Tuesday, January 7, 2025 11:45 AM
I was driving north on 20th Street and had just crossed Pico Blvd when I saw the smoke from the flames rising in the Santa Monica Mountains. I pushed the record button on my phone which was mounted to the windshield and started to record. I continued north over the 10-freeway overpass before stopping at the light on Olympic Blvd. I was zooming in on the flames raging on the side of the mountain when the Crossing Guard from the prestigious Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences stepped in front of me with a large red stop sign. I shut off the camera on my phone as the teenagers gossiping and filming the smoke with their own phones crossed in front of me. I posted the video to Facebook with the title
“Fire on the Mountain.”
January 7, 2025 Santa Monica
That morning, I was delivering a half an ounce of Blue Dream cannabis flower and two 100 mg packs of Peach flavored THC gummies to a house in Brentwood. I made a right on Olympic Blvd and headed east along the Metro Line. I made my way along the street where the desires and dreams of millions of Americans are manufactured and destroyed with mechanical precision past the Bergamot Station Arts Center, the Kehillat Ma’arav Synagogue, the New Roads School, Geffen Records, Amazon Studios, Naughty Dog Software, the Red Bull Athlete Performance Center, the Activision Blizzard Building, Tribeca West, GoodRX and the Riot Games Arena. I drove past SkyDance Media which would later that year absorb Paramount Entertainment and cancel late night talk show host Steven Colbert after he made the cardinal mistake of exercising his first amendment right on late night television. Nothing to see here folks. Keep moving along.
The sun was shining but the wind howled like a wolf baying at the moon. The palm trees were swaying back and forth like it was hurricane season in Key Largo. I made a left on Bundy, and now I found myself stuck in a traffic jam. Bundy was always jammed up between Olympic and Santa Monica Blvd at this time of day and I felt like kicking myself. I knew better than to take Bundy at this time of day but I also knew not to start beating myself up when I made a mistake. That’s when my mind starts to go to a dark place and I start to repeat negative patterns and behavior. I had learned all this about myself in the 52- week Anger Management Class that the Los Angeles Superior Court had mandated the after my own drunken Kristallnacht and failed attempt at suicide by cop in front of the Erba Markets cannabis store had landed me in the Los Angeles County Jail.
My plan that night was to break all the windows at Erba Markets cannabis store with an axe until the police arrived and gunned me down so that I could die in a blaze of glory. This ill-fated attack had nothing to do with the owner Suresh Jain’s race or religion and I have nothing particular against the Jewish people. Suresh Jain was not a Jew though. He was a Jain, a religion whose followers do not believe in God but believe in reincarnation and the principle of ahimsa (non-violence). Some Jains even wear masks to prevent them from breathing in and killing insects but it was also Jain bankers who had lent the British East India Company the money that was used to fund the private army that conquered India for the British. The most famous mass murderer in history Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian so I guess the lesson here is don’t piss off the vegans or they will make your life hell.
So what had driven me to this madness? What had convinced me that I would be better off dead and that everyone else would be better off without me? Suresh Jain had once been my landlord and I even considered him my friend. Our family had operated the Grace Medical Cannabis Pharmacy on his property for 7 years. That was until Jain had evicted us and leased the property to my former business partner after he had tried to strangle and murder me. When I discovered that he had trafficked his wife’s 13 year old sister to his brother and then his son
We then moved our business Grace Medical across the street and opened another store but Jain then submitted false ownership and lease information to the State of California in order to obtain a Retail Cannabis for another cannabis business ERBA at our former location on his property. Our business Grace was denied a Retail Cannabis Licence at our new location because it was too close to Jain’s property where ERBA was now located. We appealed the decision and argued that Grace Medical obviously had priority over ERBA as the Existing Medical Marijuana Dispensary because ERBA was operating at our previous location on Jain’s property.
During this time we were approached by former State Senator Richard Palanco who was now acting as a lobbyist for the cannabis industry. We were told by him that if we were to pay a $100,000 fee he could guarantee that our application would be accepted. We refused. Two days before Grace Medical’s appeal hearing was scheduled before the Department of Cannabis Regulation, the National Guard and CDTFA agents barged into Grace Medical brandishing AR-15’s and Mossberg shotguns. They ordered all employees and patients to get down on the ground and then handcuffed them. They then smashed all 28 security cameras that had been installed as required by law, cleared the shelves and all cannabis products, emptied the cash registers and the safe of all cash and seized all computers and records. The Department of Water and Power shut off the electricity and the water and the doors were chained up and padlocked. Grace Medical Marijuana Pharmacy, the third largest cannabis retail store in the City of Los Angeles, the business that our family had spent 10 years operating and that had taken me a lifetime to build, was closed permanently.
In hindsight we probably should have just paid the bribe. Grace was bringing in almost $100,000 a week but we were paying almost $30,000 a week in taxes and after paying $25,000 a month in rent, all our employees, and for the products on the shelves and then splitting that with my partner Barret who owned the licence I just didn’t have the extra money. A corrupt West Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Member by the name of Jay Handal had helped Jain carry out this scheme with my former business partner and Handal, a man with no experience in the cannabis business, was now the CEO of ERBA. I reported all this to the Santa Monica Police Department and the FBI. Both the Santa Monica Police Department and the FBI had declined to pursue any action against Jain or Handal.
We mortgaged our house and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and 7 years in civil litigation against Jain for promising to give me the lease but instead leasing it to my former business partner and for leasing to an illegal business that resulted in the closure of Grace. Jain’s attorneys delayed the case year after year while ERBA continued to operate and Jain collected $50,000 a month in rent. After my partner Barret Slome was tortured, shot and murdered in his Laguna Beach condo by a professional hit man in June of 2020 not one witness would come forward and testify against Jain in court. It was now my word against Jain’s who had by then amassed a substantial war chest and a team of the high priced lawyers and witnesses willing to lie under oath.
The case was tried before Judge Mark Epstein in Santa Monica the same courthouse O.J Simpson allegedly got away with killing his wife Nichole Simson as well as Ronald Goldman. Even after admitting that he knew Handal and that Handal had contributed to his election campaign, Judge Epstein refused to remove himself from the case. He then made no pretense of fairness in judging our case. To Epstein I was a drug dealer and a convicted felon in a dispute with my landlord. After catching both Jain and Handal lying under oath, Epstein told Jain “I don’t believe your story for a New York Minute.” and then took the case from the jury. We had high hopes but I should have known better. My attorney Brad Brunon who had defended Phil Spector successfully in his first murder trial had told me that there was no way Epstein who presided over the case was going to award us a dime and he was right. Epstein knew that Jain and Handal were lying but rather than accept that Lisa and I were telling the truth and that Jain had cheated us Epstein decided we were both lying and to not award us a penny. That was when I decided to end it all.
At the time, in my inebriated state and diminished capacity, I thought that the sight of my bullet-ridden corpse on the 6:00 news and flashed across the internet would shine the spotlight on these bandits who had robbed our family of our life’s work in plain with the help of the justice system but not a chance. Nobody gives a fuck here. The notorious criminal Whitey Bulger who was Number 1 on the FBI’s most wanted list had arrived in Los Angeles the same year as me in 1995 and had lived in Santa Monica for 16 years undetected. Whitey must have known that the people here are so self-absorbed they don’t notice a thing. It’s just one of the things I love about this place.
Like most elaborate suicide attempts carried out for attention and not intention, it was poorly planned and doomed to failure. I had decided to ride my bike on this mission but it was very cold that night and by the time I rode all the way from my house to ERBA I was freezing and I was starting to sober up. I parked the bike behind in the alley and rubbed my hands together to warm them up before taking the axe out from where I had hidden it beneath my jacket. I calmly broke all the windows of the porn shop and the Sam’s Liquor store and then I moved on to ERBA.
I broke two windows at ERBA and then I started to regret destroying the store that I had built with my own hands. I just couldn’t do it. People that shopped at Grace for years probably still went there to buy weed. They didn’t know the whole story. They knew there was one store. Then there were two. Then one closed. This was crazy. Smashing those windows felt like beating my own child and so I stopped.
Then I ran.
It’s a good thing I did run because sometime later a 16-year-old boy crashed his car into the Erba Markets cannabis store at 3:00 in the morning and was gunned down by the ERBA security guard as he fled. The boy bled out and died on the sidewalk before he made it to Centinela Avenue. There was no public outcry about a 16-year-old boy being put down for trying to steal some grass. Erba Markets was open for business at 8:00 am the next morning. Like most people who make the mistake of thinking they are dying for a noble cause, my death would have meant absolutely nothing. As I said nobody here gives a fuck.
After Grace Medical Marijuana Pharmacy was raided and closed by the National Guard and the California Department of Fees and Taxation, the State of California continued to hound my wife Lisa and I. We were the target of a secret 5 year investigation into our lives in which all our emails, phone calls and tax records were seized. In 2024 I was arrested and charged with felony tax evasion and am now facing 3-5 years in prison. I still managed to eke out a living by operating Grace Delivery as a black-market cannabis delivery business, but after spending my lifetime working to legalize cannabis to now be forced back into the life of a common criminal was an especially bitter pill for me to swallow.
Woody Harrelson, Bill Mahr, Devon Wheeler and Jay Handal at the opening of “the Woods”
After cheating us out of the business we had spent a lifetime building, my former partner Devon Wheeler had gone on to open a chain of Erba Markets cannabis stores with Jay Handal. Erba Markets was now the largest chain of adult use cannabis stores in Los Angeles. My former business partner and Jay Handal now operated a cannabis lounge called “the Woods” with Bill Mahr and Woody Harrelson. Before these carpetbagging predators had strong-armed robbed us out of our family’s business, I thought that our family, the Detamores, would be regarded as the Kennedy’s of Cannabis after legalization.
The Detamores. Sarasvati, Lakshmi, Vishaka, Radha Priya, Saci Devi, Olive Moore(Grace), Shawn, Karl, Jason and Paul Detamore
After all, we did the heavy lifting, risking our lives and freedom for decades Ganja smuggling while working to legalize cannabis. To watch posers like Woody Harrelson and Bill Mahr who hid in the shadows for years while we risked our lives and going to prison now profit like vultures gorging themselves on a carcass by working with these predators and then bragging about it on national TV made me want to puke. I wrote to Woody and Bill and offered to go on Bill’s Podcast Club Random with Handal and my former partner and to let Bill and Woody explain how they got in business in business with a predator who had trafficked his wife’s teenage sister and then tried to kill me after I found out but neither of them replied. I wouldn’t want to explain that either and now they don’t have to. I will.
This was definitely not the life I envisioned for myself. In 1995 after serving a 1 year sentence at the Federal Correction Institute in Milan, Michigan for selling 26.6 grams of cannabis to a confidential informant I made a promise to God that I would never sell Ganja again. Ganja is the Sanskrit word for Cannabis commonly known as marijuana, a powerful psychoactive plant that is used for spiritual, medical and recreational purposes. Walla is a Hindi word for merchant, a dealer in goods or a master of his trade. After I was released from prison I soon forgot about my vow and became a full time Ganjawalla. It turned out that my faith, my education, hard work and dedication did nothing to pull me out of poverty that I was born into. It was this broken vow that has made and lost me a fortune, almost cost me my life many times, and may cost me my freedom in the end.
When I was 16 years old I thought I was the fastest person in the state of West Virginia. The only person who had ever beat me in a race was Joey Galloway from across the river in Bellaire, Ohio. Joey Galloway went on to play football for the Ohio State University and for the Dallas Cowboys and at one time Joey Galloway was the fastest man in the NFL. I don’t mean to brag but the only reason I lost that race was because I turned around to wave to the crowd. I thought the crowd was cheering for me when I heard them calling my name but they were really trying to warn me that Joey was coming up behind me and fast. So when I turned to wave at the crowd Joey passed me on the inside. If I had won I would have probably forgotten all about it but I decided to show off instead. It's nobody's fault but mine.
The famous country music singer Brad Paisley was one grade behind me at John Marshall High School in Glen Dale, West Virginia. Brad was in the same class as Lisa Marie Henry, the girl I would marry and spend my life with. He is a brilliant songwriter and years later he would invite my wife Lisa and all the members of his senior class of 1991’ to be in one of his music videos “Letter to Me.” It's a great song about what you would say to yourself if you could go back in time. I would have told myself not to wave at the crowd and to finish my race. I have to admit that I am a bit jealous of Brad Paisley because I never even knew who he was in high school and I thought of myself as the most successful person that had attended John Marshall High School while I was there. That was before Brad Paisley had come along a year behind me and absolutely destroyed my ego by becoming a multiplatinum international country sensation. He absolutely deserves it. He is far more talented than me and has a wonderful sense of humor which I am still working on.
My favorite author Kurt Vonnegut would refer to these as “granfalloons,” a collection of human beings who identify with each other for arbitrary or meaningless reasons such as Hoosiers from Indiana or Buckeyes from Ohio as our neighbors to the west like to call themselves. In West Virginia we say that we are American by birth, but from West Virginia by the Grace of God. Still my favorite saying from West Virginia is “If you ain’t fit company for yourself you ain’t fit company for anyone else.” which is about the coolest saying ever besides “Let Go Mountaineers!”
Before winning the Golden Gloves In West Virginia in 1995 my brother Shawn Detamore was on the same All State Team as Randy Moss who went on to play for Marshall University and then for the Minnesota Vikings in the NFL. Randy Moss went on to become such a dominant football player that getting ‘Mossed” is now the term used in football to describe getting beat over the top. During the 90’s I went by the name Reggie and our family smuggled so much Ganja into the United States and so many people were smoking my weed or “Reggie’s weed” that regular ganja or “regs” is now called “Reggie” after me. It’s not what I wanted to be famous for or infamous as my mother in law Victoria Antoinette Fiorilli will tell you but what is fame after all? If you are lucky they will name a street after you and in 100 years no one will know who you are.
F Scott Fitzgerald said something like “If not an artist or a soldier then a criminal” and this gave me some comfort. I told myself that even if I had failed as an artist, I had fought as a soldier and even won a pyrrhic victory in my fight for marijuana legalization. Now that I was being forced to survive as a criminal in the heart of Babylon I was at least engaged in the last honorable profession available to me, as a criminal. Did I want to risk being arrested again for selling ganja illegally? No, but if I didn’t pay the mortgage this week, we would not even have a place to live until the state of California could find a way to put me in prison. I now had to come up with about $12,000 a month just to stay in our home. Yes, I had the wolf at the door and the tiger by the tail. Business had been slow this month and the mortgage was due on the first. It was already the 7th and I was still a few thousand short.
What I didn’t know at the time was that my wife Lisa had already put a plan into action to save our house. Her friend Clytie from Malibu had learned a spell for abundance to the Virgin Mary that was said to be guaranteed to work. The spell was actually very easy. Simply write the symbols she shared with her on a piece of paper in the order given clockwise while uttering the prayer. Then put shea butter and honey on the paper. Let the paper sit in direct sunlight for 2 hours. Then burn the paper while reciting the prayer again. Lisa had conjured this spell the previous day and I hadn’t thought much of it at the time. When you have been married as long as I have you learn that being right and being happy are two entirely separate things.
The phone rang. It was my friend Oliver. Oliver David Bane lived in Pacific Palisades just off of Sunset Blvd with a terrier named Bandit. Oliver’s father George Bane was an attorney who began his career with the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office before opening his own practice as a successful entertainment lawyer. George Bane was a man of culture with excellent taste, and his home was filled with the art, sculpture, weapons and furniture he had gathered from his travels around the world. George Bane had passed away from Covid, shortly after Oliver’s mother had died. I’m told it happens quite often to people who spend their entire lives together.
In 2021 George Bane had left his home and all his property to his only son Oliver. Oliver’s wife Tara had taken what she could get her hands on, around $700,000 from what I was told and had run off to Egypt with some guy she met. Tara was living with him and having his baby but when I met Oliver, he still believed that Tara would come back to him. After all, he still had her dog Bandit.
I tell you all this because by the end of this day everything that George Bane spent a lifetime building and collecting and had left his son Oliver would be gone forever. It would be lost in the fire that would sweep down the mountain, across Sunset Blvd and would not stop till it reached the ocean like a tidal wave rolling over a South Pacific Island.
I answered the phone. “What’s happening captain?”
“Can I get the usual order lieutenant?” Oliver asked.
“Yes sir.” I answered. “I have one delivery and then I’m going to the temple at noon, but I’ll stop by after that. I’ll be there around 1:30”
“See you then lieutenant.”
“Aye, Aye, Captain!” I replied.
Suddenly I remembered the fire I had seen earlier.
“By the way I saw some smoke coming off the mountains. Is that fire anywhere near you?” I asked.
“The fire is on the other side of Sunset. They should be able to put it out before it crosses Sunset.” Oliver replied.
“Well, I’ll see you at 1:30 then.”
“See you then lieutenant.” Oliver
“Aye, Aye Captain!” I hung up.
By the usual Oliver meant a half an ounce of indica and 3 packs of pre-rolled sativa joints. It was a $200 order about twice the amount of our average delivery. Oliver was a good customer, but I also considered him a good friend. A lot of people liked to chat for a few minutes, but Oliver would often have tea ready and invite me in for a visit. Sometimes our visits lasted for hours. The past year I had fallen behind on our mortgage and we had put our house up for sale. Oliver found out and told me not to sell the house. God had a plan for me, Oliver told me. Then he had written me a check for $40,000 and we had taken the house off the market.
Oliver’s house needed a lot of work and I offered to repair Oliver’s deck and replace the floors in his house in exchange for the money he had given me, but he refused. Oliver told me that Jesus had told him to give me the $40,000 because I was the Angel of the Lord. Oliver told me that we were soldiers in God’s army. At the time I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant. For a while I thought he wanted me to help him kill his estranged wife Tara who he referred to as the “whore of Babylon.” I think I was the only criminal he knew. I did manage to convince Oliver to file for a divorce from Tara before they were married for 10 years so that she wouldn’t be entitled to alimony for life. As soon as Oliver served her with the divorce papers Tara began telling Oliver that she was coming back from Egypt as soon as she could get a passport. I suspected that she was trying to stall so that she could remain married for 10 years and continue to collect alimony for life but I kept silent. Oliver was obviously still in love with her.