Sergeant Smack, page 9
Robert Johnson continued to run Johnny’s Place until the summer of 1970 when tragedy struck. Johnson’s Corsican girlfriend Millie had a fiery temper, and they constantly argued, especially over Johnson’s mounting gambling debts. Johnson had begun gambling with some Chinese in a strange game he knew little about. Millie discovered that jewelry and other valuables were missing from their house. After arriving in Bangkok, the couple had a baby boy, and he wore an expensive gold necklace. One night, without telling Millie, Johnson took the necklace to gamble with the Chinese. He lost the gold chain. When Millie found out, she went nuts and in a fit of rage slit the three-year old baby’s throat.
The Thai authorities charged Millie with murder and threw her in jail, but Johnson, with Mr. Yeung’s help, got her released on bond, possibly bribing some Thai officials. Johnson got her an American passport and a U.S. WAC (Women Army Corp) ID, and then Robert and Millie took the Laos route to Paris, France, where he had met her. “Johnson cut Millie loose,” Burch recalled. “He felt the obligation to get her out of a Thai jail and back to Europe, but the death of their baby ended their relationship.”
IN JUNE 1968, Burch was reportedly deported from Thailand to Laos, but the details of that report are in dispute. According to a DEA intelligence report, a joint investigation by the Thai police and the U.S. Army Criminal Intelligence Division (CID) disclosed that Robert Johnson, Herman Jackson, Pratt Benthall and Daniel Burch were dealing in false military IDs stolen from a military facility in Germany. The military police had subsequently apprehended Smedley at the main PX compound in Bangkok in possession of false ID and ration cards, and Johnson was also implicated. The report, however, noted that while orders to deport Johnson and Smedley had been prepared, they were never served.
“ None of that information adds up,” Burch said. “ First, the authorities were always confusing Pratt Benthall and George Pratt, so the wrong guy is identified in the report. I never saw Pratt Benthall in Thailand. Jimmy Smedley was retired military; he would have no need for ration cards.”
As for his deportation, Burch explained it this way: “Unless you had a permanent visa to stay in Thailand, you had to go out of the country every 90 days and get your passport stamped. I was legally in Thailand within the 90-day period, so they had no reason to lock me up and deport me. There were several other Americans I know in Thailand without permanent visas, but they were not thrown out. I was working on getting a permanent resident visa to stay, but Jack said to let Mr.Yeung and Mr. Udong, his lawyers, handle it. The lawyers got Ike and Smedley their resident visas, but they kept stalling me. Jack would say: ‘Don’t worry, we will be taking care of it.’ But they never did.”
Robert Johnson and George Pratt came to see Burch while he was in prison awaiting deportation. Burch explained: “The Thai prison had a wire fence with an open mesh around it, and a visitor could come right up to a prisoner and talk to them. Johnson told me: ‘Man, I hate to see a sucker (Jack) get down on somebody like this.’ Pratt called Jack ‘a rotten son-of-a-bitch’ and blamed him for getting me thrown out of the country.”
According to the DEA intelligence report, an informant told Thai police that Burch and Benthall were involved in smuggling gold and currency between Vientiane, Laos, and Jack’s American Star Bar. But Burch said that did not make sense either. “I went back to Germany and didn’t stay in Laos,” Burch said “ Besides, why would I deal with Jack’s American Star Bar after what Jack did to me?”
Today, Ike is baffled by the bitter Jackson-Burch relationship. “I knew Jack and Dan didn’t like each other, but I didn’t know all that was going on. Jack was Jack. I accepted him for what he was. I don’t think he ever tried to screw me. If Jack was jealous of me, he never showed it. Jack knew I could make him money.”
EARLY ONE MORNING in the fall of 1968, Ike paid a visit to Jack at his Bangkok home. Jack had asked Ike to come over to discuss something important. Jack brought Ike to the patio and told him to look at the front page of the newspaper while he took care of some things in the house. Ike read an article that reported on a widespread heroin epidemic in the U.S. He had not been to the U.S. for some time, and he was interested to read that Blacks were consuming a large part of the illegal drugs.
“Glad you could come by.” Jack said to Ike when he re-joined him on the patio. “How are you doing?”
“Fine, my friend. How about yourself?” Ike replied.
Jack nodded and said: “Did you take a look at the paper?”
“Yeah. That’s really something about the heroin problem back home.”
“I’m glad you looked at it. I don’t think I’ve ever told you anything about Nitaya’s family. Do you know anything about them?”
Nitaya was Jack’s latest Thai girlfriend, but she would become the love of his life. Ike recalled the first time he saw her in a kimono at his house when she and Jack stayed overnight at Ike’s place. With her slender figure, long, silky black hair, dark eyes and doll-like face, Ike thought she was the prettiest creature he had seen in Bangkok
“What?” Ike said, caught off guard by the strange question. “No, I don’t. Why did you ask that question?”
“Because it has a lot to with what you just read. Nitaya’s family is about the biggest opium grower in Thailand. They know how to process opium into heroin, and they can do it for a couple of thousand dollars a kilo. Do you know how much a kilo of heroin can get in the U.S.?
Ike shook his head. “How much?”
“From $100,000 to $150,000.”
Ike tried to comprehend the staggering numbers.
Then Jack called Nitaya to come to the patio. Jack asked her to describe what her family had been doing for decades.
Ike listened intently. “This is really something, Jack, but what does it have to do with me?”
Jack pulled his chair closer to Ike. “You think you’re making money with MPCs? Think of what you can make with that stuff. You’re the man who can make it happen. You got contacts in the military and all over the place.”
“I don’t know anything about drugs; I don’t even use them,” Ike argued. “It’s not the kind of thing I want to be a part of.”
Jack kept on Ike, reminding him of the millions of dollars they could make. Ike thought about the MPC scam. He was making a lot of money, but was tired of the weekly trips to Saigon. Besides, it was getting dangerous. The enemy was stepping up its attack on American troops, and Saigon was becoming like Fortress Vietnam. He thought about the riches the new venture offered, and the excitement of starting a new scam. The money from the MPC exchange was still rolling in, but the scam had become too easy. He was getting kind of bored. He looked at Jack, his partner, who had never steered him wrong.“Okay, man,” Ike said, reaching across the table to shake Jack’s hand. “Let’s do it!”
Ike knew enough about the military transportation system to know that Jack’s plan could work. He could recruit plenty of brothers who were not afraid to take chances.
NITAYA TOLD IKE about her relatives who had the heroin connection and lived in the Golden Triangle. While in Bangkok, Ike had heard about the famous Golden Triangle where opium was grown and heroin, manufactured. The Golden Triangle refers to a 350,000 square kilometer area that included the mountains of three Asian countries (Laos, Myanmar and Thailand) and to a lesser extent, Yunnan province in China. The region is covered by forest and is inhabited by a tribal, clannish population, estimated at 300,000 people, who live in about 300 villages. It is an area of little government control where the principal means of transportation is the backpack, an elephant or a mule.
The Golden Triangle’s rise to prominence in the international drug trade came soon after World War II ended. At the time, the region was producing less than ten tons of opium a year. But that all changed when the communists led by Mao Tse Tung conquered China in 1949 and clamped down on opium production, spurring the Golden Triangle to increase production. That began to happen when the Nationalist Chinese (the Kuomintang or KMT) fled for the safety of the Shan states of Burma, which are part of the Golden Triangle. From there, the CIA-supported KMT prepared for an invasion of Red China, but their military operation was a failure. The KMT settled into their new home and began expanding and monopolizing the opium trade in the Shan states. According to historian Alfred McCoy in his book The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia: “The KMT shipped the opium harvests to northern Thailand where they were sold to General Phao Siyanan, a Thai policeman who was a CIA client. The CIA had promoted the Phao-KMT partnership to provide a secure area for the KMT, but this alliance soon became a critical factor in the growth of Southeast Asia’s narcotics trade.”
The KMT remained in Burma until about 1961 when Taiwan cut off economic aid and the Burmese army drove the KMT out of existence. Many of them married into the local populace. The opium trade was the largest cash crop in the region. By this time, opium production had grown by almost 500 percent, from less than 10 tons in the years after World War II to an estimated 300 to 400 tons by 1962. Opium was now an integral part of the northern Thailand economy. The Bangkok Office of the National Narcotics Control Board estimated that 260 villages in the northern provinces of Payao, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai and Mae Hong Son were involved and relied economically on the opium trade. But stopping the growth of the opium trade became a formidable challenge for Thai authorities. For instance, the frontier in Chiang Mai province alone that required guarding was about 1,500 kilometers long.
Beginning in the early 1960s, first the KMT and then later the war lords of the Golden Triangle, most notably Khun Sa, who with his powerful multi-thousand strong Shan United Army, was trying to create a separate Shan nation, established heroin refineries in the Golden Triangle to support their war efforts. Heroin had come a long way since Alder Wright, an English chemist, first synthesized the narcotic drug in 1874, naming it diacetylmorphine. In 1898 Bayer Chemical Company renamed diacetylmorphine “heroin” and introduced it to the public as cure for morphine addiction.
Subsequently, heroin had a Doctor Jeckle and Mr. Hyde-type history. First it was hailed as a wonder drug that could relieve such ailments as pain, diarrhea and coughing spasms. The American Medical Association even endorsed heroin as a safe treatment for respiratory ailments, but the medical establishment came to realize that heroin was at least as addictive as morphine (in fact, heroin is about 25 times more powerful than morphine). By 1924, the U.S. outlawed the drug. In the following decades, the world continued to recognize the dangers of heroin; by 1963, it was used medically in only five countries and manufactured legally in only three. By then, however, heroin had replaced morphine and opium as the illegal drug of choice on the street.
Ethnic Chiu Chao gangsters, who can trace their origins to nearby Swatow on China’s south coast, got involved with the Golden Triangle heroin trade, and they brought chemists from Hong Kong to work in their heroin refineries. Until the Hong Kong chemists became involved, a number 3 heroin, a light tan colored powder, with a mere 3 to 6 percent purity was the best heroin that the drug traffickers could manufacture. But, by the time Ike and Jack started their heroin ring, the Golden Triangle refineries were starting to produce number 4, China White heroin that could reach nearly 99 percent purity. The opium addicts of Southeast Asia were the principal users of the lower grade number 3 heroin, usually smoking it. But American GIs in Vietnam began using the injectable number 4 heroin, and the spread of the drug soon reached epidemic proportions. In September 1970, an Army Engineer Battalion in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam surveyed 3,103 U.S. soldiers and found 11.9 percent had used heroin since their arrival in Vietnam. Two years later, the White House Office for Drug Abuse Prevention interviewed 900 enlisted men who had returned from Vietnam in September 1971, the peak of the heroin epidemic among U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, and found that 44 percent had tried opiates while in Vietnam and 20 percent reported themselves as being addicted.
A July 5, 1971, a Time magazine article titled “The Heroin Plague: What Can Be Done?” revealed that since 1969 the number of heroin addicts in the U.S. had risen from 200,000 to 300,000. “New heroin users are turning up every week in the suburban high schools, on factory lines and in the legions of the drug culture that once spurned smack as they spurned napalm,” Time reported.
Timing-wise, Ike and Jack were about to enter the international heroin trade at the most opportune moment. Nitaya’s main family contact, whose services the two partners would use most often in the formative years of their operation to buy hundreds of kilos of heroin for the U.S., was simply known as Papa San, a shadowy figure whom Ike only met twice. Ike believes Papa San was Nitaya’s uncle, and he lived in Bangkok on a small street off New Road. The DEA later learned that Papa San had two contacts that helped him make the heroin buys from the Golden Triangle. One was an unidentified Chinese male who lived about four miles from the alligator farm on the outskirts of Bangkok. The other, identified simply as Jim, was the manager of a tailor shop in Chai Pons on New Petchaburi Road. Jim would furnish any amount of heroin so long as half the money was paid up front.
Ike never did learn Papa San’s real name, but it didn’t really matter. He had the type of heroin the market wanted. As Ike explained, “China White is the best grade of heroin. In New York, one could dilute and cut pure China White using diluents, such as quinine or mannite, to produce heroin of six to ten percent purity that was safe to inject. It was the smack that junkies craved for.”
Nitaya’s family was the main connection for the Atkinson drug ring’s heroin, but Ike used a variety of other sources when available, if they could deliver the quantities and offered fair terms. Their purchase price averaged $4,000 per kilo of pure heroin. The couriers were only paid about $3,000 per trip. In the U.S., the kilo would be cut with diluents into four kilograms of 25 percent pure heroin, fetching $25,000 each, or a $100,000 for every $7,000 investment. Retail sales of heroin, after it was further diluted for safe injection (5-6 percent purity) was sold on the street for $10 per gram, building in a significant profit margin for retailers as well. However, retailers take a much greater risk of exposure to law enforcement action and “rip-offs.” Atkinson only sold his heroin at the wholesale level.
Ike and Jack rented a house in Bangkok that extended over a klong. “We had a trap door in one of the bedrooms where we stashed the heroin,” Ike recalled. “When we got going, I would buy as much as $100,000 worth of heroin at a time. We would pack the kilos there. The house was never left unguarded.”
In 1969, the DEA received information that Luchai Ruviwat and a member of the Thai government were working together as heroin suppliers. Chai, however, would not become a prominent supplier until after 1972 when Jack got in trouble with the law.
Another supply source was identified as a cabbie nicknamed “Jimmy,” who worked outside the Asoke Building on Soi 21 in Bangkok. A DEA informant reported that when he was talking with Jimmy, he had learned the cabbie had supplied heroin to the Atkinson-Jackson ring on several occasions. Jack would give the taxi driver half the money prior to delivery and the other half after delivery. In 1971, a U.S. Army Criminal Intelligence Division (CID) investigation reported that a businessman named Tosdi Iankiosanntis was allegedly involved with the Atkinson-Jackson ring. Jack had been observed at the Motor Coach Travel Service in Bangkok, Tosdi’s legal business front. Carrying a suitcase full of money, Jack was reportedly meeting to negotiate the purchase of heroin.
One informant described for the DEA what he knew about the ring’s operation. He stated that on one occasion Jackson, by fronting his money for about 15 days, purchased 15 kilos of heroin through the family sources of his wife, Nataya. At this time, Atkinson and Jack were paying about $2,250 per kilo, but the quality of heroin was not more than 75 percent pure. The heroin was packaged in one-pound quantities. First it was wrapped in strong transparent paper, the kind used for drawing blueprints, then put in a plastic bag, which was placed inside a brown cardboard box. The box was further wrapped in brown paper and then again in plastic. The informant stated that Jack had bought between 28 and 30 boxes of heroin from those sources.
Dealing with various dealers could cause some headaches. One DEA informant claimed that Jack had bought a murder contract on a source of supply whose name was believed to be Ought Sapsong, because he had “cheated” Jackson out of $3,400. Sapsong allegedly disappeared with Jackson’s money after offering to sell him heroin cheaper than what he had been paying. But many law enforcement officials marvel at how violence-free the drug ring was, considering the level at which it operated. Ike never carried a gun and was never implicated in any murders connected to the drug trade. Sergeant Smack, however, knew how to use a gun, if need be. After all, he was ex-army.
THE PLAN OF operation was as follows: Jack would handle the supply, and when Ike was not in Bangkok, Jack would also see to it that the heroin was properly packaged for shipment to the U.S. It would be up to Ike to figure out how to get the drugs into the U.S. Atkinson would move back to Goldsboro and await the arrival of the heroin. He would then set up sales to drug distributors eager to purchase the high-grade heroin.
In taking numerous military hops since his retirement in 1963, Ike was familiar with how Customs officials operated. Only once had he seen MPs bringing out a specially trained K-9 unit to sniff luggage. In that incident, one of the dogs went towards a young serviceman. It looked to Ike as if the man had been smoking weed earlier, and the dog caught the scent. “I’ve got nothing,” the nervous serviceman blurted out. The MPs took him to a nearby bathroom where Ike could hear the man insisting that he had no drugs with him. After strip-searching the detained serviceman and finding nothing, the MPs took him out of the bathroom and searched his luggage. Again, they found nothing. On his many trips back and forth between Bangkok and the U.S., Ike never did see anyone arrested for a drug violation.
