of the Thou Shalt Not’s. But he didn’t believe in all of them. As far as he was concerned, a crime without a victim was an opportunity. Enforcing the prohibition of marijuana made no more sense than enforcing the prohibition against alcohol. It was a mistake in the 1930s, it is a mistake now. And just like the bootleggers before him, it was a mistake Jack Stricklin fully intended to exploit.
JACK STRICKLIN
When I pulled into the alley where Mike Halliday lived, the last person I expected to see was Dave Blott. I honked the horn and started to get out, and here came Mike out of one house and Dave out the other one. I’d been trying to get these two assholes together the whole time I was in the Navy, and here they were living twenty feet away from each other.
When I got out to say hello, they walked right past me. They were staring at that four-wheel drive Scout like it was a carne asada. The first thing either one of them said to me was, “Jack, we need to borrow your truck.”
MIKE HALLIDAY
When Jack shows up in our alley in that Scout, Dave and I come out and walk right past him. Jack’s like, “I’m home!” And we’re thinking, Oh, thank you God—this is perfect!
We got him to take us for a ride down to the place where we wanted to bring a load across. Once you got past Fabens, the river is bone dry—the farmers have taken all the water. You could dribble a basketball across. So you drive through the riverbed, then you’ve got the levee on the other side, and there’s a big ditch that’s even steeper than the riverbank itself. So we walked across and showed Jack what we had in mind and he said, “Oh, hell yeah.” We locked the hubs into four-wheel drive and drove across and back—easy. That little Scout ate it up.
So that night we did our first load. Jack couldn’t go—we didn’t have room for three guys and all the pot, so he stayed home.
JACK STRICKLIN
The night Mike and Dave took the Scout was probably the longest night of my life. I was so nervous I thought I was going to throw up. That might have been the first time I ever worried about anything. I wasn’t worried when the Navy sent me to Portsmouth. I never worried about school—nothing. But I let two idiots go out in my father’s Scout to bring a load of pot across the river, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how many ways they could fuck it up.
I paced the floor, chainsmoked joints, and cussed myself for being such a dumbass. I actually made a vow that night that I would never feel that way again. The next time anybody brought a load of pot across the river, I was going to be there to make damn sure we did it right.
MIKE HALLIDAY
That was the night I discovered how different everything looks in the dark. Your whole world comes down to what’s right in front of your face. You have no idea what’s out there. It was just Dave and me. We didn’t have any radios, no spotters—just two clueless guys driving around in the dark with 250 pounds of pot.
The first place we pulled in along the river was the wrong place—it was too muddy. We didn’t have our headlights on and we couldn’t see shit. And when we got to the river there was nowhere to cross so we had to backtrack. The whole time we just knew the Border Patrol was going to pop up out of the bushes. We were sure the cicadas were sending some kind of secret fed signal. It was like every cell in my brain was sending a different message. And time just stopped. When we finally got to a dry spot in the river, I was ready to just floor the motherfucker and keep on going.
We somehow managed to keep it together. “Bump, bump, bump,” down the bank and across the riverbed. “Bump, bump, bump”—up the bank, over the levee and gone.
Dave and I couldn’t stop laughing. It worked perfect. It was the highest of highs I had ever experienced in my life. It was only 250 pounds or so, but it was our first real smuggle. We couldn’t get over ourselves.
THE GRANDMOTHER OF ALL CONNECTIONS
MIKE HALLIDAY
That first smuggle with Jack’s Scout—that got things moving pretty fast. But now we were looking for buyers. One day Dave Blott came by and said, “I got these guys, they’re sitting in a motel, and they want some pot. You want to go with me to meet with them?”
So I went with him. As soon as I came through the door, this guy hollers, “Mike!” And here were these Tennessee people back in town, and they had somehow run into Dave. Once again, fate played a huge part in all this.
I knew Jack got arrested in the Navy because some dumbass was walking around with his phone number in his pocket, so I always gave my phone number out in code. It was a simple one—probably wouldn’t fool anybody for long. Of course, these guys forgot the key to break the code. They said they’d been trying to find me ever since we did that first deal in the desert.
The guys were from Tennessee—Tommy Pitts and John Wheeler. They turned out to be a really good connection in the early time. They put together some decent buyers of their own and took a lot of weight. If I remember right, I think we started with around 200 pounds. After that, they wanted more and more. Dave could never keep up with anything like that—the suppliers he had were spotty. So Jack and I took ’em on, and Dave was more or less a partner. That’s when things started getting serious—that’s when we got with Hector and really started to roll.
Hector Ruiz Gonzales, aka El Arabe, was a well-connected Mexican whose stock in trade was heroin and opium. He was astute enough to recognize a growth industry when he saw one. As the pot phenomenon began to gain momentum, Hector was front and center. And by his side was Mike Halliday, whom he had met through Panchelli and nurtured from one small deal to the next.
Though no one realized it at the time, Mike had landed a twenty-four karat connection. From stubborn persistence and a snarl of disparate parts, he untangled his way to numero uno—the man who controlled the biggest fields in Northern Mexico. Just like Panchelli and the boys at Phelps Dodge, Hector took an immediate liking to Mike. They were similar in age and temperament, firmly attached to the values of machismo, and united in their desire to plumb the border and open the spigots wide. To Hector, Mike was still a small buyer with the potential to grow. To Mike, Hector was the mother lode.
In this case, the mother lode would actually turn out to be Hector’s grandmother. Her name was Ignacia Jasso Gonzalez, but she was better known as La Nacha.
La Nacha was a one-woman cartel before the cartels ever rose to prominence. And she was the absolute monarch of Northern Mexico’s illicit drug trade. In fact, La Nacha ruled the wide-open badlands for more than a half-century. To this day, her name is uttered in hushed tones of respect along Mexico’s northern border.
La Nacha was likely to have been born sometime in the early 1890’s, which would make her around seventy-eight when Mike Halliday entered the picture in the early ’70s. She had ascended the ranks through marriage to a smuggler called El Pablote, her first boss, her mentor, and a man who
