The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - This Is How You Smuggle Marijuana Across The Country | Ep #2

Episode Date: October 2, 2022

Johnny breaks down exactly how he smuggled pot across the country, from picking up product from the Cartel growers in Northern California, to transporting it on the highway back up to Portland, and finally- the ways that he moved it to the his buyers on the East Coast.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is where it gets scary. Working with guys who are cutting people's heads off back home. His whole job was to not just speed ahead and get that trooper to pull him over, he would actually cause an accident. But believe me, you do that drive enough, you will get pulled over. It's called survival and you used any and all methods to try to increase your chances of survival. What's up you guys?

Welcome back to The Connect. My name is Johnny Mitchell. Before we get started today, make sure to like and subscribe. turn on your notifications, follow us on all social media at Not the Connect on Instagram, and at Mr. Johnny Mitchell on Instagram. Let's get into it. So in the last episode, I explained my journey and how I began as a street dealer and ascended the ranks of the business and eventually started shipping pounds of weed

all over the country. That's how I made my millions, was in transport. And in this episode, I'm going to tell you exactly how I did it. So back then, even in 2004, before any of the weed was legal, it was still extremely hard to make a profit as a drug dealer in the Northwest. Pot was everywhere. The market was flooded. You had competition from the Hells Angels and biker gangs in BC who would have these huge grows and then smuggled a bud down to the northwest. You had the growers in Northern California. You had the cartels and you had the indoor grow ops. So the only people making real money were the people moving weight, pounds and pounds and pounds at a time. It took us years before we made any real money because we didn't have a supplier and we didn't have any buyers.

The biggest money was in the transport was getting the work, the pounds, out of state where they would get the highest prices. It's like selling cocaine in Colombia. It's extremely difficult, I'm sure, to make money selling retail bags of, Coke in Colombia because it's just simply too cheap. I remember buying Coke myself when I was living in Colombia. I was in Kali. I bought a bag of 100% pure Coke for like 10 pesos, which is like $1.50 American. So it's extremely difficult to make a living that way.

As we know, the cartels make their money by shipping overseas, right? So a kilo of Coke wholesale in Medellin cost $2,000. And L.A., that'll cost you $30,000. Make it all the way to Madrid could go for as high as $60,000 or $70,000. So the same methodology applied to our marijuana. So we knew we needed to figure out a way to get our pounds of weed to the states where it fetched the highest prices. And that was in the Midwest and on the East Coast, the places where it was the hardest to find good weed. and it was the hardest to find good weed at a wholesale price.

So let's explain how we did it. So the first thing you got to do is go pick up the shit from the Connect, the grower. We used two or three different growers at one time, and that was always good to have a couple of different guys who you could play different prices off of, right? Or if one guy was dry, didn't have any product, you could go to another guy. Also, by the end, as prices kept going down for wholesalers, a lot of them would meet us halfway.

But normally it was I driving all the way down from Portland, Oregon to the small towns of Northern California. That's about an eight to ten hour drive depending on which town and which supplier we were going to. If we were lucky, we would get these guys to drive down from the forest, from their little fucking compounds, and meet us in these little towns, Arcata, Crescent City. We would bring down anywhere from $40,000 to $60,000, depending on what they're in. order was. To place the orders, we always used burner phones or bat phones, they called them back then. And we never used it more than a couple of times before throwing it away. I remember we had a couple of stash houses in Portland with Ziploc baggies filled with old burner phones. So we would

get on the horn, we would call up one of our suppliers, and we would get the ticket, as we called it. We said, what's the ticket on one of those things? What was the price? He would give us the price. We would call up another guy, almost like we were calling around to an auto parts store trying to find the best price. We would then let them know, hey, we need whatever. Say we needed 30 pieces for that day. We would make sure that our supplier had that, and then we would set up a meat for the following day.

Now, the entire process would take all day. We would wake up at the crack of dawn, leave Portland, drive all the way down I-5, then get onto a tiny little highway called the 22, down to the very tip of Northern California. And then if we were lucky, we would have one of these guys, our suppliers, drive down from the forest in Humboldt County

or up from Mendocino and meet us, usually in like a little hotel room. They would call up, have a room ready. We would bring duffel bags full of cash, and we would start the count. And we would check the weed. We would check the pounds. We would put them, double wrap them in turkey bags

to make them smell-proof. But you got to remember, a canine dog is going to smell it. It ain't stopping a fucking canine who's trained to smell weed. This was just to make ourselves feel better at the end of the day. It was also to prevent the smell from actually permeating the trunk where we kept the load and having it come into the cabin in case a cop pulled us over and ducked his nose in, right? So say we place a 30-pound order and we're paying two grand apiece. So we got 60 grand cash on us.

We have no weapons. It doesn't work that way. By now, we're so entrenched with our connects that we're actually friends. When you bring somebody several million dollars a year in cash, you very quickly develop a tight relationship with them. And that's important. I love dealing with the Sina Loans. I love dealing with the Mexican cartels.

You know, you think it'd be some scary thing working with guys who are cutting people's heads off back home. But up here, it don't work like that. These guys are all about money. So we would meet one of these kids. It was always like some 19-year-old and his little compadre, and they would get going. Now, one of them had a gun. Of course, they could have robbed us, but, you know, were their meal ticket.

They're smart. They're business-oriented. I loved dealing with the Sina Loans. So they would count out the money. They would count it twice. Sometimes could take a couple of hours. Then we would shake hands, and we would be off. We didn't have any traps in our car.

We didn't have any spotters. At the end we did when we had enough resources to start hiring people to make the drive ourselves. But in reality, middle class dealers like us, we just took the risk. We just put it in the trunk, closed it up, and hit the highway. So now we're on the road with the product and this is where it gets scary. The first part was fun. You're driving down there with cash.

You're speeding. You don't give a fuck. You're looking out the window. When you're coming back, this is where you live or die. We made that trip so many times that we knew exactly where the state troopers were positioned. We knew what time of day to drive. We loved driving in bad weather. We loved thunderstorms and rain.

There's a lot of rain in the northwest. Those are the ideal times to traffic drugs on the highway because cops are just humans. They don't want to pull people over and get out of their car and get soaking wet. They'd rather be sitting back drinking coffee, you know, getting blown by some truck stop hooker, you know. So every dealer has their different methods. But of course, the spotter car is a classic way to transport drugs in the highway. Some big dealers would have the work in a U-Haul truck or maybe stashed in like a larger-sized vehicle.

They would then have a spotter car in front and one in back. I knew one trafficker. His entire job was to be the front spotter car for guys who were used. usually move in hundreds of pounds in the main car. And if he saw a state trooper coming up or he got one on his radar, his whole job was to not just speed ahead and get that trooper to pull him over, he would actually cause an accident. He would go so far as to cause an accident on the highway,

distracting state trooper and other state troopers that might have been close by, bringing all of the authorities in the area to that wreck. and then the car with the product would just slowly cruise by. So that's the point of having a spotter car. So the cartels have vast networks of people who are willing to smuggle drugs for them. They pay long-haul truckers to stash heroin and meth and cocaine into the cabins of their big-rigged trucks. You can't really do that with weed. Weed is very bulky, right?

A kilogram of coke is the size of a school book at most. But a fluffy pound of weed in a turkey bag is like three. footballs put together. So it's the most difficult thing to traffic and it smells, it reeks. I actually knew people connected with the cartel who would fly private planes up from California to Oregon with ecstasy and coke and meth. So that does happen. But for the majority of people like us, it was mostly DIY. Now, at the very end, I was able to pay some trusted guys from the neighborhood who needed to get paid to drive down and pick it up. and bring it back for us. But this was only six months maybe before I got arrested. For us,

for weed traffickers making 80, $100,000 a month, it's just not economically viable to rent and charter a private jet and have to pay off a captain to transport 30 pounds of weed. It's going to cost more than our profit. So you have to hit the highway with it for the majority of dealers. So these are like our drug smuggling guidelines. We always tried to move at night. And that's because it's difficult for cops to see into your car at night. It's impossible, especially out in the middle of the Oregon forest. And cops, their whole job is to profile. So you see two young men driving back in the middle of the night from a drug production hub like Northern California. It raises suspicions. So you always try to drive at night. You try to drive in

bad weather. Like I said, you try to drive when it's wet or when it's snowing even. or traffic time is great. We always try to get back to Eugene and Portland metropolitan areas during rush hour. Because when you're going five miles an hour, there's no way you can speed or even get close to speeding, and therefore you can't get pulled over, really. So we would purchase cars, middle class cars, vehicles that fit in with the Northwest. Subaru's were great. Small Toyota trucks.

Never minivans. Those are mother soccer mom. vehicles. There's no reason that two young men should be driving that. And of course, never SUVs. Those are too flashy, right? So middle class cars, suboros, hondas, things that are sporty vehicles. Sometimes if it was in the middle of the winter, we would put snowboards or skis on a rack and put them on top of the car. So if I get pulled over coming north, I can tell the officer, oh, hey, I was coming back from Shasta having a ski weekend. So that's the other thing. I always try to have a backstory. Now, of course, you have the right to remain silent.

But the minute you tell a cop, I have the right to remain silent, that's the minute he is going to bring a drug sniffing dog out, and you really are going to have to remain silent and get a lawyer. So the idea was, if you did get pulled over, was to always have a very quick, believable backstory, right? And it helps to be white, let's face it. Especially in Oregon. We would never, our drug mules, guys that we had driving down

and picking up product for us, They had to be white and they had to have no criminal record, obviously, right? Because you get pulled over and you have any kind of sheet on you and especially outstanding warrants. That was caused to search the vehicle. You had to be clean. And at this time, neither or myself had felonies. So we were safe to make that drive.

And you can take every precaution in the world. But believe me, you do that drive enough. You will get pulled over. And we did. There's a couple strategies that we employed when we did get pulled over. The first one is to put the cop at ease immediately by confessing to whatever traffic infraction made him pull you over in the first place. So I remember there was a stretch of highway about 90 miles outside of Eugene that has a sharp decline. So you go down the side of this mountain really fast.

And I was probably 20 miles over the speed limit. And we went around this curve and we blew past a trooper. So I knew immediately I was getting lit up. So we pull over to the side, roll the window down. And as soon as he comes up to the window, I say, I know I took that term way too fast. So you're confessing to a small crime or infraction to cover up the bigger crime that you're committing. And cops appreciate that. They don't like being bullshit.

No humans like being lied to. So when you give them something to chew on, it immediately tells them, oh, okay, this is a citizen. This is not a guy who's trying to cover up anything. And if I didn't know what I was getting pulled over for, I would actually. concerned. I would, in my mind, look at this cop or this state trooper and think, this is a peace officer. Let's figure this out so we can all be safer. If you can trick your mind into doing that into thinking, this guy is just doing his job, he's on my team, it'll relax you and lower your heart rate because the minute you start to panic, your pupils will dilate. These are things

cops look for. And you'll be shaking and you'll forget your story and it'll be get the cop. It'll get his wheels spinning. And they love that. So, and if they bring a drug dog out, you're finished, right? Basically, unless this dog is a newbie or he's very old. And, you know, cops have tricks where even if the dog doesn't smell anything, they yank on the leash and they get the dog to make a reaction. And that gives them probable cause to get a warrant to search the vehicle. So I know a lot of the state troopers didn't actually have dogs in the car with them. It's only the SUV vehicles that have the cane. in the back. So usually you were good. As long as you could get the first cop who pulled you over

to not call up his homeboy for a secondary search, you knew you were probably going to be okay. So I remember one time we're coming back from picking up, I believe it was a five pound order. It was a small order. This was late summer. It was the middle of the drought. There was not a lot of product to be had. We met up with a connect, a redneck in Ashland, Oregon at the very tip of Southern Oregon. This was the middle of the night. And it was just a sloppy operation. None of the pounds of weed that we picked up were in vacuum sealed bags. So the ship was just reeking through the bags. And we didn't have any like secondary turkey bags on us to double bag it, to really suck the smell out. So we just said, fuck it. We were exhausted. We just threw it in

the back and said, well, pray to God. So we hit the highway and about 30 minutes north of Ashland on I-5, I turned to B-B-and I tell him, do you fucking smell the weed in the back? He's like, yeah. And I look over, we got the windows down. The smell of the weed was so strong, the air from, I don't know how to describe it. When the windows were rolled down, you could smell the weed from the trunk filling into the main cabin of the car. And I said, Jesus Christ, dude, if we get pulled over, and I think I hadn't even finished telling him that when we see the lights behind us. So I'm in a panic.

I'm like, my God, we are going to go to prison for the stupidest shit in the history of drug trafficking. So we pull over to the side. I have no idea why we're even getting pulled over. It's the middle of the night and there's no cars on the road. So the officer comes to the window. He ducks his head down. He's got his bucket hat on.

And I'm like, this is it. He's going to smell the fucking. weed that we were too lazy to put into turkey bags before we left. And he looks at me and he goes, do you know why I pulled you over? And I was like, speeding? He goes, no, the opposite. You were going way too fucking slow. I was on your ass. When somebody gets behind you in the fast lane, pull over and let him pass. And as I turn to pick up my license to give it to him, he turns and he runs back to his car and he fucking speeds off. And I turned to, he looks at me and he's like, We gotta fucking tighten up, dude.

So there you go. I mean, you can call it white privilege, and it is. It's also just taking little steps to try to disguise yourself and make yourself look harmless. We would put college stickers on the back of our trap cars that we would bring. We would slap a University of Oregon sticker. The duck football team is huge.

I remember one time we got pulled over, I told an officer, hey, we're heading up to Otson Stadium for the game this weekend, and I'm sorry, we must have been going a little too fast. Things like that really put people at ease because it humanizes you and it gives a reason for you to be doing what you're doing. So that's what I tell all smugglers. It all depends on what region you're in, you know? The military is a great one too. Cops love the military. A lot of them are ex-military themselves. So what we would do sometimes is we had a sticker, a marine

sticker that we would put on the back of one of our trap cars. So a cop, the first thing he saw if you pulled us over was that sticker. So one time we're coming back in the pissing rain. I'm making this journey alone, actually. And it's pissing rain. I'm sleepy. I'm just trying to make it home. I've been on the road for like 15 hours.

I'm exhausted. I'm speeding. I get pulled over. As soon as this cop comes to my window, kind of ducks his head in, and he's smiling. And he goes, Memorial Day weekend is almost here.

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Drink responsibly, must be 21. Where'd you serve? And now I'm panicked, and I pull the best piece of improv I've ever pulled out of my ass in my life. I look at him and I go, I'm actually on my way up to Portland to enlist. And he looks at me and he goes, best of luck, soldier, drive safe. He gives me my license back, and he goes back to his car and speeds off. I'm sitting there with 30 pounds of weed in the trunk. It's called survival.

And you used any and all methods to, try to increase your chances of survival. And eventually we would have gotten caught. If we had kept doing that over years and years and years, and we didn't hire mules, we would have gotten sloppy, but we made hundreds of trips over the years, and every single one, we made it back safe. So after we made the trip from Northern California,

we would bring the product to one of our safe houses, right? It was either a buddy's place, or it was somebody's grandmother who was half alive, right? We would keep it in her attic or something like that. and we would bring it, we would stash it, and then we would leave it alone for a day or two, just to make sure nobody was following us. It would give the cops time to get a warrant and raid the place, so we didn't want to be anywhere near it, right? So what we would do then is go into surgery, called it surgery, and this is how we ship drugs through the mail.

This is where the real money is made. This is where the biggest risk is. This is what in the business we call arbitrage. It is that impossible task of moving illegal drugs in bulk from point A to point B. It's impossible to comprehend for most people. And it is insane. It's literally risking your life every single time you do it. But we employed basically two methods, mobile storage units and the mail. There's so much commerce that moves all over the United States at any given time, on any

given day that 50 pounds of our weed when packaged and hidden right is just going to blend in with everything else for large orders for 20 pounds and up we used mobile storage units they were called pods that's like one of the brands i'm sure you've seen them around so you get a buddy with a fake ID to go down and rent one of these pods out and sign it under his name and we were given shipping addresses by of course our buyers on the east East Coast in Jersey. They owned a lot of apartment buildings. So what they would do is they would use a dummy address, usually like a vacant apartment in one of these buildings as the shipping address for the weed that we were sending them. So we would go to discount furniture stores and we would

buy cheap furniture and then we would fill the storage unit with all this furniture. And then, of course, intermixed with all this would be boxes stuffed with the weed. So then like magic, a couple days later, this pod shows up at the address that's been given to us on the East Coast. And we've got the tracking for it. We can see exactly where it's going. If it doesn't make it there on time, on the day that it's supposed to make it there, on the day that we paid for it, guaranteed to be there, we know it's been compromised. We don't touch it. Same with sending weed through the mail. And that was our bread and butter, was actually moving product through the mail. I didn't like the big orders. I tried to avoid sending over 20 pounds of

a time simply because if one order got picked up or intercepted, there's 80 grand down the drain. So we always try to move no more than five or 10 packages at a time. The idea was to move them to different addresses. So if one got picked up, the other two would get through. Drug dealing is very easy to make a profit if you're shipping in bulk. You can lose up to 80% of your work and still turn over a profit if you're doing it right. We tried to move small, reasonable amounts through different carriers at the same time. We were shipping three boxes a week, anywhere from 5 to 10 pounds per box.

So that's anywhere from 15 to 25 pounds a week. And at a thousand bucks profit per pound, we're now looking at a million dollar a year business. But the mail was by far the fastest and the most efficient. UPS, FedEx, and the United States Postal Service, I've said it before, I'll say it again, they have shipped more drugs than Pablo Escobar and El Chapo combined. I owe them a debt of gratitude for how much money these guys made me. UPS was the worst. They rip off a lot of packages because it goes to a sorting facility in Kentucky

before it then gets shipped off to its final destination. And a lot of their workers will rifle through the boxes looking for drugs. So we lost a few packages that way. FedEx and the U.S. mail were the best options. So to get a package full of drugs ready to be shipped across the country is a specific art. We would go over to the safe house, myself and a couple of helpers, and we had it all laid out like an assembly line. So say I've got an order for five pounds, and I need to get it to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, by tomorrow morning. Well, I'm going to use FedEx.

A, because they're the fastest, and B, because they have the most efficient tracking system. Like I said before, we would track the box online every step of the way. And if that box was paid for and supposed to get to a certain location on the other end, on the East Coast, by 10 a.m., and it got there by 10.05,

we told the buyers, don't touch the box. It's been compromised. They're very efficient and you pay a lot of money to get the box there on time, especially if it's express next day air. So it's going to make it there on time. And if it doesn't, something's wrong. So we take the product. We called it the work, five pounds. We open up the original package that it was sold to us in, the big turkey bag, right?

We pour the weed into a vacuum seal bag. We then put it into one of those industrial vacuum sealers that your mom uses to, you know, store all or, you know, you know, leftover food, right? And we seal it shuts. We can make a pound that big, that fluffy, shrink down to about the size of, you know, a softball even, right? And we do that five times. We wipe it down. We double bag it for safety, and then we put it into a box. And sometimes what we would do is take old film from like old film cameras and we would wrap it around the product to and now what that did was stop the x-rays if it ever went through an x-ray scanner it couldn't see into the box so that's kind of an old smuggling trick through the mail we would then have our

address in hand and we would give it to another worker again somebody clean cut somebody who didn't have a criminal record, and we would supply them with a fake ID, and that would be that. They would get a tracking number, and from there, we close our eyes and pray. We had guys working for us from the neighborhood. Those were all kids who we went to Catholic school with, you know, from elementary school on. This is the middle of the recession, too. So nice college kids are broke and unemployed, and they're willing to, you know, take calculated risks for not that much money. You know, you just don't get paid a lot when you are at the lowest rung of the drug game.

So we would give them a couple hundred bucks to go down to the FedEx office, the post office, wherever it was, and sign for it and have it shipped off for the drug runs. For actually driving down, meeting with the Connect and bringing the package back, we would pay them usually about $100 a pound. So they could make anywhere from 2 to 4,000. $1,000 for a run like that. So it was lucrative, albeit dangerous for them. I never got close to getting caught shipping product. I think the mail is such a great way because, as they say, possession is nine-tenths of the law. So when your hands aren't on it, when it's

not your address, when nothing is in your name, it seemed at least at the time the best way to insulate myself from the criminal liability of moving the product. So we sent maybe 300 packages total. I'd say 297 of them got through. The rate of success was extremely high. Now, the ones that didn't would show up at the shipping address, weeks later, completely empty. So originally we started with our mafia buyers in the Philadelphia area,

But through them and just through various connections, we met other guys, some Dominicans, out of Washington Heights in Manhattan. And so we eventually started working with them as well and a few people in Boston. If somebody was new and I didn't know them, I would get the box ready, have it shipped out. I would then get on a flight, fly to the city where the package was landing, and meet the package myself and give it to the buyer. And I just did that a few times when we first began working together, because obviously I didn't want to get ripped off. And that developed trust.

And after that, every time we sent the weed, the money came back. There was no fuckery involved, although there very well could have been. I just was a pretty good judge of character, and I would only work with people who I absolutely trusted. Now, the money getting sent back to us was wrapped and hidden the same way that the weed was. It was vacuum sealed. They say, what percentage of $100 bills have cocaine on them? Like, you know, 100%. So money oftentimes, it's dirty and it's got the metallic strip on them now.

So it's easy for an x-ray to pick up. It's easy for a dog to pick up. And it was hidden in various ways, sometimes in packages of baseball cards. So one of the new methods for the DEA and other law enforcement is to actually intercept and interdict drug money. So it was very important, the most important, actually, to package the money in the exact same way with the exact same care that we packaged our product. Because you can always lose weed. You can always lose drugs and get more of them. If you have to get drugs on consignment from your supplier, so be it.

But if you lose the money, then everybody's down. I told my buyers it was of the utmost importance that you vacuum seal my money the way that I package your drugs. But human error. People don't listen and these are drug dealers after all. These are not, you know, brainiacs. So a few times our boxes would show up to various addresses we had in Portland. We would open them up and they would be completely empty. We'd been ripped off by the postman.

We lost, I think, a 20 grand package one time. Some lucky post office guy got to retire early off our drug money, you know? And what are you going to do? You're not going to call down there and complain, right? I probably would have done the same thing. So the money is always the most important thing. But ultimately, it is what made our operation implode. And I will talk about that in a later video.

All right, guys, well, that's it for today's episode. Again, be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications. We will be back with another episode next week. You can also listen to us. We're on iTunes and Spotify. Just go to The Connect with Johnny Mitchell. And of course, follow us on Instagram at Not the Connect and at Mr. Johnny Mitchell. Check out my other page where I have my stand-up comedy.

And yeah, we'll see you next week.