June 11, 2007
Once We Were Drug Runners
Written by Mikey Parker on June 11, 2007 3:39 PM
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Reunited!
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Now that I’m back with Abysmal Crucifix, I gotta admit I feel a little bad about writing an essay for my former buddy Tommy’s anti-Abysmal site. I was in a bad place at the time, so of course I’d say dickish and untrue things about Girth and my friends.
I’m over it now, and to make it up to Girth, I’ll tell you a 100% true story that is far more damning than anything on Tommy’s stupid defamation site. It goes like this…
When I met Tommy Janofsky, I was going to school in San Diego and playing in a metal band called Dust Storm. We needed a new drummer, and we found Tommy. His behavior was weird off the bat—always missing practice, or showing up late, or going off to return calls from a beeper at a pay phone six blocks away. After a year, I needed a roommate, and Tommy volunteered. It was good for awhile, but I started to notice he’d get beeped in the middle of the night and disappear for hours. I had to work two part-time jobs and go to classes, so that got old pretty quick. Tommy never seemed to work a steady job but always had cash. It took me awhile, but I finally figured out what he did for a living: he was a hit man.
The other members of Dust Storm, except Tommy, were also students, so the band pretty much broke up when we graduated. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I thought about going to L.A. because the metal scene there was getting pretty big, but Tommy convinced me to take a job with him in Miami. He told me I’d be the operations manager at some warehouse or something. I was pretty reluctant; I got out of Brooklyn and got my Bachelor’s to avoid working in a shitty warehouse for the rest of my life. Also, I thought Tommy was a hit man, and while I knew he wouldn’t lure me to Miami to kill me, I thought he might have another trick up his sleeve. But Tommy convinced me when he said I could make a lot of money, get in and get out in a few years, and then I could do whatever I wanted. Sounded legit to me.
I went with him. I couldn’t complain about the six-figure salary or the fact that the place ran like such a well-oiled machine that I didn’t have to do any real work. I mostly just signed bills of lading or warranty slips or whatever. I was loving the Miami life. Tommy and I got a bachelor pad together, and thanks to Tommy’s previous connections from living and working there, we got ourselves some club tail every single night.
A year went by with me living it up, making tons of money, getting all kind of great pussy, and then the other shoe dropped.
One afternoon, just before the second-to-third-shift switch, Tommy came into my office with a couple of huge guys in suits—juiced giants is what we called them back in the day. I remember this so clearly. I had the lights dim because, I’ll be honest, I was napping in my office. Most of the light came from the operations floor. My office had one big wall of windows looking out on it from three floors up, so I could see most of what was going on.
Tommy and the gorillas burst in, startling me awake, and they just took seats like nothing. I rubbed my eyes a little and was still groggy and all, and Tommy just looked me right in the eyes and said, “Here’s what you gotta know: this place you runnin’, we do some legit business as a front, but the majority of what comes in and out is cocaine and heroin from Nicaragua.”
I sat back, stunned. You could hear a pin drop. As they all shot glares at me, and I stared back with wonder, the only sound in the room was the light industrial rumble of the warehouse below, and the crunchy squeak of leather as I moved in my chair.
“I’m sorry, man,” Tommy continued, “this is how they do things. We got you by the balls, and right now we about to squeeze.”
“What?” I asked.
“Mikey, you’re in it up to your puckered asshole, whether you know it or not. This entire year you’ve just been Captain Paper Trail, signing bill of ladings and shit without having any idea what’s really coming in or out. If anyone—DEA, FBI, locals—investigated this shit, your ass would be the one on the line. For all intensive purposes, you’re running the show and funneling your dirty deeds into a shell account in the Caymans. They got paper on that, too.”
I licked my lips, taking a moment to consider what I had just been told and come up with the best possible response:
“What?”
“Now, these guys with me”—he nodded around to the juiced giants—“want to make you an offer. Fellas…”
One looked at the other and grunted; the other nodded, then squeezed Tommy’s shoulder. I could swear to this day I heard a pop.
“All right, all right,” Tommy whined, and the guy let go. To me Tommy said, “My partner got shot last week by—”
Another grunt from one of the big men.
Tommy gulped and said, “That don’t matter. He ain’t with us no more, so we gotta get a replacement. I put in the paperwork to transfer you. We run through Bilwi once a month. It’s dangerous, but your salary doubles for two days of work a month. I’d ask you if you’re in, but you already are. Like I said, I’m sorry. You gotta do this now.”
I shrugged, looking down at all the paperwork I had yet to sign. I knew I had to. Besides, isn’t it the American dream to make buckets of money for doing little more than sitting around watching People’s Court in your underwear?
At first, it seemed like a pretty simple gig. Tommy and I would get on a cigarette boat, navigate it toward the Nicaraguan coast, and a few miles offshore we’d wait. The code we used was to hang a yellow t-shirt off the end of the boat. By this time, Miami Vice had hit it so everyone knew all the stuff about flashlight codes and shit; hell, that goes all the way back to the movie To Have and Have Not, if not earlier. You had to be a little subtle with this stuff, so we’d just dip the shirt in the ocean and hang it off, like we took a swim or something and were drying it out.
After an hour or two (or three) of just sitting around, an ancient rusted frigate with a peeling Mexican flag painted on the side would blow past. Without stopping, two guys would toss the package into the water. Either Tommy or me would swim for it, together we’d haul it back on the boat, and head for shore. They’d put the package in an oversized cooler so when it was on the boat, we’d look like fishermen.
The most difficult part was avoiding police boats or, even worse, other cartels. Tommy had a sixth sense about things, though. He almost always knew when to cool it and break out the fishing rods, long before anything was visible.
We did this for several months before Tommy announced to me that our supplier, a guy only known as La Madera Verde, wanted to meet with us. He sent detailed instructions for the meet to a known drop point near Wynwood. Tommy took them and together, we followed them to the letter. We hit an empty part of the coast where a river joins up. From the river was a little tributary that went into thick jungle. We were to take that until it ended, then walk southwest for 16.3 miles. Sure enough, 16.3 miles and a whole lot of sweat and heavy breathing later, we came across a huge open clearing. This was in the dead of night. Tommy and I didn’t know what to do from there except wait. He wouldn’t build a fire or set up a real camp or nothing. We just sat there in the tall grass.
Just short of dawn, rustling in the grass woke up Tommy. Not for the first time that night, what with the animals and shit, but this sounded different—you could tell. Keys jingling, heavy human breathing, whatever. They surrounded us in the clearing, each carrying huge guns and sweating even though the sky was barely light. I’m sure my eyes bulged to the size and brilliance of agates, but everything after that was a blur. The men—there were at least a dozen—grabbed us. Two men flanked each of us, grabbing us by the arms and forcing us away. Two others blindfolded us, then fell in line in front of or behind us.
As we went further into the jungle, the sun came out, though it was hard to tell the difference between day and night under the canopy. Eventually we came on a cabin. I couldn’t tell you how long we walked, but by the time we got there my feet were blistered (and by the time we got back to the boat that night, they were bloodied). It was this small little shithole with a corrugated-aluminum ceiling and walls that barely qualified as wood. The men surrounding us shoved me and Tommy inside, then went outside to stand guard.
Tommy and I sat sprawled on a dirt floor, looking up at an ornate desk of rich mahogany. Behind the desk sat a man whose scarred face and scrappy facial hair haunt me to this day. I can only describe him as a portrait of death. La Madera Verde.
“Seí±or Janofsky,” he said, pronouncing the “j” the Spanish way, “Seí±or Parker. Welcome.” Though he had a friendly intonation, his voice had the quality of prehistoric sandpaper.
“La Madera,” Tommy said breathlessly, scrambling to get up on one knee and bow forward. He elbowed me hard and I did the same.
“You might be wondering why I asked you here today,” the ancient drug dealer said. He paused for effect, then added, “I have a proposition for you. An old score I need settled.”
He nodded vaguely to his right, and a lieutenant appeared from the shadows. He had an AK-47 slung around his shoulders and a fully stocked grenade belt hanging loosely around his waist. The lieutenant dropped what looked like an old-fashioned doctor bag. La Madera shoved it forward, and it fell on the floor, spilling out packs of hundreds.
“That,” La Madera gasped, “is two millions.”
“For what?” Tommy asked, incredulity audible in his voice.
“The warehouse,” La Madera said. “You rig it, make it to explode. Keep the money. Get out of Miami and never return. ¿No sobrevivientes, sí?”
I looked at Tommy, who was nodding. I looked back at the Madera, dumbfounded. He grinned at me.
“Se concede su deseo,” he chuckled. “Va aquí.”
Just like that, we were gone, blindfolded and escorted back to the clearing. It was dusk by the time we got there. Tommy and I sat for a little while catch our breath. The stars were out when we finally headed back to the boat. It had been stripped for parts, so our only option was to head into Bilwi with our bag full of money and rent a boat to go home.
Riding nights in a cigarette boat is something special, at least on the Gulf of Mexico. The air is crisp, the spray warm, and the world feels very much at peace. As Tommy steered the boat, he explained to me the rumors that La Madera Verde wanted to get out of the business for the sake of his American granddaughter, and we were the only men alive who knew this to be true (except for the lieutenant, I guess; probably whoever started the rumor, too). Destroying the warehouse would take out a sizable chunk of La Madera’s Miami loose ends. We imagined some other folks at the other major bases of operation (La Jolla, Plano, Detroit, Philly) had received similar instructions.
He asked me what I planned to do with my million. I told him I was going to L.A. to be a rock star. Tommy nodded and said he’d do the same.
Now, for my own sake here, I did not have anything to do with the mysterious 1992 explosion of a huge warehouse on the bay. Tommy Janofsky planned it all and paid a few guys to carry it out while he and I were well past Texas. I don’t know what he did, and I certainly wasn’t around when he used a very specific row of pallets containing ammonium nitrate powder to trigger an explosion that appeared accidental.
The downside is, I spent my entire million financing Abysmal Crucifix’s tours from 1995-1998. Lot of good that did me.
-Mikey
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