The Selected Quirks of Madjag

The Madjag Chronicles were compiled as memoirs and mental snapshots of my experiences during the 1978-1982 guerrilla growing years in Madjag Canyon and beyond. Importing weed from Mexico, lining up connections with the Colombians, and living for months in Jamaica to set up a 1/2 ton Ganja flight were some of my subsequent adventures. In recent years I have been a medical marijuana grower, a pollen chucker, and an Admin/Moderator for several online cannabis forums.

Playing Games With Dr. Death

Once upon a time in 1986 I spent 15 months in Lompoc Federal Prison Camp (Level 1) with David Scott Weekly as one of my “friends“. He and I would play Risk – The Game of Global Domination every week with two of my roommates (4 men to a room, two bunk beds) and during those games I was able to speak with him about his case. This naturally lead to him to speak about his world in general.

He was sentenced to prison because he wouldn’t reveal who he was actually working for to the various government authorities who had arrested him. He had worked for the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) along with Bo Gritz, the highly-decorated Green Beret whose career was the model for the movie role of “Rambo“. Scotty had an amazing and disturbing history in the clandestine world, too.

Scotty said that when Bo Gritz was stopped once at the Mexican border (around that same general time) with a passport that turned out to be counterfeit, Bo told the US Customs authorities and FBI that he worked for the DIA and had a dozen passports for traveling the world on clandestine missions. They held him for awhile because the DIA refused to acknowledge his employment, and mission. Scotty told me that Bo made a few calls and basically told his handlers that if they didn’t get him released, he would share his story. He was out quickly.

Scotty wasn’t as lucky as Bo and spent 14 months inside. When he went to his first Parole hearing the panel said that they knew he was telling the truth about his case, and why he was caught with C-4 explosives, but their hands were tied until someone in the government stepped up to “claim” him.

He spoke 3-4 languages, including Vietnamese and some Laotian dialect. Whenever we played Risk, he would win. It was uncanny…..even excellent jailhouse players with many years of experience would lose when Scotty played. Ironic, since he was involved in real life in the Global Domination game…..hahaha. He explained that the reason he signed up to be a dental assistant while in Lompoc was to learn another cover. He said that he could already easily pass for a dentist after working in the prison dental office for 4 months or more. Being able to appear to be one thing while actually being another was essential in his world, much like in the drug world that I knew so well. He made a point to ask each of us what our crime had been, the circumstances, and how we did what we did. More on-the-job learning I suppose. He was the consummate student of all-things-illegal and all-things-dangerous.

Also during my time at Lompoc, two brothers began their 5-year sentences by arriving in their own private helicopter that landed in the parking lot much to the dismay of the Federal prison staff. They had been convicted of selling a reputed 100 helicopters to North Korea by using shell companies and more global domination techniques. Like many of the white collar criminals that I had met or researched while inside they most likely had multiple millions of dollars stashed upon their return home.

Simultaneously, Ivan Boesky was in residence at Lompoc after being convicted and paying a 200 million dollar fine for insider New York stock trading. The movie, Wall Street, starring Michael Douglas as Ivan, was released while he was an inmate. We used to rake leaves together at the visitor center and I had a chance to talk with him, as well, on several occasions. He was another white collar criminal that had millions stashed for when he was released, thus the saying inside: “If you do the crime, make sure its White Collar crime.”  You can bilk 100’s of retirees out of their entire life’s savings in a real estate or stock scam and get less time than a guy who was caught with 200 pounds of weed. Not only that, you might be able to keep a huge chunk of your illegal funds because you’ll make a deal with the government, including the IRS, while drug-related criminals can expect no deals and nothing but IRS hell.

On game day I noticed that Scotty hadn’t showed up for our weekly Risk game. I hiked up to his room and asked one of his cell mates what was up. The guy said that someone requested Scotty to go to the main desk and a few minutes later he was gone, out the front door, never to be heard from again.

So it goes in the dark world of agents, spies, and operatives, oh, I mean in the world of sub-contractors…haha…