How the vice head boy of a top Joburg school took the term vice too literally

Review: Vivien Horler

High Times – The extraordinary life of a Joburg dope smuggler, by Roy Isacowitz and Jeremy Gordin (Jonathan Ball)

We’ve all heard of small-time dope smugglers and sellers being arrested, but hardly ever hear of the kingpins going to jail. Who are they and what are they like?

This book is about one such kingpin, and he certainly went to jail. And he was once vice head boy of King David School in Joburg, nogal.

The subtitle of the book is a little misleading, because while Michael Medjuck certainly grew up in Joburg, he left SA right after school – he had a Canadian passport – and settled in Vancouver.

And that was where he became a dope maestro, smoking, smuggling and selling marijuana and hashish, living well with numerous foreign bank accounts for 22 years – until he was arrested in Seattle in the US.

And that turned out to be very bad news indeed, since the US attitude to drugs was a lot more rigorous than in Canada.

When this book first landed on my desk I didn’t expect to read it – it’s not really my kind of book. But I read a few pages so I could refer to it in my monthly Bedside Table feature on the website – and was hooked.

It is pacy and well written, and is about Medjuck’s biggest dope deal – probably the biggest in US history at that point – and his prison experience.

The book opens in June 1991 with a tuna fishing boat, the Barbara H, wallowing in a calm Pacific Ocean somewhere between Japan and San Francisco. But the seven men aboard are not fishermen – in the authors’ words, “the closest any of them had ever gotten to tuna was by opening a can”.

They are waiting to rendezvous with the mother ship, the freighter Lucky Star, which has failed to arrive for two full days and isn’t responding on any of the agreed radio frequencies.

Eventually radio contact is achieved, and it turns out the sole representative of the hashish smuggling syndicate aboard the freighter Lucky Star has confused the geographical coordinates with the radio frequency. Rookie error.

The two ships are about five days’ sailing apart.

This enrages the captain of Lucky Star because he doesn’t wanto hang about not far from American territorial waters with a hold full of Afghani hashish – around 70 tons of it.

A week or so later, by the time the ships finally rendezvous, the weather has gone dead off,  making the transfer of the cargo from the Lucky Star to the smaller tuna boat dangerous.

The first load of about 2.5 tons is transferred safely, but the next lands in the sea.

The ships are tied up, bow to bow and stern to stern, but the bigger vessel is rolling wildly, threatening to swamp the fishing boat. The crew of the Barbara H cut themselves free, resulting in a furious Lucky Star steaming off.

The next thing is that two US Navy ships approach the Lucky Star, and insist they have the right to board the freighter.

There’s a teaser for you – to use the salty language employed in the book, everything is going tits up.

Medjuck wasn’t aboard either ship, but he was the kingpin, this was his deal. And it turns out the feds know a lot more about the deal than Medjuck had dreamed.

Medjuck is arrested and eventually, after a plea bargain, is sentenced to around 24 years in a US prison.

What follows is the story of his incarceration, and it quickly becomes very clear that you do not want, ever, to be locked up in an American prison. Counter-intuitively, it turns out conditions are much worse in the smaller county jails than they are in the federal prisons, but Medjuck gets plenty of experience of both. And some of the events are mind-blowing, and not only thanks to drugs (although there are plenty available).

Medjuck comes out of this book relatively well. He’s portrayed by the authors as charming, likeable, and basically a decent guy. He deals only in hashish and dagga, never serious drugs like cocaine, acid or heroin.

By the time he finally leaves jail, though he finds the drug climate has changed. The industry is now run by the Colombian cartels who will shoot you soon as look at you – or worse. And so he eventually goes straight – well, straightish.

As I said, not my usual reading fare – but absolutely gripping.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One thought on “How the vice head boy of a top Joburg school took the term vice too literally

  1. David Bristow

    I would read it if it landed on my desk: you must be collating a sizeable library by now. As an aside, at Getaway we got heaps of – some very nice – travel and nature books to review, so I started a library of them. After my tenure some bright replacement editor decided it was the digital age and disposed of them all, along with the full set of mags I had had purpose bound in annual sets.

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