The King of Juice (Episode 3 – Moving On Up)

It wasn’t until early 1994 that I truly came into my own as a steroid dealer. While I had been pimping gear for The Growler for over 20 months and making some nice coinage doing so, working under The Growler made me a little paranoid. He was sloppy, had a big mouth and left a trail that anyone could pick up if the really looked. Like most young, stupid juice pushers, he had some money and thought he was superman, he was invincible. A real untouchable.

Now I was not the only person distributing gear for The Growler and he made a cardinal mistake in letting all of us, all eight of us working under him, meet at one of his lavish, hedonistic, fuckfest parties. Now don’t get me wrong, man, nobody I have ever known can party and get great pussy like The Growler. I remember the first Halloween party he threw that I went to. It was like a Roman Orgy. I remember I walked into his apartment and while he must have had a 2000 square foot place, it was nowhere big enough to handle the 50-60 people who were there. The music was loud and topless, hotbody fitness chicks were running around naked or topless. I thought I had died and went to Heaven. Here I am, a guy who 6 months before was a virgin, couldn’t get laid if his life depended on it and now I am at this cool party with gorgeous sluts. The women were there for the drugs of course. The Growler, and this truly demonstrated his sheer stupidity, sometimes dealt cocaine, marijuana, and ecstasy on the side. Dealing hard drugs, recreational drugs is often what brings down many a steroid dealer because the margins in hard drugs are higher and the turnover is faster than in steroid pushing. Anyhow, The Growler had a QP of grass, maybe 3-4 eightballs and a bunch of X-tabs. So the hotbody chicks were all coked up and X-ed out or stoned. I was in the kitchen, mingling (and meeting other steroid dealers) when a fairly well known fitness chick from Florida who had not quite made national headlines (and who is really a petite little woman) came right over to me and never stopped talking for 20 minutes. Blah, bah, blah!!! Finally, I got so mad, I told her I had something I’d like to stick into her mouth to shut her up. She looked at me, giggled, dropped to her knees, unzipped my pants and sucked my dick right in the kitchen in front of maybe a dozen people. I was flabbergasted. This was the point in my life when I realized just how easy it would be for me to have sex with any woman or virtually any woman I wanted.

So The Growler was not very careful. In the Summer of 1995, the Louisiana State Police attempted to execute a search warrant on The Growler’s place. I almost shit when this happened because I was sitting in his living room playing Nintendo on his big screen when the knock came on the door. The Growler went to the door and when he opened it, surprise!!! Six state police officers busted through and shoved a warrant in his face. This sucked. This truly sucked because we were both cuffed and stuffed on the couch while the cops went through the place. Yep, they found all his shit, his steroids, his cocaine, his ecstasy. I was cursing that stupid son of a bitch in my mind . I was thinking I was truly fucked, that I would go to prison and that my life was over now. We got very lucky.

The clerk who typed out the search warrant put the wrong address on the warrant. Our attorneys argued that this invalidated the warrant and thus, the forced entry into The Growler’s apartment was a violation of out 4^thAmendment rights prohibiting unlawful search and seizure. So while the cops got to keep all the drugs, we got to go free.

Now you would have thought that such an experience would have made a substantial impact on the business operations of one Mr. Growler. I mean, this experience had a profound experience on me, I decided I would be so very careful, so very scrutinous that I would never get caught, that I would rather be known as a paranoid asshole than some sloppy Joe who was going to get himself and everyone around himself busted. But The Growler went back to his exact modus operandi and thus, I was forced to look around and find another “sponsor” because there was no way I was going to do business with this dude anymore. It took me about 3 or 4 weeks but I did find a good hookup who had prices only slightly higher than The Growler’s. I phased all thoughts of The Growler out until Christmas 1995. It was around then that I got a phone call from one of The Growler’s “salesmen” where I heard ole’ Growls got popped again and was going down for a long time. Indeed, he did go down…forever. Growler was found guilty of like 30 counts of possession with intent to distribute and so many other charges that the list filled up two pieces of paper. He was sentenced to 10-15 years. In 1996, The Growler took a shiv to the neck in a prison fight and that was the end of him.

However, after The Growler was sentenced, I thought that I might fill his role and bump myself up the ladder a notch. So, remembering the people I had met at the Halloween party, I made a list and came up with 11 people who had been dealing out for The Growler. When I called them, 2 had already found a new hook in. But the other 8 did not and boy were they ready to start dealing again. So I decided to meet with them one on one to discuss my idea for a “new steroid dealing enterprise”.

I had some very simple rules to follow if you wanted to deal out for me:

• If you can’t memorize, you can’t deal. No written records of anything are to be kept.
• If you get caught, you keep your mouth shut and get a lawyer. If you rat me or anyone else out to save your hide, I will have you killed.
• Keep a low profile. Do not solicit new customers. Let old customers who have “friends” looking for stuff buy the stuff for friends. New customers can mean police infiltration.
• Collusion is a good thing. My prices to each dealer was the same and I expected them to retail out at the same prices. No undercutting to make an extra couple of hundred bucks.
• No steroids in your home. Go get a box somewhere in a bank or whatever, but nothing in the house and you work in pairs for delivery – one guy has the gear somewhere else the other guy takes the order, pages the first guy and a drop is set up.
• I am the only upline you have. If you use another upline I cut you off for good. No second chances.

Now these may seem like suckball rules but I sold gear so cheaply that most of my original 8 dealers had no problem respecting these. The weakest of my dealers made a good $1000 per week. I was raking in around $5500-$7000 per week at this time. And life was getting good.

I bought condo’s in Mexico. I bought expensive cars and motorcycles. I bought pretty much whatever I liked and never saved a fucking dime because there was always “next week’s” money.

I am guessing that between drugs, vacations, cars, motorcycles, wild parties, whatever, that I spend around $300,000 that first year. Just pissed it away.

I was also getting power hungry and even more money hungry. Seven grand per week was not enough, I wanted twenty grand per week. I wanted to branch out of Louisiana into the other states, heck I wanted to go International.

I became desensitized and ruthless. I had this mad appetite for power and didn’t give a shit about consequences because I didn’t think there were any. After all, I was 6’3″ and a solid 260 pounds. I was the man. At a party I had, some gymwhore brought her kid sister who was maybe 14 years old and way in over her head. I did lines with the 14 year old and then fucked her up the ass on my pool table. Why? Because I could damn it!!! I had a national level bodybuilder from Florida beg me to front him about $10K worth of growth hormone. This guy is now an IFBB professional. I told him that if he sucked my dick I would loan him the growth hormone. Let’s just say I didn’t have to ask him to blow me twice. I’m not a fucking homo, so don’t even go there. It’s a power trip. I owned that guy and he knew it. Fuck, if he’d suck my dick for growth hormone there isn’t anything he wouldn’t do for me. My crew would go to titty bars and just do whatever the hell we wanted. I can’t remember how may ménage au trois I had with strippers I yanked out of clubs. Paradoxically, the more “out on the edge” I became, the less life seemed to excite me. I was becoming something I said I would not become ever. I was becoming The Growler.

Right after New Years 1998 I took a look at what my organization had become. I had a deputy now, his name was Rocco and he was the first of my dealers. I had 2 other sub-distributors under me and a total of 18 gym level dealers each moving $4000-$10000 worth of gear per week. With all that I had, I was falling apart psychologically and I handed over control of the organization to Rocco while I checked into Rehab for 28 days to sober up, compose my thoughts and get my head screwed on straight. If you have ever been to Rehab then you know how much it sucks. If you have never been to Rehab then I truly envy you. Kicking recreational drugs as a habit is one of the toughest things I have ever done. The drugs are demons and once they get inside you they never leave. Rehab teaches you how to lock them in a box, but oh how you can still hear them. They beckon to you, hide in shadows and whisper in your ear, “just one bong hit, just one line, just one hit of X, you can control it”.

When I got released from Rehab I looked at what I thought I had but the truth was I had nothing. Yeah, I had this vast network of goons to push steroids for me but I had no contingency plan, no nothing if this source of income dried up. I need to invest and divest.

I started to take 30% of what I made each week, my take from the dole and started “nesting” this in a variety of bank accounts located in Bermuda and Grand Cayman. Then I would transfer some of the money back and invest that in high growth mutual funds. I started doing this in February of 1998. It is December of 1999 now and I have just over $1.1 million dollars safely tucked away for “my retirement”, which looks like it may happens sooner than later.

Where before I was too stoned and too enmeshed in juvenile, concrete operational thought, I had no changed into a slick, efficient, mechanized individual. Previously, I had made one person very rich buy getting all my gear through him. But now, with the volume the organization was doing, saving 50 cents per amp could translate into $5000 per week. Not only that, but we were very limited in the selection we could offer. A bigger menu might mean more clients. So I started putting feelers out in Eastern Europe and Thailand. It wasn’t long before I had a connection at Jelfa in Poland for Omnadren and Metanbol. I had a guy in France who could get us Parabolan and Theramex Testosterone. I had guys in Thailand who could send up tubs of Anabol for $150 per 1000 tablets. I was making “friends”. Even though business doubled in a short period of time, even though I added 2 more “managers” and maybe 5 or 6 more dealers in other states, my income did not seem to double. Maybe I took home $1000 per week more. I was mulling over this when we had a major catastrophe – our source for Mexican steroids got spooked over something and decided to go out of business. Fucking great!!! No notice, not a damned thing, just a phone call that said, “it’s over baby”. Breaking up is so hard to do.

I had to come up with a way to get Mexican gear and get it cheaply, in massive amounts and in short time. I decided that our organization had to do two things:

1. We had to set up a domestic counterfeiting side that made “clones” of Mexican gear just in case we could not get real Mexican gear and
2. We had to have more than one reliable Mexican pipeline.

Next Installment: Episode IV: Welcome to Cyberspace

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Cinco de Mayo