal. Set up a coke buy for a kilo or two and they would spring us out of there. The thought wastempting and we told the cops we would think about their offer.
    While they waited for our answer, Bishop and I were sent over to the Federal Detention Headquarters in New York City. We took the bus with no windows across town to a six story brick building that looked like it was built at the turn of the last century. There we were processed in and taught a little dance I called the Prison Polka. “Strip naked. Put your clothes on the counter. Step forward. Hands in the air. Spread your fingers. Open your mouth. Lift your tongue. Run your hands through your hair. Turn around. Lift your feet. Bend over. Spread your cheeks. Okay stand up and get back in line.”
    Once we were processed into the holding centre, the clock stopped until Bishop and I gave the cops our decision about helping them. It would have been totally unfair, of course, to set our Ali Baba crew up for a coke sting. They had been nothing but fair and honourable with us and they had made clear from the start that they did not deal in coke. But I came up with a plan to play along with the cops and then escape to Mexico when they brought us down to Phoenix for the sting. After some discussion with others in our cellblock, Bishop and I realized that we would not be staying in hotels and set free to run around loose in Arizona. They would watch us like hawks and we’d be housed in the local jail until we could be set like Judas goats upon our friends. After three days of agonizing arguments and rebuttals between the two of us, Bishop and I finally called the cops and told them no deal. We would bite the bullet and do our time. Bishop, who was single and who had attended boarding school in New York, accepted the decision more easily than I did. For me it meant living apart from my wife, family and friends in a strange state several hundred miles from home. I would be residing in a cellblock with a racial mix that consisted of twenty blacks and ten