Smokescreen: A True Adventure

Do you think you have the balls it would take to risk your life for a million dollars?" Allen Long certainly did. Balls like a bull elephant's -- with charisma and cunning in the same large measure. But he needed to know that those around him could handle pressure. After all, they'd be violating Colombian and U.S. airspace in a dilapidated DC-3 and landing on jungle mud-tracks in bandit country. They'd have to avoid detection by America's most tooled-up law enforcement agencies and remain wired and vigilant at all times. They'd be pioneering dope smugglers -- doing it with aplomb and panache like no one else. Their leader, the irrepressible Long, was interested in only the best, Colombian Santa Marta Gold, the Beluga caviar of marijuana. He and his merry band of smugglers were responsible for upping the quality and quantity of weed smoked in North America for several halcyon years in the early '70s. And they did so in the most outrageous and remarkable fashion. From the writer of the drug-smuggling classic Snowblind comes a true story more hair-raising, high-octane, and heart-pounding than any fictional adventure thriller, as he relates the high times and fast living of America's greatest marijuana smuggler. Take a seat. And hang on for the ride of your life. "Sabbag is an incisive reporter and a stylish class-A writer.... Smokescreen will undoubtedly keep your pulse racing and adrenaline pumping." -- The Times (London) "Smokescreen is funny as well as scary. It will be enjoyed by readers who have never even shared a reefer." -- The Sunday Telegraph "Sabbag has a wonderful ear for dialogue and Long has some wonderfully outlandish yarns to spin ... extremely entertaining." -- The Observer "This guy Sabbag is a whip-song writer." -- Hunter S. Thompson "Mr. Sabbag is a first-rate writer." -- The New Yorker "An extremely rare cut of dry wit, poetry, rock-hard fact and relentless insight." -- Rolling Stone