Locked In with Ian Bick - I Smuggled Hashish Internationally in the 70s & 80s — Here's How I Did It | Scott Gussin

Starting point is 00:00:00 We come around this curve and there is a roadblock, a full-blown roadblock on both sides of the road, I might add. And here we are like, you know, a couple hundred yards away. And the last thing we could do is, you know, they set it up this way on purpose, of course. We can't pull over. We can't turn around because there's a meridian in between the highways. There's no exit. This is it. And we have the hash, not in our stash yet.

Starting point is 00:00:29 this is just in a duffel bag in the back with a surfboard in our backpacks and all that stuff. My guest today is Scott Gusson. He lost his mom when he was just seven years old and grew up in New York before building a hash smuggling route that brought product from Morocco into the United States and had a 30-year run in the drug business. Today, he's revealing how it all worked and how it all came to an end. I grew up in Portchester, New York, just over the Connecticut border, just south of. of Greenwich, Connecticut, United Hospital, and that's where I went to school, kindergarten, and ninth grade, and lived there to us about 18 or 19, and then school for two years, and a couple of years in Massachusetts and then California.

Starting point is 00:01:19 What was your upbringing like? Well, good question. It was Leave it to Beaver and Andy Griffith kind of normal up until seven years old. and when I was 7 April 1960, my mom, who I was very tight with, unfortunately, died from cancer. They didn't know anything about it at that point. And that's when the world went upside down. You know, I lost a major figure in my life. And for the next 18 years, 20 years, really, but I was out of the house by the time I was about 19.

Starting point is 00:01:55 but for about the next 20 years because my sister's six years younger, we had 18 different housekeepers that were trying to take the place of my mom. Some lasted a half a day, some a couple of months, and the longest one I think was about five years. So those were the mother figures. Was your dad wealthy that they were housekeepers? My dad was well off middle class. He was commuting every day.

Starting point is 00:02:23 Portchester is about a 40-minute train ride to Manhattan, and he was commuting during the Monday through Friday, basically 8 to 5, 9-to-5 routine. And he worked for a variety of companies, Ethan Allen Furniture, Magnovox TV, RCA, and he was usually in marketing. So he was vice president of marketing for several of these companies. You know their headquarters, I think is in Danbury, Ian Allen. Yeah, I always see it. And they have the hotel next to it, too. Exactly. And they had one of my worst jobs ever for six weeks. They had one of their plants up in Beecher Falls, Vermont. Beecher Falls is right next to New Hampshire and Canada. And during the summer, they have a skeleton crew. And my dad said myself and my best friend at the time, I was 16, to go up and work at this factory. So for six weeks, I literally handed a Frenchman. The only English word he knew was Block. We were building a six-foot-high cement block wall.

Starting point is 00:03:25 And my job was to hand him blocks all day. Block. Hand him the block. I thought jail was more fun than that. But that was my job for six weeks. Horrible. Now, how did all these women coming in now the house affect your upbringing? Well, I don't think I realized the reality of, I mean, I knew my mom was the way I knew

Starting point is 00:03:49 was we were visiting her in the hospital. And the last visit was they let us bring our pet dog. We had a poodle named noodle. And even as a seven-year-old kid, I knew when we brought the dog up to her hospital room, I don't know how I knew it. I remember this visually, you know, like it happened a week ago. I knew when I saw her and hugged her and all that and she was in tears and all upset, that that was probably going to be the last time I saw her.

Starting point is 00:04:23 And sure enough, she passed away within 48 hours after that. And my dad took me to our neighborhood. I grew up in Portchester, middle-class area. It's now called Rye Brook, because they didn't like the name Porthester for whatever reason. And he took me for a walk in the woods, sat me down, and he told me about it. And from then on, we had a housekeeper. Now, you can imagine my dad, you know, working. in the city. You know, no female figure except my grandmother who lived 10 minutes away helping out.

Starting point is 00:04:56 And so each one would come in. You know, now there was some that came in. Literally, one, he found out within about six hours, she could barely boil an egg. So she was gone. You know, some would come in and last a month or two months. Some would disappear in the middle of the night. A couple of real classics, starting with an Irish lady, Katie, who ended up bringing her daughter along and moved into the house. Her daughter was about 23, and she was a very hot 45 or something. I found out later. Now, I didn't find out this stuff for several years later. I think I was about 11 or 12 when she came in. They were running a brothel out of the house when my sister and I went to school. So from essentially 8.30 to 3 p.m. They were hookers. One of their best customers was my drum teacher. So those gals

Starting point is 00:05:56 ran a brothel. My father found out, and they were gone, and they lasted about a year and a half. With the daughter the whole time, there was another big, huge German lady. She weighed about 240 pounds, but solid as a rock. And what we didn't know, and I found out later, when I grew up, wasn't very religious, but my mom was Protestant. We went to church, I think, you know, for Christmas or whatever. A couple of years after she died, my dad thought it would be a good idea to have some religion. He's a Russian Jew. His parents, my grandparents, escaped from Estonia back in, you know, the World War I days, I think. And at any rate, he thought that we should be reformed Jews just to do like a religion thing. I had no problem with that. So I was a way.

Starting point is 00:06:44 went to Sunday school. I studied to have my bar mitzvah. I had Gertrude, the German housekeeper, driving me to Sunday school, but here's what makes that really weird. We find out years later, she was a member of the Nazi party, the underground Nazi party, so she's driving me to school. She also dated a cop who a few years later knew I was dealing weed at 15 and 16, but I had that connection, so he was cool with me. So we had some characters. Oh, one other one. She wore a nurse's outfit. My dad didn't have a specific outfit for them to wear, but she wore all white, white stockings, white bloomers. Out of the blue, we'd be playing outside as kids. The neighbors were over and everything. We had a big oak tree, about 50 foot tall in the backyard. And for whatever

Starting point is 00:07:38 reason, she would climb way up in the tree and show the bloomers to the whole neighborhood and hang out in the tree for a half hour. So we had we had fun with the housekeepers. There was a lot of real wacky ones. One, you know, one was an alcoholic. She borrowed money for my father left in the middle of the night and, you know, and so on. So there was a story with all of them. Those are the standout. How did you get into dealing weed at 15? Well, things, my attitude and everything, I think radically changed when I was seven. After my mom died, I was really tight with my grandmother, her mom. I love my other grandparents, my dad's parents, but they lived up in Buffalo. She lived right and right, 10 minutes away. And she was the one that got me, and this goes back,

Starting point is 00:08:29 before my mom died, when I was in second or third grade, my grandmother took me to a store and bought me 200 fireballs. This was my first business. Remember the really red hot fireballs? Well, back in the day in the late 50s. These things were really hot and they were a penny a piece and I took them to school and sold them for a nickel. And I liked that. You know, I thought, okay, this is cool. And then when I was 14, I decided I wanted to smoke weed for the first time. And weed was really hush, hush. And there was very few people smoking weed at the time. And I found out from one of my best friends, he was also interested in smoking weed, but we had no idea how to get weed. excuse me so we asked around it took us a long time it took us about four or five weeks one of our

Starting point is 00:09:20 friends older brothers claimed he could get us weed and we bought a nickel bag five bucks we went up to the woods behind my friend's house and we started smoking and it was real nasty and this isn't right it tastes horrible we dumped it out and we realized we were smoking the same woods we were sitting and you know they were leaves and sticks from the ground So that wasn't the real deal. Then finally about four months later, that same friend, he had a friend in the same apartment complex that sold the best deal I ever got was a $5 nickel bag that was probably this big. It was probably in today's market a half an ounce, you know, 14, 15 grants. It was black chiba chiba. It was the most potent weed to this day that I ever smoked. And his mom went to work every day. We had similarities. His dad died when he was five. My mom died when I was seven, so we were best friends going through school. And we were 15, and we pulled out the cornucat pipe and started smoking some of that weed. And before you knew, we were riding bicycles upside down, eating everything in the kitchen.

Starting point is 00:10:28 And I knew it was almost like I had an epiphany or something. I knew. I can't even explain how, Ian, in my mind, that this was going to be a big part of my future. And it didn't take me long to figure out. okay, I have a good contact to get weed. I have some other friends. So as it went along, started off with nickel bags, ounces, pounds. And before you knew it, within the next year, I was dealing weed.

Starting point is 00:10:56 And there was one other person that had a big influence. His name is Rubin. In the book, his name is Ruben. And Rubin lived in New York City. His parents were very wealthy. He lived on Park Avenue. And they also had a 200-year-old house. in Connecticut, an old Greenwich, really old cool house.

Starting point is 00:11:17 And this is kind of a funny story because one of my close friends, who was a known hash dealer and weed dealer, but something I might throw in there. Back in those days, this was 68, 69. And that time frame, literally in the part of New York I grew up with, there was more kinds of hash than there were. weed, which sounds bizarre, but there was nine, ten different kinds of hash and three or four different kinds of weed, all of it being premier, you know, high end. And my friend invited me

Starting point is 00:11:55 down to visit Rubin in the city, and I was going to score a pound, which was the biggest amount I ever bought at that point. He was giving it to me on the front. I didn't have to pay any money. And I went into Rubens, and I met him, and I saw one of the most fantastic stashes. I've ever seen. But granted, I was only 16 at the time. He opened up, he had an antique desk, and he opened up a hidden drawer, and there was several ores about this big of this soft red Lebanese hash. You could bend this hash and would touch ends without breaking. He also had a big vial of purple pills, LSD, and he had 10,000 in cash. Back in those days, 10 grand looked like a million. You know, I mean, wow, what a stash.

Starting point is 00:12:43 We proceeded to smoke some hash, and it was the first time ever that I smoked real hash. It blew me away. He gave me the hash. He fronted me about a hundred of the tabs of Purple Owsley. This Purple Owsley was the same stuff out from Northern California. He had a contact that was getting it right from Owsley himself. And so the Owsley, to give you an idea, he sold it to me for 75 cents. So I took the train.

Starting point is 00:13:10 back. I was stoned out of my mind, all excited, and I got rid of all that stuff, but I kept several tabs of that LSD and a big chunk of the hash, and that's, that was my springboard. But I was selling this LSD to kids in the private school that I went to for two years in high school for like five to ten bucks a hit. So that's when I knew, hey, this job is right up my alley, you know, I knew early on at 12 that I wasn't going to be like my dad at nine to five or commuting to the city. So I really went full board, you know, at 15, 16 years old, starting to sell predominantly hash and then, of course, weed, you know, when, you know, that made sense. And Purpleously LSD, that's, I experimented for about two years with the acid.

Starting point is 00:13:58 Can you break down the difference between hash and weed? Yeah, most because people these days, and else you're over 50, you're not going to get it. because ever since the late 70s, real hash in this country does not exist. In these, you know, the stores, or the weed stores, whether it's on the East Coast, the West Coast has some of the best in California. They do have hash. People make their own hash, and they sell it for ridiculous prices, $50, $75 a gram. And it tastes kind of like hash.

Starting point is 00:14:34 but on a scale of 1 to 10, if 10 was the quality of hash we had back in the day, and back in the day, I mean the 60s and, you know, up to the mid-70s, if that hash back then was at 10, the hash in the stores now today is maybe a 2.5, 3. But the main difference is that hash is a lot more potent even than the best pot. it also depends on what hash. For example, the heavier-duty hashes is more knock you out, you know, like incapacitate you from countries like Nepal, where they had Nepalese Temple balls, and they also had the fingers super deadly. Some of that hash was opiated, so that helped knocking you out, obviously. Pakistan had good hash.

Starting point is 00:15:27 Morocco, where I went to really good blonde hash, several different levels. But the hash was a more one hit or two hits, heavy duty, and it would last even, you know, one drag, one puff, one hit, whatever you want to call it. We used to call it hits back then with the last four or five hours where one hit a weed was really good. But the levels of high, I guess the best way in layman. turn, it would be like drinking shots of bourbon if it was hash and a fine wine if it was weed. It was just that much stronger, you know, three, four, five times stronger. So somebody

Starting point is 00:16:11 that was used to smoking, even the good weed back then, like the Alcapulco Gold was premier, Panama Red, Colombian Wheels was very good back in the day. It was great. It would get you laughing and it was a lot of fun and stuff like that. But it would last a few hours if you smoked, you know, a couple of hits. But the hash would last a lot longer and it was heavier. It was just a heavier kind of buzz for the most part. And it was more visual. I don't call hallucinations or something that, you know, that are there that you see.

Starting point is 00:16:53 but I call people I think are confused by that when they do psychedelics. I call them visuals because everybody has different visuals. But hash produced more hallucinations, visuals than the weed did. So somebody that smoked, you know, even three or four hits a hash, sometimes it was scary. I'd have to talk them down because they'd get that much higher. You know what I mean? And it was more, it was heavy, but it was more towards a psychedelic. heavy psychedelic as opposed to weed was kind of the difference there.

Starting point is 00:17:28 Now, what's the price breakdown of what you're selling everything for, the hash, the weed, the old-dea? Yeah, back then, let's go with ounces. I mean, back then, an ounce of really good weed. But now, keep in mind, I had top-top contact. So if I bought an ounce of weed for, say, you know, $15, $20 on the street, that would go for more 50 or $50. 60. HASH was pretty much, if you go buy a pound, anywhere from as little as 800 a pound to some of the, you know, Nepalese or Afghanistan, that was pricey. That could get as high as 14,

Starting point is 00:18:08 1,500 a pound. But ounces of that would easily go for 150 to 175. ounces of weed, like I said, could be anywhere from $30 to $70, even upwards a few years later. It was over a hundred an ounce. But that was really good weed. I mean, the Hawaiian was really good, but it was scarce because it was only in Hawaii. But the real good, you know, down in Mexico, Michua Khan, Panama Red, Al Capucco, gold. You know, I could get pounds of that for two. 200 and get rid of it quick and anywhere from triple the money to five, six times the money,

Starting point is 00:18:53 you know, bring it back and selling in quarter pounds or ounces with a hash, you know, a quarter pound, $350 to $450 an ounce, 100 to 175 depending. Rarely did I sell grams, but grams, there's 28 grams to an ounce, was easily $10, you know, which turns an ounce into 280. So it was very profitable. And even on the high end, you know, there was times of getting, say, 10 pounds a hash. And to be fair and everything, I normally put $200 or $300 on a pound, you know, and turn it, you know, in pounds. With weed, if I could get the weed for 200 to 250, I was selling it from 350 to 400 was basically the breakdown.

Starting point is 00:19:43 But the coolest thing about it was that it was easy to get customers for two reasons. People don't realize what's a tiny, tiny percent of the community actually smoked weed. And you could tell, you know, a head, we used to call them, oh, that guy's ahead, that girl's a head. There was just a certain thing, past the long hair, of course, that they smoke weed. But like that's where the term pothead comes from or? Probably originally, yeah. I don't consider myself a hippie, I guess. I guess I was a hippie stoner, but you could tell the people that smoked weed.

Starting point is 00:20:29 Of course, there's always those people that you would never assume because they had school parents or a job. And sometimes it was a great surprise to find out, oh, hey, did you know that he gets high? And as soon as you clicked with that person, you had an end because you had something in common. I love turning people on to weed or hash for the first time. That was my favorite thing. And then, of course, they become customers down the road. But the other thing was just kind of the general attitude. It was a big difference.

Starting point is 00:21:04 You know how today you hang out with people that don't smoke weed at all or somebody that smokes all the time? Their attitude in life is pretty similar. on a lot of things, whatever it is, for its business, whatever. But it was a big difference back then, a big difference. Because the straighter people, you know, the jocks, the preppies and everything, they walked that line, they dressed that part, their hair was short, but a freak, a stone or a hippie, way different back then, much bigger gap. I went to a private school and arrived for two years to give you an idea.

Starting point is 00:21:39 The entire student body from ninth grade to 12th grade was 300 people. It was a great school. I had to work my butt off, but, you know, I got, you know, it really helped out going to high school in the last two years, 11th and 12th. And out of 300 people, there was maybe 23 or 4 or 5, there were actually stoners. And we found each other pretty quickly, you know, within the first month. but it was such a different lifestyle like such i mean i made friends with everybody you know i was in particular you know it didn't matter the race religion you know the preppys the jocks or the hippies or the stoners or the greasers even uh those those were characters and a lot of greasers

Starting point is 00:22:25 looked apart but they smoked weed but you know so i mingled because i knew in the back of my head all these people smoke weed you know so i was always thinking more contacts you know more sales, more money, you know, because I didn't want to work. So, you know, whatever it took, I went out of my way to make that happen. That's, you know, from the years of 15 and a half to the hash trip when I was 21, I had two jobs. I worked at McDonald's. My dad wanted me to work 20 hours a week at a summer job. So what I did instead of work on Monday through Friday, what he had in mind, you know, four hours a day. I work Saturday and Sunday 10 hours each day. But after three weeks, I asked for a raise. They didn't give it to me and I quit. And something very funny about that real

Starting point is 00:23:18 quick, why I don't ever touch fast food, why I haven't been into a McDonald's since probably 1968. When you worked at McDonald's back then, this was, you know, like 67, 68, something like that, you know, the Big Mac was the big, they didn't have, you know, two dozen other items. You know, it was very small amount of items. But at my age, every hour, we had to take a 10-minute break. And during that 10 minutes, we could eat whatever we wanted. So needless to say, I always had a big appetite. I was always into sports.

Starting point is 00:23:53 I always was in shape. But I stuffed my face with this crap. And after six, you know, 10-hour shifts, I got so sick of it, I can't even look at it. at it now, you know, that was the end of it. And the other job I had was at antique shop, which was really cool. I just recently got my license. So I worked there for a couple of months. One summer, I think it was in my senior year or junior year, because I had to stay back in ninth grade to make it into this private school. So since my birthday was in December anyway, I said, what the hell I wanted to go? And then I transferred back to high school in 11th and 12th grade,

Starting point is 00:24:31 which was a piece of cake after working my butt off in this private school. But yeah, the antique shop. Those were the only two jobs that lasted about three months. I was delivering furniture to the back roads, Greenwich and Old Greenwich and Stanford, you know, people that I drive their antique bags and stuff in McDonald's. Those were the only two jobs I had. And along the way, leading to 21, that was my first job when I did when I went to Morocco to do to smuggle hash. and that's when things really took off.

Starting point is 00:25:06 Now, what was the community's view, like law enforcement, the government on hash and need? That's when that's when profiling started. That's when profiling started. Anybody with long hair, we were getting pulled over all the time. They were really down on it, but you got to understand, Ian, back then when I was 15, 16, 17, 18, So we're talking, you know, 67, 69, I was 16 when I went to Woodstock. So 70, even 71, they were so ignorant about, you know, certainly about the effects. You know, the law enforcement, you know, the straight community, the conservative community had no way.

Starting point is 00:25:55 They had no idea what smoking weed or taking LSD would do to somebody. I mean, when you're pulled over with a cop and your eyes are hanging out like this and you're tripping and you're seeing everything, you know, looking behind a cop getting pulled over, they knew something was off, but they had no idea what was off. Two quick stories. I'm sitting in a park bench, 16, in Rye, Saturday afternoon, 2 p.m. The library's there. It's busy little village. And one of my girlfriends comes over, we're sitting down just hanging. out and she goes, Scott or Gus was my nickname, she goes, Gus, check this out.

Starting point is 00:26:38 And she opened up this tin. And she had like four or five different pieces of hash, small pieces, you know, a gram each or two grams. And she's sitting there, a cop literally one of the local cops, we all knew the cops' names, they knew most our names. He walks up behind us. He looks over our shoulder. He's looking right at this tin.

Starting point is 00:27:00 and he said put that away get out of here go find something to do i to this day i obviously were a shock but we kept it together i think he thought it was incense or something like that that's how ignorant they were they just didn't know one other story which is hilarious again i was 16 i think or 17 i used to every friday night i take a hit at lSD purple houseley with the same four guys We did this about 10 months in a row, and then we did too much and we never, you know, tripped again, or we did, but, you know, not together, kind of. We all took LSD, typical Friday night. One guy would pick me up in his Volkswagen or Station wagon. He'd have two other guys.

Starting point is 00:27:51 We'd all go out. Sometimes we had a fifth guy. There was four of us this night. And one of the characters, Bigelow, was using his firebird. Firebird, really sweet 400 Firebird convertible. And we go on 684, actually. And this is about two hours into the trip. So we're right about peaking, like, really, you know,

Starting point is 00:28:13 the purple house lead to give you the quick rundown. You take it, you get off in 20 minutes. You keep getting higher, higher, higher, higher, higher, higher, in about two and a half hours. Two to two and a half hours you're peaking. That lasts a couple hours. Then you start coming back down. And on the way back down, if you smoke some hash or weed, you'll go back up.

Starting point is 00:28:33 But it's a little fuzzier if you smoked with it. So we didn't smoke anything, but one hit of Purpleousley on a scale of one to 10. It was some of the best acid in the country. And keep in mind, people, I might reel the tape back and say the people that grew weed and made hash in Morocco and India, Pakistan, Lebanon, and Nepal, and the growers in Mexico, they had a lot of pride. So their product was five stars. You know, people today say,

Starting point is 00:29:02 oh, this weed in the store is much better than it. That's a crock. The weed back then was better. So at any rate, we took this hit acid, and we decide out of the blue. It's 18 degrees in February. We're going to pull off on the shoulder. And in 1969, there's not that many people at, you know,

Starting point is 00:29:21 10 o'clock at night driving on 684. They just recently built it. And out of nowhere, lights pull up behind us. And I hear my buddy Ziggy in the backseat, long hair. My other friend has hair down to here. I have hair down, feather earring. You know, we were quite the crew. And I hear Ziggy goes, oh, no, it's a cop.

Starting point is 00:29:45 You know, he was kind of under his breath. The cop comes up and he asks us, what are you doing? The top. Now, keep in mind, we had trouble getting the top. So imagine it being 18 degrees. The top is just out of the thing, but it's three quarters open. And the cop comes up and asks, what are you guys doing? And we're all blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, putting down the roof.

Starting point is 00:30:12 And he looked at us like we were on Mars. Now, we all knew we were totally effed up. I mean, totally. And the cop looked at us like he'd never seen anything like it. He was so dumbfounded that it was an uncomfortable silence for 20 or 30 seconds. Now, the one thing with LSD that anybody will tell you, that when you're really tripping heavily on LSD, one minute can literally feel like an hour. Time crawls by.

Starting point is 00:30:45 Like, you know, this is a commitment. You're committing to eight hours, which feels like a couple of days. And he was so confused. He didn't say anything. he finally asked for the registration, which we always had, you know, we always had our shit together. So we go in the glove box, pull out the Reggie. He asks for the license, no problem. And he looks inside around the car.

Starting point is 00:31:06 We're not smoking anything. Everything's cool. And he asks this one by one, what your name and where you live. And I just reeled off. Scott Guston, Seventhold, Orchard Road, Portchester, New York. You know, in my zip code, he asks everybody else. And he looks, he just kind of shakes his head. and he's so removed from like this scene that he literally said,

Starting point is 00:31:28 okay, just take it easy and he walked away. I mean, nothing happened. And we were free to go. By the way, we did get the top down finally and we pulled away. But that's kind of how the attitude was. Like people just didn't know for a while. And then I don't know if you ever heard of it. There was a film made in the 50s, Reefer Madness, a classic.

Starting point is 00:31:50 And it was how some, how these guys, it was made. like in the 40s or something, and they smoked pot and lost their mind and turned crazy and everything. It was old cult film, but it was so removed that they just didn't know, Ian. They just had no idea. I mean, I remember talking to parents and my dad, like if I got off on the LSD too soon before 6 o'clock, you know, on the way out, and I could tell there was a vibe where he thought something was off, but he wasn't sure they were just that far removed. that far. Oh, quick, quick funny story. What happens sometimes to people in LSD, I won't remember

Starting point is 00:32:31 it if I don't tell it now. The fifth guy that used to come with us every once in a while to take acid finally took too many. We took too much acid in the final trip. Four of us were fine. We recovered, but we just didn't trip again for years or maybe never with some of their cases, but we didn't do our Friday night thing because we overdid it. We did it. We did two hits of acid. One hit at THC and smoked a bunch of ash before we got off. And it was, it's in this book that I wrote. But we had quite an experience.

Starting point is 00:33:02 And this one guy that didn't trip anymore, kind of lost it that night. What I mean lost it like he was very strange. Even the next day when we were all back to our normal freak, freak selves, he was weird in the car ride home. We had gone up to upstate New York. Oh, shit. One of my friends was going to school, Dutchess Community College. We were in a frat house through a bunch of acid in the next morning.

Starting point is 00:33:31 We dropped, it was two hours away from our house. That was the night that we did too much. And we said goodbye to him. And he was like goodbye. He was like a different person. And like that experience changed his being. So life went on. And I'd still run into these guys.

Starting point is 00:33:50 We were still good friends. We just didn't do acid together about six, eight, ten months. months later or something like that. It's hard to peel into the timeframe. Nobody had heard from. Nobody knew what he was doing. Nothing. I come home one Saturday afternoon. You know, I wasn't, I probably had smoked some weed, but nothing, excuse me, nothing out of the ordinary. And I came home and I opened my front door to a site that if I had a month of Sundays, I couldn't have dream this up. And what I was looking at, and we lived in, you know, a nice three-bedroom, you know, middle-class home in Ryebrook. My dad was on the living room, cross-legged,

Starting point is 00:34:39 smoking a cigar. And my buddy, my old acid buddy, was sitting there. I knew something was very, very bizarre because he had a black suit on, white shirt and tie. And from, from, what I knew of the years I knew him, I knew he'd never owned a suit. And he had a Bible on his hand. And he had completely gone and nothing against Jehovah's Witnesses, but he had completely from this like wild acid experience, like converted to a Jehovah's Witness. And my father is a pretty funny guy. You know, he was a great dad. And he's what, you know, he knows about the world and stuff like that. I told him about everything. I did my life. He was totally cool, you know, years later. And he was sitting there listening,

Starting point is 00:35:30 you know, like interested, although I knew he wasn't, he was being polite. And this guy had been there for like 45 minutes or so going on about Jehovah's Witness, trying to convince my father that was away and blah, blah, blah. And I came in and the good news he and was that he was just wrapping it up. We said hello. And I could tell this was a totally different person from the person that we went through and had so much fun, losing control, laughter, and had so many great nights, and he had just become this other person from, no doubt, the LSD, from that one night, from that one night. But, yeah, changed his life. I realized I was reaching for an energy drink every single time I got tired, and to be honest, that's not a habit I want to keep anymore.

Starting point is 00:36:19 As the summer starts to wind down and the schedules start to fill up again, I'm hitting a hard to reset. Instead of reaching for an energy drink in the morning, I'm starting my mornings with AG1, and it's the one habit I refuse to compromise on before the workday starts. One scoop, eight ounces of cold water every single morning. What I like is that it's not 10 different supplements sitting on my counter. it's one drink that includes a multivitamin, pre and probiotics, superfoods, and antioxidants. I always tell people that consistency is way more important than perfection, and for me, I'm being consistent with AG1 to start my mornings.

Starting point is 00:37:04 And look what comes in the welcome kit. For a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 NextGen or AG1 Pro at drinkag1.com. slash locked in. That's drinkag1.org.com slash locked in. Tell us about after high school. After high school. Yeah. After high school, well, I was definitely scared to go to Vietnam, but I had a lucky break. When I was seven, I fell off a bicycle, landed on my head.

Starting point is 00:37:41 My ear was bleeding. They didn't know anything about it back then. They made me stay in bed during the summer for three weeks. It sucked. reel the tape forward. I always had to go to the year, doctor. It was the inner ear. Years later, in 80, 82, I had four operations that had to rebuild my inner ear. But I always had a problem with my ear, and they didn't know enough back then. This would have been like 59 when it happened. And they didn't know much more in the 60s, even though I was constantly going to the same year, Dr. I ear, nose guy,

Starting point is 00:38:13 who was a friend of my dad's, they just didn't know enough. And when I was 18, My birthday, this is when the lottery was going on. So I was number two. I would have definitely been sent to the front lines of Vietnam. But my dad took it upon himself to mail the military, my medical records. And when they saw that my ear was basically, I had a chronic mastoid disease. I was deaf in the right ear. I got it back maybe 20% of the hearing after the operations.

Starting point is 00:38:45 So when my dad mailed in that I needed a new inner ear drum rebuilt, that's what I got later. He sent him the letter and they sent me back the best letter I ever had in my life. Don't even show up for the physical. Didn't even have to go in. And at the time, all my friends were going to college or trying to avoid the draft, you know, doing a lot of acid, dressing up as women, you know, getting, you know, there was psychologists and psychiatrists for $200 would write your notes saying you were nuts, whatever it took.

Starting point is 00:39:21 One guy, I don't want to get too sidetracked, but one guy, oh, it still gives me the Woolies. He was drafted, but he legitimately hurt his ankle. He busted his bust his ankle, and they got back in touch with him in six months. Excuse me, his ankle was kind of healed. He had to go into the first draft the next day, and he knew that they were going to take him.

Starting point is 00:39:44 We went out that night and he said, Gus, you got to do me the biggest favor he ever did in your life. I said what? He goes, you got to crack my ankle. I said, man, I can't do that. I can't do that. Come on, Tommy. Don't make me do this.

Starting point is 00:40:00 We went out and I'm not a drinker, but we drank, I don't know, three, four, six packs and keep in mind, I'm the guy that, you know, we'll get a buzz after two cans. We drank all this beer. I got wasted. Oh. I can't even say it. He put his ankle up on it.

Starting point is 00:40:18 We had a big cinder block, and I had this big lead piece, and I came down hard and crashed his ankle. Oh, it hurts even to think of it, but I got him out of the draft. So he was cool. He totally saved foot was like for about a month. But getting back to, he ended up going to college, like a year later, because the Army didn't take him. I did some serious damage.

Starting point is 00:40:42 And when I got out of school, because I thought it was the right thing to do. I did kind of want to go to college. All my buddies were going to college. I wanted to go to Boston University, but my grades just weren't good enough. So I did get accepted to Roger Williams in Bristol, Rhode Island, which now I hear is a four-year-of-school,

Starting point is 00:41:05 and it's come a long way since 1971, 72. Yeah, it's a pretty good school now, I think. Yeah, it's a really good school. Back then it was a two-year school. I'm not saying it's a bad school. So I went to Roger Williams for two years, but really I excelled in making more context. I mean, truth be told, yes, I took psychology classes, which were pretty cool, some business classes. I remember I had an English class that I aced, but my girlfriend, Leslie, also the one that went to Morocco with me,

Starting point is 00:41:42 she wrote all my papers. So I got A's in that class. but I got some stuff out of school. I never, you know, I went for two years and I don't even know. Honestly, I don't think I got an official degree or whatever. I was telling people, yeah, I got an associate's degree. And my lovely daughter, Arlis, she corrected me on that in front of a bunch of people one time a couple of years ago. She goes, Dad, you never got a degree.

Starting point is 00:42:11 So I went for two years. but my sole purpose and going, I mean, I'd be lying if I told you anything else, Ian, was, ah, school, more contacts, right near Boston, you know, like pretty close to Boston. So I set up my schedule to have all my classes on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and I had a four-day weekend. So I was off for those four days, and I'd always leave school. I'd come back to New York or I'd go to Boston and that's when things really started picking up even better. You know, I made more contacts at my school.

Starting point is 00:42:50 I'd make contacts through friends of friends and everything because Boston was a great place. The Boston Commons was, you know, really cooking back in the early 70s. You know, a lot of hippies, freaks were hanging out, especially on the weekends. So, yeah, I made a lot of contacts for pot and weed most. I mean, weed and hash mostly. And one of the funniest things I used to do because I rarely got a car. My dad had bought a car for the housekeeper, whichever. This was from day one.

Starting point is 00:43:24 My dad bought the housekeepers a car. And when I was 16, I got my license. So if my housekeeper, whoever was with me, one of the housekeepers, if they weren't using it, I occasionally got to take it to Rye High School. once in a while, maybe two weekends out of the year. I'd get to tail or two weeks out of the year. I could drive to college, but mostly I was hitching because back then hitching was just as easy.

Starting point is 00:43:50 So I'd hitch home or hitching to Boston and hang out with all my other friends that did have cars. And what I did many, many times, I'd come back to New York and I'd score a pound of two of wheat. And I'd put it in a paper bag with some groceries like sandwiches or whatever on top. And I'd fold up the bag with a weed in there. And what I would do is I'd get on 95

Starting point is 00:44:14 and get right on the exit and Rye or Porchester on the entrance, but, you know, going down. And I'd put the bag up on the shoulder about 20 or 30 feet in front of me, and I'd start hitching. So this way, if a cop pulled me over, you know, the bag was far enough away that I didn't have anything on me.

Starting point is 00:44:32 But if I got a ride, I knew it would take a while for them to stop and on the way up to the car, I just pick up the bag, jump in the car, and that's how I got to school, did it all the time. So school was, school was for me, more of a platform to create the business. Like yourself, I give you a lot of credit at 19. Here you are with this amazing scam. I really, I got to give you all the credit in the world.

Starting point is 00:44:57 But that's kind of, it took me a while longer. But, you know, ever since the fireball days, I knew in my heart of hearts, I knew when I was 13, 14, you know, you get Bar Mitzford, you turn into a man. What a joke at 12. Yeah, right, I'm a man. But I knew early on that I'm not saying I wanted to be a weed dealer for the rest of my life. I really wanted my own business, but I knew that I could never commit, you know, to a format, to a schedule nine to five that's just not the person I am.

Starting point is 00:45:30 I would have been miserable, you know, regardless of the money. And the one thing about the money, and I regret, you know, now I'm in my 70s, 73. When I was 20, 30s and 40s, I was more concerned, even though I have kids, I don't regret it for a second because I would have never spent that much time if I wasn't, you know, I was a middleman, you know, and if I wasn't making all this money, middling weed deals and a few hash deals back then turned mostly to weed. I would have never spent that time with my kids. but early on I was trying. I used to wrap my brain to think of a business, but I knew I had to make money. So really, that whole life,

Starting point is 00:46:12 I had a 37-year run of really not many jobs. I mean, no jobs, really. I had a limousine service out in San Diego in the 70s and 80s. After that, when the limousine service was bought, I was running the show, but I wasn't the owner. I had a metal cutting tool business. But these, I was making money, but these were fronts for the weed business, you know. So all along, I was trying to just make money and get ahead.

Starting point is 00:46:42 And it was hard. It wasn't easy because I'd have six great months and make money. But then there were no good deals for three, four, five months. Weed dealing used to be very seasonal, especially in the late 70s and all during the 80s. It was great for six months and not much going on for six months. But I never considered getting it. a job. I always wanted to try to find a business. I had a few, but nothing that really, you know, did it, you know what I mean? Nothing that I knew, okay, I can make six figures eventually if I

Starting point is 00:47:13 stick to it. Now it's probably easier to be a drug or a weed dealer back then, even drug dealer because everything's cash. Yeah, exactly. You don't have to launder money. You don't have to, it's normal. Yes, it was perfectly normal. And, you know, I got to the level where, you know, you sell enough, you know, I paid taxes, but I still needed, you know, I needed a front, you know, to live, start living in some of the places out in Cali that I was living in. So when you leave college, do you go right to Cali? Is that what happens next? Basically, yes. Basically what happened, I left college, but right after college, I met one of the best contacts of my life. And that is Cassidy, the gentleman that I went to Europe with to do a

Starting point is 00:47:59 hash scam. This was my big opportunity, and I will say the best vacation I ever had in my life. If we could hit on that for a second, I'll give you the short version. It's all in here. The short version is I wanted to meet this guy because my friend Cassidy was avoiding Vietnam. And he's also an avid surfer, ridiculous, since he was a kid, very good surfer. He found this hidden surf haven back in the early 70s. It's a little tiny village named Medea Plage in Morocco, North Africa, about halfway between Tangiers to the north, Casablanca to the south, and he loved it, all this surfing.

Starting point is 00:48:48 He also met a hash contact, really good hash contact. So while he was surfing, he still needed money. you know, he's not going to get a job in Morocco. So he started sending hash back in speakers, stereo speakers. Excuse me. He was sending these big speakers, you know, like the Jensen's and JBLs from back in the day. But he was only able to put two or three pounds a hash in each speaker. Now, understand, he and then 70, 71, 72, they didn't have dogs.

Starting point is 00:49:25 They weren't, you know, prying apart the mail. he sent his speakers back to a mutual friend. That mutual friend gave me all his hash. I sold all his hash, made money, but it was only two or three pounds. So for two years, I wanted to know who this guy was. I want to be friends with this guy. Then I got my opportunity because one of these deals got screwed up, long story short. We were both in my friend's house.

Starting point is 00:49:51 We met. We became friends. We became close. All of a sudden. It's a nasty way to put it, but we didn't need our friend. We didn't need our mutual friend. I was a guy doing the work. He was a guy with the hash.

Starting point is 00:50:04 That's just business. You know, that's just how it was. You cut out the middleman and you go to the source and that's just what was happening. So originally, getting back to the hash story, Cassidy said, why don't we use my boat from all his hash smuggling and living over there? He saved his money, bought a 36-foot sloop, really nice boat. originally I had a contact that was going to Columbia, somebody I knew, you know, from high school and, you know, hanging around, you know, because I was in a, I was in a rock and roll band and blues band. And I knew people all over Westchester, you know, all different kinds of people, like I mentioned earlier. And I knew this guy that his family was very wealthy, but they were in the oil business. His girlfriend, her family was very wealthy. This couple was going down to Bogos. they were buying usually about two keys or more of cocaine, putting them in false bottom suitcases, flying back in to the States and selling a really good Coke, high-end Coke.

Starting point is 00:51:09 Now, understand, I did Coke, but not a lot. Back in the day, there was something pink cocaine was the best ever, just incredible, two little lines out big, and you were good for four hours. But this guy was smuggling Coke, why I wanted them. And the light bulb went off. Why don't I get this guy and convince him? I got a sailboat. Let's go down to Columbia and get, you know, several pounds, several keys, 50 pounds of Coke and make a, you know, a ton of money.

Starting point is 00:51:38 And so I set this whole thing up. Truth be told, when it was showtime, I got really nervous because I didn't want to step over that line. There's a big difference between selling wheat and hash and selling Coke. it's the whole vibe and it's the loss you know the loss you know one year weed is like you know 15 years of coke or whatever back then it was really scary so I left westchester at the time and Cassidy had his boat docked in Palm Beach Florida I went down there the guy that was going to you know go do this coke thing with a contact he even gave me 500 bucks now this is 1973 in the beginning of 1973 500 bucks

Starting point is 00:52:20 was like a lot of money. So we had to outfit the boat not only with groceries, but we had to get, I think, fix the steering vein where, you know, it controls when you're sleeping below. And it's almost time. This guy's supposed to come down in four days. I'm getting really nervous he in because I'm getting cold feet. First of all, sailing, you know, a week, 10 days down to Columbia and bringing back Coke. I was really, really nervous about it. I was thinking, oh, boy, you know, you wanted it. Here it is. You got it. And I just, thought, you know, maybe you made a mistake. I was, lack of a better word, I was paranoid about doing this trip. I thought, you know, you never crossed over the line. And now all the stuff

Starting point is 00:53:01 is starting to form in my head. And I'm thinking, geez, you know, what an idiot. You know, and I can't tell Cassidy, oh, I'm scared. I got to go home. The best thing ever happened, this guy doesn't show up. The co-guy, Billy, he didn't show up. I'm calling him. Doesn't answer his phone. This goes on for two or three days. This guy got cold feet. We never saw him again, because what happened is he got cold feet and didn't come. Sad story. Six months later, he went down, got busted coming back with his girlfriend when the false bottom, because they couldn't get the flight to New York. They took a flight to Mexico. He got searched. Him and his girlfriend had to spend like three years or something, and the crudiest scary Mexican jail on the

Starting point is 00:53:47 planet. She survived because she's a tough broad. I even know her. I don't mean to say broad. I'm using it in a good sense. She's doing great. She lives down in the Florida Keys and the guy Billy never was the same. But at any rate, he never showed up. So Cassidy says to me, Gus, let's take a walk. So we're down in Palm Beach. Now we have no money. We have a sailboat that's paid for. But we have no money. We have no place. to go. We can't sail to Morocco. We don't have the funds. You know, nothing. And we take this walk all the way around the boat yard, around this bowling alley. And he goes, listen, I got another idea. What do you think about this? And the short version is he had a buyer for his boat for $8,000.

Starting point is 00:54:35 Doesn't sound like much, but keep in mind, this is 1973. That's a lot of money in 1973. he goes, I'll sell the boat and finance a trip. You and me will go over to Germany, we'll buy a Volkswagen bus, we'll drive down to Morocco, to Tetuan, we'll buy hash. He figured that we could get about 50 pounds because we had a very unique hiding place. And we'll come back. But here's the deal. Since I'm financing, he's smart. And I got it. I understood. He goes, when you come back and he knows this routine because he's driven back and forth many times in the two years already. When you get out of Morocco, you have to, Morocco, imagine this is Africa.

Starting point is 00:55:26 And Morocco is on the very northern tip of Africa, which has whatever, 37 countries or 40-something, whatever it is. But when you leave Morocco, Ian, you get on a ferry. you drive on a ferry with your vehicle or you walk on as a backpacker and you cross the Mediterranean, the rock of Gibraltar is right there to the left to the east, and you arrive in Spain. It's about a two-hour ferry ride. But he says when we leave Morocco, I am going to get out of the bus before you drive through customs and he was going to walk through pretending not to know me. He had his backpack.

Starting point is 00:56:06 he has his surfboard, the whole nine yards. He had extra $3,000, $4,000. So theoretically, fortunately, we didn't have to find out what would happen. But if I got busted, if they searched the bus and found this hash, he was going to come in and save the day. Thank God we didn't have to find that out. And so he was going to pretend on the ferry not to know me. And then when you get in Spain, same thing.

Starting point is 00:56:34 You get off the ferry. and you've got to get searched. And then the rest is like the rest of the countries, like when you go through Spain and France and Italy, we went all the way up to Rotterdam to send the bus back. It's like a toll booth, so he rode through. But he made it crystal clear in the beginning. When he asked me if I would be willing to do it, Ian,

Starting point is 00:56:55 it took me about 30 seconds to say absolutely. Because I was so excited that I didn't have to smuggle cocaine. This trip sounded great. I'm all in. So I stayed down on the boat for a couple of days and then flew back to Westchester and hung out at my dad's house. His mom ironically lived in Harrison right near where my dad was in Rybrook. But then I started to think the first day or two, I thought to myself, you know what, I need my girlfriend. And now she was my friend, but we were tight.

Starting point is 00:57:26 We had gone out already, blah, blah, blah. She was three years younger than I was. Stella, I thought, I need Stella along with me. A couple's going to look better, blah, blah, blah. So I asked Cassidy about it, and Cassidy said, great idea, done. So the deal was we went up, he sold the boat right away, we went up and we just hung out for about a month. I went to Stella knowing, and Cassidy said, well, do you think she'll say yes?

Starting point is 00:57:52 And Stella said yes quicker than I said yes. She said, yeah. I said, do you want to go to Europe? We're going to Morocco. Didn't say anything about the hash, but she knew me well enough. She said, yes, done deal. So from the very beginning of this trip, we never talked about smuggling hash. It wasn't like, you know, cloak and dagger.

Starting point is 00:58:12 Cassidy was 26. I'm 21. And believe it or not, now it's the different world out there, so nobody point the finger at me. Stella was 18. Now, can you imagine her parents liking and trusting me enough to let their 18-year-old daughter go with me to Europe for almost four months or so? And we all got, you know, Cassidy, I'm saying this real name, but Cassidy needed a driver's license.

Starting point is 00:58:41 In Europe back then, I think it's different now. You just take your passport in, which he already had, and you get a driver's license. And Stella and I needed passports, and I needed a driver's license. So we went to the city together. We got all our paperwork, took off, flew over, it all went really well, flew over to Munich, Germany, then took a train to Frankfurt to one of the biggest Volkswagen dealerships. And we bought a very unique, here's a picture of it, very close to the real thing, Volkswagen Bus. It was like right in the front row and there's hundreds and hundreds of buses.

Starting point is 00:59:18 And we knew it was almost calling our name. We nicknamed it Sweet Jane. We didn't even test drive any other. And this was one of the biggest lots. It's like, you know, two football fields full of cars, probably three. We bought the bus and we went to a furniture store. We built a comfortable like seat because it was bucket seats. No windows on the side.

Starting point is 00:59:39 It had this high roof if you look. It wasn't a pop-up, but it was a high roof. And if you're six foot two, you can walk through that roof with a clearance over your head. Nothing in the back, but we were going to get to that. And so we had the seat. And in back now, we just have our sleeping bags. we have his surfboard and we had three gallons of polyurethane resin and I'll tell you why in a moment we drove we took our time we drove all the way down we drove a little through Sweden we drove

Starting point is 01:00:10 and then we drove down the coast and we passed you know all these this beautiful down the coast you know passing Italy and France and Spain or I think it's the other way around stopping to get cheese and breads from the ladies on the roadside Ian, it was the best trip of my life. And we took our time. We were in no rush. We had no time limit. We took our time, and we drove all the way down into Morocco.

Starting point is 01:00:39 We found a campground. And the first thing we had to do is get to hash. This is in Tetuan. And our hash contact was married. Great guy. And he had a family. He lived maybe 20 minutes, 15 minutes from the campground. But he had told Cassidy, don't drive the bus near my house.

Starting point is 01:00:59 he didn't want any local police to see, you know, the bus or whatever. So we got settled. Cassidy went first to give him the money. He gave him 1,500 pounds American, which is a ton of money in Morocco. And then he invited us back to his house to have dinner with his family. So we went back and we had this great dinner, early dinner, like five to seven. And he treated us real well. Now, the communication was that Arabic has many,

Starting point is 01:01:29 many different dialects, but some of them are similar to Spanish. And Cassidy spoke fluent Spanish. So that's how they communicated. He spoke a little bit of English or hash contact. And he said, well, this is what you have to do. He marked an X on the spot. Now, granted, we had already handed him, Cassidy had handed him the $1,500 for a dinner. And he says, my brothers are going to meet you on the top of this mountain at midnight. Now, he could have ran away or whatever. We never would have saw him again, but he was a stand-up guy. We went back to the campground.

Starting point is 01:02:07 We had to kill several hours. And then we drove. And we're looking at this map, and we get up to the top of a mountain. Now, imagine the three of us are in the Volkswagen bus. And we're up on top of a mountain with no man-made things anywhere. No utility pole, no houses, no lights, nothing. scary, as you can imagine. The last, like, mile or so was a dirt road, and we pull off under this big, I think it was an oak tree,

Starting point is 01:02:38 and it's about 10 minutes to midnight. We timed it perfectly because it was about an hour up the mountain road from, like, the main highway. And out of the freaking blue, like at two minutes at 12, and to this day, Ian, I have no idea where these guys come from. Two of his brothers come up off the side of the mountain, and they have this big, big tan duffel bag. And I'm kind of looking around like, how the fuck they get here? You know, what's up? But we didn't question that.

Starting point is 01:03:08 We were more about, let's get the hash and get the hell out of here. You know, it's starting to get like, okay, you know, they could have killed this right then and there threw us off the cliff, stolen the bus and drove away. We opened up the side door of the bus and we throw the hash in the back. Oh, by the way, Stella's like half asleep in the back. She doesn't even care about any of this. We open up and I look in and I see this and I'm like a hash connoisseur at this time from Rubin's schooling and all those years of selling hash. I know what's up.

Starting point is 01:03:39 And the hash was all in cellophane. In Lebanon, they make hash what's called ores. In Morocco, they're called plaques because they're all rectangular shape with a thin piece of cellophane around it. And the cellophane you can see right through. and the hash is anywhere from, they're not meticulously weighed. So these plaques are anywhere from seven and a half, eight ounces, up to maybe 14, 15 ounces per piece. I had done the math and Cassidy thought we could fit 50 pounds.

Starting point is 01:04:14 I'm going to tell you, in the second, our great stash. I had it down to 44 pounds. Like I know, I know the size. And we ended up buying 44 pounds of hash. and you could see right through the cellophane, they had double zeros that were stamped into each and every plaque. Farmers make hash this way. They grow pot plants and they go through the fields with a big, white, thin cloth, and they gather all the resin. Then when they gather all the resin, they come back and they put them between almost imagine a giant ironing board.

Starting point is 01:04:51 And the hotter the press, the better the hash and the longer the press. That's essentially how they made hash in Morocco. So they're all like that. That's the gist of it, the short version. And I'm looking, and I open up a little salafane. I smell it. I could bend it. I knew it was the right thing.

Starting point is 01:05:09 And Cassidy's like, Gus, don't you want to smoke something? Don't you want to smoke? Well, the last thing, Ian, I wanted to do was take even one hit because I knew if I did that, I'd get stoned, I'd get paranoid. We still got to drive seven hours to this little beach village, Medea Plot. I said, believe me, trust me, Cassie, this is on me. It's great. We said goodbye to the brothers.

Starting point is 01:05:27 This whole thing took like five minutes tops. And the brothers were great, gave us a hug. They went off the side of the mountain. Never to be seen again. Ian, to this day, I don't know if there was some kind of scooter down there or a camel. I don't know if these guys walked in my... I have no idea, but they vanished. So we drive down the road.

Starting point is 01:05:46 And we're a little paranoid. Now, this whole trip, we all smoke cigarettes. Luke was buying these rot-gut European smokes because he was trying to save money. So for our trip this day, he broke out at that moment, he broke out a cart in a marlborough. So it was like, all right, you know, the cheap skate is finally, you know, coming through. Like I said, we had about seven hours to the house. We had about an hour down this mountain.

Starting point is 01:06:15 Coming down that mountain, we're going to speed limit, which was like 25, 30. It seemed like it took like seven hours itself just to get down the mountain. We smoked, we must have smoked a pack of cigarettes between us. We get down, finally we get on the highway, everything's cool. We're, you know, I think it was like, I think it was 100 kilometers, which is like 60 miles an hour. The bus, by the way, was in kilometers, but I knew that 60, you know, 100 or whatever it was. I think it was 100 miles an hour, it was 60 clicks. So we're driving.

Starting point is 01:06:49 And after about an hour and a half, two hours on the road, everything's cool. you know, we're starting to feel, okay, this is good. We had A-track, so we're listening to music in the background. Stella couldn't give a shit. She's asleep in the back, like, not even concerned, not even, and I only wish I had her mentality. That's why I brought her along. And all of a sudden, all of a sudden,

Starting point is 01:07:11 I can still remember the rush, the hair starting to get popping the back of my neck. All of a sudden, imagine coming down a highway, 50 miles an hour, and there's this big curve in the road, where you're going, but you're not, you don't see around the curve. We come around this curve, and there is a roadblock, a full-blown roadblock, on both sides of the road, I might add. And here we are like, you know, a couple hundred yards away. And the last thing we could do is, you know, they set it up this way on purpose, of course.

Starting point is 01:07:46 We can't pull over. We can't turn around because there's a meridian in between the highways. there's no exit. This is it. And we have the hash, not in our stash yet. This is just in a duffel bag in the back with a surfboard and our backpacks and all that stuff. And, you know, Cassidy and I look at each other. Let's just move ahead. So we move it ahead. Now, the interesting thing in both Spain and Morocco is it's hard to detect the difference between soldiers, the military, and the police. They're very similar. I think this was a little of both. I think there was most. mostly soldiers, but a couple of police, but that's almost irrelevant. But these guys had one of those road signs, you know, with the seesaws in a block. They have the automatic weapons. We're going through this roadblock. There's no way around.

Starting point is 01:08:37 I mean, I don't mean run through it. I mean, we're going to stop at it. I teamed up with Hungry Route to build a digital cookbook, and I called it the commissary upgrade because I know we're all tired of eating ramen noodles. I was looking for fast, delicious meals that we can make quick at home. When you click the link for the Digital Commissary Upgrade Cookbook, you can see recipes that I've personally selected and make on my own every night at home, such as the chicken fajitas with fresh tomato salsa,

Starting point is 01:09:06 the black and medium cooked shrimp, tagliatelli Alfredo, grilled pork chops with rice, green beans, scallions, and a sweet chili lime bowl, and eggs and cuties, blueberry oatmeal, Seared salmon Southwest salad, spice lamb vidvillo, plus red potatoes, the Swiss burger and roasted broccoli florets, and the black bean avocado whole green pita pockets. The best part about using hungry root is that once you go through a digital cookbook like mine and see recipes you like, you can have all the ingredients to make those dishes shipped right to your door and they arrive pretty quickly in a box just like this.

Starting point is 01:09:45 Seriously, every single ingredient right down to the next. ditty-gritty and they even send you snacks just like these, my personal favorite, the skinny dipped peanut butter cups. And today we're gonna be making the black and trim taglitelli Alpredo. That sounds good, let's get into it. This dish only takes nine minutes to cook and you could find the exact instructions

Starting point is 01:10:07 on my digital cookbook. Hungar root is literally so easy to use and put it into action because I just bring my iPad into the kitchen with the recipes and have Letitia do all the work. I'm the instruction guy. This only took nine minutes to cook, and it's delicious. Yeah, you guys need to get on Hungry Root because we're dialed in on it,

Starting point is 01:10:57 and we're going to be using this every night. Explore my digital cookbook on Hungry Root today, and find recipes that are right for you. Go to Hungryroot.com slash locked in to access my cookbook, the commissary upgrade. So we stop and on the way up, now we're only 100 yards away, you know, going slowly. And Cassidy says, Stella, Stella, wake up, get up here, sit down, bring the passports. We always kept the passports, you know, in a particular spot.

Starting point is 01:11:30 She goes, he said, bring the passport. So she got up in her little custom chair between the two, you know, the two bucket seats of the bus. And the guy comes up and he looks stern and serious and he's like 40-something. and, you know, we're just kids, you know. And he comes up, you know, I had my window down already. And I said something lame like, oh, you know, hello, sir. I might have said boy in the snotius or something. I'm not even sure.

Starting point is 01:12:01 I might have said it. I might not. My mouth was probably open, just wondering how long was coming. And he said, passports. And he was still very serious. And I'm seeing in my peripheral vision, there's soldiers. There's a dozen of them. or cops or whatever, they're all around.

Starting point is 01:12:16 And there's, you know, this could be it. You know, so I'm trying my best not even to think about that. Everything's cool, common collective. He takes the passports. He looks through one. He sees American. He looks through another and another. And all of a sudden, when he gets to the second one and then the third one,

Starting point is 01:12:34 I see a big smile on his face. And he goes, oh, Americans, yes, yes, oh, good. You know, and now he's all excited. Now he's all excited. I'm thinking, what the hell? And he goes, okay, no problem. He didn't even look. He didn't even stick his head in my window

Starting point is 01:12:51 or much less open up the side door. He goes, go ahead, go ahead because he knows American tourism is money. And we're driving down the road and we're like, what the fuck was that? Well, what was that? You know, what were they looking for? And then I think it was Stella.

Starting point is 01:13:10 It was either Stella or Cassidy. Oh, that's what it is. They're looking for Israeli passports during that time in 1973. I think it lasted about a year or whatever. I'm not a history buff. But there was something called the Yom Kippur Wars. And it was a big argument between the Moroccans and Israelis. So we figured out that's it.

Starting point is 01:13:35 They were looking for Israeli passports. You know, the Israelis shouldn't have been there. Or if they were, they were going to get interrogators. church or whatever. That's what the whole thing was for. Sure enough, two hours later, same thing happens. Another hour before we get to, we're an hour outside of Medea Plage, the little village, same thing. So we had three of those stops, but the same results in each stop. All's good. We pull up. Now it's like, you know, 7, 7.30 in the morning, you know, 8 o'clock in the morning. And we're in this small town, maybe 100 people, one little shack where they sold fruits and

Starting point is 01:14:13 vegetables. That was like the main store. There's a bigger town, you know, 18 kilometers away. And Cassidy says, stay right here. I'll be back in 20 or 30 minutes. I'm going to go get us a house. You know, this isn't like, you know, no computers. This isn't like, oh, yeah, we got to do this in advance. No, no, no, no. He goes away. He's back in half hour. Let's go check out our house. We go right down the road. There's a small little road. And right across is the beach. Gorgeous beach. He found us a gorgeous. gorgeous, fully furnished. There's a cement wall all the way around, a big white wall cement with jagged glass on the top. I guess that's to keep intruders out, but there's no intruders

Starting point is 01:14:55 that the whole thing is for show probably. And the furniture is all Moroccan colors, big pillows. It's great. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, $80 a month. That's what it cost us. We moved in, and this is our stash. Now, I'm going to ruin. this part of the book, but it's worth it. We have to build the stash. So we decide that very first day, and now it's only like nine in the morning or something, let's get this done and over with. So we go into Kenetra to get supplies. We weren't going to bring over the hammer, the screwdriver, the saw, and all that stuff. So we bought all that stuff in town. We also bought a couple of pieces of plywood, three quarter inch thick, four by 12.

Starting point is 01:15:43 And we had to get some two by fours. We needed four pieces of two by fours, one, you know, the length of the bed and the width of the bed. We had to have a couple pieces. It were eight pieces, a couple of pieces that were four foot, and then we had to have four pieces for legs. We bought an extra piece of plywood where we made a three foot high bookshelf in the back.

Starting point is 01:16:04 So what we did is imagine we'll use the book as a piece of plywood. We put the first piece of plywood down. Then what we did is we individually wrapped. Now, the hash sheets is only in cellophane. And back then, they didn't have the high-end stuff. So what we did is we wrapped all the hash in heavy-duty tinfoil. I think we brought that from the States, the tinfoil and the Ziploc baggies. We wrapped the hash in tinfoil and Ziploc baggies and got all the air out and everything.

Starting point is 01:16:39 Now imagine the piece of plywood sitting here. Then we attached the two by fours all around. So now you have a little depth. You have the two by fours and the plywood in the bottom. We put all the hashish in there. And the key ingredient that we brought over was three gallons of a material. It's a liquid material called polyurethane resin. That's what they used to.

Starting point is 01:17:03 And they still may. They used to repair surfboards and make surfboards that way with polyurethane resin. And keep in mind, today you could never bring that on a plane. But back then, it was no big deal, you know, carrying three cans of polyurethane resin. And since Cassidy always carried a surfboard, nobody had customs, you know, gave us a hard time. It was all cool, totally cool. And so now we have it all there. And we pour gently all this.

Starting point is 01:17:31 It's kind of, you know what it is kind of like? It's kind of like imagine a thick syrup. And we covered it perfectly even, you know, smooth. it all out, made sure all the plaques were underneath and so forth. Now, the first thing we did is let it dry. That stuff dries pretty quick, you know, within 45 minutes an hour. It was hard as a rock. So now imagine inside the bed on the, on the plywood with a two-by-fours around, you have this rock. It's like as hard as cement to rock, and inside the polyurethane resin that is hardened is a hash. then we put the other piece of plywood on top of that.

Starting point is 01:18:12 We sand it all down. We put the legs on. We painted it. We bought a can of dull gray paint, nothing to stand out. We painted the bed, the legs in the other cabinet we made. We painted all that gray. I had also found in town these pieces of bamboo that fit perfectly on the inside of the Volkswagen bus to make it more homey. And it was something else to detain.

Starting point is 01:18:38 tour being searched. They could look behind the bamboo. And we brought it out, made sure it fit right in the bed. It was perfect. Then we brought it back inside. We decided to keep it in the guest room. We had an unbelievable, you know, four and a half weeks, great stay. Luke went surfing every day. You stella and I did a lot of boogie boarding. We went to town. We met this young kid. He was about 13 Mohammed on the second day. He brought us in to get us better prices. One thing about Morocco is food, clothing, no matter what. In 1973, there were no set prices. Everything's a deal.

Starting point is 01:19:17 You know, whether you're buying a carrot, a chicken, a pair of shoes, a jolava, one of those ropes, everything's a deal. So our buddy Mohammed, everybody is like Joe in the United States. He's with us, so he's saving us a lot of money. Well, the third day, and this is important because this is our third passenger. on the way back. There's a wild pack of dogs, and one of these dogs took a fancy to us. I gave her a bite of this sandwich I was eating when we were on the beach. She followed me home. Next thing you know, I brought her to her vet, which was really a trip, got her all her shots or papers. Now we have a dog.

Starting point is 01:19:55 We adopted her, our third party. And we had no time frame on when to leave. And this little thing is pretty cool. There's two little parts of this story that are cool. We knew we had been there just over four weeks, and we knew it was almost time, but no date set. Our typical routine in the morning was we were just hanging out early, having coffee. We had these big bay windows that overlooked this gorgeous beachy, and it was just unbelievable. Hardly anybody on there, a couple of surfers. This local guy, this big old Arab guy is funny. He'd walk up and down the beach with hot donuts every day, hot donuts on a beach when it's 80 degrees.

Starting point is 01:20:39 they were great donuts. And this one morning we're sitting there. Our beloved dog pig pen, I can tell her real name was Primo. She's sitting on the couch with Cassidy. And Stella's in one chair, I'm in another chair, kind of, you know, the three of us, big bay windows, high ceilings.

Starting point is 01:21:02 Now I will preface this by saying, you know in life how everybody has a favorite number? Yeah. for whatever reason. For whatever reason, my favorite number was two. I had a thing about two. I considered it in my own head. Good luck.

Starting point is 01:21:16 You know, it didn't matter if anybody else believed it. I believed it. So all of a sudden, and I know this sounds like a crock. I know a lot of people are going to think, oh, this guy's making this up. It really happened. Two white doves fly into the living room, circle the living room twice, and fly out.

Starting point is 01:21:37 And it was like an omen. And once again, the hairs on my neck are sticking up. It's true, guys. And it was like an omen. That's it. Nothing else. But that's it. That happened.

Starting point is 01:21:50 Even Primo was sitting there, aka Pigpen in the book. She's looking at them. The three of us were looking. They flew out. We all look at each other and said, that's the sign that we go. The next day we went. So the next day we drove because there was one more quick, thing. We get up to, this time, Tangiers, not Tetuan. Ted Juan is over to the west. Tangiers is

Starting point is 01:22:14 closer to the ocean to us and we're going to leave from Tangiers. We get to Tangiers. Cassidy goes in, buys our three tickets for the ferry. And then he said, that's it, guys, I'll see you. Now he's leaving us. Because once again, he's walking on the ferry pretending he doesn't know us. He had a money belt with backed up money just in case anything happened to us leaving Morocco or coming into Spain. And we go through customs. This is Showtime. Now there's no turning back. I can't change my mind now.

Starting point is 01:22:48 My partner in crime, Stella, 18 years old, she's sitting there like she's high on volumes, totally chilled. She's not. She's sitting cross-legged reading the godfather like. We're just going through a toll, you know, we're just going through a border check chill. And I'm thinking to myself, huh, fuck, are you so cool over here? But I'm trying to get her energies, but she's, you know, and I have to do, I'll tell you, I had to do my best, best, best. It was the biggest mental challenge in my life.

Starting point is 01:23:24 I just drove the thought that I was doing anything wrong away. I just made myself feel like this isn't happening. I'm just going through the border check. We pull up the first thing the guy says, the head guy comes up to us, very first words out of his mouth, and I think the only English words he knew was Hashis Signor. Hachishishish, you have Hashis, Now, keep in mind, there's like six, eight lanes of people, and everybody's getting the same question from who's ever searching them. This is typical.

Starting point is 01:23:56 This happens all the time. Every day, that's how they work. They send all the people that are walking. like Cassidy through this one part that they get searched individually. I guess it's something like TSA. I never saw that where they walk through. And all the vehicles have to go through these slots. This guy comes up.

Starting point is 01:24:16 He checks our passport. And I said, no, signor, no. Meanwhile, like, it's part of the regular regime. They must have done it thousands of times. Five guys come up, not violently, but they were into their job. I've got one guy flattening one of the tires randomly. One guy's looking all through the engine, that's in taking part of it apart. Another guy's under the Volkswagen bus.

Starting point is 01:24:40 There's a long heater hose that runs. He's taken out that to see if there's any hash in there. I got two guys searching the interior. We're sitting there, but he's searching all around. Primo, aka Pigpen does her job. He's licking. She's licking the guy. She's only, by the way, the vet told us probably not even a year old.

Starting point is 01:25:00 So she was like a pup. And she's licking the guy's hand and the whole thing and everything's cool. They make me call her. So I called her up and put her in Stella's seat. They wanted to lift up. We had a six-inch that we also bought a six-inch foam mattress on top of the bed. And we had the sheets and the blankets and the pillow. We lifted that up.

Starting point is 01:25:22 They lifted that up, looked under the mattress, didn't even pay attention to the bed. They looked through the blankets. Of course, they looked behind the bamboo. We had books in that shelf. we had about six or seven boxes at eight tracks, you know, you can only fit like eight in a box this big. So they're looking through that everything. This goes on for 45 minutes, maybe not even, maybe a half hour, but there's five of them while there's other guy's asking, has she's tenure, has she's tenure.

Starting point is 01:25:49 Finally, we get, I mean, they thoroughly went through everything. Now, keep in mind, you know, the only way they would have found that is taking a chainsaw, you know, to open it up. I don't even think a dog today could have smelled it in that. I highly doubt it. Any you canine people out there might, you know, correct me if I'm wrong. But here's a weird part of that. They have us come through, but we're not allowed on the ferry. They make us pull over to the side.

Starting point is 01:26:24 Now imagine we're just went through this whole search. It was, yeah, everything's cool, but you're not letting us get on the ferry. And we're like, what the hell? Stella is like, relax, babe, it's, you know, whatever it is, don't worry about it. Everything's fine. And I jump to conclusions in my head. And there's one Arab guy that comes over, but he's not paying attention to us. He's standing there cross-legged, watching the goals on. Now, keep in mind, there's maybe 40 people that can get on the ferry, depending on the size of their cars. Everybody's driving on. The walkers are walking on. And and I'm thinking, why are we standing here?

Starting point is 01:27:04 Are they going to come and get us? Did they call somebody else? And I say, no, everything is cool. It's got to be cool. So during that time is in the book I wrote, I have a flashback to explain how I got to that position with the housekeepers and all that stuff. So the main character has a flashback.

Starting point is 01:27:22 So finally, it's almost time we're thinking because we're supposed to leave at 2 p.m. And it's like 20 to 2.2. I happen to look up to the top deck. This is a sizable ferry, but not super, super big, maybe, you know, 80, 100 feet long or something. Who's up there, Cassidy? And he's looking down at me, and I'm looking up. And I see the expression on his face, and he's all uptight.

Starting point is 01:27:49 And I'm thinking, why are you making me more uptight? I just had it under control. Like, for Christ's sake, at least give me a fake smile. Do something. Don't just stand there looking worried. And I told myself, I'm not even looking at him anymore. This is not good. Finally, they say, okay, come on, you're on.

Starting point is 01:28:09 You know what it was? I showed you this book. I showed you this roof. This roof was about two and a half on the bus, two and a half feet tall. The ferry, if you could imagine, kind of like a U-shaped. We had to be the last ones in to have enough room. for the freaking route up for the bus to fit in so literally we backed in the very last people on the ferry meaning or the first off in Spain and there's still there's only about six inches a room

Starting point is 01:28:43 but that was the reason now we're on the way over past the rock of gibraltar oh yeah oh no this happens after so we're we're over we decided to go up to the top deck and we're just chilling we leave pig pen in the bus. She's fine. She's cool. It's nice and cool down there. And we're watching Spain get closer. And I start thinking to myself, I have a problem, Ian,

Starting point is 01:29:09 where I think too much, and I shouldn't even have thought I should have just waved to the rock of Gibraltar. And I'm thinking of myself, if the search was that intense in Morocco, I should have never allowed this thought into my mind. I'm thinking, how's it going to be in Spain? It can't be worse, right? They know the people

Starting point is 01:29:25 in Morocco, and I'm playing these minds. games and Stella's just like, you know, she's not paying attention. She's like, it's fine. It's great. As we're standing on the rail, let's get back to the number two. And again, I know most of your fans are going to think it's a croc, but this happened on my mother and father. This happened. We're standing over the rail. And now we're coming close. We're like maybe a mile out, mile and a half out. We see Malaga, the shore, the whole thing, as we're standing on the top. And I know that Cassidy, I think he's on the second deck. You know, we would know I didn't want to be anywhere near him. We look out, all of a sudden, out of the blue, two dolphins come jumping up. Now, this is a long ferry,

Starting point is 01:30:17 but they're jumping with the boat at the same speed right where we're looking down. They jump twice. then they circle around the boat twice. They jumped two more times and dish the pier. And Stella and I looked at each other like, yes, it was like, that's our omen. We got into Spain. We went and pulled into the thing. The guy comes over. Oh, I, Americans, blah, blah, blah,

Starting point is 01:30:47 really friendly guy goes back, pets the dog, doesn't, looks around like this. I think he lifted up one bamboo curtain. he points to a music box Stella hands it to him he opens it up and the dog Pigpen real name Primo she's wagging her tail and he's a dog guy he's petting her

Starting point is 01:31:06 she's like in him everything's great and Stella passes him one of the cassette boxes he opens up one and he pulls it out and he goes music and she said and she goes perfect timing like we rehearsed it but we didn't see music goes la la la la la he starts laughing

Starting point is 01:31:24 looks around a little bit, shuts the door and he goes, okay. And I'm thinking of myself, okay, like, is this cool? We're good. Sure enough, we go to the exit, the big exit side, you know, to get out is open. And we go out and I'm like exploding with like this is like the hurdle. Like 75% of our hurdle is over. We made it out of Morocco. We made it into Spain.

Starting point is 01:31:51 Cassidy, meanwhile, right across from the exit, is a bar and cafe. He gave me strict instructions when I get out, park the bus, come in and get him. I decided at the last second, I don't like this.

Starting point is 01:32:05 I don't want to be next to the custom yard. I make my own decision. There's a big hill up the road. I said to Stella, she goes, we should go inside and get him. I said, no, no, no.

Starting point is 01:32:15 I want to get out of here. I drove up to the top of this hill, which you could see from there. And I parked. I figured, he'll see it. You know, you can see that if you were at a stadium, Ian, and there's 50,000 people in the parking lot, you can find this bus in two seconds. And we're waiting. And we're waiting like, it's an hour. And I'm like, what the hell happened? Do you think, you know, maybe they kept him in customs. He never got out of there.

Starting point is 01:32:41 Finally, I'm looking in the rear view because you can see out the back window. Then I look in the side window. And I see Cassidy come walking up the hill. And I know him real well because I'm traveling. And he is pissed off. I can see the look on his face. I can almost see the steam coming out of his ears. He is pissed, and I'm thinking of myself, why is he so upset? You know, so I came up the hill. He gets in, doesn't say a word. Leslie slides over. I drive, and two minutes he exposed.

Starting point is 01:33:10 What the fuck are you doing? I told you to go in there. You got me so paranoid. I thought you guys got busted. I didn't know whether to call Stella's friend, to call Stella's parents. I'm sorry, or your dad, blah, blah, blah, blah. He didn't say anything for another 15 minutes.

Starting point is 01:33:24 we rode down the road, and then my peripheral vision, I could see him look past Stella and look at me and look at me, and all of a sudden I looked at him, and we burst out laughing, and it was the best rush of our life. And the rest of the story, we made it. That was it. And the rest of our stories, he stayed in the bus from then on. We drove all the way up to Rotterdam.

Starting point is 01:33:46 Cassidy had a girlfriend in Amsterdam that had a flat, aka apartment, and she said we could stay, so we decided to stay there, had a blast in Amsterdam for a week with a dog, the whole thing. And Stella and Pigpen stayed at the flat, and Cassidy and I went to Rotterdam. We had three options for 600 bucks, and it would all take six weeks. We could go to New York, we could go to Boston, or we could go to Montreal. And we decided, we knew this beforehand, but we decided that let's go to Montreal. We thought it would just be a mellow or a vibe. I don't know why.

Starting point is 01:34:25 You know, pick one. We pick Montreal. But it would take six weeks. We stayed there a week. We all came back. We split up, stayed at our respective places. I get the call from Montreal six weeks later. I mean, right at six weeks later.

Starting point is 01:34:40 And I recruit another girlfriend of mine. This is kind of cool. And she had a 68 bus. Mine's a 69. But the measurements are pretty much the same. So I hooked her up. I was going to give her a big. plaque for doing this for me and she was gung-ho. She has the New York plates. Now, keep in mind,

Starting point is 01:34:56 I still have the European plates and we're in Canada. And that factory in Beecher Falls, the reason why I brought that up is because this is going to come into play. So we all drove up. My girlfriend, it was going to do it. And of course, Stella and Pigpen, who went everywhere with me. And we drive up, but we park about two miles away. We found this me mellow little neighborhood, two miles away from the shipyard. And I left their bus and I got a cab to the shipyard. Now I go to the shipyard. And I'm telling you, and this place was full of 18, you know, like the containers on 18 wheelers. It had thousands like yards and yards full of these containers because they're shipping stuff all over the world, you know, come inbound, outbound.

Starting point is 01:35:45 And at the way end, it took a long time to get there. There's, you know, a little office. I go into the office, show my ID. Oh, yeah, we got it for you. I get in a golf cart. And it's almost from the office. It's like a full four-minute, five-minute ride. And we're driving slowly. And I'm thinking of myself, well, at any moment, the DEA is going to come flying off the roofs

Starting point is 01:36:07 or coming down on ropes or whatever. And we pull up to this container. And he pulls a big ramp out. And he opens the door. And it was like shining. And I'm thinking, wow. And there's the bus. And I casually just will.

Starting point is 01:36:20 walk up the ramp because, of course, I want to make sure that damn bed. And I look in the back and I got the chills again. And I see the bed and it's like untouched. I can see it's exactly how we left it six weeks ago in Rotterdam. So I pull out and as I'm pulling out, I'm thinking the same shit. You know, at any moment they're going to come out and block me on. Everything's cool. I get back to the bus.

Starting point is 01:36:45 My friend is, it was a big girl. She's like 6-1 and pretty hefty. Her and I got that bed out of my bus and into hers in about seven seconds. We put it in the back. I sent them through that Beach or Falls, Vermont border. Because I knew where I worked at Ethan Allen, Canada, New Hampshire, Vermont. I knew that people are coming back and forth on a daily basis to work at the factory or shop or whatever. Sure enough, the girls.

Starting point is 01:37:18 and Pig Pen, the dog, got right through the New York plates. Like, they had just been there. They come through. Oh, we were just shopping. Yeah, come on through. Done deal. They go down to Massachusetts. I had a house back then, about 40 miles, 40 minutes east of Boston out in the country.

Starting point is 01:37:35 And they went there and Cassidy was there and my best friend Hunter was there. And they were waiting for me. Well, I didn't even want to go anywhere near them. I just had this thing. I was over ridiculously. safe. I went through a border in New York. Those guys knew I was up to something, because here I am with a European passport. They see Morocco stamped on there. I have this little like gym bag with an extra shirt, toothbrush, toothpaste. I have nothing. And the bus doesn't have anything in the

Starting point is 01:38:11 back. We even put the little cabinet in the back here or a bus. And there's nothing in it. What are you doing, man? You know, they knew. And they they did a search that was three times more thorough than the Moroccans. I mean, they really took the engine apart. They flattened two or three tires, and they had me there for like three hours to their credit. And I'll give them this. They were so professional, and they knew they were doing everything was back. Exactly right.

Starting point is 01:38:39 Everything. But they ripped it. They took off a headlight, I think, and looked in the back. I mean, everything. And I'm inside thinking, and the guy keeps asking me, Okay, Mr. Gus, what are you doing? You got a Moroccan stamp. I know you're up to something.

Starting point is 01:38:54 And I stuck to my rap. I said, honestly, I was going to come pick up my bus and I was going to tour Canada. But I ran out of money. You know, and he basically said, you're full of shit without saying that. And end of story. We got back and guess who bought most of the hash? My buddy Rubin bought most of the hash, you know, connections or connections. And there was one little problem, though, before Ruben bought the hash, you bought it all,

Starting point is 01:39:24 and we got rid of it all in about two weeks because I wanted to save about, you know, seven, eight pounds and break it down, you know, to half pounds, quarter pounds. But when I got back to, we called it to Harvard House in a tiny little town called Harvard that's still there, like no traffic lights, really cool, but, you know, high in real estate now. everybody has 10, 30 acres, stuff like that. And we had a great rental. When I got there, you know, my little crew was waiting, my best friend who I live with there. You know, the girl that drove us up there, Stella Cassidy, of course, Pigben.

Starting point is 01:40:02 And they're waiting for me. And they're like, where were you, you know, blah, blah. And so we get out the chisels and the hammers and we get the plywood off. and this stuff is like a rock. It took us a couple hours to really get it all out. We finally get it out. And we had a couple of real clean hash pipes. Nobody smoked anything.

Starting point is 01:40:25 Everything was straight. And I pull a random plaque out, get it unwrap from the tinfoil and the Ziploc baggie and the seal. And I smell it. And I went white. And Cassidy said, Gus, what's wrong? I said it smells like, it smells like glue. like the polyurethane resin smells like glue. It was my best friend, Hunter, said, relax. I already got an idea about that. So I took it. It was so soft you could, you know, smush it with your fingers.

Starting point is 01:40:58 I go, okay. So I filled two pipes. I said, here's a deal. Everybody just take two hits. That's it. No more. Everybody was straight. Nobody drank any liquor, beer. Nobody smoked anything. and I got some pros sitting around here, you know, smokers. We passed it around, you know, just in a couple of minutes. Everybody took two hits. We all sat there for about two minutes. And almost all at once, this was one of the best laughs I ever had in my life. We all burst out laughing.

Starting point is 01:41:30 We were all stoned. It was great. It was like celebration, you know. Yeah, everything's great. Everybody loved it and we knew it was cool. and what Hunter came up with, kudos to him. On the second floor,

Starting point is 01:41:45 this was a big two-story house. On the second floor, we started the trip in May, so it was like late April, but it was still cool. I'm sorry, we started in April, but it was mid-May, but it was still cool in Massachusetts.

Starting point is 01:42:02 And what we did was we opened all the windows on the top floor, and we took the hash out plain and just literally put a piece of paper on the window sill and just laid all the plaques. There was a lot of plaques. By the way, I was so close when we weighed it out. When we broke it up and to reel a tape back to the day we were making the bed, we were with exactly just a couple grams over 43 and a half pounds.

Starting point is 01:42:33 We couldn't fit that 40, you know, the half of pounds. and so we smoked when we were in Morocco, then we flush the rest down the toilet. But, you know, I always told Cassidy, I told you I was right, you know, we would have to thrown away four pounds of ash. But after about three days, the smell went away, and within two weeks, we sold it all.

Starting point is 01:42:54 I know what you're waiting for the outcome. It sounds insane right now, but Cassidy made 21,500. I made 20,000, but the bus was 15,000. I wanted to keep the bus, and we gave Stella 5,000, and that was it. Imagine if it turned out to be fake. Oh, my God. Why didn't you guys test it out there?

Starting point is 01:43:18 You're just too scared. No, when you test it back in the old days, you know. When you're dealing with it, you know. All the right people know. I knew right away. You didn't have to test it. I know it's hard to think in today, 2006. Testing it, yeah, you smelt it, you smoked it, you bent it.

Starting point is 01:43:36 you knew. There was no Fagasy, bogus, there was no bogus material. You know what I mean? Today you could pass anything off or whatever. But interesting point you brought up. The trust factor was 100 times what it is today. In other words, you could buy

Starting point is 01:43:56 mescaline or LSD excuse me in the late 60s, even in the mid-70s from people you didn't know in Boston or New York in the the park and old Greenwich, wherever, and it was a trust factor. They told you, yes, it was Purple Houseley. Yes, it was window pain. Yes, it was white lightning. Yes, it was LSD 25. And on and on. Yes, chocolate acid. Across the board, everybody was 99% honest. Now, back then, if you got caught in Morocco with that hash, how much time would you have gotten?

Starting point is 01:44:32 Well, here's what we knew for sure. The answer to that question is I'm not sure. but in Spain, you know, right over the border, we knew for a fact that it was six years in a day, whether you got caught with a gram or 43.5 pounds. Oh, that's not terrible. Yeah, not terrible, but you can imagine the conditions. Morocco, it's an interesting question that I never learned the answer to because he had the backup cash and we were still in Morocco. So technically, we were getting busted locally.

Starting point is 01:45:09 I don't know if it would have become more serious because we were trying to leave Morocco, which I imagine it might have been. But I don't know the answer to that question. But here's something very funny. I don't know if you ever heard of the book or saw the old movie. It came out in 76.

Starting point is 01:45:28 We did our trip in 73. the movie Midnight Express. But I've heard it. Wasn't there a remake? The book, I don't think there was a remake. But there was a book first, which was really good. And there was a movie. And they elaborated.

Starting point is 01:45:44 And the guard got killed in the movie. He never got killed, the true stories in the book. But this kid, he was young. He was in his 20s and his girlfriend. She didn't know anything about it. They were leaving Istanbul. And he taped like a dumb. he taped 10 pounds of hash onto his body.

Starting point is 01:46:05 When he was getting on the plane, they patted him down for bombs or explosives. And they patted him down. And when they first did, they thought he had explosives. And then they all started laughing. Then they took him to one of the worst Turkish prisons in the country. And he was there for many months.

Starting point is 01:46:29 he went to court. He was sentenced to 30 years. Three years after in there, he escaped. I don't remember all the specifics, but he was able to escape, you know, paying somebody off, and he got away from the prison and Turkey's right near Greece,

Starting point is 01:46:52 and somehow he got a hold of a small boat that was set up or part of the price. His dad put out money, and he escaped, you know, a couple of miles from Turkey. from on water to Greece and wrote this book. If it was the other way around, let's say that came out in 73 and we did this trip in 76, and I heard about the movie, I read the book and watched the movie.

Starting point is 01:47:17 I would have never gone to Morocco. So you never went back again to do that? We did. We did. We tried to do it again six months later. This time since I paid my dues, I brought two of my friends, one of them Hunter, or the same guy I lived with. And another dear friend of mine, to this day,

Starting point is 01:47:35 we're best friends. We've known each other since second grade. We get over there. This is only six months later. We're going to take a shortcut. We fly to Amsterdam. We bought the bus in Amsterdam. We're going to drive down to Tetuan,

Starting point is 01:47:49 get the hash. But this time, those two are going to drive through. I'm going to play the Cassidy roll of walking through. I had a money belt. We buy the bus. The first thing that happens is on the way home, Hunter's driving the bus. He gets in a fender bender. This is like owning the bus for 20 minutes.

Starting point is 01:48:10 Bad omen, put a little dent in the back. Then we're going to get ready to leave. We're buying, you know, stuff for the road. And Hunter said, I think we're being followed. You know, I think this, I think that he got this shit in his head, freaked our other friend out. And I knew I wasn't convinced him. And I already paid my dues. I wasn't going to do it again.

Starting point is 01:48:36 Not at this point. We stayed in Amsterdam. I blew a bunch of cash, going to hash houses and eating nice restaurants, got back. Cassidy was all pissed off that I spent all this money. And we tried one other thing. One other thing. We decided that Cassidy, and again, since I paid my dues, And another dear friend of ours, Stephen, they, Cassidy has bought a new boat.

Starting point is 01:49:06 Let me preface. He used some of the money out of the 21 grand. He bought a new boat, keeping it in Montauk. And him and this other guy were going to sail to Morocco, no Coke, no Colombian, and buy like 250 pounds of hash or something and sail back. I was so excited because I knew I would be selling all the hash. I wouldn't make as much money as them because they took the risk, but I knew I'd make a small fortune selling all that hash, and I could drag it out, you know, and just sell it smaller, you know, single pounds, you know, three and five to make more money. But they wait just a little late in the season, the hurricane season.

Starting point is 01:49:48 The round trip at the time to Morocco was a distance. I can't remember exactly. You sailors out there, please forgive me. I think it was about two, two and a half or three weeks, something like that, each way. But they leave late and hurricane season hits. So about 10 days or 12 days, something like that, maybe 14 days, something like that later, I get a call from Cassidy. And I'm thinking to myself, he should be in the middle of the ocean.

Starting point is 01:50:25 I said, so what did you get some kind of miraculous tide that? brought you there. I thought at first he might maybe made it that quick to Morocco was more realistic and he was calling me for Morocco. I had no idea. And he said, wait till you hear the story. We're back. Blah, blah, blah. I go. I sit down with Stephen. And Stephen, you know, Cassidy's the sailor. He's the guy that, you know, was doing it. Stephen was the first mate. And Stephen said he thought he was going to die. He said Cassidy was so cool under pressure. What happened was is they got out and they hit some kind of wacky hurricane from wherever because they waited too late.

Starting point is 01:51:06 And he literally said for three and a half days, they had to turn around and stay below. They had a, what's he? I'm forgetting that there's a terminology of a piece of equipment to cast a out on the boat, a steering vein, I think, or something that keeps the boat on course. He said they were going through as high as 30, sometimes 40-foot waves. And Stephen said he thought he was going to die. And he said he gave a lot of credit to Cassidy because Cassidy kept his act together the whole time. I actually got him back safely.

Starting point is 01:51:43 They still had another five days after getting through the storm and it was still really rough. He said it was miserable. And that was the final attempt of going to Morocco and getting the hash as far as I know. I don't think Cassidy ever saw our friend over there in Morocco again. I never went over again. And excuse me, at that time, within the next year, I had gone off to California. I live in California on my own, and I met, you know, some really good connections all through a Jewish guy that used to be a Shylock for one of the five Italian families. but I had heard, and then I caught up with him a few years later.

Starting point is 01:52:29 Cassidy hooked up about a year later with an old surfing buddy of his that he knew since junior high school, and he went on to have quite a career and smuggling weed on freighters and sailboats sometime by airplane, and he ended up writing four different books. He started his own publishing company in the 90s. He even got to two of his movies. It's all in the book that I wrote. He even got two or three of his movies produced. He wrote a couple scripts for the old show Miami Vice and True Crime and stuff.

Starting point is 01:53:06 And he did pretty well. And he died of unknown causes. Unfortunately, just recently, about four years ago, he died of, I think it was 22 or 23, I think, of unknown cause. And Stephen and Stella were the ones who were the ones who knew. notified me that he had died. I had seen Cassidy a few times. He came out for my son's christening, which would have been back in the 80s. And then I think the last time I saw him was in the late 80s at Stevens apartment in New York City. And we kind of lost touch. But he spent a lot of time

Starting point is 01:53:41 driving an RV and writing, always writing, writing, or after he got out of the weed business. He never crossed the line. He never went into the Coke business. But when the Coke business was getting really heavy duty in the 80s with the cartels and the DEA was moving in. It really scared him. So he focused on films and books and stuff. So he spent a lot of time driving his RV around Costa Rica and all around Mexico with his dog. So that's what he did, you know, the remaining years of his life, Cassidy. How long does your drug career go on for? My drug career stopped. Oh, well, again, if I'm may show it. You got to look this up on the book in Amazon. You can get it, Gus, all the years

Starting point is 01:54:28 combined. Interesting, great question. My drug career was at a highlight. This was about 1988-eight-ish, or 89, 88-89. I wrote the book, and I can't even remember which year, but that's irrelevant. earlier I'll give you the short version in 75 I was back in New York I was out in L.A. on my own for a year broke living in my car in an apartment building for a couple of weeks living in apartments that were evicted blah blah very entertaining life up and down roller coaster I went back east with Pigpen my dog from Morocco she traveled more than most human beings I drove back in January in a 65 Volkswagen bug, no heat. Hardly any money went to Aspen to see my girlfriend at a time before I got together with my future wife.

Starting point is 01:55:29 Stayed there a week. Had to get somebody off the rideboard. This Volkswagen bug had no heat, blue cool air. We had to, you know, plug it up. In the back seat, I took the back seat of the Volkswagen out and I made it into a big makeshift bed for Pigpen if she wanted. We had big pillows and it was really comfortable. No back seat, but the seat itself, but no back. And the back was a big bed, but no heat or whatever.

Starting point is 01:55:56 I had to get a rider off the rideboard in Aspen to afford the freaking gas to drive all the way down to Fort Lauderdale to see my buddy Stella who put me up for a week. And then I drove back up north to New York. That's where I met my ex-wife. But the trip across country, we literally made with 200 bucks between us, The rider I got was great. He had a chunk of hash. We were smoking it.

Starting point is 01:56:21 We cut out an apple and an orange. Imagine putting a hole through and out. We didn't have enough money for a hash pipe, and that's how we were smoking it. It was cold as how we were driving. It was sometimes in the teens, single digits. It was the coldest ride of my life, nonstop Aspen. L.A. to Aspen was 24 hours, and then Aspen down in Fort Lauderdale was a long time. It was, you know, 36, 40 hours, something like that, straight,

Starting point is 01:56:46 because we couldn't stop for a hotel. It was certainly two-stop, cold to sleep on the side of the road. I had a few pieces of stolen jewelry that I sold that I got from this girl in L.A. who used to max out people's credit cards. That's another story again in the book. So I sold to Stella's friend some pieces of turquoise.

Starting point is 01:57:09 That's how I got enough money to get back up to New York. I got together with my future wife. She was single in Aspen, ironically. Aspen with the same crew that I knew later. We got together left in 75 of August. That's when my, that's when it was the foundation of my drug career. We drove out to Tucson cross country with our two dogs, Pigpen, and she had a big German shepherd named Moose. He was a real funny piece of work. They were best friends. Our first stop was Tucson. We were going to Laguna Beach. And, In Tucson, we ended up staying for a year, but about four of those, three of those months were living with her second oldest sister.

Starting point is 01:57:55 She had three sisters. Her sister was going out with my future, a partner, Dupree. Dupree at the time was running weed. He was well in demand. His deal that he would run weed, and he were usually from California to Arizona. usually he'd run between 1,500 and 2,000 pounds, getting paid between $10 and $20 a pound. He was making great money.

Starting point is 01:58:24 He was that special guy that, in fact, it's right in the prologue of this book, he was that special guy that could keep it three or four miles above the speedometer and drive all day without getting, and if he got pulled over, he could keep his shit together, you know. He was that rare breed very much in demand.

Starting point is 01:58:43 I wanted that driving job. It would take me several years to get it. I worked my butt off. It was my first, oh, I'm sorry, this was a job that I had for 10 months. My first, my third real job working as a server at Red Lobster. One of the first Red Lobsters in Arizona, and Dupree, this is the kind of guy he is, he paid me $10 to dress up in my Red Lobster outfit before I started and serve him a cup of coffee. That's the kind of guy he is.

Starting point is 01:59:15 after our stint in Tucson, we went to Laguna. That's when my drug career really took off because I had a friend. The friend was a Shylock. He did booking, you know, lending money out for one of the five main families in New York. But since he was Jewish, he was never going to be a part of the family. He had a whole experience on his own, but he asked for permission. and he moved out to Laguna Beach. It was touch and go for a while

Starting point is 01:59:47 because a couple of years earlier, he had to move out, and he didn't tell anybody he was moving. These guys showed up at his house. They brought him back to New York. He had to have a sit down with the Don and the whole thing. Everything was cool. And he moved out to Laguna Beach.

Starting point is 02:00:01 But that's a whole fun story in the little chapter in the book. That's a lot of fun. And I said to him, I said, Jack Straws, name in the book. Jack, I can't, you know, I don't have any contacts. You're the only person I know out there. And this is how tight we were. We had met in L.A. when I was on my own through Stephen's father, who was good friends with Jack. And Jack and I hit it off and became very close. And he wanted

Starting point is 02:00:35 my ex-wife, Althea, and I to move out. He wanted us to move out and be close to him. So he literally he got us a condo, put out the cash, the deposit, the first and last, whatever. And Laguna Nigel, actually. And he said, don't worry about it. I said, but I have no way to make an income. Don't worry about it. I went out there complete on, and this is how it was back then. Complete trust.

Starting point is 02:01:02 He said, I got the people that I can put you with. You'll make a great living selling wheat. Now imagine trusting somebody today to do that. You'd be so sketchy. Who is this guy? whatever, but life was a different world back then again. And I went out there, and I'm not a condo guy. I'm not an apartment guy, but it was a quaint little condo village and Laguna Nigel. And keep in mind, this was like 1976 now. And it was, you know, Laguna Nigel was a sleepy

Starting point is 02:01:33 little town. And we were on the end. There was maybe five streets with about six or eight condos on each street, a little like condo community, but really low-key. It didn't have the vibe like today. And out our porch, there was all fields. There was pastures. We could see horses and cows. And Laguna and Igel, can you imagine? And he introduced me to some of the best contacts I ever had in my life.

Starting point is 02:02:02 And that comes up on my best all-time contact, aside from DePrie, Cowboy Neal. Cowboy Neal trusted Jack. I trusted Jack. Cowboy Neal and I never met. He was a bartender from Boston. He came out and he was a big, big guy. His boss was running thousands of pounds from freighters, you know, into Florida back in the day on the Donzies, the Go Fast Boats. And about a month after meeting, Cowboy Neal, I found out this is how tight we got that fast.

Starting point is 02:02:39 His wife, it didn't hurt that his wife got along well with Althea, my girlfriend soon-to-be wife at the time. We got married in 78. And he took me over to one of his stash houses. He had his house that him and his girlfriend lived in, three stash houses around the Laguna Beach, Laguna Nigel area. And when I walked in, literally, except for the hall and one bedroom, he had one person that lived. they switch shifts. And my, you know, one guy would have a bedroom and kitchen and access to the bathroom. The rest of the house was wall-to-wall weed, wall-to-wall.

Starting point is 02:03:19 The other bedrooms, whether it was two or three other bedrooms. I mean, I'm talking wall-to-wall, like with little aisles in it, the chat to go through. And he just said, literally, take whatever you want, write it down on the thing, bring me back the money. and slowly but surely through Jack and some other people he introduced me to I met a couple other contacts a couple other contacts my sister moved out in a couple of years and she dated this guy that ended up being a good contact and the more and more and more and more it grew and then we moved to San Diego so within four or five years I had some great contacts I had the lower end I had some you know, Stony Surfer guys that were selling all, you know, like three to ten pounds at a time.

Starting point is 02:04:09 And I had DePri and his crew that were buying 800 to a thousand pounds. But to show you how competitive the business was is sometimes if somebody's buying a thousand pounds, you'd think you'd make a fortune. Sometimes DePri and I had to go all the way down to $15. In other words, $7.50 each per pound to get the deal done because the market would say, well, it wasn't like his guys were trying to, you know, get us down and give us a hard time. The market was so competitive. Usually we made between 10 and 20 bucks a pound, but when you're selling 800 to 1,200 pounds,

Starting point is 02:04:49 it adds up quick. And that's when things really started taking off. We formed a partnership in the mid-80s, and it went strong for about. four and a half years before that I was doing well, but not this well. And how it worked as we moved to Northern California. That's where I love. North County, San Diego. And I had a big, it was a rental house, but it was a gorgeous house, four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a pool, jacuzzi, and the avocado capital of the world, Fallbrook. So you could see we were on three acres, but it looked like 50 acres. And those spotted houses around in the hills,

Starting point is 02:05:30 but everybody had between five and 20 acres kind of thing. Camp Pendleton, you could see to the west, so the beach was 20 minutes away, and Big Bear where you could go snow skiing was an hour and 10 minutes away. And typically how it would work is Dupree and I would get there. Cowboy Neal would come in and he'd drop all the weed off, like a thousand pounds. He'd back into the garage, drop the weed off, and he'd leave. get back to me later, you know, literally front me, you know, because we had that kind of trust. It's a lot of money, you know, because we, you know, got up there, you know, some of these deals, you know,

Starting point is 02:06:10 cash-wise, anywhere from $700 to a million in cash. And then what happened is we had meat scales, so we'd weigh it up exactly. Then Shep's buyers would come in, and typically a buyer would come in, but that buyer might have two or three or four drivers. So once the deal, there was that one scary part where for about an hour, counting the money with a money machine and weighing up the weed with a weed, for about an hour, you know, we had both the weed and the money in the same place. And I might preface this for all you family guys out there, I only did this and I never broke precedence when Althea would take my two kids because my two kids out there were like four and two. and five and three. When they were out of town, so they'd leave for the weekend and, you know, on some vacation or someplace close by, but they were never around. And once we had a wait

Starting point is 02:07:11 up and the cash was all done, what would happen is one driver would come in. I had the unique thing. It was a neighborhood very hilly. So there was no traffic. And my driveway went straight down. It was like a 90-degree drop. My neighbors were cool. He was also my golf partner, but the house secluded. The angles was perfect. Nobody could see what was going on. One driver would come in, back into the garage, and let's say we were doing a thousand pounds to make the math easy. He'd take 250 pounds, and he'd go to Detroit. He'd get on the road out of sight. He didn't know who the other drivers were. They didn't know him. Another driver would come. Same thing. He might go to Boston. Next guy. Chicago. One time, it was really funny.

Starting point is 02:07:59 because it was one driver. And on the way out, I looked out the window. And this girl, I see this girl driving. She's one of the drivers. And I asked Franklin, my contact or the weed guy who's buying the weed. I said, Franklin, who is that girl? And sure enough, it was Scarlet. It was a girl that I dated for a year when I was living in L.A. by myself.

Starting point is 02:08:23 And here we are, like all these years later in the 80s, we were dating when I was out there in 74, small world, and she's driving for this guy. I ended up seeing her again, but not for another 12 years. But that was the gist of it. And once it broke up, Franklin was one of several people that came. There was three big guys, really, three or four. And he'd take us out to dinner. And our job was, he goes, I want you to see how much you can get the bill up.

Starting point is 02:08:50 That was his game. You know, so he'd order expensive bottles of wine and champagne. And everything was going great. everything and we sat down like businessman Dupri and I and we had a two-year plan we had a tie situation tie butt we did a couple other deals again one more time in the book but I'm shortening shortening the book Gus all the years in time if you don't mind me saying that well that gets people to buy a book yeah exactly it's on Amazon Gus all the years combined We'll have the link in the description for everyone.

Starting point is 02:09:27 Very cool. Thank you. But this is what happened right before the end of my career or what I thought was the end of my career. Everything's going great, Ian, and we sat down and we made a plan. This is when the tie bud started to come for fruition. I always have trouble saying that word. Before that, by the way, I might specify that. those weed deals, 1,800 pounds, 90% of those were high-grade Mexican, like Michoacan

Starting point is 02:10:03 and several other types of Mexicans. A couple of times we did what used to be called Colombian gold wheels, but most of it was Mexican, sometimes Colombian. Then all of a sudden, I learned through Dupree and these guys, you know, Franklin and a couple other guys. They had a big market for the untied tie butt. When I say untied, back then, 70s, 80s from Thailand, there was two different kinds of weed. There was Thai stick, which everybody heard about coming out of that movie up in smoke. But I never was a fan of Thai stick because you're literally, even though the stick's light, you're paying for the damn

Starting point is 02:10:42 stick. If you buy 500 pounds or 1,000 pounds, that's a lot of stick. And the real strong stuff, really potent. I mean, I'm talking a couple of hits, was the untied, tied, tied buds. And it turns out that Cowboy Neal's boss, he had one boss, the head of the thing, he had an in on this in Thailand. He also had a 165 foot schooner, so he started bringing this stuff in from Thailand. I had the opportunity to be a runner before this, but I didn't take it because my kids. right before this happened, Neil, who I became very cowboy, Neil, became very trustworthy with, I might throw this out there. He offered me the job of going down to Florida. You got to do it 11 nights in a row. Take a go fast boat, a donzie or scarab, 90 miles out, offload weed a couple of times,

Starting point is 02:11:38 till you got two or three loads and bring it in inbound. But you had to work because it was so, so the loads were humongous. You had to work 11 nights in a row each night. These people were getting 40 grand in cash. Now, I'm talking late 70s here. So after 11 nights, 440,000, if I was single, Ian, I would have done it. But since I had a wife and two kids, I just couldn't pull the trigger. I didn't do it. Sometimes I regret not just getting it over with and doing it.

Starting point is 02:12:11 But I wanted to throw that in. But these guys were bringing it in from a schooner. And here I am. the guy that's bringing it in goes to Cowboy Neal on the next one. So I was getting this weed that on the street was selling for 2,000 and 3,000 a pound, 22, 2,400, 2,600. Even the high buyers, it was rare that buyers were able to pay less than 16, 17, 800, a pound. Cowboy Neal was making a fortune.

Starting point is 02:12:42 My guess was he was getting it for a grant a pound. I will, I'm sorry, 1,200 a pound. And he sold it to me and my partner, Dupree for 1,400. So we're making a good 100 each. And we're selling it to our guys who couldn't get it for less than 18 or 19 at the time, even buying a lot of weed. We were giving it to them for 1,600. We had some of the best prices in the area, if not the country.

Starting point is 02:13:12 and these guys came down. This is quite the story, and I'll keep it short. They came down for 100 pounds. There was Franklin and Uncle John. And Uncle John was a character. These two great people, we did it. We did four years of work with them, you know, middling. Totally trusted him.

Starting point is 02:13:42 The deal was, is that both of them, they had a lot of contacts in Sacramento area and Fresno and Northern California. So this was perfect. I was in North County, San Diego. And so that's just right up the road. Their drivers don't have to drive across the country, they say, in the same state. So the whole scene was ideal. So they came down. They got a hotel in Laguna.

Starting point is 02:14:13 And Dupree came down a day or day. early. And I got to preface this by saying they were so excited to buy it. They thought that I would consider doing it early. I told them, I said, Althea and the kids are not going out of town until early Saturday morning. I cannot do it until they leave. But we can do this as early as 9 o'clock on Saturday morning. They came down on Thursday because they thought I might break precedence and do it Thursday night or Friday and I was adamant. I wasn't going to do that. And I, we had done one deal at a hotel in San Francisco. This was, you know, six months earlier. And we all said, no more hotels. This is ridiculous. We had three hotels, a bunch of weed.

Starting point is 02:14:59 It was absurd. I said, you don't want to do the hotel. And they were both adamant and said, no, I said, you've got to respect my wishes. So they got a hotel and they were cool. That's important. So the morning of Saturday morning, DePri and I drive up there. At the time, I got rid of my beloved 78, 9-11 S-C Porsche that I love, and I still cry to this day, because the wife E Althea made me get rid of that. And in place, I bought a lame Volvo for her because of the safety conditions, the kids, you know, the vibe. And I got myself a Chevy Silverado truck, really nice truck, you know, two-tone, the whole silver and blue red stripes. And it's a funny thing.

Starting point is 02:15:42 when I used to drive the Porsche, I used to have women to hold up their phone numbers and wave and driving the truck. Nobody paid attention, but that's the difference between the cars. So at any rate, we go to their hotel room. And the plan is they're going to come down and get in their car, DePri and I are in the Volvo. We're going to drive just a few miles away.

Starting point is 02:16:04 Uncle John wanted to run into a liquor store for smokes and something else. And there was a McDonald's just close by where they had pay phones. Back in those days, by the way, we used to carry around rolls a quarter. That was the thing. Nobody talked from their house.

Starting point is 02:16:19 And I was going to call Cowboy Neal, excuse me, who was up on the hill in one of his stash houses. This was only for 100 pounds, only 100 pounds. But Debray and I were going to make 10 grand. We were making 200 grand at 200 bucks of 100 pounds, which was sweet, you know, nice little. This was the start of the season and everything.

Starting point is 02:16:42 But we were going to bring them up. Cowboy Neal was cool. He was going to meet my guys and everything. But there was respect there and everything. But they never did get a chance to meet, unfortunately. So that was the plan. But getting back to the parking lot, a few minutes away from where we were going. When they came out, Uncle John was really cool. And he said, Gus, I got a present for you. So he pulls out this Halliburton suitcase. Now, it's not in the box, but it's brand new. It even has kind of like the plastic round. I don't know if you're familiar with it, right up your alley, like a nice suitcase,

Starting point is 02:17:20 but it's thicker. And the material's like alloy. You can run a car over this thing and really nice leather interior with blue crush velvet. Really nice. I have no idea to this day whatever happened to that. I really miss it. But it's an important part of this story. So he hands me this halberton.

Starting point is 02:17:40 And he goes, Gus, this is just a gift. And I was kind of blown away because even back then I knew these things cost a couple hundred bucks. And I was like, thank you. That's really nice to you guys. It's awesome. And I put it in the trunk and not in the trunk just in the back seat of the Volvo. So we drive, but that's very important. Because it was extra eyes on us that we didn't know about.

Starting point is 02:18:03 We drive over to this McDonald's and it's like a little shopping plaza. We didn't pick McDonald's. You know my history with that. And what's his name? Uncle John goes into the liquor store in his car, and his buddy Franklin comes with Dupree and I. I mean, literally, it's like, you know, from where your studio is here now, imagine,

Starting point is 02:18:25 like 100 yards down the road, there's a McDonald's and there's pay phones outside, and we pull out down there, and the three of us get out, Dupree and Franklin and myself. I got a call, Cowboy Neil, give him a heads up, hey, we're all on our way up there. He knew who was coming, blah, blah, blah. We go into McDonald's because Franklin wanted a coffee and I think DePri wanted a coffee and I figured I'd get a coffee.

Starting point is 02:18:49 A rare exception, I'll drink the coffee. So we go in, we get our coffees, we come out, it was DePri that eagle-eyed this scene where Uncle John had parked. He had parked in front of a liquor store. We look over and what we see is like WTF. Are you serious? Uncle John has his hands on the hood of the car, and there's like all these guys around him. What made the scene so surreal is the dudes standing around them

Starting point is 02:19:25 have long hair, beards, tank tops. At first, we thought they were like, you know, a biker group. I thought they were the angels or the Mongols or, you know, one of the biker groups. That's what they look like. And they all looked. I mean, they were dressed to the nines, like, look in the part, you know, big. And some of them had the tats, the whole thing.

Starting point is 02:19:49 And DePree said, I'll meet you at the cafe in Laguna where we ate yesterday. He vanishes, very smart. To this day, I don't know how he got out of there. I told Franklin, who's with me, I said, you walk that way. I got to call cowboy Neil. At this point, I'm not that worried because I didn't think they'd put. put us together, little did I know. I go to the pay phone.

Starting point is 02:20:14 I call Cowboy Neal. Ring three times. Cowboy Neil gets on the phone. Hello? I hear him say hello. And right at that point, I remember this like it's yesterday. I couldn't tell you what I had for dinner last night,

Starting point is 02:20:28 but I remember this like it was yesterday. I'm staring at this badge, speechless with a phone in my hand, gold badge, blue DEA letters and a voice telling me drop the phone I just drop it

Starting point is 02:20:45 and I could kind of hear in the background Cowboy Neil hello I think he said it once or twice he brings me over I don't even think he hung up the phone actually

Starting point is 02:20:55 I don't think he hung up but he didn't give a shit who was on the phone that started Ian that started like this three hour freaking interview, interrogation,

Starting point is 02:21:10 harassment, whatever you want to call it, and the parking lot of McDonald's. They bring Uncle John over, and there's nine of them. Now here's the other completely bizarre

Starting point is 02:21:26 part of this story. All these guys have like the economical, the cheapest little, like Pinto's and these. other Hearst rental cars or Avis rental cars. And it was like, this is so bizarre, but they also had very realty images. But they're all in rental cars dressed like bikers. Why would you

Starting point is 02:21:48 dress like that and drive this like weird rental car? But I wasn't that concerned about what I was watching. I was concerned about what was happening. So now within 10 minutes, the Orange County police come or Laguna Beach police, whatever. I think it was Orange County. I think we were closer to them. They put yellow tape around. Now imagine 10.30, 11 o'clock on a Saturday morning. Beautiful day out.

Starting point is 02:22:18 Gorgeous freaking day. Crystal clear skies, Puffy, California, perfect, blah, blah, blah. And these guys are like three on Uncle John, three on Franklin, three on me. They got us separated by enough that we can't hear each other like this triangle. they kept switching around different guys, different stories. Good guy, you know, good guy, bad guy, good cop, bad guy, blah, blah, blah, three freaking hours even more. And we stuck to the same shit.

Starting point is 02:22:49 Uncle John has been doing this since 69. Dupree has been driving since 69. This is like almost 20 years later. These guys had their shit together. They had it down. He had a business. a legitimate business. So he could show, because keep in mind,

Starting point is 02:23:09 he's got all this cash. He has 160 grand to buy 100 pounds. And so we talked about this beforehand. Franklin just came down with him. And I was theoretically showing him different boats because I had a lot of contacts in San Diego. He was coming down to look at boats. they knew we were absolutely full of shit.

Starting point is 02:23:36 They knew that these guys were lying through their teeth, but they were still adamant and they still thought they were going to bust us. That was the weird thing. The vibe was that they had something on us. We knew we were all clean. You know, I had probably a few hundred on me as usual. He had the 160, but he could prove that.

Starting point is 02:23:58 They didn't even take that as a matter of fact because he could prove that. He had business cards, the whole thing. Franklin, I'm sure, had a grant on him, but they didn't take that. But we didn't have a roach. We didn't have any drugs in their car or the Volvo. And finally, like two and a half, three hours into this nonsense, the head guy that told me, I figured it after he was the head guy, he said, can I search your car? He saved the best what he thought for last.

Starting point is 02:24:31 And I knew that he could go get a warrant and stuff. I said, sure, search the car. The two kids seats are in. And, you know, Althea always kept like the wipes, the baby wipes, to this, to that, you know. But it was clean. I knew it was clean. Go ahead and search it.

Starting point is 02:24:48 He didn't search the car. He went right to the backseat and grabbed the Halliburton and opened it. And I was watching him. And there was two or three of the other agents with him. And when they opened the Halliburton, I could see the express. on their face, like, oh, no, we blew it. They, and I'll tell you why in a second, they thought that we had already done a cocaine deal.

Starting point is 02:25:14 They thought, this is my theory, and this is also, you know, DePrie's and Franklin and Uncle John's theory. They thought when they handed me off the suitcase at the hotel, they thought probably DePri and I were getting a Coke from Franklin and Uncle John's theory. Uncle John. But we were taking them to get a hundred pounds sample of weed. Here's the sad part. We were going to go up. I knew they were going to take the wheat because I knew how good it was.

Starting point is 02:25:42 I had already given them a sample. The whole thing would have taken, you know, 20 minutes to weigh out 100 pounds and, you know, do the cash. The deal was, this is the saddest part of the story. In two weeks, they were going up to San Francisco and Fresno and San Rafael. They had content. tax all around that area, they told me, and when they said a number, it wasn't a bullshit number. They said, if this works out well, we're going to be back in about 10 to 12 days, we're going to buy 2,000 pounds. And we had it set up. And DeBri and I thought, we're going to make $100 and $2,000, you know, and we had our business plan getting back to that. We do five or six of these deals. We'll make $2 million each over, you know, the next two years, and we'll retire.

Starting point is 02:26:30 That was the plan. That didn't happen. So they searched and they continue. And now it's kind of finally starting to die down because they don't have shit. And finally about at the three hour mark, they were letting us go. We knew it was over. Oh, and by the way, can you imagine, you know, Plaza, I left out the fun part. There must have been 150, 200 shoppers standing around outside the tape watching

Starting point is 02:27:00 this whole show. Thank God to us in social media. We would have been all over the place. Could you imagine if, you know, people had phones on their camera and stuff back then, you know, back in the 80s, right, late 80s? And he came over, Ian, and I'll admit it. Maybe I'm a whistle or whatever. This dude basically scared me straight. This head guy said, uh, yeah, Gus, they called me Mr. The real name, my son and I, copyright, so it's not like I'm really hiding, but they said, we know about your buddies up in Colorado.

Starting point is 02:27:39 I made it a different name in the book because some of the people still might be living there, a well-known ski resort town. He goes, we know about your buddies up there in Colorado. We know about your friend down in Mexico, one of my other, just to shorten this. I had a great weed dealer down in Mexico. His whole family used to bring weed in and concealed in oil tankers.

Starting point is 02:28:04 And the relatives and friends worked at the border crossing coming to San Diego. So if it wasn't Cowboy Neal, I got a lot of the weed from this other thing, but I didn't want to drag out. Same principle. But he said, we know about your friends in Mexico. Fortunately, they didn't say Cowboy Neal and Laguna because I would have to run right over. but he said Colorado and he said Mexico. He goes, I would highly recommend that you move out of the state of California because, you know, something to the effect of we didn't get you now,

Starting point is 02:28:39 but I'm going to keep an eye on your ass. And I took it to Hardy and I took it to heart. So for the next six months, I looked all around and blah, blah, blah. Because I knew with all the contacts, keep in mind from the day, that Althea and I arrived in Laguna Beach, I made the majority of my money selling weed. There was a couple of good hash deals. How much do you think you made overall?

Starting point is 02:29:07 Overall. Yeah. You mean 37 years' worth? Yeah. Well, please forgive me, JP and Arlis, my kids and my ex-wife. I'd say, you know, I must have tipped the scales. At least $3 million, I would be conservative. And you were filing taxes on that?

Starting point is 02:29:28 Well, I was filing taxes like for 20,000. Like when I had the limousine company. Oh, once you hit the 2000s? Yeah, when I had, yeah, yeah, before that in, no, no, no, not the 2000s in the late 70s. Okay. So in other words, I didn't really worry about taxes, honestly, until the late 70s. I kind of ignored them. I guess it's the only word to use.

Starting point is 02:29:59 But, yeah, I guess that's true. Yeah, I really didn't, you know, I really, because, no, I didn't really work that much. I can't remember paying too many taxes in the 70s, definitely none in the 60s other than the antique shop and McDonald's. But in 78, I started the limousine company. I mean, give me some credit. Oh, yeah, I worked at Red Lobster for a year, so I filed taxes. I filed taxes in 75. Not that bad.

Starting point is 02:30:31 I taught tennis on the side. I taught golf on the side, but I didn't file taxes, but I didn't make a lot doing that. But in the limousine business, legitimately, I made probably $22,000 to $24,000 a year, and I paid all the taxes on that. And the metal cutting tool business is about the same. I created my own metal cutting tool business

Starting point is 02:30:52 because Stephen, who used to, who had been doing that since the same, 70s was going, was getting really good metal cutting tools from Europe, mostly Germany. And he got me involved in that business. And I had whole clientele in California. I was going into machine shops. And it was like, hey, this is cool. I can sell this show.

Starting point is 02:31:11 We even went to Vegas a couple times for trade shows. But while we're on the taxes, you know what the worst thing? And this is advice I'll give you and a lot of your listeners. You know what nobody did for me in my life when I was in my 30s and 40s. and even 50s, even, you know, legitimately, but really in my 20s, 30s and 40s, nobody came up to me and said, Gus, listen to me. Listen to me, focus. When you are 65, I know you don't even think you're going to make it until then, but you probably will. You're going to depend on social security. and if you don't pay more money on taxes, your social security is going to be crap.

Starting point is 02:32:00 And guess what? It's crap. I get less than a thousand bucks because I didn't file for enough taxes. And Ian, there was definitely, you know how they take your best. Well, what they do is they take your best 20 years or 15, 15 or 20. but I could have easily, easily for 15 years paid taxes on say even 100 grand or 120 or 150 or whatever and ended up getting, you know, 2,000 and 3,000 a month in Social Security instead of Squatouche, you know, barely 900 bucks. Yeah, maybe I could live in Thailand or something,

Starting point is 02:32:47 but that's not going to cut it in the States. That's why it's 73 years old. I'm still working my butt off and living week to week because I screwed up. Nobody ever did that. I wish somebody did. So the DEA gives you the advice to leave California. Do you end up leaving? Actually, I do.

Starting point is 02:33:06 It takes a while because we have no idea where we're going to be. We love California. We were there almost 20 years. I was there even the extra year before I was with Althea. And I am heartbroken about leaving. I don't want to leave. But the one thing I do know, Ian, I got to be honest, I knew that if I stayed in that area,

Starting point is 02:33:29 in other words, south of L.A., San Diego, whatever, I had so many contacts that I wouldn't have been able to hold down a job because as soon as I got frustrated, I pick up the phone and call somebody. So I knew that wasn't going to work. We did take one RV trip with the kids all the way north, to a little town called Anchor Bay. That is about a five-hour drive from San Francisco north through Mendocino County.

Starting point is 02:33:55 And as it turned out, we went up there in the foggy season and check it out. We could have bought inexpensive property right across from the beach. The cost of living was inexpensive. And check this out. They even had an opening for deputy sheriff. So I could have been an official Barney-Fricin' fife of an Anchor Bay. but the fog up there is 24-7, three and a half months a year. And it was so depressing that even if you were on the moon,

Starting point is 02:34:26 if you were right there and the beach was 20 yards, 30 yards away, you couldn't even see it. So we came back down, checked out Massachusetts, too cold, couldn't do Boston, couldn't do the country. New York wasn't realistic. And both our parents, Southia's parents, were already retired in Florida, South Florida. My dad was in Smyrna right outside of Atlanta. We weren't seeing enough of them

Starting point is 02:34:51 because of the cross-country flight was time. So that's how we ended up in Florida. It was absolutely depressing. Lived in Coral Springs, worked all that area, bartending, waiting, worked outside on a golf course, just was miserable. But Nina's parents lived in a quaint little Beach Village. We used to visit them. It was about two hours away. We ended up moving up there. Got a lot more comfortable. And everything was going along pretty good. I got a pretty good job as a server at a privately owned restaurant, not corporate. No more red lobster. Which had no more red lobster, no more rules, uniforms. This was privately owned. In fact, I ended up being tennis doubles partners with the owners. So I kind of had an in.

Starting point is 02:35:43 And the one night that I was in the weeds serving tables, and this guy got me so pissed off, him and his family, that I literally threatened to put a bowl of red pasta sauce in his lap if he didn't stop barking out orders each time I passed his table. The owner wasn't real pleased with that, but he didn't want to lose a good doubles partner. So I got away with that and all well and good, got into the insurance business, the senior market.

Starting point is 02:36:10 I did pretty well with that for four or five years. I saved some money, made some money. And then I got into the vacation business. I had contracts with Ramada and Radisson. In short, we were selling vacation packages. And they were selling to one out of every eight families that took these vacation packages, had to tour for timeshares. That's how they made their money.

Starting point is 02:36:35 And it was very successful. Ian, I thought I was going to retire in five years of the business. I had 42 salespeople, a general manager. Althea, who was my ex-wifey at that time, but we were still tight. She was doing the books, prepping for the accountant. Everything was going great. Then they got greedy, Radisson, Ramada. They added on literally 46, 48 offices in about a six-month period.

Starting point is 02:37:04 There was only 14 of us, 14 offices, and there were plenty of leads. That's a key to this business to get your phone to ring. So our 14 sales offices for the first four or four and a half years were doing great. I was always number one or two for sales. And then the bottom fell out. I made the biggest mistake in business. I hung around for an extra year trying to turn this thing around, buying my own leads at $3, $4 a lead when you need a couple thousand a week to keep the salespeople busy.

Starting point is 02:37:36 I was doing outbound calls instead of inbound calls. Long story short, the business went under. and I was screwed. I lost quite a bunch of money, a small fortune, a few hundred thousand bucks. I was almost broken with my last 12, 13,000 bucks. I made a mistake. And this is where we're going to end it, because what I did was out of stupidity, out of desperation.

Starting point is 02:38:05 I went back to my old habits. And I got to. back involved with a weed business. But if you guys want to know what happened after that, you are just going to have to buy this book and check it out. But fun stuff, little jail time involved. And my whole world went upside down, inside out. And that's it. You live such an incredible life. Very different. I wouldn't change many things. But the one thing I would change is damn, I should have put something away for what I was in my 70s. I work outside on a golf course.

Starting point is 02:38:47 I'm in good shape, but yeah, I'm getting tired of this work crap. You know, I would like to retire. Do you think that's the most important, you know, lesson you want to share with the audience? I specifically am curious. I was like asking people that are so much older and have lived so much life, like my father, who's in his 80s and you said you're in your 70s now. is that the biggest life lesson? I can sum it up in one word, Ian.

Starting point is 02:39:14 One word. And the reality of this is it didn't even bother me until recently. I'm 73, but I started thinking about it heavily at 65, 66, you know, once Social Security, Medicare, Medicare, by the way, is awesome. But once that stuff kicked in and the one word, the one bit of advice, I would tell all you folks out there, male and female. Whether you're in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 40s, not too late, prepare. Because guess what, guys, any way you cut it, these days, this world, you need the

Starting point is 02:39:52 dinero, you need the funds, you need to have extra money. And it's not a whole lot of fun getting paid by the hour when you're in your 70s. I mean, I work with good people, no complaints, because I've only myself. you know, ended up in this situation because of the mistakes I made. But early on, prepare. And when you prepare, stick to your guns. Well, Scott, I appreciate you taking the time to come out here for such an entertaining interview. Really great story teller.

Starting point is 02:40:27 And hopefully the audience goes by the book. Thank you. I appreciate that. Should I show the book to the folks out there? We'll put it up on screen too. That's awesome. Yeah. And by the way, Gus, all the years combined, check it out.

Starting point is 02:40:42 Everything in here happened exactly as it was written. The one thing I will tell all you writers out there, if you ever decide to write a book, put aside 10 years. Because I think I could write a book on what happens after you write a book. It's pretty interesting. Awesome. Well, thank you again, Scott. Okay, my pleasure. And thanks so much for having me.

Starting point is 02:41:05 I enjoyed it.

Locked In with Ian Bick - I Smuggled Hashish Internationally in the 70s & 80s — Here's How I Did It | Scott Gussin

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