Read Online The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez by Jimmy Breslin - Free Book Online
Authors: Jimmy Breslin
Tags: General, Social Science
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where it is cooked into a paste for shipping through Mexico to be sold in the United States, where the demand on Wall Street and in nightclubs and, in rock form, in crack cellars keeps the chain going. Cepas coming down the hill in an unbroken line, one sandal after the other, cepas coming down, cepas going back up the mountain, cepas in a chain draped on a hillside covered with brush. And far off, in Detroit and St. Louis and New York, the stockbrokers hold out cash for powder or, in poor neighborhoods, cash for crack.
Marijuana is smoked so widely in the United States that U.S. law enforcement believes that Mexicans must be wholly responsible. In New York, most pot smokers get their pot by an organized system of messengers, second in size only to the network delivering ad copy and publicity releases and large packages of letters and memos and legal briefs. The papers are carried to offices by bike messengers who are generally black. And then on the streets are these neat white young men pedaling away, carrying knapsacks full of white envelopes. The envelopes are filled with pot and are delivered to offices around Manhattan like take-out food.
The messengers are from offices that take the orders by phone. A woman answers usually, and the caller gives his code: “RF for number 7.” As he says this, he can hear the woman typing the number into a computer to verify that the caller is a legitimate customer and not a cop. You get on the list by having a friend call and then the woman gets your name and number and calls you back to make sure you’re not the police. After that, you are on the customer list.
Now, ordering pot by phone, you tell the woman what you want. One envelope. They deliver from 2 P.M . to 9 P.M . You have to call before five to get it delivered by nine. They do not deliver heroin or cocaine. That is another and smaller business.
The bicycle messenger is white because cops don’t stop whites. He wears a helmet and backpack and carries a driver’s license. He brings the envelope up to the reception room of a business, the customer comes out and hands him an envelope with the standard $60, and the messenger gives him the envelope of pot. The guy goes back to his work and the messenger goes out to his bike and wheels his way through heavy Manhattan traffic on his way to the next customer.
Marijuana is so widespread that its status seems to be close to that of booze during Prohibition. You can’t actually tell because pot smokers don’t talk much. Drinkers boast, “I had a thousand beers last night.” Pot smokers are home alone. But the reception rooms have people waiting, and the messengers are in the elevators, and somewhere they are bringing it in across the Mexican border.
O UT OF THE ATTEMPTED sealing of the Mexican border comes a most imaginative and effective drug and illegal immigrant enforcement, and it makes no difference. They find a tunnel of one hundred yards in length between Naco, Sonora, and Naco, Arizona, that has been in use by drug smugglers for twenty years. It was three feet wide and four feet high, and they found about $1.5 million in cash and 2,668 kilos of cocaine. By the time they were through counting the money there was another tunnel.
Stopping illegal immigrants and stopping drug peddlers are two separate and fairly hopeless occupations. In the 280 miles of desert leading to Tucson, authorities intercepted 387,406 people in 1998. The next year, there were 470,449 officially returned Mexicans from this area. The population of Tucson is 460,000. And some people feel a million Mexicans got through, but just enough did not, with 500 dead in the desert, to become an international scandal. Simultaneously, 25 percent of the nation’s crime caseload comes from the Mexican border. Federal public defender Sandra Pules sat at her desk one afternoon in early 2000 with case number 3,500. Thecourtrooms are filled with so many Mexicans, the overwhelming number having to do with illegal
Marijuana is smoked so widely in the United States that U.S. law enforcement believes that Mexicans must be wholly responsible. In New York, most pot smokers get their pot by an organized system of messengers, second in size only to the network delivering ad copy and publicity releases and large packages of letters and memos and legal briefs. The papers are carried to offices by bike messengers who are generally black. And then on the streets are these neat white young men pedaling away, carrying knapsacks full of white envelopes. The envelopes are filled with pot and are delivered to offices around Manhattan like take-out food.
The messengers are from offices that take the orders by phone. A woman answers usually, and the caller gives his code: “RF for number 7.” As he says this, he can hear the woman typing the number into a computer to verify that the caller is a legitimate customer and not a cop. You get on the list by having a friend call and then the woman gets your name and number and calls you back to make sure you’re not the police. After that, you are on the customer list.
Now, ordering pot by phone, you tell the woman what you want. One envelope. They deliver from 2 P.M . to 9 P.M . You have to call before five to get it delivered by nine. They do not deliver heroin or cocaine. That is another and smaller business.
The bicycle messenger is white because cops don’t stop whites. He wears a helmet and backpack and carries a driver’s license. He brings the envelope up to the reception room of a business, the customer comes out and hands him an envelope with the standard $60, and the messenger gives him the envelope of pot. The guy goes back to his work and the messenger goes out to his bike and wheels his way through heavy Manhattan traffic on his way to the next customer.
Marijuana is so widespread that its status seems to be close to that of booze during Prohibition. You can’t actually tell because pot smokers don’t talk much. Drinkers boast, “I had a thousand beers last night.” Pot smokers are home alone. But the reception rooms have people waiting, and the messengers are in the elevators, and somewhere they are bringing it in across the Mexican border.
O UT OF THE ATTEMPTED sealing of the Mexican border comes a most imaginative and effective drug and illegal immigrant enforcement, and it makes no difference. They find a tunnel of one hundred yards in length between Naco, Sonora, and Naco, Arizona, that has been in use by drug smugglers for twenty years. It was three feet wide and four feet high, and they found about $1.5 million in cash and 2,668 kilos of cocaine. By the time they were through counting the money there was another tunnel.
Stopping illegal immigrants and stopping drug peddlers are two separate and fairly hopeless occupations. In the 280 miles of desert leading to Tucson, authorities intercepted 387,406 people in 1998. The next year, there were 470,449 officially returned Mexicans from this area. The population of Tucson is 460,000. And some people feel a million Mexicans got through, but just enough did not, with 500 dead in the desert, to become an international scandal. Simultaneously, 25 percent of the nation’s crime caseload comes from the Mexican border. Federal public defender Sandra Pules sat at her desk one afternoon in early 2000 with case number 3,500. Thecourtrooms are filled with so many Mexicans, the overwhelming number having to do with illegal
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