I Was a Hippie-Era Grass Smuggler
A hilarious and gripping new book traces a Berkeley student's efforts to avoid the federales
Few books about drugs are as fascinating as Tom Jenkins’ new memoir, The Next Run, which chronicles his marijuana smuggling efforts as a UC Berkeley college student in the late 1960s.
You might think: Marijuana smuggling, how passé! But Jenkins and his crew faced hard time for these border runs, usually from Mexico. There’s real tension because the reader never knows if they’re going to make it or not. Spoiler alert, they often don’t, usually because of their intoxicated stupidity rather than intrepid law enforcement tactics.
It’s a fun time capsule of the hippie era, with Jenkins’ associates cutting off their hair to look as “square” as possible, so as not to alert the federales. It’s also a love letter to pre-cartel era Mexico, when any enterprising lad or lass could pretend to be a Mazatlan surfer, bring across a few dozen bricks of grass (often soaked in sugar water), and make a small fortune.
Jenkins is a now an L.A.-based physician. He learned Spanish during his smuggling days, and continues to use it to speak with non-native patients. He wrote a first draft of this book decades ago after he quit running drugs, and has finally gotten around to publishing it. It’s not just one of the best books I’ve ever read about drug smuggling, it’s one of the best books about the ‘60s, period.
The below excerpt concerns one of Jenkins’ Colombia runs, after he’d graduated from packing bricks into jalopies and began chartering planes.
Excerpt: The Next Run, by Tom Jenkins
Bruce and I met the next day at Jocelyn’s apartment on Nob Hill in San Francisco. After serving coffee and tea, Jocelyn left the room and Bruce told me what he had in mind. He needed someone to manage the Colombian end of his operation and said I would be perfect because I spoke Spanish, knew what I was doing, and could be trusted without question.
The action, he said, was happening in the Guajira Peninsula. He showed me a map. The nearest major city was Barranquilla and a little further east was a resort town called Santa Marta. After that it was just small villages and jungle all the way to the Venezuelan border.
Bruce kept his plane in the Bahamas and would fly in low over the Guajira right at dusk, keeping an eye out for Colombian spotter planes. At a remote strip carved out of the jungle he would land to pick up the grass and refuel, then fly to an island in the Bahamas to pick up two assistants, and finally to a deserted atoll off the coast of Florida, where the assistants would drop the grass over water next to speedboats waiting in a leeside bay. In the morning the speedboats would enter Miami harbor and lose themselves along the inland waterways, which form a vast network that stretches all the way to North Carolina. About forty miles north of Miami, Bruce had rented a remote warehouse with a pier, where the grass would be offloaded.
Miami was making the news as a major entry point for grass, and I asked him if it wasn’t risky entering there. He said not at all, that there was so much pleasure boat traffic there, the authorities wouldn’t think of stopping someone without good reason. On a calm day, he said, the boats would come in with water-skiers behind them.
The hard part, he said, was the drop-off over water. He had lost a fair amount of grass working this out. In its current form, his method was to slow the plane down just short of stall-speed fifty feet over the water and make repeated figure eights, with the X of the figure eight located directly over the drop-off point. Each time he came up on the X, his assistants in the cabin would frantically shove bales of grass out. Bruce referred to these bale shovers affectionately as “dope pushers.”
The bales weighed sixty pounds and were made up by the Colombians using a Sears garbage compactor Bruce had brought them. Despite being wrapped several times with plastic and canvas, some of the bales were still breaking up when they hit the water. “Part of your job, should you decide to take it, will be to package the bales in such a way that they don’t break up.”
He went on to say he had done six Colombia runs now, each time adding refinements. With things well worked out he was in a position to do a run more than twice the size of his previous runs. He envisioned running a ton. To carry this amount he was graduating to a Beechcraft D-18, the same make of plane he and I had flown across the Atlantic, only this one was better equipped and had tricycle landing gear, which made it easier to land.
“That would be another part of your job. The D-18 will require a much longer strip —at least fifteen hundred meters. You would have to supervise construction of a new strip.”
“I don’t know anything about building a strip.”
“It doesn’t matter. All you have to do is make sure it’s long enough and flat enough. The Colombians will take care of the rest. They have access to bulldozers and all sorts of heavy equipment. They have to,” he grinned. “Every time a scammer crashes, they have to hurry and bulldoze over the plane before it attracts heat to the area.”
I noticed that Bruce was using the word “scammer” to refer to smugglers, which I found jarring at first, but it was the word everyone used in the Colombia-Florida trade and I eventually became used to it.
We discussed terms. Bruce offered me thirty percent of the net profit, an amount well into six digits assuming the run pulled through as planned. This was such a large amount that it had the paradoxical effect of making me think this was just another of Bruce’s pie-in-the-sky ideas. I began to think I shouldn’t do it. Bruce accused me of being a doubter.
“For Christ’s sake, chap, it’s not as if I haven’t already done a half dozen of these runs. Your problem is that you’ve spent too much time in Mexico. Forget everything you ever learned in Mexico. Colombians are not like Mexicans. I mean to say, you tell a Colombian to do x, y and z, and he does it. And bloody quick, too. It’s a whole different scene.”
I told Bruce I would accept ten percent less, but that I wanted $15,000 in advance before I was going to go down to Colombia and risk myself. He scoffed at the idea.
“Why not? You’re a millionaire. Fifteen thousand shouldn’t be that big a deal to you. Think of the money you’ll save if the run pulls through. You’ll be giving me ten percent less.”
“Chap, you’ve been in this business long enough to know nobody gives money up front. It’s not done that way.”
“I’ve been in this business long enough to know you can do it any way you want.”
We must have argued this point for a good half hour. In the end Bruce gave in though he seemed put out about it. Jocelyn came in to see how we were doing and Bruce shook his head. “I don’t know what’s gotten into Mr. Jenkins here. He thinks he’s Melvin fucking Belli.” As things turned out, by forcing Bruce to accept my terms I effectively talked myself out of a quarter million dollars.
Over the next four months Bruce and I pulled off three Colombia runs in a row. All three went smoothly. I flew to Barranquilla, took a bus out to the Guajira, and introduced myself to Bruce’s contacts. He had told me they were very competent and efficient, and he was right. They were also rather cool. In the entire four months we never even got on a tu form basis. Once, hiking through the jungle, we spotted an Army patrol ahead and one of the contacts grabbed me with him as he dove into the bushes. It was the only sign I had that they cared for my welfare.
Walking through the jungle was a sobering experience. Everywhere we went we saw pieces of wrecked aircraft: small scraps of fiberglass or a twisted strut dangling in the vines. It was daunting to think that each of these fragments probably represented the death of a smuggler. Bruce was right in that you never saw an entire plane; they had all been bulldozed under.
Packing the bales worked out well. Following Bruce’s suggestion, I had the Colombians wrap them in three layers of two-mil plastic, encircled with duct tape. I then added tape reinforced with fiberglass. I also had the Colombians order bigger canvas bags, figuring the looseness of the canvas would better absorb the impact of the water. We didn’t lose a single bale. Building a strip was also easy. The Colombians paid off two farmers for permission to tear down the fence between their lands and bulldoze their cornfields. I paced it off to make sure it was the right length and we spent several days clearing off rocks and roots.
The afternoon of the first run we built large fires at either end of the strip. Trash fires were common throughout the jungle and not likely to attract attention. We also lined the sides of the strip every twenty paces with tin cans filled with cow dung soaked in kerosene. As the light faded, we scanned the violet sky toward the northeast, straining our ears for distant engine sounds. Surrounding the strip on all sides was thick jungle, and the strange noises the birds and monkeys made were as exotic as any Hollywood soundtrack. In typical fashion Bruce pushed things to the limit, coming in when there was scarcely any light left. We heard him first, then spotted the black speck of his plane flying with no lights. A Colombian youth and I then grabbed a torch each and tore down the strip on either side like Greek runners, stooping every twenty paces to light the cans we had set out. Bruce said the effect from the air was to see the strip gradually light up before him like a Las Vegas casino sign.
This was the high point of these runs. I was pushing thirty while the Colombian youth was eighteen, yet I beat him to the end of the strip all three runs. On lighting the last of the cans I would toss my torch to the side, tear off into the jungle, and crouch behind a log. The thunder of the twin Pratt and Whitney engines coming in was so loud I could shout into it at the top of my lungs and not hear my own voice. As Bruce swooped in barely clearing the treetops, the very ground would tremble.
After the first run, Bruce and I met at a houseboat he kept at Paradise Island in the Bahamas. As he counted out a stack of hundreds for me, I said, “You know, if you want to go back to that deal you first offered me of thirty percent—”
Bruce cut me off with a hearty roar. “No, Mr. Jenkins, you’ll get your fifteen grand up front and your twenty percent and not a bloody penny more!”
Now I had to figure out how to get this cash back to the States. Bruce suggested I keep it in a Swiss bank instead. He said there was a branch right here on the island and coached me as to how to approach it.
“Forget your conception of an ordinary bank. I mean to say, there are no tellers and no lines. In fact, there isn’t even a sign outside; it’s just an unmarked suite on the second floor of an office building. You press a buzzer and they study you through a peephole before letting you in. They’re very conscious of appearance. Don’t go in there carrying your money in a paper bag. Carry it in a briefcase. And get yourself a coat and tie.” I did as he suggested and got myself my very own Swiss bank account.