Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. In this episode, Gary talks with Tom Jenkins, the author of “The Next Run”. Tom recounts his experiences as a significant pot smuggler in the 60s. He shares fun stories of his adventures in Mexico and beyond. He details how he got started in smuggling, the evolution of the drug trade, and his close relationships with his Mexican contacts, particularly Abelardo. Tom also discusses the challenges and risks involved in smuggling, including the use of unconventional methods like hidden compartments in cars, plane landings in the desert, and dealing with flimsy suitcases for transporting drugs. Tom reflects on the changing attitudes towards narcotics over the years, mentioning the surge in marijuana dispensaries and the shift in perception from a mysterious substance to a recreational drug. He critiques the impact of narcotics on society, pointing out the devastating consequences of addiction and the flawed approach to drug enforcement. Tom also highlights his views on rehabilitation effectiveness for addicts and his observations as a physician regarding drug use.
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[0:00]
Introduction
[0:00]Well, Hey, welcome all you guys out there. Glad to be back here in the studio of gang land wire.
And I have a particularly interesting story. I, you know, I guys,
you may, or you may not know what I get contacted by, uh, publicity companies
and book companies all the time when they have a book that they think might
be appropriate for the podcast.
And so I got this and I always get the book and sometimes I read it.
Sometimes I kind of glaze over and I’ll make notes out of it.
Well, I got one. not too long ago called The Next Run.
And those of you on YouTube, there it is.
And I started reading it. And next thing I know, I’m like halfway through it
and I haven’t put it down yet.
It is a page turner. And we are lucky enough to have the author here and the
man that lived this crazy, crazy life, Tom Jenkins. Welcome, Tom.
[0:51]Thank you so much. Happy to be here. Well, it’s an honor to beat you,
even though you were on the one side of the law and I was on the other all those years.
But it’s really cool to beat you.
And, you know, this whole marijuana thing, it’s it’s just gone crazy in the last few years.
As you’ve noticed, anybody that’s of any age or pays attention to anything in
the United States, there’s just there’s a daggone dispensary on every corner.
Practically of every place I’ve been in the United States. Maybe there’s some
states that don’t have it.
And so I don’t know. There’s probably no more guys like you.
There’s no more smugglers like you, are there, Tom?
[1:35]I doubt it. Well, unless you look to the cartels, I think anyone would be absolutely
crazy to try to get into this solo at this point.
It’s all the cartels.
Yeah, really. So what’s interesting, I think, is when you started,
it was back in the 60s, and those of us that are a certain age,
you know, we were in high school or just out of high school,
maybe post-war baby boomers is what we are.
Now we’re getting old, and pretty soon we’re going to finally die off and let
the younger people run everything, which will probably be good.
But, you know, there’s a lot of marijuana smoking, but there’s a lot of ditch weed.
Where I lived up here in northwest Missouri, there was nothing but ditch weed.
I tried it once when I was young and it’s like, you know, I’d rather drink beer,
man. I want to hit, I want something to happen to my head.
Nothing happened, but there was out in California and along the border in Southern
United States, they were getting this weed from Mexico, which would give you
some kind of a high would really work.
So Tom, tell us about how you got started in that.
[2:47]Well, I got started just on a lark. Three of us were trying to decide what to
do over the Christmas break.
We were all going, we were freshmen in college and we decided to go to Mexico.
None of us had been to Mexico before. So we decided to go to Mazatlan.
And then one of us, just as an afterthought said, hey, we ought to bring back
some pot to defray our trip expenses.
And we sort of thought, okay, we’ll think about that. And then one thing led
to another, and we were actually able to score on the beach in Mazatlan.
And we got that pot back to the States.
And we went back to school. And I thought that was the end of it.
But then a really bizarre coincidence occurred where two friends of mine had
bought a very straight-looking car for the purpose of running the border.
And they had not told a soul.
[3:41]And they even kept the car in a city not where we lived, but it was maybe five miles away. way.
And by sheer chance, I happened to be driving down this street in that city
during a very rare period of time where they took the car out of a garage to
see how it was running. And I ran into them.
I said, well, what’s this about? What are you guys up to with this very straight
looking car? Because they were used to driving hot rods and whatnot.
So I finally got them to tell me their secret. And they said,
well, the only thing we need now is a contact.
And I said, well, I’ve got that.
[4:21]So I became a partner and we had so much fun pulling that off that it seemed
like a fun thing to get into.
And as you pointed out before we went live here, things were very different in those days.
One thing is that marijuana, as we called it, we never used the term cannabis as is used nowadays.
[4:45]But marijuana had a tremendous amount of mystique, particularly in white middle-class circles.
No one knew anything about it. So it was like a strange, evil thing.
So that was kind of exciting for us. There were many differences.
We treated it something like a sacrament, and we would get a hold of a lid,
[5:11]
Early Smuggling Adventures
[5:09]and we would clean the seeds out of it and smoke it.
And then we would read straight from Freud, as I mentioned in my book,
and we would try to psychoanalyze each other.
So we used it in kind of a therapeutic way, in addition to just plain getting high.
That’s another thing, too, talking about seeds. When I got into it on a bigger
level, I would go down and examine big lots of the stuff to see which lot I wanted to buy.
And if it didn’t have seeds in it, I would reject it because in those days that
meant it was immature and had been cut down before the plants had a chance to develop seeds.
And of course, now, if pot has seeds in it, it’s a sign of very poor quality.
So a whole lot has changed Tom, you were going to the University of California
at Berkeley at this point in time?
[6:04]Yes. In the math department. It seemed like just to kind of show what kind of
guy we’re talking here, you guys.
Tom, didn’t you were eventually you were offered to go into PhD for math program.
And was it MIT or Yale or some Ivy league? It was Berkeley.
Berkeley. Oh, it was Berkeley. Okay. But you’re a pretty bright guy.
You’re not the usual kind of rum-dum pot smuggler that I used to bust up here
once in a while selling pot.
I was born with a lot of advantages.
That’s a point that I hope I’ve made clear in my book.
Anyone with the advantages that
I was born with would be crazy to get into smuggling. And I was crazy.
I was a troubled youth. there’s no question about it.
And the funny thing is that I got a fair way past my problems through the vehicle of smuggling.
I met a lot of people that made good.
[7:11]Role models for me with something I didn’t really have. And that helped me.
And actually, smoking pot helped me. It enlightened me,
turned me on to a lot of things I didn’t know about myself uh i
almost never smoke it now uh once that
was five years or something and but uh it it
did me a lot of good at the time so that smuggling world at that time it’s not
like it is now as we were talking before we turned on the recorder it’s a whole
different world and you really made a lot of decent friends and and good contacts
and and and learned a lot about yourself self as you were doing these things,
it appears to be like it was almost it was kind of honorable among other smugglers.
Can you tell us a little bit about that? You could trust each other at the start.
[8:01]There was a tremendous amount of honor. There was a point at which my Mexican
contacts were sending me six tons at a time and they would deposit it in a storage
space and let me know what it was there.
They would do this without asking for money up front. In one case,
they did it without, well, a couple of cases, they did it without even telling me in advance.
They just phoned up and say, hey, there’s all these tons of grass.
So they were very trusting of me and I never disappointed them.
And then I, in turn, I never went to these storage spaces ever.
[8:40]I didn’t want to have anything to do with that stuff in terms of being physically near it.
So I had three friends that I trusted, and I would send them in to get allotments.
And those three friends never cheated me.
It was all very, very honorable.
It’s kind of a funny story, too, because in a way, all this pot and the money
had a surreal quality to it.
And one of those very trusted friends one night came to me in a rush and said,
hey, Tom, I need to borrow your guitar.
I had a Martin guitar. I need to borrow your guitar. I’ve got a gig tonight.
And I was shocked that he would ask me. I wouldn’t loan that guitar to anyone.
So he left disappointed. And I thought to myself, well, I’m trusting this guy
with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of brass, and I won’t loan him a
[9:33]
Friendship and Honor Among Smugglers
[9:32]guitar that isn’t even worth a thousand.
But the guitar was real
and all this grass and money and even the interactions that occurred between
us uh you know one a childhood friend ripped me off for a half ton uh which
seems like a pretty serious thing and it was but three months later he and i went fishing together.
[9:57]It was almost like we were playing cops and robbers
and that all of this really mattered that
much of course for people that got busted it mattered a huge deal yeah this
was you got into it kind of before they had really the draconian sentencing
structure that they got into later on by the 80s i mean you for what you were
doing you could end up doing life in prison And actually, uh, now early on,
I think, tell us about like that, that first car that you fixed up.
I thought that was fascinating.
It was at a Mustang and the, how you created this hiding space.
That was really fascinating.
Now, how hard you guys work to make this hiding space.
Well, the Mustang, this was a 57, I’m sorry, 67 fastback Mustang that had a
natural, very large hiding space on either side of the back seat.
There was this molding that stuck way into the interior.
So we didn’t really have to do any work to use that hiding space.
I think what you’re thinking of is our Rambler. And I forget the year of the Rambler.
The Rambler. Yeah, the Rambler had these quarter panels, and our initial plan
was we got a spare gas tank at a records, and we cut a square hole in the top
of it for packing in bricks.
[11:20]And the idea was right before the border, we would swap out the real gas tank
with this rigged gas tank full of bricks.
And then we would run the car off a five-gallon can that was hidden way up in the quarter panel.
And uh we ended up spray painting
that can black if that didn’t
work we it could still be seen so then
we covered the access to the quarter panel with
uh pieces of plywood and uh
we painted them black and then we threw dust and
grit against the uh painted plywood until
it looked just like the rest of the undercarriage uh
and then that looked so good that we decided well we won’t even bother with
this rigged gas tank we’ll just pack all the stuff up into these quarter panels
and and that worked well it would it never got busted really before the drug dogs,
things were things were good before the drug dogs uh that’s so true i i think
what we did It would not have done a chance with flipping door.
It would not. I noticed that you always were able to find somebody who.
[12:36]To drive a car across the border. You would go down and set it up the deal,
make, you know, make the car, make the vehicle, have that ready,
get it down there, have the deal set up, get it up to the border.
And you’d hire somebody to them who had drive it across the border.
Then you guys would pick it up pretty smart.
I must say, cause the border was the weak point. I think the most dangerous
point, how are you finding those people?
I guess you You were paying them enough money. They thought it was worthwhile.
[13:06]That’s a good question. I think, again, I think there was a sort of unreal quality to it all.
And it was the 60s.
People’s judgment was kind of, you know, not the greatest.
And we didn’t really even have to pay that much.
And I will say that is the only thing, looking back, that I feel a little bit bad about.
Uh i don’t feel bad about bringing a
bunch of pot into the country i think people enjoyed it but
i do feel bad i feel like i kind of
used those runners none of them got busted
thankfully so they all made some money and uh presumably
were happy but in retrospect i do feel that i uh it was something that now seems
distasteful to me yeah so you start getting bigger loads and bigger And I guess
your guys down in Mexico,
they had access to more and more.
What kind of people were you kind of developed a friendship with? Was it was it Jesus?
I think that you had an ongoing friendship with what was their life down there in Mexico?
[14:18]Uh, Jesus, Abelardo and Miguel were the three friends and, uh,
I, they were more than friends.
I loved them. Uh, we were extremely close.
We told each other everything. We shared our heartaches.
Uh, it was, uh, an amazing experience.
I was closer to them than, uh, anyone I had been close to in my childhood, actually.
[14:42]
Life in Mexico and Learning to Grow Pot
[14:43]Uh, so that was a very rewarding experience for me. And certainly one of the
reasons that kept me going.
[14:52]What else can I say about them? Yeah, we became so relaxed around each other.
One thing you would have read, having read the book, is that on one run, we forgot to pay them.
Normally, the pilot would bring the cash with him.
And as the suitcases of grass were being loaded into the plane,
he would hand the cash over to my contacts.
But he forgot. We all forgot. So we watched the plane take off and then Cazus
slaps his heel of his palm to his forehead to money.
[15:27]And he didn’t care. They knew I was good for it. So that’s how relaxed things were.
Yeah. So you changed to airplanes after a while. Reminds me,
I did a story about a guy named Jimmy Chagra who went to airplanes at first.
He was kind of one of the first guys out of El Paso that really got into airplanes.
Then he went to, to, uh, freighters, ships, which sailing to clear up the coast.
So you went to airplanes and, and that’s a pretty interesting guy.
That was, he’s named Bruce that you ran into.
That was this English accent. I assume he was, was from England and,
and he, you know, was just, you know, a man of the world that you ran into somewhere
and started landing airplanes in the desert for you.
He was a really interesting guy. He was actually Australian,
but he had purposely modified his accent to be that of a wealthy Londoner.
And he had been raised by an extremely wealthy Australian real estate magnate
with powerful political connections.
But they had a bitter argument when Bruce was 17 and Bruce left home with the
goal of someday going back to his father with vast millions to kind of show
his dad he didn’t need his dad to make millions.
[16:56]
Adventure with Bruce in the Desert
[16:50]And he just pursued all kinds of pie-in-the-sky things throughout his whole life.
And it was kind of funny because he and I kind of lost track of each other,
I want to say, maybe in the 80s. And then in the early 2000s, he phones me up.
And in typical Bruce fashion, he says, champ, I’m in real trouble here and I need some help.
I need you to loan me $10,000. dollars uh
i have these diamond mines in the congo and uh
i happened to go into brassaville and uh the
lord’s resistance army took over my mines and murdered
my partner and if i hadn’t been here i would be toast and now i need 10 000
get out of here i i told him i said hey you know i i can’t afford to loan you
10 000 but i’ll give you 2 500 based on our past history he says oh i’m good
for it. Well, he never paid me back.
And sadly, about two years ago, a mutual friend phoned and said that he had
been murdered in Venezuela.
And so the fact that he was in Venezuela makes me think that he just never in
all these years got away from trying to make a quick buck illegally.
[18:04]Yeah, no, I don’t think he did. I tell you that whole story.
You got to tell Well, my guys, with you and Bruce and your effort to go to Afghanistan
and bring your hash run, you’re going to get into hash.
You’ve been doing this marijuana and you’re making money.
It seemed like you would make a bunch of money and then you just spend it.
And then you’d make a bunch of money and then you’d spend it.
You never saved. It seemed to me like.
So now Bruce has this idea of going to one of you two did of going to Afghanistan.
[18:34]And that’s a heck of a story. I mean, you guys, you were nuts.
You’re nuts to do that. But go ahead. Tell us the story.
Well, I think probably the most interesting part of that story is our transatlantic flight.
And I’m not going to try to recreate that here. People will have to read the book.
But it was an amazing flight.
[18:58]And Afghanistan didn’t work out very well.
The Afghanis were too suspicious of my partner.
And he was unable to load very much hash aboard the plane.
And they eventually started accompanying him out to the plane to watch exactly what he was doing.
He then tried to get the Afghanis, his Afghani contacts to pack it into a car, which he bought.
He bought a Mercedes limousine and they packed it into the gas tank.
And again the story of why that didn’t work out so well is too long to relate
here it’s a good story it’s a good story it’s and now.
[19:47]I mean, you guys, did he have a contact?
It almost looks like you just went over there and started asking around again.
Did you do that? I can’t remember now.
That’s what he did. I personally have not been to Afghanistan. Okay.
[20:05]I tried to go with him as far as Turkey, and we were in this light plane,
and there were near-death experiences practically every day. and I gave up a turkey.
I didn’t want any more of it. Uh, and so I let him go on alone.
Uh, yeah, but that didn’t work out very well.
Really? Uh, when, when you come back to United States, you tried this.
Did you keep your three guys, uh, Jesus and Abelardo.
And I can’t remember the third guy. Did you keep them as sources all along?
Did you go, were they continually a source?
[20:46]Oh, no. No, there were huge stride spells. I mean, there was actually a two-year
period from 72 to 74 where I had a legitimate Mexican clothing importing business.
The embroidered clothing in Mexico was very popular at that time,
and I imported it legally.
I paid 35% duty on imported cotton and wholesale to stores on the West Coast.
[21:13]
Pause in Smuggling Activities
[21:13]During that time, I did not have a method for smuggling, and so the issue didn’t come up.
I would visit my contacts, and we had fun together, but we did not get involved
in smuggling until 1975.
Then I got back into it. Why was there a drought of the marijuana?
Did the Mexican government crack down in their particular area?
[21:43]Oh, well, they could have gotten grass at that time. There wasn’t that much of a drought.
It’s just that I didn’t have a method for crossing it. Okay,
you just quit doing it for a while.
Well, everything I had tried to quit working, the planes eventually quit working,
thanks to Nixon’s Operation Intercept.
I hate to give Nixon credit for anything, but that’s for him.
Uh and then uh the rio grande runs crossing at the rio grande uh was a really good method but uh.
[22:19]Uh the people i was working with took a bust on that
and so i didn’t want to you know go anywhere near
that area again yeah but it’s very
viable method of crossing in those days i don’t
know what kind of technique they have now to prevent it
but uh the rio grande for about
a 70 mile stretch fairly closely parallels interstate
10 and the river takes a turn every
quarter mile or so so they’d have
to have 100 guys out there each night to keep people from crossing i don’t know
if they do nowadays or not but at the time i doubt they had more than one or
two guys out at night so it was pretty easy to just cross there kind of hard
to get any volume doing it like that though though,
I would think, to really make any money.
You never really got into that really big volume, like the truckload of grass,
did you? I can’t remember.
[23:18]Six tons. You did get, okay, you did get into the bigger volume.
And that’s when, were you still dealing with Jesus and Abelardo?
Mainly Abelardo, yeah. Abelardo. That’s an interesting story.
Abelardo was a very gentle, wonderful person.
But the state chief of police of Sinaloa was kind of a prick and had killed a lot of people.
And he killed Abelardo’s brother and his brother’s wife.
So Abelardo assassinated him. but he was found out and had to flee.
And so he went up to the Sierra, very deep in Mexico. No one knew where he was.
It’s not his own family, no one.
And he met pot farmers, and he learned all about how to farm pot.
And a couple of years later, he was able to pay his way out of that situation,
[24:08]
Afghan Hash Run
[24:07]and he came up to visit me.
And I was impressed. He started talking about how much potassium,
how much phosphate these plants needed. And he had learned the technique of
sincenia, of growing plants without seeds.
[24:23]So he learned quite a bit from that experience.
And from that point on, he had access to vast tons of grass.
And at one point was sending me six-ton shipments.
And that was in semis past a bright water guard or a customs fit.
Okay so he was actually running the
border and then you were ready to take it once he got across
the border he said he was driving the semi himself okay interesting yes now
you never really got into heroin or cocaine or anything even though those options
kept cropping back up didn’t they.
[25:07]They sure did. Yeah, my contacts would have loved to sell me heroin because
it was just so much easier to deal with.
And from their point of view, they didn’t really care what happened to Americans using heroin.
And I can hardly blame them.
I’d like to put in a plug for Mexico. We’ve done Mexico a terrible disservice,
both in creating this tremendous demand for the illicit drugs that come out
of there, and then supplying the cartel with guns.
[25:41]Just the way we treat firearms in this country makes it so easy for the cartel
to just get a lot of American-made weapons.
So that has really made a mess of Mexico. uh
but uh as you know from reading
the book uh my roommate jumped my mexican contact that’s a term we use where
you use someone’s contact without their permission he uh jumped my contact and
began a heroin smuggling operation which i vowed to stop and that’s an important plot point of the
book yeah it is well it’s
um it’s such an interesting part
of our history this whole our our relationship with
narcotics you know this huge demand like you said we’ve created
we we basically have corrupted every country
it seems like south of the border except maybe costa rica
it seemed like the everybody is corrupt
because of this huge amount of money and narcotics i
just it’s it’s just hard it’s unthinkable what we’ve done with with our our
demand that we have created down there and yet we blame them that’s law enforcement
primarily has blamed everybody the the suppliers and we’ve always historically
gone after the suppliers.
[27:04]That’s right. And when you say every Latin American country except Costa Rica,
I’d like to throw in El Salvador because it’s a real conundrum.
In other words, what you’ve got in El Salvador is you’ve got this authoritarian
dictator who has prevented El Salvador from becoming another Mexico. ago.
So he is currently the most popular leader in the world.
He has an rate of over 90% because he can walk the streets.
Storekeepers don’t have to pay extortion to the gangs.
Now, the downside is he’s declared a state of emergency for I don’t know how
long and has rounded people up without due process,
and has just imprisoned tens of thousands of folks, some of whom are undoubtedly innocent.
But the way he says, you know, he was having 100,000 odd people killed,
innocent people killed by the gangs.
And now that isn’t happening. So he feels that he’s done a lot of good.
And it’s kind of hard to argue with that, even as much as his means are repugnant to us.
So it’s kind of a conundrum, he presents.
[28:19]Once again, this demand for narcotics, it affects society from one end to the
other, and it’s international now for the most part, except for really repressive regimes.
Only a repressive regime, it seemed to me like, can stop it.
And even that, I don’t know how well it works. It seems to be working down there,
but that’s the only way to stop it.
Well, I think an interesting question is, marijuana has been around,
gosh, I don’t know, probably thousands of years. I really don’t know.
But why wasn’t it popular 50, 60, 70, 80 years ago?
And why is it so popular now?
And why are people using fentanyl knowing that it could kill them?
[29:13]
The Impact of Narcotics on Society
[29:07]And it seems to me that people are not very happy today in this country.
And I think that’s the root problem that needs to be solved.
And I have some ideas how that can be solved, but that’s kind of off topic.
Problems are bigger than all of us. Sometimes I think that from the Oxycontin
debacle to the fentanyl now, And, you know, it’s just addiction.
[29:37]I want to put a word in for the OxyContin debacle.
I feel even a little bit sorry for the Sackler family. I mean,
they took the real brunt of that.
Doctors got off scot-free and they should not have. Yeah.
I myself, I was running a, well, I shouldn’t give too much information about
myself. So I was holding the line and not giving folks the mountain of narcotics
that they wanted from me.
And I took a lot of hits for that. I got written up in online reviews as being
a cruel and heartless doctor.
But I think doctors in that time should have known the danger of OxyContin.
And they should not have been doling it out as freely as they were.
And the medical community should accept part of the blame for the epidemic, in my opinion.
[30:30]Yeah, they, they, they knew and they could have done something and they didn’t,
they just kept prescribing it. It appears to me an awful lot of them did.
All of them didn’t, but an awful lot of them did.
And, and then you had doctors that were, would have been corrupt in any manner.
And they set up the pill mills and they’d be, I was a tweakers would be lined
up outside those pill mills with their script.
They were trying to get, or going after their script and then run into the,
the corrupt pharmacist down the road. I knew somebody that was a pharmacist
and this started happening at his pharmacy. And so he just experimented.
These same people came in and so he just doubled the price. They didn’t care.
So they came in again. A few days later, he doubled the price again.
They didn’t care. I didn’t question.
They just paid it and got the, uh, it was before Oxy. It was like Percocet or
Dilaudid or something like that. It was several years ago.
And then he, he like got hold of me. I was a policeman at the time.
He said, man, he said, you got to get DEA. That doctor down here,
this one doctor is writing scripts like crazy, and these guys don’t care how
much they have to pay for it.
So I turned it over to DEA, and I never heard back from them,
but I doubt if anything happened. They probably just moved on.
[31:43]
The Reality of Addiction and Recovery
[31:44]That’s a funny story. It’s a crazy,
crazy world, and living that life of a junkie, I mean, it is just nuts.
I know a lot of people that are recovering now, addicts now,
Now, just like normal, regular people, they just got into this thing and it
got, you know, it got out of hand.
They didn’t know what else to do. So they did what they could do to get the
drug till it hurt them so bad they went into recovery or they died.
It seemed like there’s only two ways for them to end.
We used, as we say, locked up or covered up in that world.
[32:18]Well, an interesting experience I’ve had as a physician is that I,
with almost every new patient, I’ve asked them if they use drugs.
And I’ve been somewhat surprised at how many men in particular have said,
yes, I used heroin. I shot up heroin.
And then I ask them, well, when was the last time?
How did you stop? And I cannot remember a single time that one of those men
told me they stopped due to rehab.
[32:49]Almost invariably the story was something along
the lines of one day i saw that it was ruining my life
and i just quit uh and it doesn’t
speak well for rehab and i suppose a lot of
people hearing this might get very mad at me for having said that but that’s
my experience uh i really question the effectiveness of rehab and i know right
now of people that are like on their fourth it’s a fifth round of rehab and
it’s, it’s just not working. Yeah.
No, it’s, it’s a tough one day.
Some people are pursuing into death, no matter what, some people,
you don’t know what happens to them. They have some light’ll come on.
They’ll just say, you know, I just can’t do this anymore.
They’ll have some consequence that they don’t want to face.
So they’ll at least try to ease up on it or try some kind of recovery program
and then it’ll catch on, but the next three or four, it won’t catch on.
So it’s, uh, you know, it’s, it’s a pretty arbitrary thing that getting into recovery.
[33:51]
Conclusion and Book Recommendation
[33:51]It’s a tricky business. It is. This has been great.
I tell you what, this, uh, this is a heck of a book guys. Uh,
you really, I highly recommend you get this book.
The next run is, is there any last story you think is particularly interested
in interesting that, uh, uh, you want to tell that will kind of let people give
a taste of what they’re going to get in this book,
well let’s see i could read from it if i can get
my computer to boot up here okay there’s a passage that i thought is kind of
interesting that takes a minute and a half do we have a minute now oh i think
we could squeeze out a minute and a half okay about to get to it real here’s
a here’s a review, guys, from Kirkus Reviews.
Jenkins is a fantastic storyteller, fine dramatic detail, terrific energy, and a good deal of humor.
A fast-paced, immensely readable account of illegal adventures.
And believe me, that’s a good description of a terrific energy and a good deal
of humor and fast-paced.
[34:57]Okay, with this segment, your listeners need to know that Bruce,
who was doing the plane runs, had to make a lot of unscheduled stops.
He would file a flight plan to
appear to be legal, but he would make unscheduled landings to pick it up.
He’d have to drop it off before going through outbound Mexican customs,
go back and pick that up, etc.
So you need to know that. So here goes straight from the book here.
[35:23]Bruce’s job of unloading and
reloading the grass which he now had to do both in Mexico and in the U.S.
Was complicated by the cheap suitcases Jesus was providing to hold the bricks
these were flimsy plastic fares with a picture of the Mazatlan La Paz ferry
on the front and the handles would often break off so that Bruce would then
have to lift them up by their bottoms sometimes when they broke off,
the handles would take a big chunk of plastic with them, and bricks would fall out.
On my next trip to Culiacán, I told Jesús about this problem,
and he invited me to come with him to the luggage shop.
On the way, we stopped at a papelería, where Jesús bought several hundred sheets
of blue construction paper for wrapping bricks.
The proprietor had this paper on hand, already cut to size, and sold it without
so much as a wink or a grin.
At the luggage shop, The proprietor said he could get better suitcases,
but they would cost nearly five times as much, and he would have to special order them.
I decided we should stick to the suitcases we were using, and Keizu spot 20 of them.
To get them, the proprietor opened the door to a back room, where I noticed
literally hundreds of the same suitcases stacked floor to ceiling against the far wall.
[36:39]So we weren’t the only ones using them. It amused me the way these small shops
had adapted themselves to the dope trade.
If the narcs had any smarts, they would stake out these two shops and soon know every supplier in town.
[36:55]Interesting. Yeah. It created a whole economy in these small towns where that was going on.
It created dope, create economy, the crack cocaine economy.
I could see it in neighborhoods. There was a certain economy that came out of
this, a lot of devastation and ruined lives, but there was a certain economy
that came out of this. People all of a sudden had nice cars.
People had a little better houses. They were buying stuff for their houses. That’s right.
Tom, I really appreciate you coming on, and be sure, guys, and get the next rung.
UC Berkeley students rise to major 60s pot smuggler.
Thanks a lot, Tom Jenkins. Sure. Let me just say it’s currently available on
Amazon in both Kindle and print form paperback.
I will get an audio book out hopefully in a month.
And people can find me on my website, which is under thenextrun.net.
And my Instagram handle is author Tom Jenkins. So thanks, Gary, so much for having me.
[38:03]I’ll have links guys i’ll have links as y’all know i’ll have links to those amazon things and to his,
instagram and his website so thanks
a lot tom okay thanks again bye well
that was quite a story guys i tell you what i i did enjoy reading that book
i really did it was a fun book to read so don’t forget i like to ride motorcycles
i probably could run some dope myself i’m one of those guys And I’ll have to
admit, I did flirt with it just a little bit.
A buddy of mine right out of high school, he had heard that you can go to where
it is and buy narcotics and bring them back and make a lot of money.
And he mentioned it to me. And, you know, I thought it was a good idea for about five minutes.
I don’t know. I just I like taking risks, but not that kind.
And I don’t like risking going to jail. I guess it comes down to it.
But anyhow, watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there.
And if you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service,
you know that the VA has a website and it has a hotline number for the PTSD situation.
And if you have drugs or alcohol problem with that, you know,
Tom and I talked about that a little bit and what it takes to get people into recovery.
You know, if you’ve had enough, you know, get a hold of.
[39:23]Anthony Ruggiano. And he has a hotline number, a helpline on his website and
he’s drug and alcohol counselor.
And, you know, if you want it, Tom didn’t think that rehab worked,
but if you want it, it’ll work.
A lot of other things will work if you want it, but you got to want it. I know that for a fact.
Be sure and like, and subscribe if you’re on YouTube, you know,
if you’re on the Apple podcast,
why give me a review, if you can figure out how to do that and let your friends
know about it and share it on your own social media and get some more guys watching
and listening to gangland wire podcast.
[40:00]Get on my Facebook group.
And if you can’t figure it out, email me or get hold of me.
You can email me by going through the contact on ganglandwire.com and I’ll make
sure that you get a, a, a invitation of that.
It’s a great big group. There’s a lot of great discussions and great pictures on there right now.
One of my friends, Casey McBride from Northwest Portland,
is in New York, and he’s got another guy who is taking around all the different Frank Costello sites.
I almost forgot his name, the prime minister of the underworld.
Frank Costello sites and taking pictures and posting them on my Gangland Wire podcast group.
Group, all the houses he lived in, the buildings where he lived,
where he was shot and, and businesses he hung out at.
So it’s a lot of interesting stuff on there. So thanks a lot guys.
