Original Gangster by Frank Lucas

Author:Frank Lucas [Lucas, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4299-2385-9
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2010-01-15T02:00:00+00:00

After my third trip to Bangkok, I asked 007 if I could see where my product was coming from. I wasn’t sure if he would go for it.

“It is a very dangerous journey, Mr. Lucas. Not a vacation.”

“I understand that. Still interested in seeing how it works.”

He laughed. “Can’t be satisfied with a good price and a pure product?”

“I wouldn’t have gotten this far if I’d been easily satisfied.”

“True indeed, Mr. Lucas,” 007 said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

A few weeks later, I was trekking through the jungle in the dense area of Thailand that borders Burma and Laos. I had been warned by 007 that the trip out to the poppy fields would take several days each way. And that there was always the chance of things going horribly wrong. Needless to say, 007 didn’t join me on the trip. He introduced me to the other men on their way and left me on my own.

As we walked, I felt more alive than I ever had. I had done exactly what I’d set out to do. I thought about those days I daydreamed about what I wanted out of life while I was working in Bumpy’s numbers spot. I wanted to feel alive. I wanted to feel like I was in control of my own destiny. I was looking up, not forward or backward. And I had cut out all the middlemen. I was at the top of the chain of command, far above where I’d started out, buying heroin in a bar from Old Man Pop.

I’m telling you, I felt like we crossed every river in Asia on our way. From the Ruak River to the Mekong River, we trekked out on foot for miles and miles.

Finally, we got to a rock-covered mountain pass big enough to drive a car through. I went through and then looked out and saw flat land for as far as the eye could see. And across the land, there was nothing but poppies—everywhere. I was in complete shock.

Now, when I say there was nothing before me but poppy fields, you really have to understand what I’m trying to tell you. I’m talking about land the size of all five boroughs in New York City combined. And there was nothing but the poppy-seed plants—the plant that heroin is made from—stretching from one end to the other. I looked up and noticed that the entire field was covered with dark netting. The netting made it impossible to see the fields from the sky so that traveling military planes wouldn’t know what was going on there. But the sun could still shine through and allow the plants to grow.

I asked my guides how the area had become the headquarters for heroin. In halting English, it was explained to me: in the 1960s, there was an anticommunist group of Chinese people who had settled near the border of China and Burma. They ended up getting support from the American CIA, which of course had their own reasons for trying to defeat communist China.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.