The morning of May 24, 2019, found me running for my life through the traditional Jewish enclave of Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This was the neighborhood of stately red brick mansions and large dun-colored apartment houses where I’d grown up, come of age, learned to freestyle at the benches near the Murray Avenue Post Office and smoked my first furtive joints in the alleys that connect its winding, terraced streets.
The occasion for my flight was that the FBI had pulled over a truck leaving my stash house at 5524 Covode Street, a rust brick apartment house down a cobbled road from the Yeshiva. That truck contained $469,475, and based on the alert I’d received from a trailing driver they’d neglected to interdict; I knew something horrific was about to transpire. The stash apartment had about 245 lbs. of marijuana just delivered and another 159 odd lbs. sitting in orange Ridgid lock boxes bolted to the damp floor of a separate garage below the level I paced on. My vision blurred with panic as I tried to reason with the other two guys there that this wasn’t an accidental pullover and that whoever effected it would soon be at the door in force. The man who had the apartment in his name told me to leave. He said his brother would follow me soon after and he would hunker down until the danger had in theory subsided and then clear out under cover of darkness. I tried a few more times to reason with him before he snapped:
“GO! Walk out the door casual, and as soon as you get off this block, RUN!”
– Read the entire article at Truthout.
Original Article
