Word: bigs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...talking with macho casualness of the consecutive days and nights they spend tied to the maze of mantle heaters, two-way retorts, pumps, air-scavenging systems, condensers and plastic piping during a "burn." Says Bernard: "If you set it up right, nobody knows where you are; it's no big thing." Bernard is a virtuoso of camouflage by misdirection, of hiding the obvious in plain sight. Once, this kitchen crew recalls delightedly, they cooked a batch on the shore of Lake Elsinore, a popular tourist spot near Los Angeles, tending the bubbling retorts in a round-the-clock paranoid marathon...
...Pass, Ore., for $15,000 a lb. Almost a million net, even before the powder hit the streets, sold by the gram for nearly the same price as cocaine. A lesser cook chortles, "Those people in Oregon are taking everything we can make, and they pay a premium." Adds Big John with the believer's certitude: "Dollar for dollar, crank is better than coke: coke is just a little sexier, but crank goes eight times as far." It is obviously a more profitable line for American traffickers inclined to avoid exporting their earnings to Colombia...
...Finally a Cadillac with four men inside bumps along the track. The presence of guards at a pig farm, waving visitors through, confirms the group's suspicion that a batch was brewing, its odor lost in the waft from the barns. "Don't ask me; it's not mine," Big John says. "That's a bunch of Mexican nationals down there, and I'm not of a mind to visit...
...never been arrested, and I've never used speed; you can't do that and survive what I do. But you really get an adrenaline rush from doing this sort of thing, and I'm an adrenaline junkie. If I wanted to keep on, I could make it big; I could make a couple million dollars...
...know what I mean?" The stare is direct. "That's one reason I'm getting out, because I've got my kids, and I think about things and don't react the way I used to, and that isn't good in this business. When you're doing it big, you've got to act crazy. A guy is not going to pay you if he don't think you're the kind of guy going to come and stick a gun in his head and say, 'Hey, mother, I'm going to kill you right now.' You understand...