The MARIJUANA SMUGGLER'S GUIDE: Based on a true story

By Larry David

The Marijuana Smuggler's Guide is the real life, extraordinary, coming of age adventures of an illiterate teenager who became one of the largest drug smugglers in the country.The Marijuana Smuggler's Guide is a heartfelt, fast-paced, must read for anyone thinking about involving themselves or their family in the marijuana industry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781682138335

Book preview

Foreword

Larry David Sr.’s story is an extraordinary adventure of an illiterate teenager turned multimillionaire. As a Vietnam veteran trying to support a family and unable to get a job, he was twenty-three years old when he chose the marijuana smuggling occupation. Looking back over the past forty-one years, he now realizes all the sacrifices he had to make to be a successful smuggler. The millions of dollars, buffets of women, and the lavish lifestyle it afforded him were not enough to cover up the regrets that linger with him to this day. He was a good financial provider for his family, but he feels that it didn’t make him a good husband or father. Smuggling took up all of his time, and he was not able to be there for his family when they needed him. Furthermore, he feels his contacts put his family in danger, and that is never a good path.

Nevertheless, his story includes mountains of money, an abundance of sex, millions of pounds of marijuana, and the many ways he made in getting the marijuana across the border. Larry has traveled the world, stayed in the most luxurious hotels, and owned exorbitant homes, cars, boats and private airplanes. Smuggling marijuana was a very sexy, lucrative career for him, and this book will share with you how he achieved this success, along with the wild and crazy stories that came from it. Among the many adventures of Larry David Sr., you will find murder, kidnapping, gun fights, drug overdoses, robbery, and even some humor too. As a man in his sixties, Larry does not recommend that anyone take the drug smuggling, life-threatening career path that he chose. His hope, in sharing his life story with you, is that you can take the lessons he has learned and apply them to a legit career that brings you happiness. If this book can lead or influence one person to make judicious career choices that will make their family’s life better, it will have been worth the effort of writing.

Larry is one of the kindest, most generous person I have ever met. He is very compassionate, has an amazing problem solving capabilities, and believes strongly in the power of self-empowerment. He will go to great lengths to help a friend in need. For this reason, Larry has many friends all over the country and internationally as well. It has been a great pleasure of mine assisting him in publishing this book. Therefore, without further ado, we hope you enjoy the adventures of L.B. 6/23/12

Lisa Jones

Coeditor

Chapter 1

Business Incubator

When I tried to join the marine corps, they rejected me and said to come back once I learned to read. It was the late 1960s, and a lot of young men across the United States were burning their draft cards or running across the border to Canada to avoid joining the US military and the Vietnam War.

I was a nineteen-year-old kid living in Michigan, who married his high school sweetheart Sandy, had a son Larry Jr., and was unsuccessfully trying to find a career that would put food on the table. I was driven to make something of myself, and the free education the military provided seemed to be my best and most affordable option.

The military was not drafting married men, and the marines had rejected me, basically calling me a dummy, so I volunteered for the army. I wasn’t going to take no for an answer this time, and on April 26, 1968, I started my military training at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Thankfully, basic training didn’t have a reading or writing test required to pass. It was monkey see, monkey do, and I was a great doer. More than three hundred men went through basic with me, and I graduated in the top ten.

After graduation, I was given ten days leave before I needed to report to a base in Germany. I returned to Michigan, packed up what little belongings I had, and moved to Germany to fight for the American dream of personal financial freedom.

After nine months in Germany, I was starting to get bored, though. My assignment had me doing a lot of sitting around. During my time off, I didn’t have any friends to hang out with, but I did keep in touch with a friend serving in Vietnam, who would send me letters loaded with great war stories. I wanted to live an exciting life, like my friend, and have my own exhilarating war stories to brag about on future fishing and hunting trips with friends, or to share with my future grandchildren. I needed to do something about it, so I volunteered to go to Vietnam. In April 1969, I sent Sandy and Larry Jr. back to Michigan and jumped on an army transport airplane headed to Cameron Bay smack dab in the center of Southern Vietnam.

On my first night in Vietnam, our unit came under rocket attack, and although I was only twenty years old, it was the scariest I had been in my entire life. I had not yet experienced the jailbreaks, high speed chases, kidnappings, or shootouts that my drug smuggling future would bring. In hindsight, I didn’t know what it was to be scared yet.

I survived the rocket attack, and after three weeks of training, I was assigned to guard duty, which reminded me of the waiting around I used to do while hunting back in Michigan. At home though, the animals I was hunting weren’t trying to kill me with rocket launchers and automatic weapons. Between all the waiting around on guard duty and the constant fear of death, I had a lot of time to learn who I was, what I was all about, and what I believed in. It was during this reflective time that I first started questioning the United States’s reasons for being in Vietnam.

After my guard duty assignment, I was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division, 159th Aviation Group as a 44 E20 machinist. I didn’t have any training and wasn’t interested in the job, so I volunteered to be a door gunner, which paid forty-five dollars more than the machinist position. The door gunner position would allow me to send a nice amount of money back home to my family and would let me see North Vietnam from the air.

Vietnam was a beautiful country, with large religious temples, majestic mountains and rivers, and expansive white sand beaches with palm trees. When I would look up in the sky at night, the stars were so big and bright. I felt like I could reach out and touch them.

I also saw Vietnam after the army doused the mountain sides with Agent Orange, burning the leaves off the trees so you could see all the way to the ground. North Vietnam had fresh, enormous craters in the ground created where Nixon authorized the air force to drop our B-52 bombs. It made me feel like a big bully toward the Vietnamese. They lived in grass or cardboard houses with dirt floors and no electricity or indoor plumbing. They plowed their rice fields with water buffalo and would work for a dollar a day for us Americans, yet we were flying over and destroying their country. The Vietnamese were strong people, and we bullied them and gave them hell for it. With a wife and young son at home, I wasn’t sure I belonged in a foreign country fighting a war I wasn’t fully convinced was right.

My thoughts weighed heavily on my heart, and I started to have difficulty sleeping and eating. One particular mission highlighted my questions about the war. We flew thirty Chinook into a hot landing zone, which meant we were flying in with our guns blazing. The mission was to drop off some 11-B infantry soldiers, the backbone of the army. These guys were the true soldiers, the grunt, fighting the war on the front lines for us. Before we would drop them off, some of the GI’s handed me some personal letters to give to the mail clerk to send home for them. In my mind, I was thinking that I could have been holding the last words these men would ever communicate to their families, and that didn’t sit well in my gut. This war was not for me.

Chapter 2

Family Support

God really sculpted a masterpiece when he created man. Intuitively, our bodies can sense and know what is wrong and what is right. I felt the war was wrong, but I had a hard time writing those thoughts down, and I needed to get them out of my head to keep my sanity. I borrowed a tape recorder, and while on guard duty, I recorded all my thoughts and feeling on cassettes that I could mail home to Sandy. On one cassette, I asked her to call the Red Cross and tell them she was going to divorce me. The army would give me a thirty-day leave to go home and get my marriage in order. At which point, I would flee to Canada. My Vietnam experience had distorted my mind so much that running away sounded like a brilliant plan.

I sent the cassette to Sandy and two weeks later, received a very stern letter from her in reply. She reminded me that I volunteered for the army and for Vietnam to help support our family. She refused to call the Red Cross and said she would never divorce me, no matter the circumstances. She respected me and would not allow me, or herself, to take the easy way out.

Looking back now, this was the best thing she could have done for me. My mind was going crazy from the war, but Sandy offered a clear, sane perspective. The strength of women always amazes me.

At the time though, I was furious and completely cut off all communication with my family. A few months passed when my commander called me into his office and forced me to write home. I wrote my mother and Sandy two identical notes, saying only Hi, I’m fine. See you if I get home. Love, Larry. I didn’t care if I lived or died at this point.

I had seven months to go, and I started to fraternize with some of the guys in my 159th Group. In the B Company, there were two groups of soldiers—the drunks and the pot smokers. The drunks would work together in the daytime but at night, would drink, break arms, and give each other black eyes. The pot smokers would smoke pot, relax, philosophize, and share their dreams about what they would do when they returned home.

I was twenty years old when I was invited by the pot smokers to smoke my first pipe of marijuana, and I will never forget it. That night was the first time—since arriving in Vietnam—that I slept eight hours straight.

For the first time in over a month, I woke up feeling recharged and at peace. The anger I had felt toward Sandy was alleviated, and I invited her to join me on my upcoming R&R (rest and relaxation) trip to Hawaii to apologize.

Chapter 3

Dream Big

It was November 1969, and the time had started to move very quickly for me. I made some friends in my company, started corresponding with my family again, and was scheduled for my first R&R break to Hawaii, where Sandy was going to meet me. Before I went on R&R, I had orders to fly to Tanson Nhut air base in Saigon, though.

When I landed at Tanson Nhut, as I was walking through the airport, a Vietnamese cab driver stopped me and asked if I wanted a Number One Bobo, a prostitute. I knew anywhere off base was strictly off limits to the GIs, but my hormones weren’t listening. I had to report ten days before I needed to be in Saigon, and I only left camp eagle two days prior that morning. My hormones couldn’t resist.

I jumped into his large taxi cab, and he told me to lie down in the backseat. I was a little nervous, but I was packing my 38 Smith and Wesson handgun in case things got too crazy. We pulled away and drove right by the guard going into Saigon without any problems.

We drove for around thirty minutes, and I started to have second thoughts just as the cabbie turned down a little alley and stopped in front of a metal rollup garage door. The cabbie stepped out and motioned for me to wait as he rapped on the garage door.

The garage door loudly opened, revealing an older Vietnamese woman in a tight black dress. The woman approached the cab and smiled at me, displaying a mouth full of black, tar-covered teeth, apparently from chewing beetle nut. This was Mamasan, the boss. Mamasan opened the cab door and escorted me into her lair, where she sat us down and handed me a Bombom (Vietnamese beer) to try to loosen me up. I think she could tell how nervous I was. She also offered me a pack of Salem cigarettes, brand-new, still in their paper. When I opened them, I was surprised to find that all the tobacco had been replaced with marijuana. I was going to like this place.

I lit my joint as Mamasan clapped her hands starting a parade of women walking from the back room to the front of me. It was a buffet, big women, small