Arrived in Berra with an ounce of skunk, mobile phone and beaten up telstar(story of my weed bizo).
First published – Aug 19 2007.
This is the story of how I set up and built a fairly successful wholesale weed operation.
Its no Scarface story but it is an interesting read.
Despite the nature of the business and the general opinion of dealing drugs Im still fairly proud of what I achieved and I use many of the smarts I learned in that business in the music industry today.
As a young bloke sick to death of the daily grind I decided there had to be a better way.
I threw in my job and became a full time weed dealer.
As I said in the Illawarra Mercury to make a good living selling weed you have to move a fair bit.
To build up the clientele and finances to get there takes some time especially if you start from scratch.
Im going to write a long as hell blog on my experiences setting up my weed bizo and juggling skunk in the nations capital Canberra.
How and why I started, some experiences from along the way and how it wound up in the end.
I started moving the ganja as a young bloke of about 14 or 15 just selling joints at school and stuff, playing around.
Ha ha I would buy an ounce of skunk back in the day and sell $50 deals to my Mums boyfriend‟s customers when he was out.
When I was 15, 16 and 17 I was selling $20 and $50 deals to help me get by and to help me pay the rent on my flat in Mawson.
I mostly operated to a plan of sorts, I don‟t fall in to things.
That‟s not to say they are always good or well thought out plans but I always stick to my objectives.
Baring that in mind I started moving ganja as an occupation in early 1998.
I choose that time as the beginning because my operations before that were just to make a quick buck, to get by or to eat but in 98 I said to myself “that‟s it Im putting a bizo together from the ground up in order to get myself out of the dirt”.
In other words I was planning to move the stuff until I had enough money to set myself up in life. (I bet you have heard a dealer say that before!) I came to the decision one night after working a long week labouring for some concreters at $5.50 an hour.
I was buggered having worked the usual 45 hours for a pay of around $250.
After purchasing a fifty of smoko, pizza, a vid to watch and of course ciga‟s I was already down to well under $200.
Constantly broke I would always be thinking of ways to get on top.
I had moved to stay with my family as I had been getting in some strife with the police in Canberra and with a job offer in the city Mum was in I was able to stay there.
I had been working in the job as a concreters labourer for nearly a year and had not been able to save much at all.
How could I on the wage I was on?
I had managed to pick up an old ford telstar for cheap which I fixed up a bit over the months and finally registered.
So anyway it had been almost a year in this shitty job and I was sitting there one night contemplating my situation to Tupac‟s R U still Down album and I came to the conclusion I had to get back to Canberra.
I had to get back to Canberra because I was tired of being broke.
I knew from past experiences I could do well moving ganja at home plus if I went about it the right way using my brains I could make enough cash to set myself up.
That week I quit my job and sat down to work out my position and plan.
I had very little money, around $700 I think which was to launch the whole operation including getting my drivers licence the following day.
I got a mobile phone on a plan, an ounce of skunk which I had to make in to deals by eye as I could not afford scales.
There were only one brand around then Tanita which are a few hundred but these days they start at less then a hundred for some brands.
I went to the RTA the following morning and went for my licence but failed.
I laughed it off and decided to continue with my plans, ahh the young and foolish!
So I headed home where a mate from Canberra V was waiting to meet me at the flat so he could join me for the drive to Canberra.
I squeezed all my things in to the telstar and said goodbye to my family.
I had big ideas and plans.
For starters this telstar would help as I would be forced to start small selling twenties and fifties.
Most dealers did not home deliver small deals to your house in Berra around 98 so I would do that.
Not only would I deliver a 20 or 50 to your house I would do it 24 hours a day seven days a week!
Before I continue I have mostly avoided talking about weight and quantity of what I sold in past blogs as it is not the point but in this blog I have to do it to show the growth of my business.
I hope you don‟t take certain aspects as „bragging‟.
So I headed back to Canberra with a car full of cloths, V in the passenger seat, an ounce of skunk and a mobile phone.
I had no address to stay at, I could crash at a mates or I always had the car aye.
A funny thing that happened on the way to Berra that morning to kick things off was while I was driving on the edge of the road near Lake George playing silly buggers.
A cop car pulled up beside me laughed at my antics and sped off!
V just looked at me and we couldn‟t believe our luck, unlicensed and with the weed in the car but they didn‟t stop!
The dream could have ended before it began.
I also remember a conversation I laugh about these days, as many of you will know V
dogged me in the end but at this stage I was offering him in for half the business I was about to set up.
He was telling me it would never work.
These days he lives of the crumbs of what I started that day!
So I arrived home in Canberra having been away a while and I wasted no time at all in getting started.
I figured I had a fair client base but they knew nothing of my return or new business venture so I headed to Woden plaza.
Why?
Because I had a crazy scheme that I laugh about now, still it did work very effectively but I don‟t recommend it.
I went to the plaza where they had a business card machine and printed up 500 cards that just said DAVE DELIVERY 040*******
My mate still has one of these cards I think, if so I will post it up.
Now it was still early when I hit Berra but as I said I had a plan.
Even with the drive it still would have only been about 9.30am.
Not mucking about I hit all the colleges on the South side of Canberra. Phillip, Erindale, Sterling and more handing out cards and giving my 24/7 best skunk in town speech to anyone I knew smoked or even anyone that looked like they might smoke.
I even gave a few small samples to the guys that looked like chronic weed heads.
I had arrived with less then fifty bucks and after expenses for weed and other things most was gone already on the cards, food and petrol.
Once I had canvassed the colleges I pulled the same move on the southside malls and plazas Woden, Tuggerenong and Civic.
I had it done before lunchtime, other then a few spare cards I kept to remember the morning they had all been given out.
I then headed to Torrens my old home suburb and looked in the real estate where I found they had a cheap two bedroom flat for rent, I got the keys and had a look.
The flat was perfect and not expensive so I said I would take it.
The real estate chick gave me the paper work and I said I would be back.
The lease required proof of a job and stuff so I weaselled my way round that with the help of a friend.
I had looked at the flat by lunchtime and within half an hour or so of that my phone began to ring for deals, it would continue to ring and ring and grow for many years.
I had planned well going as far as marking a radius on a map after picking a central area, the suburbs of pearce, Mawson, Torrens and that allowed me to reach any point of my chose territory within 15min from the centre of the circle or half an hour end to end.
Being a smoker I figured 30mins was my limit to wait if I was scoring.
Yes I had planned well and as the phone started to ring I realized how well!
By just before 5 pm I had sold the ounce mainly in 20‟s and raced to the real estate paying the bond and getting the keys.
I took my stuff up stairs to the flat and unpacked setting up a mattress on the floor with my 34cm telly.
The place wasn‟t much but it was in my mind the beginning of great things so I saw it as a base for my attack.
The first night my mates Ken and Ed (not real name) came round to catch up and we had a few laughs.
Ken would be around for much of my time in the weed bizo, in fact he can probably tell you how things went down better then I can!
Ed I would bring in to my operation later on and to this day he continues to practice the things he learnt from it and makes a good living.
That night sticks in my mind, nothing exciting about it really but it was great to catch up with the boys.
I had not been smoking hooch but I did with them two bong fiends so we sat in this baren flat with a little telly and the bong going round eating pizza and laughing our ass‟s off.
Both top blokes and we are still mates to this day.
So I went to sleep that night, again with no cash as the bond had cost most of what I had but I did still have 90 bucks for a quarter ounce of smoko to continue the bizo I had started.
I had my pride back, doing things for myself again and not to mention I was pretty stoked that the ounce of green went so quickly.
I had originally expected it to take two days and to have a night crashing on a mates floor or in the car.
At first when I got back in Canberra I had trouble scoring as many connects had lost touch and changed numbers while I was gone.
I was basically getting the stuff from all over town where ever I could get it and sometimes I even had to grab mates who would score for me.
After a fortnight or so I was selling about an ounce everyday and sometimes a little more but I was still missing that “good connection” and buying quarters so an ounce was costing me $360 and I was getting back about $550 or less as I tried to make the biggest deals I could afford to sell.
So for them first weeks I was left with around a grand or a bit less a week after the bills were paid and the fuel for so many deliveries was taken in to account.
Not a great deal of cash but for me at that age it seemed like enough.
For the first time I felt a bit free of the stress and burden of being broke and always thinking about how to get life sorted.
As the phone rang more and more during the first few months I made a mistake that I learnt from, NEVER DEAL FROM HOME!
I had started to mainly deliver to those who couldn‟t make it to my flat and just let the others drop by the flat 24/7.
It was not uncommon for me to have someone sitting in the lounge room (usually Ken) waking me through the wee hours of the morn as people dropped in.
Also in the first few months I gained my first solid wholesale connection.
The way I went about it was fairly shifty but as I said I knew I was in this for the long haul so I had to get mine.
So I sat in the car park of Red Rooster in Wanniassa and waited until I saw my dealer pull up to meet his dealer.
I knew my dealers suppliers name from a conversation but had no phone number to match it so this was my only option.
I waited until my dealer left the carpark they had met in across the street from where I sat in my car and I raced over pretending as I made eye contact that I knew him.
I said hi and asked how he had been.
He looked at me funny and asked if he knew me.
I just kept on with it telling him we had met before then dropping his name at which point he pretended to remember who I was.
I then asked if he still did the smoko, he said yes so I grabbed his number and that was that!
In the beginning this guy was my saviour as I began getting ounces from him at $330
an extra $30 to me per bag and now I only had to score once a day instead of four and I no longer had to run after product all the time leaving more time for the hustle.
Another thing with this guy was his weed, it was always primo, top shelf skunk.
I would stick with this guy for sometime despite picking up many connections along the way.
That was until a friend arrived on the scene with a better deal sometime later.
So just months in and I didn‟t know anyone else moving as many small deals as I was.
I became well known around the south of Canberra and was the number one go to guy for $20‟s and 50‟s stealing customers from the old and young alike.
Many didn‟t like me encroaching on there turf and I had the odd run in but things were pretty smooth.
The 2 grand or so a week I was now making seemed like a fortune to me not to mention me and my close mates were getting to smoke all the time and live the lifestyle.
I had also began selling quarters, in my mind I was at the start of climbing the chain.
Things carried on until my first run in with the snout.
It began with a customer ringing me after scoring one day to tell me the cops had stopped him up the street from my flat and tried to search him.
He had refused but the cops had said they knew he had scored from me.
I went down to a real estate the next morning and I got an application for the first place I saw in Lyons.
I went home and again Ken was there amongst others when there was a knock at the door.
I answered and it turned out to be my first raid.
The cops were just uniformed officers led by a constable David Grant.
They found my three ounces of bud I think it was but they missed the cash.
A detective interrogated me asking who sold the drugs to me but I had dealt with cops as a child and new a little bit about there games.
This would be the first meeting between me and a detective named Shake shaft who hounded me for quite a while until I was finally locked up.
After many hours of questions and no release (I had not learned to call a solicitor yet) and promises of a free release if I dobbed in my supplier I concocted an idea to get myself out of trouble.
I knew of this really straight guy who never did a thing wrong so I gave the cops his details to call there bluff telling them I had scored from him.
As I expected the promises of a release turned out to be false.
I was charged and held overnight returning to my flat the next morning after a brief court appearance.
During my night in my cell I reviewed the one part of my business I had neglected which was safety.
From that moment on I always moved house and changed car/phone number every six months to help stay underground.
I also never dealt from home again becoming just a mobile number who would meet you around the way.
I got home around 9 in the morning grabbing the cash the cops had missed and going to score as the phone was going nuts due to being switched off all night.
I also had to swing by Fyshwick for a new set of tanita‟s.
Dealing was difficult for a while as constable Grant kept showing up at my local shops and phoning me.
He thought he may be able to get info from me and although he nearly caught me in the act of dealing several times his harassment of me gained him no reward at all.
I suspect that all the traffic to my house had my neighbour suspicious and she called the cops so I was raided but there are so many theories that fit the secenario.
The neighbour had tried to score once but I said I didn‟t deal as I never sold to strangers in my own backyard; maybe she was pissed off and dobbed me in but really who knows how that raid came about.
One thing I did know was that I needed to change car and move house!
So I bought an old Gemini and began shacking up at a chick‟s place I was seeing.
I ran things from her house some days while others I would stay in hotels.
Around this stage I told my mate Ed to quit his job at a local bookstore and to come work in my business.
Ed joined in festivities and that went well as we were good mates.
After a couple of months of living in hotels we decided to get ourselves a place.
As always I stayed Southside as all my business was in that area.
We found a nice townhouse in Phillip and signed the lease.
About this time the Gemini died so business car number 3 was a pale blue commodore, there were so many run around cars for doing deliveries over the years and they gradually got better.
This was before they got better lol.
So bizo was going well and I had a nice place.
We partied pretty hard, at our peak we were clubbing five nights a week, there aren‟t to many jobs where that‟s possible.
On the bizo side of things I ran in to a mate who began selling us four ounces for $1200 which at the time was good.
So the product was cheaper, more cash for me is always a good thing.
And again I saw the move upward in quantity as a measurement of my growth in the weed bizo and another small step toward where I wanted to be as far as my plan went.
So for a while things moved along well, this was far from the peak financially but I must say they were some of the best days of my life so far.
Ed would do most of the day to day running around so I would either hang out with mates, cruise with Ed or do what ever in the day and by night we would party and chase the ladies.
I also had community service and various court appearances going which mad the lifestyle difficult at times but by no means impossible.
After a while I moved in to a house in Weston and bought a done up 86 BMW which was a proud moment for me.
Proud until a few weeks later when I crashed it un insured acting a fool.
With a twisted chassy it was sold for parts at a fraction of what it cost to buy.
At this stage that wasn‟t to much of a bother to me as I just picked up a cheap runner and we still had the commodore as a work horse.
I had moved to Weston as I had pretty much left all the duties with Ed and wanted to set up a place with my new girl plus my younger sister had been up to no good so I was keen to have her under my wing also.
Life continued on as per usual apart from the new address except the night the crew and I took out a rival dealer.
The guys we robbed ended up calling police during the hit and we were charged with armed robbery for stealing there drugs along with assault.(that story is in my older blogs).
With help from my new solicitor Tim Sharman I got bail and went back to things.
So the year 2000 came along and we celebrated hard.
It wasn‟t long after the new year began that I had a bit of a crisis.
Me and Ed had been buying $1200 worth of pot each time when scoring for quite a while and it seemed my plan was stagnant.
I also had greedy characters in my ear suggesting Ed was short changing me.
I think now that they said that for there own purposes.
I decided I had to go alone again and I went to the townhouse in Phillip to retrieve my phones and product.
Ed was not happy and in hindsight I was probably a bit of a prick but anyway I grabbed the stuff and went solo again.
My first move was a new house, I had broken up with the girl I lived in Weston with and my sis and I wanted to get away from her as she was still hanging around.
I found a nice townhouse in Pearce again and got one of those big LTD fords but the older model like xf or something, real big and square for a bizo car and again it was on for young n old.
I began to go as hard as I could, I contacted everyone in Canberra I could think of to spread the word and if I didn‟t have a persons number I drove to there house if I could remember where it was.
I also began my hunt for ten pound of hooch.
I didn‟t have the dosh yet but I knew it could take a while for a steady source.
Suddenly one day I ran in to an old pot dealing mate, it turned out he had really prospered and was scoring in the region of 200 pound at a time!
He said he could supply me with any size order so I grabbed his number and got 8
ounces.
Then 12, then a pound and within just a week I was buying five pound at a time then within a month hit my ten pack, I would end up buying even bigger down the track!
I would see this guy for many years even after I built up a massive network of suppliers from around ACT, NSW, VIC and SA.
Suddenly my cost price was so cheap that I dumped my prices and boosted deal size so that I was making not a great deal more then I had.
I would always split the profit with my sale price when I got a cheaper deal to keep the price as low as I could.
I liked the keep things very hard for competition.
Actually to be more precise I did this for two reasons.
One was to drive the other dealers out of business and the second was to create a massive influx of new customers to push me in to the next level and beyond.
Two weeks after I had gone solo again I purchased a Suburu Liberty and an EB falcon and a week after that I still had the cash to buy ten pounds at a time!!
Things were great I was buying jewelry, cloths, sneakers,anything I wanted!
I had a mad audio visual set up and being a young hoon even had a small rubber swimming pool in my lounge room!
Maybe 70cm deep and 2m x 1m.
I had so much fun with the crew we would just cruise all day selling weed, smoking weed and spending cash.
By night we would hit the clubs, go to restaurants or just smoke ganja and chill.
Life really was just a party.
The thing I loved just as much as the money and nice stuff was just the cruising in the car all day.
The stereo pumping, enjoying yourself chatting to the customers and stuff.
Not a care in the world.
As things had jumped forward so drastically I gave up on selling 20‟s and 50‟s and now just sold quarters and up.
I felt as though things were really getting where I wanted them.
I even hired two runners at 1000 bucks a piece each week to run the 20‟s and 50‟s at first but they couldn‟t handle the pace so being a bleeding heart I gave the 20‟s and 50‟s customers to a young local guy who had come up hard, it set him up for life so far.
So now my customers were mostly other dealers and people who smoked but bought quantity.
I was even selling half pounds, full pounds and even two‟s or three‟s.
I hooked up with a new girl and she moved in at my place in Pearce, my sister moved out around this stage.
This chick would go on to rip me off but at this stage I thought all was sweet, over time I would tell her to quit her job and spend a heap of cash on her.
So life seemed good except for a few court cases I was fighting including the armed rob charge which carried 25yrs.
I couldn‟t do it now but I managed to keep that from causing me to much stress.
I could put the court stuff out of my mind as my solicitor was fighting it hard and believed we could win.
Suddenly I was raided again and it was only the AFP‟s incompetence that saved my ass as there whole team searched my townhouse and missed all the big stashes.
Still they had found some fifties and twenties as this was while I had the two runners on board.
I had left a bag they had returned the night before with some deals in it on the lounge room floor so it was found easily.
The AFP also found a few other odds and ends.(I tell the story in an older blog).
So the AFP arrested me and some how Tim got me bail despite the other cases I had.
I pleaded not guilty and eventually got a suspended sentence a year or two later.
Again I had to get rid of all my cars and move.
So I moved to a house in Curtin with this chick I was with and bought a ford laser nice and discreet.
I also decided I was getting to the age of needing furniture and things like nice homely stuff.
I out laid a bit of cash on some nice timber furniture for the whole house and all the nice white goods etc.
My mate had recently passed away and of course I was not happy so I was mainly just getting high all day