Customer Reviews

Contrabandista!

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Around 1966, heroin use spiked in NYC. Contrabandistas is a term that refers to pilots who smuggled mostly heroin out of South America, but they didn't start out that way. It's Uncle Sam verses French Corsican mobsters. Nixon turns up the heat after 1968. Thus began our current and never-ending war on drugs. The U.S. was looking in the wrong place. The refined stuff was coming out of France into South America. It then went north from Paraguay, through Panama and into Florida. At its peak, total importation was at something like two-thousand pounds per year. This is the French Connection. The plot is character driven and moves very quickly. I was sorry to see it end. A revolution has happened since the late 60s, and readers might be shocked at how simple and low-tech it all once was. That world is dead. The advent of regular trans-Atlantic jet travel in the late 50's was a gift from the gods for smugglers (used to come by boat). Security was practically non-existent. But, Uncle Sam started to wise-up, hence the gradual shift to contrabandistas who had previously smuggled mostly consumer goods (convert the dollar amounts and the math is crystal clear). The authors don't discuss the cause for the surge in heroin use. Nor, do they really discuss what later turned out to be the Vietnam connection (see Alfred W. McCoy's work); that was beyond their scope. The CIA gets a mention late in the book, but this seems a little out of place, hence the missing star in the rating. The primary focus here is on Auguste Ricord, a Mephistophelian ex-Gestapo agent from France, who expertly applied his war-time criminal skills to post-war smuggling. His design was sophisticated and simple. Like anything else, it came down to scaling human nature, but that's why this book is so good: this specific activity and these particular characters provide a kind of clinical look at it. Again, the narrative is in the form of a chase. As a side-note, I read this in connection with a macabre interest in Christian David (dah-veed). There was something sloshing around the Internet to the effect that if Steve Rivelle (The Men Who Killed Kennedy) had read this book before talking to Christian (one of Ricord's capo régimes), he could have saved himself. Christian was feeding him a line, and after reading the book, this whole business about Lucien Sarti is hard to accept, even though a part of me wanted to believe it. Of course, both David and Sarti show up in the book, as does Michel Nicole, Francisco Chiappe and Jean-Paul Angeletti. Finally, I would add that Momo is supposed to have said that the company had to supply its own shooters. If that's so, I doubt Sarti was one of them. I suspect that we know who shot for the outfit. I just can't see Sarti in that role. If he did it, then perhaps it was because was compelled to or felt compelled, and I've never even heard of that. In the event, how could he shoot straight? That's not company policy.