Book of the Day: A tale of high adventure

Robert Sabbag, Loaded: A Misadventure on the Marijuana Trail (Little, Brown & Co., original title, stated 1st ed., 1st printing, 2002). ISBN 0-316-76511-2. Hardcover, unclipped dust jacket, 342 pp., very good condition. Rare. HBB price: $40.

Just as state-sponsored gambling killed off the romantic tales of Damon Runyon's numbers runners, so the new vogue for legalized pot makes books like Sebbag’s much sought-for entries in the “nostaljuana” market for stories of the Cheech & Chong era.

A Harvard-educated journalist, Sebbag’s first book, Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade (1977), chronicled the life of the drug smuggler Charles Forsman, and was hailed as one of the best drug trade books ever. A best seller, it was reissued in 1999 as an artwork: a limited edition designed by British artist Damien Hirst. Bound in mirrored glass, numbered and signed by both author and artist, each book contains a rolled hundred-dollar bill whose U.S. Treasury serial number corresponds to the series number of the book. A copy of the museum-quality piece was presented personally- if inexplicably- to Queen Elizabeth by the book’s publisher, Jamie Byng of Canongate Books.

After a book about the US Marshals Service, and another about a plane crash he survived, and many articles on law enforcement and the drug trade for the likes of Rolling Stone and The New York Times, Sebbag returned to smuggling with Loaded (since retitled Smokescreen: A True Adventure), which proved a transatlantic bestseller.

Writing in The Guardian, Peter Preston lauded author and book:

Sabbag, a very superior magazine journalist, specialises in rollicking tales of drug-trafficking days. Snowblind was an exuberant chronicling of early coke; Smokescreen seeks to turn the same trick for pot. Long ago, in the flower-empowered Seventies, a hunky, jaw-flexing film-maker from Richmond, Virginia, called Allen Long needs weed to feed his loaded habit. Nothing ventured, nobody stoned. Off he goes to Mexico to do a little buying and attempt a little smuggling; then he and his mates buy an old DC3 - assembled bit by bit to fool the feds - and begin shipping Santa Marta Gold from Colombia in bulk. Soon he's the king of the hill (or monarch of the marijuana mountain), running boats and planes heaving with hash. In one 18-month period, he personally nets $8 million. 

Can this be a scenario modern Hollywood could love? Only - even today - if it's an old-fashioned morality tale, just like Blow. Thus, as the Seventies turn into the Eighties, hard-faced mobsters move in; Cuban killers and Colombian cartels take over; Long becomes a relic of supposedly kinder, gentler times left to rue the way his sweet revolution turned to ashes. He's essentially an innocent romantic (Sabbag seems to say): he and his ripely berserk chums were lovable buccaneers before big business took over. They've served their time - some of it unconscionably long in an era of Blunkett quasi-legalisation. Now they're history - and we can giggle and reminisce along with them. Nostalgia is one drug that no one bans. 

Fair enough. Sabbag has a wonderful ear for dialogue and Long has some wonderfully outlandish yarns to spin. Most of his characters - El Coyote, with his incredible shrinking suit; Miguel, the young Mr Big; Marie and Cherie, Long's fragrant squeezes - are shrewdly, hilariously sketched. You may not have been there for the high jinks and low cunning - but at least you know what it was like. 

What is perhaps rather less hilarious, however, is the background of knowledge Sabbag brings to his task. It wasn't only marijuana that was a cargo problem by boat or plane; the money to pay for it was unblessedly bulky, too. A quarter of a million dollars in $100 bills fits neatly into 50 envelopes holding $5,000 apiece. Five million dollars makes a stack twenty feet high and weighs 110 lbs. And one weighty matter, with added fascination, leads to another. 

Sabbag is more than an entertainer (though he is extremely entertaining). There's a jolting theme here beneath the hippy fluff. Allen Long and the pioneers were amateurs, unsmooth operators who learnt their trade the scatty way and perished when the professionals took hold. But who were these pros? They were men like Jimmy Alvarez - 'heart as cold as a New York bank lobby' - there at the Bay of Pigs and protected henceforth by the CIA. They were the Cuban gangs who took over Miami while Uncle Sam nodded complaisantly. They were double or triple agents playing every end against the middle. 

Allen Long, perhaps, isn't quite the hero Sabbag would like to make him: more a creepy Leonardo DiCaprio than Cary Grant. Some of his Faustian dilemmas, too, are overdone. ('If it is OK to sell marijuana, is it not OK to sell cocaine? If it is OK to carry dope in your car, is it OK to carry a gun?') There is, though, a core of seriousness here among the sniggers and the snorts. Drug cultures don't just happen. They have to be malevolently contrived. And who's that setting out now in a jeep for deepest 'liberated' Afghanistan? Not Long; he's gone to retirement and a 'white picket fence'. But there are always heirs, always successors, in the war of endless retreats and shattered illusions.

_________________

Henry Bemis Books is one man’s attempt to bring more diversity and quality to a Charlotte-Mecklenburg market of devoted readers starved for choices. Our website is at www.henrybemisbookseller.blogspot.com.  Henry Bemis Books is also happy to entertain reasonable offers on items in inventory; for pricing on this or others items, kindly private message us. Shipping is always free; local buyers are welcome to drop by and pick up their purchases at our location off Peachtree Road in Northwest Charlotte if they like. #Robert Sabbag #Loaded #Marijuana #Book of the Day #RareBooks #HenryBemisBooks #Charlotte

What’s your favorite social media outlet?

We’re blogging at www.henrybemisbookseller.blogspot.com. We tweet as Henry Bemis Books.  Have you liked us on Facebook yet? Henry Bemis Books there too. And Google+, too!