Smuggler's blues

Before becoming a writer, Richard Stratton ran hash from the Middle East, making money hand over fist and living off adrenaline. Until he got caught.

By Oliver Broudy

Read more: Drugs, Books, Marijuana, Interviews, Authors, Books Interviews

Jan. 14, 2006 | In 1982 Richard Stratton was convicted of operating a Continuing Criminal Enterprise under the kingpin statute of New York State. For over 10 years he had been running an international drug smuggling operation, bringing tons of marijuana and hashish into the United States and arranging for its distribution. How does one become an international drug smuggler? For Stratton it was a fluke, a chance encounter south of the border in 1964. But what kept Stratton coming back for more was the challenge, the adrenaline rush, and the belief that one day he could take his experiences and put them all into a book.

After his conviction, Stratton got his chance. His eight-year stint in prison afforded him plenty of time to write "Smack Goddess," a novel based on the life of notorious drug dealer Frin Mullin, which was published upon his release in 1990. Since then, Stratton has worked as a consultant for the TV show "Oz," co-written and produced the award-winning feature film "Slam," and the Emmy Award-winning "Thug Life in D.C.," and created the Showtime series "Street Time." His first job after prison was working for Barbara Kopple, the Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, who hired him to write a treatment for a film about Mike Tyson. Kopple kept him on as a field producer once the project got underway. "I remember running around from phone booth to phone booth," Stratton says, "setting up interviews, coordinating camera crews, organizing transportation logistics, and thinking, I can do this; this isn't so different from running a smuggling operation."

Late last year, a selection of Stratton's best nonfiction work, which originally appeared in such magazines as GQ, Esquire and Details, was collected in an anthology called "Altered States of America." The subjects covered range from in-depth profiles of Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson to exposis of the CIA's covert LSD experiments, and the FBI's complicity in a series of New York Mafia hits in the 1980s.

Salon caught up with Stratton, now 60, at his studio apartment in Chelsea, where he stays when he has business in New York. The apartment is windowless except for a skylight, high over Stratton's desk. The bookshelves are lined with tomes about cannabis and crime. On the walls hang various movie posters from projects Stratton has worked on. Stratton himself, wearing black nylon jogging pants and a black tee, sits at his desk in a wooden swivel chair, sipping Earl Grey. He has the elegant, brushed-back hair of a TV preacher and the solid build of a wrestler.

The first and most obvious question is, how does an upper-middle-class white kid from Wellesley, Mass., become an international drug smuggler?

Well, that's a good question. I had flirted around with pot when I was in high school. But when I got to Arizona -- I went to ASU on a wrestling scholarship -- I started going down to Mexico with my roommate, and that's when I made my first buy. It was $100 a kilo. I had 300 bucks on me so I bought three kilos, hid them in the car, and then brought it back to Boston and sold it to the cousin of this friend of mine. I made $2,000, which was a lot of money in those days, especially for a 19-year-old kid. I never really thought of it as "smuggling." After that I dropped out of school, became a hippie, and went on the backpack hippie tour of the world for two or three years. I started doing these little scams where we'd build these false-bottom suitcases and we'd hide hash in there, and then friends would carry it back to the States.

What was your parents' reaction to this activity?

My parents never really knew what I was up to. Well, my father had some suspicion because I had all this money. But I had been such a rebellious kid. I had been in reform school and arrested so many times that they really didn't want to know. My mother was very different; she was supportive no matter what I did. She was one of these overweening mothers that you could've gone to and said, Your son just killed three people down the street and ate them, and she'd go, Well, they must have been really bad people, otherwise he would never have done something like that.

So how did an irredeemable delinquent like yourself end up a writer?

I went to a prep school in western Massachusetts, because they had a great wrestling coach. My English teacher there was a guy named Dudley Cloud, who had been an editor at the Atlantic Monthly. And he took an interest in me, based on essays I'd written. He said, You really have a knack for this. You should pursue it. So when I came back from Europe I enrolled in a summer writing program at Harvard. After that I applied to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and got a writing fellowship. That's when I met Norman Mailer. He was living two houses down, across the street. There was a woman who worked for him, his cook, who lived in the apartment below mine. She said, Oh you gotta meet Norman, you guys will love each other. And one day he called and invited me over to watch a football game. We stayed up the whole night, drinking and talking. At that point he was offering to help me any way he could. I was 22.

And did he help you?

I interviewed him for Rolling Stone. Then they hired me to write a piece about Rochdale College, in Toronto, which was one of these experimental colleges that sprang up in the early '70s. But it had turned into one of the centers of soft drug distribution in North America, largely because of Robert Rowbotham, who was like the hippie godfather. When I went up there and started interviewing people they all said, Oh you have to talk to Rosie. He's the flower. That was his other nickname. He was probably in his early 20s and already had maybe $5 million or $6 million in cash stashed away. The guy was a master organized crime figure in the marijuana underworld. People would come up from all over North America and buy hash from this guy, and then smuggle it back into the United States.

So I hung out at his farm for three or four days, and we started talking about some of the smuggles I'd done. He was not an importer, he was a dealer. He was connected to these Lebanese people who would bring tons of Lebanese hash into Canada. And then Rosie would sell it to people from all over North America. So I wrote the piece, but in the meantime he fronted me like 100 or 150 kilos. We smuggled it back into the United States and I sold it to friends of mine who I had been doing business with prior to that. So then with Rosie's money and connections I went back to Europe and started sending loads of hash back to the United States.

Next page: Outlaw marijuana growers still see themselves as political ... as American