Snowblind

Sabbag Robert

Description

Snowblind is the true story of Zachary Swan, an American smuggler, whose intricate and ingenious scams made him one of the most revered and legendary figures in the cocaine world of the late Sixties and Seventies. For a few breathless years he ran rings around the police and customs officials. From New York to Colombia, Swan enthusiastically plied his trade. Robert Sabbag's riveting account of Swan's brief career provides a compulsive insight into the cocaine underworld in which all the double-dealing, crazy characters and over-the-shoulder paranoia are captured brilliantly. The result is one of the funniest and most illuminating books about drugs ever written ... a genuine underground classic. This new edition is published as a companion to Robert Sabbag's blockbusting new book on pioneer marijuana smuggler Alan Long, Smokescreen, and comes with a specially commissioned introduction by another legendary smuggler: Howard Marks, aka Mr Nice.

Sujets

• True crime

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 02 février 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781847674135
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Praise for Snowblind


‘All you need for successful communion with the white powder’ Financial Times


‘A triumphant piece of reporting’ The New Yorker


‘A witty, intelligent, fiercely stylish, drug-induced exemplary tale' Los Angeles Times


‘One of the most dazzling and spectacular pieces of reporting I have ever read’ Nora Ephron


‘Unputdownable . . . the best book ever written about cocaine’ Loaded


‘Sabbag's vintage hard-boiled reportage flows like fiction’ Heat


‘Read it for its speed prose, its dazzling description of "the operation", its redemptive ending and its joy in life’ Untold

For Thomas J. Butler Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit …
The publisher would like to say a big thanks to Chris Sullivan who first recommended this book. Here’s to that session in The Wag.
CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
BREAKAWAY
1 Indian Summer
2 Talking to Boswell
3 Brownsville Breakdown
4 After Math
5 Aesthetics and Anaesthetics
GOING SOUTH
6 A Rainy Day in Santa Marta
7 A Way with the Spoon
8 Snowbound in Carthage
9 The Carpenter Said Nothing But …
10 Alkaloid Annie / Power of the Press
11 Horse Latitudes
12 Why Did You Write My Name in the Snow?
RUNNING BLIND
13 Back to the Border
14 Journey of the Magi
15 Blues in the Bottle
16 The Hawk and the Hired Man
17 After the Fox
EPILOGUE
1 New York
2 South America
APPENDICES
1 Qu ludes
2 Credit Cards and Traveler’s Checks
3 Mexican Brown
4 Speed
5 Marijuana Abroad
6 A Swan Lexicon
7 Colombia and Big Business
8 Airline Security
9 Day of Judgment
Author's Note
Afterword
Index
INTRODUCTION
Howard Marks
Snowblind made me and a million other scammers feel totally at one with our profession, and I am greatly honoured to be asked to write an introduction to this re-issue.
I obviously wanted to re-read it. My copy had long disappeared in one of many busts, so I called a host of friends, libraries, and bookshops in what became an increasingly difficult search. Eventually, Olaf Tyaransen of Dublin’s Hot Press temporarily parted with his copy, and I determined to discover just how much, if any, Robert Sabbag’s book had dated in almost two decades.
I was travelling by train to London after a mad one in Manchester and I fished out Snowblind . In no time, I was wondering why I hadn’t made a point of re-reading it years sooner. I blamed availability. There was so much I’d forgotten (an occupational hazard): the insightful articulation of how scamming is no more than a combination of waiting and winging it, preceded by the most labyrinthine of plans, fall backs, and security procedures, all somehow executed by personnel well off their trolleys; the explanation of how cocaine use was probably the most important factor in enabling America to understand the metric system; and most of all, the definition of dope, ‘Nature’s way of saying high’.
I was in the only carriage that allowed smoking. Dope-heads were bonding with yellow-haired old ladies, pipe-smoking gentry, and stressed-out executives. Lights and skins were shared with grace and pleasure. I smoked a joint.


A million centuries ago, plants said ‘High’ to animals. Roots and seeds seduced tongues and stomachs. Vine, leaf, and resin interplayed with hand, heart, and mind. Drinking, smelling, and sucking were the order, but not the regulation, of the day.
And Nature said, ‘Higher’.
A pyramid here and a pyramid there.
Gargling, sniffing, smoking, puking, and starving for God, Siva, and the Sun. Who’ll have the booze? Who’ll have the blow? Who’ll have a line? Who gets the fun?
‘I’ve got the dope. But stick to my brand. Use any other dope, and I’ll kill you. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. That fruity stuff is verboten.’
Nature asked, ‘Why?’
So fuck you, and let’s smuggle cider into the Garden of Eden? Adam’s apples are shite. Eve’s cool. She calls it a SCAM. Smuggling Cocaine, Alcohol and Marijuana. But is the Snake a grass?


A legacy of murderous priests, psychopathic megalomaniacs, bloodthirsty colonialist rapists, sadistic puritans, non-inhalers, and other manifestations of sinister evil have ensured that chemically induced changes of states of mind are rewarded by imprisonment and other socially acceptable forms of torture. The Society of Satanic Spoilsports feel comforted by our suffering. Our happiness disturbs them. Congratulations to alcohol. It’s done well in the rat race for the survival of the fittest psychoactive. But not without God’s creative efforts in blood transfusion: the wine of Christ: ‘Do this and forget your short-term memory problem.’
Murdering Spanish bullies fronted up as God’s servants and discovered that Indians from the Andes had been chewing coca leaves for three thousand years, getting high, and not getting come-down hangovers. Were Catholic priests really convinced that the effects of the leaf resulted from a pact between the devil and the Indians? Not really, but nothing haunts fraudulent missionaries more than heathens getting high. The Indians worked harder when stoned, so coca didn’t bother purveyors of the Protestant work ethic as Nature said, ‘High. But it’s a lie.’


The Satanic Spoilsports saw the workers were in too good a groove. They didn’t lose their breath, didn’t feel tired, didn’t feel hungry, and felt very sexy. And what was worse, they shared their highs with Blacks. Bang them away. Lock them up. Call them murderers, rapists, and friends, except Uncle Tom. Nature said, ‘Try.’


So how can we get the leaves we want, the herbs we want, the grapes we want. Nature said, ‘Lie.’


And it came to pass that the world became full of scammers. Never before have so many laws been broken without a single pang of conscience. False names, forged passports, phoney driving licences, money laundering, tax evasion, customs dodging, stolen vehicles, illegal planes, false documents, lies, lies, and lots more new lies. Who cares? It’s all for the cause. It’s not our fault they won’t let people get high. Anyway, the world of international dope dealing is fun. It’s fucking great!


I began my dope smuggling career in the late ’60s. Twenty years later, I was busted by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and was looking at life in prison. Had I not been busted until 1993, the same quantity of dope would have guaranteed me the federal death penalty by lethal injection. Zachary Swan, the paradigm of dope dealers and central character of Snowblind , would have also been sentenced to death had he performed his scams today rather than in the seventies.


An early copy of Snowblind was personally delivered to me by a New York dope dealer on December 31st, 1979. It could have been Zachary Swan. It wasn’t. He was called Billy Bronx. But Billy Bronx and I had just landed fifteen tons of Colombia’s finest weed on a remote Scottish island. Short-wave radios, walkie-talkies, scanners, nightscopes, Zodiacs, pulleys, anoraks, thermals, jeeps, ropes, formed a new tidemark as a mountain of marijuana heaved out of the sea near Holy Loch, the bastion of British/American defence. The Loch Ness monster had turned into the marijuana Messiah from the Highlands. The ’90s will be cool. Carter’s compassion will take care of Thatcher’s brass. ‘We’d better start the next scam before they legalise the shit,’ said Billy Bronx. ‘Read this when you’re chilling out, Man. It’s on toot, not reefer, but it’s really about us kind of guys. It’s the only book that has ever been written about scamming. It will always be the best one.’


Within months, I could not meet a dealer of any dope who was not reading (or had not already read) Snowblind . It became the scammer’s Bible. Hunter S. Thompson and the book’s reviewers have said the rest.


Then came the Satanic Years, the rule of Reagan, Major Thatcher, and the inappropriately named Bush. ‘Don’t smoke. Don’t sniff. Don’t swallow. Just say "No", followed by, "Don’t even read about it. Don’t say ‘Know’." It’s no longer literature if it’s about scamming.’
Consequently, many English language libraries and book-shelves have had glaring omissions. Primarily through the extraordinarily talented writing of Irvine Welsh, true tales of drug culture are now occasionally permitted by the mainstream. There’s a long way to go: people are still being incarcerated for writing informative books on the horticulture of naturally occurring therapeutic herbs, and all kinds of scammers are writing their accounts. As predicted by Billy Bronx, Snowblind has stood the test of time. It’s still the best.

Breakaway


ONE:
Indian Summer
Zachary Swan is not a superstitious man, but he is a very careful one. Like any professional gambler, he has survived by taking only calculated risks. So, in October of 1972, when he decided to throw a party to celebrate his most recent return to New York, he decided to throw a small one, and his caution was inspired less by the fact that it was Friday the thirteenth than by the compelling reality that on the mantelpiece above his suitcase there were three and a half kilograms of 89-percent-pure cocaine.
The cocaine had entered the United States that morning in the hollows of three Colombian souvenirs fashioned out of Madeira wood. They included a long, colorfully painted rolling pin, the symbol of marital bliss in Colombia; one rough-hewn statue, twenty inches high, of the Blessed Virgin; and a hand-wrought effigy of an obscure tribal head, about the size of a coconut. The fill had been made a week earlier in Bogotá. The load had passed U.S. Customs at Kennedy Airport, New York. It was carried through and declared: ‘Souvenirs.’
The arrival of these artifacts at Zachary Swan’s beach house in East Hampton, Long Island, launched a celebration which would not end until the following morning. It began at eight p.m. when the Madeira head was cleaved top-dead-center across the parietal lobe with the cold end of a chisel. Within