📸 Photo

M3, THE SUNSET CAR WASH

people's runs, including Marco's Lemon Juice, like a big gambler slinging handfuls of chips onto numbers on the roulette table. Lots of people were investing. Chino had people putting up a million dollars for a container load of drugs, doubling their money in days. The odds were gigantic, and the risk minimal if you knew the secrets of the game.

Chino was a calculated gambler and knew Rafael was trustworthy and smart, so he started investing in his runs, rather than just buying on arrival. Some weeks, they were bringing up to 20 kilos to Bali, using two or three horses on different flights. They were also able to traffic big amounts using Rafael's creative new method of packing the coke into windsurfer booms.

Rafael had pioneered the boom method, after surfboard bags became overused. Always wanting to be a step ahead, and have new options, he'd spent weeks studying sports equipment, pondering what to try next. The first boom he packed was the trickiest. He bought the equipment, then set to work in a beach bungalow with Poca. It took them two full days of figuring it out to ensure it was be X-ray-proof.

It was a complex job to make the coke invisible. First they put it in a blender to make it baby-powder fine, obliterating any rocks, then they used a funnel to fill the boom. Finally, they used a tailor-made metal rod, with a coin welded to its end, to pound the coke down hard into the aluminium tube to compact and cement it, and eliminate any air bubbles. This first time, their technique was imperfect - they lost 2 per cent of the coke, as the fine dust blew all over the room, covering them.

I start punching the coke ... suddenly, poof, the coke shoots out from the tube like a bullet from compression of air; we get coke in the eyes, in the face, and that shit comes in my mouth, on my skin, I start