Prologue
Portola, California
September 1997
Those in the business call it the pour-and-run method, and it is one of the most dangerous and explosive chemical processes ever practiced. But Bennie the Chef was the master of this dangerous, arcane art:
In a large glass tub, Bennie mixed seventeen pounds of ephedrine-crushed over-the-counter diet pills dissolved in chloroform-with a toxic, corrosive chemical liquid called thionyl chloride. The combination immediately produced toxic sulfur dioxide, corrosive hydrogen chloride gas, and a substance called 1-phenyl-1-chloro-2- methylaminopropane, or chloropseudoephedrine for short. They call it pour-and-run because even in the open air only a full-body antiexposure suit and an industrial-strength ventilator or positive-flow breathing system will save anyone within fifty yards from being asphyxiated by the sulfur dioxide fumes or severely burned by caustic acid. Bennie never used any of this gear, so it became a test to see if he could run at least half the length of a football field while holding his breath. He ran the race with a towel over his face, because if the hydrogen chloride gas touches any water, even the tiny bits of moisture in the eyes or nostrils, it instantly produces hydrochloric acid so corrosive that it will eat away an eyeball in seconds.
If he survived the test, he’d be several thousand dollars richer. If not, he’d be alive just long enough to taste the blood in his throat as his lungs dissolved, like a sheet of paper thrown into a fire.
Fifty-year-old Bennie, withered and emaciated-looking, was nearly exhausted after his dash to the edge of the trees-but he made it. His mixing tub was under a lean-to facing into the wind, and he could see the poisonous gas streaming out from the tub and collecting under the shelter. Ten minutes later, it was safe to approach the tub, and he began stirring the mixture.
His two guards, both tall, beefy, bearded men with long hair, huge beer bellies, Doc Martens ass-kicker boots, and black leather vests, could never hope to make the run, so they were already a safe distance away, smoking dope and drinking beer. Both were full-fledged Satan’s Brotherhood motorcycle gang members, wearing their “colors”-the leather vests with the Brotherhood logo and the upper rocker that read “Brotherhood” and the bottom rocker that read “Oakland” on the back, and Satan’s Brotherhood tattoos on their left arms. Most of the gang members were among the most dangerous of America’s outlaw bikers, the ones rejected or stripped of their membership in other gangs such as the Hells Angels or the Outlaw Bikers or the Brothers. They were avowed racists, even neo-Nazi; although they dealt drugs to all races and ran black, Asian, and Hispanic women in their whorehouses and strip clubs, they never associated with anyone other than other whites. There were more Satan’s Brotherhood members in the United States than Hells Angels or any other biker gang, but fewer of them in prison. The reason for this was simple: They vowed never to be taken alive by the police.
When Bennie finished stirring the mixture, precipitating the chloropseudoephedrine in the bottom of the glass tub, he moved on to the second, even more dangerous step. In a large steel tank he mixed the chloropseudoephedrine with a metallic catalyst called palladium black and a powerful solvent called hexane, then capped the tank and pressurized it with pure, highly explosive hydrogen gas. The hydrogen would bond with the chloropseudoephedrine to form a shiny white crystalline powder called methamphetamine, more commonly referred to as speed, crank, or meth. In a single day a skilled meth “cooker” like Bennie could produce about twenty-two pounds of methamphetamine worth four to six thousand dollars a pound in its unadulterated form- assuming he survived the cooking process. The Brotherhood sold it by the pound to wholesalers all across the United States, using gang members who carried it on their bikes, or “mules” who traveled with the bikers but didn’t ride motorcycles or hang out with the pack.
Methamphetamine, born of so many dangerous and toxic chemicals that it is impossible to believe it could ever be safely handled, is one of the nation’s fastest-growing abused drugs. By the time it has been cut with pyridoxine, or vitamin B6, available at any health-food store, its street value has jumped to ten to twelve thousand dollars a pound. Ingested-usually mixed with coffee or booze-or snorted, it produces a gradual high and a sense of heightened energy, sexual potency, and awareness that lasts anywhere from two to twelve hours, followed by a very relaxed weariness that continues for one to three days. If smoked or injected, the stimulant effect is sharper and more pronounced, producing the “rush” that gives the user a sense of enormous power, limitless energy, and a feeling of complete invulnerability. The Brotherhood and other outlaw motorcycle gangs had gotten very rich selling the drug in the western United States.
Bennie used just over two thousand dollars’ worth of chemicals in this batch. Most of them are controlled substances in the state of California but readily available in Mexico or other states. Ephedrine, the main component, was the easiest to get. Mexican factories would ship a ton of diet pills, or even truckloads of the ephedrine itself, if he requested it. If the DEA, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, or the BNE, California’s Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, started to nose around, Bennie simply switched sources. There were mail-order companies in the US that would ship a hundred cases of diet pills to the Brotherhood every week-and for twenty bucks, kids would steal several pounds of diet pills off store shelves in a matter of seconds. In a pinch, in place of ephedrine Bennie could also use phenylalanine, an amino acid sold wholesale in health-food stores at two hundred bucks for forty pounds. He had even synthesized chloropseudoephedrine from mahuang roots sold in Chinese grocery stores; and he was also adept at manufacturing phenyl-2-propanone, a compound similar to ephedrine, from noncontrolled chemicals. These could be used to produce a large quantity of lower-quality meth if other ingredients were hard to get. But they rarely were, and the meth business was thriving.
Bennie made it through this “cookout,” but his body, including his eyes and lungs, bore the scars of countless cookouts that had gone horribly wrong. Inhaling just a whiff of thionyl chloride can destroy lung tissue, and a drop of it can eat a pea-sized hole in a hand or finger. Ephedrine can cause severe weight loss, heart arrhythmia, or tremors. Chloroform is a known carcinogen. But Bennie never thought about the hazards. He just thought about the money.
Bennie was a survivor. He had been cooking meth ever since he and a classmate mixed up a batch while working summer jobs as janitors in a chemistry lab at the University of California-Berkeley back in 1973. The batches they made in the lab’s big Florence flasks and Graham condensers were only a few ounces, but enough for Bennie and his friends to party with for a couple of weeks. A tiny hit of crank, less than the size of a fingernail, produced mild LSD-like hallucinations, with the added bonus of creating the “pecker of power,” a hard-on that lasted for hours. With a little crank secretly mixed in her cocktail, his date for the evening would sometimes turn into a sex-starved creature whose wild-animal lust could pull a ten-man “train” all night.
Bennie left Berkeley in 1974, but not because he got caught cooking meth in the school’s labs-in fact, Bennie’s younger professors and graduate assistants were some of his best customers. He had been working on his bachelor’s degree in philosophy on and off for almost six years, but he was offered a job far more lucrative than teaching or writing: cooking meth for the Oakland chapter of Satan’s Brotherhood. Within three years, he had supervised the construction of eleven major meth labs from Oregon to Nevada to Bakersfield, and taught nearly half the Brotherhood in northern California how to cook meth. He was almost single-handedly responsible for filling the Brotherhood’s legal war chests with enough money to pay an army of lawyers to fend off dozens of racketeering indictments all throughout the 1980’s.
Now, more than twenty years and countless batches later, Bennie still had the knowledge, the patience, the touch-and, more importantly, he could still run-and he was still the best there was at the meth-cooking game. Besides, meth-especially American-made meth, as opposed to cheaper Mexican meth-had never been more valuable than it was today, so it was a thriving business. Bennie was in it to stay.
He carefully checked that all of the fittings and hatches on his reactor were secure-introducing oxygen through the tiniest leak anywhere in the hydrogen gas line to the pressurized reactor tank can produce an explosion and fireball that would look like a small thermonuclear mushroom cloud. Then he checked the pressure inside the reactor. Still dropping, which meant that the chloropseudoephedrine was still accepting hydrogen. Another hour or so, and it would be done. Another few hours to wash the meth with ether, then dry it in a dryer made from a few janitor’s buckets and mop squeegees, and he’d have collected about a hundred and twenty thousand dollars’ worth of crank. His two bikers were nowhere to be seen-probably sleeping off the beer-so he stepped away from the hydrogenator toward the tree line for a smoke break.
The key to the all-important second step, the hydrogenation process, was the reactor. A commercial Parr
