Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [10]
South Florida, as Nelson and Pincus described it, was the victim of its own geography. Its thousands of miles of beaches, hundreds of airstrips, the inviting emptiness of the Everglades—all beckoned the drug merchants.
“When it comes to law and order and justice and all those other beautiful things the Constitution promises, the United States of America ends just north of the Miami line. Miami is a free-fire zone, a no man’s land—call it what you will,” Nelson said.
“This is drug central, amigo. From spaced-out kids to pillars of the establishment—everybody’s into it; everybody’s getting rich, and some people are getting dead.”
From the Caribbean came huge quantities of marijuana, particularly from Jamaica, where ganja was the biggest cash crop. From Colombia in South America came mountains more of marijuana and perhaps the most prized drug of all, cocaine, the rich man’s high.
The Colombian smugglers had established networks to move small quantities of cocaine. It came in purses, in high heels, in bellies and rectums. Customs once found two kilos sewn into the corpse of a three-month-old baby. A young Colombian once fell over dead, getting off a flight from Bogotá. When the pathologists got to her, they discovered she had stuffed nearly a pound of pure cocaine into her vagina. The plastic bags had leaked.
“She never would have to work another day in her life. Instead, she went out on an eternal high.” Pincus snickered.
However, as the market grew, Nelson related, the smugglers had grown bolder. Small quantities became tedious, more trouble than they were worth. The smugglers began sending freighter loads of grass and big bundles of coke through the Windward and Mona passages into the Florida Straits. Fast boats came from shore to offload. Airborne smugglers landed tons of grass on headlight-lit runways in the Everglades. One load was enough to pay for an aged DC-3 or a rusty tramp freighter a dozen times over.
In the past few years the drug trickle had become an avalanche of unprecedented proportions. It was enormous, unstoppable. If the risks were huge, so were the profits. Drugs made hundreds of blue-jean millionaires every year.
And new widows as well, for as the volume grew, so did the violence. For a long time the Colombians distilled the coke and ran it as far as Florida. There the Cubans took over.
Among the half million Cuban exiles in Miami there were some who remembered fondly the old Batista days when tough hombres ran the women and the slots and their own private armies. The Cuban multitude also held legions of lean young men who had learned to kill, to infiltrate, to run small boats at high speed on moonless nights. The CIA had taught them, in a secret, losing war against Fidel Castro. They had learned well—and they had taught their young, acquisitive, upwardly mobile American-bred cousins, nephews and children.
Drug money was easy money. But more and more it tended to be bloody money.
“Now the pros are in tight. They have no room for wise-ass amateurs. There are still some around, but soon the big boys will be calling all the shots.”
The violence had begun in earnest when the offshore-onshore arrangement between the Colombians and the Cubans had begun breaking down. Cocaine greed had been the divisor.
The Colombians had decided to become farmer-to-market dopers, cutting out the Cuban middlemen. They had moved onshore, setting up their own networks in Miami to distribute Colombia’s down-home produce. The Cubans had writhed at the intervention, defended their home turf with lead and moved offshore, buying wholesale in Colombia and transporting the coke northward themselves.
It would be messy, but simple, if the Colombians shot the Cubans and vice versa, but it was more confusing than that. Colombians also shot Colombians and Cubans shot Cubans, and if sometimes a beautiful woman and her little girl got