The Next Run: A UC Berkeley Student’s Rise To Major 60s Pot Smuggler

The Next Run: A UC Berkeley Student’s Rise To Major 60s Pot Smuggler is the dramatic memoir of a successful young drug smuggler.

Tom starts by smuggling pot hidden in cars, graduates to planes, resorts to wading sacks through the Rio Grande, and ultimately finds himself heading the Colombian end of an operation using a twin-engine cargo plane to drop bales to waiting speedboats off the coast of Florida. At the same time, his Mexican contacts are sending him tons at a time transported in semis past a bribed customs officer. At a point when both operations plan to escalate, Tom makes a decision that stuns the smuggling world.

Praise:

“A fast-paced immensely readable account of illegal adventures.” -Kirkus Reviews

“Amazing book! The level of detail is incredible...It reads like a first-rate work of non-fiction by a top journalist/memoirist.” – Ben Westhoff, Author of Fentanyl Inc., Original Gangstas, and Little Brother

Excerpt:

On a rainy December night in 1965, I was playing cards with my two best friends, Bill Gretsch and Arf, as we wondered what we should do over the Christmas break. Arf and I were studying engineering at UC Berkeley and Bill was going to Merritt Junior College. Neither Arf nor I had any interest in engineering, but we were both good at math and science, and engineering was the only science-related major that didn’t have an English requirement. We had been traumatized by our English teachers at Berkeley High, who always seemed to want something more from us, though we could never figure out what, and asked questions like, What does the river symbolize in Heart of Darkness? To us it was just a river. Anyway, this is what we were basing our future careers on: avoiding English class.

Arf came here from Puerto Rico in tenth grade and our teacher introduced him to the class, then asked me to show him how to use a slide rule. I introduced him to our crowd and he told us people called him Raf, short for Rafael, but because we liked to mangle words, and especially because Raf wanted nothing more than to blend in here in this new country and not stand out in any way, we changed Raf to Arf. At first he hated the name. One day I called him by it and he drew himself up to his full, six-foot, Latin-macho height and said, “The name is Rafael Agustín Lopez Loera!” I figured I would never be calling him Arf anymore, but a few days later he called me up, saying, “Hey, what’s new? This is the Arf.”

Above us we could hear the rain with its random pounding on the roof of Bill’s flat as we concentrated on our cards. We were playing hearts and I was always trying to “shoot the moon” while Bill and Arf kept trying to stop me. For a long time none of us said much, then while Arf shuffled, Bill said, “Say, we ought to go to Mexico over the break. We could take your truck, Tom, and Arf here could do the translating.”

Now I had dreamed of going to Mexico ever since I was partly raised on my grandparents’ farm in the Salinas Valley, where I saw Mexicans driving around in their long, low, rattly cars with the serape over the rear deck and a pile of kids going wild in the back seat while their mother sat placidly in front. A Mexican family lived next door to my grandparents and I used to play with their kids and envied the secret language they had for talking among themselves. I vowed I would learn Spanish and even got a little, red, Morocco-bound Spanish dictionary to carry with me wherever I went.

So by the end of the evening, it was decided: we would go to Mexico over the break. Then as a complete afterthought, Bill said we should bring some pot back in order to defray our trip expenses. Pot was still something of a mysterious unknown in 1965, at least in our circles, and none of us knew much about it. Bill had tried it several times, I had tried it twice, and Arf had never tried it at all. Coming from an aristocratic Latin family, he regarded pot as low class. The game broke up with our deciding vaguely to look into it.

Bill used to live in La Jolla, where he learned to surf, and a few nights later he called to tell me one of his old surfing buddies was in town. “He’s been to Mexico,” he told me, then whispering over the phone, “He knows where to score.” We met with him the very next night at a Mexican restaurant in an industrial area of west Oakland. Arf was there, along with Bill and his friend, and we took a booth at the back, next to the kitchen. Bill’s friend kept looking behind him as though the cook might be listening.

“Mazatlán’s the place to score,” he told us in low tones, leaning close. “Just hang out on the beach there. Watch out you don’t get burned, though. A lot of cats will sell you weed and then turn around and have you busted. They get their weed back as part of the deal. Just ask some surfers where to score. They’ll hip you to the right people.”

A few days later I ran into Arf on campus and learned he had no intention of scoring grass. He had only been playing along with the idea for the excitement of plotting something dangerous and evil. He called our plan a pipe dream and said it would never happen.

“Anyway, what am I going to do with a bag of pot?” He waved his hand in a deprecating way that was like a habit with him.

“Sell it for a small fortune.”

“I don’t know anyone who would buy pot.”

“I’ll sell it for you. Better yet, I’ll buy your share.”

He thought this over, the prospect of easy money seeming to interest him.

“But we’ll get caught.”

“No, we won’t. Remember, bad stuff only happens to other people.”

We both laughed because this was a conclusion we had come to recently during one of our late night, philosophical discussions. I eventually got him to go along with our plan, and the next day the three of us checked my truck out for hiding places and decided the door panels were the safest place.

About the Author:

Tom Jenkins lives in Pasadena, CA. He is a physician who has spent much of his career caring for Spanish-speaking patients using the fluent Spanish he learned smuggling. His memoir The Next Run was released on April 20, 2024 and is available for sale on Amazon.

To learn more, visit TheNextRun.net