A Friend's Bad Decision (s)

Today is Thursday April First Two Thousand Ten. April fools day. I don't know the history of this day but I do remember the snowstorm we had on this day a few years ago. It was like mother nature telling us "Fuck You, Fools ! Spring Ain't Here !" I think if I had to choose a higher power it would be mother nature. She is something I respect, worship, and need in a daily basis. I've always been an outside kid and one of the main indicators of my addiction was that I was inside all the time. Apologies for the spelling mistakes but I just upgraded mo-zilla and my right button doesn't seem to allow me to check spelling anymore. It lets me know that a word is misspelled but it doesn't allow me to replace it with a suggested word. Fuckers.

It was the summer of Two Thousand One and I had quit my high brow job and high tailed it to NOLA Jazzfest that previous April. I was living in a mansion on the best street in Salem MA and really enjoying life. I was going out seven nites a week to carouse and see music. My friend had started a custom hand drum shop the previous year and asked me for some help. What turned into some computer work ended up with me working in the drum shop for the summer and it was awesome. For someone who hadn't worked with his hands in years it was like a dream come true. It was hot, sawdusty, loud, and sometimes terrifying work but I liked it. We would get woods from furniture stores and rip them down into pieces in order to assemble Djembe drums. My friend rented a shop in Rockport and we had a pretty good production line going. Money was always a problem because while people liked the drums they just were not buying them so my friend supplemented his income my dealing drugs out of the shop. This really didn't bother me as this friend has dealt drugs for as long as I've known him and I'm no saint either. One day he asked me what I thought of the idea of some LSD in liquid form be shipped in a wine bottle from Europe and then we could buy any tools we needed with the profits of selling the LSD. For those who don't know, a wine bottle full of liquid LSD is a pantload of the drug and with a couple drops going for five bucks it was a goldmine. I told him that it wasn't the best idea and perhaps he should ask his folks for a business loan and then I went back to building drums.

It was early August and I had just returned from Indy where I had attended my great aunt's birthday. When I couldn't reach mt friend to find out what time we were going to work in the morning I called his house and his girl answered crying. She explained that he was in a ton of trouble and that I should come over right away. When I arrived she was a mess and explained someone had sent him something and the cops had intercepted it and he was in a shitload of trouble. My eyebrows went up and she asked me if I had known anything about it and I told her that he had mentioned the possibility of something like that but there was no way to talk him out of anything when it came to dealing drugs. She freaked out at first but I was able to explain that this was a few months prior and I didn't think anything of it. Obviously I was wrong and then something went very wrong because the whole idea of LSD is that it is a colorless, odorless liquid that should get past customs unless the packaging is suspect.

Well, not only was the packaging & return address suspect but the idiot sent a few kilos of MDMA powder rather than the planned LSD. From what details I know it was sent in a box with a false bottom and a bogus return address. Customs noticed the bogus return address and investigated further. Then the DEA placed the shop in Rockport under surveillance for a few days and then made a controlled delivery to my friend. He was chilling with some friends of mine and as soon as he signed his name for it a bunch of gun toting cops burst thru the doors and spread eagled everyone in the shop. We had a sort of living room/jam area in the shop and the DEA tore everything apart looking for more drugs. Thankfully they only found a few pipes and a small amount of grass and thats it. So yes, my friend is an idiot for doing something like this but the guy on the other end was a complete idiot for not taking more care in sending it and not sending the correct substance. I am not saying all of this wouldn't have happened if LSD rather than MDMA was send because all in all its a dumb idea but there was an element of trust there.

So my friend was faced with a decision. Go down for the entire amount of drugs and be faced with a minimum of ten years in prison or help the DEA catch the idiot who sent the drugs in the first place. My friend chose the latter not only because he wanted to save his own ass but he felt that this guy had totally fucked him in this deal. He wore a wire and met with someone multiple times and the DEA arrested both of them at one of the meets. My friend didn't spend much time in jail at that point but he was under the management of the DEA and US Marshall service. He had to go into Boston once or twice a week to submit urine and well as work out his plea agreement with the federal version of the district attorney. This being a federal crime both helped and fucked him at the same time. He believes that he was given less time than he would have but in the federal system you have to serve at least eighty five percent of your sentence. There is no time off for good behavior.

As expected, my friend received three years in prison with two and a half years to be served. I am not quite sure how all of that works but the bottom line is that we was going to be locked up for quite a long time and he was given about six months to prepare for it. It was a difficult time, he had to tell his family about it and he had a one year old at home. I think that the waiting and the unknowns may have been the worst part other than the actual time served. He had also just purchased a house and he needed to work as much as he could so that some money was put away. I don't know the exact details of how he lived his life because I had become somewhat distant with the Salem crew because of a few things that I had done and need at some point to make amends. It was around this time that I had my first extended blackout and there were people around to witness it. Normally I would be alone when I got so drunk that I blacked out but one night there were a couple of people around to witness it. I feel however rightly or wrongly that a couple of people took out their frustrations on what happened to my friend on me and I was pretty much shunned by a couple of good friends of mine.