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  The plan was to fly the pot across the border and land on one of the dozen or so dry lake beds that lay on the desert floor around Twentynine Palms, in the southwest part of California. The lakes measure anywhere from two to fifteen miles long, and except for the forty-mile-long Salton Sea, which is filled with twenty feet of water leaching in from the Colorado River, they haven’t been very wet since the glacier receded ten thousand years ago. At most they get a little muddy during the rainy season in the winter months, when the runoff flows down from the surrounding mountains—albeit muddy enough so battle tanks from the U.S. Marine base at Twentynine Palms have been known to roll out on them and get hopelessly stuck. The rest of the year, when the salt from the runoff dries out and binds itself with the clay in the soil, the lakes provide a surface that is as smooth as concrete and hard enough to take the weight of a one-hundred-ton space shuttle. Dirt roads come and go in all directions, and except for sporadic salt-mining operations, the dry lake region has about as many people hanging around as does the face of the moon.

  By now George had built up a tight collection of dependable friends and operators, a regular little band of beach characters, who furthered the enterprise in various capacities. There was his girlfriend, Annette, who lived with two other women, both named Wendy. All three worked as stewardesses for United Airlines or TWA and were known to the crowd as “Annette and the two Wendys.” There was Earl “the Pearl,” a computer programmer for a hospital in L.A. who would soon put his organizational skills to use in the wholesaling end of the business, and “Pogo,” a graduate of USC who had left his job as a stockbroker as well as his wife and a house in Bel Air to embark on the pot trade. Pogo would drive the loads back from the dry lakes for George; he also served as the radio ground controller for the incoming flights. General chores were handled by other beach habitués: Junior, a roustabout who had gotten George his job on the pile driver; Sam the bartender, with a bandito mustache, who was a friend of Frank Shea’s from Massachusetts; Orlando, the son of a wealthy curtain-rod family in the Midwest, who had been a door gunner on a helicopter in Vietnam; Randy, who worked in the oil refinery next door in El Segundo. Along with Frank Shea, who knew how to fly, the pilots included Greg from Arizona, who had flown for the airlines, and Cliff Guttersrud, stylish and handsome, the son of a well-off Chicago family who paraded around in blue blazers and white polo shirts and sported a license plate on his Porsche that read FLYBOY. Then there was a pilot known as Here-We-Go Bob, for the unnerving habit he had of gripping the yoke with feverish intensity as he brought his plane in for a landing, announcing in a voice quivering with apprehension and self-doubt: “Heeeeeeeere we go!”

  * * *

  Located about halfway down the western coast of Mexico, the city of Puerto Vallarta sits at the head of the Bahía de Banderas, a parabola-shaped bay eighteen miles deep and twelve miles wide, which from an airplane looks as if God had taken a big bite out of the shoreline. Ramón Moreno grew up in Puerto Vallarta in the mid-1950s, when it was just another sleepy coastal town of cobblestone streets and modest frame and white-stucco dwellings poking out from the jungled foothills of the Sierra Madre looming in the background. Ramón’s great-grandfather, a Yaqui Indian, came to the town in the late 1800s and began growing bananas, corn, and tobacco, which were shipped out on coastal steamers and sailing vessels. He had been driven out of Sonora, in the north, when the government confiscated the Indians’ land and turned it over to wealthy farmers, leaving them with nothing to tend but the meanest holdings. Ramón’s grandfather become a well-to-do store owner in town, and his father a schoolmaster and a famous local soccer player. You couldn’t get to Puerto Vallarta by automobile until after World War II, and even then, when Ramón was little, the roads stopped short at the rushing waters of the Cuale River, which split the town vertically down the center, spanned only by a pair of swinging bridges. A broad jetty, or malecón, ran along the oceanfront, where on Sunday evenings the young people joined the paseo by the sea, as their elders sat on the benches watching the ungainly pelicans dive for fish and the large orange sun disappear slowly into the Pacific.

  Because of its charm, its deserted beaches, and its great marlin fishing, word started spreading slowly in the late 1950s that Puerto Vallarta was an undiscovered paradise. Americans and Canadians arrived, hotels started going up to the north and south, and Ramón joined the flock of young men who earned money furnishing services to the turistas on the beach—selling souvenir hats, sodas, and a coconut-oil suntan concoction he mixed up at home. Eventually his grandmother staked him to an inboard speedboat, which he used to take people skin diving and exploring along the coast. One day in 1963 he was hired to provide water-taxi service for an American actress with a sensuous mouth and a raucous laugh, to deliver her regularly to Mismaloya, a tiny beachfront village south of town, inaccessible by car, where they were filming Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana. Ramón, of course, had never heard of Ava Gardner. “She would give me a list of the things she wanted on the boat. Always it was a lot of ice, and plenty of beer, and tequila, and gin—a lot of gin. Sometimes she would drink it with an olive, or mix the gin and the tequila and pour it into a coconut with ice and stick in a straw. Sometimes early in the morning I would take her to an empty beach. She could take her clothes off and swim and lie on the sand.”

  With publicity from the movie, the town quickly became overrun by tourists and actors from Hollywood. John Huston, the movie’s director, built himself a house just below Mismaloya, still reachable only by boat. The Oceana Bar in the center of town, whose windows open out onto the ocean, became the boozy haunt of Richard Burton and his new wife, Elizabeth Taylor, as well as Robert Mitchum, Marlon Brando, and his pal John Barrymore, Jr. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper hung out there after making Easy Rider, along with Groucho Marx’s son, Fred, whose motorcycle starred in the movie as Fonda’s bike. A permanent population of North Americans, including Richard and Liz, settled into a section of expensive houses and condominiums overlooking the center of town and known as Gringo Gulch. The population of Puerto Vallarta jumped from 12,500 souls to 82,000, with 200,000 more descending on the place at the height of the tourist season.

  Retired by now from being a beach boy and chauffeur, Ramón was looking to get into something substantial. On the beach he had run into a wealthy young man from Mexico City named Sanchez, the son of a Mexican army general, who owned several sportfishermen he chartered out for marlin fishing. As a sideline, Sanchez was also helping to fulfill the increasing demand by Americans for pot, and he needed someone to liaise with the farmers in the hills, who had been persuaded by the law of economics to take a portion of their ten-acre plantations of corn and beans and turn it into a more lucrative tillage. Ramón became his man. Then in his late teens, fluent in English, Ramón wore his hair long, straight down to the center of his back. Like other Indians, he possessed a pair of penetrating, heavy-lidded eyes that betrayed a distant ancestry somewhere in East Asia but gave away little else, a distinct advantage in the marijuana business. Sinewy, tough, and quick, Ramón had already earned the nickname Garavato. Strictly speaking, the word translates into “hook” or “sickle,” but carries many subtler meanings, among them a darting movement, a piece of scribble, or an entwining action—a tree that wraps itself around another tree is called a garavato. It was Ramón’s father’s nickname, too, for the way in soccer he seemed to be all over the field at once.

  Brought to the New World by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century—the word marijuana comes from the Spanish word for “intoxicant”—the cannabis plant particularly appreciates life in high mountain valleys because of its exposure to the sun and the protection from harsh weather afforded by the surrounding peaks. It likes warmth and humidity, which Puerto Vallarta, at 250 miles below the Tropic of Cancer, has in abundance the year round, and in the 1960s the growers liked the relative secrecy the foothills afforded. The weather there also enabled farmers to reap two crops a year: one harvested in Octob
er, at the end of the rainy season, and the second in March, which had to be irrigated in the dry winter months by a network of hoses feeding water to the fields from the springs and streams higher in the hills. The plantations were small, a half acre to an acre and a half, tucked away in ravines and at the back of canyons, difficult to find if you didn’t know the way. The only access was over a maze of donkey trails that wound through the mountain villages, ensuring that snoopers and others who didn’t belong there were quickly discovered and discouraged from venturing further.

  At first the pot farmers of Mexico, faced with little of the competition that came later on from Jamaica, Colombia, and parts of Asia, carried on their job pretty crudely by current standards, leaving the plants to grow however they would, expending little effort to thinning them out or providing fertilizer. In addition, the growers sold the whole plant—flowers, leaves, seeds, and stems—chopped into bits, pressed into brick-size kilos, and shipped off to California. All in all it was a pretty raggedy product, providing only a weak buzz, and a harsh smoke in the bargain. Gradually, however, the pot culture improved. Although the plant will grow plentifully almost anywhere—hence the nickname weed—its quality can be boosted dramatically through the use of certain cultivation techniques. The most significant one, reportedly developed in the second millennium B.C. in India, involves culling all the male plants out of the field before they have a chance to release their pollen and fertilize the females; it’s during this period, while they’re waiting to be fertilized, that the female plants achieve the most potency. To snare the pollen wafting around in the air, they produce a sticky resin compound in their buds. Once pollination occurs—they get their guy, as it were—the girls shut down the factory. For pot smokers, that’s bad, since it’s the resin that contains the highest concentration of THC, or delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, the element you need to get good and blasted. In concentrated form, the resin and the buds become hashish. Boiled in solvent and extracted further, the mixture is turned into hash oil, the most powerful pot there is, with a THC content ten to one hundred times greater than what’s found in ordinary marijuana. This is the stuff that calls forth visions.

  Ramón saw it as part of his job to increase awareness among the farmers that those female plants had to be kept deprived; that way, he told them, they could charge more for their pot. “If you’re a good farmer, you go out every morning and every male plant you spot in the field you rip that fucker up,” says Ramón, whose English was refined in the 1960s and qualifies as landmark-status hippiespeak, littered with “chicks,” “old ladies,” and “bummed out, man.” “Those fuckers sneak in and they hide, they seem to know when you’re looking for them, but you see those little seed buds poking up, and you get that fucker right out of the ground and put him in a plastic bag, so they won’t reseed, and you have more and more. You have to be on top of it to get good grass.”

  On his trips into the hills at harvest time, Ramón would travel up alongside the Cuale River, past its waterfalls and rapids, then branch off, following the trails leading into the farms. He’d bring along six men to help and a team of twelve donkeys, spend a day going in, a day assembling the load, and a day coming out. The animals carried fifty to eighty kilos each in burlap bags, a total of five or six hundred kilos a trip. The trail was narrow and in many places ran along deep ravines. More than once even one of the sure-footed burros would go over the edge, Ramón recalls; he would hear it crashing down through the forest, then silence, no time to stop and search. Ramón’s personal record load on a single trip was five thousand kilos, eleven thousand pounds, which he brought out during a particularly good harvest in 1969. It took fifteen days and thirty donkeys to get the job done.

  For premium-grade marijuana, Ramón paid the farmers a high of one hundred pesos, equivalent to about eight dollars back then, for each kilo. This added up to a lot of money, compared to the twelve hundred dollars a year that a family of six might otherwise earn off its small holding and a few animals. With three to four hundred marijuana plants to an acre, each plant producing up to a kilo of pot, and two harvests a year, the farmer could make with a single acre of marijuana three to five times what he could on all ten acres of corn and beans, and still have the corn and beans. For this reason, Ramón’s appearance in the hills above Puerto Vallarta became for the campesinos an increasingly significant event. “We’d go to many fields and the farmers would say, ‘Take my pot, take my pot,’” he recalls. “The farmers would have their kids and old ladies helping out. Sometimes the farmer that had the littlest field had the best shit, man, because he takes care of it more. Sometimes they go even into the higher places, where there is nobody’s land, although sometimes a farmer would go on somebody else’s place and there would be a little discussion over it, you know.”

  As the marijuana business became large-scale and serious, it was not advisable for a gringo, or a nonindigenous human of any persuasion, to wander about up in the hills around Puerto Vallarta. The farmers found it difficult to imagine what a stranger would be doing there were he not an informer or someone out to steal their money. And then there were the banditos to watch for, especially if you were an American. “The Americans,” says Ramón, “sometimes they would be in town asking for someone to take them up into the hills, maybe they want to buy something. They would be taken this way and that way, and pretty soon they are way, way up there with all their money, away from everything, and all around are only the banditos. Or you buy something from a farmer in the hills and they put rocks in it, and you don’t know until you get down here, and then it is too late. One year an Italian who was buying loads had come with a lot of money, and they took him to one of the fields and buried him in the field and took his money. His mother came down looking for him, but it took a long time. He had to be identified by a dentist.”

  * * *

  Late in the summer of 1968, George arrived in Puerto Vallarta on a commercial flight with Sam the Bartender and Frank Shea, ready to put their grand scheme into play. The word had been out in Manhattan Beach about Puerto Vallarta being the place to get marijuana in large quantities, but for all their talk and planning, George and company had almost no idea of how to make a connection. None of them spoke more than pick-up Spanish. They knew nothing about the city or where to go. They had no names or contacts to start with. For days that stretched into weeks, they wandered about the beaches and the hotels and bars, chatting up strangers, leaving behind veiled queries about whom they might talk to regarding the possibility of scoring some dope. Sloshed on beer and Cocos Locos, they’d lie down under the palm trees at night and pass out on a deserted beach, deaf to the crash of the surf, to rise the next day in shaken condition and resume the quest. “There were Americans down there, and you could tell what they were doing,” George says, “but everyone wanted to keep it to himself. No one wanted to involve us.”

  The center of the city still retained much of its old charm, particularly in the categories of recreation George liked to pursue. At four o’clock in the afternoon, across the street from the malecón in the Oceana Bar, where the old wooden ceiling fans pulled in the sea air through open windows, he’d meet up with Richard Burton and Liz Taylor. The three became friendly, putting away large quantities of Scotch and ruminating on the ironies of life as the waves flopped languorously along the beach. George had seen The Night of the Iguana several times, putting the defrocked minister, Shannon, on his list of icons. Liz would disappear on shopping trips with her retinue of thin-waisted males. “Here comes the queen with her six little sissies,” Burton would taunt on her return. One night the three attended a traveling circus, during which one of the clowns nearly drowned when he lay underneath the elephant and was inundated with several gallons of steamy urine. To George’s consternation, Liz stepped into the ring and let the Mexican knife-thrower hurl near-misses all around her body. Back at the Oceana, when Richard was off in the men’s room, George leaned over and kissed Liz on the mouth. “‘I’ve always wanted to do that,
’ I told her. ‘I think you’re the most beautiful woman in the world.’ She said, ‘You’re cute, but you don’t have what Richard has. And you don’t have his money either.’”

  They’d heard the scary stories of Americans rotting in Mexican jails, so George and his cohorts were somewhat chary of announcing their quest too openly, lest they fall into the hands of undercover policemen. “Finally, it was the fourth week,” says George, “and everyone was getting really pissed. We couldn’t find a connection, we were running out of money. They wanted to go back home. ‘Fuck this, we can make more doing what we were doing, it’s never gonna happen.’ Then one afternoon we were coming out of the Oceana, and this little yellow VW bug pulls up in front and this girl with straight blond hair pokes her head out the window, a hippie type, and says, ‘Get in the car, you guys. I know what you’re up to.’”

  She drove them up into the foothills, where the cobblestones turned into a rutty dirt track running past tin-roofed shanties, with naked children playing in the street and junk cars sitting under poinciana trees in the yards. Eventually she parked, and they walked up a hillside and through an archway that opened onto a large stucco villa with jutting balconies and a red-tiled roof. She left them for a minute and returned with a couple of pounds of pot. “It was beautiful stuff, I mean like nothing we’d ever seen before,” says George. “She said she worked for some people who’d been watching us in town for several days and wanted to see if they could do business.” Inside the house, where it was dark and cool, she introduced them to a thin, wiry young man with long, jet-black hair, whose name was Ramón.

  When Sanchez showed up soon thereafter, George told him they had a plane and asked if he could provide them with two or three hundred kilos to fly to California. “Sanchez said he could get us as much as we could carry away, a thousand kilos, whatever we could handle.” The deal they worked out was that George would pay $25 dollars a kilo, which because of its high quality he knew he could turn over for as much as $150, maybe more, in Manhattan Beach, and twice that easily if he took it to Amherst. The expense of staying the month in Puerto Vallarta, however, had drained their finances, so Sanchez agreed to front them three hundred kilos, taking payment only after it was sold. In exchange for the favor, George agreed to sell an additional hundred kilos for Sanchez himself at the prevailing price in the United States. This deal meant not only that George got the pot for no money, but since it was Sanchez’s load now mixed in with his, in effect he’d also acquired a Mexican partner, created a relationship. “If he was in a partnership with you, he wouldn’t fuck you around with the quality or the delivery or the price.”