The Battle With Seward County

The Take Down PART 1

News clip on my arrest from local news in Nebraska and please remember INNOCENT UNITL PROVEN GUILTY

Tuesday October 29, 2024

Nebraska I-80

It was a long day of driving on I-80 in Nebraska. The winds were blowing. There was an adversary out, 50-55 mph winds, flashing signs warned. It was about 2 pm in the afternoon but I still had a ways to go. I was undecided if I would turnoff to Missouri and hit I-70 at Kansas City or if I would continue onto Chicago and the East Coast on I-80. Had some business in Missouri but it could wait. My business on the East Coast was more pressing. Plus I had been arguing with my wife all day. That seemed to be my life. Arguing either with my girlfriend, 20 years my junior, or my wife. Or both. It was a never ending battle that was killing me and sending me into a negative tailspin. I just didn’t know it would end that day. That fucking afternoon in fact.

I felt like a trucker I’d been driving so much. Up before light, on the road by 6 am, driving til 6 pm. Since I got off probation for the second time at the beginning of 2024 I’d been traveling a lot. I had been flying a lot the last couple years but now with freedom I just wanted to get in the car and drive. It was my new hobby. A very American trait, the right to travel. A constitutional right. I loved the feeling of the open road. Going where I wanted. When I wanted. After either being in prison, on probation, bond, or pre-trial fighting a case for 30 of the last 33 years I was reveling in my new found freedom. Staying in hotels, being in a different place everyday, visiting friends and family, just sort of popping in, and meeting new people became my thing. I made films for a living and when I wasn’t on set I handled most of my business on zooms, phone calls, and my MacBook. Traveling hindered nothing.

I had friends who’d been pulled over and arrested in both Kansas and Nebraska recently but I felt Nebraska was better for me. I would soon find out that I was wrong. I was an ex-con filmmaker down on his luck so to speak. In debt, out of sorts, constantly fighting with two women. I was a wreck. Smoking this new hash I discovered called Cali Static. A Moroccan style hash that was made in Los Angeles. The premium of the premium. The Spanish and Moroccan producers liked the cannabis from Northern California, the famed Emerald Triangle. Because it washed out at a higher percentage than the marijuana in Morocco. I’d heard Moroccan weed washed out at 6-7% where as California sun grown would came back as high as 22%, and we are talking trichomes here, the crystals in marijuana that got you high.

Cali static hash was a recent discovery for me and it was addictive as fuck. I’d been smoking it for a month straight since I discovered it. Very super high potency hash. But old school hash which I loved and first smoked in the UK when I lived there from 1984-87 when my military stepdad was stationed there. I’d been sprinkling the static hash into my blunts that I rolled with backwoods and Humboldt County light deps, which I preferred to smoke, due to the entourage effect. I’d always been a triangle guy and favored Humboldt due to all the farmers I knew there. Straight old school outlaws who transitioned from the traditional to the legal markets.

I met most of them during the filming of my forthcoming series on Amazon, Tangled Roots: The True Story of Humboldt County, which is basically my love letter to the mythical world of giant trees and cannabis, the Emerald Triangle, a place I first visited in the late 1980s, before my two-decade long federal bid for LSD, as a first-time nonviolent offender in Americas failed War on Drugs. Which raged from the late 80s into the 2010’s. It’s only been recently, at least in my lifetime, that marijuana or cannabis as it’s called now became legal, first on both coasts, and then slowly across the whole country. But to my detriment, not in Nebraska, the famed Cornhusker state.

I’d been through Nebraska before as I journeyed across the country. Crisscrossing it as I pleased. Basically living out of my truck. Camping. Staying at friends. Freedom at last. A god given right. I was an outlaw, not a criminal. I was an advocate for cannabis and psychedelics and had been all my life or at least since the age of 13 and a lot of what I felt and thought about these medicines has finally come back into vogue. Not the life I chose but the life that chose me. But as of late, ever since I started writing about prison life, gangsters, gangs, and the mafia in my Street Legends series and for magazines like Penthouse and Vice and started making documentaries, I was more gorilla convict writer and outlaw filmmaker than actual outlaw. But most of my friends were still involved in the trade as advocates for the cause, champions of the culture, or legal brand owners, farmers, and distributors.

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I just wrote about the counterculture. And made films and documented the history, legends, and myths. Painting and crafting stories that I felt needed to be told from my unique point of view. Doing psychedelic and cannabis events, telling my story and showing my films. I fancied myself a self made documentary writer, director, and producer. A counterculture hero and legend (if only in my own mind) with balls of steel, who talked the talk, walked the walk, and did the time. Twenty-one years straight in the feds, from 1993 to 2015. But since my release I had effectively been out of the game. Besides my 2019 Missouri pot bust , where an informant dropped off 50 pounds and then put the local narcotics squad on me, resulting in five years probation with a seven year suspended sentence. I was clean. So called law abiding, tax paying citizen who employed people and ran businesses. I served 3 years probation from 2021 to early 2024 on that offense and was again a free man.

But I had been down on my luck lately. Had a bad run. It’s crazy how fast things can change for the worse. I went from flying high in the early 2020’s, being a poster boy for reentry, cannabis, and psychedelics, the toast of the town for my work on the Netflix hit White Boy to being heavily in debt, my finances and credit wrecked, and my once bright future in doubt. A sobering reality to say the least. I had a film company and four releases on Amazon but I wasn’t where I needed to be. In reflection though it was all of my own making. I’ve been chasing the wrong things. I made all my own choices and I was about to pay for being a cannabis/psychedelic warrior yet again. In the game of life my number was about to be called again. That’s the thing with me I’m like a lightening rod for controversy, good or bad. While others manage to slide by it seems that I always have to pay.