B35) Arriving with weed in my luggage

September 1984 Midnight

Sky Harbor International Airport. Flying from phoenix to Chicago with four suitcases full of marijuana. This is a nice flight to take. Leaving at midnight the plane is often sparsely populated. When arriving into chicago’s ohare airport (weather permitting) you can see the sunrise when landing. It’s beautiful.

I began to spend so much time on airplanes, once I heard the jet engines begin to howl and scream I fell into a trance and drifted off to sleep.

It didn’t take but a couple of months before I was trying to cram eighty pounds or more into my luggage. You need four suitcases for eighty pounds if you are lucky. That looks odd. One man checking four very heavy suitcases. I paid in cash which made it even odder. I was wearing a full length leather coat topped off with my Indiana Jones hat.

Did I look like a drug dealer or what?

In actuality I was the perfect passenger. I paid in cash and wanted nothing more than a calm quiet flight. I wanted to fit in. to be seen but not seen. To blend in. I did not want to be remembered for any reason. Eventually I began to dressed like a businessman and carried the wall street journal under my arm. If I didn't have the Wall Street Journal then I was a magazine, GQ or Esquire.

(On one flight I sat next to a federal judge and his wife. The judge and I had a nice conversation during the flight. He had his private pilots license. We chatted up a storm, I even bought him a drink.  After I found out the man was a Federal Judge I became aware I was wearing a nicer suit than he. My job paid better.

Reagan appointed this guy. A brilliant judicial mind so he was smart. But the judge was not smart enough to know not to stick his hand under a lawn mower while it was running. The brilliant legal mind was missing a few digits on his right hand (if memory serves). It looked painful)

After handing me a ticket with boarding pass I was told the sky cab would be needed to take my luggage to the gate. I missed the opportunity of checking my bag at the ticket counter. This never happened before.

Let this be reason number one to be on time!

A sky cab loaded my suitcases onto his cart and we proceeded to the boarding area. I had a smile painted on my face with a weighty look of concern in my eyes. This was going to be interesting.
At the gate a baggage handler would come get my bags and load them into the cargo hold. I felt trapped in the circumstance I so careless created. I had only one way to go and that was forward.

What worried me was the xray machine between us and the gate. They were going to xray my luggage.

At the security checkpoint my luggage was placed on the conveyer belt and fed into the xray machine. I took the opportunity to sidle up next to the robust woman staring at the monitor attached to the x-ray machine.

I needed to see it.

I wanted to see it.

What a grand opportunity to see what weed looks like in a suitcase with the aid of the xray machine. How often will this opportunity present itself?

As each suitcase passed through the machine it could not have been more obvious I had weed in my luggage. Weed or coke. Bale shaped objects. It was definitely something other than clothes. I stood there looking in disbelief. Why was she not sounding the alarm?

The security official could not have looked more disinterested. I loved her for that!

I think the Jedi mind trick I played on her worked to perfection.

“Everything looks fine”

“Have a nice flight sir”.

I do feel the force. Thank you obi wan Kenobi.

I don’t recall if I tipped the sky cab or not. I hope I did. Those fucking bags were heavy.
This experience put me off flying with weed. I never wanted to go through this again. I needed a car. It was time to start driving loads. From here on out I’m driving the loads.

It was a beautiful sunrise as we landed. Everything went fine when I arrived to Chicago. I hopped in a cab and headed for streamwood, IL. Three pieces of luggage in the taxi trunk and one in the backseat with me. 

I arrived to DT’s house in streamwood around 7:00am. We got all the suitcases in the house and started weighing the weed. I wanted to smoke a joint and DT had no rolling papers so we hopped in his car and headed to the seven eleven.

We were not gone long.
On our way back to DT’s house, when we turned the corner we saw four Streamwood police cars parked in front of his house. There were many uniformed officers on the lawn, walking around the house.

We pulled into a strangers driveway, backed out and went back to the 7-11 to call DT’s wife.
She answered the phone as if nothing was wrong because nothing was wrong.

How can that be?

DT told her to look out front. With eighty pounds spilled out all over DT’s living room floor his wife opened the front door and a cop was right there.

She stepped outside and asked the officer what was going on?

As it turned out the neighbors were robbed during the night. They woke up with their TV, stereo and a few other items gone. Someone broke in as robbed them as they slept. How wild is that?

The cops were outside looking for whatever? Footprints. Evidence of the theift.

Everything was fine. We went back to the house and back to bagging eighty pounds of weed into one pound  zip lock bags. The cops were right outside as we worked.