Tag Archives: breaking bad

Notorious Outlaw Motorcycle Gang

Posted: January 17, 2020 at 4:00 pm

It was harder and harder to get the chemicals we needed to make crystal meth. Barrels of ephedrine, we used to be able to get them easy, and they were cheap. Something like $500. But the prices kept going up and up, and then there was a big drug bust, so the prices doubled again. The new cost of one big blue barrel of ephedrine was $60,000, if you could get one. This caused things to be a little dry for crystal meth users (me) and crystal meth cookers (also me). So I wasn’t surprised to hear Jamie discuss his plan at his house with Wrench and Mullet Mike.

The three men crowded around a scarred coffee table, covered in empty bottles, cigarette butts and baggies of various drugs.

“The girl needs to be rescued, Jamie,” said Mullet Mike.

“Yeah,” said Wrench. “The cook’s holding her in that house and she has her kids there too. That cocksucker cook’s gotta pay for that.” 

Jamie fired up a joint and let the smoke wrap around his face a bit before answering. “OK, let’s go get her. And since he’s cooking, and we’ll be there anyway, we’ll just take whatever else he has on hand.” The other two men laughed like Jamie made the best joke ever. “We’ll go tonight. And Bunny, you’re driving.”

I often drove for Jamie’s little capers. Not for what I might get out of it, but just because these guys were my friends. I had my own pickup truck, and I was the only one with a driver’s license. Most of the people I knew had criminal records and were careful because of warrants. They were secretive about where they went, what they were doing. Cars and licenses had too many records attached. And cars were a burden to look after; it was just easier to steal one, or ask me.

About 4am I cut the lights of my truck as I drove the last 100 feet to the meth cook’s house. It was a quiet residential neighbourhood with a primary school down the street and basketball nets on driveways. You would never guess there was a major drug operation going on in that house; it had a garden, and a wicker mailbox, and looked just like the others. Jamie, Wrench and Mullet Mike slipped on balaclavas. They openly carried guns.

“Bunny, you stay here.” Jamie waited for the other two guys to go around the back of the house and then Jamie let himself in the unlocked front door. Unlocked?

There was nothing to do in my truck while I waited. I didn’t understand what could be taking so long. There was no screaming, which was good for a change. I expected that after a few minutes they’d come out with the girl and maybe a couple of bags of crystal meth. I must have nodded off and woke with a start to realize they’d been in the house for a couple of hours. After all that time I still wasn’t worried about what might have happened to Jamie. Nothing ever happened to Jamie. He was the reason bad stuff happened to other criminals.

Jamie walked out the front door and came to the driver’s side window. He was sweating quite a bit. “Bunny, open up the tailgate and the cab. We gotta get this shit out of here.” Jamie returned to the house.

When he next came out, Jamie was struggling, carrying a 50 gallon barrel. Only Jamie could carry a 50 gallon barrel by himself. The other guys carried pails in each hand, something spilling out at each step. By the smell alone, I knew it was wet crystal meth. It had been cooked, but was still in liquid form.

“What the fuck? We’re taking all this?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Jamie. “And there’s more. I figure it’s about a million bucks worth.” Jamie went inside and retrieved three more barrels. When the fourth barrel and several buckets were loaded, Wrench came out of the house holding the hand of a 20-year-old girl. She wasn’t dragged out, but she didn’t look happy to be rescued either. She didn’t look like much of anything, with a vacant, haunted look on her face common with addicts.

“Are you all right? I heard we were supposed to come and get you,” I said. The girl had started crying, and was talking, but it was mostly nonsense. There was something in there about her kids being at her mother’s place, so that made me feel better. The girl looked really worried, and only then I figured out it was an inside job. The story about saving a trapped girl was fake. She was Wrench’s connection, and she must have told him the address and when to come when the cook wouldn’t be there. No wonder the door was unlocked. The girl just realized the consequences of crossing the cook’s boss. 

By the time I pulled away, the sun was up and it was 730 Monday morning. We had to drive the crystal meth to a safe house across town, Pete Woodson’s place, and we were in bumper to bumper rush hour traffic. Every time I came to a stop, some of the crystal meth sloshed onto the floor of the cab. The kind of chemicals you don’t want splashing in your truck: red phosphorus, ephedrine, iodine. The stink was overwhelming and I worried the other drivers could smell it from their cars too. It’s not like we were racing past each other; there were drivers right beside me, sitting still in traffic. If I got caught there, I was in big trouble with the cops. My car, my name, I’m done.

The girl looked like she had been up for days, which wasn’t unusual for a crystal meth addict. She continued to cry, so I said, “It’s OK, we’re going to a safe house, right? We’ll go somewhere where no one will know where we are.” 

As soon as we got to Pete’s place across town, and carried the crystal meth into the house through the garage door so no one would see, I asked Jamie for my cut.

“Sure, Bunny, sure,” Jamie said. “You can have this.” Jamie threw me a small package.

“An eight-ball? All you’re giving me is an eight-ball? I don’t want that. I want money.” An eight-ball is 3.5 grams of drugs, worth about 100 dollars.

“That’s what you’re getting,” said Jamie. “If you want money, you can just sell that.” I didn’t want to complain too much because there was lots of crystal meth in that house, and I knew that by hanging around, I could use it for free. Even though we had all been up all night, we immediately began putting the wet crystal meth in filters and drying it. We’d only know how much we had when it was all dry, which would take a couple of days.

No sooner was it dry, the owner of the stolen crystal meth discovered who had his product. Neither the owner nor the thief were happy to discover the identity of the other.

“The Notorious Outlaw Motorcycle Gang?” asked Jamie. “We stole a million bucks of meth from the Notorious Outlaw Motorcycle Gang?”

“Yeah,” said Pete. He had come to the house because the Notorious Outlaw Motorcycle Gang asked him to be their go-between with Jamie. Normally they’d just kill whoever crossed them, but since it was Jamie, they needed a different approach. “I can tell you they weren’t too pleased to hear it was you, either. You know they’re afraid of you.”

“They might be afraid, but they won’t let me just keep it. What a fuckin’ mess.” Jamie flopped onto the couch and crossed his motorcycle boots on the coffee table.

“I was talking to their guy, and he was shitting too, because it was you,” said Pete. “But he tried to act all brave like, and he said if you just give back the twenty keys you stole, they’ll let you off. They won’t kill you.”

“Twenty keys?” asked Jamie. “They want back their twenty keys?”

“Uh-huh. That’s what the cook said he had when you got there.”

Jaime let out a howl. “Those fuckin’ cooks. They all lie. He had thirty keys. He planned to sell ten on the side, I bet. He probably does that every batch. Sure, I’ll give them twenty keys back. I’ll just keep the other ten, and the boys will never fuckin’ know.”

Miss October 1981

Posted: October 1, 2018 at 9:10 pm

As you may know, my first book, The Next Trapeze, is still looking for a home. In the meantime, I’m helping my friend  Kelly Tough, Playboy’s Miss October 1981, write her memoir. It’s entitled Tough Enough,” for obvious reasons. Here’s a description I wrote for the back of Kelly’s book:

“Living in the Playboy Mansion was the least interesting chapter of Kelly Tough’s life.

Raised in a broken, dysfunctional family, Kelly suffered years of childhood sexual abuse. Homeless at 14, she survived on her looks, working in nightclubs until discovered by a Playboy photographer. She reached the pinnacle of sexual objectification as a Playmate of the Month, and thought this would satisfy her need for love and acceptance. Before she realized she would achieve neither, she slid into a decadent life of cocaine, B-list actors and group sex.

Once discarded by an industry searching for the next teenager to exploit, she had nothing to trade except her brief flirtation with fame. When her promotional opportunities dried up, Kelly supported her drug addiction for 25 years by manufacturing drugs for criminal organizations. During this time, Kelly lived inside a country and western song, looking for love in all the wrong places. Most men she dated beat her, cheated her, or gave her drugs. 

After an incident involving her near-death at the hands of a Hell’s Angel, Kelly went to rehab and withdrew from her gangster network. She relaunched her life on her own terms, without relying upon men to validate her worth, or drugs to dull her emotional pain.

Tough Enough is the intimate memoir of Kelly’s search for love and self-worth in a world of users, abusers, drugs and criminals. Other Playmates have written prurient exposés of life in the Playboy Mansion, step-by-step accounts of Hugh Hefner’s bedroom rituals. Tough Enough doesn’t shy away from Kelly’s carnal side; far from it. But the Mansion was merely one stop on Kelly’s journey from disposable sexual plaything to drug addict to crystal meth hustler, ending with her surprising redemption.

Part Playboy’s The Girls Next Door, part Breaking Bad, part A Million Little Pieces (but true!), Tough Enough is the ultimate story of survival.”