Smokescreen

  • ISBN: 9781841953458
  • Author: Robert Sabbag
  • Description:
    When Allen Long's attempts to make a documentary on drug smuggling stalled for cash, smuggling seemed the obvious way to raise the necessary money. Millions of dollars later the film still hadn't been made; but Long's own life as a pioneering dope smuggler had played out like a Hollywood movie - the seat-of-the-pants rides in decrepit DC3's into the Colombian badlands, the near misses with law enforcement agencies, the fortunes earned and blown, the models, the partying, the Studio 54 years, being busted ...Written by Robert Sabbag, the undisputed master of the genre, Smokescreen is a hilarious piece of hair-raising reportage that will keep your pulse raising to the very last page. About the Author Robert Sabbag is the best-selling author of the cocaine classic Snowblind and the definitive book on the U.S. marshals, Too Tough to Die. His journalism appears in numerous magazines, among them Rolling Stone, to which he is a regular contributor. Witness Protection, based on his New York Times Magazine cover story, The Invisible Family, was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards, including Best Picture. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Excerpted from Smokescreen by Robert Sabbag. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1: Emerald Coast Allen Long descended from a short line of American aviators. He in effect was the first. One morning off the coast of South America, as his DC-3, with the break of dawn, violated Colombian airspace, there rose before him, as palpable as the peaks of the Sierra Nevada hovering on the horizon, the probability that he might be the last. “Red to white, red to white, I have bad news for you, sir.” Bad news in Allen Long’s business, of which aviation was only a part, was typically very bad news, and transmitted on an air-to-air frequency from a clandestine Colombian landing strip, the news had to be that much worse. “Sir, I am sorry, but you cannot land,” squawked the voice over the cockpit radio. “You must go back, you cannot land. Repeat, you must go back.” Long and his crew, who had been airborne for fifteen hours, stared stupefied at the source of this advisory, the three of them gazing at the instrument panel as if the radio itself were crazy. Long’s transmission was blunt. He keyed the microphone, and said: “We can’t go back.” Nor could they put the aircraft down in nearby Barranquilla or over the border in Venezuela. To say that the plane was not “cleared” for that was an understatement at best, but Long said it anyway, and short of announcing the choices they faced, that was about all he said. “We have to land and take on fuel, or we’re going to crash this - airplane.” As it happened, they did both. The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta rise out of the Caribbean in a sheer, almost vertical ascent to an altitude of 20,000 feet, the highest coastal range in the world, its perennial snowcaps dominating the tropical beaches of Colombia’s oldest city. From the fertile forests of Santa Marta the mountains run parallel to the shoreline and reach one hundred miles to the east. Here their north face terminates on a hot, semiarid peninsula, a flatland of hardscrabble and stunted vegetation that stretches to the northernmost point of the continent. This inhospitable region into which the mountains decline, settled by Indians who survived the Spanish conquest and home to their descendants today, subsists outside the mainstream of Colombian life, sparsely populated, underdeveloped, historically bereaved of - economic opportunity, and largely neglected by the federal government. Here in the northeastern desert is a Colombia untouched by the magical - realism evoked by its finest literature, unenriched by the supernatural, a Colombia drained of its mystery, where the meta- physical happens only at night. These are the Colombian badlands. This is the land beyond the Río Palomino. Independent, if not autonomous, unregulated, virtually lawless... This is the Guajira. This is where Allen Long conducted business in Colombia, trading on what the region’s inhabitants extol as its principal natural resource: that “the Guajira is ruled by the gun.” In the fall of 1976, that morning as his cargo plane came within view of the mountains, Allen Long’s business was booming. Up there, high in the foothills, waiting, lay the treasure of the Sierra Nevada. Up there, unburied, proliferating, was the Santa Marta Gold of legend. The finest marijuana in the world. And from there to the docks and the Mayday strips that were strung out along the Guajira, mule trains moved, by day, by night, in seemingly endless procession, under the weight of the find. The gold rush was underway. Back home, 30 million American heads luxuriated in notions of getting twisted on nothing less than prime Colombian, and for almost a year now Long and his partners had been delivering it to them by the ton. Among those partners were the pilots of the DC-3, Frank - Hatfield and Will McBride. Allen Long American Flyer was really just a state of mind, his rating as an aviator being—well, call it un- official. As architect of the criminal conspiracy and operational leader of the enterprise, Long was more than just along for the ride, but even in a mind as rich with fantasy as his, there abided no doubt that his taking control of the aircraft unsupervised was the functional equivalent of suicide… The precipitation merely suggested itself, a grace note, nothing more. Still, it was something new. Breaking clear of it almost instantly, the smugglers started searching for smoke. A billowing column of thick, black smoke would bring them in to the runway. Spiraling from the flames of a burning tire, the plume could be seen on a normal flight to rise 200 feet in the air. Long, this time, was the first to spot it, and this time it hit the ceiling at fifty. At Camarones, they made radio contact. Only then did the omens add up. “Sir, it has been raining here.” It had rained half the night. Torrentially. The downpour had ended only an hour before. Effectively, there was no runway…. The color drained from Long’s face. He turned to Hatfield, the man in whose hands their fortunes rested—their lives and their fortunes literally, their sacred honor only if you stretched it—for something in the way of instructions. Hatfield, five years older than his partners, at thirty-three the oldest of three would-be millionaires whose lives were now up for grabs, differed from them most significantly in that he was not a smuggler by vocation. Marijuana, as far as he was concerned, was just a really good reason to fly. A professional pilot, Hatfield had been recruited the year before, and in a matter of months he had demonstrated an aptitude for crime that most pilots could only aspire to. But Hatfield remained true to his roots. His instructions were in keeping with conventions established by aviators throughout history, and characteristically brief. He said: “Buckle up and hang on.” --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
  • Pages: 384
  • Format: Paperback
  • Genre: Biography
  • Rating: Not yet rated

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