The Smuggling Story

I waited about a month, until I thought it was safe for me to travel again and then returned to Europe. I made a brief stop in Rome to pick up the little bit of stuff I'd left there on the earlier trip and took the late afternoon, overnight train to Barcelona.   There I saw the unfinished Gaudy church,  his wavy, organic looking apartment buildings and park.  Then, satisfied with my brief tour of the city, I left for Ibiza.   Ibiza was not the never ending party it is today.  Still, it was a place to lose your inhibitions and have lots of good times.  An English ex-pat bartender named Martin Knebel, from a bar whose name I can't remember,  put me up the first three nights until I found an apartment near the beach in Ibiza town.

I began to settle in and, at some point soon after my friend Carlos sold me a chunk of black Afghani hashish only slightly smaller in size and shape than a major league baseball.  Black Afgani Hashish was highly prized and considered the best hashish in the world and yet it wasn't very expensive.  Because I shared it with everybody I knew for several months the baseball sized chunk soon became the size and shape of a ping pong ball.   But now, with my money running low I decided I needed to return to the states to get some work, make some more money and then return to Europe.

Unfortunately, I didn't have any idea what to do with the hashish.  Although it had shrunk, a ping pong ball sized piece of hash is still a lot.  It was way too big to give away and, frankly, I wanted to keep using it and really impress my friends back in New York.  But there didn't seem to be a way to get the hash into the US and stay out of prison.

Then, almost on cue, I met a  guy whose name was also Rob and claimed to be an expert at getting contraband across boarders,   He told me it was easy to smuggle hash and that he'd done it many times without incident.   This Rob claimed a lot of things, said he done a lot of things and I was naive.

One afternoon, about two weeks before I was scheduled to leave for New York,  I met with Rob in his apartment and he showed my how to smuggle hashish.   He had some tin foil, an iron, some glue and a stack of hard cover books.   Rob showed me that if you placed the tin foil over the hashish you could iron pieces of it as flat as a sheet of paper.  The idea is to then steam off the paper that is always pasted on the inside and back covers of hardback books,  then place a sheet of flattened hashish against the book cover and re-glue the sheet of paper over the hashish.  We used at least ten books, hiding the hashish in the the covers.   I thought the result looked damned good.

The next idea was to hide the books, as many of the ten as possible, in plain sight.  We strapped them into several open shoulder bags, the kind that have long straps and large woven baskets.

For the next two weeks, we let the books dry and forgot about them.    When, finally, the day of the flight arrived I felt relaxed and confident.   I had hidden the hash well and I knew it.

As I boarded the flight,  some of the book bags came aboard with me and some were stowed with the rest of the luggage down below.    I sat back in my seat, closed my eyes and soon heard the sounds of the doors closing and the gateway moving away from the plane.   It was at that point that I picked up Clipper Magazine,  the official in-flight PanAm reading material.

When I opened the magazine I noticed an article listed in the index:   "School For Customs Agents. Where alert students learn smuggler's secrets".

In a panic, I flipped to the page.   In addition to the text there were the pictures.  The first picture was of a false suitcase bottom, the second of a false heal on a boot.  The third photograph showed the old paste-it-in-a-book routine, for smuggling hashish.

The plane was just pulling away from the gate.  I had eight hours ahead of me to consider my situation.
By the time we landed I was in New York, I was drenched in sweat and out of ideas about how to handle the now desperate situation.  After all, they would see my books which even smelled of hashish.

I looked down the line of customs inspectors, to pick a person who looked like they might be sympathetic.   At the very end of the line was a woman about 35 years old with kind eyes.  I got on her line and when she got to me, I had three large baskets with books right out in open.  I also had a red Valentine Olivetti typewriter which she noticed first.

"Where'd you get this?" she asked.
"It's mine," I said.
"I didn't ask you whose it was," she said,  "I asked you where you got it."
"Here,"
"Here New York?"
"Yes"
"I notice it's got an enyay as well as an "n".  Only a Spanish typewriter has that"
"I'm sorry.  I meant to say  I bought it here, in Madrid."
"You're in New York."
"I know.  Im a little confused."
"I see that," she said

Now she came to the books.   She picked up the book that was right on top of one of the baskets and  never looked down at it as she flipped through the pages.  She kept a steady, level gaze on me.

"Where'd you get these books.  They're all in Spanish.  You speak Spanish?"
"I'm learning," I said, "The books are for that."

She never looked down at a book and there was a long pause before she spoke again.

"Let me tell you what I'm going to do about this," she finally said.

My heart was pounding right out of my chest.

"We both know what you've got here, young man.  So I'll tell you what I'm going to do with you.  I'm going to let you go this time.  But you never, ever try this again."

She never said why she let me go.  I guessed that she must not have believed in jail time for kids.  At least that's what I've thought all the years since it happened.