Burton St. John III

The call comes in at 11 a.m., well after the rain stopped at this rural Atlanta scene. I give Bert the green light to head over. He’s my driver, a six-foot-four, corn-fed Iowa boy who can handle an 18-wheeler, and himself. He’s on his way to me in our stash house—a 3,000-square-foot country home controlled by my distributor Pete that’s uphill on the end of a curvy asphalt driveway. We have 30,000 pounds of choice reefer in his rig. At $250 a pound, that’s $7.5 million in 1978 dollars (that’s around $23 million today).

I start pacing, looking out the window. After 20 minutes, I’m jumping out of my skin. The cocaine I snorted earlier isn’t helping my anxiety. My long-time friend and partner, Kash, keeps looking at me. So do the bale humpers—the guys who will unload the truck. Scared, nervous brutes they are.

This is taking too long. I start sweating bullets. Something must have gone wrong.

I look out the window again, and this time I see Bert and his co-pilot running full speed up the driveway, legs churning. They are sucking wind, their eyes almost as wide as their mouths. They fly in the door. I’m hoping the cops aren’t close behind.

“The truck! The truck!” they say, yelling over each other. “It turned over!”

“Where?” Kash grunts out.

“On the gravel road just a little short of this driveway,” Bert says, chest heaving, white as a cadaver. “No damage though.”

Seven and a half million bucks worth of weed! There’s no way I’m allowing myself to lose that load. “Bert, get back to the truck,” I say, and turn to his co-pilot. “You too, and let Bert do the talking,” I said. Then, the head stash man and humper takes the floor and shouts, “Let’s go get it.” I grab him by the neck of his sweatshirt and tell him to shut the fuck up. “Kash and I will call the shots, you motherfucking bale humper!” I yell. Things are tense and I’m putting him on notice to not interfere.

Kash and I walk down the drive. As we approach the truck, we see it on its side, the wet road collapsed under its weight. There’s a small crowd of neighbors gathering and whispering. I told Kash to zip his Yankee lips. The load’s refrigerated, sealed, and contains “fish,” according to Bert’s paperwork. The neighbors are pure Georgia crackers and look confused. Luckily, I was born and raised in Memphis, hung out in a lot of Mississippi poolrooms, and sure as hell know how to talk Southern Redneck. I break it out now, telling everyone that Bert, a total stranger to me, came to use my phone. “He’s a good ol’ boy from the Midwest,” I say. “Let’s help him out!”

Just then the police show up, two cops in a squad car, lights flashing. One of the officers gets out and asks for the driver. Bert steps up, paperwork in hand as the cop wanders back and forth around the truck, stroking his chin. He takes Bert’s papers and driver’s license. “So, you got some fish there, do ya?” he asks Bert. The cop’s a cracker as well. It’s a scene, and Bert’s holding up like a champion, He is talking smoothly and looking them in the eye, just the likeable Midwest country boy I say he is.

Meanwhile, I hear some grumbling from the crowd. “Maybe we should open the ol’ boy up,” someone says. I turn in the direction of the voice, getting ready to waive off that stupid piece of advice, but my attention turns back to the cop because he asks Bert why he turned down this road. Bert says, “Sir, it was kind of an emergency.” He shuffles a bit, squirming. “I had to take a shit.”

The crowd laughs. The perfect lie. “Then I was looking for a spot to turn around and well...” his voice and his arms drop. Nerves of steel, that Bert.

The laughter is my opening. “How can we help him get going?” I say. “His fish is gonna spoil!”

“There’s Spiderman,” someone yells out. “He’s got two of them big cranes over thar’ at the Texaco just a couple of miles south on 37.”

I ask, “Bert, do you have five hundred bucks to get this Spiderman going ?”

“Yes.”

“Well, let’s go get ‘em.”

He climbs into the truck and comes back with the money. We jump into my car and, after just a few minutes, we see the cranes standing above the Texaco. We walk up to Spiderman who’s standing in the doorway, a tall, long-necked redneck with a protruding Adam’s apple and ball cap. I’m playing the helpful neighbor, describing where the semi lies on its side and telling him how this unlucky man, Bert, winds up near my driveway needing help. His 18-wheeler is on its side. Spiderman nods and listens. I show him the five hundred bucks. “Will this do?” I ask. He nods again and takes the money.

We get back to the overturned truck and, while we wait, we see a carnival: more neighbors, cops, flashing lights, more action than ever happens out here in the boondocks. This was my third time on the premises. The first time I looked it over to see if it could handle the job. Then I came back with Bert to see if he could easily navigate it. Then I came back this time to bring in the bale humpers and be ready for that truck. So, I knew it was a quiet spot. But not anymore.

After I sweat the minutes, Spiderman and his associate show up with his cranes, coming smoothly down the gravel road. My heart’s doing flips—could it be true? Are we pulling this off?

The cops don’t interfere; I’m ready to kiss them! The semi’s now upright and three feet off the ground with a crane at both ends. They place it right side up on the gravel road as the crowd disperses. The cops turn off their lights and move on. This Spiderman is now my new favorite superhero. To our relief and delight the truck, and all the money its load will bring, is a go. But now there’s too many people aware of it; we’ll have to unload it somewhere else. So, we send it back to the truck stop to comfortably await a new destination. I’m feeling giddy, and I’m sure Kash is too, but we show no emotion. We’re playing a role. I thank the neighbors for being so helpful and kind to the good ol’ boy from the Midwest who needed to take a shit.

We need a new stash house—and we find one in the country near Terre Haute, Indiana. My head stash man, Pete, has a family that owns a large parcel of farmland there. It has a huge concrete bottom barn with two power doors wide enough for the truck to pull in, with plenty of space for cars to drive in and load up also. Sure, it’s a 500-mile drive from Atlanta, but no matter. Kash and I and the bale humpers are on our way there, and the buyers follow to a Holiday Inn nearby.

Unloading 30,000 pounds of weed is hard work. We have 732 bales, each must be weighed, parceled out, and accounted for, making allowances for things like seed pockets (stray seeds that appear in the bales). Taking care of the numbers—that’s my job. I barely sleep for days, using coke, speed, and booze to keep going, and blue Valium to bring it all down.

At one point, I’m standing on top of this pile in the garage, throwing down bales. I feel like a king—I’m literally on top of the heap. It’s a huge stack of weed, which is to say a huge pile of money, but also a huge job. We need to load cars four at a time—and there are plenty of cars coming. I have the bale humpers break it all into two piles in order to load from both entries. This goes on for days until we finally clear it out, the last load going as a front to a salesman for his “just married” wedding present. He approaches us like he’s sneaking up to take a peek at a poker hand. I yell at his chicken face, “Boy get in and get your ass outta here!” He grabs his load and drives off. We finish and then head over to the Holiday Inn to count our money, divvying up several million bucks. Two suitcases alone have one million bucks total: $700K for the Columbian who sold us the load and $300K for our loading partner. Other bags have less. Still, the bags are so crammed with cash we have a hard time shuttling them out of the hotel. Not that this is all of the money we are anticipating. A lot of this weed is now out on consignment, and the money will be flowing in over the next month or so. I give $100K to the humpers as they clean up the stash house and I drive off with $300K. In the end, I pocket a cool million.