Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer by Jay Carter Brown

nothing from me, and it will take months before you get me out of this house.” He then made good on his threat by spending what remained of his rent money to hire a lawyer to stall his eviction.
    In order to maintain unseizability, Irving used front men for everything. For the homes he owned. For the cars he drove. For the race horses he bought and gambled on. In order to protect his assets, he always had a “paper” drawn up by his civil lawyerwhich he would put away someplace safe until he needed it. Not too many people would challenge Irv over any of his possessions, regardless of whose name they were in, but the lawyer’s paper seemed to give him peace of mind.
    A true anarchist who lived by his own rules, Irv saved his greatest contempt for stoolies and rats. He was always talking about his disdain for this kind of person and made it clear that ratting was not something he would ever tolerate. His first bust for the armed robbery of a supermarket had come because his partner’s younger brother had ratted them out. It had cost Irving twelve years of his life. He often expressed regret that he had let his partner talk him out of killing the younger brother and he swore that he would never make that mistake again.
    Irving had learned the jewelry trade in jail, partly because his father was a successful jeweler and partly because it allowed him to have bartering power. Jewelers were the only convicts allowed to possess gold, which, like cigarettes, is another type of money in jail. Gold was even better than cigarettes, however, in that it could be used as a commodity on the inside as well as on the outside. What Irving did with his gold inside the pen was a mystery to me because he did not drink and he did not use drugs. He said he made jewelry with the gold to sell to the other inmates and I suspect that Irv came out of jail with a lot more money than he brought in.
    Irving usually drank diet soft drinks except for the odd time when he chose to celebrate with one solitary glass of planter’s punch. When I asked him why he did not loosen up more often he said he liked to keep his wits about him. I saw him stoned only once when he was taking some painkillers that I gave him for his bad back. He took his pill with a sip of rum and, under the influence of both codeine and alcohol, he was pleasant and charming. It was a side of him that Irv did not like other people to see.
    Unlike most career criminals, Irving had a wealthy background with maids and butlers and he had lived in big homes in the nicest part of town. He had been given everything he wanted growing up, but along with his family’s wealth came rules and authority. Parental authority. School authority. Legalauthority. None of which Irving was going to stand for, with his disdain for following rules and his stubborn nature. He ran away from the family home at a young age and began living on the streets using his muscle and his wits. His addiction to crime followed an addiction to gambling, which Irving thought he had under control at the time that he met me. He used to own racehorses paid for with loot from his bank robberies and he gambled much of his stolen money away at the track. His racehorse was called Lucky which was a misnomer if ever there was one. Irving’s racehorse never earned a dime in any of his races and the only person really betting on him was Irving.
    When Irving and I first went into business together, he called me to a meeting at his apartment and sat me down with a solemn look. We were alone in his tidy unostentatious fifth-floor dwelling. There was a couch that looked nice but was uncomfortable and a teak dining table and chairs that looked like they were seldom used. The apartment came with wall-to-wall carpet and a small kitchenette that looked like it was not very well set up for cooking, with hardly any counter space. At that meeting Irv was wearing a terrycloth bathrobe which was complimented by a pair of comfortable leather