‘PABLO Escobar of hash’, one of American and Canadian print and broadcast news media – which included the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Toronto Globe & Mail and the NBC – described him upon getting wind of an affidavit submitted by his attorney, in a desperate and ultimately futile bid to secure him bail, after he’d been nabbed on charges of conspiracy to import and possession of over 70 tons of hashish, subsequent to having been arrested during a sting operation by US Customs Service officers at Sea-Tac Airport in Washington State on September 18, 1991.
It had unfolded pending June of 1991 when the US Coast Guard intercepted the 350-foot freighter, the Lucky Star carrying cargo of 70 tons of Afghani hashish whilst transferring its load onto a fishing boat named the Barbara H, in international waters.
On April 16, 1993, pending a pre-trial hearing, he took a plea bargain (which meant accepting a 20- year sentence in a federal prison – instead of a life sentence were he’d to go on trial) subject to surrendering all his assets to the US government – which included, inter alia, 371 Krugerrands worth $840 000; $1 588 056 in cash and gold coins; real estate to the tune of $900 000; $87 000 worth of French wine; and three cars.
Medjuck’s portfolio of investments also included, inter alia, plots in Palmilla – where South African tycoon, Sol Kerzner would put up a One&Only resort – a wind farm in Tehachapi, California which sold power to a local power company; Eagle Ridge Development which owned land upon which Whistler ski resort is located; Tropicana Inn in San José del Cabo, a resort on Mexico’s Baja California peninsula; a UK-based business manufacturing toys included as freebies inside Kellogg’s breakfast cereal boxes, etc.
Medjuck though, didn’t disclose cash running into millions of dollars concealed in a safe in his own home and those of trusted friends and safety deposit boxes registered under false names amounting to some $12 million which his family would live on whilst he was incarcerated; offshore bank accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands, et cetera.
Amongst Medjuck’s visitors during his pre-trial confinement at Pleasanton prison in 1992 was his mistress, Ariana Farkas who came, under false pretext, accompanied by a female lawyer. Having not seen each other for more than eight months, they met in the facility’s visiting room where, hey presto, they copulated on a table right in the presence of the lawyer – and in view of a camera which filmed the frenzied incident!
“Who is that girl? She looks like a supermodel from New York!” a guard impressed by his choice of conquest – a medley of unusual beauty wearing a long dress without any knickers on – enquired.
The magnetism over girls had been a part of Medjuck’s character, harking to his formative years in 1960s Johannesburg where he was part of South Africa’s late 1960s generation which regarded apartheid’s neo-Calvinism’s approach to sex, drugs and freedom of expression as a Counterreformation to their counterculture!
Back in South Africa, where he was the vice head boy of the Jewish King David High School and was a popular student who excelled at various sport, he even got laid with an older girl from another school for his bar mitzvah in 1963 – a feat which became part of suburban Joburg lore!
It was there in his country of birth that he realized his first penal experience pending a 1972 visit to Joburg – having left in 1969 aged 19 and ultimately settling in Canada in 1970 – in search of ‘weed’, when he got briefly detained at John Vorster Square after a package he had mailed to Vancouver was discovered to contain dagga.
In July of 1993 his 20-year sentence commenced at the Sheridan Federal Correctional Institution where Captain Abdul Rasheed, a Pakistani who had skippered the Lucky Star was also held. Whilst there, he learnt from a newspaper report that his main hash distributor in Ontario, Derrick Smythe, had perished in a plane crash in Toronto.
As it happened, Smythe’s death would be of interest to Medjuck since his association with him would have a bearing in his appeal for a re-trial based upon technicalities which can’t be expounded on in this review – suffice to mention that owing to the assiduousness of his legal representatives (who also included Alan Dershowitz – who defended OJ Simpson), he ended up winning the appeal handed down on February 3, 1995, resulting in the rejection of the plea deal and the state awarding him a US Treasury cheque for $2.5 million as estimated value of what he had surrendered.
Medjuck’s trial, at which a vindictive prosecutor named Lou Davis lined up some of his co-conspirators such as Captain Rasheed resulted in him being sentenced to 24 years and four months in prison on the basis of three counts relating to the 70 tons of hashish aboard the Lucky Star.
Bitterly, some in his syndicate decided to snitch on him in exchange for leniency!
Between his legal processes, Medjuck would be shunted from miserable county jails serving inedible food to federal penitentiaries such as Santa Rita, Pleasanton (which had a medium-security prison for women which once held, et al, President Gerald Ford’s would-be assassin, Sara Jane Moore – and at which three women who were detained in the men’s remand centre pending a period a malleable guard turned a blind eye to Medjuck consorting with a female in the same men’s ‘hole’ filed a civil suit against the Bureau of Prisons alleging sexual abuse and rape whilst there, resulting in a settlement for $500 000 and early releases and the warden and several guards of the men’s prison losing their jobs!) and United States Penitentiary Florence where he eventually landed after being sentenced.
At USP Florence Medjuck befriended, et al, Hector Tapia Anchondo who was serving life for the largest cocaine bust in history (21.4 tons) after the Texan took a proclivity to his burritos with cheese and hot jalapenos, and Randy Lanier – an ex pro racing driver who had raced at Daytona and in the Indianapolis 500 – who had been sentenced to life without parole for dope smuggling.
It would be here that Medjuck witnessed stabbings involving Mexican nemesis and Native American inmates against a White snitch.
One time in April 20, 2001 on what would had been Adolf Hitler’s 133rd birthday, a bunch of swastika-tattooed White Aryans showed up in the Florence penitentiary yard with a cake and sang ‘happy birthday Adolf’ in Medjuck’s presence – resulting in him not allowing himself to be provoked by anti-Semitism.
Having been transferred from Florence to Pekin, a medium-security prison in Illinois, his attorney John Markham was visiting when he casually remarked: “I’ve made some friends and there’s a cop that smuggles in weed for me and sometimes booze …“ Astounded at the irony of a guard doing precisely what Medjuck – now past 50 and imprisoned for almost 11 years – had been incarcerated for doing, Markham hit upon a strategy which would lead to his client’s early release, were he to co-operate with the feds against the guard and other corruption enablers!
Medjuck obliged by ratting on the culprits (during which he was moved from Pekin for fear of reprisal and shunted around various jails for almost two years), culminating in a trial which resulted in a judge reducing his sentence to time served – much to Davis’ chagrin!
Alas, a mere 14 months after his 2005 release from the US penal system, Medjuck would be back in prison in 2006, this time in Spain where he’d serve nine and half years for an ill-judged cocaine smuggling venture.
Upon release in 2015, Medjuck retreated to San José del Cabo on Mexico’s Pacific coast – where back in 1989, he had invested $1.25 million in the Tropicana hotel – where, aged 73 and after 22 years of incarceration, he now calls home!
High Times: The Extraordinary Life of a Joburg Dope Smuggler, is a collaboration between authors, Jeremy Gordin – an award-winning journalist, editor and author who was brutally killed in his home during a burglary in 2023 – and Roy Isacowitz, a journalist and author now retired and residing in Tel Aviv, Israel.
A trade paperback, High Times: The Extraordinary Life of a Joburg Dope Smuggler, is published by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R320.
