The boat veered starboard into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Four bourgeois, white guys dreamed up the scheme. They smuggled a ton of marijuana into Washington state and made enough to buy property and build houses.
It was the mid-1970s. They were lucky to avoid the Coast Guard. Forty years ago, you could turn profits from drug smuggling into restaurants, boutiques, tuition. You could turn dirty money into clean money.
By 1990, that changed. Legislation spawned by the War on Drugs made it difficult to launder money, purchase expensive items like new cars with cash or withdraw large sums from banks without notice by the feds.
The risky entrepreneurship that inspires stoner comedies and cable melodramas is now more myth than reality. Organized crime replaced it.
When we consider the modern drug trade in Seattle — or any North American city — we picture tweakers, junkies and potheads, raves, crack houses and street deals. With medical marijuana, dispensaries put a compassionate face on pot.
Who runs the business? What can we do about them?
Supply and demands
Criminal organizations mature or self-destruct.
In the mid-1980s, when crack cocaine appeared, Seattle saw battles between Crips and Bloods, black street gangs from Los Angeles that grew onto a national scene. Chicago-based Black Gangster Disciples were already in Seattle, but Crips and Bloods escalated a shooting war. They took advantage of a longstanding Central District/South End rivalry to find neighborhood hoods to move product, to control turf, to die.
By the 21st century, new contenders arrived: Los Sureños, a Southern California Latino gang, and the Mara Salvatrucha, a Salvadoran gang from L.A. It was a far cry from the 1950s, when Mafioso from Las Vegas smuggled drugs out of Mexico in American sedans with hidden compartments.
As U.S. demand for drugs surged, so did the supply chain.
Sometimes, someone is outed. Last fall, Quy Nguyen, leader of the Vietnamese Young Seattle Boyz gang, was found guilty of second-degree murder for the contract killing of his associate Hoang Nguyen.
The Young Seattle Boyz built a large-scale grow operation from five houses in South Seattle and Tukwila. Quy Nguyen was also involved in importing large amounts of pot through the Vietnamese syndicate in Vancouver, B.C. He earned the nickname “Godfather.”
The largest criminal operation that touches the Pacific Northwest is the Canadian Hells Angels. Across the border, the Hells Angels grew from a few chapters around Montreal in the 1980s to become the largest biker gang in the world and a syndicate controlling cocaine and marijuana. Jerry Langton’s 2010 “Fallen Angel: The Unlikely Rise of Walter Stadnick and the Canadian Hells Angels” details how it happened.
Ironically, as the 1980s and 1990s saw B.C. bud enter Washington state, Washington pot found its way into Canada, as growers sent crops north through the Peace Arch at Blaine. Then, it went to Canada’s eastern cities. Smuggling pot to Canada seems like sending coal to Newcastle, but the cover worked for one grow operation for years, until someone did something stupid.
The girlfriend of one of the growers sent a package via FedEx. She got a call from a sympathizer that the authorities were notified. Her boyfriend pulled everything from the grow house, tossed it in a pickup and dumped it in a national forest. Mercury from the broken halide bulbs would leach into the watershed of Puget Sound.
Operations fold because of fools, because somebody gets mad and turns someone in, because dealers and suppliers start using too much coke, crack, horse, crank, whatever they move.
Taking control away
Of the eight operations I’ve seen — two pot and six narcotic — only one offered insight into management. During summer 2007, while I led crews in forestry work along the west side of Beacon Hill, I met Mr. Big (I have no idea what this man’s name is).
Several afternoons each week, Mr. Big held court at Dr. José Rizal Park’s picnic shelter. Fastidiously dressed, head shaved, a strong muscular, Latino man in his late 30s, clean, with the look of command, he was accompanied by an entourage of Hispanic bodyguards.
Whenever Mr. Big appeared, the retailers would come — white, black, Asian, Latino, men and women — the trade is EOE. A few looked like street people; most looked destined for clubs or downtown. Businessmen in suits arrived among hipsters.
Mr. Big’s goods went to Capitol Hill, Pioneer Square, Belltown, north of the ship canal — he got it wholesale.
If arrested, nothing would stick.
He finally left the park. Since so many volunteers came to do trail building and forestry, he needed to move elsewhere, without witnesses.
As long as rackets control supply, young people are in the crossfire. The only way to break the cycle of organized crime and drug violence is to legalize possession and have government distribution. Anything short perpetuates the big business of addiction.
This fall, in Washington, we can legalize one Class A substance: marijuana. Even if the initiative is imperfect to some — and the state would sort it out with the feds — we should support it. It’s a step to end a War on Drugs that opens prison doors and fills mortuary slabs.
We can do better than let organized crime win. If we don’t, it’s only a matter of time before we discover the blood on our streets has covered our hands.
CRAIG THOMPSON is a longtime community activist.
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