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SNOWING IN BALI

so it was lucrative, but it was hotter than hell. He was making money hand over fist, but he was lining himself up to go down.
- Gabriel, American surfer

Despite being hot, Rock ’n’ Roll was blasé, flapping huge wads of cash about. Out one night, he showed Rafael $10,000 cash. ‘I say, man, you crazy. Stop, Ruggiero, calm down. Keep your money in the safety deposit; why you show it to everybody, you crazy?’ He rode around drunk, loud, with blow or hash in his pockets, often snorting coke off counter-tops at places like Ku De Ta, so blatant that his friends were all telling him to be careful.

One of Ruggiero’s customers, American big-wave surfer Gabriel, had seen his previous dealers, including Alberto, busted. He’d been coming to Bali every surf season for years, buying coke from Rafael, then Alberto, and now Ruggiero. He was no good boy himself, using drugs and notoriously riding his big motorbike around the island topless, in his pink hibiscus-flowered Quiksilver board shorts, slurping on a Bintang beer. He also usually flew from LAX to Bali with a tiny bag of dope in his underpants, always slinging $200 to an official at Denpasar customs to avoid a search.

We would just tuck it into our underwear and cross our fingers. But we had a guy there . . . I’d go to the office and pay the guy a couple of hundred bucks and we’d walk out without them searching any of our shit. Money is the trick.
- Gabriel

Although he took his own risks, Gabriel felt his friend and dealer Ruggiero was way over the top, perilously acting as if he were Bali’s Scarface.

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