EXTRACT | ‘High Times’ by Roy Isacowitz and Jeremy Gordin

ABOUT THE BOOK 

High Times is the true story of Michael Medjuck, whose taste for weed, women and the good life led him from late 1960s Johannesburg to notoriety as one of the biggest hash and weed smugglers in North America.

From his base in Vancouver, Medjuck built up a smuggling network that supplied dealers in scores of cities across Canada and the US. The proceeds of smuggling afforded this former King David High School pupil a lifestyle of hedonistic excess – the finest wines, the most glamorous hookers, the best weed in the world.

In 1991, Medjuck was nabbed by US federal agents while smuggling an enormous shipload of Afghani hash into the West Coast of Canada. Put on trial as the scheme’s mastermind, Medjuck was convicted and sentenced to 24 years behind bars. His US prison experiences, from dingy county lock-ups to brutal federal penitentiaries, are the stuff of legend. Eventually, a chance remark to his lawyer led to his early release and return to Canada.

After barely a year of freedom, Medjuck was again arrested – this time in Spain for an ill-judged cocaine-smuggling venture – and sentenced to another prison term of nine years.

This is Medjuck’s extraordinary story, as told to fellow South Africans Roy Isacowitz, author and journalist, and the late Jeremy Gordin, award-winning journalist, editor and author.

EXTRACT 

Michael was a lean and vigorous 41-year-old, despite a rapidly receding hairline and the odd grey highlight in his bushy moustache. A time-worn wariness now shadowed the slate-grey eyes that had tantalised a generation of schoolgirls in South Africa.

He had been having thoughts recently of slowing down, perhaps even of retiring, but who was he kidding? He lived for the business and the ego boost it gave him. The money, too, of course, but having made a lot more than he ever thought possible, he had begun to understand that it was really the acclaim he thrived on. His kingpin status.

Not only was he Canada’s leading pot and hash smuggler, but he had come from the most unlikely circumstances to achieve that status. Jewish boys from Johannesburg normally settled for far more conventional pursuits.

As Michael had anticipated, all flights were grounded when they arrived at Bellingham Airport. The murky haze had attached itself to the runway like a limpet mine, limiting visibility to a few metres at best. After considering the alternatives, Michael boarded the bus provided by the airline for the three-hour drive to Seattle. This in itself was a radical departure from standard practice.

The bus was a mode of transportation Michael had abandoned at least a decade earlier. Along with economy-class flights, restaurant wine lists and off-the-shelf clothing, public transport had become surplus to Michael’s requirements once he made his first million. They were baggage from a previous life.

The bus filled up with the rest of the passengers from the cancelled flight. Businesspeople in polyester suits and ties, mainly. Some working people in polo shirts with company insignia, a few oldies, already in their winter coats, and a couple of beefy guys in windbreakers who could have been cops.

Well, fuck’em if they were. He wasn’t carrying a thing.

Settling into his seat, Michael pulled a Walkman from his briefcase and slotted in a cassette of the Grateful Dead album American Beauty. Being on the bus brought to mind Ken Kesey and his Merry Prankster followers. What music had they listened to while careening crazily on their drug-fuelled jaunt from California to the East Coast? The Dead, of course. He fast-forwarded to ‘Friend of the Devil’.

Great bus music. The only thing missing was a joint.

He was reminded of the totally insane Neal Cassady, nicknamed Sir Speed Limit by the Pranksters (because he didn’t have a speed limit – he drove stupidly fast). Cassady, it was once said, ‘could roll a joint while backing a 1937 Packard onto the lip of the Grand Canyon.’

That had resonated with Michael. He himself was a driver of some renown, not specifically for his driving skills but for the loads he had carried. He had driven many thousands of kilos of dope across North America – from El Paso to Bellingham, Miami to Pittsburgh, San Diego to Vancouver – with the wheel in one hand, a joint in the other and a rockin’ song on the radio.

The worst of the fog had burned away by the time they pulled into Sea-Tac Airport. Planes seemed to be taking off and landing as usual. As Michael stepped off the bus, he saw Ollie lounging outside the departure terminal, ubiquitous cigarette in hand. Beside him was Michael’s luggage.

‘Hey man,’ Ollie said, ‘bummer about the fog, hey?’

‘Yeah, I’ve missed my flight.’

‘No worries. They’re pretty frequent.’

‘Guess I’ll go get a new boarding card.’

‘Yeah, man, I’ll wait here. When you’re done, we can take the car for a spin and get stoned.’

‘Sounds great,’ Michael said. ‘Where’s the car parked?’

‘Up on the roof.’

When Michael returned with the boarding card, Ollie ground out his cigarette with a bootheel and took hold of Michael’s carry-on bag. They ambled over to the elevator, waited for it to descend and, once inside, pressed the button for the rooftop parking.

Just as the doors were closing, two guys tried to get in, shoving their hands into the narrowing aperture of the doors and yelling, ‘Hold it.’ Michael and Ollie made space as the two scrambled in. They looked as straight as a pair of old-fashioned cut-throat razors, with tidy, side-parted hair, blue windbreakers, jeans and sneakers.

Michael, too, looked super-straight, although his get-up – short hair, tailored suit, white Egyptian cotton shirt and coffee-coloured Italian lace-ups – was a disguise, or, more accurately, a disguise that had become a habit and then a choice.

Early on in his career, while he was transitioning from dealing to smuggling, he’d been told by Nick Sadowski, his mentor from Pittsburgh, that when you’re smuggling large quantities of drugs, the last thing you want to look like is a long-haired drug dealer. Looking straighter than the cops and wearing suits they would never be able to afford made you virtually invisible – although it pissed them off extraordinarily when they just happened to bust you.

What irritated Michael about the guys in the elevator was not that they were straight but that they had the macho, oxygen-depleting bearing of cops. They bullied the air around them, asserting their control. Tough-guy toxicity permeated the rising metal box. By the nature of things, Michael was allergic to cops.

At the rooftop parking, the two guys exited the elevator and headed right. Michael was relieved to see them go. He’d had a bad feeling about them.

Ollie, followed by Michael, zigzagged towards the open-air section of the lot, struggling to remember the row number he had committed to memory less than an hour earlier. Wisps of fog lingered over the lot like strings of cotton candy. Through the diminishing haze, Michael could see the flashing landing lights of a plane descending onto a distant runway.

That was when the unreality took over. Trying to put it all together later, Michael remembered his relief as the two straights walked off in the opposite direction. He also remembered thinking about his agenda for the rest of the day, much of it to do with the (legit) import-export business he had in San Francisco.

Whether one of the guys actually shouted, ‘Hands up!’ Michael couldn’t be sure. It sounded a bit too B-movie-ish and, given what he was to subsequently learn about the feds, they weren’t the types to give fair warning. Still, he had a vague memory of a shout before the lights went out.

When he came to, Michael was splayed out on the ground, with a shattering pain in his head and a dead weight on his neck and upper back that was pressing the air out of him. The rough concrete was cold and coarse against his cheek. Someone was trying to clamp his wrists behind him and cursing shrilly.

‘Don’t move, asshole! Move again and I’ll put a bullet through your fucking head! You understand? Stay fucking still.’

Grinning like a lunatic and still panting from the sheer exertion of hitting someone over the head from behind, the cop hauled Michael to his feet, his arms now cuffed behind his back. Michael’s head pounded like a manic Ginger Baker drum solo on too much speed and he could feel the trickle of what seemed like was blood down his forehead.

Glancing down, he saw that his $3 000 suit, personally hand-tailored by Bijan of Beverly Hills, had a nasty tear over one knee and a patchwork of oil and grime stains. The suit was ruined.

Over the years, like most drug smugglers, Michael had dealt with the prospect of being busted through a combination of denial and repression. He had simply refused to think about it and therefore had no preconceived scenario when it eventually happened. His mind was as blank and glutinous as the fog earlier that morning, leaving him with little option but to stay silent and do nothing. He had no better ideas.

Other cops began to arrive on the scene, some creeping forward, weapons levelled like infantrymen in a Vietnamese rice paddy, and others whooping and high-fiving each other. Soon there were hands all over him, spreading his legs and patting his torso and the insides of his thighs. He was told to bend over, lie down and lift his head, all by different voices at the same time.

The guy who had busted him had moved to the side and was leaning against a silver Ford Taurus, deep in conversation with a uniformed officer and a couple of plainclothes men. He appeared to have handed over the prisoner, but when one of the uniforms manhandled Michael, he quickly intervened.

‘Get the fuck away from my prisoner,’ he shouted at the offending cop, without relinquishing his place by the side of the Taurus. The cop did as he was told. This was clearly a federal gig.

Extract provided by Jonathan Ball Publishers.