Southern California Tales of the Crank

By Jonathan Beaty

Big John, first at the rendezvous somewhere southeast of Los Angeles, sits patiently in the captain's chair of his motor home, parked on a promontory overlooking a panorama of backcountry hills green as spring in the afternoon sun. A full silver beard spreads over his chest, almost obscuring the picture of a Thompson submachine gun on his red T shirt. THE LAST GREAT AMERICAN FREEDOM MACHINE, reads the legend. A bird-skinning knife is holstered parallel to his belt. Big John is an original road warrior, a man whose history stretches back to the beginning of time as bikers measure it: 20 years riding the Harley express across the country delivering a variety of drugs -- first methamphetamines (called crank by the bikers and speed by city users), then cocaine, and now crank again. "When the good German meth was taken off the market by those guys in San Diego with the Mexican connection in 1981 or so, I decided I was too old to learn to cook ((manufacture synthetic drugs)) myself, so I just shifted over to coke."

He hitches around to look back at his companion, Jeanette, who sits on the bed doing something with stacks of tiny Ziploc bags. "Wasn't that '81, hon?" Taking a mumble for confirmation, Big John peers beyond the cat stretched out in the sunlight on the dashboard. "There are 150 narcs running around out there, and everybody is in a stampede to roll over. Everybody and his brother is distributing Product, and it's getting to be a dog-eat-dog world." His face assumes a mournful set: "I've been ripped off by my friends big time; they get down into the bag, on the pure stuff, and get paranoid, and right away they want to get you first." Too much crank can easily produce self- destructive paranoia.

Far below, a black Jeep starts up the dirt road leading to the hilltop. Three alchemists, led by the inestimable Bernard, have come for a meeting. "At least there's one cook that ain't wired to the max," Big John concedes. "He never touches the Product." It shows: most illegal drug chemists, awash in dollars but their brains stewed by fumes, seldom pay attention to the little touches that transform banal consumer goods into personal statements of good taste. Bernard has 14-karat-gold-plated wheels on his favorite Corvette, and he gave a designer team jacket to the fellow who jockeys his offshore-racing boat. But Bernard is not some Johnny-come-lately cook with a jailhouse recipe in his jeans. He is a second-generation outlaw who at 16 learned how to extract pure methamphetamine from common industrial chemical solutions in a laboratory hidden on an Indian reservation. He was tutored by two German chemists flown in by his father. Bernard can't pronounce methylmethamphetamine, but he knows how to make something very like it and how much to charge. "I've worked hard for everything I have," Bernard says, proudly citing the enduring American ethic.

Bernard's skills are much in demand these days. Crank sales in the revitalized industry pushed past the $3 billion mark last year. And because the 25-ton annual demand exceeds manufacturing capacity, there has been a scramble to increase production. Here in the heartland of the meth outlaws, a territory beginning roughly at the southerly edges of the great Los Angeles metropolitan sprawl, anarchy has replaced the discipline of a monopoly maintained for decades under the mailed fist of the renegade motorcycle clubs. Southern California, a nose ahead of Texas, remains the manufacturing capital of the country, with scores, if not hundreds, of clandestine operations scattered south from Orange County to San Diego and eastward into the Mojave Desert. "The absolute lock the bikers held has been broken, and it's now a wide-open game, with every player for himself," says Larry Bruce, a lean, bearded Orange County criminal lawyer and former public defender celebrated by the biker fraternity for his courtroom skills.

To Big John's way of thinking, the sacrifice of the Bikers' Code to the realities of Big Business is serious, a matter of forsaking fraternity for individual enterprise. "New members join just to get in the trade: there are even Hell's Angels chapters out cooking for themselves. Look at that chapter over there; they cashed in their fraternal defense fund to buy chemicals. Now they're all riding new bikes -- them that don't have limousines."

The three cooks, master and apprentices, sit expressionless at a table perched atop the highest granite boulder, 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. "We came in four 'Vettes, pulling ten jet skis, followed by the RV," recalls Bernard, stroking a mustache that adds only slightly to his years. He is not yet 21 years old.

The old motor home, stripped of furniture and crammed with glassware and supplies, was parked in the trees next to a friend's lake-side shack. "They skied and chased girls while I cooked," Bernard remembers. This was no home- kitchen production with towels stuffed under the door to contain the pungent odor of the process. This was a major manufacturing operation disguised as a beach party, using black-market chemicals to produce 100 lbs. of crank, presold to a buyer in Grants 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.

Wary eyes have been watching cars below wind up the dirt road and turn off to a ramshackle pig farm in the next ravine. 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."

Danger is integral to the booming crank business, especially in the retailing end, where double crosses are as much a threat as arrest. In a far different territory from the backcountry rendezvous, Surfer Jim, a jobber of the Product, sits in a car in his sales district near glossy Newport Beach, Calif. Just back from a cruise to Jamaica with his wife, the tanned 26-year- old has been thinking things over. "I'm second generation in this, you know, and I don't want my kids to be the third." He jiggles a foot and flops one go-ahead from his toes as he talks. "I'm out. I've 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."

A sudden segue: "They shot my father, you know, some people that were going to rob us, and he died in my arms. My brothers got out of it then; they were scared. I was too, but it kind of made me a little crazier at the time. I used a gun more quickly; I wasn't as slow to think it out. I'd just react, which is the way you got to be in this business, you 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? You got to act crazy so people don't get over on you, so they think you'll come and kill them and their mother and their kids."

The pale gray eyes ask for empathy. "See, I don't have that in me anymore. When my dad got killed, you know, I could stick a gun in somebody's head and not shake and think about it. I can't do that anymore, so I'm getting out. I've got money put aside. I'm out."

Larry Bruce, the extraordinary dope lawyer, believes few retire voluntarily. "Some make it out," he says, "but this crank business is getting bigger. It's no longer limited to the backwoods, bikers and interstate truckers. It seems to me that I'm seeing as many arrests for possession of meth as for cocaine, and my user clients caught with meth are frequently young professionals and students. The business may be terrible -- it is terrible -- but you're looking at capitalism in action here. I wonder if it may be building toward critical mass."