Chemical Cowboys

Israeli drug dealer Oded “Fat Man” Tuito was the head of a global business that had made him rich beyond most people’s wildest dreams.  For almost ten years in the 1990s, he oversaw an operation that had cornered the market on his wares, from Los Angeles to New York and Miami.  His success allowed him to buy houses in different countries for his wife and children. In case they got bored in one place, they could simply pick up and go to another.  He put his mistresses up in various apartments in case he got bored with his wife.  He had people working for him all over the world.  Tuito was, if not respected, at least feared.  That’s because Tuito was a drug dealer.

Chemical Cowboys author Lisa Sweetingham wastes no time grabbing her reader’s interest in the complicated story — both personal and professional — of how Tuito’s reign finally came to an end.  With deft, crisp writing, she paints vivid pictures that quickly make you believe you’re reading a gripping, almost belief-defying thriller — but it’s all true.

Sweetingham’s taut, noir-style prose follows DEA agent Bob Gagne and his team as they lay the foundation that will get them closer to their ultimate target.  Along the way are various characters whose roles, though minor in the big scheme of things, make possible the sort of power and success enjoyed by Tuito.  Gagne is young, smart, and willing to take risks to get the bad guys.  While his approach does not always go over well with his superiors — and rightly so — he’s effective, and his personality and approach inadvertently facilitated Sweetingham’s job of keeping the action on pace.  To do what Gagne and his colleagues did requires the sort of obsessive personality that both captures our interest and inspires our admiration.  Few among us would be willing to make the sort of sacrifices involved in dismantling an international and vicious organization.

This story isn’t, however, simply an action-packed, true-life tale of a maverick agent taking down the billionaire Tuito.  It offers us a glimpse of the astonishing system at the heart of this degrading trade.  It’s astonishing because it is at once both incredibly sophisticated and yet utterly disorganized.  After all, the people involved in drug trafficking are themselves typically users, and so not among those who make the best use of their reason.  But part of the success has to do with demand, not rationality.  People want drugs.  They’re not interested in the supplier’s business plan or stock rating.  That leaves room for people to prosper — people who would otherwise fail miserably in a real business environment.  (Or maybe they would be mortgage brokers and those who inadvertently orchestrated the biggest economic failure since the worldwide Great Depression.)  The people at the top, however, are often simply businessmen who see an opportunity to get rich.  The legal and ethical considerations are, for them, mere complications.  This is where the level of the businesses’ sophistication enters the picture.

At the end of the day, however, regardless of whether or not it’s the drugs themselves that contribute to the dehumanization of those who partake of them literally or as a business venture, it is still the case that, on average, the people involved in the drug trade demean themselves.  Be it the teenage mules, the distributors, the producers, the hit men and enforces, or Tuito himself, it takes a certain sort of person to be willing to denigrate himself and others simply to make a buck.  Sweetingham captures, both subtly but clearly, what it means to be that person and what it means to be the sort of person who tries to stop him — and succeeds.