Chapter 1
Minding Someone Else’s Business
Dewey Lynne here. What’s up? I hope that things are going well for all you folks out there in Readerville. I’m tempted to say “good morning,” as I have sat down to writing a few minutes before ten a.m. but you may not be reading in the morning, so I’ll just say “good day.” That seems more appropriate.
Anyhow, I need to tell you a little about the business that ended up being the money-maker behind my “empire,” if you will, before I dive right into the action of what led to me being arrested by an Arkansas State Trooper somewhere on I-55 north of Blytheville for transporting illegal substances across state lines with the intent to deliver. This would have been in the middle of the 1980’s shortly after I graduated from high school, and what I wrote above is the entirety of the crimes for which I went to prison. Like most people who have been charged with committing crimes and have been incarcerated for those charges, I will tell you in utter truth that of that particular criminal activity mentioned above, I am completely and totally innocent. Unlike most people detained by the justice system, I really was and always will be innocent of those charges, and that is why what I am telling you is so important. It’ll give you a good sense of the injustices of society, and some idea of how the justice and penal systems of America are ineffective exercises in futility. I have never served a minute of time for all the bad stuff that I have actually done, not one minute--and that bad stuff is probably a whole lot worse than what you are thinking--and I served three years for something that I never did but was willing to say that I did in a blatant and outright lie. Do you sense how stupid it is that I can make such a statement as that and it be true? Whatcha gonna do?
Anyhow, the ridiculousness of my serving time for what I did not do and not serving time for what I did do that was much worse is the central point of the story that I’m getting to. First, though, hang with me as I explain how and why a simple ol’ country boy like me was able to get involved in a big-time criminal enterprise at all. It’ll bear the telling.
In the 1960’s, some few years before I was even born, the folk music legend Jimmy Driftwood of Battle of New Orleans fame and some other Arkansas musicians and politicians suddenly decided out of the blue that they had an idea that they were going to help out the poor and ignorant backwoods folks of Stone County, Arkansas by building what came to be known as the Ozark Folk Center. This Folk Center was gonna help keep those same folks’ rural traditions alive although 90% of the employees and administrators over the years have not been natives nor do they have kinfolk in North Central Arkansas. (Figure that one out if you can!) These fellers also got quite a bit of help when the Blanchard Springs Caverns and National Forest recreation area opened at around that same time. I don’t know how close the two were together, my not being born yet when they started, but they’re in the same basket and tied up with the same bow. These two attractions presenting the natural beauty of the Ozark Mountains, and the rustic, pastoral life of its inhabitants brought tourists by the hundreds and the thousands to the sleepy, rocky, timber-covered hills and hollers of Stone County and the surrounding area and created a tourist industry that many of the region’s residents are still dependent upon today. Many of those tourists who came in droves happened to be hippies from the east and west coasts of the United States, who, once they got here, thought they might as well stay for a while, and so they needed to have access to the substance that was at the center of their counterculture and their laissez faire lifestyles. This necessary “substance” is a plant and that plant’s products that are dried, divided, and smoked to create several different pleasing sensations for most people who partake of it. The plant is known scientifically as Cannabis Sativa, but you know it by another name, Marijuana. Don’t act like you don’t know what marijuana is, and don’t act like you haven’t tried it at least once. C’mon, man!
Anyhow, though not many cultivatable crops grow very well in the thin, rocky, and clay-ridden soil of the North Central Arkansas hills, marijuana seems to be a plant that does like what is called Arkansas “residium” soil, and it tends to thrive if it is not crowded, and crowding was never really an issue because hardly anybody ever tried to row crop marijuana since most of the people who grew it only intended to harvest enough for their own personal use. Yes, there are some obvious contradictions to this claim that you may have read in the newspapers, but for the sake of brevity, let’s not argue over that point. Row cropping of pot was done, but not much.
During the 1970’s, for the large majority part, marijuana cultivation was about as innocent a garden hobby as could be for a substance that was made illegal all the way back in the 1920’s. Marijuana growers never feuded or fussed with one another over the production of their ware as far as I ever heard. They were a peaceful and happy lot who encouraged their neighbors to grow some themselves and even shared advice on how to raise the THC levels in the different breeds of marijuana plants. THC’s the stuff that makes you feel good. This happy, peaceful, sharing sort of attitude among pot purveyors helped keep them clear of entanglements with law enforcement officials as long as they weren’t pushing their product on young kids or other impressionable folks. In fact, I’ve heard more than a rumor or two that some former Stone County sheriffs and deputies might have been involved in the marijuana trade themselves. I don’t know that it is true, but every rumor started with some bit of truth, you know.
Anyway, everyone seemed to be happy with the way pot production was working through the 1970’s, and had everything just stayed the way it was, I could not have and would not have had the opportunity for the criminal enterprise that I so easily stepped into right after I got out of high school. But things do change, and sometimes in big ways and sometimes in bad ways, and big change generally means bad change. Well, the big change happened and bad shit started happening, and…uh…well, if you don’t remember what Uncle Boog convinced me of the night of the dogfight, I will remind you: “Make the bad shit that happens work in your favor, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.” As such and only as such, by the mid-1980’s, the production, trading, and trafficking of marijuana was shifting in my favor.
You see, when people are just growing produce for their own personal use, there is no surplus. There is no need for trade and transaction. The very relatable concept of supply-and-demand works as well with tomatoes as it does with marijuana. They are extremely comparable. When folks are only producing what they need and can use, they don’t have any left over to sell. Nobody sells their tomatoes at a roadside market stand if they don’t have enough tomatoes to eat for themselves. They’re gonna do what they can to hang onto what they’ve got and cook their tomatoes into soups, relishes, and sauces that can be stored, and they are not likely to let other folks know what they’ve got stashed away unless they’ve got some to share. But when you notice you always seem to have some to share, some people start to realize that money can be made harnessing their expert tomato gardening and productions skills, especially if they can consistently harvest extra, and they think to themselves, “If I can grow five tomato plants for my personal use, how much harder would it be to grow ten tomato plants and sell the extra tomatoes and tomato products to somebody who doesn’t know how to grow tomatoes like mine? And, once I’ve got the tomatoes and tomato products I can easily sell them at a price that is above their actual value to me.” I have no degree in business, but I do know that the laws of supply and demand work the same for any product, so while I don’t give a damn about tomatoes, and I never was aware of marijuana prices in small quantities like ounces, grams, kilos, and pounds, when it got to the point where one marijuana plant harvested, dried, and divvied up into selling-sized baggies was worth $2500-$4000, I knew that certain people weren’t thinking about growing tomatoes in their gardens anymore. Can you imagine growing $3000 worth of tomatoes on one plant? I sure can’t, but, if you could, would you do it? If it was legal? What about if it was illegal? One tomato plant, $3000?
Anyhow, with a lot of different people thinking up lots of different answers to the questions that I posed above, numerous Stone County residents were suddenly producing a saleable product with a high monetary street value that could be sold for tax-free money or traded for other tariff-free products, but since marijuana is illegal, it couldn’t just be sold in a stand down at the local farmer’s market. It had to be moved and preferably as far away from Stone County as possible. Local pot growers needed movers and traffickers. They needed people that they could trust to get their product secretly and confidentially from one place to another without having to worry about dealing with either law enforcement officials or the even more dangerous criminal elements who were inevitably at the other end of the supply chain. It was this dodgy criminal element, such as the tweaking bikers, the coked-up cartel, and the meth mafia, that the simple country pot growers really wanted to avoid, and so most of them tried to have two or three degrees of separation from these types through people they knew but who did not live in their communities. These “middlemen” (Nobody ever called them that, by the way.) were people who might have grown up and gone to school in Timbo, Fox, Fifty Six, Pleasant Grove, or Mountain View, but they had moved on to the bigger cities in and around the state like Little Rock, Conway, Memphis, Fort Smith, etc. They could come to visit family or friends in Stone County without arousing any suspicion, pick up bags or bales of marijuana, head back to wherever they were, and arrange meeting places with potential buyers or traders. These middlemen had connections going both ways and kept both sides from ever having to deal much with one another, and it was in this junction between those middlemen and the cartel or mafia men where I found that I could provide a service that provided me a relatively safe disconnection from the community in which I lived.
You see, when folks start making deals with cartel-types that involve the producing, trafficking, and trading of valuable products that no one can report as stolen to law enforcement…well, let’s just make this simple…if the cartel senses a weakness in the chain, so to speak, they’ll cut out a link. They are not looking to make connections because they had just as soon control every circle in the loop and keep all the product and money for themselves. The middleman was the first, easiest link for the bad men to cut out of the line, and so, in the mid- to late 1980’s, a lot of those middlemen without a decent show of protection ended up dead, dozens of them, maybe even hundreds. I don’t know how many because there is no way to keep track of it. Nobody really cares how or why when drug dealers end up dead or missing. You know that is the truth. Go figure!
Anyway, mostly by pure accident, the idea for the business that I ended up in was inspired when I was present at a marijuana-for-money exchange at an interstate rest stop right outside of North Little Rock with my first real employer, Enos Taney--who I will introduce more thoroughly in the next chapter--and three or four of our mutual buddies. We had all been at a keg party together somewhere near the town of Greenbriar up on Highway 65, and we had spent the whole night drinking cheap cold beer and smoking cigarettes or joints or engaged in other immoral and probably illicit activities when “Stainy” asked if anybody was willing to take a ride a little ways down Interstate 44 with him. I can’t say why any one of us agreed to his request since not one of us had had a wink of sleep and were either stumbling drunk or green-gilled with a hangover, and Stainy was very obviously still drunk and high, but somehow we all ended up packed into a banana yellow 1974 Chevy Blazer barrelling east at 80 mph on I-40 between Conway and North Little Rock. Little did I know at the time, but there were several black garbage bags of dried marijuana in the very tail of the Blazer under the back bench seat. About 6:30 that morning, we roared into a rest area just past the Maumelle exit. Most of the crew had dozed off and only awakened when Stainy slammed the front wheels of the Blazer against. Every one piled out. Some went immediately to the bathroom, some stumbled around in the sparse grass and looked up into thick pine canopy, trying to figure out where they were and what time it was, and some sat on broken, moss-covered concrete picnic tables holding our pounding heads in our tobacco-stinking hands. I was one of that “some.” Only Stainy had any clue why we were there and what was going on. The rest of us were clueless idiots who, as it turned out, could’ve found ourselves in a deadly jackpot. Only dumb luck or kind fate kept us from dying an oblivious death because fifteen minutes after we arrived, this black Suburban rolls into the parking lot. Two emotionless men with automatic weapons beneath their long black jackets get out, one from the passenger side front and one from the driver’s side on the back. Though we are all in a deep shade from the early morning sun in the heavy pine trees, they both have on dark sunglasses, and they carefully scan the whole rest area grounds with a sweep of their heads, their black gloved fingers on the triggers of their weapons. It was like a choreographed dance for them. Each had his individual part, but it was synchronized with the other guy perfectly. I still remember how impressed I was with their organization. It was a beautifully coordinated thing to see, and I knew that I wanted to be like that.
Anyway, one of the two gunmen must have signaled the other passenger in the back seat of the Suburban, and what I would think is the “boss man” gets out. Boss man’s wearing a black suit with a white shirt and a thin black tie. His black shoes look like he just got them shined down at the bus station, and his sunglasses are big and dark and exactly the same as the other two. This dude is decked out and looking like a real serious player here at 6:45 on a half-foggy Sunday morning. He’s got a black canvas bag slung over his shoulder that is obviously half full of shifting, solid objects. As far as the driver of the Suburban, I never saw him behind the windows tinted ten times darker than allowed by law, which was another aspect of their whole outfit that I found remarkable in the details. Stainy, who I think might have been puking behind a bush at that moment, groggily becomes aware that the men in black and their matching Suburban are in the parking lot, and he walks over to the black-tie boss man with the duffle bag. Stainy looks like a stacked up pile of turds next to a beautiful black marble statue. The two say some words that I can’t hear, and sharp dressed boss man hands the duffle bag to Stainy, who doesn’t even look in it but carries it with him as he wobbles drunkenly over to the Blazer. One of the gunman with his finger still on the trigger follows Stainy to the back of the Blazer, drops his weapon onto its shoulder sling, and accepts the black garbage bags from Stainy’s hands as he drags them from under the backseat and carries them all in one load back over to the Suburban. My eyes stick with him as he opens the back doors to toss the bags in, so I don’t notice that the other guys have already disappeared back into the vehicle. This last gunman slams the back doors, hurries to the rear driver’s side door which was still open from when he got out, steps up and in, and before he even gets the door closed, the suburban is hauling ass through the parking lot headed down the merge lane to I-40.
Wow! What an adrenalin rush! As hungover as I was, my heart was beating like it was gonna jump out of my chest. I knew those men could have easily killed Stainy, killed all of us, and taken whatever they wanted, the marijuana, the Chevy Blazer. They were prepared and trained for violence, and they could have unleashed that violence upon us, and we had absolutely no response. I think that the only reason they didn’t kill us is that six bodies would have been hard to make disappear. My mind was busy processing the whole scene that I had just witnessed. This was some bad shit. How could I make it work in my favor? Ideas were popping like little firecrackers in my brain. I started thinking, “What chance does a guy like Stainy have against those men? How much would he pay to feel that he could stand on a level field with them? If I knew where the meet was ahead of time, could I cover those gunmen with snipers?” I am not a dumb guy, so I was also formulating my own answers to those questions. Nonetheless, those questions and answers might have never gotten any farther than some crazy ideas in my head until Stainy walked over to me and said, “Damn, every time I deal with those guys, it scares the shit of me!” Then, I knew that I had found a niche in the marijuana trafficking business that I could carve out for my very own.
Holy Cow! I see that I am at the bottom of page six, probably a little past the Ardell reading point, so I’m gonna have to wait and tell you all about Mr. Enos Taney and my first very complicated foray into the protection business in the next segment. See y’all later.
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