victimless
crime
faction
MICK PACHOLLI
Copyright May 2001
CHAPTER 1
E and I had been working together for about five months.
You wouldn't call it a partnership - more co-operative entrepreneurs - although, if you had asked either of us what we did, the answer would be that we provide a public service, not unlike s.p. bookmaking or sly grog, over-coming unworkable statutes. A thankless job but someone was going to do it...
We complemented each other. E was a green man, whereas my contacts mainly provided a smorgasbord of imports - all types of hash, hash oil, Buddha sticks and a variety of South American and African combustibles. We did a lot of product swapping providing our customers a varied selection of illicit, euphoric delights.
The local grass was rarely great, no-one really knew what a mature female hooch plant looked like in the mid-seventies, although the Greeks produced some amazing seedless dope (sinse was unheard of), but the Italians - neither knew nor did they give a shit. Theirs was usually seeded, stalky, leafy, brittle-dry or a mixture of the aforementioned, it had never interested me.
But...It appeared Customs was doing a great job in the Autumn of '76 and very little quality pot was reaching our shores, and E asked if I could raise the cash to do a run to Adelaide with him, to take half each of a hundred pounds of heads that the wogs reckon was pretty shit-hot.
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E reckons that if I wanted in on this mid-west connection of his we would be using my car and I'd be bringing the shit back on my own. I was not to talk business, he'd have it under control - bit of a big-head ol' E, but it was his trip so that was cool.
Trepidation crept into my head. I wasn't the paranoid type, but the idea of driving four hundred odd miles with one hundred elbows in the boot of my recently acquired Euro mobile took a bit of mind-wrap. After sussing out a few of the dealers I worked with, the money was no problem, Melbourne had never been so dry, the phone wouldn't stop ringing, people were screaming for a choof - so I thought .....Fuck it, let's go!
The next two days were spent chasing people around, picking up cash. Pounds were only one hundred and fifty dollars a piece, so selling at two hundred, I only had to sell forty up front to pick up the bag price, a bit of pocket money for the trip, and ten pounds for myself to chop up for a couple of bag dealers I knew - and lots of free choof - the prime directive!
E's mate in Adelaide had lined everything up for Thursday night. My new girl, Vivien, stayed the night before to help me sort and count the money, eat food, drink wine and share body fluids. She was my 'older woman', by about seven years. We'd met through friends in a band I was managing, Flash Annie and the Floyd Boys.
She was loud and pushy but gravity hadn't played havoc with her yet, plus she was smart and a rampant sex fiend - bikie-chic, biker chick. Turned out to be mad as a cut snake down the line - but that's another tale.
We were up at seven-thirty. Viv knocked up a bit of brekkie and coffee which I scoffed. I arranged to drop in on her on the way back from the run to celebrate a success in the usual manner - sex, drugs and champagne. She said she would try to organize a surprise for my return.
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My mustard coloured Renault 12 was relatively non-descipt. I figured if I stayed within the road rules there would be enough idiots on the road to attract the filth's attention. I made a call to E before leaving and he was ready to go as soon as I arrived at his gate. Pumped, thoughts both positive and negative racing around my head, using my skull as a velodrome, we were off. After our initial animated greetings E nestled his head in between the door window and the highback seat and excused himself as he slipped into unconciousness.
By the time we'd hit the outskirts of Melbourne I was in cruise mode. A Roy Buchanan tape,'That's What I Am Here For' , was the first one to come to hand as I groped in the glove-box and provided a very apt musical background - I miss that man. Into the third song E was back with us, I had cranked it up to about eight and the windows were vibrating. He didn't look too happy so I reached into my shirt pocket and chucked him a big lump of Afghani hash,some papers and a packet of Albany, motioning with my left fingers for him to roll a joint. That put a smile on his dial. Poking a hole in the air with his left digit finger, and giving me a look a drunken magician would give as he prepared to pull his rabbit, he reached behind me into his bag and extracted a bottle of tequila, then back again for a lemon and a packet of salt.
We weren't overly concerned about the police. There was no drink/drive hysteria and the local country coppers along the highway weren't looking for, or expecting to find car loads of pot. E rolled a three paper joint, lit it and simultaneously rolled down his window and turned the music down. Handing me the number, E asked for my knife, which I removed from it's scabard, ever present on my belt, and passed it over - it was more a fashion statement than a weapon, and he proceeded to chop the lemon into sixths.
Ah, the old tequila ritual - lick, sip, suck! E opened the bottle, flipped the lid over between his left thumb and digit, poured a shot,
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wedged the bottle in his crotch, then grabbing the salt, poured a little mound into the webbing of same, quickly licking, sculling, wincing and rapidly sucking the lemon to kill the taste of the tequila. He shuddered,eyes watering and asked if I would like to partake.
Three shots, two joints and four hours later we hit Bordertown. As we cruised in for a petrol stop E was explaining how he'd spoken to his mate last night, and things weren't going down until tomorrow afternoon. He must have been biding his time to drop this one on me, I'd made arrangements back in Melbourne with the guys that fronted up with the money to catch up with them.
As I started to grumble I noticed a public phone on the roadside, just past the garage. I threw him the keys and asked him to fill her up while I rang homebase. A Kiwi mate of mine, Greg, shared the house, so I gave him a ring to fill him in on the changed circumstances. He'd be able to placate the boys for me. I tried Viv - no answer - then I remembered that she would be at work, I'd have to try her later. As I strolled back to the car I realised that we were past the half way point.....I chilled - so far the journey had been a hoot. E was looking pretty sheepish as I approached the car, he'd paid the bill - cool - so I let him off the hook.
Apparently E's mate, Danny, had assured us of a bed and a feed. His wife and kid were away for the night so we'd be able to relax and have a few pipes. Now that time constraints had relaxed we slipped back into convivial conversation, then, bang, the munchies hit, my arsehole felt like it was racing up my throat to eat my tongue! E ageed it was time for a feed, so we pulled up outside the first pub we came across, a quarter of a mile down the road. A large plate of dusky flathead in beer batter, with chips and salad - it
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barely hit the sides going down, but certainly did the job. .............MTC
1 comments:
SOME MEMORIES FROM THE SAME PERIOD
I knew there was something suss about them, but nothing prepared me for what came out of the smaller one’s mouth. They knew everything about me and my business, and followed it up with the offer you can’t refuse.
“Well what if I just keep goin’ the way I am? I replied:
“You’ll end up in the river with ya mate Tony then, won’t ya.”
That got me.
The dope trade in Brisbane in the early 70’s was generally a fairly gentlemanly pastime, with an aura of hippy gentility and crusading zeal. Trouble was there if you looked for it, but we didn’t see it that way (or chose not to). The disappearance of Tony a year before had sent dark rumours flooding through the scene like octopus ink. I knew he’d spent six months living in a cave on Stradbroke Island, surfing and tending some hidden crop, which he’d harvested and brought back to sell, and then had just vanished. Even his sister, who I knew quite well from school, (not well enough for my liking, biblically speaking, but you can’t win ‘em all) didn’t know what had happened, but after a while word got about that he’d been shot and disposed of in the bay somewhere. We assumed it was bikies or “real” crims, but now these guys were telling me in no uncertain terms who had done it and why.
They’d announced themselves as, and carried themselves like, cops: and were as bold as brass. They ran the dope on the south side, so stop fucking around: get on the team or get a bullet. They even knew the name of my supplier down near Mullumbimby and how much I paid per elbow.
The rainbow aura of pot culture melted away as I took on board what they were saying, and my choices were stark.
I said I’d think about it.
I got into the drug trade like most 14 year olds…selling 5-buck matchboxes at school so I could buy Black Sabbath records new instead of waiting for second hand copies to turn up. I also worked a milk run every Friday night, but we were poor, and at that age you want everything, and can’t see why some other bastard has it all and does fuck all. So I’d ride me pushy out to the paddocks at Carina, pick Magic Mushrooms, swap them for pot with older guys, then flog it at school. Nice earner too.
By the time I got a job in the Public service I’d really developed things.
Back in the Bakelite days there were no faxes or e-mails, and possibly not even photocopiers if I recall correctly. We had roneo machines which were cranked by hand and used huge amounts of viscous ink that indelibly marked one’s polyester shirt with one careless swipe, so transmission of written information was practically still unchanged since Dickens. Thus was employed a small army of couriers, usually young clerks on their way up such as myself, or older pisspots and no-hopers stalled on the rungs of achievement. They spent the whole day collating inter-departmental memos, documents to be signed and returned, reports, circulars, gazettes, notifications, requests for information, official forms, and countless other manifestations of bureaucracy, then carried it in bags building to building from one end of the town to the other.
They also dawdled in bookshops, nicked off to the pictures, sat pondering things in parks, and generally wandered about as the main conduits of this huge documentary interface with total disregard for urgency, efficiency, or any other consideration…it was a fabulous job for the right type of bloke: and I’d found one. He was a total hippy, who hid his love beads behind a loosened tie and Zapata moustache, and like all true love–and-peaceniks, was a brown-rice capitalist at heart.
So was it arranged: I had another associate, a Greek/Russian lunatic over in the Social Security building who had a locker full of my pre-packed bags of heads. Dead on the Ounce mate… 30 bux. My courier would make my office at the Health Department the first stop on his rounds before he completed his twice-daily circum-perambulation of the city, and I would have the list of customers and departments all typed out.
Bill over in the Defence building 3rd floor …2 ounces
Jim in the Reserve Bank 2nd floor…. 1 ounce.
Bruce at Tax 7th floor..3 bags
And so on.
The money would be delivered in regulation brown envelopes, as was the product, me mad mate and the hippy were paid in kind, and all that lovely folding, (as well as the occasional favours of cash strapped office girls) went to my good self in recognition of my organisational skills.
I was making a grand a week when my wage was barely 150.
It was a perfect system…if you leave human frailty and greed out of the question.
They started taxing my bags: like most underlings in a capitalist organisation, they fell victim to envy and greed, and conspired to fuck the Golden Goose.
I was proud of my reputation as an honourable trader, and was deeply hurt by their lack of vision, but should have remembered the old rule: everyone hates a dealer, and all your friends are bought.
Greater events on life’s stage took a hand, however, and everything was soon in turmoil: when Whitlam was thrown out I led the workers in my building on a march down to join the rest of the masses in the city square. This irretrievably blotted my copybook with the big-wigs, and I was consigned to the basement in the great purge that followed the Fraser victory a month later.
My finely tuned system no longer worked. Life as a tea-boy without his own desk didn’t really sit well with a man in my social position, so I chucked in the job and became a professional criminal…and good fun it was too. Tequila and blondes was now my daily fare as I cruised down to the Gold Coast (on weekdays no less) to eat mushies and fuck other bloke’s girlfriends on the beach while they were at work in the hot sun.
After a while my conspicuous lifestyle became a bit wide for comfort, so I decided I needed a front, and a well-paid one. There was only one source of real money around our way: the meatworks. Blokes could pull down 80 bucks a day when even brickies only got 60. It had been the standard way to earn money in the school holidays, and my first job after being arseholed from school at 15. I knew the joint well, so I lined up at the gate at dawn, just like the old days, and got straight onto the beef floor.
This was the real thing: blood, shit, tattoos, stabbings, striped tans, and general cacophony and mayhem.
I loved being back, had the dacca flowing in no time, and took over the trade at that end of the building. My ethical standards and quality of product ensured that I was immediately very well connected, so I never had to worry about aggravation from any of the lower orders and violent hooligans that abounded. I was no namby-pamby playboy in need of protection at the piss-troughs however. I was a bit of a knuckleman if called upon, and had been around at least once.
The year before, a rather nasty bikie war had broken out between the Rebels and the Uhlans. Several shootings and unexplained disappearances occurred, and the town was tense. I knew members of both gangs through various dealings, and as it transpired, one mob had all the pot, and the other all the trips and powdered goodies. They couldn’t talk or trust each other, so I became a sort of honorary transactional broker between the gangs. Sharp-end stuff, but I was only 19 and up for derring-do. This did my social standing no harm, and actually saved my life on one occasion when a psychotic lone bikie with at least three murders to his credit caught me one night at a clubhouse and decided it was time to pay for some insult I’d proffered during a fight we had when we knew each other at high school. He’d blown out to about 300 pounds since our last encounter, and had all his teeth filed to points like a fucking white-pointer with which he tore pieces off his opponent’s faces.
The threat was real, but he was warned off by the gang’s leader, and I never saw him again, so I owe Big Al for that one, even though I can’t pay in this world due to his demise by gunshot not long after.
I stayed away from guns if at all possible: keep it cool was my motto.
I saw pot as a positive force in society, and it’s illegality as social engineering by reactionary capitalism. Which doesn’t mean I gave it away…I’d met too many parasites and bludgers wearing tie-dyed rags..no, fuck that …my risk=my money, until the Age of Aquarius actually got here and we were all rootin’ in the streets……...until then…pay up pal.
This neat little existence continued upon its hedonistic way for another year or so until the fateful night when those two shifty bastards knocked on the door of my flash new apartment. I wouldn’t let ‘em in to walk on the new cream carpet, but they stained my whole life anyway.
The mask was off in Bjelke’s Christian dictatorship.
The cops ran it, and “justice” came out of the barrel of a 38 if you didn’t like it.
The hypocrisy and sheer brazenness of it all was staggering, but I copped it sweet: I’d had me run, and now the piper was calling. I moved to a new house quick smart, but all my stock got ripped off there, and to cut a long story short: when the money runs out, the women aren’t far behind. I soon had no dope no money no girl no mates and nowhere to live.
I went around to me old man and said I wanted to leave town.
He could probably see that I had to.
He bet me 50 bux I didn’t have the guts.
I was back with me swag that arvo.
I took the 50.
I hit the road.
Never been back.
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