The Crows of Sunset Park

The Crows of Sunset Park

by

Jason Detamore

PROLOGUE

Santa Monica, CA 4:19 AM.

A thick fog has rolled off the Pacific Ocean this morning and settled over the quiet sleeping city. Rows of faultlessly landscaped homes and streets planted with Indian Fig trees stretch from Lincoln Blvd to the Santa Monica Airport. Into the neon orange sky, the Crow family flies; above the Penmar by the Sea Golf Course, along the chain link fence that the Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca had installed around the golf course to keep the homeless people from camping there. The fence had been installed just before the election of 2020 and has been there ever since.

On the hillside above the golf course a cluster of 4 palm trees appears. The Crow family lands in the 4 palm trees. The Crows look down on a small white house nestled in the hillside. A lone figure sits on the deck typing in the dark. A laptop rests on his knees. Only the iridescent glow from the laptop illuminates his face. A corncob pipe and book of matches sits on his left. The Crows of Sunset Park begin to disturb the morning silence.

“Caw! Caw! Caw!!!” The Crows call out.

The writer picks up his pipe, strikes a match and cups the flame against the wind. He takes in a deep inhale, coughs loudly and exhales. The Clock on his laptop now switches from 4:19 to 4:20 AM. The Crows take flight. A single old crow with one glassy eye who the author has named Odin remains watching him from the roof.

“Good Morning Odin.”The writer exhales a giant cloud of smoke in Odin the one eyed Crow’s direction. The Sun peeks over the trees on the horizon bathing the sky in orange light. The lone figure starts typing again.

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 above the Santa Monica Mountains in the distance. 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 a 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, CA

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 past the Bergamot Station Arts Center, the Kehillat Ma’arav Synagogue, the New Roads School and now I was on the street where the desires and dreams of millions of Americans are manufactured and destroyed with mechanical precision. I passed 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. Then 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 making a joke on late night television.

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 failed Kristallnacht and 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. Suresh Jain was not a Jew but was actually a Jain, a religion whose followers do not believe in God but believe in reincarnation and the principle of ahimsa (non-violence). Some Jains are so committed to non-violence they 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.

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 at one time I even considered him my friend. Our family had operated the Grace Medical Cannabis Pharmacy on Jain’s property for 7 years before Jain had evicted us and leased the property to my former business partner, Devon Wheeler. This was after I discovered that Devon had trafficked his wife's sister to his oldest son Chad Wheeler who was playing left tackle for the University of Southern California but before Chad Wheeler had gone to prison for trying to strangle and murder his girlfriend Aliyah Taylor and lost his job playing Right Tackle for the Seattle Seahawks.

The last time I saw Devon Wheeler he had tried to strangle and murder me. LAPD had just told Devon that he couldn’t just lock me out or our business because he had the lease and that he had to honor his contract with me.

“Just because you can hijack a plane doesn’t make you a pilot.” I said taking a bong hit and turning my back on him. Devin then punched me in the side of the head and when that punch failed to knock me out he grabbed me from behind me from behind and got me in a choke hold and started to strangle me. I was stars and my vision started to go black around the edge as my brain was being cut off from its oxygen supply. I smashed the bong against the concrete block wall of the greenhouse and held the jagged edge of the bong up to Devon’s throat.

“Is this really what we’re doing? Fighting over a weed shop? What happened to you?” I asked him and I meant it. I had grown up with Devon and he had always been petty and selfish and sure he had ripped of all of his previous business partners but this was me. I was Jason fucking Detamore. Our our family had spent 20 years building this business and had never had to use violence or guns in any way. Besided we were making tons of money or at least I thought so.

The security guard Michael Yee now showed up looking terrified.

“Michael, I need you to taze this faggot if he doesn’t get off of me right now”

“Devon, please.” Michael said.

Devon let go of me and ran out of the store. That would be the last time I saw him.

People still ask me to this day why Devon felt like he had rip me off and I just say ”Why did Cain slay Abel?” I found out later that the only reason Devon hadn't cut me out of our business before just like he had done to all of his business partners before me was because he was afraid of me. It was only after I told him that I would never do anything to hurt him or his family that he stabbed me in the back. Devon had even come out and said it at the weekly meeting of the Grace partners. There was Peter Tajera, the disgraced CEO of Mepco Oil who had been found guilty of planting chips in gas pumps to fleece customers and James Catipay who was about to be charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with defrauding investors of more that $11 million dollars in a scheme in which investors paid into a fund that promised to sue physicians and pay returns on the proceeds of these lawsuits. And there was my childhood friend Devin Wheeler who had introduced me to all these people and insisted that we be in business with them.

At that meeting Devon Wheeler had said “Well if I locked you out of the business you’d probably send your people from the Rolling 60’s after me.” Devon was referring to the fact that he had ripped off all of his former business partners including his father in law Leonard Kamhout who had carved all the silver jewelry for the Chrome Hearts brand and who ended up shooting himself in front of the Hare Krishna temple in Vancouver, Washington later that year. At the time I didn’t think much of telling Devon that “I would never do something like that to you or your family. Chad is my godson. You guys are like my family.” That was the biggest mistake I ever made. Telling Devon Wheeler that I would never hurt him or his family. Unfortunately that is true. After all that has happened I still feel sorry for him.

Once Devon knew that I would not hurt him or his family changed the locks and cut my wife Lisa and I out of our business Grace Medical. We moved Grace Medical across the street and opened another store but Wheeler and 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 but I just didn’t have the extra money. It cost me every penny I had to move and we were paying almost $30,000 a month in taxes and $25,000 a month in rent plus I was splitting all the money that came in with my new partner Barret who owned the licence. A corrupt West Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Member by the name of Jay Handal had helped Jain carry out this scheme with my Devon Wheeler and Handal, a man with no experience in the cannabis business, was now the CEO of ERBA.

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, Handal and Wheeler 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 coached witnesses willing to lie under oath.

The case was tried before Judge Mark Epstein in Santa Monica, the same courthouse that O.J Simpson allegedly got away with killing his wife Nichole Simson as well as Ronald Goldman. Even after Judge Epstein admitted during the trial that he actually knew Jay Handal and that Jay Handal had contributed to his election campaign, Judge Epstein refused to remove himself from the case. Epstein then made no pretense of fairness in judging our case.

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. When Epstein took the case from the jury we had high hopes but to Epstein I was a drug dealer and a convicted felon in a dispute with my landlord. 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 the windows at ERBA felt like beating my own child. I just couldn’t do it. 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.

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 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.

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 and Ali Sharkachian. 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.

Vulture Capitalists Woody Harrelson, Bill Mahr, Devon Wheeler and Jay Handal at the opening of “the Woods”

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. 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.

The Detamores. Sarasvati, Lakshmi, Vishaka, Radha Priya, Saci Devi, Olive Moore(Grace), Shawn, Karl, Jason and Paul Detamore

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 and now I’ll never forget it. 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. Brad 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!”

A few years before winning the Golden Gloves In the state of West Virginia in 1995 my brother Shawn Detamore was on the same All State Team as Randy Moss who then 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 enough to be really famous they will name a street after you and in 100 years no one will know who you are. “Vanity of vanities. All is vanity”

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. After we had taken out more than $1,000,000 in loans to pay our legal bills 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. When you have been married as long as I have you learn that being right and being happy are two entirely separate things.

The spell was actually very easy. Simply write the symbols 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.

The phone rang. It was my friend Oliver. Oliver 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 this man 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 sacrificed 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 me to stop and talk 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. When Oliver found out that we had put the house up for sale he 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. 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. Then 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 Oliver 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 but I have watched too many “Forensic Files” to think I could get away with murder. I finally 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. He really did think she was coming back to him.

I headed west on the 10 freeway, exited on Robertson Blvd and then made a right on Venice Blvd toward the beach. I took a right on Watseka Avenue and parked in front of the Hare Krishna Temple. I took off my shoes and went inside. The doors were open and the deities of Sri Rukmini Dwarkadisha were on full display. The marble temple floor was cool and dry on my bare feet and the smell of rosewater and incense filled the air. My friend Clytie was sitting on the floor playing the harmonium and had already started chanting. I grabbed the mridanga drum off the shelf and sat down next to Clytie on the lotus flower shaped marble floor that my father had installed over 50 years ago. My friend Shiva arrived and picked up a pair of brass kartal cymbals and began to play. Clytie led the chant singing the words of the Bengali song. Shiva and I repeated them. A dozen Indian ladies, a few old men and a few soccer moms from the Veda Yoga Studio on Venice Blvd bowed down before the altar and then began to clap along. We all started to chant, and all these thoughts soon disappeared from my mind like the mist clearing from a grassy meadow with the morning sunrise.

There was a time when I could go through a fifth of Patron Silver in a night but between the binges, the 12 step meetings and retreats I discovered that what I was really looking for was connection. Kirtan is the ultimate connection, sound that transcends time and space. When we read the words of an author who lived thousands of years ago we connect through time and space with that author and with all those people who have read those words and comprehended them. For example when you say the words “Vini, Vidi, Vici” you connect not only with Julius Caesar who spoke those words 2000 years ago also but with the countless people who have read these words or spoke them since that day. “I came, I saw, I conquered.” In this way when we chant we can connect with all those souls who have chanted in the past wherever they are now just as we connect with the author who wrote those words and the readers who read them.

In 1492, Chaitanya Mahaprubhu introduced Kirtan, the public chanting of the Hare Krishna Mantra, as an act of social protest against Islamic rule in Bengal, India. Chaitanya’s message was that God is present in His name and that by chanting this Maha (great) Mantra (mind-release) people of all faiths would be able to connect with God directly through the science of Bhakti Yoga. Bhakti means “love” and Yoga means “connect.” Each of us sees the world through the mirror of our own mind which is colored by Maya (illusion). Kirtan is the process of chanting these names that clear the dust from the mirror of the mind, the illusions of Maya. This allows us to connect to our natural state of bliss, Ananda. Through this process of chanting we can connect directly through time and space with the billions of great souls, those Mahatmas who have chanted these mantras and prayed before us in the past, present and the future.

After 30 minutes the Kirtan came to an end. The guests lined up at the altar to receive their blessings and we put away our instruments. Clytie, Shiva and I walked outside.

“Kiba Jaya Das!” Clytie said she gave me an ecstatic hug “Good to see you!” Kiba Jaya was the name given to me as a child. Kiba means spiritual. Jaya means victory.

“Good to see you too. How was the trip to Merry Old England” I replied. “It was fantastic.” Clytie answered. “My mother is doing so well and I got to go to the temple at the Manor, which is my favorite.”

Clytie was referring to the palatial estate that George Harrison of the Beatles had donated to Bhaktivedanta Swami the founder of the Hare Krishna Movement in the west and that was now home to the Bhaktivedanta Manor Radha Krishna Temple in London.

“You have to go to New Vrindavan this year. The next time we go you have to come” I told her.

“To West Virginia?” she asked timidly. She had heard stories about New Vrindavan. They were not good. I could see that she was not enthusiastic about the idea.

“Yes.” I replied. There is no place like it on earth in the spring. The trees and the lakes are so beautiful and there are wild peacocks roaming around.”

“Like at Old Malibu?” Clyie asked.

“Yes, like at Old Malibu.” I replied.

My phone rang but I silenced it. I don’t like to answer phone calls while I am having a conversation with someone so if you call me and it goes straight to voicemail that does not mean I am ignoring your call but that I am giving the person in my presence my undivided attention. Now my phone rang again and then again and so I decided to check it. I saw that I had 5 missed calls from Oliver.

“Hey Clytie, I really want to catch up but this is my friend Oliver from the Palisades and I need to call him back.” I said.

“I’ll see you later Kiba. Tell Lisa I said hello.”

“Tell Nick I said hi.”

“I will. Hari Bol Kiba Jaya!”

“Hari Bol Clytie Dasi”

Clytie and her husband Nick Nolte lived in Malibu near Zuma Beach. Nick and Clytie’s daughter Sophia was born the same year as our youngest son Brady, and they had been friends since they were 2 years old.

Nick Nolte, Brady Detamore

For years we would go to their house on Christmas Eve and they would come to our neighborhood to trick or treat on Halloween. Nick and Clytie lived in a wonderful place in Malibu that Nick had bought from Tommy Chong of the “Cheech and Chong” movies. It was actually the same property where the Eagles had recorded the album “Hotel California”. Nick had created a rock labyrinth of wonderful gardens there. For years he had allowed us to use his greenhouses to breed Grace Medical’s collection of the finest cannabis strains in the world.

We used these “mother” plants to make the clones that we provided to our growers to ensure a consistent supply of the essential medical strains. All these “mothers” were lost in the Malibu Fire of 2018 that destroyed most of the estate and almost all of Nick Nolte’s material possessions.

Malibu Grace before and after the fire.

After the fire, Clytie and their daughter Sophia had come to stay at our house with their 2 dogs Socrates and Charlie and 3 cats whose names I don’t remember. I had no idea then that history was about to repeat itself as it does time and time again and that 7 years later another person who lost everything in a fire would come to live with us.

Shiva and I walked towards the car. I pushed the button on the remote to unlock the doors. Shiva and I got in the van and closed the doors. I turned the key in the ignition and started the van. We pulled back on to Venice Blvd and headed west. Shiva pulled a glass pipe from the console. Then he pulled out a frosty green and purple bud and crushed it into the glass pipe. Shiva picked up a blue Bic lighter, struck the flame and lit the crushed flower in the bowl. As the purple flower burned Shiva took a long inhale before coughing out a giant cloud of smoke.

“Om Namah Shivaya” Shiva exhaled, reciting a prayer to Lord Shiva before handing the peace pipe to me.

I took a long breath from the pipe, felt the smoke filling up my lungs and then I exhaled.

“Om Namah Shivaya” I repeated, giving homage to lord Shiva the god of Destruction and Dance and the greatest devotee of Lord Krishna.

I dialed Oliver’s number. He answered on the first ring.

“Lieutenant, it’s bad.” Oliver said. “It’s getting smokey and the hound is getting nervous.”

I heard a little Bandit howling like a baby wolf. I looked at the time. It was 12:45, exactly an hour since I had seen the flames burning up on the mountain on my way out. They should have put the fire out by now.

“How close is the fire to you now?” I asked.

“I heard that there is fire below me on Las Casas. I’ve got the hoses ready though. Bandit and I are ready to make a stand.” Oliver replied.

That did not sound good.

“Are there any fire trucks near you?” I asked him

“I haven’t seen any.” He answered.

“I think you should get out of there now. You can come to my house if you want.”

“Uh Oh.” I heard him say.

“What is it?” I asked him.

“The electricity just went out.” Oliver sounded worried now and so was I now.

“That’s it. I want you to grab Bandit and get out of there now.” I commanded Oliver.

“”I can’t just leave, I haven't had time to get my stuff together.”

“You need to get out of there now. Just grab what you can carry. Come to my house. You can stay downstairs in Brady’s room. He can move upstairs with us. You’ll have the whole downstairs and the yard for Bandit. Just get out of there now.”

“Ok, I’m leaving now.” The phone went dead. I called Oliver back, but the phone went straight to voicemail. I handed the pipe to Shiva and texted my address to Oliver.

Shiva had been listening to the conversation and now wanted to know.

“Is his house going to be okay?” Shiva asked me, puffing on the bowl again.

“I have no idea.” I replied. I called Oliver back. Again, his phone went straight to voicemail.

“Do you think he’s really coming?” Shiva asked.

“He’s got fires burning on two sides of him and only one way out so I hope he’s on his way.” I answered.

“So do you have any deliveries or do you have time for lunch?” Shiva wanted to know.

“I was supposed to deliver to him but now I guess not.” I replied.

“Why don’t we go up on Culver Hill. We can see everything from there.

“Let’s go.” I took a left on Overland, and we headed south. We made another left on Washington and drove past Sony Studios before making another right on Duquesne. We drove past the Culver City Police Department and National Public Radio West before crossing Jefferson Blvd. We followed Duquesne Avenue up the hill past Culver City Park before parking at the top of the hill at Bill Botts Baseball Field. The smoke was still billowing from the side of the mountain but now it had spread across the sky and out over the ocean. To the right of us the sky was clear. To the left the sky was filled with black smoke.

My phone rang. It was Oliver. I answered it.

“What’s going on brother?”

“Well, I made it out of there and now I’m on Sunset Blvd. There are houses on fire on both sides of me. There are burned cars everywhere. I just drove through a wall of flames but there were no fire trucks anywhere.”

“Did you get my address?” I asked him.

“Yeah I’ve got it programmed into the GPS now. I’m heading your way. Hey, there’s a roadblock ahead. I’m going to get off the phone now.”

“ I’m on the way home now. I’ll see you at the house.” I answered.

The line went dead.

“If you have to go you can drop me off at India Sweets and Spices. I’m going to have lunch there.” Shiva said.

“Alright. I’ve got to get the room ready for him.”

I put the van in reverse and backed out. We headed down the hill into Culver City.

Shiva had been a major ganja smuggler back in the day and was part of a ring that smuggled thousands of pounds of high-grade indoor grass from Vancouver, British Columbia into California and Hawaii back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Back then you could buy Canadian BC bud for $1500 a pound, hike it over the border and sell it for $4000 a pound in LA. In Hawaii it sold for up to $5000 a pound. I actually got into the Ganja smuggling business when Maha the guy Shiva was working with got ripped off and came to me for help.

Legalization had destroyed Shiva’s career as a smuggler and now he lived in an RV that he parked at the Sprouts/CVS shopping plaza on the corner of Venice and Exposition. He spent half of the year at his parents’ farm in Oregon but in the wintertime, he brought 20 pounds of homegrown weed down from Oregon and made it through the winter by selling it a few grams at a time to some of his old customers. Shiva was also one of the best mridanga drum players in the world and had played on my friend Karnamrita’s album “Dasi” which I think may be the best Kirtan album ever. Shiva and I had been playing the noon kirtan for years and talked about forming a Kirtan band. In the back of my mind I thought that if it all fell apart we could go on the road and make a living playing bhajans as a kirtanwalla. Lord Krishna says that if His devotee is sincere he then takes away everything so that he is completely dependent upon His mercy. Maybe that was Krisna’s plan to take away everything from me so I would be completely dependent on him. I shuddered at the thought and tried to put it out of my mind but the thought was always there.

I dropped Shiva off at India Sweets and Spices, hopped back on the 10 freeway, and headed West. I took the Cloverfield Exit and headed south toward Ocean Park Blvd. I made it home, parked the van and went inside to give my wife Lisa the news. Oliver would be coming to stay in our guest house. That meant Brady would have to move back upstairs into his old bedroom. Oliver had a little dog Bandit, and our dog Copper and Lola did not get along with other dogs and had to be kept away from him. The dogs would have to give up their yard to Bandit.

Lisa changed the sheets and the bedding while I cleaned the floor and emptied the trash cans.

My phone rang. It was Oliver.

“I’m downstairs.” He said.

“I’ll be right down.” I replied.

I walked through the yard and on to Navy Street and there he was. Oliver David Bane stood at 6’2 and 240 pounds. He was bald with a white goatee but now wore a brown digital camo American Flag hat that I had given him. He drove a tan Subaru Legacy with a Route 27 Montauk Highway bumper sticker on the right-hand side. In his right hand he held his dog Bandit like a football high and tight. Hanging loosely from his left hand was an old brown leather satchel.

“Do you need help with anything?” I asked him.

“No. I didn’t have time to grab much. Just my dog and my Jew bag.”

“I see that.” I couldn’t help laughing to myself.

On the show “South Park” Cartman claimed that all Jews carried a bag of gold around their necks. Oliver was born to the chosen people and now he carried a leather satchel filled with rare gold and silver coins left to him by his father George Bane. Though he really did have a Jew bag Oliver did not follow the religion of his father but that of his mother who was a Roman Catholic. When I say that Oliver was a Catholic I do not mean that he attended any church. I don’t think Oliver had been inside a church or synagogue in decades. By Catholic I mean that Oliver drank wine and had accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior. I got Oliver settled in Brady’s room and a bed set up for Bandit. Then Oliver wanted to make a trip to Costco to buy supplies.

Oliver Bane at Costco in Marina Del Rey

After we got back from Costco, Oliver and I spent most of the night drinking Kirkland chardonnay, puffing on Gelato pre-rolls and watching the news coverage of the fire. The winds continued to rage out of control and the firefighters were forced to give up ground all night. As the evening wore on, I confessed to Oliver that I was grateful to have the chance to have him stay in our home. After he had given me the $40,000 and kept our house from going into foreclosure I didn’t know how I would ever repay him. I still didn’t know but Oliver insisted that he only gave me the money because Yahweh (God) told him to do it. We finally went to bed around 3:00 am.

The next morning we learned that Oliver’s home and the rental property he had inherited next door were completely gone. Oliver seemed unconcerned though.

“Easy come, easy go. My father made the money, not me.” ” Oliver said to anyone who would listen.

It was true his father George Bane had earned the money, not Oliver. As far as I could tell Oliver had never worked a day in his life. Oliver told me that when he was alive his dad had used his money to manipulate people and even now that his father was dead he was still trapped in the house that he had grown up in. Trapped in a house he had inherited in Pacific Palisades with a rental property next door that paid all his bills and a trust fund with over $900,000 in it as he would like to boast. Now that the house was gone he would be able to use the money as he pleased.

Oliver told me not to worry about anything and that Jesus had big plans for me. He said that that was why Jesus had told him to give me the $40,000 last year and that was why Jesus had burned down the Pacific Palisades. Oliver was absolutely thrilled that Donald Trump had been elected president. It was time to kick out all the illegal immigrants and clamp down on the women and the blacks. They were really getting out of control, especially since Obama.

When I asked Oliver what kind of plans Jesus had for me he told me that he would let me know. For now I was to order a set of business cards because it was time to do the Lord’s work. Then Oliver Bane wrote me a check for $10,000 dollars. I deposited the check and paid the mortgage. Even if we couldn’t make another payment it would take them 90 days to foreclose on us and we would at least be in the house until Brady graduated from Santa Monica High School.

The spell my wife had cast yesterday was working so far.

You see, I am blessed and lucky and I actually think that is why so many people absolutely can’t stand me. People fall in love with me because I make it look easy swinging from miracle to miracle like Tarzan swings from vine to vine. They worship me at first but then they end up hating me for always being so lucky. Sometimes I think my superpower is making people insanely jealous of me so that they wish that I would get smashed in the end. The greatest satisfaction that I get in life is surviving their hatred. You may be starting to hate me too. If you are, that's ok. You are definitely going to get your money’s worth. I definitely get smashed.

Leonardo DiCaprio steals my look and tries to act like he’s from West Virginia after meeting me for the first time on December 31,2010.

Albert Einstein once said. “There are two ways of looking at the universe as if nothing is a miracle and as if everything is.” On the way home from paying my mortgage, I had to admit that I had no idea what was going on or why this was happening. For years I had been surviving from miracle to miracle like Tarzan swinging from vine to vine. Now I had grabbed another vine and I had to admit that this was yet another documented, genuine, according to Hoyle miracle. There was no other explanation. It was crazy but I had to ask myself.

“Could Oliver be right? Did Jesus really burn down the Pacific Palisades so that Oliver Bane would move into my house and pay my mortgage?”

Of course the idea was crazy but the alternative was even more terrifying. If Jesus didn’t burn down the Pacific Palisades so that Oliver Bane would pay my mortgage we would have lost our home. That meant that no one on this earth was there to help us and that I was all alone and that was even harder to accept. I decided that if there was even a slight chance that Oliver was right the least I could do would be to write down the story of my life. If it was true, why did Jesus care so much about me that he made thousands of people homeless so that my family could stay in our home. Or maybe it was the spell my wife has cast to the Virgin Mary.

So I did as Oliver asked. I ordered the business cards and decided to write the story of my life. Maybe someone could make sense of it all. Three days later the business cards that Oliver Bane had told me to order arrived. The business cards had no name, only my contact information and read

“Angel of the Lord.”

Cannabis (Ganja) first appeared in historical and fossil records about 12,000 years ago. It has no known evolutionary predecessor, meaning the DNA structure of cannabis is unique to any other plant on Earth, leading some to believe it did not evolve on this planet. Cannabis is a Greek word that combines “canna,” which is the root of “canine” or “dog,” with “bis” or “bi,” which represents the number two. The word Cannabis means the “two-dog star.” Sirius. Cannabis is the plant of the Dog Star.

In Mali, West Africa the Dogon Tribe, the oldest recorded users of Ganja, claim that cannabis was brought to Earth from Sirius (the two-dog star), when Earth was visited by beings called the Nommo. According to the Dogon legend, the “two-dog plant” Ganja was brought to earth by the Nommo, a race of dog headed warriors. For thousands of years, The Dogon Tribe has celebrated this event every 50 years. Though Sirius the Dog Star star is not visible from earth without a telescope, the Greek historian Herodotus recorded that the Dogan Tribe knew the location of this hidden star long before Sirius B was visible or photographed with modern telescopes and that the celebration had been going on for over 1000 years when he witnessed it.

The word Ganja comes from the Sanskrit Ganga who is the Goddess of the river Ganges. Ganja (cannabis) grew wild along the banks of the Ganges River in India and the plant gets its name from this sacred river. Ganja has been used for thousands of years as a sacrament by Indian Saddus (holy men) in their daily practice. It is used to clear the mind of distractions, calm the senses and to invoke Shiva the God of dance and destruction and the Goddess Durga the divine mother, protector and deliverer. Walla is Hindi a word that means a merchant or a dealer in good master of his trade.

For 25 years I have been telling people that I was an American History teacher, a football coach and a writer and a filmmaker but I have also been a Ganja-Walla. The illegal Ganja trade generates tremendous profits and therefore draws the unwanted attention of thieves, murderers, robbers, swindlers, cocaine friends, gold diggers, kidnappers, and crooked cops. The legal Ganja trade has proven to be even more difficult to navigate for those old school cowboys with a predisposition toward decency. The floodgates have been opened to bankers, vulture capitalists, tech boys, crypto douchebags, celebrity wanna-bees and the carpet bagging politicians and tenaciously inept bureaucracies that tool for them.

I first became a Ganja Walla at the age of 14. I was living with my dad in a two-bedroom cabin in the backwoods of Marshall County, West Virginia. My mother had left my father who by then had become a bitter, abusive and violent alcoholic. My mother had finally had enough and she had taken my 8 brothers and sisters and moved into the Hare Krishna Temple in Pittsburgh. I remained behind as a sort of caretaker/hostage. I was there to make sure that my dad stayed away from my mom as the Judge had ordered him, and to make sure he didn’t commit suicide like he threatened to do if my mom ever left him. I ended up being his lookout and his mule. By then he was so paranoid he couldn’t trust anyone else.

DAD

My father Gregory Wayne Detamore, God rest his soul, was born along the Eastern shore in Cambridge, Maryland and shared a birthday with President Donald J. Trump. Cambridge, Maryland had served as a major port and breeding hub for the transatlantic slave trade the 18th century and was also the the birthplace of the Underground Railroad Conductor Harriet Tubman. My father came from a long line of Scotch-Irish corn farmers and fishermen who had turned to bootlegging whiskey during Prohibition.

After prohibition ended the family went into the antique business, something my dad could not stand. He couldn’t be bothered with anything conventional or old fashioned except for baseball. Growing up, the one thing my dad loved more than anything was playing baseball. As a freshman he stole more bases than any player in Dorchester County but by the end of his sophomore year he had dropped out of high school and left home soon after that. He took to smoking grass, taking LSD and supported the anti-war movement, especially because now that he was a dropout his number could come up in the draft anytime. He had just come back from Woodstock when he met my mother walking with her two sisters on the Boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland.

MOM

Olive Marguerite Moore was the daughter of the Reverend Allen George Moore and Jane Elizabeth Lang of Baltimore, Maryland. The Reverend Moore attended Marysville College in Tennessee and then went on to Princeton University to attend the Seminary. At Princeton he served as Albert Einstein’s assistant, serving him his meals and keeping his house clean. During World War 2 the Rev. Alan Moore was a Chaplain in the US Navy in the Pacific Fleet. He met my grandmother Jane Elizabeth Lang who was also from Baltimore at a USO dance in Los Angeles. In 1953 the Reverend Moore founded Hope Presbyterian Church in Baltimore. The city of Baltimore was still segregated in those days and the Reverend Moore was an active supporter of the civil rights movement. Dr. King once came to my grandparents' house for dinner. Dr Martin Luther King was the first black person that my mother Olive Marguerite Moore ever met.

Olive’s brother Robert had been accepted to the United States Naval Academy and graduated from Annapolis with a degree in Computer Science. At the time he was one of the few people at the Academy who knew anything about computers or they would have no doubt kicked him out on account of his abysmal fitness reports. Uncle Bob was a voracious eater and loved to drink, and though he was in the best shape of his life at that time he still managed to pack on the pounds during his time in Annapolis. He once told me that he held the record for graduating from the Naval Academy with the most demerits.

Ensign Moore’s first assignment after graduating from the United States Naval Academy was assembling an IBM computer system for His Majesty the Emperor Haile Selassie the King of Ethiopia. My Uncle Bob once told me there were lions roaming free all over the palace of King Salassie Jah Ras Tafari. They seemed to be well fed and it was a good thing too. He told me that if the lions had wanted to eat him they could have. No one would have stopped them.

My mother was the youngest daughter in a family of 9 children. She and her sisters Susan, Chris and Deborah sang in the choir and my mother played the piano at the Rev. Moore’s church. My mother’s Aunt, Olive Tuttle Sullivan was a wealthy widow and her godmother. She dreamed that my mother would enroll in the Peabody Conservatory at John Hopkins University. My mother attended Arbutus Junior High School in Baltimore, Maryland. David Byrne, the lead singer of the Talking Heads was her classmate. No doubt everyone thought he was the weirdest kid in school at least until the little blond girl who played piano dropped out of high school to marry my dad and join the Hare Krishnas.

“Don't you know her

When you see her?

She grew up

In your back yard

Come back to us

Barbara Lewis

Hare Krishna

Beauregard”

John Prine

It was 1970 and my mother was 15 when she told her parents that she was was in love with my father and pregnant with me and. Her family immediately demanded that she have an abortion and have nothing to do with my dad. My mother’s Aunt Olive who professed to be a devout Catholic, threatened to dis-inherit her if she refused to have an abortion and married my father but my mother would not be persuaded. Olive Tuttle Sullivan was related somehow to Dr. Arnold Tuttle who had written the US Army Field Surgeon’s Manual “Handbook For The Medical Soldier” and the widow of John Sullivan, a well-known builder in Baltimore who some said had mob connections. John Sullivan had died and had left Olive a very wealthy woman. My mother would not be purssuaded and did not have an abortion. She did marry my father and Aunt Olive did disown my mother depriving her of what would have been a substantial inheritance. Years later after my father ran out on us we were forced to survive on welfare and we really could have used that money. Aunt Olive eventually left her entire estate to the Archdiocese of Baltimore and the properties were later sold and used to pay off the victims Catholic priests sexual abuse.

“And she’s buying the

Stairway to heaven.”

Robert Plant

Eventually the Reverend Moore relented and married my parents in his church. Soon after that I was born and baptized by him. When I was one year old my parents moved out of their little apartment on High Street in Cambridge, Maryland and moved to Boulder, Colorado. My dad got a construction job working on the new housing developments that were going up for IBM employees. My mom got a job at the A&P as a checkout girl. Then one fateful day I would do something that would change my parent’s lives forever.

I was just a baby and was sitting in the stroller playing with my dad’s wallet as my parents walked through the Aurora Mall in Boulder. A young blond Hare Krishna girl with a red dot on her forehead, wearing a nose ring and dressed in a colorful sari approached my parents. The woman asked them if they liked the Beatles. It was 1972 and George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” was the number one single in the US that year. “ Did they like the Beatles?” Of course my parents answered yes.

“This book has a forward by George Harrison.” the woman told them.

In her hand the Hare Krishna woman held a beautiful silver framed hard backed book. On the cover was a picture of an Indian deity and the words “Krishna, The Supreme Personality of Godhead. She opened the book and there written in George Harrison’s handwriting were the words.

“All you need is Love (Krishna) “

George Harrison

The Hare Krishna woman in the sari tried to explain about yoga and reincarnation and that chanting was the ultimate form of yoga but my dad wasn’t having it. He handed the lady her book back and told her thanks but no thanks. They didn’t want to join a cult today.

A few minutes later the Hare Krishna woman in the sari came running up behind them holding my dad’s wallet in her hand.

“Your son must have dropped this,” she said, handing the wallet to my dad. After looking inside to see if the money was still there my dad felt bad and bought the book. Soon after reading “Krishna The Supreme Personality of Godhead”, my parents packed everything they owned into their car and moved into the Hare Krishna Temple on Cherry Street just off Colfax Avenue. My father shaved my head bald and my mother made saffron robes for me.

Author Denver, Colorado 1973

My dad was a carpenter and he was recruited to help finish construction of the Los Angeles New Dwarka Temple. From there we moved to New Vrindavan, West Virginia. It was there that my parents met Kirtananda Swami, the founder of New Vrindaban who they would serve with absolute devotion as God’s representative on earth until he was exposed as a fraud and finally sent to federal prison.

Keith Gordon Ham AKA Kirtananada Swami was born September 6, 1937, the son of a Baptist minister in Peekskill, New York. He had contracted polio as a child and walked with a cane even as a young man. In spite of his physical ailment Keith was a charismatic orator and a brilliant student. He attended Marysville College in Tennessee, like my grandfather the Rev. Alan Moore, and earned the Woodrow Wilson fellowship to study American History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

It was there that Keith Ham met Howard Wheeler who was to be the love of his life and his partner in crime in this world and probably the next.

Howard Morton Wheeler who later took the name Hayagriva Das was the scion of a prestigious Pensacola family. While he was a student at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill Keith who considered himself a modern-day prophet began to promote LSD to his tiny flock on campus. Howard was his chief apostle, a brilliant aristocratic hedonist who was perfectly at ease with his divine right to his own hypocrisy. In my opinion these too men were gay out of convenience, because they were so in love with themelves women were disgusting to them. They were not shy about their relationship and after being threatened with expulsion when their homosexual relationship was discovered Keith and Howard withdrew from the University of North Carolina in 1961.

Keith and Howard moved to New York where they enrolled in Columbia University. In 1965 Keith and Howard travelled to India in search of a Guru. They returned disillusioned by the experience convinced that the gurus of India were no better than carnival barkers selling snake oil, cut from the same cloth as American television evangelists. Keith, who imagined himself as a guru, already had a small band of followers at Columbia University when he met Abhay Charan De Bhaktivedanta Swami, the founder of the Hare Krishna Movement.

Abhay Charan De Bhaktivedanta Bhaktivedanta Swami was born September 1,1896 in Calcutta, India into a Gaudiya Vaishnava family. He completed his classes from Scottish Church’s College in Calcutta but refused to accept his degree in solidarity with Gandhi's protest against British rule. As a young man Abhay Charan De desperately wanted to overthrow British rule. While Gandhi advocated the path of satyagraha, non-violent protest, Abhay Charan was a supporter of Subhas Chandra Bose who aligned himself with Adolf Hitler and advocated the violent overthrow of the English colonists. Abhay’s guru Bhaktisidhana Swami told Abhay Charan De to give up on his political ambitions, as there was no material solution to a spiritual problem. Whether the Persians, the Afghans or the British ruled India, life did not change much for the common man who was suffering all around the world.

At the age of 50 Abhay Charan left his family and took the renounced order of a Sanyasi,donning the saffron robes of a monk and taking the name Bhaktivedanta Swami. At the age of 69 Abhay Charan Bhaktivedanta Swami sailed to America to spread the Benediction Moon of Lord Chaitanya’s Sankirtan Movement. Bhaktivedanta Swami’s early days were marked by profound disappointments. He was ridiculed by his peers in India who thought his mission would end in failure. He had written to his god-brothers asking for help but received none. After his apartment was robbed and his typewriter was stolen, Bhaktivedanta Swami was on his way to inquire about return passage to India when he met Howard Wheeler walking down the street.

Howard Wheeler had only recently got back from India with Keith Ham. They had travelled to India on the Jaladutta, the same freighter that brought the Bhaktivedanta Swami to America. Howard approached Bhaktivedanta Swami and began to question him, puzzled by the sudden appearance of an Indian swami on the bank of the East River. Bhaktivedanta Swami told Howard that he was giving classes on the Bhagavad Gita, the Song of God and invited Howard to come. Howard couldn’t wait to tell the others. Imagine after going all the way to India to find a guru now finding a Swami living on the Lower East Side. Keith and the others were skeptical. They had seen their share of “Swamis” and up till that time they were not impressed.

The next Monday Howard, Keith and the others arrived at a small storefront on 26 Second Avenue. A neon sign left behind by the previous owners flashed the words “Matchless Gifts.” Sandalwood incense burned reminding them of the temples in India they had visited. At the front of the room was a small altar with pictures of Indian gods they did not recognize. Someone had placed straw mats on the floor for people to sit on. A half dozen other people were also sitting and waiting. As they waited for the Swami, others came in filling up the small room.

Bhaktivedanta Swami entered through the hall door, sat on one of the straw mats and faced his congregation. His attire was simple: a saffron dhoti worn in the style of a Sanyasi monk, and a saffron chadar over his shoulders. He sat erect and cross-legged, his face was serene, meditative, and radiated with joy and compassion. Picking up a pair of kartals, (brass hand cymbals), he plays them and begins to chant. After chanting for a few minutes the Swami stops and explains.

“Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare. Hare, Krishna, and Rama. These names of God are the transcendental seeds of the maha- mantra, the great mantra.” he tells them.

“Krishna means all attractive. In Bhagavad-gita, Krishna declares Himself to be the Absolute Truth, Bhagavan, the possessor of all opulence. Atma, the Self, is subordinate to Paramatma, the Supersoul,” Bhaktivedanta Swami tells them.

“This Paramatma, the Supersoul is Krishna, is manifested in the hearts of every living entity. Everything is subordinate to the personality Krishna. The demigods, Brahman, time, space, the spiritual and material universes, and all incarnations and avatars are all subordinate to Krishna. Krishna is the sum total of everything; and yet He is beyond everything. To realize the supreme ultimate truth is to realize Krishna, and realizing Krishna means becoming His devotee. Every living entity is an eternal servant of Krishna. This is our svarupa, our eternal identity. All of us see things not as they are but as our minds conceive them. “ Bhaktivedanta Swami tells them.

“This chanting will cleanse the dust from the mirror of your mind allowing you to perceive things, as they truly are, part and parcel of Krishna the Supreme Personality of Godhead”.

Bhaktivedanta Swami ’s conviction is absolute and it was contagious. Keith and Howard who had arrived with the intention of discrediting the Swami decide immediately accept Bhaktivedanta Swami as their guru and join his mission. Keith’s LSD flock from Columbia join next and they bring their friends, many of whom begin to attend the Swami’s lectures, decorating the temple, passing out fliers at Columbia University and organizing the first public kirtan at Tomkins Square Park.

The poet Allen Ginsburg has been chanting ‘Hare Krishna” at anti-war marches and Howard Wheeler sends him an invitation. Allen Ginsburg was considered by many to be the poet laureate of the beat generation. His poem “Howl” was an ode to the wasted youth of postwar America and cry against materialism, military oppression, and sexual repression. He is a fierce anti-authoritarian and vocal anti-war protestor.

Ginsburg comes to visit the Swami with his lover Peter Orlovsky. He brought a harmonium from Calcutta as a gift for Bhaktivedanta Swami. Prabhupada tells Allen Ginsburg that it was Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and the chanting of the Hare Krishna Mantra that inaugurated civil disobedience in India. Bhaktivedanta Swami tells Ginsberg.

“When the government officers broke the sankirtan drums, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu personally led thousands of people to the Chan Kazi’s palace. Finding nothing in the Koran prohibiting the chanting the Quazi then agreed to lift his ban on the chanting and promised that his descendants would do the same after him. A peaceful revolution had taken place in the heart of Mughal India and the Hindus were now allowed to practice their faith after 500 years of oppression. The principle of Satya-Graha or non-violent protest had been established. So, you are a very influential man. I request that you chant this Hare Krishna at your poetry readings and other public functions. So this is a great opportunity for you to introduce this Krishna consciousness. Hare Krishna can purify everyone.”

Ginsberg listens and promises to chant Hare Krishna every day but tells Howard that he does not think Prabhupada’s message will be well received. Giving up eating meat was one thing, but asking hippies to give up taking drugs and having sex in the middle of the sexual revolution was a tough sell. It turned out Ginsberg was wrong.

In fact there were thousands of people who were disenchanted with sex, drugs and hedonism of the hippies. A great many of them were Catholics or Jews like Ginsberg who were disenchanted with their own parents' materialistic lifestyles and now trying to one up them in austerity and piety. When an old Jewish mom once asked Bhaktivedanta Swami.

“Why do so many Jews join the Hare Krishna's?" she asked the Swami.

“Because they are intelligent.” Bhaktivedanta Swami answered.

The old bubby couldn’t have been happier. Bhaktivedanta Swami always knew exactly what to say to anyone.

Allen Ginsberg and Bhaktivedanta Swami have their differences but Ginsberg invites Prabhupada to chant with him at every opportunity. In January of 1969 they organized the Mantra Rock Dance at the AvalonBallroom in San Francisco.

The Grateful Dead opened the show followed by Moby Grape. Then Big Brother and the Holding Company took the stage. After Janis Joplin finished her set Bhaktivedanta Swami took the stage. Allen Ginsburg introduces the Swami and tells the crowd “I especially recommend the early morning kirtans,” Ginsburg adds, “for those who want to stabilize their consciousness on LSD re-entry.“

“Stay High Forever. No More Coming Down” was the message as advertised and it was popular. Within the next 5 years the International Society for Krishna Consciousness [ISKCON] spread across North America establishing temples in 20 cities in the US, Canada and Mexico. After Bhaktivedanta Swami meets the Beatles in London, George Harrison records “My Sweet Lord “with Phil Spector, Billy Preston, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Bobby Whitlock, Carl Raddle, and Jim Gordon who would in the future form Derek and the Dominos. In 1970, the song topped the charts at number 1 in the United Kingdom and in the US.

At first and especially in public, Bhaktivedanta Swami would cooperate with anyone who was receptive to chanting Hare Krishna. To his disciples he mocks the “uptown gurus” in their elaborate yogic poses.

“Om. I am moving the sun. I am moving the moon,” He rolls his eyes. Everyone laughs.

“Just see what nonsense,” he says.

As for the anti-war movement Prabhupada considered it as a waste of time. “We are against war, of course. We are not causing harm to any living entity. “People are eating meat,” and we will have wars as long as people eat meat. In this material world death is staring at us every moment. Just as college students prepare for their final examination, we must prepare for the examination at death. Whatever we do for perfection will be tested at the time of death. If we pass that exam, we are transferred to the spiritual world.”

Commenting on the civil rights marches, Bhaktivedanta Swami preaches, “What is this nonsense? People are thinking, ‘I am black, white, red, yellow.’ All this is skin disease. False designations. I am not this body. What am I? Aham Brahmasmi: I am Brahman, spirit soul. Since this knowledge is lacking, they are fighting like cats and dogs, and they will continue until they transcend their skin disease and understand that they are all spiritual sons of Krishna, eternally part and parcel of Him.

Prabhupada dismisses the NASA moon landing as a hoax. “They are trying to reach the moon and other higher planets by material means. Impossible. They will not be permitted entry. You must qualify spiritually to go there. Just as you require a visa to enter another country, a spiritual visa is required there. According to the Vedas, the moon is a higher planet where demigods live in advanced civilizations.”

“The last snare of maya is to think, ‘I am God. I control everything.’ But these rascal yogis claim this, and so cheat the innocent public. Give me some money. I will teach you yoga.”

In the beginning there are no rules. Chant Hare Krishna and your life will be Sublime. Then one day a notice is posted in the temple.

“All initiated devotees must attend morning and evening classes. Must not be addicted to any kind of intoxicants, including coffee, tea and cigarettes. They are forbidden to have illicit sex-connections. Must be strictly vegetarian. Should not extensively mix with non- devotees. Should not eat foodstuffs cooked by non-devotees. Should not waste time in idle talks nor engage in frivolous sports. Should always chant and sing the Lord’s holy names, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna. Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.”

When my parents got to New Vrindavan, West Virginia in 1975 it was little more than a few devotees and old farmhouses and a barn. Kirtanananda Swami put my father to work immediately converting the old farmhouse into the temple of Radha Vrindavan Chandra. My father built Kirtananda’s first ashram with only a rigging axe from the giant oaks that the devotees had timbered behind Govardhan Hill. Then came the Brahmachari (celibate monks) ashram, the barn and the utility building where the woodshop, marble shop and the molds for Palace of Gold were to be manufactured.

My father Syamakunda Das, His Divine Grace Bhaktivedanta Swami. New Vrindavan,1976

New Vrindavan, named after Lord Krishna’s birthplace in India, was founded when Kirtananada Swami (Keith Ham) and Hayagriva Das (Howard Wheeler) found the land in an advertisement in the San Francisco Oracle. The owner thought these two fairies from New York City would not last the winter and leased the property to them for 99 years for the sum of $4000 a year, thinking they would move out by the end of winter, but he was wrong. The Hare Krishna’s were here to stay. Over the next 10 years they would buy most of the land surrounding the farm accumulating over 3,000 acres.

Kirtananda Swami’s followers served with fanatical devotion living under the most austere conditions through hot summers and freezing cold winters surviving on rice and pinto beans. In less than 10 years they built New Vrindavan from a community with a few hippies in ramshackle farmhouses and barns to a 3000-acre Hare Krishna community with almost 700 members. In 1974 they began construction on a magnificent palace for their guru Bhaktivedanta Swami.

(left) Author in my mothers lap as a baby, (center) Kirtannanda Swami and his early followers.

At the age of 5, I was sent to live at Nandagram Gurukula, the ashram at New Vrindavan where I would spend the next 3 years. Nandagram was white two-story farmhouse at the end of a long gravel road. It sat behind a row of 50-year-old pine trees and in the shadow of two rolling hills that protected it from the cold north winds. Cows grazed on the hillsides and in the green valley that the house overlooked. The sound of water splashing over the rocks in the creek could be heard in the quiet of the night.

There were about 20 of us between the ages of 5 and 7. Our heads were shaved and we wore the wooden tulasi beads and the saffron robes of Vaishnava monks. We slept on the hardwood floors in our sleeping bags. At 2:30 am our teachers would wake us, dumping us out of our sleeping bags if we were not standing at attention bright eyed and bushy tailed.

“JivJago! Jiv Jago! Wake up sleeping souls.!” they shouted.

Half asleep we would rush for the shower together. If you got there early there was warm water in but the warm water ran out quickly. If you got there late chances were you were taking a cold shower. We dressed in our saffron dhotis (robes) and made our way to the temple room for the morning kirtan for the purification of our spirit. We were expected to chant enthusiastically, or face being punished with a quick slap across the back of the head. Then followed a lecture on the Bhagavad Gita, which we were expected to stay awake for, also under penalty and under constant jeopardy of the slap on the ear. Then we sat down for breakfast, which consisted of rice and oat water, a mixture of oats, salt, ginger and water. We spend the mornings in class learning English, Sanskrit, Math and Geography and studying the Bhagavad Gita.

From there we would head out to the barn to call the cows in for milking. The cows hearing the sound of our voices and knowing that food was being served would jog down the hill or hike up from the creek pushing their way into the barn, their milk bags overflowing with milk. Herding the cows into their stalls we milked them by hand into 5 gallon buckets. The work was back breaking for a grown man. For 5 and 6 year olds it was overwhelming but it was still better than being in school.

In the afternoons we were allowed to play. We wandered over the hills and through the valleys playing hide and seek and collecting sticks and rocks for war games. We built elaborate forts out of hay bales in the barn, had corncob wars and fought each other with sticks and stone. In the evenings we read stories of Lord Krishna pastimes before falling asleep. Putana the assassin who murdered children by poisoning them with her breast milk, Aristasura who disguised himself as a bull, Agasura the great snake, Dhenukasura the donkey demon and the serpent Kaliya all were defeated by Krishna before the age of 16. Rukmini, Draupadi and the Pandavas were all saved by Krishna’s mercy. In all these stories the message was the same. “If Krishna wants to kill you, no one can save you. If Krishna wants to save you, no one can kill you.”

The standards at Nandagram Gurukula were very high and discipline was harsh. We missed our parents who were busy selling books, collecting money and building temples for their guru. Serving guru and Krishna was the most important thing in life. Everything else was Maya’ illusion. Though we hated the ashram most of the time, I think we were all true believers then and hoped to one day be initiated as full-time devotees. We wanted to help spread Krishna Consciousness around the world. We were told that all we needed were 18 perfect yogis to conquer the world. I aspired to be the chosen few. I was 8 years old when my teachers decided that I had outgrown the small Nandagram School at New Vrindavan. When they told me I was going to study at Bhaktivedanta Institute in Vrindavan, India, the birthplace of Lord Krishna, I was ecstatic.

On October 7, 1979, at the age of 8 years old I boarded a Pan-Am 747 at John F Kennedy Airport for the long flight from New York to New Delhi. After stops in London and Karachi we descended into the murky night. Smoke from the coal and wood fires filled the air. The air was thick and burned my eyes as we stepped off the plane and as we walked down the steps onto the tarmac it felt like a wall of heat from the city hit us in the face. My head was shaved bald and I was dressed in the saffron robes of a Brahmachari student. I was traveling with two other boys and the headmaster of the Bhaktivedanta Institute Dhanurdara Swami who had promised my parents that he would take personal charge of me. After claiming our bags we hailed a taxi. As we sped through the crowded streets our driver honked furiously not just at other cars and pedestrians but at the cows, horses, goats and even elephants and camels that were everywhere. Monkeys swung from the rooftops and the telephone and electric wires. Chai-wallahs and beggars call out to us. From Delhi it is a 99-kilometer drive to Vrindavan, the land of Krishna.

Krishna was born over 5,000 years ago in a prison cell in the city of Mathura in the province of Uttar Pradesh. Krishna’s uncle Kamsa had taken the throne from his father King Ugrasena and imprisoned him in the palace dungeon. Believing that the child of Krishna’s parents Vasudeva and Devaki would someday kill him, Kamsa murdered each of Krishnas’s older brothers and sisters. Krishna the 8th child escaped to live in the house of Nanda the headman of the village of Vrindavan. As the story is told, Krishna spent his child living incognito among the cowherds of and wooing their wives the gopis (milkmaids).

When Krishna’s uncle King Kamsa learned of this deception, he sent many powerful assassins to kill Krishna, shape shifting rakshasas with the ability to change their form at will. Even a child Krishna had the ability to see through their disguises and dispatched them all to Yama the god of death with ease. When Krishna grew into a young man he returned to Mathura and with the help of his brother Balaram, defeated the wicked Kamsa and returned his uncle King Ugrasena to the throne.

Jarasanda the king of Magda was a powerful ally of Kamsa and Kamsa had married Jarasanda’s daughters Asti and Prapti. Furious at the death of his friend and that his sisters had been widowed Jarasanda attacked Krishna and his family the Yadus in their capital city of Mathura. For many years Krishna fought against Jarasanda defeating him 17 times. Finally, desperate for victory, Jarasanda attacked Mathura from three sides and with the aid of the Yadava king Kaliyavana and the Naga king Narakasura Jarasanda captured the city of Mathura and burned it to the ground. While Jarasanda celebrated his victory, Krishna with the help of his brother Balaram engineered a daring escape, moving citizens of Mathura out of the city with their wealth and their livestock. Though he saved his people, after fleeing from the battle Krishna became known as a coward and was given the name as Ranchor ‘One who runs away.”

Krishna and Balaram moved the Yadu capital to Dwarka along the west coast of the Indian Ocean. Krishna then married Rukmini the daughter of the King of Vidarba cementing his alliance with the powerful kingdom as a buffer between Dwarka and Jarasanda the king of Magdha. Krishna also married Satyabhama the daughter of Satrajit the Yadava king, Jambavati, Kalindi, Mitravinda the daughter of Jayasena the King of Avanti, Nagnajiti of Kosala, Bhadra and Laksmana and the princess of Madra cementing alliances with all the 16 major kingdoms and isolating Jarasanda from his stalwart ally King Narakasura of the Yavanas in the East.

Krishna had a beautiful sister by the name of Subhadra. Subadra was married to Arjuna the younger brother of Yudhistira the king of the Pandava dynasty. Yudhistira was the rightful heir to the throne of the Kuru Dynasty and when Jarasanda refused to recognize Yudhistira’s claim and accept his supremacy, Yudhistira’s brother Bhīma challenged Jarasanda to a wrestling match. As a Kshatriaya (warrior) Jarasanda could not refuse the challenge from Bhima as a matter of honor. After a wrestling match that is said to have lasted for several days, Bhīma finally defeated Jarasanda, by splitting him down the middle into two pieces. Krishna then crowned Jarasanda’s son as king of Magdha. After decades of war and conquest with Krishna’s help King Yudhistira established peace in the land of Bharat (India) uniting the country for the first time in ancient history.

For many years Krishna tried to make peace between the Kuru and Pandava princes who both laid claim to the throne of Hastinapura. Krishna tried to remain neutral but, in the end, he found himself on the side of the Pandavas princes who had been cheated out of their kingdom in a game of dice by their cousin the Kuru prince Duryodhana. Krishna pleaded in vain for peace with the Kuru prince Duryodhana. Krishna even offered to accept 5 cities one for each of the five brothers to rule in exchange for peace but Duryodhana would not agree. Duryodhana declared that he would not give the Pandavas enough land to fit on the tip of a needle. War was inevitable. All the kingdoms in the Bharat were forced to choose sides, brother against brother, fathers against sons and grandsons.

The two armies assembled on the great plain at Kurukshetra in the state of Haryana. On the first day of the battle, Krishna who agreed not to fight in the war drove his friend Arjuna to see the two armies arrayed against each other. Arjuna was the greatest warrior in the land but when he saw his kinsmen and friends arrayed against him, he lost all his will to fight. Arjuna’s hair stood on end, his skin burned, and tears welled up in his eyes. Arjuna spoke to Krishna with a trembling voice, “It would be better to let the sons of Kuru defeat us than to win this war. Sin will overcome us if we fight this war against our own kinsmen and society will be destroyed if the women of our civilization are left unprotected. Dropping his bow and arrow he spoke to these words “Govinda, I shall not fight.”

Now Krishna who had worked all his life for peace but now found himself at war listened to Arjuna’s words and answered him.

“While speaking learned words you are acting like a fool. The soul is eternal and is not slain when the body is slain. Therefore, the wise lament neither for the living nor the dead. Just as death is certain so is rebirth for the atman (soul) is made of energy and can never cease to exist. From Lord Brahma the creator on the highest planet to the lowest insect all living entities in this material world are suffering under the spell of Maya’s illusion. Arjuna’ your dharma (duty) is that of a Kshatriya (warrior) and allowing Duryodhana to take the kingdom by deceit would be failing in your duty to the people you are charged with protecting. Allowing attachments to cloud judgment in the performance of duty will only lead to defeat and infamy. Krishna tells Arjuna to stand up and fight this war without attachment to the results.

This knowledge of the science of self-realization is known as the Bhagavad Gita or the Song of God. The knowledge had been passed down by word of mouth from Krishna to Arjuna and through a direct line of bona fide disciples in succession known as the Param-para for over 5000 years. In Vrindavan we studied the Bhagavad Gita like the Bible, memorizing each verse and translation so that we would know them by heart and be able to recite them at will.

The Bhaktivedanta Institute in Uttar Pradesh India was a big change from New Vrindavan’s little farmhouse school in Marshall County, West Virginia. The building itself was a massive 3-story structure just off Bhaktivedanta Marg, the main street that runs through Vrindavan. It sat next to the Krishna Balaram Mandir and the ISKCON guesthouse. Across the street were a number of small shops and stands. Bihari Lal’s where lassis and nimbu pani lemonades, and pani puris could be purchased for .50 paisa. We were forbidden from visiting these stores or leaving the school grounds without permission. The penalty was a severe beating, so these visits were made in secret which made them even more precious, and the snacks and drinks purchased there even more delicious.

The classical Sanskrit education I got at the Bhaktivedanta Academy in Vrindavan was exceptional. We were required to recite and memorize volumes of Sanskrit text to develop our mental capabilities, and we were taught Hindi, English, Math, History and Political Science. Discipline was harsh and violent and like most of the Western students, I hated the school, I hated our teachers, and I especially hated the older Bengali kids who ran the school like a POW camp. There was a rigid caste system in place. There were 4 Ashrams on the campus: Brahmins (priests, scholars, ministers of state) Kshatriya (soldiers, policemen, administrators) Vaishyas (bankers, merchants and herdsman) and Shudras (laborers, menial workers and artists). The teachers assigned the task of administering the school to their favorite Bengali boy toys who they assigned as “monitors”. The teachers and headmaster looked the other way while the beatings and buggering were as rampant and severe as they were frequent. All communication with our parents was censored and so our parents received only glowing reports of our academic and spiritual progress.

Fortunately for me I fell in with a bad crowd early. Though I had highest marks in Sanskrit, English and History, because of my young age and poor attitude towards authority I was demoted to the Shudra (laborer) ashram. . Shudras were the lowest caste, and our ashram was assigned the task of keeping the hallways and the bathrooms of the ashram clean. Other than that, we were left alone. Apparently, the upper castes preferred buggering people in their own social strata.

Students were not permitted to leave the campus without permission and all outside literature was forbidden. After I was demoted from the Kshatriya(warrior) Ashram to the Shudra (laborer) Ashram, I was put in charge of buying cleaning supplies for the school. Once a week I would take a rickshaw from the school to Loi Bazaar. While I was there buying supplies, I would also buy a few comic books from Amar Chitra Katha and smuggle them back into the school. We had no television or movies at the school and so these Amar Chitra Katha comics were extremely valuable. After some time, I managed to accumulate almost the entire collection of the Amar Chitra Katha library. Amar Chitra Katha comic books brought India’s elegant and extravagant history to life for us. We immersed ourselves in these illustrated tales of India’s ancient past reading stories from the Ramayana, the Mahabarata the great Rajput heroes and the merciless Mogul Invaders. We laughed till tears filled our eyes and our bellies ached at Birbal’s wit or Ramen of Tenali’s pranks. We reveled in the victories of of Rana Kumba and Shivaji against the Moguls invaders and wept at the death of Shuja Shah and Dara Shikoh at the hands of cruel Aurangzeb. We may have hated our teachers and the Bengali “mean girls” that ran the school, but India was our home and our Mata (mother), and we loved her with all our hearts. The fact that the books were banned by our teachers made the nectar we extracted from these flowers planted in centuries past by writers under the thumb of the Mogul invaders taste even sweeter than a forbidden fruit like no other. There was no TV, and only religious texts in the library and so these books were like water in the desert to children desperate to escape the Spartan reality of their dogmatic routine. Still though we hated our teachers unequivocally and the older boys, we all still prayed to Krishna. None of us were atheists yet.

The local shop wallas in Loi Bazaar had been given strict instructions not to sell Amar Chitra Katha comic books to the students from the Bhakti Vedanta Academy, but everyone who has lived in India knows that Indians are by nature a rebellious and mercenary lot. The wallas in Loi Bazaar all wanted my business. They knew that I bought cleaning supplies and whatever else was needed for the school. They also knew that I loved Amar Chitra Katha books. So they would call me into their stores when they got a new shipment of Amar Chitra Katha books and then look the other way when I took the comics off the shelves and left the money for them in their place. This went on for some time and by the time my library was discovered I had built up a collection of over 300 volumes.

It was the spring of 1982 and I was 12 years old when my underground library was discovered. The headmaster Dhanurdara Swami who had brought me to the school and promised my parents that he would personally look after me now brought me before an assembly of the entire school. I looked out at the Bengali and white faces, shaved bald, dressed in saffron robes, wearing the yellow clay tilak of Vishnu worshipers down the center of their faces and some of them holding the tulsi beads around their necks as they stared at me. As I was dragged up in front of them, I avoided their gaze but as I looked out at them now I could make out the faces of my friends whose eyes looked at me with pity.

On the ground in front of me was the open footlocker containing all that I loved in this world, my precious Amar Chitra Katha comic collection, the treasure of knowledge I had spent the last 2 years building. The headmaster, Dhanurdara Swami, a former high school wrestler, now shaved and dressed in the saffron robes of a Sanyasi monk, pointed his finger at my looted treasure.

“You are not allowed to buy these and you know it. Admit it! You are a thief!” he screamed at me, his eyes burning with anger, purple veins bulging from his forehead and neck. He was visibly enraged at the sheer size and audacity of my literary horde and I couldn’t help myself. I was proud of my defiance. I fought to keep a smile off my face.

I looked him straight in the eye convinced he would see the truth in my eyes. After all he was supposed to be an advanced soul, a Sanyasi monk.

“l am not a thief. I bought all of these.” I answered.

Looking in his eyes I saw that there was no all-seeing wisdom of a holy man. What I did see terrified me. I saw anger. Dhanurdara Swami just could not accept that any of the wallas in town would dare to defy him and sell the comic books to me. So he convinced himself that I had stolen hundreds of comic books in broad daylight from Loi Bazaar risking being caught and being publicly beaten in the street which was the penalty for stealing in Vrindavan. Thieves were caught and beaten. We saw it happen all the time and none of us wanted it to happen to us. Now that he had convinced himself that I was a thief he decided to make an example out of me.

The left side of my face exploded as the force of the blow from his hand sent me sprawling to the ground.

“You liar!” he screamed and kicked me in the stomach which knocked the wind out of me.

Now his lips were moving but I could not hear anything he said.

He kicked me in the back which stopped me from catching my breath again. My eyes watered and I gasped for air. I gasped for air and started to catch my breath again.

“Get up.” He screamed.

My ears were ringing as I struggled to my feet again

“Admit it. You are a thief. Just admit it!

Another blow sends me sprawling again.

“Admit it! You are a thief!

“I am not a thief,” I cried out defiantly.

Then the beating started for real. Dhanurdara Swami began raining punches down on me with both fists. I raised my arms to protect my face and my ribs and this bit of defiance from a 12-year-old set him over the edge. The punches came harder and faster, but this was not the first beating I had taken, and I was determined not to make a sound. No matter how much it hurt I would not give him any satisfaction. I would not cry out. I wouldn’t make a fucking sound.

As the blows fell and the pain grew worse, I formed a plan in my head. I thought about my classmates. We were all prisoners there and dreamed of being rescued. If I could get Dhanurdara Swami to kill me in front of the whole school, President Reagan would send in the Marines to rescue us land we would all be airlifted back home to the United States to be reunited with our parents. I would die like my hero Abhimanyu.

I blocked out all the pain. As the blows from the Dhanurdara’s Swami’s fists landed on me I had visions of my lifeless body collapsing in front of the whole school. My classmates gathered around in horror and looked down at me. My dead eyes were still open in defiant accusation and blood flowed from my nose and my ears.

Then came the sound of the Chinook helicopters landing on the roof. The first two gunshots were warning shots and the old Chokidara (security guard) who sat on the roof armed only with a BB gun to scare off the monkeys dropped his Daisy Red Rider and raised his hands to surrender. He unlocked the rooftop door and my father Syamakunda Das led the Marines as they charged out of the helicopters down the stairs. My dad waved his framing axe in the air pointing out the guilty culprits who were systematically neutralized with extreme prejudice. Blood spattered on the walls as the bodies of the teachers and Bengali “mean girls” hit the ground. The Marines armed with M-16’s machine guns and M-72 RPG’s marched through the hallways of school, blowing up all the bathrooms I had scrubbed and kept spotlessly clean for years, pulling the American children out of the classrooms escorting them on to the roof to the safety of the helicopters. My father followed them carrying my lifeless corpse to bring back to my mother.

After rescuing all the American children and bringing them safely back to the helicopters, the school was emptied and destroyed by 4 well placed Hellfire Missiles which they fired from one of the Chinooks on the way out. Along the road the remaining students left behind watched the building crumble.

Back in the United States there was a funeral for me in the rain. All my classmates were gathered there mourning me from under black umbrellas. President Reagan was there and so was Nancy Reagan as well as Prince Charles and Diana. My casket was lowered into the ground as the Marines in full dress uniform honored me as a fallen hero with a 21-gun salute.

Finally, the beating stopped and Dhanurdara Swami handed me a straw whiskbroom. He issued his punishment in front of the entire assembly.

“You will sweep this entire school from top to bottom. While you are sweeping you will chant Hare Krishna one time and then call out “I am a thief” so everyone can hear you. Do you understand?”

I staggered to the top of the stairs. I started to sweep the hallway. “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna KrishnaHare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare. I am a thief!”

I cried out, burning in anger sweeping the ground ahead of me. I cleaned the hallways from top to bottom that day. I dared not leave a speck of dirt out of fear of more beating.

As further punishment, while my classmates all gathered to watch a movie “The Ramayana” I was assigned to stuff the report cards for the spring semester and address them to the parents. For hours I sat in the headmaster’s office folding the report cards, sealing the envelopes, and applying postage to the envelopes, and addressing them to their parents. Did I mention that I had exceptional handwriting back then. I had taken a Calligraphy class my first term and my penmanship was superb. That was what gave Dhanurdara Swami the idea to give me this punishment. I was to address each letter like it was an invitation and I did. Finally I came upon my own report card. I scratched a note to my parents and stuffed it in the envelope with my report card. I wrote.

“Mata. I hate it here. Get me out now! “

The next week a ticket arrived by express mail and within two weeks I was on a Pan Am flight from New Delhi back to the US. Knowing that I was leaving soon, Dhanurdara Swami and all the teachers were really nice to me but I still told everyone about what had happened as soon as I got back to the US. By the time I got home most of my injuries had healed, Dhanurdara Swami insisted that I was a thief and the matter was swept under the rug. At least I was out of there. Some of my friends remained behind for years, unable to get word to their parents about the conditions. If not for the punishment I was given that day, who knows how long it would have been before I got that message to my parents and how long I would have been stuck there. I was just lucky to be back in America, free at last.

What I didn’t know was that all this time my dad was smuggling hundreds of kilos of hashish oil from Afghanistan through India using Hare Krishna devotees as mules to finance Kirtananda Swami’s land purchases and building projects at New Vrindavan. In 1977 my father Syamakunda Das went to India with Kirtananda Swami to see his guru Bhaktivedanta Swami for the final time. Bhaktivedanta Swami was close to leaving his body and his disciples had all gathered around to hear his final words. Prabhupada spoke very softly giving simple instructions from his bed.

“Everything is moving under the direction of Krishna. This is Krishna Consciousness. “

Like a bolt from the blue these words hit Syamakunda Das. He took Bhaktivedanta Swami ’s words to heart. He decided to do something big for Krishna. Selling books, flowers, records and incense in airports and parking lots was chickenshit. Pure hash oil (honey oil) from Afghanistan sold for $1000 a kilo in Delhi could be broken down and sold for $10,000 a kilo in New York.

In a room of Mrs. Kalaska boarding house just off Connaught Place in Delhi. Syamakunda Das holds his hands above his head as Aziz carefully taped 10 kilos of the precious “honey oil” to his bare chest and back.

“Everything is moving under the direction of Krishna. This is Krishna Consciousness. “

The words keep echoing in Shamakunda’s head as he stares nervously out the window of an upstairs hotel room looking out at the smoky New Delhi evening. Outside on the street a taxi waits. The driver checks his watch anxiously.

Syamakunda Das now wearing the robes of a Hare Krishna devotee lowers his kurta shirt down over the duct taped packets of hash oil. Syamakunda Das raises his arms in the air. Nothing can be seen beneath the loose fitting robes.

“Acha, you can’t see anything. Allah ho Akbar!” calls out Aziz

“Hare Krishna!” Syamkunda Das replies. Aziz shakes his head side to side as only Indians do. Shyamakunda Das picks up his suitcase. He walks out the door. Outside the taxi driver opens the door for him. He gets inside. The taxi speeds off into the crowded Delhi's streets heading to the airport. 36 hours later Syamakunda Das walked through customs at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York and hailed another taxi. They sold the hash oil in less than a week.

For the second run Shamakunda Das grew his hair and his beard out and flew into Tehran disguised as an American contractor. In Tehran he would meet with his connection Aziz Ghaznavi. Aziz claimed to be a descendent of Mahamud of Ghazni the first Afghan to sack Krishna’s birthplace in Mathura in 1018. Shyamakunda Das would then don the turban, Punjabi pants and kurta of the Tajik tribesmen. Hiding his ocean blue eyes with mirrored Ray Ban sunglasses and with $50,000 cash duct taped to his body beneath his robes, Shamakunda Das quietly slipped across the border from Iran into Afghanistan in Aziz’s Volkswagen Van.

Once across the Afghan border, Aziz drove Syamakunda Das north into the foothills above Khamzagar. There Syamakunda Das would supervise the processing of the Ganja harvest into pure hashish oil. The “Honey Oil” was over 80% THC and was the color and texture of golden honey. Aziz’s brother would then smuggle the “honey oil” through Pakistan into India. In New Delhi it would be broken down into small pouches. From there Krishna devotees would body pack it beneath their saffron robes as they flew into JFK and LAX. India was not considered to be a source country for narcotics during the 70’ and 80’s and Hare Krishna’s were a common sight in America’s airports where they were usually busy selling books and flowers to annoyed passengers. Most people were anxious to get away from Hare Krishnas for fear of being talked into buying a book or a flower and for years the US customs agents waved Hare Krishna monks through without a second thought.

Gregory Wayne Detamore aka Syamakunda Das

The “Honey Oil” they brought in would be sold in New York and Los Angeles for $120 a gram where it was in great demand to come down off of cocaine. Cocaine was cheap. Getting to sleep it off was expensive though. In the late 70’s and 80’s the price of cocaine was $60 a gram. A gram of honey oil sold for $120 a gram. A few drops on the tip of a cigarette was enough to land the plane after a long night on the town. It was the perfect way to take the edge off of cocaine, much safer than heroin, if you could find it and you could afford it. It was $60 a gram to go up and $120 to come down. The money made from the sale of the “honey oil” was used to buy land and build temples, ashrams and schools for the children of the Hare Krishna movement.

Initiated Hare Krishna devotees are forbidden to take any form of intoxication but most of the people who joined in the early days did so either while under the influence of LSD or shortly after taking it. The assassination of President Kennedy, RFK Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcom X paralyzed generations of leaders in this country and the people in the US have struggled to find their ball sacks ever since. Can you really blame people? If they could get to Kennedy and King, what chance did anyone else have to make a difference? As the 70’s wore on and the Viet Nam War ended, the idealism of the 60’s faded. Most of the hippies went back to work in the offices, the mills, the mines and factories.

The Me generation was taking the stage with cocaine and Quaaludes replacing Ganja and LSD. Krishna’s temples needed money to print books and build more temples, but there was another reason they were willing to bend the rules and to justify Ganja smuggling. In the minds of enthusiastic devotees like Shamakunda Das, Maya’s illusion was getting stronger and it was becoming even harder to break people free from it. People were turning their backs on the hippie movement and plugging back in. They were getting jobs and moving to the suburbs like their parents. Most devotees had been Ganja smokers until Krishna had “saved” them. Some of the more radical Hare Krishna devotees argued that since only Krishna was stronger than Maya and Ganja helped them break free of Maya’s grip the best way to get people to turn away from Maya and to Krishna was to get them to smoke Ganja.

If more people smoked Ganja, then more people would become dissatisfied with the material world and turn to Krishna.

My father Syamakunda was one of the true believers in this jihad for the hearts and minds of America. Heroin was bad karma, and so he settled on “honey oil”, golden colored, highly concentrated hashish oil from Afghanistan. It sold for more than heroin and was in great demand in the United States for people coming down off cocaine during the 70’s and 80’s. After all, to him the Hare Krishna Movement was a Jihad, a holy war to be won for his Guru at all costs. Though selling even soft drugs like hashish was bad Karma, my dad told himself that anything could be used in Krishna’s service and that by donating the fruits of actions to his Guru and Krishna he could escape this bad Karma.

After that first run came a second and then a third. The devotees at New Vrindavan bought most of the farms on McCreary’s Ridge, rapidly expanding to over 3000 acres. After the Palace of Gold was opened in 1979 new members flocked to New Vrindavan. In the early days of New Vrindavan my father, Syamakunda Das was Kirtananda’s right hand man. If Kirtanananda Swami wanted something done he called my father. During the spring and summer Shamakunda Das shaved his head and swung a hammer for 10 hours a day as the buildings of New Vrindavan rose around them. In October he would grow his beard and fly to Tehran. During the fall he would supervise the preparation and packaging of the honey oil. From there he would return to Tehran and fly to Delhi. Aziz and his family would bring the honey oil from Afghanistan to Delhi. From there my dad would dole it out to the Hare Krishna mules who body-packed it into the United States via JFK and LAX. In the spring when the snow melted in West Virginia he would return to New Vrindavan to resume construction again.

My dad’s last run was in the fall of 1978, just before the Shah of Iran fell and the Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan. The plan was to buy 100 kilos of honey oil at the source, sell them for $10,000 a kilo and make $1,000,000 off this last deal and then retire. “Let’s pull one last job and retire” has been the plot of countless forgettable crime movies and how so many “how I got caught and went to prison stories” begin in real life. It’s a cliché but unfortunately stereotypes and clichés more often than not turn out to be unfortunately accurate.

In ’78 the situation in Iran already getting hairy and flying into Tehran with the money was now out of the question. Syamakunda Das had been detained and questioned by Savak agents when he had tried to fly out of Tehran the last time and he had barely managed to convince them to allow him to return to the United States. “Midnight Express” the story of Billy Pilgrim’s nightmare of being sentenced to serve time in a Turkish prison was released that year and after his encounter with Savak my dad was terrified of ending up in a foreign prison. Up until then it had seemed like a game and the risk had not seemed real but after being at the mercy of Savak the reality began to set in. The pressure was starting to get to my dad and his nerves were practically shot by then. He was smoking a ton of grass during the day and drinking heavily in the evening.

They did not want to fly into Tehran again and there was no international airport in Kabul so flying directly into Afghanistan was not possible. So my parents decided on a change of plans. My dad flew to Germany and bought a fully loaded Volkswagen bus from the factory in Wolfsburg, Germany. My mother Olive Moore who had been initiated as Girindra Mohini Dasi then flew to Germany with $100,000 in cash stashed in the diaper bags of my sisters Radha Priya, my brother Syamantaka and my sister Saraswati. My mother was pregnant with my sister Saci at the time and my sister Vishaka and I were still living in the ashram. My mother had never taken part in any of the previous runs and she only agreed this time because Kirtanananda Swami swore to her that the money would be used to build a new school for the children.

My father outfitted the Volkswagen bus with a secret compartment underneath the floor and they stashed the $100,000 in the compartment.

My parent’s plan was to drive from Germany through Austria, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and then Iran. They would then cross the border into Afghanistan and pick up the honey oil from Aziz in Khamzagar. From there they would drive it through Pakistan and finally to India where my dad would hand it off to the mules in Delhi.

If this sounds like an insane plan and an obvious recipe for disaster let me assure you that this part of the plan worked out to perfection. My mother did run into a camel while driving through Turkey and my father had to bribe the camel’s owner to prevent them from being stoned by the villagers. A monkey did kidnap my little brother Shawn and return him only after he was given a ransom of bananas, but aside from that the plan went off without a hitch. My parents and all my brothers and sisters and the “honey oil” made it all the way to India. My mother then flew home with my brothers and sisters and went back to New Vrindavan, West Virginia.

Up till then the plan had always worked perfectly but this time one thing was different. This time one of the mules they brought along was not really a Hare Krishna devotee. The brother of one of the mules had shaved his head, dressed in saffron robes of a Hare Krishna monk and made the trip. While waiting in line the pretender lit up a cigarette and aroused the suspicion of an alert US Customs agent. Hare Krishna’s were a common sight in airports but Hare Krishna’s don’t smoke cigarettes. The pretender was questioned and searched and the “honey oil” was found in his bag. The rest of the mules were taken into custody and one of the mules rolled on my dad. He was arrested at the airport in Delhi as he tried to leave India. As my dad used to say.

“There is no such thing as a foolproof plan. One fool can fuck up any plan.”

In October of 1978, my father Shyamakunda Das was taken into custody while trying to board a Pan Am flight out of Delhi. He bailed out of an Indian jail, but Interpol was still holding his passport. Shamakunda Das then shaved his head and his beard, borrowed a passport from another Hare Krishna devotee, dressed in saffron robes and flew back into the United States. Apparently, all bald people in saffron robes looked alike to Customs agents. My dad spent the next 5 years on the run in the US before being taken into custody again. During that time, he lived in constant fear of being caught.

With the money he got from selling the last bit of hash oil my dad bought a beautiful piece of land on Stulls Run Creek just outside New Vrindavan. He started to work on building a house for us. Other families from New Vrindavan bought land near us and built homes.There was Chuck and Deborah St. Denis, Kurt and Janet Cleaver, and Dr Nick Tsacrios the community’s physician.

Talavan was for Hare Krishna devotees on the fringe or “fringies”, a place for the “not so spiritually advanced.” Fringies chanted Hare Krishna and didn’t eat meat but they smoked grass, drank beer and occasionally tripped on acid and did cocaine. Rumor had it that some of them occasionally swapped partners. This did not sit well with the more strictly following members who demanded that these “fringies” be expelled from the community. The problem with expelling these “fringies” was that they did most of the skilled labor on the farm. They included the community’s doctor and nurse, the qualified electricians and plumbers and contractors. Fringies also got paid to work.

After the Palace of Gold was built, New Vrindavan's ranks were swelled with new fanatical devotees who were willing to work for free. What really bothered Kirtananda Swami the most about the “fringies” is that they didn’t work for free. They expected to be paid for work. One by one the “fringies” were expelled from the community and replaced by sober, hardworking fanatics who worked for free as a service to their guru, and followed Kirtananda Swami’s orders without question.

For years Kirtanananda Swami supervised the construction of a palatial home to his guru Bhaktivedanta Swami at New Vrindavan. Kirtanananda Swami travelled the world collecting ideas and materials from Europe, the Middle East and India to build a truly magnificent creation. Set atop an enchanted hill rising out of the mist, the colossal black and gold dome is the first thing that catches your eye. The sun reflects off the Spanish Gold, German stained glass, and Italian marble that adorn the exterior of the palace. Once inside French chandeliers, Italian frescos, Turkish and Iranian onyx, and elaborate teakwood from Sri Lanka are fused into Kirtanananda’s vision of a perfect symphony of eastern and western devotion plus a lot of gold.

Prabhupada’s Palace of Gold opened in 1979 and the response was spectacular. It was hailed as America's Taj Mahal. The Louisville Courier Journal stated, "It's hard to believe that Prabhupada's Palace is in West Virginia. In fact, it's hard to believe it's on this planet." CBS Magazine reported, "The magnificence of the Palace of Gold would be hard to exaggerate." The New York Times proclaimed, "Welcome to Heaven.” Visitors flocked to see the Palace of Gold and passionate new devotees arrived in New Vrindavan every day.

After the Prabhupada Palace was built devotees flocked to New Vrindavan. They began to worship Kirtananda Swami as God and he encouraged them to do so. Maya’s last trap for Krishna’s devotee is to think, “I am the greatest devotee.” and very few people can be worshiped as God and not think that they deserve it.

Prabhupada’s Palace of Gold

In 1990 after Donald Trump opened the Taj Mahal Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, Kirtanananda Swami invited him to visit the New York temple. By then Kirtananda Swami was under federal indictment for conspiracy to commit murder for hire, kidnapping and copyright infringement. Mr. Trump declined the invitation but did reply to Kirtananda Swami telling him that he had been to the Hare Krishna love feast years before.

“Mr. Trump also told Kirtanada Swami that he got the idea for the Taj Mahal from Prabhupada’s Palace of Gold.

When I was 19, I visited the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City the year it first opened. It was the first casino I ever visited. After growing up around Prabhupada’s Palace and visiting the real Taj Mahal I was not impressed. The Taj Mahal in Atlantic City was tacky, adorned with garish colors, plastic facades and cheap materials. The Taj Mahal in Atlantic City is gone but Prabhupada’s Palace still stands. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that the man who created the Taj Mahal would one day become president of the United States or possibly imagine that he would someday inspire the same militant devotion that Kirtanananda Swami had inspired in his followers.

Tulsi Gabbard, the Author

In 1976, 40 years before the 2016 election, the Hare Krishna devotees in New York needed a place to build the floats for their Ratha Yatra Festival of the Chariots parade. After being turned down by everyone in Manhattan the devotees approached Mr. Trump to ask him to use the rail yard that he had recently purchased. They had no money and wanted to ask Trump to let them use the space as an act of charity. Mr. Trump’s secretary told them Donald Trump would never agree to let them use the property for free, but they would not take no for an answer. The devotees left a letter for Mr. Trump and as the story goes Mr. Trump read the letter and said, “Sure why not.” Mr. Trump immediately agreed to let the Hare Krishnas use the rail yard to build their floats for the parade for free.

That was 40 years before the 2016 election but many Hare Krishna devotees believe it was Donald Trump’s early service to Lord Jaganatha that gave him the good karma that propelled him to the highest office in the land and many Hare Krishna devotees now support Donald Trump almost fanatically. Maybe Krishna did owe Trump a favor and it took him 40 years to collect. There is that number 40 again. Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel who were appointed by President Trump both took their oaths to defend the United States Constitution were sworn into office with their hands on the Bhagavad Gita. As Lord Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita “As they surrender to me, I reward them accordingly.”

I was finally home. After the long flight from Heathrow the PanAm 747 that had flown us all the way from New Dehli via Karachi landed at JFK airport. 8 hours later I was back in New Vrindavan. From there my parents sent me to live with my grandma Jane who lived in Severna Park, Maryland. My Grandma Jane had a wonderful home on the Magothy River about a mile up from where it flowed into the Chesapeake Bay. From my Grandma Jane’s back porch you could see out across the mouth of the river to the tip of Gibson Island. To the south was the United States Naval Academy and the city of Annapolis.

I lived upstairs in a single room with my Uncle Scott and my Uncle David. Scott was attending Anne Arundel Community College and Dave went to Broadneck High School and played in a band. Scott taught me how to sail and to fish for crabs and how to throw and catch a football. Dave taught me about the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, CCR, Fleetwood Mac and later Eric Clapton, Bruce Hornsby, and Dire Straits. On Sundays we attended Hope Presbyterian Church where my grandfather the Reverend Allen Moore had preached before he had been paralyzed by a stroke at the age of 55.

This was a happy time for me but it was the strangest time of my life. All around me I saw what I had been taught was wickedness but I didn’t care. Eating meat was a sin but now everyone in the house except for me ate meat and they all seemed like nice people. Alcohol and tobacco were everywhere too and nobody seemed to even notice. Gambling was supposed to be a sin too, but I didn’t care. Sex was supposed to be a sin, but it was in every advertisement and I found myself thinking about it more and more. At the time I had no idea what Ganja or any other drugs were for that matter. All I cared about was fitting in which was not easy. Americans were completely foreign to me. So I watched TV and read books and retreated into my fantasy world of comic books. I now immersed myself in the lives of American heroes like Mack Bolan, Peter Parker, Bruce Wayne and Matt Murdoch. I found myself living in two worlds, the real world in which I did not fit in and the world as I imagined it could be. I decided that no matter what career I chose I would also have a secret identity.

I began to plan my life as a superhero. I began a regular exercise routine and I started to sprint a mile every morning. I would jump out of bed, put my shoes on and head out the door. From there I would run to the end of our lane, then make a right on Magothy Avenue until it ended at Shore Acres Road. From there I would take a left and really get moving before making the climb up the hill to the dead man’s curve before Deep Creek Road. At the top of the hill, I would turn around and sprint down the hill running faster and faster until the trees and the houses were nothing but a blur. On the cold winter mornings, the warm tears would stream from my eyes freezing on the side of my cheeks. Sometimes I would grab a handful of snow from a low hanging tree branch and let the snow melt in my mouth as I blazed my way toward home. It may have looked like I was running but I felt like I was flying. Though I rarely spoke in class at Magothy River Middle School or Severn River Jr. High School, on the playground no one could beat me in a race.

When I was 14 years old I moved out of my Grandma Jane’s house and back in with my parents. My dad had been drinking every day since he had been fired from his job as construction manager at New Vrindavan for drinking. Up until that time he had been the guru Kirtananda Swami’s right-hand man and a respected member of the community, but now he was persona non grata. He was never the same after that. He would eventually get sober but I don't think he ever forgave himself for the terrible things he did when he was at his worst. To one who has been honored, dishonor is worse than death.

We were all sitting on the couch watching Magnum PI and my mom bought my dad a sandwich and a bowl of soup. He looked at the sandwich on the plate, and punched her in the jaw sending her flying across the room into the kitchen table, the stainless steel dishes crashing onto the linoleum floor.

“Is it too much to ask that when I come home after working all day that I can get my sandwich cut the way it’s supposed to be done!”

He screamed, jumping to his feet towering above my mother. She laid still on the floor sprawled amid the dishes, the soup and the sandwich. She was covered with pieces of lettuce, and pickles. The spilled tomato and cauliflower soup on the side of her head looked like blood and brains seeping out of her ear.

I jumped to my feet. I clenched my fist and aimed for the spot on the right side of my father’s jaw that I knew would knock him out cold. Or so I thought. Only a few weeks ago I had watched Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini kill Kim Deuk-koo in the ring and I aimed my punch for the same spot on my dad’s chin. I swung and caught my dad cold in the jaw. At the last second I worried that I might kill him and decided to let up care. It was a beautiful sucker punch. I caught him completely off guard. Bam! Right in his bearded jaw. But he didn’t budge. Instead, my eyes started to water and my vision got blurry. I tried to gasp for air, but I couldn’t. My dad’s grizzled, calloused hand hardened from years of swinging a rigging axe gripped my throat like a sandpaper vice. I started to see stars flicker. I made one more pathetic attempt at taking a swing before everything went black. I collapsed on the floor unconscious.

Two days later the Sheriff of Marshall County came to our house and told my dad to stand aside. Then my mom piled my 8 brothers and sisters in her brother’s Oldsmobile station wagon, and they were gone. The Sheriff had made it clear that he did not want to get involved in any more trouble at the “critter farm.” “Hairy Critters” was what the locals called us Hare Krishnas. We called them “billies” for hillbillies and “necks” for rednecks but mostly we called them karmis. A Karmi was someone who was bound by the laws of Karma. Devotees of Lord Krishna were free from the laws of Karma and therefore not subject to the Maya, the illusion that made the Karmis work like dogs, hogs, camels and asses to gratify their senses.

I stayed behind with my dad in the two-bedroom cabin he had built with his own hands from the timber he felled from the woods on our property. I was there to make sure he stayed away from my mom as the Judge had ordered him to do and to make sure he didn’t commit suicide like he threatened to do if my ever mom left him. I ended up being my dad’s lookout for the summer and his mule in the fall. I got stuck with this assignment after I had convinced my mom to drive down to the Marshall County Sheriff's office in Moundsville to file charges against my dad. When she moved out I didn’t want my dad to be alone and so I stayed behind.

It was only after my mom left him that my dad told me that his plan was to harvest a bumper crop of weed, sell it in Maryland and then somehow use the money to get my mom back. He had already planted about 50 of the Ganja seeds from Afghanistan in the corn field behind the garden. By the middle of July the plants were in full bloom. I spent the summer with my dad’s Remington 20 gauge shotgun keeping the deer and the racoons out of the garden while my dad worked 10 hour days at the Koontz Sawmill across the river in Neffs, Ohio.

In the fall we harvested and dried the plants in the living room. After spending days trimming the harvest we bagged the Ganja in Hefty trash bags and packaged it in two cardboard boxes. My dad bought me a bus ticket and dropped me and the two boxes filled with Ganja off at the Greyhound bus station in Wheeling, West Virginia. I rode the Greyhound bus from Wheeling, WV to Cambridge, Maryland while my dad followed behind in his blue Chevy Van.

It was a long trip along the Pennsylvania Turnpike and I hoped that my dad’s plan worked. He had stopped drinking and was going to AA meetings now. He seemed truly heartbroken by his terrible behavior and to really miss my mother and my brothers and sisters. As we drove past the farms in the mighty Susquehanna Valley, I thought about my dad’s life and all that he had gone through. He was dyslexic, he had no high school diploma, and at just 30 years old he already had 9 children. Still he had already accomplished more than most people do in a lifetime. I wanted my dad’s plan to grow a big weed crop, sell it and get my mom back to work. I didn’t know exactly how it was going to work but I knew that when we had money my parents got along. Now that we didn’t have money my parents fought all the time. I wanted my dad’s plan to work and I wanted my parents to get back together.

We made it all the way to Salisbury, Maryland, with me riding the bus with the two big brown boxes of homegrown weed below with the luggage and my dad following in his blue Chevy van. When the bus pulled into the Greyhound station on Phillip Morris drive my dad was already waiting for me. I got the big brown boxes loaded with ganja from the luggage compartment under the bus and my dad loaded them into the back of his van. We drove quietly out of town to my grandma Connie’s house.

My dad’s mother Connie was a perfectly proper, chain-smoking southern lady who ran a furniture reupholstery business. She had excellent taste and she and her third husband Leroy still collected antiques. They had a teenage son Ricky who had long hair and drove a metallic blue Chevrolet Camaro which I thought was the coolest car in the world. Their house was decorated with beautiful furniture, rugs, grandfather clocks, china and pottery. Union and Confederate flags, swords, pistols, uniforms and medals decorated the walls. I was given strict instructions not to touch anything but I couldn’t help myself. When no one was around I would take one of the swords and pistols from the wall and imagine myself battling against the British at Yorktown or fighting for General Lee against the Yankees in the War for Southern Independence as my ancestors did.

My dad sold the weed in 2 days and after staying for the weekend, we said goodbye to my Grandma Connie. On our way out of town my dad told me that he had a new plan. He wanted to use the money he had made from the weed to and to go out to Denver, Colorado. He would rent a house and then send for my mom and the kids. He just wanted to get out of West Virginia. I did not want to spend the winter alone in the holler with my dad and as I said I wanted things to work out. So I kept my mouth shut and we headed west. My dad said that there was plenty of work in Colorado and so we headed straight to Denver. He even let me drive on the highway while he slept. When we got to Denver my dad rented a house on Cherry Street just off Colfax Avenue and enrolled me in Gove Middle School for the fall.

My mom and my brothers and sisters did not come to Denver as my Dad had planned. Now that my dad was out of the house, my mom moved back into our house in Marshall County, got a restraining order against my dad and filed for divorce. I decided to stay with my dad and live with him in Denver. I was making $5.00 an hour working for my dad and for the first time in my life I had money of my own to spend. He had stopped drinking and just smoked weed but he seemed to be okay now.

I attended Gove Middle School, a predominately black school, and I was the only white person in most of my classes. I was not cool at all and I got picked on a lot. The black kids used to make up dis raps about me all the time but since I couldn’t think of anything to say back to them, I would have to take it without saying a word. So, for the first half of the semester I didn’t really talk to anyone at Gove. Then one day I guess I’d had enough. I was in Auto Shop class and this kid named Kris was ripping on me and so I made up my own rap and spat it back at him. It went like this.

“His name is Kris

He smells like piss

If he don’t watch his ass

He’s going to get my fist.”

It was terrible, I know but I think it was the first time most of those little black kids had heard me say a word and they burst all into laughter. When the kids in Shop Class started laughing at him Kris got mad and I could see that trouble was brewing. Kris took a swing at me. I ducked his punch and slammed him up against the lockers. He managed to punch me a few times but I didn't notice. I looked around and all the kids in Shop class were cheering for me. Now my fists flew on their own, faster and faster landing blows on his cheeks, the sides of his head and his face, before the Shop teacher pulled me off him. He made us shake hands and sent us to the principal’s office. The principal suspended us for 3 days and sent us home early.

When I got home, I found my dad in bed with our neighbor Kjirstin. She had been over a few times but I had never suspected anything until now. He tried to explain to me that they were in love but I was through with him. My dad had got a DUI the previous weekend and I had spent almost all the money I had saved up bailing him out. I went to my room, packed a bag and walked out the door and straight to the bus stop. I bought a ticket and I was on the next Greyhound bus on my way to Wheeling, West Virginia. I never did tell my dad that I got suspended from school that day.

My mother had already filed for divorce and had moved back into our house in Marshall County, West Virginia. My sisters Vishaka, Radha and Sara and my brother Syamantaka had been living in the ashram but now would live at home with my sister Saci and Lakshmi and my brothers Vrindavan and Krishna Das. Up till then I had lived in the ashram and then with my Grandma Jane and then with my dad. For the first time in my life I was living with all my brothers and sisters. Counting my mom there were 10 of us, 5 girls, 4 boys plus our mom in a two-bedroom cabin. The boys slept in one bedroom and the girls slept in the other. Our Mom slept on the couch. We had one bathroom so we took showers at night before school if we wanted hot water. In the winter we heated the house with a woodstove. If someone didn’t get up in the middle of the night and put wood on the fire, the house would be freezing in the morning and in the winter the pipes would freeze leaving us with no water.

Growing up on welfare and food stamps in Marshall County, West Virginia we certainly did not have a lot of money, but I never felt poor. There were plenty of people in Marshall County who used food stamps, but they looked poor and acted poor. We had grown up with money and so when my dad ran off and we had to get on welfare we didn’t know how to act poor. To deter welfare cheats, the state of West Virginia had mandated that benefits would only be paid up to 5 children. My mother and her 9 children received $435 a month in cash ($75 for each of the first 5 children) and $500 in food stamps a month $11,220 a year to feed and clothe 9 children and herself. So my mom grew a garden and canned vegetables and we bought flour and oats and baked our own bread and though we got by on far less than anyone else in the county we were actually eating no processed foods and were much healthier than the local kids we went to school with.

While writing this I called up my sister Radha who is a CPA in Columbus, Ohio and asked her to help me figure out. In the 5 years our family was on welfare Uncle Sam shelled out $56,112 to feed and clothe all 9 of us plus my mom. Since 1995 we have paid more than $1,215,986 in income taxes and $540,348 in property taxes.Even if you don’t count the $70,274, in alcohol taxes and $13,274 in tobacco taxes we have paid that still amounts to a return on Uncle Sam’s investment of 1,070,022 from $56,112 an over a 3000% return. People can say what they want about welfare but as far as I’m concerned the Detamores may have been one of the best investments Uncle Sam has ever made.

The Detamores back in the day.

It made things a lot easier for us that my mom grew the best weed in Marshall County from the seeds my dad had brought back from Afghanistan. My mom never did sell the bright green Afghani plants with the giant purple crystals that grew every summer in the cornfield behind the garden for fear that she would be arrested and put in prison. She did trade the grass with the locals to get her car fixed, to get bulldozer work done on our road after flooding, for firewood and even to get a new well dug. The Marshall County locals took a lackadaisical attitude toward work even when they were getting paid in cash. Most of the locals already had everything they needed, a truck, a trailer and a dog but when it came to scoring top notch grass, something they could not find, they were there at the drop of the hat. The locals may have called us “hairy critters” behind our backs but everyone in the Ohio Valley knew that the “critter weed “was the stuff of legends.

It was 1986 and my sister Vishaka and I were enrolled in Sherrard Jr. High School in Marshall County, West Virginia. At the time no one knew that my parents were Hare Krishnas or “Hairy Critters” and we wanted to keep it that way. I went by Jason and my sister Vishaka was going by the name “Vicky” to conceal her identity at the time. I had lived with my grandma in Severna Park, Maryland and I had gone to Gove Middle School in Denver, so I had already had 2 cracks at Jr. High School. I wanted this time at Sherrard to be different. I tried out for the Track and Field Team. The football coach Mr. Batista, who also coached the Track team, discovered that I was by far the fastest kid in Sherrard Jr. High School when I dusted everyone in the 100, 200 and 400 meters. While running track that year, I also met Lisa Marie Henry, the girl I would fall in love with and spend the rest of my life with. Things were definitely going my way.

When I moved back to West Virginia in 1986 after living with my Grandma Jane and my dad, I tried to fit in with the locals even though I knew that they hated us “critters. I knew they hated us by the way they talked behind our backs about us when they didn’t think we were around. “Critters were dirty, they smelled, they were lazy and they stole.” Now I knew that this wasn’t true but there was no way I could tell these “billies” the truth without admitting I was a “critter”. There were absolutely no black people or Mexicans around and so to me it felt like the “billies” had just taken all the stereotypes usually reserved for African Americans and Latinos and applied them to us. Not all of them. There were some exceptions but most of the locals were “Christians” which to me at the time meant that they pretended to follow Jesus who was a nice guy and hated everyone who didn’t believe in their ridiculous fairy tale.

We believed that the soul was eternal and would reincarnate into another body in the next life depending on what we did in this life. Christians believed that the soul only had one life and that after that life your soul and your body would go into the grave where you then waited for the return of Jesus Christ when only 144,000 of you would be saved. To us this was about the dumbest thing we had ever heard. If God was eternal and the soul was eternal then damning a person for eternity because of what they did in one lifetime seemed cruel but I soon gave up trying to explain this to people. After a while every time someone asked if I had been “saved” I just answered “Yes.” and we got along just fine.

The problem was that just as the “billies” (hillbillies) and the “necks”(rednecks) hated us and looked down on us “critters” we despised them and looked down on them too. We came from a highly regulated and cultured environment. No meat eating, intoxication, sex outside of marriage or gambling were the pillars of our morality and our society. These people ate meat which we thought was absolutely disgusting. After all, who wanted to eat rotting flesh? They drank alcohol and smoked cigarettes and their women were low class, they cussed like sailors and dressed like prostitutes. They played “quarters” and cards and gambled their money away like donkeys. We looked down on them and to be fair most of the “billies” who picked on “critters” were white trash losers who lived in abusive homes and trailers that smelled like beer and cigarettes. Still after I turned my back on the Hare Krishnas I tried to fit in with them as best as I could.

When I first came back to West Virginia to live with my mom and my brothers and sisters I would go to New Vrindavan for festivals and there I was reunited with some of my old friends. They would go on to become my best friends and I am still close with many of them to this day. One day while I was walking along the road on my way to the temple a maroon Toyota Land Cruiser pulled up beside me and stopped. It was Kirtanananda Swami, the guru at New Vrindavan dressed in the saffron robes of a sanyasi monk. Laying beside him on the passenger seat was the cane he walked with. In the back seat was a giant German Shepard who went by the name of Gudakesha and who now looked at me suspiciously.

“Do you need a ride?” he called from inside.

“Thanks.” I replied. I had just walked up to Ma Eddy’s General Store on Route 250 and bought a Mountain Dew and a pack of Newports. I had been buying cigarettes for my dad for years and now that he was gone I still went in every now and then and asked for a pack of Newports for my dad and they sold them to me. I preferred Marlboro Reds but my dad smoked Newports and I didn’t want to make Ma Eddy or her husband suspicious. I had just finished smoking at one of the Newports and I hoped that Kirtananda Swami wouldn’t notice the smell.

I opened the door to the Land Cruiser and got inside. Kirtananda took his cane off the seat, then took his foot off the brake and put his foot on the gas. We started off down the hill toward the temple which was still around 3 miles away.

“So where have you been?” Kirtananda Swami asked me as if I had just come back from vacation.

“I’ve been living with my Grandma in Maryland.” I replied.

“Have you been chanting?” He asked me instantly, making me feel guilty about my lack of devotion.

“No, but I went to church when I was at my grandma’s. I answered.

I had known Kirtananda Swami for my entire life. For years Kirtananda Swami would show up at our house first thing in the morning with some new idea or needing a solution to a problem and we had many conversations while he waited for my dad to have his coffee, smoke his first joint of the day and get ready. Though I would not say that we were close, I had grown up believing that Kirtananada Swami was Krishna (God’s) representative on earth and I still had great respect for him and for what he was building at New Vrindavan.

“You should never stop chanting.” Kirtananda said. “Krishna is present in His name and if you call out to him He will always protect you.” he said.

“I’ll try.” I said sheepishly.

“So why did you leave us?” Kirtananda Swami asked me. “You were our best student and there was never any doubt about your love for Krishna. Srila Prabhupada (Bhaktivedanta Swami) said that you were very special even among devotees.” Kirtnananda Swami continued.

This was true and he was right. When I was only 4 years old a senior devotee by the name of Brahmananda had complained to Bhaktivedanta Swami that though I had not been initiated in the renounced order of a Sanyasi but that I was dressing as a Sanyasi monk.

“Pretending to be an advanced person is the greatest Aparada (sin) but KIba Jaya is dressing as a Sanyasi and preaching” Brahmananda complained to Bhativedanta Swami.

Bhaktivendanta Swami then answered Brahmananda.

“KIba Jaya is very special even among devotees. You just leave him alone.” and they did. From that point on no one tried to stop me from dressing and acting like a sanyasi.

I thought of how Prabhupada had treated me and then about how my ashram teachers had treated me, but that was not what was bothering me at the time. When I came back from India I had wanted to get married to a girl that I loved but I had not been allowed to marry her. Even though she was my age she was engaged to someone else.

“Then why wasn’t I given initiation and promoted with the rest of my class? I was a Kshatriya(warrior). Why was I put in the Sudra(laborer) Ashrama (class)” I asked bitterly.

“That was your mother.” Kirtananda Swami protested. “She said that you were too young to take the vows.” he answered.

“You married all the girls our age off to older men.”

“That is Vedic culture and that is what we are trying to establish here.” He shot back. Now his voice softened and he continued.

“I know your father and I have had our differences. You know his drinking is a problem but you can’t turn your back on who you are.”

Kirtananda Swami’s carefully chosen words, spoken softly, cut into me. My father’s drinking was a family secret carefully hidden by us all and even the mention of it by someone outside the family filled me with shame instantly.

“Srila Prabhupada said that you were an incarnation of Lord Nityananda the brother of Chaitanya.” he continued.

“I told you. I wanted to get married. I wanted to have a family.” I said.

“How old are you now?” he asked.

“I’m 14.” I answered.

“Do you even have hair on your genitals yet?” he inquired.

“Yeah.” I answered thinking that he wanted to find out if I was old enough to get married and have children.

“Can I see?” He asked which I regarded as a challenge to my manhood. Now this became the confrontation that I had been looking forward to for years. Damn right, I was old enough and I had been through enough to be a grown man.

With my left hand I unbuttoned my Levi’s 501 jeans revealing my white Hanes jockey shorts. Using my right hand I pulled down the waistband of my underwear revealing my flaccid hairy dick.

Kirtananda Swami’s right hand shot over and attempted to clutch the crown jewels. I quickly released the waistband of my jockey shorts covering up my business and pushed his hand away with my left hand.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“It’s ok.” he replied, looking over at me as the Land Cruiser edged toward the right edge of the road.

“Just watch where you are going.” I yelled.

In the back seat the German Shepard Gudakesha began barking and snarling. I could feel his hot breath on the back of my neck. I was terrified that he would bite me but he just stared at me.

“Can you pull over! I asked. “I want to get out.”

“It’s okay.” Kirtanananda replied softly.

“Stop! I yelled. “Let me out. I’m not going to the temple.”

Kirtananda Swami pulled the Land Cruiser over to the side of the road. Gudakesha was still barking at me as I opened the door and got out. I stood there waiting for him to leave.

“Everything is ok. You will be fine.” Kirtananda Swami said as I closed the door.”

“You need to find Jesus.” I yelled at him as he pulled away and I meant it. I had been going to church on Sunday at Hope Presbyterian Church while living at my Grandma Jane’s house. I had developed a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I thought of Jesus Christ as my guru and I prayed to Jesus Christ when I wanted something from his father Krishna. Jesus’s instructions seemed a lot easier to follow than the ones of the gurus that I had grown up with. Just be kind to people. Now after what had happened today I was determined not to have anything else to do with the Hare Krishnas.

I pulled one of the Newports out from the inside pocket of my Levi’s jean jacket. “What the fuck had just happened?” Well it was obvious. The man I believed was God’s representative on earth and who everyone believed was celibate monk was an old pervert who liked boys. But who could I tell? And if I did tell who would do something about it? People had tried before. Kirtananada Swami was god to these people.

In 1983 our neighbor Charles St. Dennis learned that Kirtanananda Swami aka Keith Ham was not a celibate monk as he claimed to be but was in fact in a homosexual relationship with his life long partner Hayagria aka Howard Wheeler. Charles St. Denis then began openly accusing Kirtananda Swami of being a fraud, of being a homosexual and not a celibate monk. He also accused him of being involved in other criminal activity, such as kidnapping and insurance fraud and not a divinely empowered representative of God as he claimed to be. This did not go over well with Kirtananda Swami’s more fanatical disciples. Charles St. Denis disappeared soon after he began to make these accusations and was never to be seen again.

Earlier that year Steven Bryant had accused Kirtananda Swami of masterminding a massive criminal organization and using beatings and murder to cover up the abuse of minor children. Not long after that Steven Bryant was found shot in the head in his van in West Los Angeles. Who could I tell? Absolutely no one.

Shortly after this Thomas Drescher, a former Green Beret and Vietnam veteran was arrested and charged with the murder of Charles St. Denis and Steven Bryant. Drescher was arrested while trying to leave the country and Kirtananda Swami’s fingerprints were found on the cash that Drescher had in his possession. The US Attorney William Kolibash thought that he had the Swami dead to rights, but Drescher swore that Kirtananda Swami had not hired him to kill St. Denis and Bryant. Drescher instead claimed that he had killed St. Denis and Bryant on his own for blaspheming his guru as authorized by his faith.

In January of 1987, the FBI and the West Virginia State Police raided the New Vrindavan Hare Krishna Community charging their leader Keith Ham aka Kirtananda Swami with conspiracy to commit murder, racketeering, fraud, copyright infringement, and being a homosexual child abuser. New Vrindavan then closed the Nandagram School that my brothers and sisters and I once attended, and all the Hare Krishna children were sent into the Marshall County public schools.

Now everyone at Sherrard Jr. High School was talking about how the “the critter kids” would be coming to our school and no one seemed happy about it. The said critters smelled bad, they were dirty and lazy and they stole. I knew that once my sisters Radha, Sarasvati and Saci, and our brothers Syamantaka, and Krishna Das started riding the bus with us our cover would be blown. Everyone would know we were “critters” too.

The dreaded day finally arrived. We were the last house at the end of Stulls Run Road and so the school bus picked us up first. Everyone else would get on after us. First there was Gopal Crocker who went by the name “Paul”, then there were the Prins, Chaitanya and his sister Nityananda, the Cleavers Sudarshana and Radhastami and then the Hertz’s Nama, Vasudeva and Ve. They were all well-dressed, the girls in cotton dresses and the boys in jeans and button-down shirts all from Hills Department Store in Benwood. They were very polite, nodding and smiling to each person who looked at them as they passed. A few of the locals even offered them a seat next to them. No one on the bus called them names or made fun of them that day. I was actually surprised and a bit moved. I started to wonder if I was wrong about the “billies”.

By the spring of 1987 my freshman year at Sherrard Junior High School year I was feeling great. I was on the Track and Field Team and I hadn’t lost a race all year. On top of that the best thing of all happened to me. I met Lisa Marie Henry. I met Lisa at a party that her older brother Jay threw at their house. Lisa and I were on the track team together, but up till then I hadn’t talked to her at all. That night she had a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 and we decided to drink it together. We talked for a long time about absolutely everything and we finally ended up kissing but that was it. I said goodnight but from that moment it was on I was madly in love with her.

After I started going out with Lisa things changed. It didn’t happen right away but once Lisa and I started dating things started to get weird at Sherrard. Sometimes when I walked past a group of people, I could swear that I heard someone whisper “Critter” which is what the “bilies” called us, but when I turned back to look to see who said it everyone seemed to be talking and acting as if nothing had happened. They said it quietly under their breath at first so at first I thought I was just imagining it. Sometimes I thought that people were saying something else and I was hearing it wrong or that I imagined it, but what could they have said? What rhymes with critter? The way the “billies” said the word made it sound a lot like the word “nigger” but there were no black people in our school so I knew that couldn’t be it.

Once I started smoking weed I started to identify with black people. There I was the fastest kid in a school, winning every time I stepped on the field but I was hated for my success. Sure they cheered for me in the stadium when they wanted me to win for them but behind my back they called me names and secretly shunned me. The billies and the hicks listened to country music and we started listening to rap music. There was one cassette tape in particular that we played over and over again. It was NWA’s “Strait out of Compton” and I took the words to heart. I was tired of the bullshit. When I heard people say shit behind my back I would just kick the shit out of them up right there and then. I got into two fights in one week at the end of my freshman year and got suspended for the last 3 days of school. I had been keeping a lot of stuff bottled inside and now it was starting to come out. I was mad as a hornet and I was out of control. Lisa, I broke up that summer.

By the time I went to John Marshall High School I had started hanging out almost exclusively with Hare Krishna kids that I grew up with at New Vrindavan. My best was Matt Horvath aka Vishnudutta Das who I now call Matty Boy. Matty Boy had left New Vrindavan a year earlier and had gone to Bridge Street Jr high where he played football and wrestled for the Red Devils and then had gone on to Wheeling Park High School. Matty Boy was my best friend and he was also dating my oldest sister Vishaka at the time. There was also JR who lived up the road who would go on to join the Navy and eventually marry my sister Radha. There was also Jacob Lennon aka Jayananda who was our age and Devon Wheeler aka Samba the son of Howard Wheeler AKA Hayagriva who had helped found the New Vrindavan community. These guys didn’t go to school with me but they were my family. I considered them my best friends.

I had some exceptional teachers at John Marshall. My favorite by far was Mr. Montgomery who taught Phys Ed and Sports Journalism. He also refereed girls’ basketball games and regaled us with the tales of the ladies’sportsmanship, never missing a chance to humorously point out that the girls were just better, smarter people than us guys. I also was fortunate enough to be in Harold Vitale’s History Honors class and was therefore privileged to be made a member of the Chester Greenwood Club, the History Honors Club of which I have been a lifetime member. I graduated from John Marshall High School in the Spring of 1990 and was accepted at West Virginia University.

I spent that summer in Morgantown, West Virginia attending training camp for the West Virginia University Mountaineers football team. I may have been the fastest person in the state of West Virginia at one time but I was a middle of the pack defensive back in Coach Don Neilan’s Mountaineers defense. I did not make the final cut and Coach Don Neihlan’s gave me the news himself. He told me that he liked the way I played and invited me to come back and try out the next year.

I enrolled in Military Science Class and started taking the morning PT classes with the other cadets at ROTC. I had not been able to get an appointment to the United States Naval Academy but my plan was to get my degree, enlist in the Navy as an officer and become a pilot in the United States Navy after graduation.

I did meet a few guys on the football team that smoked Ganja but none of them were from West Virginia and they didn’t know where to get Ganja. So I started picking up a few ounces of Ganja on my weekend home, breaking them down and selling them to guys that would ask me. A few of the guys I met started selling for me and by the end of the second semester of my freshman year I was selling pounds of brick weed wholesale and bringing in over $5,000 a month which was quite a bit of money back then. I bought a Kawasaki Ninja and a silver 1988 Honda Accord-LXI 2 Door-Coupe.

It was 7:00 AM on a cold February morning when agents from the DEA and the Morgantown Police Department knocked on the door to my dorm room at 381 Boreman Hall with a warrant for my arrest. I was arrested and charged with two counts of distribution of marijuana 26.6 grams (1 ounce) and 14 grams (1/2 ounce). This was not a large amount, but the United States Attorney Sam Nazarro brought me into his office and personally threatened with me a 5-year sentence unless I testified against my childhood friend Devon Wheeler.

In 1990 the United States Attorney William Kolibash had indicted Kīrtanānanda Swami aka Keith Ham, the guru of New Vrindavana on 5 counts of racketeering, 6 counts of mail fraud, and 2 counts of conspiracy to commit the murder of two devotees who spoke against him, Charles St. Denis and Stephen Bryant. The Justice Department claimed that the followers of Kirtananda Swami had illegally amassed a profit of more than 10.5 million dollars through various criminal enterprises including the sale of illegal copyrighted materials and that the Swami had engaged in the sexual abuse of minors. The indictment also charged that the Swami had ordered the killings of St. Denis and Bryant because the victims had threatened to reveal his sexual abuse of minors.

The government claimed that witnesses had seen Kirtananda Swami molest my friend Devon Wheeler who had sold me the weed but Devon denied these allegations and insisted that he had not been molested. The United States Attorney wanted me to testify against Devon Wheeler for selling me the marijuana so that they could pressure him to testify against Kirtananda Swami for molesting him. Devon swore that Kirtananada had always been treated as a son and had never touched him and he refused to testify against him. At the time I believed him.

Devon did not grow up with the rest of us in the ashrama but had lived with Kirtananda Swami as his son. He was even worshiped by Kirtananda’s more devout followers. I did not know at the time that Devon’s father Howard Wheeler aka Hayagriva had been Kirtananda’s lover or that Howard had spilled the beans about Kirtananda Swami and him to Charles St. Denis while they were partying together and that was why St. Denis had been murdered. I did not know that Devon’s father had also arranged for the murder of Steven Bryant and the payment of the hit man Thomas Dresher aka Tirtha. At that time all I knew was that my friend’s dad had died of cancer and the feds were trying to get me to roll on him.

Tom Brown, the guy I sold to, had been busted selling cocaine on campus and had agreed to act as an informant for a reduced sentence. He got me on a recorded buy and they had me cold. They Feds told me from the start that they didn’t really care about me. They knew I had got the weed from Devon Wheeler and they just wanted me to flip on Devon so that he would testify against the Swami.

“The Swami is not what you think. He’s a really bad guy.” They told me and I knew they were right but they were the Feds. They were the ones who had arrested me and embarrassed my mom by releasing my name to the press and having my name plastered on the front page of the Wheeling News Register. Now they wanted me to snitch on one of my best friends, someone I had grown up with whose father had just died of cancer. At the time I had no idea at the time how involved Devon’s father Howard was in the murders. All I knew was that Howard had just fought an excruciatingly painful battle with cancer and died and now the Feds were trying to get me to snitch on Devon over an ounce of weed. I told Sam Nazarro, the US Attorney, to go kick rocks.

When the Feds told me and my lawyer that I was facing 5 years for selling 26.6 grams of Ganja unless I rolled on Devon Wheeler I was sure they were bluffing. When my lawyer told me that unless I wanted to face 5 years going to trial where I would surely lose my only choice was to take a plea agreement and accept a mandatory 1-year prison sentence, I was convinced that this was some kind of scared strait program and at the last minute the sentence would be suspended. There was no way they were going to put me in federal prison for a whole year for 26.6 grams of ragweed.

Up till the moment the Hon. Judge Frederick P. Stamp pronounced his sentence. I was certain that someone would come along and intervene. After all, I had a 3.8 cumulative GPA and was at the top of my PT Class in ROTC at West Virginia University. I had even volunteered to enlist for the Gulf War for the liberation of Kuwait later named “Desert Storm” if my sentence could be commuted. I was told that the sentence was mandatory and that Uncle Sam would not accept drug offenders even after my sentence was completed. My military career was over before it started.

When the Hon. Judge Frederick Stamp dressed in his black robe seated up on his high bench calmly sentenced me to 12 months, it finally dawned on me that this was real. I was going to federal prison for a year for an ounce of weed. My cheeks burned and I fought the tears back, deciding not to let a single teardrop fall. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. The law had never protected us. When my father used to beat the crap out of my mother the Sheriff would say.

“What did he smack you around a little?”

Then the Sheriff would tell her to go home and try to get along with her husband. After all, if he arrested everyone in Marshall County who beat up their wives the jail would be packed.

There was nothing new under the sun. After all that I had overcome to get where I was, it was all being taken away over a bag of weed that would fit in the palm of your hand. All of this over $200. I lowered my head as a single tear leaked down the left side of my cheek. I leaned to my right and let the tear roll down the side of my face into my mouth, swallowing the single tear I had let escape.

I had three days to report to the Federal Correction Institute in Morgantown. I called Lisa and I broke the news to her. Up till then I never believed that I would go to prison over an ounce of Ganja, and so I had painted a rosy picture for her. After I was sentenced I told her that I didn’t expect her to stay with me but she told me that I wasn’t getting out of it that easy. There was no way she was going to let me dump her after we had finally got back together. Then I asked her to marry me but she said no. She had just enrolled in the Speech Pathology and Audiology School at West Virginia University and told me that she couldn’t marry someone without a college education. If I got out of prison and got my degree she would marry me.

I drove down to the admissions office to withdraw from West Virginia University. When they asked me why I was withdrawing I should have lied but that would have violated the Honor Code and I could be automatically expelled if my deception was uncovered. So I answered truthfully that I would be serving a year in prison for possession of marijuana.

From there I went to say goodbye to my fraternity brothers at the Kappa Alpha house. The Kappa Alpha fraternity was founded in honor of General Robert E. Lee to uphold the values of chivalry and brotherhood and to maintain the honor of the southern gentleman. Pledges are educated in proper conduct and etiquette in the company of ladies and are initiated as Knights of the Kappa Alpha Order. For many years the KA house was known for being one of the most racist fraternities on campus but by the time I got there, half of the guys in the house were Dead Heads from Virginia, Maryland and New Jersey. The other half were legacies from southern West Virginia who chewed tobacco and listened to country music but almost like German descendants of the Holocaust they wanted nothing to do with their ancestors in the KKK. They really were a great bunch of guys and I had a great time living in the house. We threw massive parties with the Delta house next door and artists like REM, the B-52’s and Dave Mathews performed at our legendary Backyard Bashes.

I have to say that for all the culture shocks that I have had to endure, moving from the Kappa Alpha fraternity house at West Virginia University to the Federal Correction Institute in Morgantown, WV was probably the worst. When I had moved into the KA house I had been cheerful and pleasant to be around but now the shadow of my arrest hung over me was like a dark cloud. When I went to prison, I felt no guilt or remorse for what I had done. I felt only anger against the people who put me there. I made a list of the people I would get revenge on. On my list there was Tom Brown, the narc, Sam Nazzaro, the prosecutor, Frederick Stamp, the judge, my lawyer, some other people who ended up snitching on me and even the president at the time George Bush 1.

I was mad as a hornet but I was also devastated. It felt like I had lost everything I had. After my first month at FCI Morgantown, I called my mother from the prison payphone crying but by that time she too had had enough.

“Jason ,” she said. “You did a stupid thing and you got caught. Now you have to deal with it.”

At the time I thought it was a cold blooded thing to say to me while I was in jail but after she hung up I started to try and see it from her perspective. My name had been on the front cover of our hometown newspaper but I was nowhere to be found. She had had to deal with the shame of walking into the grocery store and having people talk about her. It was true and I had to accept that she was right. I was stupid and I got caught. So, I stopped complaining. I kept my head down, went to work, went to school, went to the gym and tried to keep my mind off the outside. If I started to feel sorry for myself but when I would remind myself of the guys my age doing 10 and 15-year sentences, and so I held my tongue. No one wanted to hear me complain about my lousy year.

Two months into my sentence I received a letter informing me that I had been expelled from West Virginia University for violating the Honor Code. I appealed the decision to the West Virginia Board of Trustees. The DEA and the Morgantown Police Department both sent officers to testify against me at my appeal hearing. Both agents claimed that I had refused to cooperate or show remorse and that I would pose a danger to the students at University of West Virginia if allowed to reenroll. My appeal was denied and I was permanently expelled from West Virginia University.

I protested that 25 other students had been arrested and none of them had been expelled. I was told that if I wanted to give the University their names they too would be expelled. The names of the students who had been arrested on campus had all appeared in the newspaper but what good would it do me to give up their names now? I could suffer in silence and go down alone or take everyone else down with me. “Suck it up sissie. Be a man.” It was only 12 months but it was a long fucking year.

Growing up we were taught that this material world is controlled by the “demons” but by the time I went away to college I thought my parents were crazy. When I went into prison I thought of the United States as the good guys and that lawmakers were just misguided. After witnessing the true depth and horror of the mass incarceration of millions of young men I changed my mind. I realized that my parents were right. The Asuras (demons) were in control. Who else could be so cruel? I decided that all I could do was bear witness to the suffering that the Empire of Babylon had caused and promised that I would never forget who the real enemy was. I threw away the list of people I wanted to get revenge on, and I swore that I would dedicate my life to freeing all the Ganja prisoners.

I made a promise to God that I would never sell Ganja again. I was going to dedicate my life to freeing the “ganja prisoners.” My plan was to go out to Hollywood, become a famous actor and make movies about people who went to prison for Ganja. When I was released in 1993, I enrolled at Wheeling Jesuit University. I graduated with a B.A. in American History in 1995.

At the end of my senior year, I married Lisa Marie Henry, the woman I would spend the rest of my life with. Lisa’s father John Henry had grown up in the Ohio Valley and had played football at Central Catholic High School in Wheeling, West Virginia. He had done two tours of duty in Viet Nam before taking a job at Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel where he worked as a mechanic until he retired. Lisa’s mother Victoria Antoinette Fiorelli Henry has worked as a tax-preparer for H&R Block for as long as I can remember. You could search the whole world and not find two better people. Lisa was their only daughter, and even after I had gone to prison they welcomed me into their family. They were such good people and I did not want to disappoint them again.

Lisa and I moved to Los Angeles in the fall of 1995 but with my criminal record I still had trouble finding a job. Lisa was pregnant with our oldest son Jordan at the time and so I supported us by going out of town on the weekends and selling stickers and hats at concerts, races and football games. In the summertime I would follow concert tours or the NASCAR circuit and we’d spend our summer weekends at Watkins Glen, Pocono Raceway, Dover, and Bristol. In the fall we headed down to Charlotte and Atlanta before finishing off the season at Talladega. We also followed big concert acts like the Grateful Dead, Lollapalooza, Jimmy Buffet and Dave Mathews.

Selling people things that they did not plan to buy is not easy but I had a secret weapon. It was “the pick. “The pick is a sales technique developed by Hare Krishna fundraisers after they were no longer allowed in airports. A lot of the guys I grew up with still survived by doing the “pick.” If you have ever attended a concert or a sporting event you have been approached by a “picker” who you probably didn’t know was a Hare Krishna. It has become such a common occurrence that most people don’t give it a second thought and many people get hats and make donations to them every time they see them. A lot of them look forward to it.

The“pick” works like this. You are in the parking lot of a concert, or sporting event hanging out, drinking and someone with a badge carrying a duffle bag approaches you. Flashing his badge he says.

“I’m sorry but we’ve had a complaint that it was too quiet over here. You were having too much fun and I see you brought some dangerous women in here with you. How do you plead? Guilty or not innocent.”

This statement is designed to catch the group off guard, initially creating a sense of concern that they might be in trouble. As the “picker” continues, they place a sticker or a hat in each person's hand and lighten the mood with a few jokes.

“So there is no jail time but we are going to try to issue you a hat and fine you a donation for charity.”

The initial fear of being in trouble is quickly replaced by laughter and relief when the group realizes it was all a joke. At this point, the “picker” asks for a donation, typically around $20. This full court press and combination of the emotional rollercoaster—from fear to relief to humor—and the social pressure of already holding the hat makes it very likely that the mark will comply by keeping the hat and making the donation. If you have attended concerts and sporting events in the United States and this has probably happened to you, you have more than likely been “picked.” The money raised goes to feed homeless people and veterans and the “pickers” keep a percentage to cover their expenses and travel.

During this time Kirtananda Swami was engaged in a 10 year legal battle with the Feds who were trying to convict him of running New Vrindavan as a criminal enterprise using this fundraising technique among other schemes and for conspiracy to murder Charles St. Denis and Steven Bryant. Thomas Drescher aka Tirtha Das had been convicted of the murders but he had insisted that had not been ordered to kill them by Kirtananda Swami. Dresche insisted that he had killed St. Denis and Bryant because they had blasphemed his Guru Kirtananda Swami and therefore deserved to die.

The jury failed to reach a verdict on the murder charges but on March 29, 1991, Kīrtanānanda was convicted on nine of the 11 charges. Defense attorney Alan Dershowitz represented Kirtananda Swami on appeal and convinced the United States Court of Appeals to throw out the convictions, saying that child molestation evidence had unfairly prejudiced the jury against Kīrtanānanda. On August 16, 1993, Kirtananda was released on house arrest and rented an apartment in the Wheeling neighborhood of Warwood. I visited him there with Devon and he told me that the Feds had offered him a plea for 3 years. I had just been released earlier that year in March and knew that once the Feds have you they don’t let go. I told him he should take the deal but he didn't. I didn’t really expect him to.

Many of Kirtananda Swami’s followers remained loyal to him and even organized protests against the government for religious persecution. The more dirt the Feds dug up about Kirtananda Swami, the more his supporters insisted these stories were fake and created by the demons to bring down Krishna’s greatest devotee. Then in 1993 Kirtananda Swami was discovered in the back of his Winnebago in a compromising position with a young male disciple. There was a half hearted attempt at a cover up but no one was buying it this time.

Thomas Drescher was serving two life sentences in the West Virginia State Penitentiary for murder now changed his story and claimed that he had killed Charles St.Denis and Steven Bryant because Kirtananda had ordered him to do it. After Dresher rolled on him Kirtananda Swami knew the jig was up. Kirtananda Swami aka Keith Ham pled guilty to conspiracy and racketeering and was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. He really should have taken the deal.

Donald Trump was a great admirer of Kirtananda Swami and I compare his rise to the presidency as the large-scale application of the “pick” as a persuasion technique. If you think about it, Trump first scared these same Americans who had been getting “picked” for years and convinced them that the country was in dire straits, using rhetoric that painted a picture of a nation under siege by various internal and external threats. This narrative created a sense of urgency and fear, much like the initial “complaint” scare in the Hare Krishna “pick” technique. Trump’s approach also included a heavy dose of humor and showmanship. His rallies were filled with jokes, nicknames for opponents, and off-the-cuff remarks that endeared him to his supporters. This use of humor served to humanize him and make him seem more relatable, much like the jokes used by the “pickers” to build rapport with potential donors.

Most Trump supporters had already been getting hit up by Hare Krishnas for years at country music concerts, Nascar races, NCAA and NFL sporting events. Of course most of them have no idea that they had been programmed for years to say yes by the Hare Krishna “pick” line by the time Trump came along and “picked” them all off. During the pandemic when all other sporting events were cancelled Trump continued to hold rallies. It was Hare Krishna “pickers” who sold the “Make America Great” hats made in China to the MAGAs.

I gave up the “pick” and became a full time Ganja-walla after crashing and burning as an actor. Our oldest son Jordan was 2 years old and Lisa was pregnant with our second child Max. We were living in a 1 bedroom apartment on Watseka Ave just west of Robertson Blvd and just scraping by. Thanks to my friend Gauravani Buchwald who had already appeared in a few films, “Dangerous Minds” with Michelle Phifer and “Virtuosity” with Denzel Washington, I was enrolled in a pretty reputable acting class. I had a decent headshot; I had been to a few auditions but hadn’t had a single callback.

Then my friend Gauravani did the strangest thing. He just quit acting. This absolutely blew my mind because to me Gauravani had everything that I wanted in the world. He had an agent and he was getting roles. It was obvious he was going to be huge and now he was throwing it away. Gauravani told me that he wasn’t willing to do what it took to make it in show business and that he decided to dedicate his life to serving Lord Krishna. I had no idea what he was talking about at the time but I think I do now. At the time though I would have done anything to get into showbiziness but he left it all behind. Gauravani moved to Potomac, Maryland, married a lovely Indian girl and formed a Kirtan band Gauravani & As Kindred Spirits. They have gone on to record many absolutely beautiful and successful albums.

At the time I was crushed though. Without Gauravani I didn’t know anyone in show business but I was not ready to quit LA. I had come to Hollywood to expose how the war on cannabis had created a generation of opiate addicts and how the prison industry had decimated a generation of black leaders by incarcerating 1 out of 4 of them between the ages of 18 and 25. I decided to give up on being an actor and become a writer. I started to work on my first screenplay “Storm” about a college football player who is sent to prison for marijuana. I finished the screenplay but could not find an agent or a buyer. I was starting to wonder if we should even stay in LA.

Growing up I assumed that the problem in Los Angeles was a lack of talent. Boy, was I wrong. When I moved to LA, I thought the film industry was made up of pretty girls and boys from small towns and like me they just knew they didn’t belong in the mines or the mills. Most crashed and burned but what I didn’t realize is that almost none of them went home. They made LA their home, finding employment within the industry as carpenters, set designers, stuntmen, or in the restaurants, bars and strip clubs on Sunset or even the massage parlors on Santa Monica Blvd. Some ended up walking the streets and some found love in the suburbs and settled down churning out generations of beautiful people to whom they passed on their dreams of stardom. Say what you want about Los Angeles. There may be a lot of ugliness but there are some beautiful people here. After generations of actors, writers, directors and producers had clawed and scratched their way into these jobs I was starting to realize what a fool I was to think I could make it.

It was the summer of 1997 and it was miserably hot. Our apartment on Watseka Blvd did not have air conditioning but most days the ocean breeze kept us cool. That day the wind was blowing from the east and the fans in the windows blew only hot, sandy air through the room. My son Jordan who was 2-years old had jumped off the kitchen table and fallen on his face. He was screaming at the top of his lungs. I held him over my shoulder patting his back walking back and forth in front of the fan to try to cool him off and calm him down. There was a knock on the door. I was surprised to see my friend Nitai standing there.

“Can I come in?” He said.

Curious about our visitor, Jordan stopped crying. I invited Nitai inside.

We sat down and Nitai explained that for the last few years he and Shiva and some other guys we knew had been going up to Vancouver, British Columbia and buying high-grade indoor ganja and selling it in LA and Hawaii. This big time weed dealer from Honolulu named Maha had given $130,000 to another guy named Vasudev to hold for him. Vasudev and his girlfriend Sara decided to steal the money and had hopped on the first flight out of Honolulu. Nitai told me that Maha thought they were headed for my hometown back in New Vrindavan, West Virginia where Vasudev had grown up. Nitai came to ask me if I could help find them.

Vasudev’s older brother JR had married my sister Radha and so by marriage he was my brother-in-law. I knew that if he had gone back to West Virginia it was so he could hide out and have our family around to watch his back. I told Nitai that I didn’t know if I could get the money back but that I would try to talk to Vasudev. I was going back east to work the Poconos and Michigan NASCAR races, and my plan was to check on Vasudev during the week in between while I was back east.

When I got back from the Poconos, my brother Shawn told me that he had sold Vasudev a black Ford Taurus and a Colt. 45 automatic. We went to talk to Vasudeva and his girlfriend Sara. Vasudeva claimed that Maha had slept with his girlfriend and that was why they stole the money. My brother Shawn and I finally got Vasudeva and Sara agreed to return half the money to Maha. Then I got Maha on the phone and asked him for $40,000, 1/3 of the money he had stolen from him, if I could get him 40,000 back. Maha lost it on me and told me that he would come get the money himself. I tried to convince him to be reasonable, but he wouldn’t listen.

“I’m coming there right now.” he shouted over the phone.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” I replied.

“What’s that mean? You were supposed to find him. That’s it.” Maha shot back.

“He’s my brother in law and he came here for our help. Now I would never go to Hawaii and start causing problems and I am asking you not to do that here.”

“You just hold him there.” Maha ordered me.

“No, I’m not going to just hold him. He’s agreed to return half of the money, and I think I should get something for finding it for you.”

“I’m coming there.” Maha barked on the phone.

“The money will be gone then.” I told him.

I hung up the phone. I didn’t know it at the time but I had just been drafted into the cannabis business. Vasudev gave us $40,000 of the $130,000 he had stolen from Maha to invest in the movie I was trying to produce. In return my brother Shawn and I agreed to back him up if Maha came looking for him. $40,000 was not nearly enough to make a movie but our plan was to turn that money into a lot more.

Shawn and I figured if these knuckleheads could make money smuggling Ganja from Canada, so could we. At the time you could buy pounds of high grade indoor grass for $1500 Vancouver and sell them for $4000 back in LA. My brother Shawn and I drove up to Vancouver, British Columbia with the $40,000 to and bought 25 pounds of high-grade indoor grass. We packed it in vacuum seal bags and loaded them into a black hockey bag. From there I dropped Shawn off in the woods just north of the US-Canadian Border. After carefully inspecting and vacuuming the car I drove through the border alone. The Customs Agents just waved me through.

From there I made sure I wasn’t being followed and then drove back along the border and picked up Shawn who had hiked the Ganja into the US by then. He would wait for me at the top of a hill where he could see every car that came into the valley. If I were being followed, he would stay hidden. If I wasn't being followed Shawn would flash his light and I would turn around and pick him up. From there it was an 18-hour drive to Los Angeles where Ganja was selling for $4000 a pound and was usually gone within a week. In the winter of 1998, we put up the $40,000 and made $100,000 of our first run. Our plan was to start filming in the spring.

It was March of 1999 and my lovely wife Lisa and I were living in a charming wooden dome house on the corner of Braddock and La Salle just behind Sony Pictures in Culver City. Late one night there was a knock on the door. It was Devon Wheeler. Devon told me that he had just found out that his father-in-law and business partner Leonard Kamhout had been molesting his wife Lila while she was 9 years old. I knew Leonard Khamhout who had carved the silver jewelry and created the designs for Chrome Hearts and I didn’t believe Devon but when I questioned Lila about it she swore that it was true. Lila’s sister Chandra and her mother Patricia who had joined the Hare Krishna’s with my parents in Denver backed up her story and I was forced to accept the truth, the man behind the billion dollar brand Chrome Hearts was a pedophile. People do love their predators.

Devon now claimed that Leonard was trying to make a side deal with the Japanese buyers to cut him out of the silver business that they were partners in and asked me if he could move the masters and the molds from his shop in Venice to my house in Culver City and if he could set up the silver production in my garage to do his Christmas first orders. I agreed without asking too many questions or asking for any payment. My friend was in a bad spot and needed help. I didn’t know that Devon’s father in law Leonard Kamhout was the creator of the Chrome Hearts jewelry line which would go on to become a billion dollar brand and that his work was already world famous. I definitely had no idea how successful the business would be. The next day there were 10 people working in my garage, casting, assembling and polishing silver jewelry. After a few weeks a thick layer of black dust from the sanders and polishers covered the orange and avocado trees in the yard.

One day Devon came to me and told me that they were going to make $6,000,000 in the first year of operation. “Well maybe you can pay someone to clean some of the dust off my orange tree then. My yard looks like the side of the freeway. I can’t eat these oranges anymore.“ I told him pointing at the black dust that was now caked on to orange the trees in my yard.

“Don’t worry about it. I’m going to pay for your movie.” Devon offered up casually.

“Get serious.”

“No, how much will it cost?” Devon asked me.

“If we shoot it with a skeleton crew and only one star can do it for $250,000. Right now I’m trying to get Brett Harrelson.”

This was true. My friend Hippie Steve from Venice who supplied Death Row Records, Julia Roberts and a bunch of other Venice Cats back then had introduced us. Hippy Steve had been buying Ganja from me for a couple years now and was the real life inspiration for “The Dude” in the film “The Big Lebowski”.

“I’m going to pay for it.” Devon went on to say. “We’ll be making a lot of money. We can put the jewelry in the movie and write it off as business expense. I haven’t forgotten what you did that year for me.”

“Come on. I wouldn’t snitch on anyone over an ounce of weed.” I shot back.

“Still not everyone would have done what you did,” he replied.

“Thank you. That is awesome. Alright let’s do it. I think I’m going to change the name from “Storm” to “Karma to Burn.” I said.

“I like it.” Devon chimed in puffing on the massive blunt we were sharing.

From that point on my brother Shawn and I went ahead as if the movie was happening. I buried the hatchet with Maha and I told him I would put every dime of the money that I had gotten from Vasudev into the movie. I had taken Maha’s money from Vasudev and I was taking money that Devon was making off ripping off his father in law. It was true that Leonard had molested his daughter and it kind of freaked me out that they were making money hand over fist in Japan from the predator jewelry that he carved. It really made me realize how much people love predators. The entire situation made me uncomfortable, and I swore I would put every penny Vasudev and Devon gave me into the movie. I didn’t want their bad karma to burn me and so I would put it all into the movie.

With the money I had made so far I hired the director and the actors, booked the locations and rented the cameras, vans and equipment. When I went to ask Devon for the money for the movie, he told me that had changed his mind. He decided to give me just $50,000. I had already signed contracts with the actors; paid deposits on locations and rented the cameras and vehicles with the money I had. I took the $50,000 Devon gave me and told Brett Harrelson that we couldn't afford to pay him. My brother Shawn Detamore would have to play the lead. We packed up the two cargo vans I had already rented and headed out to West Virginia to start shooting.

We had hired Peter Daskaloff to direct the film and he had great connections with actors willing to work in independent films. Our plan was to shoot the film in 35-millimeter and we got a great deal on short ends. We shot the film with a 5-man crew. Peter the Director lit the set and was the Director of Photography. Milan Kiss did the sound and grip work. Tereza Nelson did makeup and pulled focus while the cameras were rolling. Jalu Bidye and Vikram Bharati handled the special effects and reloaded the film.

My brother Shawn Detamore, Patrick St. Esprit, Tulsi Ball, Robbie Welles, Ernie Garcia, Ken Del Conte, Shea Curry and Mellisa Busby all made the trip to West Virginia. My brother Shawn Detamore played Jonathan Storm the lead and we cast Robbie Welles and Ernie Garcia from “Dusk Till Dawn” to play the bad guys. “Karma to Burn” was the first film appearance for Patrick St. Esprit who went on to star in such films as “United 93” and “The Hunger Games”. The whole cast and crew went on location to West Virginia and Ohio for 2 weeks. We shot the rest of the film in LA but it would take almost 3 years to complete the project.

Making a feature length 35-mm with no prior education or experience and almost no money was an ambitious and foolhardy endeavor, but I wouldn’t trade it for all the tea in China. I may have come to Hollywood thinking I could do a better job than them but now I have nothing but respect for the men and women who make films, even bad ones. They really do pour their heart and soul into their work. I was very proud of all the people who worked on the film and that it was set in my hometown. A lot of people come to West Virginia to film movies but most of them are not set in West Virginia. Our film was set in the Ohio Valley and in places I remember growing up. If not for the locals bailing out from day one it would have never happened.

From the beginning disaster seemed to shadow the production of “Karma to Burn” like a dark cloud but so did incredible and impossible luck. The first day of shooting the Chief of the Wheeling Police Department who had agreed to let us use the Wheeling Police Department police cars in the film told us that he had read the script and changed his mind. The Wheeling Police Department would not cooperate in the making of a film about a criminal who makes the police look bad. So the first day of shooting we had no cops and no cop cars, the whole reason I decided to shoot on location in West Virginia. It was the first day and it was already a disaster.

I walked out of the police station. The cast and crew stood around on the corner of Chapline and 15th Street drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, all ready to get started. They were all set up to shoot the first scene of the film but now I had to come out and tell them that we had lost the cops, the cars and that we needed to find another location. I told Peter to shoot the establishing shots while we were set up. We would have to cheat the interior shots somewhere else later.

“You’ve sure got your ass in a sling here. Jason, What are you going to do now?” said Patrick St. Esprit after I told them what the Chief of Police had said.

“I’ll think of something.” I replied.

“Well you better.”

Patrick wasn’t meant to be the star of the film but he was by far the biggest name in the movie and he stole every scene he was in. He had done parts on Walker Texas Ranger and a few other TV shows and he was the most experienced actor we had. He had been up all night partying and seemed ok with not having to work. He was also getting paid the most. I really needed him to make the film work and he was right. I was so fucked.

A man approached us from across the street. He had long black hair and was wearing a Motley Crue cut-off T-Shirt, cut-off jean shorts and flip flops. In his right hand he held a Newport cigarette .

“Say, are you guys making a movie?” he asked, inhaling a drag from the Newport.

“That’s the plan.” I answered him.

“Well, if you need anything let me know. He held out his hand to me.

“The name is Rusty Fatula. My dad owns Wheeling Tent and Awning. I know everyone around here.” he said.

I shook his hand furiously.

“Jason Detamore. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” I answered.

“Maybe you can help me.” I said. The Chief of Police of Wheeling agreed to let us use their cars in our film and he just told me that they won’t let us. We need some cop cars.”

“Does it need to be Wheeling police cars?” Rusty asked.

“Not really.” I said. “We need cop cars for a chase.”

“I know the Sheriff of Belmont County right across the river. I’ll give him a call right now.

I found out that Rusty was telling the truth. He did know just about everyone in the Ohio Valley. Rusty introduced us to Mike Riley who knew just about everyone else. Mike Riley owned Riley Chevrolet and let us use cars from his dealership for the movie. The Sheriff of Belmont County not only agreed to let us use their police cars for the car chases but even had his deputies appear as extras in the film. I also ended up getting the Sheriff of Marshall County to help. I did end up having to use Rusty’s wife in the movie but she actually did okay. The more I thought about it the better it was. In fact the Wal-Mart we were supposed to rob for the movie was across the river in Ohio. It would actually make more sense in the car chase. After only a two hour delay, we were back in business and on to the next shot. Vine to Vine Like Tarzan we go.

The entire shoot was like that as we seemed to bounce from miracle to miracle. We had rented a Brinks Truck for the armored car robbery scene at Wal Mart, but Brinks backed out at the last minute too citing the same reason as the Wheeling Police Department. They would not let us use their armored car to be robbed in our film. We were all set up to film at Wal Mart when we got the bad news that the Brink’s truck wasn’t coming. Just as we were about to break up the set, the real Brink’s truck pulled into Wal Mart for its daily pick up. So we filmed the scene guerilla style using the real Brinks Truck and cheated the close ups later.

In another scene one of the bad guys Oscar (Ernie Garcia) steals a kid’s bike after wrecking his car. The scene wasn’t even in the script. The kid had just come along on his bike while we were filming, and we asked him if he wanted to be in a movie. He said yes and so we used him and his bike. I thought it was one of the funniest scenes in the movie.

We shot everything we needed in West Virginia and Ohio in two weeks. Then we ran low on money and had to make another trip to Vancouver. With the last of our money, we decided to make one more run up to Canada to keep the production going. We hoped to make at least $100,000 from the run, enough to finish the filming and editing. We also decided to film the excursion and to make a documentary film about how we made “Karma to Burn. I brought along my Canon GL-2 digital video camera and my brothers Shawn and Paul came along too.

The mission was a complete disaster. For one thing it was summer and finding good weed was not easy. We spent almost 2 weeks looking in Canada before finally scoring 25 pounds of the sweetest, stickiest mean green we had ever seen. The smell was so strong we had to triple seal it. “This shit is too good. We can’t let the Feds get it.” I told my brothers Shawn and Paul as we were sealing the packs in the garage jinxing the whole mission. Stupid, Stupid, Stupid. It is not wise to mock the gods.

In those days I would drop my brother Shawn off with a backpack full of Ganja just north of the US-Canada border at Osoyos. He would then hike over the border with the backpack full and I would drive through with nothing in the car in case the car was searched at the border. By then we had made this run 3 times with no problems, and we were very comfortable with it. Only this time when I went to drop my brothers off at our normal spot there was smoke and firefighters everywhere. A forest fire was raging out of control, and we were told that no one was allowed any closer. There was no chance we could get through at our normal spot.

My brothers, Shawn, Paul and I looked at the map of British Columbia and Washington and decided to try another route. We drove through the sleepy town of Hope, British Columbia where the film “First Blood” starring Sylvester Stallone was filmed. It was foggy and rainy as we drove through the little town, and it reminded us of the movie. We drove even further south following the Skagit River until we reached Ross Lake Campground on the Canadian side. The northern shore of Ross Lake sits in British Columbia Canada while the southern tip of the lake is in Washington.

Our plan was to stash the backpacks with the Ganja along the trail on the Canadian side and then drive through the US-Canadian border with nothing in the car. Once we were on the American side we would drive back to Ross Lake, hike back into Canada, grab the weed and hike it back into the US like we were regular campers. What we didn’t take into account is that the trail along Ross Lake runs through some of the most rugged terrain in North America. We burned through our food early in the hike and after running for 46 miles over rocky mountain passes and through thick forests in 24 hours, we emerged starving and exhausted. We were surrounded by Border Patrol, DEA Agents and Whatcom County Sheriff’s Deputies.

We had a plan for what to do if this happened and we all stuck to it. There were signs everywhere in Ross Lake National Forest offering a $5000 reward for information on smuggling. We had filmed ourselves pretending to find the bags packed with Ganja along the trail. We had all agreed to turn the bags in for the $5000 reward and recorded it on video. When we were arrested, we told the Border Patrol that we were location scouts and that we had found the bags or marijuana stashed along the trail and planned to turn them in for the reward. The Feds didn’t believe our story and we were all taken into custody, but there was no evidence proving otherwise. 2 years later, after spending a small fortune on lawyers, we pled guilty to a possession charge and a $5,000 fine.

After the bust in Washington State, we were out of money and so we had to shut down production of Karma to Burn. We all had bills to pay, and now we needed money for lawyers on top of everything else. I was out on bail with charges pending against me in the state of Washington when I decided that being a filmmaker and a Ganjawalla were both difficult careers. I had to make a choice. I could do one or the other but not both. I would have to become a fulltime Ganjawalla.

For years the only Ganja you could get out of Mexico was Brick Weed, compressed kilos of seeded, wispy sativa. In the early-90's the Mexicans began separating the male and female plants so they were no longer filled with seeds and planting high grade Indica. The bud looked almost identical to the indoor strains being made popular in the US at the time. They called them “pretendica“ or “pillows”.

We had about $10,000 left and that was not enough to finish Karma to Burn so I decided that I would just stick to being a Ganjawalla. I rented a Ford Ranger Pickup Truck and filled the spare tire with 16 pounds of Mexican Pillows that I picked up from my friend Rasa in San Diego. I drove the Ford Ranger across the country back to Wheeling, West Virginia. Once I got there my brothers and I sold the 16 pounds with the help of my brother-in-law Matty Boy.

Matt Horvath aka Matty Boy (Nascar), the Author, Joel Horvath

From the moment I showed up at his house with the spare tire full of “pillows” Matty boy went to work. Matty Boy had been my co-defendant in my first case and had served 2 years in F.C.I. Morgantown. He had been out of prison for a few years now and was tired of the low paying jobs that were being offered to him because of his criminal record. Within a week Matty Boy had the 16 pounds sold and I was back on the road again.

I had paid 600 a pound for the pillows in San Diego and sold it for $1,200 a pound to Matty Boy back in Wheeling who then sold it for between $1800 to $2400. Pounds of indoor weed were selling for $4000 a pound and the good “pillows” went like hotcakes for up to $3000. I took the $28,000 we got from the first run and bought a Dodge Ram Conversion Van for 12,500. I drove the Dodge with the money back to LA and spent the rest of the money on another 30 pounds of “pretendica.” My guys in San Diego agreed to front me another 60 pounds so now I had 90 pounds packed and ready to go.

My plan was to stash the ganja behind the speakers and above the cabin in the conversion van. That way even if I got pulled over and searched the van they wouldn’t find anything unless they tore the van apart. My mother was staying with us at the time and had just retired from her bookkeeping job with Good Night Inn. She was already bored with retirement and offered to drive the van back for me. So we registered the van in her name, and she was on the road a few days later, just a retired old lady driving back from visiting her grandkids in Santa Monica. She dropped the van off with my brother in law Matty Boy and two-weeks later my mom was back in LA, this time with over $100,000 in cash.

I bought another Dodge Ram Van and the next time I bought 200 pounds and packed it in the van. From that point on it was on like Donkey Kong. We started sending out 200 pounds every 2 weeks and by then the other van would come back with $200,000. The product was fantastic. Big, juicy, green and purple buds that you couldn’t tell much difference between the indoor strains that were just becoming popular on the East Coast. It was less risky than crossing the border into Canada and cost half as much. Wheeling, WV was centrally located and within a year we were supplying distributors in Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Cleveland, Columbus, Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York. After my youngest Karl brother moved to Gainesville, Florida we expanded south adding distributors in Charlotte, Atlanta, Little Rock and Miami.

The Detamore Boys. Karl, Paul, Shawn and Jason (the author)

Back then I went by the name Reggie and after a while people asked where the weed came from and the answer they got was “This is Reggie’s weed.” After a while they started asking for it by name. “Bring me some of that Reggie” they would say and the name stuck.

I like to think of this as the “Golden Age” of Ganja smuggling. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were in full swing, and the interstate highways were mostly clear of the most gung-ho law enforcement agents, many of whom were also in the Reserves or the National Guard and had been called into rotation and sent overseas to fight in the Middle East. In their absence, our business thrived. By the end of President Bush’s first term all of us had bought our first houses and by the end of his second term were all planning on buying second homes.

It was around this time that I first met Woody Harrelson. Devon made a bunch of money from Lone Ones, the silver business he and his wife Lila had jacked from her dad but now they were getting a divorce. Devon bought Fred Durst’s house up the street from Woody off Coldwater soon after Fred was made Vice President of Interscope Records. Woody’s father Charles Harrelson had been involved in the assasination of President Kennedy and had gone to prison for murdering a federal judge and Devon’s father Howard Wheeler had died of cancer while under investigation for the murders of Charles St. Denis and Steven Bryant and the two of them quickly became fast friends. I was introduced to “Woodrow” as he is known by his friends after my brother Shawn and I had finished “Karma to Burn”, a film about a college football player who was sent to prison for Ganja (marijuana). Woody’s brother Brett was originally going to be cast in the film and even though that had fallen through the film had been nominated for a few Independent Film Awards and we thought it would be cool if we could get Woody to help us promote the film.

My brother Shawn and I used to go over to “Woodrows” with Devon and his brothers in the afternoons to swim and play Pool Ball. Woody had two toy basketball nets set up at either end of his pool and he would invite friends over to play Pool Ball, a combination of basketball and water polo played in the water. The objective of the game was to score baskets in the kid sized basketball hoops. The strategy consistently employed was to gang tackle the ball carrier while dragging and dunking the open players under the water to prevent them from catching the ball. These games were very competitive, and you never knew who was going to be there. Sometimes Owen or Luke Wilson would show up, and I remember that Ed Norton was an absolute dawg out there. Alicia Silverstone even played a few times. Bill Mahr lived close by off of Coldwater Canyon with his girlfriend who was also operating an elite escort service out of Bill’s guesthouse. Her girlfriends all smoked weed and didn’t like to pay for it and so they used to hook up with my friend David, a dentist who also grew phenomenal weed in a string of warehouses out in the Valley. So my boy was getting his board waxed on the regular at Bill Mahr’s all the time because as a rule hoes absolutely hate to pay for weed. I do remember that Woody had a wall in his house where guests are invited to write down something for others to read in posterity. The last time I was at Woody’s house I wrote on the wall in black magic marker.

“Hypocricy is the tribute that Vice Pays to Virtue.”

I often wonder if it is still there.

After losing just about everything in Canada in 1999, by 2003 we had made enough from our Ganja smuggling operation to pay our lawyers, our fines and to wrap up “Karma to Burn”. We managed to get a distribution deal for the DVD rights. With the money we got from “Karma to Burn” we put a down payment on a small house in Santa Monica. This was in 2003 when they were giving loans to anyone. Our plan was to fix the house up, sell it and then buy another one. My dad and I got to work remodeling the house to get it ready to sell.

By this time Devon Wheeler had made a small fortune with Lone Ones, the sterling silver jewelry business he had started with father-in-law Leonard Kamhout. When Devon first came to me and asked me to loan him $200,000 for two months to buy silver to fill an order for Japan I was surprised. Devon told me that if I lent him the money in cash he would have the money wired to me and he could deduct it as a business expense. The banks had stopped giving out jumbo loans to people who couldn’t prove their income and I wanted to buy another house so I lent Devon the $200,000 cash thinking that it was a win-win for both of us. Two months later Devon told me that the guy he had given the $1.3 million to hold for him had ripped him off. Devon said that he could pay me back but I would have to wait two years for his divorce to settle. Since we now couldn't get a loan to buy another house and flip it, we decided to keep the house we were living in. That is where we ended up living till this day.

By then my oldest boy Jordan was 9 and had just started playing tackle football for the Santa Monica Vikings youth football team. We lost every game but one the first year and after a year as an assistant coach I was tapped as the Head Coach of the Mighty Mite division (7-9 years old). My first year as head coach I was determined to win at least half of our games. A few years before that the legendary coach Norm Lacy had won CIF Championships at Santa Monica High School and at St. Monica’s High School running a two Tight End, 3 Running Back offense called the Double Wing. We decided to run this offense too.

At the time the two dominant teams in the Pacific Coast Conference were the Palos Verdes Broncos and the Lakewood Eagles. We had lost to Palos Verdes by 45 points the year before, but we didn’t have to play them till the last game of the season. That meant that we had the whole season to be ready for them. We barely won our first games against Tri-Cities and Torrance but then we lost badly to Gardena and Inglewood. From there we went on a 3 game winning streak winning against Culver City, El Segundo, and Mira Costa before losing our final game to Palos Verdes.

The Vikings ended the season with a 5-3 record and limped into the playoffs as a Wild-Card, but we had to face the dreaded Palos Verdes Broncos again in the first round of the playoffs. The game was a hard fought defensive struggle as the Broncos did an excellent job against our Double Wing Offense with their 5-3 Defense.

With less than a 1 minute left in the 4th quarter the Palos Verdes Broncos took a 14-7 lead on the Santa Monica Vikings.

On the kickoff the Vikings got to the Broncos 35 yard line with 48 seconds left to play.

We called a Quick-Out pass play out of Shotgun but the Center snapped the ball over my Quarterback’s head.

I quickly signaled in another play but again the Center snapped the ball over my Quarterbacks head.

The Clock continued to run and now with 38 seconds left in the game I called our last timeout.

My son Jordan, who was our quarterback, jogged over to the sideline calmly.

“No more shotgun plays,” Jordan said, looking at me.

“It’s 3rd and 24. We should try and pick it up on two plays but unless we get a first down or out of bounds we’ve only got time for two or three plays. What do you think” I asked.”

“We could just try and run 28 Toss twice and see if we break a long one on the cutback. They are tired.” Jordan suggested.

“That gives me an idea.”

I stepped into the huddle and asked the linemen.

“So we all know how to run 47-Counter?”

“Yes Coach!” the little Vikings shouted from the huddle.

“So we’ve run this play over and over out of spread now we are going to run it out of the Evil-I. That’s Double Tight End with all three Backs in the I Formation. Linemen block 47-Counter. Now the Full-Back is going to fill at the 4 hole as usual but the H-back will lead like it’s 28 Toss to pull the defense. Now remember Tight Ends you have to block your man down on both sides. If your man is outside you let him go for the guard or the tackle to pick up. Everybody got it.!”

“Yes Coach.”

“Ok Jordan, call the play.”

I stepped out of the huddle.

Jordan stepped into the huddle.

“Evil I 47-Counter on two on two”

Jordan looked at me and I gave him the nod. Snapping the ball on two was a good idea and if the Defense jumped offsides we might pick up an extra 5 yards and stop the clock again.

The Vikings came to the line of scrimmage and got set. Jordan started the long cadence sending the H-Back in motion.

“Reaaaadyt, HUT!” Jordan barked.

The Bronco defenders jumped across the line of scrimmage.

The Broncos jumped back across the line of scrimmage but it was too late.

The Yellow flags flew in the air.

“HUT!” Jordan barked out hoarsely. The Viking Offensive line surged forward catching the Broncos backing up and pinning them back.

Deep in the I-Formation our tailback #7 Atzlan Gonzales took two steps towards the right following two backs blocking for him.

Jordan took the snap from center and opened to his left as if he was going to toss the ball to the running back Atzlan..

A Bronco Linebacker followed the Pulling Guard into the backfield and slipped the Backside Tight End’s block. He lowered his helmet to take Jordan down.

As he was being tackled Jordan spun around and reached out the ball to the left.

Atzlan stepped to the left, snatched the ball from Jordan and followed the Right Tackle around the left side. He slipped the blitzing Linebacker’s tackle, picked up a block from the backside Tight End who had missed his first block but had connected on the second. Atzlan sprinted 58 yards down the sideline to score a Touchdown to send the game in to overtime

In overtime the Vikings and the Broncos scored back and forth and the game went to Triple Overtime. In Triple Overtime the Vikings scored first and kicked the extra point. Now it was the Bronco’s turn. They scored a touchdown and opted to go for the 2 point conversion.

The Broncos lined up in the I formation. The quarterback took the snap and pitched the ball to the left. The Bronco’s tail back dove towards the endzone and was about to cross the line and end the game. Suddenly our Defensive End Brandon Lapins reached in and punched the ball loose from the Bronco ball carrier. The Vikings Defense jumped on the loose ball and the Game WAS Over! We had won at the last second!

The crowd rushed on to the field in celebration. The players and the coaches looked around at each other in total amazement. At the very last possible last second, we had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. I gathered the team on the sideline and we all took a knee.

“This was a great win guys.” I told them. “This is the kind of thing that doesn’t happen very often and I want you all to take a minute of silence to remember this moment. I want you to remember that no matter what happens, if you keep fighting, any one of you can make a difference and change the outcome of the game.”

We made it all the way to the Pacific Coast Championship that year but were defeated by the Lakewood Eagles. The next year we lost in the playoffs to the Gardena Mohicans who went on to defeat Lakewood in the PCC Championship. In my third year as Head Coach we played Lakewood again in the PCC Championship but again we came up short. I didn’t come back for a 5th season with the Vikings and spent the next year as an assistant coach at St. Monica’s High School Junior Varsity Team. Still, my ganja smuggling business was doing well. We were making plenty of money and I had a lot of time on my hands. It made me feel good to be able to give back and when I look back on this time it was probably the best time of my life. We had some great players and some great times.

Then in 2010 legendary coach Norm Lacy hired me to coach the Freshman football team at Santa Monica High School. Travis Clark who had played for Norm Lacy was hired to be the Head Coach of the program and he was on a mission to build Samohi into a powerhouse. My son Jordan was coming to Santa Monica High School as well as a lot of the players from the Pop-Warner Vikings team that I had coached. I was very excited about the direction that the SAMOHI football program was heading. I invited my friend Devon to bring his son Chad Wheeler to Santa Monica High School. Chad was a 3 year starter at Santa Monica High School and was recruited to play Left Tackle for the University of Southern California.

By 2007 there were over 100 medical marijuana collectives in Los Angeles and so I began to focus on cultivating high grade cannabis for distribution to the newly legalized medical marijuana stores in Los Angeles. Within a few years I was supplying 5 stores in Los Angeles with medical marijuana. My biggest client by far was Organica on the corner of Lincoln and Washington Blvd. In 2009 Organica was raided and closed down by the DEA and LAPD. At the time the owner Jeff Joseph owed me a lot of money from the product that was seized, and he offered to sign controlling interest in Organica over to me in return for a 1/3 share of our new business. I got a 5 year lease on the property at 12320 Pico Blvd on the corner of Centinela Avenue and we started to work on opening Grace Medical Marijuana Pharmacy.

While all this was going on I continued to supply my contacts on the East Coast until disaster struck. My friend Jacob and I were driving back to California from West Virginia in the van with $178,000 stashed in the compartment behind the VCR above us. We had just gone through the tollbooth on the Oklahoma Turnpike headed west when we spotted an Oklahoma State Trooper perched above the overpass staring at us through binoculars.

As we passed under the bridge the Trooper jumped into his cruiser, hit the lights and sped on to the freeway entrance toward us. Jacob was driving and I was in the passenger seat, but I wasn’t worried. We weren’t speeding, we didn’t have a scrap of weed on us and the money was stashed away. I kept my eyes looking straight forward and pretended to play with the radio. Jacob stared straight ahead with no expression on his face. The Trooper pulled up behind us, flashed his lights and ordered us to pull over. The Trooper drew his gun and ordered us to come out of the van hands in the air. He ordered us to get down on the ground and handcuffed us.

More cop cars showed up and a K-9 unit pulled up in front of the van. The dog went around the van and did absolutely nothing but that did not stop them from tearing the van apart and eventually finding the money. We were taken into custody but both of us said absolutely nothing, and we were released.

“Nobody Talks. Everyone Walks”

The Oklahoma Department of Public Safety seized the van and what they claimed was $78,000. I still don’t know why we got pulled over that day and I don’t know what happened to the other $100,000. I guess I’ll never know unless the dirty cop who stole my $100k reads this and confesses. We decided to let things cool off for a minute. Eventually we told everyone that Reggie had opened up a medical shop in California and that I was retired.

It was the fall of 2009, and I planned to do one last black market deal before I got out of the illegal ganja business once and for all. I had sunk all the money we had saved into building the Grace medical cannabis store in West Los Angeles and after the incident in Oklahoma, I was almost out of cash. Lisa and I had signed a five-year lease on the property on the corner of Pico Blvd and Centinela Avenue and we had exhausted our savings remodeling the building into a first class medical cannabis facility. After I lost the money in Oklahoma I figured I needed to make enough money off one last deal to keep things going till we could get open.

I planned to meet with these Jamaicans from Miami at the Sheraton in Universal City, but I was running late. I had met Dexter and Karl through the son of one of my heroes Bob Marley. Rohan Marley had played football for the University of Miami while I was at West Virginia University. Rohan had been a standout linebacker with the Hurricanes and had gone on to play a couple of years in the Canadian Football League. This was years before the Marleys got into the cannabis business. Back then Rohan was just starting up his coffee company Marley Coffee and wanted Grace to sell Marley Coffee in our store.

I had already done 2 deals with Dexter, and they had both gone off without a hitch. It was getting dark when I got to the Sheraton in Universal City and I don’t like doing deals after dark. You can’t really see what Ganja looks like without the sunlight. I parked in the Sheraton hotel parking garage and waited for my friend David. David was the best grower in the valley and he was always on time. Not many people in the Ganja business are on time but David was never late. I sat there and watched the lights from the speeding cars on the 405 in the dark, the red taillights streaming up and down the mountain like an electric river of fire or lava flowing from a volcano on some South Pacific Island.

The Crows landed all at once on the railing of the parking garage at the Sheraton in Universal City. By the Crows I mean the family of Crows that lived in the 4 palm trees in my yard. I could tell because Odin, the old crow with one eye, was with them. It had been many years since the war between the Crows and the Owls when I had wounded Odin by mistake.

A family of Owls had once tried to build a nest in my next door neighbor Steve’s giant pine tree. The Crows who lived in the 4 Palm Trees had harassed the Owls in the pine tree furiously as they carried twigs and branches into their new nest but the Owls refused to abandon their construction project. It was summertime and sometimes I slept outside on the veranda. I was asleep on the couch when I heard a terrible shrieking and then the sound of the Crows.

“Caw, Caw, Caw!

I looked up and saw that the 2 Owls were attacking the Crows nest and the entire family of Crows, all 7 of them, were defending their nest as best as they could. I can only assume that the Mother Owl was about to lay eggs in their new nest and the Owls did not want the Crows to steal their eggs. The Owls had decided to make a preemptive strike and take out the Crow’s nest before her own eggs were stolen by the Crows. I grabbed the old Daisy Red Ryder BB gun that I kept in the corner to scare off raccoons and possums. The spring was old and the BB’s dropped after less than 25 feet. It wouldn’t kill the Owls but it would sting them a bit. I cocked the BB gun and took a shot at Mr. Owl. The BB struck a palm leaf behind him and he darted away quickly. I cocked the Red Ryder again and took aim at Mrs. Owl. This time the BB hit her square in the behind. She followed Mr. Owl and as they retreated toward the pine tree.

I had mastered the art of reloading and rapid firing the old Red Ryder. and each time the Owls tried to attack the Crows I would open fire on them lobbing BB at them with the old Red Ryder. While taking one of these shots a BB struck one of the Crows in the eye and he fell to the ground in my yard. I went down to check on the Crow who had regained his senses by the time I reached him in the yard. The BB had struck him in the eye and he now glared at me from his remaining eye. He reminded me of Odin the one-eyed god of the Norsemen as he struggled to his feet and flew up into the nest. It was a Saturday and for the rest of the day I guarded the Crow family’s nest. I slept outside again that night and in the morning the Owls were gone. The next evening the Crows all gathered around on my balcony as I played my harmonium and chanted. I could see that one of the Crows was missing his eye from when I shot him. The Crows did not hold a grudge against me though. They knew exactly what was happening that day and that I had defended them. I named the old crow Odin. From that day on the Crow family and I weren’t just neighbors. We were friends.

Crows are highly intelligent birds, capable of problem-solving, tool use, and complex social interactions. They can hold conversations, recognize individual human faces and remember past interactions associating them with positive or negative experiences. Almost all crows live within 5 miles of human populations and so their behavior and cultures have evolved alongside our own. Crows have been observed engaging in contests, ball games and even windsurfing. Crows can hold grudges against people that have harmed them, and they have been observed to leave gifts for humans they perceive as friendly. Crows can learn from each other, including knowledge about dangerous humans, and share this information with other crows and humans.

Now as I sat in the parking lot of the Sheraton and watched the Crows sitting on the railing I could swear that they looked familiar. I was sure that I recognized Odin with his one glassy eye with his family that lived in the 4 palm trees in my yard.

“Could that really be possible?” I thought.

“Did this flock of crows really follow me all the way from Santa Monica?” Technically it was possible. Though it had taken me a half hour to get there it was only 11 miles, not really very far “as the crow flies.”

I had just learned that a family of crows is called a murder, and I thought that it was very strange that a “murder” of crows was here. Now I started to wonder.

“What were these Crows doing here? Were they trying to warn me?”

“You’re losing your mind, Jason.” I mouthed the words out loud. “Where the hell are you David?” I thought.

I reached for my phone to call him again but in the rearview mirror I saw David pull up in his blue Chevy Suburban. David parked next to the green 2006 Toyota Camry I was driving and unlocked the passenger side door. I got out and sat next to him in the Suburban.

David put down his phone.

“How long have you been here?” he asks.

“Almost a half hour.” I replied

“The 405 is a parking lot right now.” he said.

“It took me 30 minutes to get here.” I replied.

“From Santa Monica. Tarzana is another planet right now.

“Let’s get on with it. I don’t want to keep these guys waiting. “I said.

David took a Samsonite laptop case from the back seat and handed it to me. I opened the case. Wrapped in vacuum sealed Foodsaver bags were 2 pounds of super frosty, nugget sized buds. One purple pound. One green pound. I opened the bags and smelled them.

“Just like the doctor ordered 25 OG’s and 25 Purple Kush.”

David beams, grinning ear to ear. He is proud of his work. David unzips two duffel bags in the back. One duffel bag is filled with frosty purple pounds of Purple Kush the second duffel bag with frosty green pounds of OGKush.

“It’s the cold room. It makes the nugs so frosty.” David opines.

My phone buzzes.

“That’s them calling me now. I need to get going. “

“So I was thinking we need to be really careful.” David zips up the bags.

“Of course.” I replied.

“No. I’m serious. Angie is pregnant.” David’s mood turns grave.

“Congratulations Papa Bear!”

“Well Papa Bear hasn’t paid the trimmers. I’m behind on the rent and the electric bill. If anything goes wrong, we are going to have to move in with Angies’s mom.”

“Tell me about it. I’ve sunk every dime we have into building the store.” I admitted. “ I’m in debt up to my ears and I still don’t know how we are going to get the rest of the money to finish.”

“That doesn’t make me feel better.” David was getting nervous.

I try to calm him down.

“Don’t worry. We are going to get you all your money right now.”

“Well, I was talking it over with Angie and we decided that we should get half the money up front in case something goes wrong. “

“I’m supposed to be bringing them 50 pounds. They’re not going to just hand me the money like I’m running to get them a dime bag from around the corner. “

“But I’m supposed to just hand you my entire harvest? What if you don’t come back with the money?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I didn’t mean it like that. But seriously, how well do you know these people? You just admitted to me you don’t have the money to cover it if something does go wrong.”

“I told you I’ve done this twice before with them already. I met them through Bob Marley’s son for crying out loud.”

“Well Bob Marley has a lot of kids.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I ask him.

“Exactly what I said. The man had a lot of kids. To you this is just another deal. You make the exchange and pick up your money. Everything I have is tied up in this and Bob Marley is not going to come back from his grave and pay my electric bill if something goes wrong”

“Hey, I need this too. Why don’t I just take one of the bags with me? I’ll come back with the money and get the other half.”

“No. I promised. Bring the sample case with you. They can give you half the money and you can bring one bag up. When they give you the other half of the money you can bring them the other bag.”

My phone rings.

“They’re calling again.”

David hands me the Samsonite case.

“Fine.” I grab the Samsonite case and get out of the car.

Once I’m out of the car I answer the phone.

“Yeah, Everything’s good. I’m on my way up. No, I don’t need any help. Yes, everything is here. I’ll see you when I get there. “

David watches me nervously as I walk toward the elevator. I push the button for the 9th floor. The door opens and I get in. The elevator stops in the lobby first and fills up. The ride up takes forever because the elevator has to stop and let the passengers out of the elevator onto their floors. Standing there holding the Samsonite laptop case I wonder if the passengers can smell the skunky weed through the vacuum sealed packaging. The elevator finally stops on the 9th floor and I get out.

I walked toward room 912 and knocked on the door. Karl, light skinned, clean cut, wearing a tan cardigan sweater and reeking of Polo cologne answers the door. Dexter, dark skinned dreadlocked and dressed in camo pants and a khaki tank top sits in the chair. I step into the room carrying the Samsonite laptop case. Dexter gets up, shakes my hand and comes in for a hug.

“Haha finally. I was fretting some just now.”

“You know traffic in LA.”

“Is everything ok? Are we good?”

“We’re better than good. Here let me show you.”

I laid the Samsonite laptop case down on the bed. Dexter opened it. Karl opens the bags. Smells the ganja. Shows it to Dexter. Dexter takes a deep inhale.

“It’s a fire to be sure but this is supposed to be 50 pounds man. I see only two. Where da rest?

“The guy I am getting it from wants half the money up front first.”

“So you have it in your car?”

“No. He still has it.”

Dexter is getting annoyed now.

“So call him and tell him to bring it up.”

“I have to bring half the money to him first.”

“Come on. You know the money stays here. I need to see what I’m paying for when I pay for it.”

“I understand but it’s a lot of weight. He wants to be careful.

“Sure. But I gotta be careful too.”

Dexter reaches into his backpack and pulls out a Beretta 9-MM pistol.

Dexter holds the barrel to my neck.

“You know what this is?”

I raise my hands slowly.

“Yeah.”

“And do you understand what’s happening now?”

“I do. Just take it easy.”

“Tie him up!”

Karl grabs my hands and pulls them behind my back. He zip ties my hands together. Karl zip ties my feet together with a second zip tie. I don’t resist.

“There’s no need for all this.” I say “Just take it.

Dexter holds the phone up to my face.

“You are going to call your partner on the phone. Tell him to bring the stuff up here now.”

“He won’t do it without the money. His wife…”

Dexter smashes the butt of his gun into my nose. Blood spurts from my nose dripping onto the carpet. I look down at the blood dripping from my nose onto the white carpet.

“Do you want to grab a towel or something for that?” I ask. Surely they would want to keep the room clean and not leave evidence I think.

Dexter smashes the butt of the Barretta into the back of my neck knocking me to the ground.

“Shut the fuck up!”

I lay face down on the ground and looked at the pool of blood forming on the floor in front of my face. Up till now I had been calm because I assumed that this was a simple jack move and that they planned to let me live. Now I realized these people weren’t thinking ahead. They were stupid, they were desperate but they couldn't afford to let word about this get out. They weren't planning to let me live. I was about to become a statistic.

Karl grabbed a towel from the bathroom, but Dexter smacked the towel away. Dexter grabs the back of my head and pushes me down, grinding my face into the bloody carpet. I was now laying face down, with my hands and feet zip tied together. Karl goes through my pockets grabbing my wallet and keys. Dexter puts the Baretta to the right side of my head.

“I’m only going to ask you a question one time. You answer me the first time. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Are you driving the Camry?”

“Yes.”

“Is your partner parked next to you?

“Yes.”

“What kind of car is he driving?”

“A silver Honda.” I lied out of pure instinct, instantly regretting it, but not wanting to change my story now. This was no time to play hero.

Dexter smashed the butt of his Barretta into the back of my head. I fell to the ground stunned. I closed my eyes pretending to be unconscious. I couldn’t really see any advantage to being conscious at the moment so I decided to play possum and pretended to be out cold. Dexter kicked me in the ribs just to be sure but fortunately he knocked the wind out of me and I didn’t have the breath to cry out. I stayed limp, kept my eyes closed and hoped he wouldn’t kick me again.

“Do it and let's go.” Dexter commands.

Karl pulls out a roll of DUCT tape from the bag and stuffs a tennis ball into my mouth. Then Karl DUCT tapes the tennis ball into my mouth. Karl takes a third zip tie from the backpack and hogties my hands and feet together leaving me face down on the ground.

“All right. Silver Honda. Let’s go.” Dexter commands. As I hear them walking away I crack open my eye and see Karl pick up the Samsonite laptop case. Dexter puts his gun away in his belt. The door opens and closes behind them.

I laid there face down on the carpet on the floor of the Sheraton with a Penn tennis ball duct taped into my mouth, and my arms, feet and legs hogtied behind my back. Blood was dripping from my nose onto the white carpet forming a pool of blood that felt warm and sticky on my face.

“This is really bad.” I thought to myself. There were video cameras all over the hotel and these clowns were leaving clues all over. They didn’t even put a towel down to soak up the blood.

“Who does stuff like that? I asked myself.

“Stupid people and stupid people are dangerous.” I answered my own question. If they found David and robbed him they would be back and then what. If they didn’t find David they would know that I lied to them and then what? “Killed by some fucking spooks from Miami in a drug deal gone bad?” I could just see my dad saying after all I had been through. Was this how it was really going to end? I thought of my wife Lisa and my three boys Jordan, Max and Brady. I wished I had spent more time with them that morning. I had bought a $1,000,000 life insurance policy but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t pay off if I was killed while involved in criminal activity. “Fucking bean counters thought of everything.” I thought and laughed even though with the tennis ball in my mouth it hurt my bloody nose to laugh.

I closed my eyes and my mind drifted back to when I was 11 years old. We were all swimming in the Jamuna River in Vrindavan, India. The monsoon rains had cut huge sand cliffs into the sides of the river bank. Some of us were splashing water at the base of these sand cliffs. As the sand at the base of the cliff was washed away the cliffs would split off into huge chunks of sand and crash into the water. All of us would then scatter out of the way to avoid the “sand rocks.” While splashing the cliffs one day a huge “sand rock” broke off and fell on me and trapped me at the bottom of the river. I struggled to get free but it was no use. The “sand rock” was too big. Pinned face down to the bottom of the Jamuna river by the “sand rock” I was convinced I was going to die. “At least I will die in Vrindavan, the birthplace of Krishna and the most holy place on earth.” I thought. So I made my peace with my death and stopped struggling. Almost immediately after I stopped struggling, I felt someone grabbing my legs. Then someone else grabbed my hand. Before I knew it, my classmates had rolled the “sand rock” off me and pulled me to the surface. I gasped for air and looked up at the sky. There was a flock of crows flying above me. “Caw, caw, caw!” the crows cried out.

Back at the Sheraton Universal City, I heard the crows outside.

“Caw, caw. Caw!”

I snapped out of my daydream. I opened my eyes and looked up at the window. Odin the crow with the glassy eye was sitting on the balcony outside the window. Now there was no doubt in my mind that it was him. I stared at Odin. Odin stared at me. Then Odin bent down, and then began hopping along the ledge outside the window.

Suddenly I got the idea that I might break the third zip tie that hogtied my hands and feet together, get to my feet and and hop out of the room. I had heard stories of people under extreme stress gaining temporary super strength enough to lift a car to save a child or to pull themselves to safety. Maybe I could break the third zip tie and hop out of the room as Odin was trying to show me.

I rolled on to my side. With all my strength I pulled my legs away from my arms. To my utter and complete surprise the 3rd zip tie holding my arms and legs together slipped apart. Like it was nothing. No it wasn’t because I had gained super strength. In their hurry they had put the third zip tie through backwards and it did not hold. It really was better to be lucky than good.

I rolled toward the wall. Using the wall to help me up I struggled to get to my feet. I tried to pull my arms and legs apart but no luck. Those zip ties held fast. Hands still zip tied behind my back and my feet still tied together I hopped toward the door. Blood spurted from my nose over the tennis ball in my mouth and onto the carpet creating a trail from where I was lying down to the door. I turned my back on the door and stood on my tiptoes. With my zip tied hands behind my back I pushed the door handle down and pulled the door open.

I peeked out the door into the hallway. No one was there. I hopped out of the room and down the hallway. Blood spurted from my nose onto my shirt and the carpet with every jump. I hopped toward the elevator. I turned my back to the elevator, stood on my tiptoes and pushed the Down button with my zip tied hands. I backed away from the elevator and watched the lights, as the elevator got closer. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. The elevator doors opened. I prayed that it wouldn’t be Dexter and Karl.

A blond Australian family with their son and daughter stepped out of the elevator. They looked at me stunned. Suddenly everyone screamed at once horrified at my bloodied face, the tennis ball duck taped into my mouth and my shirt soaked with blood. Dad stepped forward.

“Charlotte. Call the police.” Dad says

Charlotte dialed 911 on the house phone on the table next to the elevator.

Dad then took the duct tape off my mouth. I spit the tennis ball out onto the floor.

“No police.” I blurted out.

The last thing I wanted to do is explain this to LAPD.

“Why not?” Dad asked me. “Are you in trouble with the law?”

“No. It’s not that. I’m in the entertainment business and I don’t want people to see me like this.” I lied quickly.

“I’m calling the police.” Charlotte lets me know. We can’t have these maniacs running around. They may hurt other people.”

“That’s right. Now hold out your hands.” Dad says.

I hold out my hands. Dad takes out a new Universal City souvenir Zippo torch. Dad presses the flint hammer. The Zippo torch lights. Dad melts the zip tie off my hands with his Zippo torch.

“Just picked this up today. Somehow I knew it would come in handy. Isn’t that funny.”

“Hilarious.” I answer under my breath, incredulous and wondering just how I am going to get out of this pickle.

“I’m sorry. I don’t imagine that it’s funny to you.” Dad is truly apologetic.

“Actually it is.” I reply, cracking a bloody smile. Now it dawns on me that no matter what happens I’m going to live and that is definitely a good thing.

Dad melts the zip tie off my legs with the flame from his Zippo.

“That’s the spirit. We’ll have you out of there in no time.”

Charlotte hangs up the phone.

“The police are on their way.”

I do my best to hide my disappointment. Dad lays the melted zip ties on the table next to the house phone and the pieces of duct tape. Charlotte takes out a pack of baby wet wipes from her purse and hands them to me.

“Now let’s get you cleaned up.”

I go to the mirror on the wall and start to work on cleaning up my face.

“Are you alright? Do you need to go to the hospital?” Charlotte asks me.

“No. I’m okay.” I answer.

I look like hell but I feel much better now that the tennis ball is out of my mouth and my nose has stopped bleeding.

I wipe the blood from my nose and my face and toss the used wet wipes into the garbage. I manage to get most of the blood off my face but my shirt is still covered in blood which is starting to dry now.

Two LAPD officers step out of the elevator.

“I’m Officer Kirby. This is Johnson. Are you the victim?”

“Yes.” I replied.

“I need to ask you a few questions.” he tells me. Can you get a statement from them?”

“Sure.” Johnson replies.

Johnson takes Dad, Charlotte and the kids aside.

Kirby interviews me.

“Can you step this way please?”

I follow him gingerly.

Kirby puts on a rubber glove. Picks up the bloody tennis ball off the floor and sets it on the table next to the melted zip ties. Kirby eyes me suspiciously.

“So tell me what happened?”

I rubbed the back of my neck and shook my head.

“Well I’m not really sure.” I replied. “I was hanging out with these guys and I guess they hit me over the head and robbed me. I woke up and my wallet, my phone and my keys are gone.

“Are you a guest at the hotel?” Kirby asks me.

“No. They were.” I reply.

“How did you get here?” Kirby continues to press me.

“I drove.”

“Where is your car?”

“In the parking garage.”

“Do you use narcotics?”

“No."

“Are you involved in the sex trade in any way?” Kirby eyes me suspiciously.

“Uh no.” I answer looking him dead in the eye.

“I have to ask.”

Kirby picks up the melted zip 1/2-inch zip ties.

“So you broke one of these?”

“No. There was a third zip tie but when I pulled my legs and arms apart it came loose. They must have put the third zip tie in the wrong way.”

“Right. Do they know what your car looks like?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go see if we can find your car?”

“Ok.”

Kirby and Johnson step into the elevator.

I follow them.

I pushed the button marked P-2.

Watching the lights in the elevator flash 9,8,7,6,5,4,3 on the way down I started to panic. I really did not want the cops to find Karl and Dexter and I definitely did not want them to find David with all the weed in his car. This was turning into a nightmare.

The polished steel doors to the elevator slide open. The green Camry is still parked against the wall. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that David and the blue Suburban are gone though. To the left of the Camry Dexter and Karl sit in a Black Dodge Charger facing us looking for David. Kirby and Johnson exit the elevator. I follow them.

“That’s them on the left.” I whisper to the cops dropping the dime on them. “In the black Charger.” I tell Kirby and Johnson.

Kirby and Johnson draw their guns.

“LAPD! Hold it right there. “

Kirby and Johnson approach the Charger from the left.

Inside the Charger, Dexter and Karl duck down. Karl opens the passenger door. Then Karl and Dexter crawl out the side of the car and duck behind the car.

“LAPD! Hands in the air now!“ Dexter and Karl run. They hang off the rail of the second floor of the parking garage and drop to the street below. Kirby and Johnson run towards the stairs chasing after them.

“Stay here.” Kirby orders me.

“Yes sir” I replied.

Kirby and Johnson run after Dexter and Karl. From outside comes the sound of more SIRENS. Outside, more police and a helicopter arrive. I can hear the sounds of the pursuit outside but I’m left alone.

I walked toward the black Charger. I peeked inside. My wallet and the keys to my Camry were in the console. I started to reach in the window to get my keys but then I noticed that the door was unlocked. I opened the door, reached inside and grabbed my wallet and my keys. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted the Samsonite laptop case in the back seat. I reached into the back and grabbed the Samsonite case. I unzipped it just a bit and saw that the 2 pounds of Purple Kush and OG were still in the Samsonite. I zipped it back up.

I looked around. The parking lot was empty. There were no cameras. I grabbed the Samsonite laptop case from the back seat of the Charger, walked toward the Camry and opened the trunk. I took the two pounds of Purple Kush and OG out of the Samsonite. Stashed them under the spare tire of the Camry in the trunk. Closed the trunk.

Just as Officer Kirby and Johnson come up the stairs sweaty and disappointed.

“Did you get them?” I asked knowing the answer and thrilled that it was no.

“No.” Kirby answers. “They ran across the freeway and over to the other side. We did recover the gun. He tossed the weapon after they made the jump from the parking garage.”

“Well do you need anything else from me?” I ask them.

“No. We have your information. A detective will contact you. Do you need a ride home?

“I found my hide key. I’m going to drive home if that’s ok.

“That should be fine. “

Johnson shows me the third zip tie. It is connected backwards and slides back and forth.

“You see. If you put these on backwards, they slide back and forth. The third zip tie was put in backwards. You got really lucky. Someone must be watching over you.” Johnson tells me.

“That’s what they tell me” I answer. “I hope you catch those guys.” I responded. “I know you must have gave them a hell of a scare.”

“They’re not too bright so it’s only a matter of time before they end up getting caught up but there’s no telling how much damage they’ll do before that happens.” Johnson muses. “

“You got their car and their gun. I’m going to call this a win.” I tried to encourage them. After all, I still had my keys, my wallet and even the weed. I just wanted to get the hell out of there.

“This could have turned out a lot worse.You’ve got one hell of a story to tell.” Kirby tells me.” You better be more careful from now on.”

“I know. I’m just lucky I guess.” I replied.

“It’s probably not a good idea to press your luck.”

“Well I really should get home.” I say deciding to heed Kirby’s advice.

“We’ll be in touch.” Kirby says.

I got into the Camry and started the engine. I backed out slowly, put the car in gear and pulled away from Kirby and Johnson slowly. Then I watched them grow smaller and disappear completely in the rearview mirror. I turned on the radio. Ice Cube’s song” It was a good day” was playing.

“Even Saw the lights of the Goodyear Blimp

And it read Ice Cube’s a Pimp.

I gotta say it was a good day.”

I finally made it home and Lisa was waiting for me in her pink silk nightgown, her eyes swollen from crying. As I laid there in bed, she bent over me and put an ice pack on my head and painted liquid skin on my cuts which burned like hell. Even in my damaged condition I couldn’t ignore her breasts as they heaved as she sighed as I told the story, before she finally burst into tears crying.

You could have been killed. I want you to stop.” she cries.

“Stop what?” I asked.

“I want you to get out of this business before you get killed. All these years I’ve been worried about you going back to jail. I’ve tried not to think about how embarrassing that would be for the kids and my parents, but this is too much. You could have been killed and left for dead in that hotel.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry doesn’t fix something like this and these people are still on the loose. Do they know where we live?”

“No. The address on my license is at our mailbox.”

“But they know where the store is.”

“At the store we’ll have a safe and armed security and we’ll be able to call the police. That’s why we need to open the store so I don’t have to do business in hotels and parking lots. People will be able to come in and buy and sell legally.”

“I still hate it. I hate this business. People act like it’s all peace and love but that is just bullshit. People get killed all the time.”

“Not all of it is bullshit. It does help a lot of people.”

“No more street deals. Promise me everything you do from now on will be at the shop and legal. I want you to promise me.”

“We still need to come up with the money to finish.”

“Then find a way, but I want you to promise me no more side deals.’”

“I promise.” I mouthed the words reluctantly hoping that I would be able to keep my promise. I had just survived in a situation that I thought I had no chance of getting out of. I had no idea how I would get through this but after what had just happened, I had come too far to stop. I had to try.

I decided to ask Devon to loan me $50,000. Devon was now operating his silver business Lone Ones out of a warehouse off Jefferson Blvd in Culver City. I had also been growing cannabis in half of Lone Ones' shop because the silver business had been slow, but when I asked Devon to lend me the money, he was not enthusiastic. The Feds had been raiding shops in LA for years and if we got shut down it would be a long time before he saw his money. I told him that President Obama had just taken office and his Attorney General Eric Holder had announced that the Federal government would no longer participate in raids against legal medical marijuana stores. Devon’s mother had passed away from complications due to the interaction of her medications a few years ago and his father Howard Wheeler had used ganja all his life and had used it for pain during his battle with cancer. I thought that Devon would be receptive to my cause and loan us the money we needed to finish but he turned me down flat. He wanted to come in as a partner.

I was seriously pissed at Devon for not lending me the money, especially after I had lent him $200,000 just a few years ago and he had made me wait two years to pay me back. Devon did have good connections with Hollywood’s pedo-elite because of his jewelry business but I had decided a long time ago that I didn’t want to have anything to do with that blood money. It really did blow my mind that so many people loved jewelry carved by a notorious pedophile like Leonard Khamhout who had begun to molest his own daughter at the age of 9. What was even worse was that I had to admit that the jewelry Leonard carved was fabulous. The thing is most predators aren’t just hairy old men in trenchcoats. They are talented, charming, persuasive and successful people who other people want to be like. Michael Jackson, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Harvey Weinstein, Ron Jeremy, Bill Cosby, Tupac Shakur, Jeffery Jones, Kevin Spacey, R. Kelly , Michael Jordan, Britney Spears, Brad Pitt, John Travolta, Tommy Lee, Anthony Kiedis and Marylyn Manson were all talented and famous celebrities that were accused of sexual misconduct but people still listen to their music and watch them perform because they are talented. The truth about predators is that most people are secretly jealous of them and wish they could be like them. People love to denounce predators in public but worship them in secret.

I said goodbye to Devon, jumped on the 10 Freeway and headed west toward Santa Monica. It was my first year as Offensive Coordinator for the Freshman team at Santa Monica High School and our team was turning out to be pretty good. The minute I got on the field the nagging voice in my head stopped like it always did. This is why coaching football has been such a blessing to me. On the football field, I was completely absorbed in the planning and the execution of our game plan. Football has always been a great escape for me because I have to stay in the moment and not think about the past or the future. I have to stay in the present. I once read.

The past is history.

The future is a mystery.

The present is a gift.

That’s why we call it the present.

I love that saying. It was halfway through the season and the kids were playing solid football. We were making solid tackles, and our blocking was improving every week. We had lost badly to Matre Dei and to Hart High School but they were both powerhouse teams. We had won our last two games before dropping a game to Hart High School and if we could beat Valencia that week, I thought the Santa Monica Vikings freshman football team was on track to winning the rest of our games.

We spent the day doing our offensive install for the week and I was very happy with our progress. Our running game had really improved since our running back Ray Mancini Jr. had learned to follow his blocks. Ray Jr. was the son of boxer Ray Mancini who had been a great fighter from Youngstown, Ohio back in the 80’s. Ray Mancini had retired from boxing after killing a Korean boxer named Duk Koo Kim in the ring and was now a thoughtful and enthusiastic presence at the games. Mancini’s son Ray Jr. had blazing speed but a tendency to get out ahead of his blocks. For weeks we had been working with Ray Jr. trying to get him to run straight to the hole for “5 tough yards” instead of bouncing it outside when he didn’t see an opening right away and getting stopped for a loss. It took some time for Ray Jr. to learn to let his blocking develop and trust that the hole would be there by the time he got there. Now that Ray Jr. was “running on faith” and trusting his blockers, our running game was becoming methodical and punishing instead of explosive but inconsistent. These inside runs also set up our quick play action game and our passing game was becoming crisp and efficient.

After practice one of the Viking moms from the team Lisa Frank whose son Clayton played for me approached me. Lisa was a pretty blond and her and my wife, who was also named Lisa, had been good friends for a long time. Lisa had been our real estate agent when we bought our house and Lisa’s mother Suzy Frank was the owner of Abbot Kinney Real Estate. Suzy Frank was one of the shrewdest businesswomen I have met. She had owned a bunch of property along Abbot Kinney in Venice and had made a small fortune when property values had skyrocketed after Google had moved its headquarters to Venice. Lisa had offered to represent us when we leased the building on Pico and Centinela for Grace but I was already under contract with another agent at the time. I know that Lisa was disappointed that we did not use her as our agent at the time so I was a bit apprehensive when she approached me. If she was bitter, she didn’t show it now.

“Hi Jason.” She let the words roll off her tongue casually letting me know that if there were any hard feelings before they were gone now.

“Hi Lisa. Did you see Clayton out there today?”

“I did. He looks great.” she replied. “So can we beat this team? Clayton says they’re really good.”

“Valencia is undefeated, but I think we can beat them.”

“How is the construction going?”

I hesitated for a moment, ashamed to admit that I had run out of money, but it had been a long day and my defenses were worn down.

“We’re pretty much screwed.” I admitted. We’ve sunk all our money into the place and we still need to come up with at least $25k to finish up and probably another $25,000 to keep it running till we start to make money.”

“So $50,000. You should ask my mom to lend it to you. She just made a bunch of money.”

“I’m not going to ask Suzy.”

“Why not? How long have we known each other?”

“Let me see.” I thought about it.

“It’s been about 7 years.”

“You guys are like family to us.”

“Still I can’t ask Suzy.”

“I’ll ask her then.”

“You would do that really?”

I was completely floored. In all my life, absolutely no one had ever come forward and offered to help me like this.

Lisa’s son Clayton and my son Jordon walked out of the locker room and towards us. Jordan was tall and thin already 6’3 as a freshman with sandy blond hair like his mother. Clayton had short black hair, solid muscle with the face and the demeanor of a middle linebacker. The two of them had been friends since they were 6 years old and had been playing football together just as long. They bumped fists casually and split up. They were so cool.

Lisa and Clayton got into her white BMW 328.

“So I’ll ask her tonight.” Lisa said waving goodbye.

“Thank you”

“She better say yes too.” she added.

“Good night.”

As Jordan and I drove west on Pico Blvd towards home, he

questioned me.

“Ask her what?” he wanted to know.

“Lisa is going to ask Suzy Frank to lend us the money to finish the store.”

“I thought you were going to borrow the money from Devon.”

“I did. He said no.”

“Why?”

“He wants to be a partner.”

“You can’t be partners with him. He ripped off all of his partners or drove them crazy.”

“Well at any rate Lisa is going to ask Suzy to lend us the money. Maybe she will.”

“She will. You should hear how she talks about you. She loves you.”

“I thought she was still mad because we lost to Lakewood 2 years in a row.”

“Will you stop it? That Lakewood team only lost one game in 5 years and that was to Gardena.” So we lost 3 championships in 4 years. We’re the Buffalo Bills of pop-Warner.”

“You know that I rooted for the Buffalo Bills in all those Super Bowls, every time even though I’m a Dolphins fan.”

“I’m sure you did. You love the underdog.”

“The Buffalo Bills of Pop-Warner. I like that. I mused.

“So Dad when we were watching the film on Valencia I noticed that their biggest plays were on screens, especially the middle screen. I think we should play Cover 3 against them and have the middle linebacker spy the quarterback runs and screens.”

I’ll mention it to Coach Ken. He is the Defensive Coordinator.” I said.

“I was just thinking that when we run scout offense against the Defense, we make sure they see a lot of the middle screen. They are really good at running it.” Jordan continued.

“That’s a good idea. I’ll go over it again with the O-line tomorrow. Is there anything else?” I asked.

“Get some new shoes.” Jordan said.

“What’s wrong with these shoes? They’re comfortable.” I protested.

“Come on. You asked and I’m telling you. Kids look at shoes. Get some Nikes. You’ll feel better.” he insisted.

“Thanks. I don’t know what I would do without you?”

“Me neither.”

As we pulled up to the house my phone rang. It was Devon.

“Yo what’s up.” I answered it.

There was a lot of noise in the background. People were talking and laughing and I heard bottles clinking. For a minute I thought it was a butt dial.

“Reginald what are you doing?” Devon yelled on the phone over the noise calling me by my old street name Reggie.

“I’m just getting done with practice.” I replied

“Woodrow is having a party. You should come by?”

“It’s been a long day and I have to get up early tomorrow to take care of the plants. I’m going to crash. Besides, isn't Woodrow still butthurt with me after I told him that his raw food diet made him look like a crackhead on TV.”

“He is not eating raw only anymore and he’s looking a lot better so I think he’s over it now.”

“Well good because I was just looking out for him.”

“Listen, I’m here at Woodrow’s and all everyone is talking about is how now is the time to get into the weed business. Obama is not going to enforce cannabis laws in medical states.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” I yelled back at him.

“So let’s do it. Listen, I just had a great idea.”

“Oh yeah what is it?” I inquired.

“We just finished a line of jewelry and we called it “grace” which is French for grass. The jewelry was very leafy and flowery and didn’t sell very well but I was thinking we could use all the art and the branding from the line and call the store Grass.”

“That’s actually not a bad name.” and I had to admit it was.

“So we use my branding, I’ll put up the rest of the money and we do a 50/50 split. What do you say?”

“The thing is I already asked Lisa to ask Suzy Frank for the money.” I protested.

“Oh forget Suzy. Tell Suzy thanks but no thanks. Come by the shop tomorrow and I’ll have the money for you. Come man this our chance. It’s going to be huge. I promise.”

“Ok, I’ll see you tomorrow.” I said.

“You won’t regret this homie. I promise.” he said.

It turned out that they had misspelled “grass” in French and had spelled it as “grace.” So we opened the store with a sign that read “grace” thinking that “grace” was how you pronounced “grass” in French. When people came in and saw my mother working at the front desk they would always ask if she was Grace. My mother tried to explain that the store was actually called “grass” but that we spelled it grace but everyone seemed disappointed. They liked the name Grace. So, my mother Olive Marguerite Moore, prodigal daughter of a minister, mother of 9 children and Ganja smuggler took on the name “Grace”. We stopped telling people the store was called “grass” because they didn’t want to hear it. That is how the name of the store went from grass to Grace. Grace, defined as simple elegance, refinement and compassion became both our name and our mission statement.

Grace Medical Marijuana Pharmacy opened the day after Thanksgiving in November of 2009. The first day we opened we had 5 customers and made $206 just enough to cover one day of our $6000 a month rent payment. The next day was better. We made just over $600 and we saw one return customer who brought a friend. When we first opened, my mother worked in the front reception area signing up new patients and I waited on customers in the back. At night I worked in the cultivation operation in the Lone Ones building in Culver City.

A week after we opened Grace Medical Marijuana Pharmacy was raided by LAPD. Even though we had the proper licenses, I was arrested, and we were ordered to shut down immediately. After first insisting that I make him a partner Devon was now furious with me for getting him into the weed business. I offered to buy him out of his share but he stormed out and went to talk to our competition at Herbalcure to see if they would buy him out. Devon was still growing cannabis at the Lone Ones silver shop and didn’t want to risk his silver businesses getting raided by the Feds. He wanted us to close down Grace immediately, but I had sunk every penny we had into Grace and if we closed now I would have nothing.

We found a fantastic attorney David Welch and we filed a lawsuit contesting the City’s claim that Grace was not operating legally. David Welch explained to us that as long as we had litigation pending with the City, the matter would be in civil court and we would not be raided again. We filed a lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles, crossed our fingers and reopened the store.

We decided to bring our friend Sudar Cleaver from West Virginia in to help us with the store. Sudar had grown up in our neighborhood, and had gone to school with my younger brother Shawn. He had played offensive line at John Marshall High School a few years after I was there and had attended Wheeling Jesuit University where I had graduated. He was a gentle and compassionate bear of man whose steady and thoughtful demeanor helped bring order to a business that was chaotic and contentious. Within a year Sudar and my mom “Grace” took over the day-to-day management of the store so that I could focus on assembling the best strains for cultivation and ensuring that we had a consistent supply of the first-rate ganja.

In 2010 we leased another building and built a state-of-the-art cultivation facility on Beach Avenue in Culver City. This cultivation operation allowed us to isolate and produce a consistent supply of ultra high grade cannabis strains for our patients. By the end of its second year of operation Grace Medical had established itself as the premier authority on Medical Marijuana in the State of California establishing relationships with doctors and researchers at UCLA, USC, the Veterans Administration, and the National Institute of Health. After years of struggling it felt like we had turned the page. Everything seemed to be going right. It felt like we were living on a cloud.

On Thursday May 27, 2010 Devon and I were at Juliano’s Raw on Santa Monica drinking wine infused smoothies after work. Devon looked over at me and said.

“That’s Ron Artest sitting next to you.”

I looked over and sure enough sitting at the bar to the left of me was Ron Artest and his future wife Maya Sandifort. The Lakers had just beaten the Suns in the playoffs on their way to advance to the NBA Finals against my favorite team the Boston Celtics on a last minute buzzer beater. Kobe Bryant had missed a shot in the final seconds and Ron Artest had grabbed the rebound and drained the 3 point shot at the buzzer to win the game.

I hadn’t seen the game but I had heard about it and I knew how Artest had won the game.

“What a game tonight.” I said.

“Thanks. In all my years of playing I’ve never been in a situation like that. It was special.”

“I kind of know how you feel.” I said. We beat the Palos Verdes Broncos on last second play in triple overtime a few years ago. It was absolutely crazy and I had never been part of anything like that before. I actually made the team take a minute of silence just to remember that moment”

“That was a really good idea. Artest said. “Those kids are never going to forget that day. I know I won’t”

“How could you?” I asked him. You’re probably still hyped up.”

Suddenly Artest’s phone RANG.

“It’s Kobe.” Artest told me cupping the phone with his massive hand.

“Go ahead.” I told him. I couldn’t believe it. Kobe Bryant was on the phone. Don’t get me wrong. I was still a die hard Celtics fan and hated the Lakers from the depths of my soul. Still LA was my home and just as a History guy I had to appreciate the significance of this moment. I was sitting with Ron Artest while he was on the phone with Kobe Bryant after he had made the shot of his life. I definitely felt like I was in the right place at the right time.

Artest listened to Kobe for a minute and then answered.

Artest continued “The thing is the whole game every time I got the ball Coach kept yelling at me. “Don’t shoot! Don’t Shoot. Then I missed that wide open one and I didn’t want to shoot.”

Ron Artest was referring to a wide open field goal that he had missed earlier and that everyone had assumed had cost the Lakers the game. I could hear Kobe’s voice on the phone getting louder but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Artest listened to Kobe for a minute and then answered him back.

“I know. I know. I’ll try. I’ll try. Thanks. Ok see you tomorrow." Artest said and hung up the phone.

I tried to keep my cool but I was curious. So I told Juliano to bring us another round and asked Artest.

“So what did Kobe say?” I asked him casually as if I knew the man.

Now Artest answered me. “So during the whole game every time I got the ball, Coach Jackson would yell “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” to make me pass the ball. Then at the very end Coach yelled “Shoot! Shoot!” and so I did and the ball went in and then it was just crazy. I’ve never had something like that happen to me. So Kobe just told me that Coach Jackson is a Zen Master and I have to do exactly what he says.”

Our drinks had arrived and I raised my glass.

“Let’s drink a toast to Coach Jackson” I said.

Ron and Maya touched their glasses to ours.

“So what do you do?” Ron Artest asked, sipping on his alcohol free spritzer.

“We have a medical cannabis pharmacy.” Devon chimed in.

“Where is it?” Maya asked.

“On the corner of Pico and Centinela just off the 10 freeway exit.” Devon replied.

“Grace. I’ve seen it..” Maya said.

“You know I’d actually like to see that.” Artest replied.

“We can go after we’re done here.” I replied, trying to hide my excitement. We finished our drinks and gave Artest and Maya the address.

I headed over to the shop to open it up for them. Artest and Maya arrived at the store and I was pretty excited. I had grown up a Celtics fan, then I was a Pistons fan before I was a Bulls fan. I had always rooted for the East and always against the Lakers. Still, I had lived in Los Angeles for over 20 years and the Lakers had grown on me even if I still rooted against them. Besides, Ron Artest was a cool guy.

Artest looked around at the security cameras.

“Don’t worry. You’re not gonna be on TMZ. Go ahead. Help yourself.” I said.

Ron went behind the counter and opened a few of the glass jars smelling the green and purple crystal packed buds.

“I just like to smell it.” Artest inhaled.

“Take anything you want. There are bags on the counter.” I told him.

“Not until we win the Championship.” Artest replied.

“Ya'll have to get through my Celtics and that’s not going to be easy.”

“So you’re a Celtics fan? Is that why you got me in here? You're trying to slow me down.” he laughed.

“Nah. Grace is a valley of peace. All the beef is left at the door. You aren’t even the first Laker to shop here. Kareem comes in here all the time you never hear about it. ” I assured him.

“Really Kareem shops here?” Ron Artest asked me.

“I swear to God. Besides, no one can slow the Celtics down. This is the new NBA. Back in the day no easy layups was the rule but now they let Rajon Rando charge the basket like a waterbug and nobody does anything about it.” I went on.

“The Celtics are hot right now. They are not going to be easy to stop.” Artest admitted.

“You stop Rajon Rondo from getting those easy layups and they will be.” I opened my big mouth and said.

Devon asked Ron Artest for his number but Ron gave him a fake number. It was kind of a dick move and so when Ron Artest was late for practice the next day it was a national story. I thought of leaking the video to the media of Ron Artest at Grace at 1:00 in the morning to try and hurt the Lakers against the Celtics but I had told Ron that Grace was a Valley of Peace where all beefs were left at the door. Besides, Ron Artest hadn’t done anything wrong. He didn’t even take any weed. So I kept my mouth shut and the story never came out.

But this is LA where no good dead goes unpunished and sure enough Ron Artest did stop Rajon Rondo. In the third quarter of Game 6 of the most closely contested finals in NBA history Ron Artest elbowed Rajon Rondo in the jaw and shut him down for the rest of the series. The Celtics wanted to play an up-tempo offense but they couldn't get into an easy rhythm against the Lakers' s physical defense. Artest’s physical play would "demoralize the Celtics in the paint" and prevent easy layups and fast breaks.

Ron Artest would later change his name to Metta World Peace. I would like to say that Ron Artest came into Grace, the Valley of Peace as Ron Artest and left as Metta World Peace but that may not be true. I do know that Ron Artest took out Rajon Rondo and the Lakers won. Until the day I die I will always wonder if my big mouth cost the Celtics an NBA Championship.

Lots of famous people would visit Grace and we honored their privacy. I will always remember that when Chris Kristofferson, who was suffering from dementia first came in and said. “Well if I wander off again you know where I will be.” Lots of celebrities visited Grace and some of our budtenders knew them well. A few of our female budtenders even dated some of them. They would get invited to parties on the weekends and always had stories to tell.

When celebrities came in to Grace Devon would try to sell them silver jewelry from his company Lone Ones which I did not like but they didn’t seem to mind. Leonard Kamhout was a sick man but Chrome Hearts and Lone Ones actually did make nice jewelry. Actors, musicians and athletes loved that predator jewelry and Chrome Hearts and Lone Ones chains and rings appeared in photographs, movies and music videos. As I said before, the truth is predators are very talented people.

In 2013 the owners of the cannabis stores established before 2007 bribed the Los Angeles City Council to trick the voters into passing Proposition D. Proposition D banned all cannabis dispensaries in Los Angeles except those licensed before 2007. We had opened Grace in 2009 and in order to keep Grace open we were forced to partner with another dispensary with a Pre-2007 license. I wanted to partner with Barret Slome and DEC Medical but Devon insisted that we bring in his friend Peter Tajera and James Catipay from Herbalcure.

The partnership with Herbalcure got off to a rocky start. Peter Tajera announced that Herbalcure would not pay for medical coverage for employees and would not contribute to paying for Cody William’s medical expenses. Cody Williams was a football player at Santa Monica High School who had been paralyzed from the waist down. After Cody’s insurance company cancelled his medical coverage Grace Medical Marijuana Pharmacy began sending Cody’s family a check for $1000 every month to cover his physical therapy expenses.

Peter announced that Herbalcure would not contribute to the fund and would not pay health insurance for our employees. This was unbelievable. We were now operating a business that made millions of dollars a year off of the community and depended on the goodwill of that community. I simply did not know that it was possible for someone to be making that much money to not feel obligated to help others in any way. From that point on I found it hard to hide my disdain for Peter, but it was too late. We had signed a contract with Herbalcure and a deal was a deal.

I decided to focus on the other things that were important in my life and what I found out during that time was that I was a damn good football coach. I had been hired as the Offensive Coordinator for the freshman football team at Santa Monica High School but the Head Coach Doug Kim soon relegated many of the important tasks to me. It was my responsibility to create the offensive game plan, to run the scout offense against the defense and to call the offensive plays during the game. These responsibilities made it compulsory that I understood all aspects of our team and by the middle that first season we were humming along. After losing our first two games we went on to go undefeated for the rest of the season and I was overjoyed. I wanted to build Santa Monica football into a powerhouse and that meant recruiting players for our squad.

In 2012 I convinced Devon to bring his son Chad Wheeler to Santa Monica High School to play football for Coach Travis Clark. Devon was living in Marina Del Rey at the time and so I let him use my address in Santa Monica to register Chad at Santa Monica High School. Chad took to football like a duck to water. He worked his ass off in the weight room and on the field and by the time he was a senior Chad Wheeler was 6-5 and 250 pounds and had offers from Arizona State, UCLA and Cal.

In his first year as head coach at the University of Southern California Lane Kiffin had only 15 scholarships because of the NCAA sanctions leveled against Pete Carroll’s dominant Trojan team. When I met Pete Carroll for the first time at the Nike Coach of the Year clinic in 2008 Carroll mistook me for UCLA head coach Rick Neuheisel and asked me.

“Hey Neuheisel. How did you get in here?”

It was actually kind of funny because Neuheisel’s UCLA Bruins had struggled to a 4-8 record his first year and also because Rick Neuheisel’s son did play for our team the Vikings. As I write this Jerry Newheisel has been named as the Head Coach of the UCLA Bruins after a stunning comeback victory against Penn State electrified the Bruins 2025 season and propelled him to the head coaching role. I couldn't be more happy for Jerry and wish him all the success in the world. Jerry will always be a Viking to me.

As I was saying during Lane Kiffin’s first year as head coach at USC he was limited to 15 scholarships. Chad Wheeler had already committed to Arizona when Coach Kiffin extended him an offer to play for the University of Southern California. I introduced Chad Wheeler to Lane Kiffin and told Coach Kiffin that not only was he getting a great football player in Chad Wheeler but he was also getting a great human being.

I meant what I said. At the time Chad Wheeler had a plan. He was going to make it to the NFL and he was going to buy a house for his mother Lila who had been abused by her father and then taken advantage of by Devon in the divorce settlement. Chad was on a mission to save his mother Lila.

Lila Kamhout was a world renowned Bharatnatyam (classical Indian) dancer and the most talented performer of the art that I had ever seen. Her expressions and eye movements combined with her sheer athletic prowess and stage presence were absolutely unforgettable. Most dancers are tiny creatures but Lila stood over six feet tall and towered above the others on stage. Lila was blond and Caucasian and her dances burned images in your mind that remained long after the performances were over. She was a shining star and had performed on stages and in theatres all over the world. Lila’s reputation for devotion and perfection was unmatched.

After Lila married Devon and had two children with him she continued to dance but Devon did not approve. He wanted her to stay home with the children like a good Indian wife but she refused. After Devon began sleeping with the babysitter, a 16 year old girl by the name of Damayanti Mims, Lila and took the children Chad and Shawn on the road with her.

Devon then accused Lila of sleeping with her dance partner Vishnu Tattva, took Chad and Shawn with him and filed for divorce. Devon then borrowed the $200,000 cash from me and used it to live on while he only paid himself a small salary on the books while the divorce was being settled. He now only had to pay Lila a few thousand a month.

When I gave Devon the $200,000 in cash he told me that he was going to have John Sims wire the money to me. Devon had given Sims 1.3 million dollars to stash from Lila but then Sims ripped Devon off. I had to wait two years to get the money and it had almost driven me crazy. Everyone knew that Devon had driven Lila crazy by taking her children and accusing her of sleeping with her dance partner. The accusation destroyed her reputation and she stopped performing.

In a truly sad way she began to try and compete with Devon. She approached her father Leonard and tried to get him to start a silver business with her. After Lila found out that the girl Devon was dating was half black and wanted to be a musician, Lila began dating random black rap artists and talking about making records. She blew through the money that she got quickly on cars, clothes, plastic surgeries and tattoos and paying her “boyfriends” expenses. She started abusing drugs and had a number of violent episodes with the police. Lila had suffered a mental breakdown and was unfit to make decisions at the time she signed the divorce. Till this day Lila insists that she never agreed to a divorce and that she and Devon are still married. Love is truly blind and no one can love someone as much as an abused child. They want love so much they will believe or do anything for it.

It was a very sad story but Chad Wheeler was determined to make it right. He was playing Left Tackle for the University of Southern California and he was going to the NFL. Then he would take care of his mom. Chad went after his goal with fierce dedication and his hard work paid off. He was a four-year starter at USC and by his senior year he had grown to be 6-7 and 320 pounds, a prototype NFL offensive lineman.

In December of 2015 at the weekly meeting of the Grace partners with Peter Tajera, James Catipay Devon made an announcement. Devon announced that he was going on vacation with his new girlfriend to Hawaii with his daughter and that he was leaving the keys to the house with Chad so that he and his wife’s younger sister Tulsi could hook up. I do not know why he felt compelled to tell us all this but I was definitely not okay with it and neither was my wife Lisa the CEO of the business.

“But Tulsi is his aunt.” Lisa protested.

“Arent’t they more like brother and sister” I asked?

“They aren’t related by blood,” Devon replied. Besides, he's been sniffing around that for a long time now. It’s time he had a shot at it.” he responded gleefully, apparently looking forward to his son’s conquest.

Peter Tajera chimed in gleefully. “I hooked up with my cousin once and it was great.”

I looked at James Catipay who said nothing. James was always a decent guy but now he was strangely silent. I now know why. James Catipay had a dark secret of his own. He was about to be indicted by the Treasury Department for defrauding investors of over 11.6 million dollars in a ponzi scheme that promised to share the profits from suing doctors for malpractice. James didn’t want to rock the boat. It’s always the quiet ones you have to be careful of.

I studied the sleazy artwork and the tacky furniture in the Herbalcure office and I wondered how the hell I had ended up in this place. Soon after Peter and James had come in as partners my mother Grace had enough and had bailed and moved to Maui. Before we signed the contract, Peter had told us that Herbalcure was tax exempt but that turned out to be false. We had just paid off a $180,000 back sales tax bill because Peter and James had lied to us and claimed they had Tax-Exempt status in order to convince us to partner with them. Grace was making more money than ever but the people that we had to be in business with to keep it open were the absolute scum of the earth.

After Devon and Lila had jacked the Lone Ones silver business from her father Leonard Kamhout, Devon divorced Lila and married the babysitter, a 17-year-old girl named Damayanti Mims. Damayanti Wheeler who went by the name Monte was an attractive, petty and cold hearted 7 who thought she was a 10. She hailed from Badger, a small dusty town in the Central Valley and she was a stone cold gold digger and made no bones about it. She never pretended to love Devon and he seemed to enjoy having an “angry negress” as he called her around. Monte had one child with Devon but made it clear from the beginning that she did not intend to raise Chad and Shawn Devon’s two boys from his marriage with Lila. Monte was barely an adult herself when she moved in with Devon, his sons Chad, Shawn and Devon’s two step brothers Howard and Gabriel.

Monte also brought her 13 year sister Tulsi to live with Devon and his two sons and their uncles.

Tulsi Mims had long blonde hair, light olive skin and sky blue eyes and was fleeing the same dysfunctional home that her sister Monte was. Devon and Monte told Tulsi’s parents that she would be training to be a tennis player and promised to help her get into the world of modeling in LA. Tulsi was a great athlete and even played football for the Santa Monica Vikings but she quit playing tennis and her modeling career did not take off.

Monte also looked the other way when Tulsi became involved with Devon’s step brother Gabriel while they were living together. Monte had once been lured by promises of a career as a model and performer but was now just another westside Karen with her second set of fake tits and leased BMW X-5, but hey life could be worse. So what if her sister hooked up with Devon’s brother. That was how the sausage was made after all.

Tulsi bounced around for a while and got involved with a few older men but never “harpooned a whale” as her sister Monte had managed to do with Devon. Then Tulsi got pregnant by one of the men and had a baby boy. Chad Wheeler had grown up in this home and had watched this all happen to his Aunt Tulsi. Chad’s dreams of saving his mother Lila powered his quest to make it to the NFL. Chad was playing football for USC and had a girlfriend but he had fallen madly in love with Tulsi. Now he dreamed of rescuing her too.

Back when the Lone Ones silver factory was in my garage in Culver City and Chad was 12 years old he punched my niece Hladini in the arm underneath the orange tree in the backyard. My brother Shawn immediately grabbed Chad and pulled him away by the arm telling him.

“We do not hit girls in this family. Ever. Do you understand?”

Chad who was already a giant and as tall as my brother already was mad and protesting that she had hit him first.

“It doesn’t matter.” Shawn barked.

“We do not hit girls. At all, ever. Period. Do you understand?”

Hearing Shawn scolding his son like this, Devon flew out of the garage shouting.

“Hey, take your hands off him ok. No one else disciplines my kids except for me.” Devon shouted, pulling Chad away from Shawn.

“Then you tell him. He needs to know.” Shawn insisted.

“Just stay out of it okay. I don’t let anyone else discipline my kids.” Devon repeated.

“Ok” Shawn said walking back towards me.

Devon was a believer in the “Yes Parenting” theory of child development. As a child Devon never refused Chad anything. Now as an adult on the verge of signing a multi-million dollar NFL contract Devon was not about to start refusing his son’s request no matter how obscene. If the kid wanted to have sex with his aunt let him. I, myself, had had enough.

“You people are all sick.” I exclaimed.

I stood up in disgust.

“So what are you going to do? Have your buddy Steve send the Rolling 60’s after me now.”

Devon was referring to my friend Steve, who sold weed to the Crips and the Bloods and and used to have my back when it came to any bullshit. Peter’s friend had ripped Steve off for 20 pounds and Steve had shown up at his house with a few of his Crip buddies and beaten him down. Steve never did get his money back but ever since then Devon, Peter and James had been acting like they were white collar business men and I was some kind of thug. For the record I have never used a gun or any type of violence in any business deal. I never dealt with people I thought I needed to have a gun to do business with. If I got ripped off I just never did business with the person again. So this slimy backbiting that Peter, James and Devon were doing was really starting to piss me off.

“I would never do that to you.“ I answered even more angry now. Chad is like my family, he’s my godson for Christ sake. Seriously this is fucked up and I know there’s nothing I can do about it but guess what. I wish you hadn’t told me. I don’t want to know about this.”

I looked at Devon, Peter and James. They all stared at me like I was the one that was crazy for trying to convince Devon not to encourage his son to have sex with his aunt. I have 0 tolerance for predators as a rule and even though rules are made to be broken this was stretching the limit of my tolerance. Sure I was making a hell of a lot of money but the people I had to deal with to make that money were absolutely awful. I was way better off when I was dealing with the Sinaloa cartels in Mexico and the Hell’s Angels in Canada. They were decent respectable Catholics and Pagans. These people were absolute savages. I suddenly couldn’t stand to be in their company for another minute. So I got up and left. Then I proceeded to get good and drunk. I was doing that a lot in those days.

For almost a year Devon had not been paying me the full amount of what I was owed from our Marina Caregivers cultivation operation. When I did an audit and demanded that I be paid what was owed, Devon instead went to our landlord at Grace and convinced him to terminate my lease for which we were paying $7000 a month. Devon then got our landlord Ramin to sign a new lease with him for $13,000 a month, almost doubling the rent. Devon refused to pay me what I was owed for the Marina Caregivers partnership and with both leases in his possession it was only a matter of time before Devon tried to cut me out like he had done to Leonard Khamhout, Lila, Keith Weber and every other person he was ever partners with.

The only thing that was stopping Devon from cutting me out was that he was afraid of Steve and my brother Shawn might do to him. He was a predator and he was terrified of both of them. I didn’t know this at the time and I had just told him that I would never do anything like that to him. Me and my big mouth. I had given him the gift of a lifetime that holiday season. I just had no idea at the time.

In December of 2015 while Devon and his girlfriend were on vacation in Hawaii Chad Wheeler told his teammates on the USC football team that he was going to quit the team, marry Tulsi and raise her baby with her. When Chad’s teammates began to make fun of him Chad began shouting insults at them, punching walls and breaking windows in the dorm. The police arrived and Chad was taken into custody for psychological evaluation, but was not arrested. The story made the national news and seriously harmed Chad Wheeler’s chances in the upcoming NFL draft.

At the next Grace/Herbalcure meeting I told Devon that he should take some time off from Grace to get his family situation in order. I did not want his family scandals affecting our business. A female employee of Grace was now threatening to sue us after Devon made unwanted advances against her, but Devon dismissed both these incidents.

“This is the way it is with kings.” Devon said.

I had no idea whether he was referring to the medieval right of prima nocta when the monarch claims the right to bed any female subject or the tradition of royal families breeding together to maintain the purity of the royal blood. I really couldn't be sure what he meant.

Devon had been raised by Keith Ham aka Kirtananda Swami who was worshiped as a king but Devon claimed to never have been molested by him. I had come to learn Devon’s first wife Lila had been molested by her father, so I assumed that like me Devon had 0 tolerance for predators. Now instead of forbidding the incestuous relationship between Chad and his aunt Tulsi Devon he was attempting to justify it and how. By claiming that because of his family’s royal blood this was acceptable? This was really the most incredible thing I had ever heard. I was completely floored but realized that it did not matter. Devon had the lease and Peter and James were on his side. Anything I said now was merely a suggestion. So I kept quiet. Lisa and I were about to go on the first vacation we had taken in 5 years, and I didn’t want to start any kind of drama that would spill over into our time off.

We flew to Cabo San Lucas and spent 10 days with our friends Andy and Jenny from Sandusky Ohio. Andy grew up with me in the ashram at New Vrindavan but now he and his wife Jenny run a wonderful restaurant called the Old Dutch Tavern in Sandusky. We stayed at a wonderful hotel by the beach and went scuba diving and got our feet cleaned by the fish. While we were out at Cabo Wabo one night Sammy Hagar made a surprise appearance onstage and decided to play a bunch of Jimmy Buffet songs. Sammy told the story of when Jimmy Buffet first came down to Cabo. Sammy even claimed that it was he who got Buffet out of the cowboy boots and into flip flops and it was Sammy who inspired him to change his attitude and lifestyle to adjust to life south of the border. It was so good to spend time with Andy and we came back thoroughly refreshed and inspired.

When we got back to LA Devon claimed that Woody Harrelson had been interested in buying the building and becoming our landlord but that after he looked at the books he decided not to. Then he accused Lisa and I of stealing $1,000,000 from the Grace/Herbalcure partnership. Suresh Jain, the owner of the liquor store next door, had recently purchased the building and was now charging us $28,000 a month in rent. According to Devon Wheeler, Woody Harrelson had offered to come in and buy the building and become our landlord but now based on the loss of him as an investor and potential partner Devon, Peter and James demanded that I step down as managing director of the business and that Lisa step down as CEO.

It was all BS of course. It was concocted based on some phantom scenario where Woody Harrelson was supposed to buy the building but because Lisa and I were stealing he backed out. It didn’t matter though and we were voted out and locked out of Grace while they claimed to be auditing the business. We filed a lawsuit against Devon Wheeler, Peter Tajera, James Catipay and the landlord Suresh Jain and asked the court for an injunction that would allow me to resume operation of the business while the lawsuit proceeded.

Before our injunction could be heard, the new CEO of the business they appointed, James Catipay, was charged by the SEC with defrauding investors of over 11 million dollars. He would eventually serve 18 months in prison. The day before we were scheduled to go in front of the court to get an injunction, less than 4 months after we were locked out, LAPD raided Grace and closed it down.

Grace was now closed but there was a sign in the window telling customers to visit our Marina Caregivers location. The next day I walked into Grace Medical Marijuana Pharmacy carrying a copy of my lawsuit in my hand. I opened the door and handed a copy of the lawsuit to the security guard Michael Yee. The lone employee left behind to mind the store who went by the name of Jackson took a swing at me, but I ducked him, spun around behind him, locked his arm up and pushed Jackson towards the door. I kicked the door open and shoved Jackson outside. I pulled the door shut behind me and locked it. Jackson took out his phone and called Devon and Peter I assumed. I sat down at the front desk and waited for LAPD to arrive.

It didn’t take long for LAPD to get there. Devon Wheeler, Peter Tajera and the landlord Suresh Jain showed up with them. I let them all inside. Suresh Jain, Devon Wheeler and Peter Tajera demanded that LAPD throw me out and charge me with trespassing. I showed Sergeant Davis of the LAPD a copy of the partnership agreement that designated me as managing partner, and my wife’s name on the business license and a copy of my lawsuit. Sergeant Davis looked at my paperwork and it was all in order.

After hearing my explanation, Sergeant Davis who was responding to a report of breaking and entering, read them the riot act and threatened to arrest Devon, Peter and Suresh for filing a false report if he heard another word out of them. Devon was mad as a hornet, Peter looked like he shit his pants. The landlord Suresh was whining like a baby about how the police never do anything about white criminals like me. Davis reminded them that they were all facing criminal charges for operating an illegal marijuana dispensary and that my wife and I were the only legal operators designated by the city at this location and under the partnership agreement. Before leaving Davis left his final instructions.

“I suggest you work out your differences with your partners and if I hear another peep out of any of you, I will arrest you all.”

Captain Davis gave me his card and headed for the exit. Suresh and Peter slithered off behind him.

Devon and I went back to the greenhouse to talk things over. I took a bong off the shelf and packed it. I picked up a lighter and asked Devon.

“So why don’t you take Marina and I’ll take Grace? You don’t want to be partners with me, that's fine. You go your way. I’ll go mine.”

I suggested.

“I guess. He answered. “It looks like you are the only person that can run this place right now anyway.” he admitted.

“Hijacking a plane doesn’t make you a pilot.” I sounded off feeling very pleased with myself for the first time in a long time.

I struck the lighter in my right hand and lit the bong in my left hand. I took a deep inhale. As the smoke entered my lungs I felt the left side of my face explode in pain. It took me a second to realize what had happened.

Devon had sucker punched me in the left side of the head as I took a hit from the bong. Now Devon stands about 6’2 240 pounds and I am about 5’9 170 and so I think he expected me to go down with the one punch but that wasn’t the first time I had been hit in the head and I have a pretty thick skull. I turned around just in time to get my right arm under his arm of the choke hold he tried to get me in from behind. As he tightened his chokehold, the lighter in my right hand fell to the concrete floor. I felt the oxygen being cut off from my brain. I smashed the bong in my left hand against the brick wall and held the jagged glass edge of the bong to Devon’s throat. This caught him by surprise, and he loosened his grip slightly but did not let go.

“Is this what it’s come down to really?” I asked him. “After all this. Are you trying to kill me over a fucking weed store. What the fuck happened to you man?”

Michael Yee, the security guard came running in.

“Michael, get this faggot off of me.” I yelled. Tase him if you have to”

Michael looked terrified. He had been with us for years and used to roll my joints for me. Michael did not want to put his hands on Devon and he pleaded with him

“Please Devon.” Michael begged keeping his hand on his taser gun.

Devon finally let go of me.

Devon then turned around and ran out the door.

Micheal turned to me in shame.

“I’m sorry Jason,” Michael said.

“Don’t worry about it Michael. Everything will be fine but don’t let him back in here. He’s gone over to the darkside.”

I tossed the shattered bong in the trash can, grabbed a broom and started sweeping up the broken glass. I called my manager Sudar up and told him to schedule the shifts for the next day. Then we called all the vendors we knew. There was a lot of work to do if we wanted to be open the next day. By the morning the shelves were stocked, and we were open for business.

I was in the office the next day when Sudar told me that Jay Handal was there to see me. Jay Handal was our local West LA Neighborhood Council representative. He had shaken us down for a $1500 contribution before the last election by promising to act as a liaison and advocate for Grace with the community and the City Council. Jay Handal told me that Suresh Jain, the landlord, had sent him to talk to me. Devon had not paid rent since the Los Angeles Police Department had raided the business and closed. I told Handal about Devon and Chad and Tulsi and that Devon had tried to strangle me. Handal told me that Suresh wanted Wheeler out and that he would sign a lease with me once I settled with Devon.

Over the next few weeks Jay Handal and I negotiated a settlement in which Lisa and I gave up our share of Marina Caregivers operation in return for Devon Wheeler’s share of Grace. As part of the settlement, I also agreed not to disclose anything about the Wheelers private family affairs, not press criminal charges or pursue civil damages against Devon for civil battery. We agreed to all these terms. We still had a business to operate and wanted to settle this quietly. We did not want our names to be associated with these predators.

After we dismissed our lawsuit against Devon Wheeler and assigned our share of Marina Caregivers to him, Suresh Jain the landlord evicted us and leased the property back to Devon Wheeler. Jain leased the property to Wheeler through his stepbrother Gabriel Dezio to conceal Wheeler’s ownership of the business. Devon Wheeler, Jay Handal and Ali Shekarchian then opened Erba Markets at Grace Medical Marijuana Pharmacy’s former location.

For many years Jay Handal operated an Italian restaurant in Brentwood until it was closed for selling alcohol without a licence. I knew Handal through Peter Tajera, who had convinced us to donate to his campaign. Handal, who was Treasurer of the West Los Angeles Neighborhood Council at the time negotiated the fraudulent settlement, was made CEO of Erba in exchange for his participation in this scheme. Handal fit right in with Wheeler, Tajera and Catipay and couldn’t hide his satisfaction when the Santa Monica Police dropped their investigation into Chad and Tulsi’s relationship because it is not illegal for consenting family members to have sex in California. Jay Handal even texted me boasting about it. I texted Jay Handal back and told him that he was bragging about people getting away with statutory rape and incest. He claimed that he was not bragging but I don’t know what else you could call it.

We took out a loan against our house and leased another property across the street at 2340 Centinela Avenue. Then we signed a partnership agreement with Barret Slome who agreed to bring the DEC Medical license into our new address on Centinela Ave. When Barret attempted to move the DEC Medical license into our new address the request was denied because we were within 600 feet of Erba Markets which was operating illegally at our previous location. We appealed the decision and submitted evidence to the City of Los Angeles proving that Grace had signed a lease before Erba and that Erba was in violation of Proposition D and therefore not eligible for a license. An appeal hearing was scheduled with the Department of Cannabis Regulation for December 12, 2019.

Two days before our appeal hearing, on December 10, 2019, armed agents from the California Department of Taxation, the National Guard and LAPD burst into Grace Medical Marijuana Pharmacy wearing masks and riot gear and with guns drawn. They ordered everyone to get down on the floor and then began smashing the camera system that had been installed as required by the law. The agents handcuffed all the patients and employees and brought them outside onto the front lawn where they sat on display for hours for their neighbors to gawk at and photograph. They ordered my son Jordan, who was the manager to open the safe and began emptying the shelves, seizing and inventorying all cannabis products and cash on the premises. Lawyers from Grace’s legal team arrived and produced copies of Grace’s pending Adult Use Retail Cannabis application. The lawyers explained that Grace was operating legally and that an appeal hearing had been scheduled for the matter in two days, but they were told to stand aside or be arrested for obstructing justice.

Grace was looted from top to bottom by the CDTFA that day. All the inventory, cash, computers and point of sales devices were seized. The Department of Water and Power was ordered shut off the water and electricity and the doors to the business were chained shut. Our landlord was ordered to evict us. After 10 years of operation, Grace was now permanently closed.

Lisa and I spent 7 years and more than a half a million dollars in legal fees and to get our former landlord Suresh Jain into Judge Mark Epstein’s courtroom in Santa Monica. A few months after Grace was raided and shut down, our partner Barret Slome was shot and murdered in his condo in Laguna Beach. A contract killer by the name Dudley was arrested for the murder but has refused to disclose either the reason and who if anyone paid him to kill Barrett. After Barret was murdered most of the witnesses that we had lined up in our civil case against Wheeler, Handal and Jain clammed up and refused to testify. So now it would be my word against theirs.

The Defense delayed the trial for years, bogging us down by filing anti-slapp motions and motions to dismiss. By the time our case got to trial 7 years later Erba Markets was making over 20 million dollars a year. Jay Handal, the CEO of ERBA and Devon Wheeler were partners with Woody Harrelson and Bill Mahr in a cannabis lounge called “the Woods.” When my own lawyer Brad Brunon told me that at the end of the day no judge was going to award me the millions of dollars in damages I was asking for I should have known it was true.

After getting off the phone with Brad, I decided to stop by at my neighbor's house for a drink. Dr. Steven Yu is an internal medicine surgeon who specializes in fibroid removal, vaginal rejuvenation and hymen restoration. The Doc did very well for himself and owned a Jeep, an Audi, a Ferrari and had a million-dollar Benetti anchored in Marina Del Rey. The Doc and I used to drink a lot together but since I had given up drinking, I spent a lot less time with him. The Doc had invited me to come by earlier and so I decided to pay him a visit. After a few drinks I told him what Brad had said about my case and he grew quiet.

“You know I love you, my brother.” he said affectionately.

“I love you too man.” I replied.

“Can I tell you something?” the Doc said.

“Yeah, what is it.?”

“Your friend Devon is a piece of shit.”

“Well, that may be but lots of people love him. Woody Harrelson likes him. Bill Mahr likes him. You would probably like him if you knew him.”

“Man fuck Woody Harrelson and Bill Mahr needs to retire. He’s not even funny anymore. Devon makes his money off the business you built. You know that. He can’t take that from you.”

“So what is your point?” I said.

The Doc poured us each a shot of Absolut and quickly downed his. I tilted my head back and swallowed the hot firewater.

“We should have killed him when I told you to do it back in the day. We should have taken him out to the desert, buried him up to his neck and left him there.” The Doc said.

“You know I couldn’t go through with it.” I answered.

“If I grew up with someone and he did that shit to me, I’d put him in the ground. I know you’re a Buddhist and you don’t believe in violence, but I believe in an eye for an eye and that karma is a bitch.” The Doc was hopping mad now.

“I’m not a Buddhist. Buddhists don’t believe in god.” I still do. I just think he’s a sick sense of humor.” I said.

Now The Doc starts to sing the Depeche Mode song. I join and we sing together

“I don’t mean to start any blasphemous rumors,

But I think that god’s got a sick sense of humor”

“And when I die, I expect to find him laughing.”

“We should kill him seriously.” The Doc says brandishing his drink.

“You’re not the first person who has offered to kill him for me just on general principle, but I always tell them no. Devon’s life is his own punishment. Besides, the Tao says.

“If you wait by the river long enough

you will see the body of your enemy floating down it”

“Ok. Enough of this fortune cookie philosophy. The Doc growled. ”I’m the Asian in this conversation. The problem is you still think of him as family.”

“It’s true. I do, even though I know he’s not. Still his life is his own punishment. I wouldn’t want to trade places with him.

The Doc pours us another drink. I just sip on this one. I’m starting to get buzzed.

“So how is Chad doing?” The Doc asks me. “I saw him on TV playing for the Seahawks against the Rams last year. “Do you ever talk to him?”

“Not really. I reached out to Chad after he got arrested but I never heard back from him.”

“Arrested for what?

“Come on, you watch ESPN all the time. It was national news.” I answered him.

“What happened to him?

“So, you really don’t know.”

“No. Tell me what happened.”“Just google Chad Wheeler.” I told him.

The Doc picked up his phone and typed in the name Chad Wheeler. He read the story out loud.

“It says here. Seattle Seahawks lineman Chad Wheeler is no longer with the team after being arrested on suspicion of felony domestic violence. Kent, Washington Police report that a woman called 911 and informed them that someone was trying to kill her. When police arrived, they found the victim Aliyah Taylor was bleeding from injuries and had a dislocated arm. She reported that Chad Wheeler had shaved his head bald and ordered her to bow down to him. When she refused to bow down Chad strangled her until he thought she was dead. The woman woke up to Chad standing above her and he was surprised to find out she was still alive. “

Steve stopped reading and looked up from his phone.

“What the fuck. I can’t believe this. His football career is over. He’s going to jail.”

“The girl he beat up has been going on talk shows and making a big deal about it. So I think he’s going to jail.”

“Devon must be losing his mind. Can you imagine if that happened to your son? What if Jordan or Max was going to jail for trying to kill some girl?”

“I couldn’t think of a worse thing to happen to someone if I tried. Why did you think I said his life is his own punishment?”

“Didn’t Devon try to strangle you the last time you saw him?”

“Yeah, but I ended up dropping the charges.”

So he strangled you and got away with it and now his son is going to jail for it. That is some biblical shit.”

“Why do you think I said God has a sick sense of humor? It’s like Willie Nelson said, ”Nobody slides my friend.”

“I still don’t understand what happened with you two. You guys grew up together.” The Doc asked.

‘Why did Cain slay Abel?” I answered.

“What does that mean?”

“It means there’s nothing new under the sun? What do you think happened to the guy who invented the wheel? Someone hit him on the head with a club and stole the idea from him. That’s like asking why wolves hunt. What really sucks is that I don’t get to be happy about any of this. I feel terrible for the girl, and I feel terrible for Chad.”

“Dude, he almost killed that girl. He’s a psycho.” The Doc continued reading.

“The kid never had a chance.”

“What do you mean?”

“Chad grew up getting everything he wanted. No one ever said no to him. There were a few incidents at USC that got covered up before he made it to the NFL. A lot of people thought it was racist because the girl was black but I don’t think it was. Chad was a gladiator and people treated him like a god. He probably thought that his girlfriend should bow down to him and worship him. He just ran into the wrong black girl and she wasn’t having any of that yes massa shit.”

“I still say both of them belong in a shallow ditch.” The Doc took another drink of his Absolut.

“My friend David is a dentist and says the same thing. You doctors are so bloodthirsty. Don’t ya’ll have to take some kind of oath not to harm anyone to practice medicine?” I countered.

“I’m a surgeon bro and he’s a tumor as far as I’m concerned.” The Doc lit a Marlboro Light cigarette and took a long drag.

“That is cold, Doc and I agree with you but that’s not going to happen. I just don’t have it in me.” I protested.

“Let me tell you something. You think about this stuff way too much. Karma, the afterlife, they’re all myths that we created to explain things we don’t understand. We evolved and evolution works like this. For long periods of time, we are in stasis. Stasis means things stay pretty much the same. We eat, we reproduce then we die. Then some violent event like a volcano, a fire, an earthquake, a tidal wave or even an ice age comes along and wipes out most of the species. Only the species that adapt survive. That is called punctuated equilibrium. But even during stasis the natural order is kill or be killed.” he stated absolutely.

“That’s what I’ve been saying. Some of us are predators, and some of us are prey?” I agreed.

“I’m saying unless something drastic happens things don’t change and if you don’t adapt you don’t survive.” he bellowed.

He poured us another drink and downed it right away.

“Well, I’ve got surgery in the morning so I’m going to crash. Here, take the bottle.”

The Doc handed me the bottle of Absolut.

“That’s ok.” I said pushing it back into his hands.

“No, take it. I’ll see you later. Luv you baby.”

The Doc shoved the bottle back into my hands and staggered out the door. This was par for the course. On his days off the Doc drank like a sailor but he had a switch and in the middle of a conversation he’d say he was tired and go right to bed. At times I suspected that he just got tired of our conversations and that was probably the case. He was a brilliant surgeon, one of only a handful of people in the United States who could operate a DiVinci robot which was designed for non-invasive surgery. He knew absolutely nothing about history, literature, philosophy or any of the subjects I had spent 5 years pursuing a degree in American History. I had studied what I loved but The Doc had taken the hard way and clawed his way to the top. I had to admit to myself that my story had ended in abysmal failure, but his tale of adaptation and accumulation had been a resounding success. He was a useful part of the machine, and I was an obsolete part.

When I got home the lights were all off and everyone was asleep. I walked around the side of the house up to the front porch. The city was quiet now and the thick fog made the shimmering lights look like tiny suns in a far-off galaxy. I had a T-shirt with a picture of the Milky Way Galaxy filled with stars with a red map pin dropped on one of the dots that read. “You are here.” I loved that shirt. Now it made me think of how insignificant I was. Just another grain of sand on the beach or a speck of dust in a tornado. I took a long pull from the bottle and the clear molten liquid slid down my throat. It had been 5 years since Grace had been raided and closed. During that time our former landlord Suresh Jain had collected $50,000 a month in rent earning him over $3,000,000 for destroying my family’s life’s work. We had taken out two second mortgages on our house to pay for our new store which had been closed and down to cover our legal bills. Now I had no idea if we were going to be able to keep our house which was all we had at this point.

Did the man who invented the wheel profit from his invention or did some bigger stronger cavemen hit him on the head and claim the idea for himself? Everything that I had learned about human beings told me that the inventor of the wheel had ended up with his skull bashed in and with his invention stolen by some stronger predator. I had been functioning under the mistaken assumption that I was living in a civilized society in which the rights of citizens were protected under the law, but deep down I knew my lawyer was telling me the truth and he was right. Judge Epstein would not award us a penny of the money that we had lost.

I had been in stasis for five years waiting for punctuated equilibrium but without some drastic event or adaptation, I was going to end up as prey, just another wildebeest taken out by a hyena on the Serengeti. So, I formulated a final plan. I had failed at everything that I had attempted. I failed as an actor, failed as a writer, failed a ganjawalla and now I was failing to provide for my family. I had lost everything that I had worked my entire life to build, and my reputation had been destroyed but I still had an ace in the hole. I had a 1-million-dollar life insurance policy.

I decided that I was ready to cash out of this casino. I had failed at life but I could die with a purpose and at least my family would be taken care of. I thought about my father Shyamakunda Das and how he had sacrificed everything only to be cast aside by Kirtananda Swami after Prabhupada’s Palace had been built. My father had passed away a few years ago and now Kirtananda Swami’s son Devon Wheeler had done the same thing to me, cheating two generations of our family out of our life’s work.

I took my father’s axe out of the tool shed and hid it in the left arm of my jacket. I had decided that I would die with my father’s axe in my hand.

“If you are a big tree, I’ll be a small axe”.

Ready to cut you down, sharpened to cut you down.”

Bob Marley.”

It was a cold night and so I made sure to add extra layers as I prepared for my last mission. I pulled my jacket closed and zipped it up. I put on my black leather gloves. I pushed my bike quietly towards the gate and slipped out into the alley. It was only about a mile ride from my house to the Erba Markets store on Pico and Centinela Ave. I got to the store and saw that all the lights were on. I drove past and parked the bike around the corner in the alley. I unzipped my jacket and held my father’s axe in my hand.

When I was a kid, and my dad was drinking a lot, me and my sister imagined ourselves as superheros who smashed up liquor stores. Now I would get my chance. Like some dark avenging angel, I slipped through the alley towards the store and came to the Adult Book Store, the sleazy porn shop that Suresh Jain rented. I smashed every single window in the porn shop. Then I came to Jan’s Liquor, the liquor store that Suresh operated. I smashed every single window in Jan’s Liquor. Now the alarm from the liquor store was going off. I expected the police to arrive any minute.

I made my way to ERBA and looked inside. The shelves were filled with colorful packages, drinks and candies. An oversized rendering of Leonard Khamhout's pedo-jewelry, a giant metal chain with a bell hung in the middle of the Erba store defiling the sacred place that had once once been Grace. I thought of my father who had dedicated his life to serving Kirtananda Swami and building New Vrindavan only to be excommunicated from the community that he had built with his own hands for drinking alcohol by a “guru” who turned out to be a homosexual predator pretending to be a celilabate monk. I had helped Devon at every turn because I felt sorry for him. His father had abandoned him and he had barely known his mother. I thought he was my friend. I had served a year in federal prison for him. I had helped him steal his father in law Leonard Khamhout’s business from him after we found out he was a pedophile. Now he had taken the one sacred thing I had built in Grace, My Valley of Peace and turned it into a den of thieves.

I gripped my dead father’s axe in my right hand. I raised the axe above my head. The giant picture window shattered into a thousand pieces scattering glass all over the floor and the sidewalk. I struck again and another window collapsed. I went to strike again, but this time it felt different. I suddenly felt sick inside. I had installed these windows; I had put in the Himalayan Slate floor. I knew where there were fossils on the floor that were over 250 million years old. A lot of my old friends that were patients for years still shopped here. I could hear sirens now. The police were on the way, but I couldn’t bring myself to break another window. Grace had been my baby and destroying any part of it just felt like hitting my own child. So I ran.

The police were closing in on all sides now. I ducked into the alley and jumped on my bike. As I came out of the alley and headed east on Pico towards Bundy an LAPD Ford Explorer sped by me but then quickly turned around. I crossed over Bundy and parked the bike at a Tiny Hi Dive Bar and walked inside. I saw LAPD pull up outside. I thought of ordering a drink and trying to play cool but I didn’t have my phone or identification on me. I walked through the bar and out the back door and into the alley. In the alley I saw another LAPD unit heading north on Bundy. I pushed my way inside the gate of the apartment complex on the corner of Bundy and Pico and slipped inside. I hid behind the bushes next to the wall.

There were cops everywhere now and I could hear them searching for me on foot outside the fence. I laid very still and kept completely quiet. If I made a sound they would hear me. As I laid there trying not to move, I heard a sound in the garden. Something was crawling through the bushes toward me. I hoped and prayed that it wasn’t a possum or a racoon. The creature moved closer and closer towards me, but I dared not make a sound to scare it away for fear of alerting the police on the other side of the fence.

‘Meow?” I heard the beast cry out pitifully. I looked over my shoulder and saw an Orange tabby cat staring at me. I breathed a sigh of relief. Thank God it wasn’t a possum. They freak me out more than clowns.

I put out my gloved hand toward the tabby who I will call Orange, and he slowly made his way towards me. I started to stroke Oranges back and he started to purr. I felt a sneeze coming on and I tried to hold it in. I cupped my gloved hand over my mouth and let out a muffled sneeze. Then Orange bolted, jumped up on a shelf and knocked over a plastic flowerpot. The pot crashed to the ground and Orange scurried away and disappeared into the night.

“What was that?” I heard someone shout.

“It came from over there.” I heard one of the cops say.

“You, in there. This is the Los Angeles Police Department. Come out with your hands up!”

I stayed completely still. After all it was the cat who made the noise, not me.

“You, in there. This is the Los Angeles Police Department. Come out with your hands up.” Again, the order came.

I am a firm believer in making the police work for a living and I know better than to ask the police for help. I don’t cooperate with the police. I don’t admit anything to the police, and I don’t turn myself into the police. But it was late, and I was getting tired, and I really had changed my mind about wanting to get shot.

I had sobered up and the adrenaline from my bike ride had worn off. I was starting to get cold and the whole plan was starting to seem like a terrible idea to me. Besides, I hadn't been able to go through with it. No one had even fired a shot and yet somehow here I was lying in the dirt with some random alley cat who then gave away my position. I guess that’s why you never try to wrestle with a snake. I wasn’t sure that this was rock bottom, but I did know that I didn’t want to be there anymore.

Again the cops outside repeated their order.

“This is the Los Angeles Police Department. Come out with your hands up. You are completely surrounded.”

I picked myself up off the ground, dusted myself off and got to my feet. I put my hands in the air and pushed on the gate.

“I’m coming out. “I said. “Don’t shoot me please.” I shouted.

The LAPD guys turned out to be pretty cool. A few of them knew me from when Grace had been broken into a few years earlier and they had shown up to take the call. They couldn’t figure out why I was smashing my own store up. After I told them all that had happened and that I had a civil case against Jain they decided not to arrest me. They were about to write me a citation for destruction of property and release me with a court date to appear. Then they ran my name for warrants and found out I had a pending case against me for operating an illegal cannabis business within the city of Los Angeles. I was arrested and booked. My bail was set at $100,000.

Fortunately for me cash bail had just been outlawed for non-violent crimes in the City of Los Angeles. After 24 hours, I was released without bail. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. I pled guilty to operating an illegal cannabis business and in exchange the State of California agreed to drop all other charges against me. As part of the plea agreement I was ordered to complete 300 hours of community service and a 52 week Anger Management Program. I did my community service work building sets for the Odyssey Theater on Sepulveda Blvd. The director Beth Hogan is a wonderful lady and it was a genuine pleasure to work there. It was a great experience and I actually learned quite a bit about set design.

After I had completed my sentence and my community service Lisa and I were arrested and charged with tax evasion by the State of California. I had filed a claim against the State of California for over $300,000 for the illegal raid against Grace in 2019 that had resulted in the closure of the business. I had contacted Jason Nakano who headed the investigation for the State of California and informed him that the 2019 raid was illegal because Grace had a pending application with the Department of Cannabis Regulation. The illegal raid had taken place after we had refused to pay a $100,000 bribe to Senator Palanco to guarantee that our application would be accepted and the tax evasion case was filed in retaliation to us seeking the return of the property that was seized in the 2019 raid. I already signed the first plea agreement with the State of California in exchange for all charges being dropped against me, but now after being led to believe that the matter was settled, Lisa and I are facing 3-5 years in prison.

We had already lost Grace, the business that we had spent a lifetime building and had mortgaged our house to pay our lawyers. We had borrowed the money and expected to repay the loan after our case was settled but Judge Rosenberg and Judge Epstein seemed perfectly willing to let Wheeler, Jain and Handal steal our business and we got absolutely nothing. Not a penny. We were trying to sell the house which we had lived in for 20 years and had raised our family in but it needed some repairs and had fallen out of escrow. Now I had only one mission. To keep our home from going into foreclosure long enough to be able to fix it up and sell it.

I was barely surviving by operating Grace as an illegal weed delivery business during the week and selling American flag hats on “the pick” on the weekends. Lisa had gotten her real-estate licence and she managed to sell a few condos. So we were scraping by and I was hoping to not get caught selling weed again and arrested and to keep our house from going into foreclosure. We put our house up for sale, but the house had fallen out of escrow. Now we were behind on our mortgage and I didn’t know if we would be able to stay in our house long enough to see our son Brady graduate from Santa Monica High School. This was the desperate situation I found myself in when Oliver Bane came to live in our home.

Easter fell on 4-20-2025. Oliver Bane and his wife’s dog Bandit had Bandit had been living with us since January 7, 2025 the day of the terrible fire that ravaged the Pacific Palisades and destroyed the home that Oliver had grown up in. Even though Oliver had lived in the home most of his life when I tried to console him, he was not sad about his home burning down and everything that he and his father had collected in their lifetimes being destroyed. Oliver had let the house go. The floors were coming up in the living room, the cabinets were falling apart and there were giant holes in the deck. The house needed lots of repairs but now it would be built brand new all covered by the insurance. It was good to be one of the “Chosen People”. Oliver told me it was all part of God’s plan and that God had chosen me to spread his message. When I asked him what that message was Oliver told me that it would be revealed to me. We would have to wait for Eve’s return. By Eve, Oliver meant his wife Tara.

The White Castle (top level) and Oliver and Bandit’s Quarters downstairs.

Oliver’s wife Tara had run off to Egypt with her boyfriend and they were now living in Cairo raising their child together. Oliver was convinced that Tara was coming back to him. After all, he had given her $750,000 and he still had her dog Bandit and she he had never filed for divorce. For years I told Oliver that Tara had never filed for divorce because she was waiting for the marriage to last 10 years so that under California law she would be entitled to half of Oliver’s income for life. Oliver and Tara had been married since August of 2015 and the 10 year mark was fast approaching. I begged Oliver to file for divorce from her before the 10 year mark but when Oliver filed for divorce from Tara she told him that she was coming home as soon as she could get a passport. Months went by with no sign of Tara and still Oliver waited.

Oliver now explained to me that Adam had to be reunited with Eve to make the Trinity whole and that when Tara came back from Egypt we would all figure out God’s plan together. Oliver was now starting to worry me but as I said Oliver, unlike any of my other friends, actually did help me. Faith needs doubt and I told myself that if Jesus walked on earth today people would probably think he was crazy or at least call him a left wing communist. It was not easy to keep the faith, but I tried to keep faith with Oliver. Blind faith.

I wrote day and night and kept Oliver up to date with the progress of the book. After all, if Jesus really did burn down the Pacific Palisades, I’m sure people would want to know why. I had known Oliver for years and he knew that I had grown up in the Hare Krishna movement but when Oliver found out that I still worshiped at the Hare Krishna Temple he decided to put a stop to it. I had just returned from the morning service at 7:00 on Easter Sunday when Oliver decided to have it out with me.

“So it’s Easter. Jesus is paying the bills now, not Krishna.” Oliver said, lighting up a joint while standing in my front yard.

“Happy Easter. And happy 4-20. I said”

I held out my hand for Oliver to pass me the joint.

“Get your own. We need to have a talk.”

Oliver pointed to a pack of Grace joints on the table.

I took a joint out of the pack and lit it.

“So what do you want to talk about?”

“What has Krishna ever done for you?’

What does that mean?” I replied.

“Sure you do. What has Krishna done for you?” Oliver asked.

“Well, if by Krishna you mean God I would say he has done everything for everyone.”

“But what has Krishna done for you lately?”

“Is this a trick question because I really don't know what you want from me.”

“It’s a simple question. What has Krishna done for you lately?

“Well He sent you to me when I needed help paying our mortgage didn’t he?” I answered.

“”No he didn’t send me, because I work for the Jew. The guy who was nailed to the cross. The guy who paid for your sins.” Oliver answered, pouring himself a glass of Kirkland red wine from Costco.

“Nobody is paying for my sins but me. After all, who else would pay for them?” I argued.

“The Son of God paid for them and it’s time you recognized where the manna from heaven is coming from.”

“What does that even mean?”

“You told me that you couldn’t pay your mortgage until I came along and Jesus sent me to pay it” Oliver challenged me. “So what has Krishna done for you?”

“I just told you. Krishna is God. Jesus is the Son of God. For all I know Krishna told Jesus to send you to me?" I shot back.

“Krishna is a false god. There is only one God and his name is Yahweh and I work for Yahweh, not some blue guy who played the flute and danced with all the girls.”

“I think that if you do a little more research on Krishna you will find that he did a lot more than that. Krishna was born in prison and faced many attempts on his life as a child but still he rose to become a great king. He worked his entire life for peace but could not stop a great war and only then did he recite the Bhagavad Gita to his friend Arjuna because he was his friend.

“Did Krishna die?. Yes or no.” Oliver asked me point blank.

I had just finished writing a play called “The Fig Tree” which was about Lord Krishna’s final hours on the earth and a conversation with the hunter Jara who had shot him in the foot.

“Yes, Krishna died.” I answered Oliver truthfully.

“So Krishna was a man, not god. He died didn’t he? Oliver spoke as if he had delivered the final word on the subject. I really had no idea where this was coming from.

“So is there one God or are there many gods?” I asked Oliver.

“There’s one true God.”

“So if there is only one God, are you saying Krishna is a different god than Yahweh?” I asked Oliver.

“There’s only one God and his name is Yahweh and he says that you shall have no other Gods before me.” He replied.

“So if there is one God that means people all over the world worship Him or Her in different ways. Ask yourself why. Do you like to eat the same thing everyday? I don’t. If we are all made in God’s image, how do you know that all religions aren’t worshiping the same God just in different ways, just like we enjoy different recipes from different cultures?” I wanted to know.

“There is only one God and there is only one way to get to him. No man comes through the father but through the Son.” Oliver insisted.

Jesus said “No man comes to the Father but through the Son” but Krishna says that when someone is ready to approach Me, I take away everything so they must depend on me completely. My father who dedicated his life to building temples for Krishna built this house, so tell me after your home and all your material possessions were taken away, where did Jesus Christ lead you? To his father Krishna’s house?” I asked Oliver, very pleased with my answer.

“You’re fired?” Oliver said, setting his wine glass down on my son Brady’s computer desk.

“Really? I didn’t know that I was working for you. As of right now you haven’t asked me to do anything other than get business cards that read “Angel of the Lord” whatever that is supposed to mean.

“You know what it means.” Oliver replied.

“No, I really don’t know what it means and if you do I really wish you would tell me.” I blurted out.

“Sure you do. You know exactly what it means.” Oliver insisted.”

“No, I don’t. All my life people have been telling me that I’m blessed and that I know what to do but I really don’t. So maybe the lesson I am supposed to take from this all is that I’m really just like everyone else. Maybe we’re all swinging like Tarzan from miracle to miracle and we just don’t see it because we are busy grabbing the next one. ” I reasoned.

“That’s not it. That’s not it at all. I wouldn’t have given you the money if you weren't the Angel of the Lord.”

“Dude, You gave your wife $750k when she left you for some other guy. Now I really am trying to be your friend here but you are living in my house so I need you to stop this. I appreciate what you have done but I’m not the Angel of the Lord. Hell I don’t even understand what that is supposed to mean.

“You are and you have to understand that I am just His lawyer. I handle His business. I don’t decide on it. I just do what he asks.” Oliver continued.

“Again I still have no idea what that means. I’m just trying to get through another month.” I shot back.

“Do what you have to do. I’m through with you.” Oliver

“That’s fine by me. You are the one who told me not to sell the house and that God had a plan for me here. So did God change his mind or did you because it looks like we are back to selling the house now.”

“Whose fault is that? My father worked this whole life and left me well taken care of. Your father was a lothario and hedonist and look at you. Banging on your drum, chanting and dancing like a monkey. If I hadn’t come along, you would be out on the street. Now you expect me to listen to you.”

“All the temples that my father built for Lord Krishna are still there. My father has over 30 children and grandchildren. Everything your father worked for his entire life to build and collect is gone except for you and you have no children. After you are gone there will be nothing left of you or your father. Your name and your line will vanish from the earth.

“It’s not gone. I just got off the phone with my accountant this morning. My property even burnt to the ground is worth 3 million dollars and the Bane Family Trust is up to $975,000.”

“So what? You say you hated your dad because he hoarded his money and used it to make everyone around him do what he wanted? Now that you have that money and what are you trying to do with it? The same thing.”

“So, what do you think I should do? Just let you be in charge of the money?”

“You say I’m the Angel of the Lord. If you can’t trust me who can you trust? But seriously I can’t tell you what to do because I have never been in your shoes before. There has never been a day when I didn’t have to worry about anyone depending on me but you don’t have to worry about anyone else. So no, I don't know what to tell you. You are the one who told me not to sell the house and said that I had nothing to worry about .”

“Now I’m telling you. You’re fired.”

“What does that even mean?” I asked him.

“It means you can take your dog and pony show on the road. I’ll find somewhere else to live.”

“Ok, You are welcome to stay as long as you want but if that’s what you want to do that’s fine. I just don’t understand. First you tell me that I am the Angel of the Lord. Now you don’t want to hear what I have to say.”

“You are the Angel of the Lord but I’m His lawyer.”

“Again. What does that mean?”

“It means you need to recognize who the one true God is. Krishna was a man. You admitted it yourself.”

“No, I said that even if Krishna was just a man everything he said about living an honorable life is true today. Sanatan Dharma, the science of self-realization doesn’t require a belief in anything. It’s like going to the gym. If you practice it you will evolve spiritually. I don’t have to believe Krishna was God to follow his advice just like you don’t need to believe Jesus was the son of god to follow his commands and love your fellow man.”

“He wasn’t just the Son of God. He was his only son. And that $40,000 came from Him.”

“Again, I’m not going to argue about this because I’m actually living on a cloud of Lord Krishna’s mercy at this point and I really can't look down. I should have crashed and burned a long time ago but I haven’t and I can’t afford to lose faith because I actually go from miracle to miracle like Tarzan swinging from vine to vine. I have to keep looking up to catch the next miracle or I fall. To most people having someone give them 40,000 would be a once in a lifetime thing but it has happened to me before. That’s how I got my first movie made. You are not the first person to come stay with me when they lost everything in a fire either. Nick Nolte’s family came and stayed with us after they lost their home the Malibu Fire. So, have I come to expect miracles? Yes. Do I depend on them? Absolutely.” I admitted.

“I am the miracle you depended on, and I was sent by Yahweh not Krishna.” Oliver insisted.

“That was a miracle and I am eternally grateful to you but did Jesus or Krishna really burn down the entire Pacific Palisades so that you could come live with us and pay our mortgage for a month? Do you really believe that?” I asked.

“That house was falling apart. Jesus burned down the Palisades so that I could be free of my problems, not so I could take on your responsibilities.”

“So Jesus burnt down the Palisades and then he sent you to the wrong house? Is that it?” I asked him.

“I work for the Jew and if you want to chant and dance around you can ask Krishna to pick up the tab. You are dismissed” Oliver said in his best Colonel Kurtz voice.

I paused for a moment not knowing what else to say. During the last month Oliver’s behavior had become increasingly more erratic. When he wasn’t playing the part of God’s chosen one he played the part of different characters from movies like Godfather, Scarface and of course Bane (like his last name) from Batman. He had even told me on a few occasions that he was Lucifer. Now he imagined himself to be Kurtz from “Apocalypse Now”. Maybe he thought that I was Captain Willard coming to kill him.

I had been trying to make sense of all this but I was more confused than ever. I was used to eccentric behavior but this was something else. I was genuinely concerned for Oliver’s mental health, but what really frightened me was that in all the world Oliver was the only person who had helped me. None of my friends or neighbors had offered to help me and the ones that I did ask turned me down flat. I still desperately wanted to believe that Krishna was watching over me and had sent someone to help me and that Oliver was not just crazy. After all, if Oliver was crazy did that mean I was crazy too?

“I wish you all the best.” I said.

I got up and walked out, closing the door quietly behind me, not wanting to excite him further. It has been my experience that just as pretty girls get boys to hang on their every word and then think of themselves as intelligent, the children of inherited wealth get their way so often they think they are inspired when they are actually prone to insanity.

It was such a cliche but Oliver really was turning out to be the kind of Jew that gives Jews a bad name and the kind of Christian that does the same thing. Was this how Christians and Jews really act? Did they really just move somewhere, and then decide the place belonged to them and try to convert the locals? I really was starting to feel like a like an Native American or a Palestinian. It had been over 3 months since Oliver had moved in and as much as I appreciated his help I was getting tired of walking around on my tiptoes waiting for Oliver to make it rain the “manna from heaven” as he had promised. I walked upstairs to tell Lisa what had happened. We both agreed Oliver’s mental state was becoming a concern but what could we do?

Three days later Oliver Bane and Bandit moved out. He never said a word and left all the gifts that I had given him behind. I have tried to contact Oliver but he has never answered my calls or returned my texts. Who knows. Maybe Olivier and Tara reunited and they are raising her baby together or maybe he was off helping some other people he ran into. It would be easy to dismiss Oliver as a madman but I can’t bring myself to do it. Oliver had helped me more than any of my sane friends ever did.

It was early morning the next day and I was busy typing when the phone rang. It was a New York number. Thinking it was probably a telemarketer, I let it go to voicemail. Then I remembered that I had sent a query letter to Jay Shetty’s talent agency asking him to represent me in distributing my first film “Karma to Burn” in India. Jay Shetty is a famous internet influencer/guru who had grown up in the Hare Krishna movement like me and he recently opened a talent agency in Beverly Hills. I had reached out to Mr. Shetty about his agency representing me but did not hear back from him.

I did not hear back from Mr. Shetty and so I called Mr. Shetty’s guru Radhanatha Swami and asked him to help me get in touch with him. Richard Slavin AKA Radhanatha Swami was one of the most influential Hare Krishna gurus in India and had written a book called “The Journey Home.” Radhanatha Swami had stayed in our home in New Vrindavan when he first arrived there as a long haired hippie in the early ‘70 and I had known him for years. Radhanatha Swami’s disciples were very kind and wonderful devotees and I have great respect for him.

Radhanatha Swami was rumored to be one of the co-conspirators involved in the murder of Steven Bryant who was threatening to expose Kirtananda Swami but I truly believe that he thought that he was doing the right thing at the time. All religions have a bit of fanaticism to them and our religion while claiming to be non-violent justifies the killing of blasphemers. Radhanatha Swami survived the legal battle and went on to become one of the most powerful and influential gurus in India. His followers had built hospitals and shelters and fed thousands of people a day and were known for their exemplary behavior. Whatever he may have done in the past, like Robert Dinero in “The Mission” I felt that Radhanatha Swami had more than atoned for any sins that he may have committed. I had called Radhanatha Swami who had a New York phone number and left him a message. Thinking it might be Radhanatha Swami, I decided to call the number back. I picked up the phone and hit the call back button.

“This is Eva Mcann from CNN?” The voice on the other end answered. This was a total surprise. CNN? WTF?

“This is Jason Detamore. What can I do for you?” I replied.

“Was it you I was talking to? Are you part of the group that was protesting last night?”

“No, that wasn’t me. I was here at home.”

“I’m looking to speak to someone from Felons 4 Trump.”

“Felon’s 4 Trump”? I asked. “What do you want to know about it?”

“I got this phone number off the Facebook Page Felons 4 Trump. So, you are not the person I was talking with yesterday?

“No, that wasn’t me.” I answered her.

“Do you own the Facebook Page Felons 4 Trump?”

“Yes, I do.” I replied.

This was a total shock. After Donald Trump had been shot I had designed a bumper sticker of Trump with his fist raised and flipping the bird that read “You Missed. I created a Facebook Page called Felons 4 Trump to sell the “You Missed” merchandise. Using an AI program, I designed a flag that combined the US, Mexican and Canadian flags. All and all I spent about an hour total on the Facebook page Felons 4 Trump. The page didn’t have a single follower or like but now I had a reporter from the CNN Political Desk in Washington, DC on the phone asking me about it.

This absolutely blew my mind. For years I had been trying to get someone in the media to pay attention to my story but they could care less. Now that I made a Facebook Page as a gimmick I had a reporter from CNN on the phone calling me. Unreal. I told Ms. McCann that I had created the Felons 4 Trump page after the State of California had sent the National Guard to raid and close the business we had spent 10 years building after we refused to pay a $100,000 bribe to a former California state senator. I told her that I had reported this to the FBI and that when I first heard that it was someone from CNN on the phone, I thought that maybe someone was finally investigating my case and paying attention. I was wrong. Ms. McCann was not really interested in my story. She was following up on another outfit with a similar name. It seemed like some cosmic joke that after being robbed, kidnapped and having my life’s work taken away from me the only thing that anyone in the media noticed was a stunt I pulled on Facebook to try and sell bumper stickers to Trump supporters. What a colossal joke it all was. I had to laugh.

You Missed Sticker created by Author

I asked myself what the point of writing this book was. After all, I had failed spectacularly at almost everything I had tried. I had been duped by predators and had let them walk all over me. I was facing prison and bankruptcy and so I didn’t feel qualified to give anyone advice on life. Sure a lot of things had happened to me but did I really have anything important to say? That is unless Jesus really had burned down the Pacific Palisades so that Oliver Bane would get me to tell the world the story of the “Angel of the Lord.” and Oliver Bane was gone now. We had quarreled and he vanished without a trace, but I really did feel responsible to fulfill my obligation to finish what I started. I decided to take Ms. McCann's call as a sign. I told myself that all I needed to do was finish the story and the rest would take care of itself.

“The wind it was a-howlin', and the snow was outrageous

We chopped through the night

And we chopped through the dawn

When he died, I was hopin' that it wasn’t contagious

But I made up my mind that I had to go on”

“Isis’”

Bob Dylan

During my time as a football coach at Santa Monica High School I was fortunate enough to coach all three of my sons Jordan, Max and Brady. Over the years we were blessed with a wealth of talent but the 2010 season was probably my favorite year. We were stacked with players and had a great defense and my oldest son Jordan was playing quarterback for me. The absolute worst year was the 2016 season during my son Max’s junior year when we had a very young and inexperienced team.

If that wasn’t bad enough our new head coach tried to run a “No Huddle Offense” and to have the quarterback just call out the next play we were running at the line. This gave the other team a chance to hear what play we were calling before we ran it. By the second series of the game the opposing team’s defenses had most of our play calls figured out and just te-ed off on us blowing up our offense on one play after another. We would actually hear the other team’s coaches tell their players to listen for the call and sure enough they did. The other coaches on our team and even the players begged our new head coach to call the plays in the huddle so we would not give our plays away every time but he refused to listen.

We got absolutely destroyed by everyone that year. God we were awful. We even lost to Beverly Hills. Still I took one great memory from that season that I will never forget. It was the last game of the season against Culver City and we were getting beat 21-0 in the 4th quarter which was actually pretty good for us that year. Then our quarterback threw an interception and it was run back for a touchdown. The player from Culver City who had made the interception came up to me on our sideline and handed the ball to me and pointed at the scoreboard which now read Culver City-26 Visitor -0 with less than 20 seconds left in the game.

I knew the kid. His name was Peirce and had coached him in an All Star game a few years ago. I looked the kid dead in the eyes and said to him with a straight face.

“Serioulsly. Y’'all ain’t that good. The good teams are up on us by 50 by now.” I said. Now the entire Vikings sideline burst out LAUGHING!!

“Yeah man, Grace Brethren was up on us by 30 points at halftime.” our Center Juan Castillo yelled. We had a running clock the whole second half. We were home by 10:00. You guys ain’t all that”

The other Viking players joined in the smack talking.

“Mater Dei beat us by 40 and y'all are scared to even play them. Seriously. It’s true. Y'all really not that good.”

“You know who was good was Valencia. Those guys could play. We do suck this year y'all really not good”

Now the rest of the team joined in calling out the names of the teams who had beat us bad that year.

“Now get out of here Peirce.” I said. Before I call your mom, that is if I still have her number in my phone.”

Now the Vikings tore into Peirce.

“Damn Coach Jason got your mom’s number, Peirce. You better tell your mom to watch out for Mrs. Detamore. She don’t play around!”

Our sideline erupted with laughter. It had been a long time since we had all had a good laugh and now everyone on the sideline was laughing at Peirce. Peirce just looked at us all like we were crazy then turned around at us and ran back to the Culver City sideline.

As we got ready to receive the kickoff, I watched the Viking players high fiving each other like we had just won the game and I thought to myself that this might have been my finest hour as a coach. We hadn't won a single game all season but it is a rare and precious moment that we find the perfect words for the moment and this was just such a moment. As we took the kickoff and the final seconds of the game ticked away and I told myself.

“Damn it Jason, you are one hell of a football coach.”

I coached football in Santa Monica for 15 years and won over 100 games, but I have forgotten most of them. I will never forget that game. I have seen many coaches celebrate with their team in victory and then shun them in defeat. It’s easy to keep it together when things are going your way. Winning solves all your problems for the moment but the cold hard truth is that we all lose in the end. Defeat comes for most of us at some point and even the mightiest of us face death in the end. It is how we face it that defines us. To be able to keep your head when things are not going your way and to laugh at your opponent and yourself in the face of defeat may be the hardest lesson we need to learn.

I was proud of the Vikings. We had lost every single game that year but we hadn’t stopped fighting. Even when we threw that interception at the end of a game when we had no chance of winning I was ok with it. Most teams would have been trying to run the clock out but we were still trying to score. That was without a doubt the most untalented Santa Monica Vikings team I had ever coached but I have never loved a bunch of guys more. They never lost heart.

“Alright. Bring it in. Helmet’s off.” our Center Juan shouted.

The Vikings all took a knee.

“Now how did we get here?” Juan asked.

“Together!” the Vikings shouted back.

“And how are we leaving?” Juan called out.

“Together!” the Vikings shouted, and the sound filled up my heart with pure joy.

“Gentlemen, let's pray.” Juan said.

As the team knelt, their captain Juan led them prayer. The Vikings recited the Lord’s prayer for the last time of the season, uttering the words with passion until it reached a martial crescendo like a war cry.

“Our Father who art in heaven,

Hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses,

As we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation,

But deliver us from evil.”

For thine is the kingdom, and the power,

And the glory, for ever and ever.

Amen.”

I loved that prayer and there was a time when the sound of it struck fear in the hearts of the opposing team. It meant that we were coming for that ass. Not that year.

I will always remember that moment for another reason. Less than six months later our captain and our Center Juan Castillo who led us in prayer that day was shot and killed in the street right off of Pico Blvd here in Santa Monica. Juan had grown up with my son Max and they had played football and baseball together. We felt his family’s loss very deeply. When I went to Juan’s memorial and looked at pictures of him playing football his entire life first with his family and then the Vikings and it reminded me of how much football means to so many families and why coaching is such a sacred duty. Many of my former players have gone on to play college football or into military service and to become police officers and firemen. I have truly been blessed to be part of so many wonderful moments in so many young people's lives and to see them grow into fine young men. Still I will never forget “Juan” whose star burned so bright for only a moment and who we lost for no reason at all. This gift of life is very precious indeed.

At the end of the 2016 season every coach was required to submit an evaluation of the team’s progress to the head coach. I made the mistake of being truthful in my evaluation and the new Head Coach Ramsey Lambert did not ask me to come back and coach at Santa Monica High School the following year. Coach Lambert also decided to take it out on my son Max and did not allow Max to play football for Santa Monica High his senior year. Some people may think that it is no big deal for a kid to not be allowed to play football his senior year. After all, playing football is a privilege not a right. For my son Max who grew up with dyslexia and had trouble making friends outside football, not being allowed to play his senior year by the new effeminate, long haired metrosexual coach with an ax to grind was just too much to take. After his senior year, Max slipped into depression and began smoking weed and drinking alcohol. After numerous threats of suicide he had to be admitted to a mental hospital.

That was the absolute worst time of my life. My beautiful, strong boy had snapped. He was hearing things, he thought people were talking about him and he was not making sense. He was in the hospital but I still worried about him all day. At night I could not sleep thinking about him. Max had had a few concussions playing football and rugby but never wanted to quit playing. I wondered if it was our fault for allowing him to keep playing. I swore to myself that if he got out of the hospital, I would be there for him every day if I had to be.

Max was a big strong kid growing up but he also struggled with dyslexia and autism which can create mental health problems. After spending weeks in the hospital on the medication that he was prescribed Max began to act like himself again. I have never been a fan of the pharmaceutical industry but now I must humbly admit that they have created some amazing treatments for mental illness and I am eternally grateful to them. Max now works as a direct home healthcare provider, helping others with disabilities. Max has grown up to be such a kind and caring person and has made me so proud of the young man he has become.

In 2019, the new head at Santa Monica High School Matt “Captain” Kirk hired me back to coach the freshman team. I will be eternally grateful to Coach Kirk for this opportunity because I had already coached my two older sons Jordan and Max and now I would get to coach my youngest son Brady as a freshman at Samohi. It also made it possible for me to get my 100th win as a coach for the Santa Monica Vikings when we were down by 14 points with 6 minutes left in the 4th quarter and we came back to defeat Culver City on the final play of the final game of the 2020 season.

https://youtu.be/bBFqlzNiTi4?si=9QSys6RKc-lvMlUT

That would be my last year as a coach for Santa Monica High School. Brady would develop kidney disease the next year and fall seriously ill. He would have to stay home from school and give up playing sports. Brady did recover and returned to graduate with his class at Santa Monica High School his senior year. He is now enrolled in the Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology and is studying to be an airplane mechanic.

I was 55 years old and all three of my sons had graduated from Santa Monica High school. My oldest son Jordan attended Loyola Marymount University and was now a hospital administrator at Cedar Sinai Hospital. Max was working in St Clairesville, Ohio as a Direct Healthcare Provider and Brady was studying to be an airplane mechanic. My plan was to live to be 108 years old. That meant that technically I was at the halfway point of my life, if things had gone the way I planned. They had not. Everyday I woke up facing the very real threat of losing our home and going to prison. Oliver was gone now and with him the faintest hope that some magical solution would present itself. We were barely hanging on and unless we thought of something soon I couldn’t see us lasting till the end of the year.

I did have one last Hail Mary Play.

We had filed two civil lawsuits against my former business partner Devon Wheeler and our former landlord Suresh Jain. In 2016 we filed the first complaint Detamore v Wheeler after our partners locked us out of the business. Jay Handal then negotiated the settlement in which Wheeler agreed to give up his share of Grace on Pico Blvd in return for our share of Marina Caregivers at 13453 Beach avenue [Highway Cannabis]. After we dismissed our case against Wheeler and agreed to give up our share of Marina Caregivers, Jain evicted us and then leased the Grace Pico Blvd property back to Wheeler through his step brother Gabriel Dezio.

In 2018 we filed a second lawsuit Detamore v Jain in which we claimed that Jain’s leasing to Wheeler interfered with the 2016 settlement agreement Wheeler and I had made and that leasing to an “illegal dispensary” Jain would cause our business Grace significant economic damage if they were able to somehow obtain a licence and we were forced to close. In 2018 Erba was able to obtain a licence and the DEC Medical request to move to the new Grace location was denied. After 10 years of operation our business was closed, the damage done.

Jain’s attorneys managed to delay the case from going to trial for 7 years from 2016 until 2023. In 2019 they agreed to settle for $500,000 but after the trial date had passed and our business was raided and closed they refused to pay the settlement. By the time our case got to trial our business had been raided and closed for years and we had nothing to show for it but a hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills. Our partner Barret Slome had been murdered and none of the witnesses who had previously agreed to testify were willing to come forward. It would be my word against Jain’s in Judge Mark Epstein's court.

In my lawsuit I claimed that I told Jain to buy the building because it was zoned for cannabis even though the City of Los Angeles claimed it wasn’t. Jain on the other hand denied that he knew me at all and claimed that had bought the building to build an apartment complex. By the time the case went to trial Jain was collecting $50,000 a month from ERBA, had owned the building for 10 years and still hadn’t built an apartment complex on it. Still he claimed that our lawsuit was preventing him from building low income housing on the property. My wife and I were portrayed as drug dealers who got shut out of a business because we were criminals that were now trying to take advantage of Jain, a poor Indian businessman.

Judge Epstein who admitted to knowing Jain’s chief witness Jay Handal then delayed the trial for a week and by the time the case reached the jury for a verdict weeks had gone by since my testimony. The defense even managed to weaponize my brutal honesty against me when I acknowledged that a document had been forged by Devon Wheeler and that I had revealed that to our former partners at Herbalcure Peter Tajera and James Catipay. Somehow that fact that I told the truth about this forgery was used as proof that I was dishonest. The jury had sat through tales of Jain’s poor upbringing and listened to his hard luck stories. Both of Jain’s attorneys had solicited his chief witness, LA Neighborhood Council Member Jay Handal and Jain himself to commit perjury under oath and it had worked. Jain, who was worth more than $50,000,000 was portrayed as a poor Indian immigrant who wanted to build low income housing on the property but could not because I was suing him. If he had to pay this judgment he would never be able to build his apartment complex. It was total bullshit but that was the story they stuck to in front of the jury.

Still after Judge Epstein told Jain “I don’t believe your story for a New York Minute” we thought we had won for sure.

The question put to the Jury was.

Was there a settlement between Detamore and Wheeler?

Did the Defendant know about the settlement?

If the answer is no, stop here.

And they did.

After 7 years of waiting and 3 weeks of trial the jury was back in 10 minutes with a “Not Guilty” verdict and they let Jain walk.

“God help the man who tells the truth in this courtroom.” I remarked.

I could not restrain myself.

Judge Epstein was not pleased. We would recover nothing.

The second case Detamore v Jain for Civil Conspiracy, and the Unjust Enrichment was set for trial in Santa Monica on July 24, 2025. We had already gathered all the evidence from the first trial and I was planning to present only one witness at the second trial, Los Angeles City Attorney Jon Prosser. Prosser, who had charged Jain in criminal court with operating an illegal cannabis business at 12320 Pico Blvd and my plan was to have Prosser explain how Suresh Jain, Jay Handal and Devon Wheeler had evaded detection and prosecution by using straw men and have him explain how ERBA was granted an Adult Use Recreational Cannabis License at the location while operating illegally.

The elephant in the room was that during the trial in Detamore v Wheeler Suresh Jain had admitted to leasing the property back to Devon Wheeler making him the owner of two marijuana businesses a violation of Proposition-D the law governing marijuana businesses at the time. Jain also admitted that he was charging Wheeler $50,000 a month in rent. These two admissions alone should have enough to prove the Civil Conspiracy, and the Unjust Enrichment claims. Under the law I still had a chance to make them pay.

In Detamore v Wheeler Suresh Jain had gone before the jury and claimed that he did not know me and that he didn’t know anything about the settlement that Jay Handal had negotiated in which we gave up the Marina Cultivation in exchange for the Grace Retail location. Jain did admit under oath that he had evicted us and leased the property back to Devon Wheeler through his brother Gabriel Dezio. Dezio had admitted that Jain leased the building to him to conceal Wheeler’s ownership of the business.

Suresh Jain’s attorneys then filed a Motion to Dismiss on the Pleading based on our loss in the previous trial. We filed an Opposition to their Motion Dismiss claiming that the two cases arose from Jain’s interference with two separate businesses. In Detamore v Wheeler we sued Jain for not leasing 12320 Pico Blvd to me after he had promised to do so. In Detamore v Wheeler we sued Jain for interfering with the 2016 Settlement and interfering with our new business at 2340 Centinela Avenue. I also filed a Motion for Summary Judgement based on evidence and the facts that established that the DEC Medical move to 2340 Centinela was denied because it was within 700 feet of another ERBA, another Adult Use Recreational Cannabis Business.

In Detamore v Jain the Defendant Jain filed an Anti SLAPP Motion to Dismiss arguing that Suresh Jain and Jay Handal’s fraudulent behavior in convincing us to give up the Grace Marina Cultivation Operation in return for Devon Wheeler’s share of the Grace Retail Store was protected by “litigation privilege”. In my Opposition to the Motion to Dismiss and Motion for Summary Judgement I argued that in Detamore v Wheeler had sworn under oath in trial that he did not know me and had no knowledge of the 2016 Settlement but in Detamore v Jain he had argued that fraudulently inducing me to give up my share of the business to Wheeler was protected speech under “litigation privileges. Both could not be true and therefore Jain had either obtained a verdict through perjury in Detamore v Wheeler or was committing perjury in Detamore v Jain by claiming the fraudulent settlement was protected speech.

What a lot of people don’t know about the Hail Mary play is that it is not just to have everyone run down the field and try and catch the ball. In a true Hail Mary 3 receivers line up on one side of the field and the Inside Man and the Outside Man run deep while the Target Man in the middle trails them running 5 yards behind them. The Inside and Outside man’s job is not to catch the ball but to draw the defenders deep and to tip the ball back to the Target Man who is following them.

The two lawsuits against Suresh Jain were my Inside and Outside man. The Motion for Summary Judgment was my Target Man. We had taken Suresh Jain to trial and lost the first case Detamore vs Wheeler but the Defendant had his admitted guilt in a previous case and the Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss was before this court improperly. I filed the motion with the court myself and I thought that there was no way Judge Mark Young could rule against me. The facts were before the court as plain as day. Still it was a long pass. The ball was in the air for a long time!

Judge Young first ruled in my favor. The Defendant Jain’s motion to Dismiss on the Pleadings was before the court improperly which was grounds to dismiss motion for the case to proceed to trial. The Defendant’s Motion for Judgement on the Pleadings was before the court improperly and rightfully was denied. The Outside man tipped the ball into the air. The Hail Mary had a chance now!

Judge Young then refused to hear my Motion for Summary Judgment and dismissed the case himself. We had fought the Detamore v Jain case all the way to the California Supreme Court to get it to the trial and the Court had ruled that our remaining causes of action were intact. Our argument that the Motion for Judgement on the Pleadings was before the court improperly was 100% correct. Then without being asked Judge Mark Young, a former prosecutor and head of the Organized Crime Task Force stepped into the shoes of the Defendant as he had previously during the course of the litigation and dismissed the case himself demonstrating his clear and “implicit” against us. What is “implicit bias"? When I say kindergarten school teacher you think female. It was just like my lawyer said before I fired him. “No judge is going to award you what you lost in this case. There is no way this judge is going to award a drug dealer a penny from a landlord and be right. After the years of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars we had spent to get that case to trial our case was dismissed. We would not get a penny.

Even Jain’s attorney Mr. Angwin was ashamed to have won that way. Following the ruling Mr. Angwin took off his tie, folded it and presented it to me, like an officer presenting his sword to the general who had defeated him. It was a surprising thing to do for someone who had taken me behind the woodshed and absolutely kicked my ass but Angwin knew the fix was in. He was a first class gentleman and I will always appreciate the gesture.

My Hail Mary had failed miserably, not in spectacular fashion for all the world to see but with only me alone in the courtroom the sole witness to the crime. I told myself that I hadn’t lost anything that wasn’t gone ago. That was true but it still stung like hell. I had been robbed of everything that I had worked for in broad daylight by predators who took whatever they wanted and then played the victim and there was nothing I could do about it. The legal system in the United States was designed to legitimize the theft of the Native American savages property while at the same time keeping captive African Americans enslaved in subhuman bondage. Along the way it has been perverted by some of the greatest minds in history and evolved into the greatest legal system on the planet when it comes to guaranteeing the rights of citizens and corporations to lie, cheat and steal from each other and to legitimize these activities.

I knew all of this, going into trial at the Santa Monica Courthouse, the same building in which O.J. Simpson got away with murder. Still like a gambler who has lost so many hands in a row that he believes he is now due, I foolishly believed that justice could be found in a court of law. I knew better but still I wanted to believe so badly that I convinced myself that because we were right we would win in the end.

I sat on my front porch rocking back and forth to calm myself down. I took a corncob pipe out of the teak wooden box on the table next to the couch. I opened a small glass jar labeled “Runts” and packed the pipe full of the crispy, sticky, purple dried flowers. I lit the flowers and inhaled. I looked out at the “bloody red sun of fantastic LA” and exhaled. My friends the Crows were returning from their daily foraging and landed in the palm tree that I had helped them defend from the Owls all those years ago.

The Crows of Sunset Park had been fruitful and multiplied under my protection and I was proud to see them thriving. Their flock had grown over the years and I now counted 23 of them. I sat on my front porch and watched the next generation of Crows feeding their chicks and I thought of my boys Jordan and Max who had already left the nest and my youngest son Brady who would be gone soon. There was a time that I thought that Grace would have been a legal cannabis empire by now. I imagined that after working my entire life to legalize cannabis like Joe Kennedy I would retire to a life as a country gentleman and my sons would run for political office. I thought that I would one day leave my sons a fortune, an empire that created generational wealth based upon a commodity but now I had nothing to leave them and it was my own fault. I could not look the other way when I saw Tulsi being abused by my business partner’s son or bend the knee and pay a crooked politician a bribe to “guarantee” my business would get a license. My ex-partner Devon Wheeler who had encouraged his son Chad’s sexual relationship with his aunt Tulsi and had tried to murder me was now partnered with Woody Harrelson and Bill Mahr two icons of the cannabis movement. I who refused to compromise with the predator elite was now like Dan Akroyd in “Trading Places” forced to survive as a common criminal.

Odin, ancient sire of the flock, looked down at me with his one milky eye watching me feeling sorry for myself and showing no mercy. I imagined Odin saying to me.

“You’re still alive and you’ve still got both of your eyes. Suck it up sissy.”

Odin was a cold blooded son of a bitch but he always put things in perspective. My hound dogs Copper and Lola came out onto the porch, hopped up on the couch and sat next to me. They must have sensed that I was feeling low. I sat on the couch petting the dogs and looking out at the Crows and I started to feel a little better.

“So what are my orders from the Dog Star?”

I asked Copper, the hound dog who now stared at me, his eyes boring into the depths of my soul before looking away after finding himself bored there and looking away. I had just written a screenplay “Empire of the Sea” about an advanced microscopic civilization, the Akari, that lived underwater and an empire of dog people, the Cannabi, who ruled the universe from Sirius (the Dog Star) and communicated through telepathy. Sometimes I would ask my dogs questions about what the Cannabi Empire wanted from me. Now Copper just looked at me with his wise old hound dog smile and it made me laugh at myself for thinking of such foolishness. As crazy as it sounded this made as much sense as any of the religious origin stories that I have heard. After all, dogs did live in luxury on this planet and were loved and worshiped by humans. It was true that some dogs were kept in pens and euthanized, but if the Cannabi Empire was an intergalactic fascist empire who believed in Eugenics like the Nazis, maybe humans were just doing the bidding of their imperial masters.

Looking at Copper the hound dog sitting there calmly looking at me, I thought to myself that maybe I could write my way out of this jam. But how? My life was in shambles and I was going deeper into debt all the time. I had never worked a day in my life for anyone else or held a real job my entire adult life. I had 3 felonies on my record for selling marijuana and was facing charges of tax evasion. Still I have always been a glass half full kind of guy. I tried to look on the bright side. I could still run for president of the United States or governor of California. I didn’t expect to win but writing a best-selling book and running for political office would solve all my money problems and winning a political office would solve my legal problems.

For the past 10 years almost nothing had gone according to plan and so maybe it was time for a change. Lisa and I talked it over and decided to put the house up for sale. After Brady graduated from Santa Monica High School in June we would have raised three sons in the home my father and I built before he passed away and that I now call the White Castle. We had defended the White Castle for 21 years but it maybe was time to give it up and move on. We would sell the house, I would publish my book and then run for political office.

Lisa Detamore the best Real Estate Agent in the World.

I might not win right away but I was still young. I had time. Besides, if I really was the “Angel of the Lord” anything was possible. I just needed to come up with a plan to convince people to vote for me to get the word out.

To run for president all I had to do was raise $100,000 in 20 states and then I would be eligible to receive matching public funds. Then I could raise as much money as I wanted for my “campaign” and the government would have to match those donations. If I won, thanks to the Supreme Court I could not be prosecuted or incarcerated while I served in office or while I was running for office again. Even if I didn’t win I could keep all the money left over for “fundraising” and “future campaigns” and use it to pay my legal fees thereby avoiding prosecution indefinitely.

Of course if I ran for public office all the grimy shit from my past would come out but maybe the dirt in my past could be an asset. Most people elected to political office are lawyers but in my opinion drug dealers, thieves and pimps cause far less damage to society than lawyers who pass laws that allow companies to poison our air, our water and our land and pervert the very constitution and the law they are sworn to uphold. Most Americans know that politicians, corporations and foreign governments are lying to them and stealing from them like the partner of a cheating spouse knows the truth. The problem is that every time these crooks get caught stealing they play dumb. It’s like when you catch a thief breaking into your house or your car he will lie and say “This is your house. I’m sorry. I must have got the wrong house or I thought this was my car.” playing dumb.

The public, like the frightened homeowner or the battered spouse, pretends to believe the lie just to keep the peace. It’s complete bullshit but is how so many people get fooled into thinking the government can’t do anything right when that is just not true. If you want proof that the government can work properly, just ask anyone who parks illegally in Los Angeles. You can say what you want about the mayor, LAPD, even the Fire Department but if you park illegally in Los Angeles you will get a ticket and you will be towed. That is proof enough to me that even in the most chaotic, sprawling city in America where the police and other emergency services are overwhelmed the government works just fine if the same rules are applied to everyone equally. The problem is that they are not.

One party in this country claims that good government is the solution and tries to fix it and another party claims government is the problem and then gets elected and tries to prove it. Both sides blame the other but in reality they work for the same people. The Republicans are the Harlem Globetrotters and the Democrats are the Washington Generals. Neither of them work for you. So who do both parties really work for?

“Those who say do not know.

Those who know do not say.”

The Tao De Ching

Most politicians are lawyers and most lawyers are lazy crooks. Just ask any good lawyer. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Washington, DC on K-Street which functions like an open air drug market where bribery and corruption have been legalized by the Supreme Court and rebranded as dark money political contributions and protected industry lobbying. While the news, media and celebrity watching shows like TMZ cover the daily lives of thousands of movie stars, and athletes, not a single news channel follows any one of the 535 politicians who represent Americans around Washington, DC to see who they meet with in a day. Instead Americans are subjected to a constant onslaught of “news and entertainment” which has been weaponized into a tool of psychological warfare to divide them by the special interest groups and the fringe elements that drive the narrative. So who is really behind the curtain?” Who is that the media is talking about when like the great and powerful Wizard of Oz they scream? ”Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

There is absolutely no way a regular citizen with a family to raise and support can be equipped to deal with the truckloads of bullshit that is heaped on them by their government and that overwhelms them with the help of the media. I certainly didn’t want to get involved with politics when I was selling weed. I was trying to be respectable. I have been down in the muck my entire life and I’ve had to know where the bodies are buried to survive. Now they have grown so bold and so accustomed to winning that they operate in broad daylight with no fear of repercussions. We are expected to look the other way and tell ourselves “That’s the way it is.” and that was what I was being asked to do. I had always remained quiet because I did not want to draw attention to myself. Maybe now that I had lost all respectability, I was ready to go into politics.

Rome did not collapse from a powerful republic into an empire overnight. Instead, Rome drifted through centuries of civil wars and conquests with emergency powers granted to rulers and through a series of legal workarounds changed from a republic to an empire. Romans allowed more and more foreigners to be part of the empire and continued to buy expensive luxury goods from the far east. Eventually all the gold from Rome ended up in India and the empire collapsed. We are now witnessing the same thing happening in the United States. The United States of America was formed in opposition to monarchy but since World World War II the United States has become the chief defender of monarchies and dictatorships and now functions as an empire while maintaining the facade as a republic as its wealth is drained. To understand how we got here we need to have a basic understanding of human history.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe entered the “Dark Ages” and was overrun by barbarian tribes and later suffered through the Crusades, the Black Plague and the Inquisition. On the northern frontier of China, Genghis Khan hordes broke through the Great Wall and slaughtered and burned their way to gain control of Northern Asia. In the Arab world and the Middle East and India the Islamic jihad came as death to all who stood in its path and opposed submission to Islamic rule. In Mexico and South America the Mayan, Aztec and Inca empires brought most of Mexico and South America under their rule. The Dark Ages were the Golden Age of Africa. While the rest of the world descended into chaos, Africa entered a golden age of expansion as the kingdoms of Mali and Ashanti were created. So while the rest of the world was in the Dark Ages the empires of the Dark Continent were at the peak of their prowess and prestige. Yin and Yang baby.

Marco Polo returned from China bringing with him maps, paper and gunpowder and Europe rebounded sharply after reaching the tipping point and hitting rock bottom in its thousand-year spiral. Contact with Islamic scholars during Crusades and the invention of the printing press led to an unprecedented diffusion of knowledge in Europe. After centuries of war and pestilence Europeans had built up an immunity to alcohol and diseases, and with the printing press they now had the ability to transmit knowledge from generation to generation. They also had an ace in the hole. Gunpowder. After centuries of relative isolation Europe was ready to share these “gifts” with the rest of the world. Within a century of Columbus’s voyage, maps, sailing vessels, gunpowder and European resistance to disease had allowed the European and and Asian colonial powers to carve up Asia, Africa, North America, South America and Australia into colonies. Can anyone say, “Punctuated Equilibrium?”

Above all the European nations, Great Britain emerged as the dominant colonial power which history tells us was because of Great Britain’s first-rate navy and exceptional diplomatic skills which were both true. What history does not tell us is that it was also a matter of luck. Disease killed far more soldiers than combat in these foreign wars but the English soldiers boiled water and drank tea instead of drinking from the local water supply. While other colonial powers had to drink the water that ran from the local streams and wells and were exposed to such ailments as dysentery, typhoid and cholera, the British soldier drank tea long before it was discovered that boiling water killed the bacteria that caused these diseases. If you have ever been unfortunate enough to have typhoid or dysentery you know this is good luck indeed.

England was the first European power to gain the advantage at sea commissioning and organizing a first-rate navy under Queen Elizabeth 1. In 1588 King Phillip of Spain sent the largest fleet of ships ever assembled against England. The Spanish Armada which was dispatched by Phillip II to subjugate England was destroyed by a freak storm that sank almost half of the warships in the Spanish Armada. From that point on Great Britain never lost its command of the seas. During the American Revolution General Howe's fleet set sail from New York in 1776 for an attack on Philadelphia but were blown off course to the West Indies allowing General Washington’s army to escape and live to fight another 2 years an ultimately win the war. It really is better to be lucky than good.

In 1778 the French king Louis XVI made a decision that would forever alter the course of human history. The Treaty of Alliance brought France into the American Revolution on the side of the American colonists. Up until that time Washington had lost just about every major battle that he fought but had he managed to hold the Continental Army together. Though Washington was not nearly as gifted of a military commander as my ancestor the infamous traitor Benedict Arnold who had won victories at Ticonderoga and Saratoga, his narrow escapes had molded him into the image of a Robin Hood and he was very popular in England. Many intellectuals in England and France sympathized with Washington and the idea of a republic based on John Locke’s Rights of Man. Locke rejected the concept of Divine Right, which asserts that monarchs derive authority from God and argued that legitimate government is based on the consent of the governed. Locke believed in natural rights, including life, liberty, and property, which must be protected by the government. He posited that if a ruler violates these rights, citizens have the right to revolt.

After 5 years of the Revolutionary War, King George of England was having none of it and in the spring of 1781, General Charles Cornwallis landed in Yorktown, Virginia with an army of over 7000 men to unite with General Howe and finally crush Washington once and for all. Lord Cornwallis did not know that the French Commander of the West Indies had left the islands undefended and dispatched his army of 5,500 French troops as well as a fleet of warships commanded by Admiral DeGrasse to come to Washington’s aid. Cornwallis found himself trapped and without naval support and was forced to surrender which effectively brought an end to the Revolutionary War. After this defeat at Yorktown, England abandoned its attempts to regain the 13 Colonies and focused its resources on the conquest of India. The Earl of Cornwallis the loser of the Battle of Yorktown would eventually become the governor of India, and George Washington would become the first President of the United States.

The 13 colonies would not have gained independence if not for France’s help or Britain’s desire to conquer the fabulously wealthy Mogul Empire in India. Britain valued India far more than America's forests, river lakes and mountains. Great Britain’s world domination would begin with its conquest of India, but the myth of the moral superiority of the British Empire would end in India when confronted by Mahatma Gandhi’s “nonviolent protest” movement. After England clawed its way to the very top of the colonial food chain Gandhi then used nonviolent protest to show the English the inferior nature of the conqueror, just as Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had shown it to the Chand Quazi in Bengal in the year 1492. In the United States Dr. Martin Luther King would follow Gandhi and Chaitanya’s example during the civil rights movement employing non-violent protests rather than violence to change hearts and minds.

The wars in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, and Iraq and Iran have demonstrated that the United States is not capable of winning wars of conquest because the price is too high. War has always been hell. The conquerers would burn the cities, rape and pillage, exterminate the males or sell them into slavery and take the women into captivity. Television and the internet has made winning a modern war extremely difficult. It turns out that when people actually see what war is they don’t like it very much. Even the Russians historically known for their brutality have been unable to win in conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine because of pressure to not exterminate their opponents and destroy their cities. Now we find ourselves in an endless succession of limited proxy wars between these neo-colonial powers, the European and Asian monarchs and the corporate empires that dominate the globe.

If the United States did not intervene in World War II, Communism or Fascism would have relegated monarchy to a forgotten institution. Hitler or Stalin would have deposed all the European and Asian monarchs and taken possession of their kingdoms and their colonial possessions. Then along came Uncle Sam and the American taxpayers to save the day. With the help of the United States the European and Asian monarchies emerged on the victorious side of World War II and were preserved along with the fabulous wealth these monarchies had accumulated over centuries of mass murder and international banditry. These royal families that had carved up the entire world before starting two World Wars resulting in the death of over 100,000,000 people but they were not surgically removed from the body and continued to grow in power and influence.

When the former colonies of the victorious European monarchies gained independence they were required to respect the property rights of the former colonial monarchies and their subjects by allowing them to maintain their plantations, and their mineral, oil, gas and property rights in the former colonies if they wanted to participate in the new economy under the US and British protection. The European constitutional monarchies were allowed to keep the wealth they had accumulated from centuries of conquest and slavery. Under the protection of the United States the Asian monarchs have managed to hold on to both their sovereignty and their kingdoms and have even established new monarchies. Communism has collapsed on its own in every nation that the United States did not intervene to stop it. The threat of nuclear war kept the United States from attacking the Soviet Union directly during the Cold War but Communism collapsed on its own in the USSR. The United States and the Soviet Union did fight a series of proxy wars in Korea, Viet Nam, South America and Afghanistan but by the end of the Cold War in 1993, the only places where Communism still survived were China, North Korea, Cuba and North Viet Nam, the very places where the United States had fought wars to actively try to stop it.

In 1953 for the first time in history, the United States of America overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran and established a monarchy and the world is still dealing with the fallout from this decision. After gaining independence from Great Britain the people of Iran elected Mr. Mohamed Mozadeh as Prime Minister. Prime Minister Mozadeh then demanded that the Anglo Persian Oil Company [BP- British Petroleum] submit to an audit. When Anglo Persian Oil refused, Prime Minister Mozzadegh nationalized Iran’s oil industry. The United States and Britain were terrified that Iran would fall to the Soviet Union and that Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States could fall like dominos to Communism. So in 1953 the CIA and MI-6 launched Operation Ajax and overthrew the democratically elected leader of Iran. Kermit Roosevelt Jr., the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt directed the coup from Tehran personally and even threatened to go ahead with the coup without the Shah’s cooperation. With the help of the CIA the Shah was placed back on the throne of Iran until he was overthrown in 1979.

Iran, once the greatest ally of the United States in the Middle East is now America’s sworn enemy and this was not an isolated incident. Since World War II, in the name of halting Communism the United States has supported monarchs, dictators and tyrants all over the world but the monarchies of Europe and Asia have remained in power long after the threat of Communism was neutralized. The Communist states that exist today are a reaction to anti-democratic US foreign policy just as US interference in the Middle East on behalf of the European and Asian monarchies is responsible for the rise of Islamic movements hostile to the US in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.

Meanwhile the United States of America has been left holding the bag supporting 41 of the 43 monarchies in the world. I have compiled a list of these rulers by Divine Right below for the benefit of the American taxpayers who now go to work each day to pay for the defense of their properties. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Jamaica, Antigua, Belize, Bahamas, Jamaica, Grenada, St Lucia, St. Kitts, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon and Grenadine Islands are all monarchies ruled by King Charles of England. In Europe, the kings of Belgium, Denmark, Liechtenstein, Monaco, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Sweden, Norway, Spain and the Pope in the Vatican still sit on their thrones. Though these are constitutional monarchs and their power is limited they still control vast fortunes in farmland, commercial real estate, water, cattle, timber, mining and industrial production in the countries they once colonized. In the Islamic world monarchs’ rule in Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Kuwait, Oman, Quatar and Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates controlling over 50% of the world's oil reserves. In the Far East royal families sit on the thrones of Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Bhutan and Tonga. In Africa, though only Lesotho, Malta and Eswatini remain as monarchs since the fall of the Ethiopian King Haile Salasiah. The African nations of Algeria, Angola, Chad, the Central African Republic, the Congo, Barundi, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Gabon, Libya, Rwanda, Somalia, the Sudan, Uganda, Western Sahara and are all ruled by dictators who will no doubt attempt to establish dynasties. Add in the dictatorships in Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Iraq, Syria, Laos, Tajikistan, Tibet, Turkey and Russia and China and we come to find that less than 25% of the world’s population now lives under full democracy. Long after the fall of communism the United States has maintained the most powerful military organization in the world and contrary to the wishes of its citizens that military has been systematically directed at the enemies of these powerful monarchies. This has required consistent and constant manipulation of the public to convince them to go to war from the day Roosevelt allowed the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor to the day President Trump attacked Iran without provocation in 2026.

I was in India in 1979 when the Shah of Iran fell and the Islamic Revolution took place. I remember when Jimmy Carter ordered the failed attempt to free the US hostages at the embassy in Tehran. The mission ended in total disaster and after that disaster I was glad when Ronald Reagan was elected president. Immediately after Reagan was sworn into office, Iran set the hostages free. I was so proud to be an American on that day, proud to think that we finally had someone in the office who was ready to handle business. Years later I learned that during the campaign, members of the Reagan Administration were already in negotiations with Iran to sell them the American weapons and spare parts they needed for their war against Iraq in exchange for the release of the hostages. “The Ayatollah Khomeni had agreed not to release the hostages until Reagan was elected.” That meant that American citizens who were being held as hostages by foreign adversaries were used as pawns to gain an advantage in a US election. This was my first experience with the calculated psychological manipulation that we as citizens of the Empire of the United States are subjected to on a constant basis. No other nation’s population is subjected to this level of manipulation because the US elections are quite frankly the most important elections on the planet and maybe the only ones that matter anymore. And for good reason. The President of the United States has control of the United States Military and he can do pretty much whatever he likes.

In 1982 the United States Congress passed the Boland Amendment cutting off military aid to the Contras, a rebel army fighting against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. The Sandinistas had overthrown the brutal dictatorship of the Somoza dynasty which had ruled Nicaragua since 1936 with the support of the United States and the United Fruit Company. The Contra rebels were accused of of carrying out acts of terror including kidnappings, mutilations, rapes and mass murders and therefore Congress had cut off all military support to the Contras. President Reagan decided to support the Contras anyway and so under the direction of Colonel Oliver North the Reagan Administration continued to send weapons to the Contras while the CIA allowed operatives under its control to smuggle kilotons of cocaine into the United States.

Most of this cocaine was sold in poor urban neighborhoods fueling the “crack epidemic.” in America’s cities and the exponential growth of the prison population during the 1980s. The “crack epidemic” in the United States was created when the DEA’s sophisticated interdiction and eradication efforts severely restricted the supply of Mexican cannabis entering the US while the CIA had facilitated a massive 50% increase in the supply of cocaine. The introduction of freebased cocaine also known as “crack” in a smokeable form made the drug cheap, convenient and extremely popular. Almost overnight in America’s cities it was hard to find grass but crack was everywhere.

Most people I know that smoked “crack” for the first time did it because they couldn’t find weed. I am sure many of the people that got hooked started that way. I used to wonder if that is what happened to Len Bias. Len Bias had played basketball at the University of Maryland and had just been drafted by my favorite NBA team the Boston Celtics before he overdosed and died after reportedly smoking “crack “ just one time. I was 13 years old at the time and living with my Grandma Jane in Severna Park Maryland. I attended Magothy River Middle School and on Sunday I worshiped at Hope Presbyterian Church where my grandfather the Rev. Allan Moore had been the pastor.

Back then I was glad that President Reagan was doing something about the crack epidemic. Rival drug gangs had armed themselves and competed for territories in America’s cities. At night the sound of sporadic gunfire and sirens made sleeping more than a few hours at a time almost impossible. During the daytime base heads walked along the avenues like zombies alarming the commuters. Restaurants lost millions because people were so coked out they people weren’t eating. Crack vials and bullet shells littered the streets. Blood stains and chalk outlines painted the sidewalks. Police departments found themselves overwhelmed by the violence and and riddled with corruption. The headlines were filled with stories of drive-by shootings, and overdoses. I had no idea what cocaine was or where it was coming from.

In 1986 Congress passed The Anti-Drug Abuse Act which created mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses. Lawmakers on both sides lined up to throw the book at drug dealers and passed the bill creating mandatory minimums for drug offenses in record time before the election and Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law. Then in September of 1989 President Bush came on television from the White House and announced that the United States had declared “War on Drugs” and that drug dealers would be caught, arrested, prosecuted and incarcerated. Back then I didn’t even know what grass/ganja was. I definitely had no idea that I, like millions of other Americans, would be sent to prison under this law a few years later.

It actually turned out that Len Bias did not smoke crack for the first time and did not die from taking one hit. That was the official story we were told “for our own good” and it was widely accepted as fact. The United States government has repeatedly denied that it was responsible for creating the “crack epidemic”but it has been proven that the Reagan Administration sold weapons to Iran and funneled the profits from money to the Contras and at least looked the other way while the supply of cocaine in the United States doubled. CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz even testified before a House congressional committee.

“As I said earlier, we have found no evidence in the course of this lengthy investigation of any conspiracy by CIA or its employees to bring drugs into the United States. However, during the Contra era, CIA worked with a variety of people to support the Contra program. These included CIA assets, pilots who ferried supplies to the Contras, as well as Contra officials and others. Let me be frank about what we are finding. There are instances where CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking activity or take action to resolve the allegations. “ Source - Wikipedia.

Translation. It happened but there is nothing anyone can do about it now. Now that would be believable if it only happened once. Burn me once. Shame on you. It was not just once though. After first allowing the crack epidemic to take hold and decimate the black population in our cities during the 1980's the Drug Enforcement Agency [DEA] then looked the other way as pharmaceutical companies like Purdue and Lilly created generations of opiate addicts in America’s Heartland including my home state of West Virginia. States like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee were especially hard hit by the recession of the 80’s and NAFTA in the 90’s but the DEA continued to focus its efforts on the low hanging fruit of cannabis eradication and interdiction while doing almost nothing to slow the spread of legal but deadly narcotics like oxycodone (hillbilly heroin).

My brother-in-law was 16 years old when he was first prescribed oxycontin for a football injury. By the time he was 18 years old Oxycontin, Prozac and Adderall were being fed to America’s youth like tick-tacks for halitosis and opioid addiction was out of control. During one 6 year period of time 780 million pills of oxycodone were shipped to West Virginia, 433 pills for every one of the 1.8 million people in the state. All of this was completely legal and the DEA did nothing to stop it while actively pursuing medical marijuana cultivation and transportation even in states where the voters had legalized cannabis. Millions of Americans have become addicted to these opiates and millions more continue to rely on Suboxone, a pharmaceutical substitute to treat their addiction. In some parts of the United States almost 20% of the population is addicted to a combination of these opioids. That is 1 out of 5 people. In 2025 Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family were ordered to pay 7.4 billion in damages for their contributions to the addiction of generations of Americans. While millions of Americans have spent decades in prison for cannabis, not one person from Purdue Pharma or a single member of the Sackler family has spent a day in prison. In 2016, Harper’s Magazine revealed that the “war on drugs” was concocted as part of Richard Nixon’s broader “war” against Black activists and opposition to the Vietnam War. Nixon had commissioned the Shafer Commission to study cannabis which had recommended federal decriminalization of marijuana but Nixon instead increased penalties and began the draconian enforcement of new laws.

White House Council John Ehrlichman stated in the interview.

“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Richard Nixon may have invented the War on Drugs as a political tool but every president Republican and Democrat alike has found it useful for one reason or another. Under Ronald Reagan. George Bush and Bill Clinton those policies continued and the skyrocketing cost of the War on Drugs is now impossible to ignore: billions of dollars wasted, countless lives lost on the streets of our cities, and millions of lives destroyed by draconian punishment that doesn’t end at the prison gate but in the disenfranchisement of millions of American voters because of a felony conviction. The deliberate campaign of defamation, of poisoning and incarceration of Ganja prisoners should be treated as a war crime. President Nixon knew that he was misleading the public and waged a private war with the express intent of targeting his political opponents. This war was continued by his successors for decades for political expediency.

When we see these examples of government inaction and uneven application of the laws as unrelated events it is easy to mistake them for incompetence and not corruption. As I said before when you catch a thief stealing they pretend that it is a mistake or an accident.

When we see this as evidence that in the United States we have created our own aristocracy that is not subject to the rule of law in the same manner that medieval dukes and barons were not subject to “common law” it is difficult to accept that these are just mistakes or accidents. If you see them as examples of psychological warfare waged against American citizens who were perceived as potential threats such as young black men empowering themselves in the 1980s and radicalized rural whites disillusioned with the loss of manufacturing jobs arming themselves and joining militias in the 1990s then what? Who would actually do such and who could possibly benefit from keeping Americans so weak and divided?

If all men are created equal then there is no Divine Right to rule and therefore monarchy is the antithesis of what it is to be an American. If Franklin Roosevelt allowed the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor in order to convince Americans to join the war against Japan and Germany on the because he knew that Hitler was killing 50,000 Jews a day and had to be stopped, does that make him wrong? After World War II, the Soviet Union abolished all monarchies under the territories that it captured from Germany. The United States was in a position to abolish the monarchy as an institution as the Soviet Union did but did not. Even after these European and Asian monarchs had carved up the entire world through centuries of conquest and slavery and had caused 2 World Wars resulting in the deaths of over 100,000,000 people these predators were allowed to remain on their thrones. Most predators are not creepy old men flashing little girls in the park. They are charismatic and powerful people who get away with rape and murder because no one suspects them or stops them when they do find out the truth. Somehow the United States of America has fallen under the sway of these European and Asian monarchies who, let's be completely fair, have all demonstrated their rapine tendencies . Beguiled by their predatory charm America has now become the theatre and the instrument of wealthy and powerful families led by Great Britain and and conducts itself as an empire on their behalf while maintaining the illusion of the republic for the public at home.

Even more disturbing is the growing power of an unscrupulous and mercenary clergy and their sycophantic and “unholy alliance” with this nouveau-royalty. This “unholy alliance” has its nexus in the fanatical belief that it is the church’s God-given right to not pay taxes. Churches were originally granted tax-exempt status because the state did not provide social services and relief aid and the churches did. Following the Great Depression, the advent of Social Security, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (welfare), Food Stamps, Medicare and Medicaid shifted all these burdens from the Church to the State. Still the Churches retained their tax-exempt status but having been freed from the responsibility of caring for their poor in their flock they have continued to acquire wealth and properties and support their extravagant lifestyles like cardinals breaking away from the Holy Roman Empire. Jesus said that “It is easier for a rich man to enter the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” but you will not hear that message in the church today.

The United States government’s assumption of all the liabilities of the Church while refusing to tax this estate is much akin to the assumption of the responsibilities of European and Asian monarchs in these kingdoms while allowing them to retain their wealth and property. The gospel of wealth and prosperity has utterly polluted our churches just as our tolerance for monarchy and dictatorship has polluted our government. To prevent the emergence of a permanent aristocracy in the United States the wealthy citizens of the United States were once taxed at a very high rate as much as 70%. To avoid paying these taxes the wealthy would spend their money on paying their employees high wages, improving and maintaining their businesses and funding the arts and other charities to keep the government from taking most of their profits. Robber Barons like Carnegie and Rockeffeler spent the first half of their lives building their fortunes and the rest of it giving it away so that the government could not take it from their children in inheritance taxes designed to protect against the emergence of a permanent aristocracy.

In 1981 Ronald Reagan cut these taxes on the wealthy to stimulate economic growth. The theory was that if the government cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans they would use the money to create more jobs and the money would “trickle down” to the middle class and back into the economy. What actually happened was that once these tax rates on the wealthy were cut from 70% to 28%, the United States was forced to borrow almost 10% of its annual budget to cover its expenses and increased military spending.

The wealthiest taxpayers did not invest in job creation but instead purchased tax exempt United States Treasury Bills allowing them to lend the money they should have paid in taxes back to the US government and collect tax free interest payments from the American taxpayers. This created a permanent aristocracy who could now collect interest from the American public while contributing almost nothing. They also borrowed money against the value of these Treasury bonds and bought back shares of their own companies which pushed their own stock prices up and increased their own paper wealth which could not be taxed unless they sold these securities. The national debt grew from $985 billion in 1981 to $2.9 trillion in 1989. Since 1981 the national debt of the United States has grown from less than $1 trillion dollars to $40 trillion dollars. The United States taxpayers have paid $20 trillion in tax free interest to bond holders and Wall Street bailouts since then. That is 60 trillion in total spending that the United States has borrowed and spent since 1981. Remember that 60 trillion number. It is going to come up again.

In that time total dollar value (market cap) of all companies in the S&P 500 the largest 500 companies has grown from 1.1 trillion in 1981 to approximately $61.1 trillion as of late 2025 for a gain of, you guessed it, $60 trillion dollars. Since 1981, the wealth of the top 1% in the United States has grown dramatically, capturing a significantly larger portion of the nation's total net worth. As of the third quarter of 2025, the top 1% collectively held a record $55 trillion of the $60.1 trillion dollars in the S&P 500. Since 1989 their wealth has increased from approximately $4.7 trillion to $55 trillion—a growth of over 1,000%. Forensic accounting research indicates that between 1981 and 2021, an estimated $50 trillion in wealth was effectively transferred from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1% due to shifting tax policies and the resulting growth of the stock market. So when you hear people bragging about their $401k’s keep in mind they are tooting their horn about their share of 0.89% of the index while the other 99% is held by the 1%.

Now they are squeezing us all again. Between 2022 and 2025 the United States saw the sharpest increase in interest rates in history as interest costs on the National Debt doubled from $476 billion in 2022 to an estimated $970 billion in 2025. The US will spend more than $1 trillion dollars in interest payments in 2026. 1 out of 5 dollars that Americans now pay in federal income taxes goes to pay interest to these bondholders. So of course they have enough money to buy the media, to manipulate public opinion, depress voter turnout and to buy politicians, judges and even elections in order to prevent this from changing.

People may try and argue that I’m simplifying things but only because they are trying to cloud the issue. What I am trying to say is actually pretty simple. Just follow the money. The growth of the S&P 500 since 1981 is almost dollar for dollar what the United States has borrowed, spent and paid in interest since then. People may argue that the government wastes money but that money doesn’t disappear. It just changes hands. Tax cuts do create economic growth. They increase the amount that the government deficit spends creating debt thereby transferring wealth of the republic from the taxpayers to the bondholders. Anyone who tells you differently is pissing on your leg and telling you it’s raining. Remember when you catch a thief stealing they also act like you are dumb making a mistake too.

I recently had a chance to watch Ken Burn’s “The American Revolution.” It was a brilliant portrayal of the most important time in American history up until now. America was forged by the most intelligent and enterprising men of their time in opposition to the tyrannical rule of the most cunning and ruthless empire in the world. It was an existential battle between those who believed that all men were created equal and those who believed that God had ordained that a king should rule them. When General Washington took the city of New York 4 out of every 5 families were Loyalists who supported King George.

During the American Revolution only 1 out of 3 people supported independence. 1 out of 3 people supported King George and 1 out of 3 could care less. Today 1 out 3 people in the United States vote Republican, 1 out of 3 vote Democrat and 1 out of 3 people do not vote. In our 2 party system the two sides are split so evenly that the only place to get votes is with the people who don’t care, the so-called Independents. So both parties chase the votes of the 1 out of 3 people who don’t care and that is who is deciding our elections. That is who is running the United States right now. The 1 out of 3 people who absolutely do not give a fuck and it shows.

The United States is listed as a flawed democracy under which 39% of the world’s population lives. For all the political outrage we see in the media the US has unusually low levels of participation in elections. In a flawed democracy elections are free and fair, civil liberties are respected but these nations struggle with:

1. Low levels of participation in politics.

2. Maintaining a functional government.

3. Politicians subvert the will of the majority due to foreign influence.

I think this is a pretty fair assessment of democracy in the US. I realize that we are jumping around a lot here and now I have gone on quite a tangent here but if you endure with me for a short while longer you will see that there is a point to all this if you are an American.

Despite everything that has happened to me I still believe that the United States of America is the last and greatest hope for humanity. Abraham Lincoln found himself in this same struggle as he fought to rid the Republic of the United States of the last vestiges of the Divine Right of one man to have dominion over another. After the terrible victory at Gettysburg Lincoln delivered a speech that will forever enshrine the highest ideals of this Republic and inspire us all to reach the sacred ideal for which it stands.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. —and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln

Never was there a more powerful speech delivered when the fate of the republic was still in doubt. Unfortunately, what we once believed was the most powerful force for good on planet Earth is no longer “a government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Today the United States Government’s primary function often appears to be to suborn and thwart the will of the majority of the citizens of Planet Earth, suborning democracy in favor of monarchies, borrowing money for wars while neglecting the citizens at home. The “thousand points of light” flicker anemically like some opiate induced hallucination in the misty valley below and there is no “shining beacon on the hill”. To the rest of the world we are savages dancing around the smoking embers of a once great bonfire beating our chests and shouting our own praises while the fire dies out and the darkness closes in around us. Our leaders, the people we have entrusted with keeping this eternal flame burning appear to be incapable of even gathering firewood and this is no accident.

The Author smoking a joint on Stonewall Jackson’s gravestone. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

What great men do common men follow? The Achilles heel of a republic is that the leaders reflect the public consciousness. This works well if the republic promotes the well-being of the majority of citizens by providing the essential components of a healthy, educated, economically stable and independent electorate. When the electorate is the constant target of sophisticated and uninterrupted psychological manipulation by factions that transform conflicting ideas into divided tribes unwilling to compromise, the machine of the republic breaks down. Power alternates between the party in power and the party out of power, each side refusing to cooperate on any meaningful legislation out of fear of giving the other side a victory. Each side does as little as possible while in power and lays the blame on the other thereby avoiding accountability to their own constituents. This has not gone unnoticed by the populace, half of whom have checked out of the electoral process entirely refusing to participate in the charade.

So what does that have to do with you?

The United States has 350 million people, about 4% of the world’s population. About half of all Americans vote so only 2% of the world’s population votes to choose the next President of the United States. The presidential election is always very close, again splitting the electorate in half. The domestic power of the President of the United States is limited by congress but as the Commander in Chief the president has control over the most powerful war machine ever known to man and almost unlimited discretion to overthrow regimes through both military and covert action. For all of our progress mankind has not evolved so much from the days in the cave. If you look around, the guy with the big stick is still in charge. The voters of the United States, just 1.5% of the world’s population, decide who has the biggest stick in the world but 1 out of 2 Americans will tell you they don’t vote because “Their vote doesn’t count.” In the movie “The Usual Suspects” Verbal Kint AKA Kaiser Soze tells Detective Kujan

“The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing people he doesn’t exist.” The greatest trick anyone ever played was convincing the American public that their vote doesn’t count so that more than half of them don’t vote at all. Which brings me to the point of this story which is you. If you are an American you are part of the 2% of the world’s population whose voice actually counts for something but I hear people tell me all the time that they don’t vote because it doesn’t matter. It matters to everyone on Planet Earth. Unfortunately we haven’t evolved as a species much since our days in the cave and the guy with the “big stick” which is us is still in charge. America may have paused, staggered and even gone backwards along the way but its path has been clear since Benjamin Franklin uttered the words. “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, hang separately.”

The United States formed as a republic but it has behaved like an empire since the beginning. Just ask the Native Americans. Alexander said that empires grow or they shrink and history has taught us that where one empire ends another begins. The Sumerians, Spartans and the Persians all built walls that fell eventually. The Chinese built the Great Wall to stop the Mongols but the Mongols eventually overran them. The Romans built Hadrian’s wall to keep out the Northern British tribes but within a few hundred years Britain had emerged as the greatest empire in the world. The Russians built the Berlin Wall but it was America who emerged as the greatest empire in history. So when I hear people talk about building a wall on America’s southern border I worry about America’s future. Do we really want Mexico to become the next great empire?

So what can we do? What is the next step for us as citizens of the last and greatest hope of humanity, the Republic of the United States of America if we want to avoid becoming another failed empire. The first step is becoming a solvent nation not dependent on bondholders to decide policy. This is a problem that no one has been able to solve and so I decided to use Artificial Intelligence to solve the problem for us. I asked Chat GPT “How can the United States balance the budget, provide universal single-payer healthcare and eliminate net national debt within 30 years and this is what it created.

The American Fiscal Regeneration Act (AFRA) is a comprehensive policy framework designed to address three of the most persistent structural challenges in the United States economy: the high cost and uneven accessibility of healthcare, chronic federal budget deficits, and the long-term burden of national debt. Rather than approaching these issues independently, AFRA proposes an integrated solution that aligns healthcare reform, tax modernization, and national investment strategy within a single system.

At its core, AFRA establishes a universal single-payer healthcare program—the United States Health Security Program (USHSP)—which replaces the current fragmented mix of private insurance, public programs, and administrative intermediaries. By consolidating billing systems and eliminating duplicative insurance overhead, the model aims to reduce administrative waste—estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars annually—while extending comprehensive coverage to all citizens and lawful residents. The result is a system that lowers total national healthcare expenditures while improving access and financial predictability for households.

To support this transformation, AFRA introduces a restructured federal revenue model designed to reflect the modern distribution of wealth and capital. The framework shifts a portion of the tax burden away from wage income and toward large concentrations of financial assets, unrealized capital gains, corporate profits, and inherited wealth. Additional revenue is generated through the capture of economic rents from domestically produced natural resources, the taxation of revenue-generating institutional entities that currently fall outside standard tax structures, and the redirection of savings achieved through healthcare system efficiencies. Modest reforms to the taxation of higher-income Social Security benefits and new lending activities within the Social Security Trust Fund further contribute to fiscal capacity.

A central component of AFRA is the creation of a United States Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF), capitalized through a combination of public revenue streams and equity-based contributions tied to large-scale financial holdings. The fund is designed to invest globally, generating long-term returns that compound over time. In parallel, Social Security is repositioned as a more active financial institution, authorized to issue low-interest loans for single-family home purchases, thereby both expanding access to homeownership and generating stable returns for the Sovereign Wealth Fund.

Over a multi-decade horizon, these mechanisms are intended to shift the federal government from a position of persistent borrowing to one of asset accumulation. As annual deficits are eliminated and replaced with structural balance and periodic surpluses, and as the Sovereign Wealth Fund grows, national financial assets are projected to rise relative to federal liabilities. Within approximately thirty years, AFRA envisions a scenario in which the United States eliminates its net public debt—either by directly retiring outstanding obligations or by offsetting them with sovereign assets.

In this sense, AFRA is less a single policy intervention than a systemic reconfiguration of national finance. It replaces fragmentation with consolidation, short-term deficit management with long-term asset strategy, and reliance on private intermediaries with public-scale efficiency. Whether evaluated as an economic model or a policy proposal, its defining premise is that fiscal sustainability and broad-based economic security can be achieved not through contraction, but through structural realignment of how the nation generates, allocates, and grows its resources.

AFRA transforms U.S. fiscal policy from debt accumulation to national wealth creation. This would require the nationalization of all oil and gas royalties as well as taxation of churches who operate for profit but the benefits far outweigh the alternative which is bankruptcy and insolvency. It is important to note that coal rights are already owned by companies and not the people who own the land. They know this is the only way things will work out for America and they know that only you can make this happen and this is why you are being manipulated every day.

THE AMERICAN FISCAL REGENERATION ACT (AFRA)

PURPOSE

AFRA restructures U.S. healthcare, taxation, and national capital formation to:

Provide universal single-payer healthcare

Balance the federal budget

Eliminate net national debt within 30 years

Establish long-term national wealth through a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF)

1. UNIVERSAL SINGLE-PAYER HEALTHCARE

Establishes United States Health Security Program (USHSP)

Covers all citizens and lawful residents

Replaces private insurance, Medicaid, ACA, Veterans Administration and redundant federal systems

Financials

Current system cost: ~$4.3T/year

Net federal cost: ~$2.6–2.7T/year

Administrative savings: ~$0.30T/year

Outcome: Universal coverage at lower total system cost

2. REVENUE FRAMEWORK

Annual Fiscal Capacity

$1.6T — Wealth & Unrealized Gains Levy

$1.0T — Corporate & High-Earner Tax Reform

$0.25T — Estate & Inheritance Tax Modernization

$0.20T — Nationalized Oil & Gas Revenues

$0.06T — Taxation of Churches (revenue-generating/political only)

$0.30T — Healthcare Administrative Efficiency Savings

$0.15T — Flat-Rate Social Security Benefit Tax (above threshold)

$0.10T — Social Security Home Lending Program

Total Fiscal Capacity

≈ $3.66–3.70T annually

3. FEDERAL BUDGET BALANCE

Annual Federal Need

Structural deficit: ~$1.8T

Net single-payer cost: ~$2.7T

Total need: ~$4.5T

Gap

Revenue: ~$3.66T

Remaining gap: ~$0.84T

Gap Closure

Federal price controls (healthcare + procurement)

Phased implementation

Targeted spending restraint

Economic growth from increased household liquidity

Balanced Budget Timeline: Year 4–5

4. SOCIAL SECURITY MODERNIZATION

Revenue Additions

$0.15T — Benefit taxation (upper income only)

$0.10T — Home lending program returns

Structural Reform

Trust Fund becomes active capital allocator

Issues low-interest single-family home loans

Outcome: Permanent solvency + asset generation

5. U.S. SOVEREIGN WEALTH FUND (SWF)

Structure

Annual contribution: ~$1.0T

Capitalized via equity transfers + fiscal surplus

Globally diversified investment portfolio

Return Assumption

~4% real annual return

Projected Value

Year 10: $12–14T

Year 20: $30–35T

Year 30: $55–60T

6. DEBT ELIMINATION MODEL

Starting Point

Current federal debt: ~$38T

Interest rate assumption: ~4%

Strategy

Balance budget (Years 4–5)

Eliminate new borrowing

Build national assets via SWF

Apply surpluses to stabilize debt growth

Outcome by Year 30

SWF assets: ~$55–60T

Federal debt: ~$40–60T (range)

7. ECONOMIC MECHANISM (CORE LOGIC)

AFRA operates through three aligned systems:

Cost Compression

Healthcare consolidation reduces system inefficiency

Revenue Realignment

Tax base shifts from wages to wealth, capital, and rents

Asset Accumulation

SWF compounds national wealth over time

8. HOUSEHOLD IMPACT

No premiums, deductibles, or surprise medical bills

Increased disposable income

Expanded homeownership access via Social Security lending

Stable retirement benefits

9. MACROECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION

AFRA transitions the United States from:

Deficit-dependent → Structurally balanced

Consumption-based → Asset-based

Debtor nation → Net asset holder

10. FINAL OUTCOME (30-YEAR HORIZON)

Universal healthcare fully implemented

Federal budget structurally balanced

Social Security permanently solvent

Sovereign Wealth Fund exceeds $50T

Net national debt eliminated

AFRA transforms U.S. fiscal policy from debt accumulation to national wealth creation.

So you have 2 choices. Sink or swim. I choose to swim. When my Grandma Jane passed away after raising 9 children and God knows how many grandchildren she had one request. She loved the song” I Hope you Dance” by Lee Ann Womack and requested that it be played at her funeral. Now I ask you to do the same thing that my Grandma Jane asked all of us when she passed away. You can turn the other way and ignore what you have known for so long but there will come a time when you know what you have to do. I hope that when that time comes and that you get the chance to sit it out or dance I hope you dance.

I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean

Whenever one door closes, I hope one more opens

Promise me that you'll give faith a fighting chance

And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance

Dance

I hope you dance

I hope you dance (Time is a wheel in constant motion always)

I hope you dance (Rolling us along)

I hope you dance (Tell me, who wants to look back on their years and wonder)

I hope you dance (Where those years have gone?)

I hope you dance.

The next morning I got a call from my public defender Jim Gates.

“Mr. Detamore I sent you an email and I want you to read it when you get a chance but I’ve got some bad news on the search warrant.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“I did all the research to file the motion to get the search warrant thrown out and here is the thing. Now I know you are passionate about this, and I know that during the raid less than 20 pounds of cannabis were seized but the CDTFA Investigator Jason Nakano had put down on the warrant application that 420 pounds of untaxed cannabis products had been seized to get a warrant to search your financial records but all they have to do is tell the judge that it was an error and they are going to let the search stand.”

“So what are you trying to tell me?” I asked.

“I’m telling you that I’m not going to file a motion that is going to just be thrown out. The search stays and all the evidence that they got because of it is going to be admitted.”

“Then I guess we go to trial and show them the partnership agreement with Barret and I and they have it on record that we paid our share of the taxes.”

“If it comes to that, I doubt it will. That’s why I wanted you to read the email. I don’t think they can get a conviction on this. They found a copy of the partnership agreement in the records and records of your tax payment and payments from you to Barret that he did not pay taxes on, so I think that’s enough for the jury to find reasonable doubt.”

“That is great news.”

“I don’t want to be too optimistic, but I wanted to tell you I do believe you.”

“Thank you because I am telling the truth.”

“Your next appearance is on May-5. I can appear for you if you want.”

“Thank you.”

“Have a good day Mr. Detamore.”

“Thank you Mr. Gates. I’m writing a book about this and I’m going to put you in it now. Let’s go”

“Well thank you. Bye now.”

“Vaya con Dios Amigo”

I looked out at the morning sky and breathed a huge sigh of relief. I knew I was innocent, and it was not over, but I also knew that if a public defender thinks the prosecution’s case doesn’t look good then it’s bad. As soon as we sold the house I would have the money to finance my run for political office. If not I would go back to smuggling Ganja.

“Vine to vine I go from miracle to miracle just like Tarzan I know.”

The Crows of Sunset Park now took flight from the Palm Tree I had defended against the Owls so many years ago. They knew that I was about to leave them but I had been their patron for over 20 years. I had watched them grow but now I could no longer protect them. It was time to say goodbye. I had bigger fish to fry.