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Authors: Iain Parke
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absolutely in a striker , and then a full patch , it was security and secrecy . A nd yet , here was Scampi blabbing about his business in front of me , a non-member. We all knew it was the meth talking, but it was still Scampi’s mouth that was running off. I didn’t give much for his chances in the long term if he kept that up.
I studiously didn’t want to hear . What you quickly learnt as a crime journalist visiting the less salubrious type of watering holes was to be scrupulous about not listening to other people ’s conversations that didn’t concern you. What you didn’t overhear, didn’t make you a potentially inconvenient witness.
But by the time we’d had the full Scampi guided tour, there wasn’t much scope not to know anything about what he had going on.
*
‘I’ve set it all up sweet, it’s just like a real factory. I’ve got my prep in the rooms at the front,’ he said , waving into what had obviously been the lounge. Now trestle benches ran alongside each wall.
Delia had nothing on cooking with Scampi.
Like with all good cooks Scampi was fanatical about sourcing only the best quality ingredients and controlling as much of the process as possible himself.
Whether you were hot cooking or cold cooking, the basic ingredients of the red white and blue method were the same, and with meth the first tricky part was always getting hold of your main active constituent, pseudoephedrine or pseudo for short. Either you had to have a contact somewhere overseas where they could get it in industrial quantities , the way they used to be able to in Oz, and then smuggle it in to you, or you had to extract it from over the counter decongestants which you then had to bulk buy.
Seeing as there weren’t any catering sized cans of Australian peaches lying around it didn’t surprise me to see that Scampi must have laid claim to the worst sinuses in the world. Stacked next to a row of five gallon drums of solvents in the corner were a shed load of Sudafed boxes.
Scampi was really proud of this part of his process because he’d really got it sussed.
Once h e’d stripped the dye and wax from the pills with ethanol and ground them into powder, he needed to shake them , mixed in with methanol for about twenty minutes. But this was hard work for any significant quantities, so Scampi’s solution had been to invest in one of those industrial shakers, the sort of thing they use for mixing up paint to your required colour in a DIY store.
When they were left to settle out, the pseudo floated to the top and the other crap s a nk to the bottom so Scampi could siphon the methanol/pseudo liquid off the top, filtering it as he went.
The next part of the fun of meth cooking was driving the alcohol off until he was left with a white powder. It was a sensitive process, too much heat and it would turn yellow , telling you you’d burnt it. Some cooks used a hairdryer for fine control. Scampi , it seemed , preferred an oven. But whatever a cook used, the fumes, if they didn’t catch fire, made your eyes water and hacked at the back of your throat, so I could understand why Scampi had a couple of respirator masks hanging from a hook on the wall.
In the other room across the hallway Scampi made his blue ; his iodine crystals, and his red ; his phosphorus catalyst.
The room was set up much like the first one, with trestle tables arranged around the walls. Only on this side of the house he had rows of large plastic drinks bottles for the iodine and supplies of tincture, hydrogen peroxide and hydrochloric acid, as well as a small chest freezer on the floor with a little kitchen timer on the side for producing the gooey dark black purple mess of the iodine crystals he was looking for.
As with most of the rest of the process, getting the red phosphorus was a case of solvents a go-go as the approved Scampi method involved cutting the striking strips off books of matches, soaking them in a bath of acetone to add a pear drops scent to
I studiously didn’t want to hear . What you quickly learnt as a crime journalist visiting the less salubrious type of watering holes was to be scrupulous about not listening to other people ’s conversations that didn’t concern you. What you didn’t overhear, didn’t make you a potentially inconvenient witness.
But by the time we’d had the full Scampi guided tour, there wasn’t much scope not to know anything about what he had going on.
*
‘I’ve set it all up sweet, it’s just like a real factory. I’ve got my prep in the rooms at the front,’ he said , waving into what had obviously been the lounge. Now trestle benches ran alongside each wall.
Delia had nothing on cooking with Scampi.
Like with all good cooks Scampi was fanatical about sourcing only the best quality ingredients and controlling as much of the process as possible himself.
Whether you were hot cooking or cold cooking, the basic ingredients of the red white and blue method were the same, and with meth the first tricky part was always getting hold of your main active constituent, pseudoephedrine or pseudo for short. Either you had to have a contact somewhere overseas where they could get it in industrial quantities , the way they used to be able to in Oz, and then smuggle it in to you, or you had to extract it from over the counter decongestants which you then had to bulk buy.
Seeing as there weren’t any catering sized cans of Australian peaches lying around it didn’t surprise me to see that Scampi must have laid claim to the worst sinuses in the world. Stacked next to a row of five gallon drums of solvents in the corner were a shed load of Sudafed boxes.
Scampi was really proud of this part of his process because he’d really got it sussed.
Once h e’d stripped the dye and wax from the pills with ethanol and ground them into powder, he needed to shake them , mixed in with methanol for about twenty minutes. But this was hard work for any significant quantities, so Scampi’s solution had been to invest in one of those industrial shakers, the sort of thing they use for mixing up paint to your required colour in a DIY store.
When they were left to settle out, the pseudo floated to the top and the other crap s a nk to the bottom so Scampi could siphon the methanol/pseudo liquid off the top, filtering it as he went.
The next part of the fun of meth cooking was driving the alcohol off until he was left with a white powder. It was a sensitive process, too much heat and it would turn yellow , telling you you’d burnt it. Some cooks used a hairdryer for fine control. Scampi , it seemed , preferred an oven. But whatever a cook used, the fumes, if they didn’t catch fire, made your eyes water and hacked at the back of your throat, so I could understand why Scampi had a couple of respirator masks hanging from a hook on the wall.
In the other room across the hallway Scampi made his blue ; his iodine crystals, and his red ; his phosphorus catalyst.
The room was set up much like the first one, with trestle tables arranged around the walls. Only on this side of the house he had rows of large plastic drinks bottles for the iodine and supplies of tincture, hydrogen peroxide and hydrochloric acid, as well as a small chest freezer on the floor with a little kitchen timer on the side for producing the gooey dark black purple mess of the iodine crystals he was looking for.
As with most of the rest of the process, getting the red phosphorus was a case of solvents a go-go as the approved Scampi method involved cutting the striking strips off books of matches, soaking them in a bath of acetone to add a pear drops scent to
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