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…Continued from: Empty: The story of a boat, an abandoned town and $17 million worth of pot, pt. 1

Night is falling. The tugboat towing the Saja is slowing down. They’re 22 miles up the Columbia River, and in the dim light the crew can see a forest of pilings sticking out of the water on the south shore. This is a ghost town. This is Bradwood Landing.

Bradwood Landing, 1954. Photo via Clatsop County Board of Commissioners.

For over 100 years, Bradwood Landing was a teeming, isolated knot of timber industrialism. Stacks of cut wood lines the docks. New ships arrive every two days. The millpond is choked with logs. The town is filled with hundreds of men. In 1962 a plan to expand the mill fails and the town is abandoned. By 1985 all that remains are rotting pilings sticking out of the river — that, and on a few of those pilings, a brand new dock. The Saja ties up. The tugboat leaves. Silence descends.

Almost 20 years later, an Texas company called NorthernStar Natural Gas will propose tearing out those pilings and building a plant that will turn liquefied natural gas into normal gas, which the company will then pipe to the rest of Oregon. A massive project. A genuine need for natural gas. But there are some in the state who say there are environmental concerns and safety concerns and the company will spend countless dollars fighting a public relations battle that stretches from the empty banks of Bradwood Landing to the desk of a state governor intent on fighting the project.

NorthernStar Natural Gas' artist rendition of the plant. Photo via NorthernStar Natural Gas.

I’ve driven the old road from the highway down to Bradwood Landing several times. It twists and turns, and aside from the road, a locked gate and a rusted line of railroad tracks, the land shows very little signs of human contact. The paved road stops at the gate. On the other side it turns to gravel and leads to an empty beach. And to a half-buried metal warehouse the smuggling crew built in the days before the Saja arrived. When the ship ties up at the dock, a crew of eight men, several pickup trucks and two rented moving vans are waiting for them. Night has fallen. In one of the trucks is a generator and lights. But they don’t take them out.

I know why. I’ve stood in the middle of the old pilings at dusk on a low tide. On the far shore, lights twinkle and reflect off the river. It’s a home, one with a broad view of what’s happening on the river. Back then there is only one home, one  twinkling light. But the men aren’t taking chances. Instead of the generator and the lights, they line the dock with flashlights and go to work. They transfer burlap coffee sacks filled with bales of marijuana into the pickup trucks. The trucks drive down the dock to the moving vans in the warehouse. Pound after pound; ton after ton; the same weight as about 12 full-size pickup trucks. And when they’re finished, the trucks sit in the warehouse, waiting for daylight to drive away.

Bradwood Landing, 2008. Photo by Abraham Hyatt.

It takes the feds 2 1/2 years and many almost-misses to build a case against the men behind the Saja. Investigators are able tie together three different smuggling operations in Boston, Miami and Bradwood Landing. Ten men from five countries are indicted; most are caught. Acquilino gets 10 years; his bother gets six. The South Korean captain disappears as does the Spaniard who bought the Saja in the Canary Islands. Ownership of the Saja is never determined and no one comes forward to claim it. One of Arnold’s clients becomes a government witness and is in the Federal Witness Protection Program. One man shoots himself in the chest and dies. Goldman gets 15 years and then sleeps with a member of the prosecution in hopes of getting a reduction in sentence. He goes to jail just the same.

But that’s long after the Saja ties up at Bradwood Landing. As the sun rises on May 29, the trucks drive off to a 40-acre plot of land the crew has purchased in the hills west of Hillsboro, Ore. In the days leading up to May 28, the men had monitored the local highways, talking back and forth on hand-held radios, analyzing traffic. It was a needless precaution. The trucks arrive at the property without problem and the buying and selling begins.

Buyers around the country phone in an order to a motel room near Tigard, about 15 miles southeast of Hillsboro. Price: $345 a pound. A representative of the buyer shows up at the hotel and pays half the money up front. Then they drive to Hillsboro and pay the rest of the money. The property has been outfitted with a loading bay so that buyers can use semi trucks if needed. In a single day, somewhere around $17.2 million changes hands. And within a few days, everyone is gone. The feds are years too late in stopping the biggest drug deal in Oregon history. The marijuana disappears into thousands, maybe tens of thousands of hands across America. The smugglers make millions and then have years to spend it. The Saja operation is, in many ways, a massive success.

On May 31, three days after she landed in Astoria, the Saja is spotted at Bradwood Landing. By the time the Customs Service, Coast Guard, National Marine Fisheries and all their dogs and guns board the boat, the Saja sits empty and listing, gently rocking against pilings set by long-dead loggers and mill men.

Bradwood Landing today. The warehouse the smugglers built -- visible in the center of the photo -- is nearly covered in sand from a dredging operation that took place a few years later in the Columbia River. Photo via the Clatsop County Board of Commissioners.

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Sources:
United States of America v. David Carlton Arnold and Armando Coto, 117 F.3d 1308 (11th Cir. 1997).
Interviews with Paul Benoit, City of Astoria, city manager; Charles Deister, NorthernStar Natural Gas, spokesman.
“Phase I Environmental Site Assessment – Revised.” Prepared by AMEC Earth & Environmental, Inc. for NorthernStar Natural Gas, August, 2005
“Summary of Bradwood Industrial Site,” presentation to Clatsop County Board of Commissioners by NorthernStar Natural Gas, Oct 19, 2007.
The Oregonian, August 4, 1988, “10 Face Federal Charges In ‘85 Smuggling Scheme”
The Oregonian, August 17, 1988, “Investigators Detail Big Marijuana-Smuggling Operation”
The Oregonian, February 19, 1989, “Drug Case Figure Gets Protection”
The Oregonian, September 12, 1989, “Drug Smuggler Admits To Charges”
The Oregonian, March 20, 1990, “New Yorker Draws 15-Year Term In Record Oregon Narcotics Case”

The captain is South Korean. The drug lords are brothers from Miami. The fixer is a drunk and his lawyer knows too much. And when everything is said and done, when the all the drugs are sold and all the arrests have been made and everyone is in jail, no one — no one — will admit to owning the ship.

This is the day: May 28, 1985. The weather off the mouth of the Columbia River is warm and a little windy. The ship is named the Saja. She’s a refrigerator ship and end to end is as long as the Statue of Liberty is tall. This is end of a 10,000 mile trip. The black grouper the captain and his crew bought in Senegal are frozen in the hold. The 23 tons of marijuana they picked up in Columbia — the biggest smuggling job in Oregon’s history — is safely hidden.

Mouth of the Columbia River. Photo via U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

In a few years, the Saja will become a footnote in a sprawling criminal investigation marked by suicide, sexual scandal and countless near-misses by the federal government. And then, twenty years later, an energy giant will fight to build a $650 million liquefied natural gas plant, coincidentally, on the site of the Saja’s remote landfall in Oregon. But in 1985, history has yet to be written. And the Saja is pulling up to the docks in Astoria, just inside the mouth of the Columbia River.

The town the Saja arrives in is still a frontier town. The heady days of logging and fishing are coming to an end. Downtown is filled with decaying businesses and prehistoric bars. It will take another decade before city officials and Chamber of Commerce types begin to reclaim the city as their own. Charles Goldman, the fixer for the smuggling operation, had paid a Portland, Ore. company to help clear the Saja through customs on the docks in Astoria. But he forgot to take into account simple geography: Black grouper is from the South Atlantic. Which is a long way away. When the Saja unloads the fish, the questions begin. Enter the U.S. Customs Service. They detain the South Korean crew. They search. And search. But all they find is ice.

Tolonen Boat Shop, Astoria, Ore. 1987. Photo via Historic Fishing.

The ice is the secret. There is a secret hold in the ship. After filling it with the marijuana, the smugglers let ice form over its access hatch. Then they board over the hatch and let ice form over the boards. “Absolutely undetectable” is how a Customs agent would describe it three years later. And with that, the Saja is free to go.

This isn’t Goldman’s first smuggling job, nor his last. As the Saja arrives in Astoria, he’s 38 years old, splitting his time between New York City and Portland, and trying to figure out ways to get rid of the grouper once it’s offloaded. Goldman’s the main smuggling distributor for a guy named Acqulino Melo, who’s 41 and lives in Miami with his brother. The Melo’s are big shit.  Between 1982 and 1985, they’ll smuggle somewhere around 88 tons of marijuana into the U.S. How much is that worth? About $116 million wholesale in today’s dollars. Goldman is well paid; he’ll walk away with about $5 million. But that doesn’t mean the Melo’s like him. They think he’s a drunk and a druggy. After major smuggling operations, Acqulino sends his enforcer to Goldman’s house to pick up the earnings from the deal. And then, in one case, he gives his enforcer permission to strong-arm $75,000 in cash from Goldman to pay for the enforcer’s “services.”

Fish cannery, Astoria, Ore. Photo via Jody Miller/Flickr.

Goldman’s biggest problem isn’t the Melos. He’s busy trying figure out what to do with all of his cash. And he’s screwing up pretty badly. He keeps some at his mom’s house and some with his lawyer. His lawyer, David Arnold, helps him buy houses and cars under different names — a bumbling attempt at money laundering. Goldman gives Arnold power of attorney when Goldman flees to France and the Philippines as the feds are closing in after the Saja deal. Every clumsy step he takes at hiding money is fodder for investigators. Arnold’s mistakes are, too. Prosecutors will eventually try and convict Arnold of money laundering and aiding in racketeering. Thanks to Goldman that case will bounce from court to court. Because by then Goldman has turned on his fellow smugglers and is the government’s lead witness. But he’s also sleeping with an IRS agent who’s part of the prosecution. Mistrials abound.

That’s getting ahead of the story. Today is May 28, 1985. And Goldman is not screwing anything up. The opposite, in fact. He and the rest of the smuggling network are watching from their respective viewpoints across the country as their plan continues to unfold: The ice is opaque. The agents’ search is done. And so a tugboat begins towing the Saja up the Columbia. It’s going, the crew says, somewhere for “repairs.” Its destination: an abandoned mill town named Bradwood Landing.

Next week, part 2: The town, the Texans and how the deal went down.

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Sources:

United States of America v. David Carlton Arnold and Armando Coto, 117 F.3d 1308 (11th Cir. 1997)

Interviews with Paul Benoit, City of Astoria, city manager; Charles Deister, NorthernStar Natural Gas, spokesman

“Phase I Environmental Site Assessment – Revised.” Prepared by AMEC Earth & Environmental, Inc. for NorthernStar Natural Gas, August, 2005

“Summary of Bradwood Industrial Site,” presentation to Clatsop County Board of Commissioners by NorthernStar Natural Gas, Oct. 19, 2007

The Oregonian, Aug. 4, 1988, “10 Face Federal Charges In ‘85 Smuggling Scheme”

The Oregonian, Aug. 17, 1988, “Investigators Detail Big Marijuana-Smuggling Operation”

The Oregonian, Feb. 19, 1989, “Drug Case Figure Gets Protection”

The Oregonian, Sept. 12, 1989, “Drug Smuggler Admits To Charges”

The Oregonian, March 20, 1990, “New Yorker Draws 15-Year Term In Record Oregon Narcotics Case”

Robert Arthur Cambridge had been to the National Gallery in London with his sawed-off shotgun once before. Not just there but the Tate Gallery, too. Both of those times he’d wandered around, looking at art, the gun hidden in a small flight bag he carried by its handles. On those days he’d kept his disquiet mind in check and had left the paintings untouched and had gone home — taking the Underground south to Wimbledon and his mother’s flat where he’d been living since his divorce four years before.

At 37, Cambridge’s life was a failure. He was unemployed, living in an apartment filled with ugly childhood memories: ceaseless battles between his domineering mother and a father he remembered as drunk and weak; cruel schoolmates; a fractured family life. He joined the army at 17 and left a year later, the same directionless, anti-social boy he’d always been. One clerical job followed another until the day he got drunk, smashed a window and was escorted from a job by police. The marriage should have stabilized him, he thought. She left after he tried to commit suicide, twice, and wouldn’t get psychiatric help. Now he was a drunk with a bad back who sometimes sold antiques in a street market, his dreams of an ideal family — peaceful and self-affirming — as empty as his future.

The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist, 1499-1500, Leonardo da Vinci, 141.5 x 104.6 cm, black chalk and touches of white chalk on brownish paper, mounted on canvas on tinted paper

And then, quite by accident, he found the family he’d been looking for. For three months, Cambridge had been wandering aimlessly through the city, getting on and off the Tube at random stops. One day he walked into Room 7 in the National Gallery and found himself face to face with Leonardo da Vinci’s tranquil, reverential cartoon known as the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist. The four-foot, 6-inch tall charcoal sketch sits by itself, the only piece of artwork in the small room. The lights are dim; people speak in whispers. The face of Mary radiates serenity. Cambridge found himself seated in a chair, staring at the iconic, beatific mothers and their two boys, deeply moved by their beauty.

A week later, July 17, 1987, Cambridge arrives back the National Gallery. His plan is simple: wait until just before closing when the museum is beginning to empty, wait for a guard to give him the final warning to leave, wait for that guard to walk away, and then pull out the shotgun.

It’s late afternoon as he pushes through the front revolving doors of the museum. He wanders from room to room, a feeling of pressure building inside his head. He has a cup of tea in the cafeteria. The clock inches closer to 6 p.m: closing time. He walks up the stairs from the cafeteria to the main floor. More wandering; more art-filled walls. Raphael. Michelangelo. da Vinci. Titian. Finally, Room 7. He sits on a bench. Slowly, the room clears. 5:55 p.m. Right on schedule, here’s the guard with the final warning. The guard turns and leaves. Cambridge stands. And in the space of a few seconds, he takes the gun from the bag, holds it waist high and blasts, without aiming, a six-inch-wide crater in the glass over the Virgin Mary’s heart.

The roar of the gun blast fills the gallery and tendrils of smoke and the reek of gunpowder fill the air. Glass shatters and sprays on the ground. Dozens of guards pour into the room. They kick the gun away from the bench that Cambridge is sitting on and pepper him with questions. But Cambridge is silent. He sits with his chin resting in his hand. He’s aware of the melee of people and voices, but inside of him is an incredible feeling of relief. “Suddenly, it’s over,” he thinks to himself. “I will be arrested and taken to hospital.”

Cambridge spent four years in a maximum-security mental hospital undergoing intensive psychotherapy. The Independent in London profiled him the month before he got out and described a hyperactive man who spouted self-help platitudes — he repeatedly called it “a cry for help” — when asked why he’d attacked the painting. The story never mentions if his mother came to visit.

Sources:
The Associated Press, July 18, 1987, “Art Restorers Tend Blasted Leonardo Da Vinci Drawing”
United Press International, July 18, 1987, Ed Lion, “A man who pulled a sawed-off shotgun from his jacket and fired on a sketch by Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci in Britain’s National Gallery may have irreparably damaged the 16th century masterpiece, an art expert said Saturday.”
The Associated Press, July 20, 1987, “Man Charged With Damaging Da Vinci Drawing Appears In Court”
The Times (London), January 15 1988, Lynda Murdin, “Restorer tackles microscopic jigsaw”
The Independent (London), November 17, 1991, Steve Boggan, “The invisible mending”
The Independent (London), August 6, 1998, Jason Bennetto, “Man squirts yellow paint on National Gallery Rembrandt”
Cabinet Magazine, Issue 3, Summer 2001, Steven Goss, “A Partial Guide to the Tools of Art Vandalism”
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/plan/floorplan.htm

When the Iraq War began, I was sitting in a small steakhouse in rural Central California and as the television screens lit up with grainy, phosphorescent splashes of color, the people around me began clapping. We all knew it was coming; the build up to the war had been years in the making. But I was the one stunned into silence, amazed by the satisfaction and appreciation on the faces of the people around me.

Near the Iraq/Syria border, 3/6/06. Photo by Staff Sgt. Aaron Allmon, U.S. Air Force.

The next day, the Department of Defense released its first press photo (stock photos shot by the DoD for media outlets) of the war — an image of Donald Rumsfeld in a press conference. Since then, the agency’s collection of media photos has grown into the hundreds. They’re fairly uniform: Soldiers run to helicopters that are blowing up walls of dust. Soldiers with guns search homes. They stand in streets having pleasant conversations with Iraqis and they peer around brick walls with their guns at the ready. There are never any dead bodies; the smiling Iraq children are always hugging smiling soldiers — the photos are propaganda at its most transparent and banal.

And the photos are, at times, beautiful. They were shot by people with an aesthetic eye for the moment, an eye for the dramatic and powerful. The truly artistic photos are rare — only a few each year. And they’re limited in their scope: dramatic composition and lighting is the best most photographers can pull off. But the images are striking and memorable all the same. Flipping through the last four years, I find myself pulled into the DoD’s narrative of the war.

Sather Air Base, Iraq, 3/12/08. Photo by Tech. Sgt. Jeffrey Allen, U.S. Air Force.

Camp Ar Ramadi, Iraq, 9/3/06. Photo by Tech. Sgt. Jeremy T. Lock, U.S. Air Force.

When I write that sentence I hear the echo of four-year-old applause in my words. I know the steak house diners were clapping for something different. Me appreciating a propaganda photo from the DoD is not the same as their Pavlovian response to foreigners dying along the axis of some fabricated argument for war. But it’s disingenuous to pretend the photos are independent from the government that created them. It’s like my relationship with the US Army, which I despise for its role in the war, and the individual soldier, whom I respect for her service. Each one is an intrinsic part of the other, just like a photo and the events it depicts.

To like the photos does not mean I have to be an apologist of the war. But to like them brings me into a closer relationship with the powers that created this war than I would ever want. And so I try and balance on that line. I see the art. I hear my own clapping. And I remain coldly aware of what birthed these beautiful images.

Fair al Jair, Iraq, 12/16/07. Photo by Tech. Sgt. Adrian Cadiz, U.S. Air Force.

Sonny Liston had 15-inch fists and a 7-foot reach. He was the son of an Arkansas sharecropper, a “labor enforcer” for the Italian Mafia, a world heavyweight champion who learned to box during a teenage prison stint for robbing a gas station. He was powerfully built, illiterate, sullen, violent and withdrawn — a man who did not engender support from the civil rights leaders of the 1960s.

Liston is best remembered for loosing two of boxing’s most controversial and most famous fights, one in 1964 and one in 1965, against a man with antithetical looks and personality, Muhammad Ali. You don’t know it, but that’s how you know Liston, too. The iconic image of Ali standing triumphant and raging over the sprawled figure of a boxer was from the second of those two fights. Ali’s muscles are taught and shiny; he looks impossibly powerful. Liston, his face obscured, looks not just defeated but destroyed.

That’s the famous photo. The one below was taken as Liston struggled to stand up moments later. He would fall down again, get up and then try to defend him self from a flurry of blows from Ali before the fight was called.

The match was fixed. Or at least that’s the predominate theory. He supposedly owed money to his underworld contacts. Or he threw it because he was scared of what the Nation of Islam, which was managing Ali, would do to him if he won. The punch that sent him to the floor was, from some angles, glancing at best. Four former heavyweight champions said he threw the fight. But Sports Illustrated did a frame-by-frame analysis and said he didn’t. Liston was not a subtle man. His acting skills — especially for a man who’d never been knocked down in a match before — weren’t that good. Either way, while he continued boxing over the next five years, Liston’s career was essentially over. He was found dead in his apartment in 1970 from what police described as a suspicious heroin overdose. Liston didn’t know the date of his birth; he was dead for long enough before being found that the exact date of his death is unknown, too.

In the footage of the pre-fight weigh-in for the 1964 fight, the locker room is a melee — a mass of people, helmeted police, cameramen and Ali, who formed his own whirlwind of taunts and verbal explosions. Liston looks at once both irritated and tired as he weakly tries to shout rejoinders at Ali over the crowd. Somehow, he looks sad.

But maybe that’s because I know what’s facing him. I watch him unsmilingly flash peace signs to the crowd as a doctor checks his lungs with a stethoscope and wonder what it must be like to fall to the ground like he’s about to do. What a deep ache there must be in your heart you try to get back up and your legs fail, and the lights overhead explode like stars, and you collapse with the roar of the crowd and the echoing taunts of a younger, better man ringing in your ears.