I got an email yesterday, from an Amazon customer who hasn’t yet received his copy of “Barry ‘the boys,’” my book about the biggest drug smuggler in American history, and it has prompted me to do something I’ve been reluctant to do:

Announce my coming—but  not quite yet imminent—demise.

My reply to the customer whose book was tardy included the disclosure I hoped to have made in a slightly more elegant fashion. (I think it’s called being “Overtaken by Events.”) I needed to notify customers that in future my Amazon fulfillment will be in the hands of someone who’s relatively pain-free.

Handled.

 

MadCow is Dying?

What it is I do, I’ve always felt, is not about me. But about the work. Alas, at a `certain point, it is about me. This is one of those times.

No sooner was that crisis averted when I got a broadcast email from a longtime correspondent with a subject line reading (in all caps) MADCOW IS DYING. 

And I realized things wouldn’t get any easier until I divulged my current status and publicized it to that small fraction of humanity that follows my work.

 

“Yeah, you know, like Stage 4”

I was recently diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, and am currently in a hospice in Venice, Florida. Apparently, Stage 4 is the wrong end of the scale to be on.

In my day job, I mostly covered drug trafficking. And I had the same goal journalist Gary Webb did regarding CIA drug trafficking. He told me once that all he wanted was to be able to say that he’d helped drag the dead body out from underneath the bed just a few more inches.

It’s a noble ambition, and one we both found to be harder than it looked. But since Gary is at least indirectly responsible for my neurodivergent career path, he’s a good place to start.

Back in those long-ago halcyon days during the 1990’s, Webb reported a series of bombshell articles in the San Jose Mercury News entitled “Dark Alliance,” about the CIA having allowed that colorful gang 0f freedom-loving thugs called the Contras to sell cocaine to fuel their insurgency. I’m sure a few of  you remember it.

It happened right after the Civil War.

 

America’s Big Dirty Secret? What, just the one?

For his  pains, Gary Webb was exiled to an American gulag where they keep those with the temerity to speak unpleasant truths about America’s Big Dirty Secrets.

He was run out of journalism. I recall the New York Times and the Washington Post being particularly unkind. Soon he found himself unemployable in his chosen profession. He lost his house, then his family, and finally committed suicide the night before they came to repossess the last thing he cared about: his motorcycle.

It’s an almost ineffably sad story, and I can only hope that—if he still is, and wherever he is—he knows how big a culture hero he became to a generation of Americans… and that he was not the loser I’m sure he felt himself to be when he took his own life (it took two shots, so you know he was serious.)

Incidentally, the name of the US Attorney in San Francisco who stifled the prosecution of Contra-associated drug traffickers connected to the CIA was Robert Mueller.

Which is an excellent example of the sort of incidental knowledge that following the drug trade has provided.

Trump Attorney General Bob Barr, to take another example, was first exposed as a CIA agent in a book about Iran Contra, Terry Reed’s groundbreaking  “Compromised.”

Barr’s been running strictly true to form these days.

 

The Cleveland Browns meet The Mighty Wurlitzer

Unfortunately, journalism—the Fourth Estate—is the Cleveland Browns of American institutions. It always finishes out of the money. All we hear is some tinny music in the background from what Webb used to call “The Mighty Wurlitzer.”

(Check out Kill the Messenger (2014), exploring his investigation tying the Reagan administration to drug trafficking in San Francisco during the cocaine-fueled 1980’s.)

As for me, I’ve had my “three-score and ten,” I’m happy, and (mostly) at peace with how I spent my time here.

I lived my life (not somebody else’s) and had a ton of fun doing it.

For twenty years I was privileged to investigate stories too hot for the Oatmeal Journalism which dominates America’s news-cycles. (And—forgive me for saying so, but I got surprisingly good at it.)

I realize the inherent absurdity of believing that my feeble efforts could ever change anything. The loot from drug trafficking constitutes the biggest slush fund in the history of the planet. You and I still don’t get any part of it. And they’re not about to let it out of their sight.

Was it childishly naïve to think the truth will set you free? I don’t think so. Telling the truth—as we perceive it— is all anyone can do. You Don’t Push the River.

Also, the incidental knowledge that I was able to accumulate along the way was, well, fun.

 

“Paging Paris Hilton. White courtesy telephone.”

I know the story behind what happened when a ‘400-Kilo Drug Bust’ went down at Paris Hilton’s Ranch in Costa Rica, although I can’t remember the last time I heard her name.

On a more serious note,  I know the Big Dirty Secret behind 9/11, which had nothing to do with holograms or ‘termites’ (thermite) in the World Trade Center Towers… but with the Lear jet of the owner of the Huffman Aviation flight school that was busted—just three weeks after Mohamed Atta arrived for flight lessons—with 43 pounds of heroin onboard.

That amount of heroin is what’s known in the trade as “heavy weight.”

What’s happening now in my life is what’s called the ‘perceived end of middle age,’ which is a general summary of my subjective rate of ageing.

As I carefully lay down the various strands of my life, I’m reminded of my gloriously footloose days in Southern California, when the weather report always called for “late night and early morning low clouds and fog along the coast, turning to hazy sunshine by mid-afternoon, with a high of 72.”

That’s probably changed by now. I’m not particularly sad if I’m not around to see it.

I was lucky enough to have written a play that ran all summer one year (an instantly forgettable comedy) at a nifty theater on Sunset in West Hollywood . It was called “The Burning of Los Angeles,” named for a classic novel about Hollywood in the ‘20’s…until…

Until… you guessed it: Los Angeles burned, after the Rodney King debacle, and titling a madcap comedy “The Burning of Los Angeles” was out of the question.

 

“The Zen of Finishing Strong!”

There are as-yet unnamed Americans who make more money from the drug trade than two dozen Mexican drug lords with bandoliers strapped crossways across their bare chests could ever even think about making. They’re mostly called bankers.

My ambition was always to—before I shuffle off this mortal coil—have some vague idea of what was going on while I was alive.

I can say with confidence: I came close.  All in all, I had the time of my life.

 ^“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”

There was a time when I ran the Los Angeles or San Francisco Marathon almost every year. And for some reason I recall something that happened at mile marker 23—three miles from the finish line— on a hot smoggy day in LA.

As I trudged along, those more fleet of foot were already walking back past me, headed to their cars, and then home.

And for some reason—I must have looked in agony—a man who’d already finished stopped and stared at me, and then pumped is fist and said (his exact words)  “The Zen of Finishing Strong!”

And I didn’t quite know what he meant, but I picked up my pace a little.

So, I guess I did know, after all.