Robert Sabbag: Snowblind

Filed under: Book Reviews   

Robin Askew

Snowblind - Robert Sabbag

See all books by Robert Sabbag at
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

If Howard Marks is Mr. Nice - a lovable, educated former cannabis smuggler who didn’t touch anything harder on principle – then Zachary Swan was Mr. Somewhat-Less-Nice. A harder sell to the liberal middle-classes than Marks’s entertaining raconteur, Swan was an American cocaine smuggler whose meticulous scams became the stuff of legend in the ’70s. One of the true classics of drug literature, Snowblind has been in and out of print many times since it first appeared in 1976. This welcome new edition from Scottish counter-culture specialists Rebel Inc boasts a rambling, adulatory introduction from Marks (". . . the world of international dope dealing is fun," he vouchsafes once again, adding, perhaps unnecessarily, "It’s fucking great!") and an afterword (actually written ten years ago) by Robert Sabbag, recalling how, as a young and ambitious newspaper hack, he was reluctantly persuaded to write the book that made his name.

Too old to be a hippy and Republican by inclination, Swan was a smuggler of the old-school, motivated more by greed than the politico-chemical fervour of the times. His swift transition from dope to coke resulted from a calculation of the vastly increased profits to be made from Colombian nose candy. (In an amusing digression, Sabbag reminds us that we should never underestimate the contribution made by illegal drug dealing to his nation’s numeracy: "The United States of America effectively converted to the metric system in, or around, 1965 – by 1970 there was not a college sophomore worth his government grant who didn’t know how much a gram of hash weighed.")

These being comparatively more innocent, pre-freebase times, Swan didn’t carry a gun until late in his brief career and never shot anyone, had a moderately enlightened attitude towards women by the antediluvian standards of the time, and – unusually – devised each of his cunning scams with a loophole that allowed his often unwitting ‘mules’ to walk away, much to the frustration of the Feds.

It’s the mechanics of these ingenious smuggling schemes that provide the most pleasure. Increased security measures mean that many of them couldn’t be employed today, though some remain infallible. For one brilliantly executed scam, Swan spent days perfecting a technique for imperceptibly removing and replacing the seals on jars of coffee. Finally satisfied, he deposited a leaflet in a sealed jar, sneaked it back into a store and waited. Days later, he received a call on a phone that couldn’t be traced to him from an elderly couple who’d found that they’d just won a free trip to Colombia courtesy of the coffee company.

Posing as executives from the company, a heavily disguised Swan and his sidekicks dispatched the couple from the airport having extracted an agreement that they would be photographed on their return with the gifts they’d been given. Down south, still-disguised Swan made a great show of handing over the souvenirs, which were, needless to say, stuffed with the finest toot. Abundant witnesses and the couple’s bogus signed agreement – not to mention their genuine innocence – meant they stood no chance of being convicted if caught. Back home, the souvenirs were discreetly swapped for identical if somewhat less valuable ones during the photographic session and the contented oldsters went on their way none the wiser.

Should you be naughty enough to read it as a handbook, Snowblind boasts plenty of hints and tips for the aspiring drug smuggler. (If you’re going to conceal your stash inside that old favourite the hollowed-out ethnic wooden ornament, choose something like medeira wood, which has a high specific gravity.) But armchair adventurers who’d prefer not to risk spending the rest of their lives being sodomised by large South American gentlemen in third world jails will enjoy it just as much for the racy prose, period charm – the description of the drug scene in ’70s Harlem reads like the script for one of those big-Afro Blaxploitation flicks – and terrific cast of characters.

Sabbag’s rich turn of phrase brings brilliantly to life such dramatis personae as the psychopathic Jago ("There was always a look in his eye which seemed to indicate that his body was metabolising raw flesh"), Michel Bernier (who "embodied all those individual characteristics that Americans find distasteful in a man – he was French"), and the aptly named Billy Bad Breaks, who was so inept that he achieved the singular distinction of being jailed for attempting to smuggle a joint into Mexico.

Posted on December 1st, 2001.

• Leo Marks - Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War 1941-45
• Nicholson Baker – A Box Of Matches
• Jeff Noon: Cobralingus
• Tony Wheeler – Lonely Planet Unpacked
• Lawrence Thornton – Imagining Argentina