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Flying high: Inside big-time drug smuggling
Inside Big-time Drug Smuggling in the U. S. As it really went down.
269 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1984
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December 6, 2012
This book details some of the investigation into a large marijuana-smuggling organization, The Company, that operated out of the Midwestern USA in the late 1970's and early 1980's, with marijuana from Columbia. It purports to be investigative journalism, but it isn't a top example of the genre.
Here are some of the problems with the book:
- The author is not objective. He's clearly on the government's side and depicts the duplicitous, lying, manipulative (and probably drug-using) DEA agents as heroes but the Vietnam vets who started the smuggling with the skills the government had taught them in wartime as the bad guys, despite that all they were doing was smuggling pot.
- His primary sources are the drug agents, court transcripts, and a couple of minor players in the smuggling organization that ratted out their employers or were trying to keep themselves out of prison during a trial: not the most reliable witnesses. The dialog from early meetings of the smugglers meeting setting up the hierarchy is unlikely in the extreme. I suspect strongly he never spoke to any of the top four men in The Company (one was on the lam still when the book was written, later to be captured).
- While the author gives a one-chapter history of drug laws in the U.S., he never calls into question the deeper issues of economics and politics that made marijuana illegal in the first place. The book opens in tobacco country, but never once does he ask, hmm, what's the relationship between tobacco lobbies, and alcohol being a legal recreational drug in the U.S., and marijuana staying illegal? What's the role of big pharma in anti-drug laws, particularly in laws against the sorts of drugs than can be grown in one's back yard? Who wins and who loses here? To what extent does keeping recreational drugs illegal cause a criminal underworld that the government then has to tax citizens to battle? Why would the government wish to do that? The author doesn't care. The whole tone of the book is that of a government press release.
- He doesn't really analyze how the smugglers went wrong. At some point, could they have stopped, pocketed what they'd made, and the DEA would have gone on to other operations, but they didn't. That's an interesting question, but he never really says what tipped the government off, who was the first informant, how the DEA came to think it was more than a couple of guys and one little plane. He does tell us that The Company didn't kill anyone or bury any bodies; if someone messed up or was thought an informant or failed a polygraph (a condition of employment there), they merely got fired from The Company, which seems sweetly naive and of the 1970's, doesn't it?
- He talks about the main first three players of the smuggling organization, but at the end, when he details trials and convictions, he says nothing of them but concentrates on some minor employees' trials. WTF?, I wondered. Even from a pro-DEA stance, I'd think what's interesting is not a minor pilot's trial, but the machinations of pleas, bribes, and whatever else was involved with the principles' trials.
The most interesting bit in this book was when one minor executive in The Company said that in the long run, the only one who profits from smuggling are the attorneys that have to be hired to keep everyone out of jail for as long as possible. The book also details plenty of bribes that had to be paid (hundreds of thousands to local law enforcement in the U.S., and hundreds of thousands more to Columbian army and government officials to get arrested pilots returned to the U.S), as well. So this part of it, the economics of the smuggling operation, was fairly interesting. Between that bit of interest and this being the only book-length treatment of the topic, I'll give it more than one star.
I'd recently read some articles about The Company that now exist on-line that are more interesting than this book and which led me to this book. (I also vaguely remember a 1980's 60 Minutes segment on it). To me, the fascinating story is of how a handful of working-class, small-town veterans, one a disabled war hero, but none with a university education, saw this opportunity and created a successful business from nothing but an idea garnered from the off-duty scene in Vietnam. If someone wrote that story, it'd be a little like The Wire, but with down-home Midwestern white boys, full of drama and interesting, flawed characters on all sides.
(P.S., I'm not a pot-smoker myself. But I know a stupid law and wasted tax dollars when I see them.)
Here are some of the problems with the book:
- The author is not objective. He's clearly on the government's side and depicts the duplicitous, lying, manipulative (and probably drug-using) DEA agents as heroes but the Vietnam vets who started the smuggling with the skills the government had taught them in wartime as the bad guys, despite that all they were doing was smuggling pot.
- His primary sources are the drug agents, court transcripts, and a couple of minor players in the smuggling organization that ratted out their employers or were trying to keep themselves out of prison during a trial: not the most reliable witnesses. The dialog from early meetings of the smugglers meeting setting up the hierarchy is unlikely in the extreme. I suspect strongly he never spoke to any of the top four men in The Company (one was on the lam still when the book was written, later to be captured).
- While the author gives a one-chapter history of drug laws in the U.S., he never calls into question the deeper issues of economics and politics that made marijuana illegal in the first place. The book opens in tobacco country, but never once does he ask, hmm, what's the relationship between tobacco lobbies, and alcohol being a legal recreational drug in the U.S., and marijuana staying illegal? What's the role of big pharma in anti-drug laws, particularly in laws against the sorts of drugs than can be grown in one's back yard? Who wins and who loses here? To what extent does keeping recreational drugs illegal cause a criminal underworld that the government then has to tax citizens to battle? Why would the government wish to do that? The author doesn't care. The whole tone of the book is that of a government press release.
- He doesn't really analyze how the smugglers went wrong. At some point, could they have stopped, pocketed what they'd made, and the DEA would have gone on to other operations, but they didn't. That's an interesting question, but he never really says what tipped the government off, who was the first informant, how the DEA came to think it was more than a couple of guys and one little plane. He does tell us that The Company didn't kill anyone or bury any bodies; if someone messed up or was thought an informant or failed a polygraph (a condition of employment there), they merely got fired from The Company, which seems sweetly naive and of the 1970's, doesn't it?
- He talks about the main first three players of the smuggling organization, but at the end, when he details trials and convictions, he says nothing of them but concentrates on some minor employees' trials. WTF?, I wondered. Even from a pro-DEA stance, I'd think what's interesting is not a minor pilot's trial, but the machinations of pleas, bribes, and whatever else was involved with the principles' trials.
The most interesting bit in this book was when one minor executive in The Company said that in the long run, the only one who profits from smuggling are the attorneys that have to be hired to keep everyone out of jail for as long as possible. The book also details plenty of bribes that had to be paid (hundreds of thousands to local law enforcement in the U.S., and hundreds of thousands more to Columbian army and government officials to get arrested pilots returned to the U.S), as well. So this part of it, the economics of the smuggling operation, was fairly interesting. Between that bit of interest and this being the only book-length treatment of the topic, I'll give it more than one star.
I'd recently read some articles about The Company that now exist on-line that are more interesting than this book and which led me to this book. (I also vaguely remember a 1980's 60 Minutes segment on it). To me, the fascinating story is of how a handful of working-class, small-town veterans, one a disabled war hero, but none with a university education, saw this opportunity and created a successful business from nothing but an idea garnered from the off-duty scene in Vietnam. If someone wrote that story, it'd be a little like The Wire, but with down-home Midwestern white boys, full of drama and interesting, flawed characters on all sides.
(P.S., I'm not a pot-smoker myself. But I know a stupid law and wasted tax dollars when I see them.)
Displaying 1 of 1 review