Hard Time (3 page)

‘I’d like to wrap that fucking surfboard around his head,’ Wild Man said, ‘seeing as he’s kept us waiting this fucking long. Why don’t I just kick his door down and take his shit?’

‘That’s not good business,’ I said.

‘It’s not good business him keeping us waiting out here for two hours either!’

‘If you rob him, then who’re we going to go through?’ Turning to Wild Man’s cousin, Hammy, I said, ‘Keep the Wild Man under control, would you?’

‘That’s like trying to keep a bull from a red rag,’ Hammy said. ‘I’ll do me best.’

I got out, and knocked on Sol’s door.

‘Come in,’ Sol said.

‘I’ve been here a while.’ Entering his house, not quite knowing what I was getting into, I feared someone might jump out and rob me.

‘I lost track of time,’ he said with an indifference that irked me right away. ‘I have your 500 Mitsubishis. I’ll be right back.’ He went into another room. For a few seconds, I half expected him to reappear with a gun. But my heartbeat slowed down when he brought out a Ziploc bag with more pills than I’d ever seen.

‘How much MDMA’s in them?’ I asked, feasting my eyes on the quantity.

‘125 milligrams. From Holland. I don’t sell any Made-in-America bunk. Besides, I’m told you can afford a lot more than 500. I’m sick of Arizona ravers coming to my house and buying a hundred here and there. I’d rather sell bulk to one person. It’d be safer for all of us. And the product will be good like these.’

‘Can I taste one?’ I asked.

‘Taste one?’ he said, surprised.

‘I always chew them. They have a distinct taste,’ I said, studying his face for hints of deceit.

‘Want a chaser?’

‘Water, please.’

I examined a pill. More dirty white than beige. Speckled like a bird’s egg. A press of three diamonds: the Mitsubishi logo. Chewing it, I recognised the sharp chemical taste that precedes an Ecstasy high. ‘It’s a good pill. Here’s seven gees. If you want me to buy more, I expect a much better price next time.’

The Ecstasy my friends and I didn’t eat, we dealt to the local dealers in Arizona. Making money from the dealers enabled me to increase the scale of things. I began throwing raves for thousands of people, generating enough profits to give away hundreds of Ecstasy pills every weekend and to squander thousands on lavish after-parties and other drugs like Special K, GHB and speed. The more I fed my friends with drugs, the more they pampered me. I was buying popularity, especially with the glitter girls who spoiled me at the after-parties. Due to all of the drugs and sexual attention, I was beginning to lose touch with reality. But I was enjoying every second of it without thinking I’d ever get caught.

The ravers nicknamed me ‘English Shaun’ and ‘The Bank of England’. I was considered one of the wealthiest people in Arizona’s rave scene. So as not to get robbed in a scene that attracted all sorts, I formed my own security team. One of my security guards, G Dog – a tall Mexican-American with long hair and prison-tattooed arms – urged me to meet his brother, Raul. He said if Raul and his associates had my back, I wouldn’t have too many problems in Arizona.

The grenade launcher on top of the biggest TV I’d ever seen belonged to Raul, who was watching a much smaller CCTV screen showing the comings and goings on the street crowded with lowriders outside his home in Tempe.

‘This is the English guy I want you to meet,’ G Dog said.

Raul, short and plump, tilted his head back. ‘Wattup, homey,’ he said without smiling.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said, shaking his hand. ‘I like your TV.’

‘Damn, you talk funny – like an accent – I guess you are from England, homey. Come through to the kitchen. Meet my homies.’

Raul introduced me to a gang of gargantuan Mexican Americans. Heavily tattooed, they were standing around a table laden with slabs of crystal meth, cocaine and various weighing scales. They eyed me suspiciously. The biggest swung a spoon with cocaine towards my face. ‘Snort it.’ There was danger in his wide and alert eyes.

Concerned, I looked to G Dog for help, but he just nodded back with a serious expression. G Dog hadn’t told me these men were members of the New Mexican Mafia, the most powerful criminal organisation in Arizona at that time. Or that the man with the spoon was a hit man on a killing spree. Sensing the gravity of the situation, I rolled a hundred-dollar bill, pushed one nostril flat and snorted the cocaine through the other.

The man with the spoon nodded and shook my hand. But he didn’t smile. None of them smiled.

‘Shaun, let’s go talk business,’ Raul said, leading me into a bedroom. ‘G Dog tells me you can get this Ecstasy shit and that it’s all good.’

‘I can get it,’ I said, my throat gagging on the numbing aftertaste of the cocaine.

‘None of us have ever done that shit. The only thing I do is smoke good weed – know what I’m saying? – hydro, kind bud. I’m having a party at the weekend, some women are coming over, and we wanna check your Ecstasy out.’

I was present when they all took Ecstasy for the first time. Not only did they smile, it reduced them to overgrown teddy bears who wouldn’t stop hugging me. That’s how I earned the protection of the New Mexican Mafia. It was a relationship that probably saved my life later on, when, for reasons of their own, they killed some rival gangsters who were about to shoot and rob me.

In the run up to the
dot.com
bubble, I started day trading and became a millionaire. Now I had enough money to really expand my operation. My new main supplier in LA, Mike Hotwheelz, was arrested, and the other LA suppliers like Sol couldn’t fill my increasingly large orders, so I imported bulk Ecstasy. At the peak of things, I had my own rave clothing/music store and LSD chemist. I married one of the most glamorous glitter girls in the rave scene, Amy – a political science student at the University of Arizona who was also a bisexual topless dancer – at a chapel on the Las Vegas Strip, and we moved into a million-dollar mountainside home in Sin Vacas, Tucson. I had run-ins with gangsters such as Sammy the Bull Gravano, my main competitor.

The first time I discussed business with members of Sammy the Bull’s crew, I brought along one of the notorious Rossetti Brothers, who also worked security for me. Outside the meeting place, Heart 5 in Tucson, I drank some GHB, which had the effect of making me fearless. I said to Rossetti, ‘While I talk to Spaniard, make sure you’re always somewhere you can pull your gun in case they try to kidnap me. I’m not going to start any shit, but who knows how big a crew he’s with or what might happen.’

‘No problem. If they try anything, I’ll open up on the mother-fuckers. ’

I was at the bar when a six and a half foot man with dark spiky hair and biceps as broad as my neck tapped me on the shoulder. ‘I’m Mark, Spaniard’s partner. He wants to see you in the VIP area.’

‘OK, Mark.’ I shook his hand and followed him.

‘Glad you came, English Shaun,’ said Spaniard, a well-groomed Hispanic. ‘Mark, clear that sofa so we can all sit down.’

Mark yelled, ‘You need to move, so we can sit down!’ The people on the sofa jumped up.

To the side of us, Rossetti slipped into the VIP area.

As I sat down between the two of them, the GHB jolted my brain. It made me playful and crazy. Like my grandfather used to do to me, I squeezed their legs just above the knee and said, ‘So what’s this all about?’

They were taken aback for a few seconds, then Spaniard laughed, and said in a friendly voice, ‘Look, we know you’re doing your own thing. You’ve got a lotta people working for you. As do we. It would be best if we worked together rather than be enemies.’

‘What’re you proposing?’ There are not many things in the world more reckless than an Englishman on GHB, yet I could always negotiate business shrewdly no matter how high I was.

‘We’re getting a lotta pills, and we figure we can give you a better price than what you’re paying.’

‘You don’t know what I’m paying. I’m familiar with your pills, and I don’t think the quality is there. I’m getting European pills. None of the coloured pills you guys are getting.’

‘Who the fuck do you think you are, talking shit about our pills?’ Mark yelled.

Because of the GHB, Mark didn’t scare me. I viewed him as a monster but a funny one with a little brain.

‘Hey, Mark, calm down,’ Spaniard said.

‘Do you have any idea who Jimmy Moran is?’ Mark said, still fuming.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Sammy the Bull,’ Mark said. ‘That’s who we work for. One call to him and we can have you taken out to the desert.’

I was aware of Sammy the Bull from the news. He’d been a hit man for the Gambino Crime Family run by John Gotti, aka ‘the Teflon Don’. Later on, he became an FBI informant, confessed to killing 19 people, and helped the Feds put the Teflon Don away for life. Still, looking at those two in their shiny animal-print polyester shirts, I assumed they didn’t have as much power in Arizona as my associates in the New Mexican Mafia. I glanced at Rossetti. The look on his face said,
Should I shoot that lunkhead or what?

Almost imperceptibly, I shook my head at Rossetti.

‘There’s no need to say all that,’ Spaniard said. ‘Forgive Mark, Shaun. He gets upset real easy. He’s a bit of a hothead.’

‘I have no problems with you guys. But I really don’t care who you work for. You just moved in. Over the years, I’ve made friends with a lot of locals,’ I said, playing it like a gangster.

‘I hear you,’ Spaniard said, implying he knew of my connections. ‘But what if we can get you a better price on pills, would you be interested?’

‘I appreciate the offer, guys, but no thanks. And here’s why: before you guys moved into Ecstasy, the police pretty much ignored us. Now your runners are going around bragging they’re the biggest Ecstasy barons in the world. That’s brought considerable heat to the scene. And I’m not saying this to put you guys down but to give you a heads-up on what’s happening. Every weekend at the raves, we’ve got undercover cops and vehicles hanging around. We’ve got undercover vehicles taping who’s going in and out of the raves and driving through the parking lots taping licence plates. It’s no coincidence that the police moved in shortly after you guys. It’s not each other’s crews we need to beware of, it’s the cops.’

‘What about your security team?’ Spaniard asked.

‘What about it?’ I asked.

‘Will our runners have problems with your security guys jacking their pills?’

‘I don’t want to start a war with you guys. If my security grab someone and we find out they’re part of your crew, we’ll let them go. Ecstasy’s so hard to get and the demand so high, there’s enough of a market for us to coexist. But if I tell my security not to jack your runners, I don’t expect any problems from you guys for my runners in the Scottsdale scene.’

‘Sounds like a good agreement,’ Spaniard said, and shook my hand.

Years later, when I became friends with Sammy the Bull’s son, Gerard Gravano, he said he’d headed a crew dispatched to kidnap me from The Crowbar in Phoenix. Wild Man and his girlfriend had fought that night, so we had left the club in a hurry. That’s why the Bull’s crew just missed us.

The meltdown of my business interests came on fast. The NASDAQ, where I’d invested most of my money, crashed in the latter half of 2000. Some of my smugglers were arrested at airports in America and Europe. Most of my crew were doing so many drugs they were growing paranoid and scheming against each other – my top salesman tried to rob my LSD chemist, resulting in a shootout that made headline news. I could no longer afford my mountainside home and the $20,000-plus a month I was paying in bills for that home and multiple cars and apartments. My wife, Amy, was arrested in a grocery store, high on drugs, walking around barefoot, babbling to herself, with shotgun shells in her handbag. Later on, she bought a one-way ticket to Egypt to commit suicide. She ended up overdosing on prescription pills and slitting her wrists in her hotel room, where she was rescued by staff. With us both too messed up to sustain our relationship, it fell apart – like everything else in our lives.

Drugs had scrambled my mind. I reacted to the disasters by trying to numb myself with even more drugs, accelerating my own downfall. Through bad choices, I lost almost everything. All of the fun, glitz and glamour were gone. I was no longer swanning into raves with my entourage, getting hugged and thanked left and right by partiers high on my Ecstasy. I was hiding out in an apartment in Tucson, fearing the police or rival criminals were coming to get me, having to take Xanax to fall asleep. The meltdown put an end to my large-scale criminal activity, but I feared the name I’d made over the years as English Shaun would eventually lead to my arrest.

Towards the end of it all, an attorney I used whenever one of my crew was arrested called me into his office.

‘How’re you doing, Ray?’ I asked, shaking his hand.

‘I’m good. It’s you I’m worried about.’

‘Why?’ I asked, growing alarmed.

‘My sources at the DEA tell me it’s time for you to get the hell out of Arizona.’

‘Since the stock market crashed, I’ve not been doing much anyway.’

‘You shouldn’t be doing anything at all! You’ve had a good run. Now’s the time to get out. You’re an intelligent guy. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. If you continue on, there’s only one way this is going to end.’