To my credit, I never believed that I “deserved” what I had when I had it. Similarly, I never believed that I could “take it with me”. Do the job, enjoy the lifestyle, and do the time if and when was pretty much my whole philosophy of life during the five years that I was a millionaire pot smuggler.
I’m surprised that on some level it always seemed temporary to me, but still, if I was even just leaving the house to run a few chores around town it was automatic to stick at least two grand in my pocket (small bills because large bills stand out more at the gas station, and large bills are easier for moving large sums of cash over long distances so save them). Hey, if someone I was stopping in on had just gotten a pound or two of Thai sticks in the mail I wasn’t going to let one of my competitors be the one to walk out with them. And, of course, we were always stopping at banks to buy rolls of quarters because we were still in the era of coin pay phones, and the home phone only existed so that family could drop their messages on the answering machine.
On commercial flights carrying anything over fifty thousand (no matter what denominations or how it was packed) just exceeded my personal comfort zone. Others disagreed with me, and some got away with some crazy shit (it still being the Seventies and all) but I also knew a guy who had himself and $3.5 million in the luggage compartment hauled off of a United Airlines flight.
I wired many thousands more on Western Union than I ever even should have tried for, but my luck held there. On the other hand we went one time too many with airline package express out of the same ticket counter, and the agent snagged herself $18,000 that there was just no sane way to retrieve. The room cleaner that lifted $5,000 from my open suitcase when she moved through my “Do Not Disturb” doorknob sign, however, believed me when I told her that the money needed to be put back in place by the time I got back from having a few snacks and cocktails at the bar. Such are the vagaries of life in “the underground economy”.
Not bragging or anything, but do you know that thousand dollar bills are real (and can be real convenient, but that’s neither here nor there)? When the guys in our “company” needed stuff done in Europe (banking, dummy corporations, etc.) I always got the call because I was the only one with a law degree. So, one time I was in Lichtenstein and got a call about some money (not a lot, but still) that was in a Swiss bank account and had just gotten required to be in the U.S. immediately. When the teller told me that only part of the $55,000 withdrawal could be had in thousands on the spot, but that they could arrange for the rest shortly, I told her that I would be happy to return after a short lunch break (and not only were there no managers involved in this, but the young lady actually apologized to me for the inconvenience). Man, the only way to smuggle cash from Europe to the U.S. is when it fits in your jacket packet, and doesn’t even make a bulge.
And then, of course, sometimes we might be banking offshore, but a bit closer to home. As was the case when there was $350,000 that just needed to find a home in a new Cayman Island bank account on very short notice. This one only required me to break the speed limit in order to get to the Salt Lake airport in time to catch the flight that would land in Ft.Lauderdale just before the scheduled departure of the Lear Jet that had been chartered to do the C.I run. My buddy met me on the commercial side of the airport, drove me over to the private terminal, handed me a medium sized suitcase, and I started to chalk this one up in my mind as complete. But, no! I hadn’t much more than finished the shrimp tray and a bottle of really good champagne, and then been whisked through C.I. Customs (successfully I thought) when I was being royally reamed out by the Lear Jet pilot (a legend in his own right, but that’s a different story) for making him an object of disrespect. Harvey let me know, in no uncertain terms, that the guys in the Customs shack had ridiculed him up one side and down the other over that being the smallest delivery that they had ever been paid to ignore. And Harvey made it perfectly clear that, while we might be his favorite customers, he was not about to jeopardize his reputation and his business for a bunch of white punks on dope.
But the craziest to me was the time I got talked into taking a load of bags and boxes of cash (the back end of an SUV full) through the lobby, onto the elevator, and into the counting office of some obscure bank outfit around down town Miami. I wasn’t even sure what that was all about but I trusted the guy who told me that it would help him and wouldn’t hurt me.
To conclude, then, the most cash that I personally ever directly and knowingly possessed was $2,000,000. One mil in the hard bodied American Tourister in my right hand, and likewise on the other side. (And the guy that left the stash house at the same time, carried just one bag, went rogue, and lived to tell about it. But that’s another story.)
And there you have it. I was always nothing and had at least two million dollars cash in my hands at one time. And that was in a world so long ago, and so far away from this one. People, extrapolate. Please extrapolate. In the War on Drugs, we’re not talking mere millions. Hell, we’ve obviously even long since blown past billions. We're obviously someplace in the area of trillions of dollars, cumulatively on a worldwide basis, and we don’t even have a clue where.
Right now we’re fighting a “War” against ourselves, with stakes we can’t even begin to calculate, and we don’t even begin to think twice.
What the hell is that?