Somebody once made the observation that there are really only two kinds of dope dealers in the world – those who need forklifts, and those who don’t. In the mid-1970’s, at the height of his dope dealing career, Allen Long didn’t just need forklifts. Planes, freighters, speedboats, helicopters and trucks were other regularly required tools of his trade. Yet despite having made millions of dollars from his marijuana smuggling activities, nowadays Long strongly warns against any form of criminal activity. And not just because he eventually wound up in jail for his efforts.

“I’d never advise someone to go into a criminal activity for one reason,” he declares. “And not necessarily because you’re going to go to jail. Because you might not, you might make millions. In the same way as I wouldn’t say to someone not to drive a car because you might be killed, I wouldn’t advise somebody against criminal activity because you might get locked up. I wouldn’t get into a criminal activity because it estranges you from the rest of society. Inevitably. It may be a slow but it is an inexorable process. You become an outsider and, slowly but surely, the only people you can relate to are fellow outsiders. And you become a criminal through and through.

“You see, marijuana might be an innocent substance but in order to smuggle it, I had to deal with people who were involved in other parts of criminal enterprise – fake passports, bribing officials and worse. At one point, the Colombians I was buying from asked me to bring them down an entire planeload full of guns, which I did. And suddenly I realised that now I was doing things that I thought I’d never do. This wasn’t part of what I’d set out to do. But these were my people now, you know, and the rest of the world was against me. That’s the problem.

“And that’s why I’m for legalisation of marijuana. They say that marijuana is a gateway drug. In truth, the only gate that opens is the fact that it’s a criminal act.”

The 53 year-old Virginian certainly knows what he’s talking about. He’s been there, been done for that and worn the prison T-shirt. Throughout the 1970s, Allen Long and his associates amassed millions of dollars daringly smuggling tonnes of high grade marijuana out of the Guajira (Colombia’s bandit territory) and up into the States, significantly upping both the quality and quantity of weed being smoked in North America – and doing it with aplomb and panache like no-one else.

Tall and chiselled, built like the proverbial brick shithouse, and casually dressed in beige chinos and a bright red woollen ‘Dad’ sweater, Long doesn’t look much like a former dope dealer and ex-con, but it’s not for nothing that he’s rapidly becoming known as ‘the American Howard Marks’.

We’re meeting in the Groucho Club a few hours ahead of the London leg of the Smuggler’s Tour – a promotional event organised by Canongate to promote Smokescreen (published under the title Loaded in the US), American writer Robert Sabbag’s riveting account of Long’s life and times as a drug smuggler.

Essentially an open interview with Long and Howard Marks, chaired by Robert Sabbag, the Smuggler’s Tour has already played to packed houses in Glasgow, Liverpool and Leeds, and will go on to Bristol and Brighton after tonight’s event in the Conway Hall (ironically, the headquarters of an ethical society). The whole tour was actually originally due to kick off in Dublin, until the good folk of the CPAD intervened with some threatening calls to Vicar St., who duly cancelled the gig.

“I heard about those guys,” Long nods grimly. “Concerned Parents Against Drugs, yeah? It’s a bit dumb really, them cancelling the show. The equivalents of those groups came to the shows in Glasgow and Liverpool and they really got a healthy debate going during the question and answer session. But they know that there’s a world of difference between marijuana and heroin. Those guys in Dublin might actually have learnt something useful if they’d come along, instead of making threats.”

Although a little exhausted, Long claims to be hugely enjoying the tour and, perhaps predictably, seems very taken with his wily Welsh counterpart (another former dope dealer who had regular need of forklifts).

“I love Howard Marks!” he enthuses. “I had no idea how to handle this personal appearance tour or how it was going to go down, but Howard taught me that people were fascinated by the story – which is kind of what I thought. But more than that, Howard Marks has shown me that we can hold our heads up and be who we are. You know, there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Howard is a stand-up guy. He doesn’t rat. He says what he believes in and he stands up for it.”

Did you ever do business together?

“It’s funny,” he laughs. “Our paths crossed, briefly and fantastically, at one point during our mutual careers, but we were both using different names. So we didn’t actually know whether we knew each other or not until we actually met up just a few days ago, when I came over from the States. We were like, ‘Oh, you were the guy who was moving that load through New York with so and so that time?’ We hadn’t actually met before, but we had done business with some of the same people around the same time. It’s kind of a small world really, everybody knows everybody on the smuggling scene. Just usually by different names!”

He’s known Robert Sabbag (by his real name) since 1978, when work on Smokescreen initially began. They originally met when Long, cash rich from his criminal enterprises and looking to legitimise his funds, unsuccessfully attempted to buy the movie rights to Sabbag’s now-classic tale of cocaine smuggling, Snowblind. As it happened, the movie option to that book had already been sold, but Long did manage to convince the writer to travel down to Colombia with him to begin researching a book about his own dope smuggling activities. Unfortunately, he’d neglected to mention that he was still very much in business.

“Yeah, I was still in the middle of doing it then,” he smiles. “I had lied to Bob a little bit. I told him I was out of it, not to worry, I had made my money and I was producing movies, blah, blah, blah. Then eventually Bob and I arrived in Colombia and when he saw that I was buying a 400-foot freighter, he realised that, actually, this wasn’t all over.”

That wasn’t the only problem. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Long’s criminal associates weren’t overly keen on the idea of a book being written about them.

“Then I had told some friends of mine that I was doing this book and it was gonna be a true story based on my exploits. And they basically said, (adopts strong Columbian tough guy accent) ‘You can do a fuckin’ true story about your fuckin’ exploits when you’re fuckin’ dead – and you can be fuckin’ dead today! That’s up to fuckin’ you!’ And I called Bob and told him, ‘We’ve hit a small obstacle, and it’s one we’re not gonna be able to get over!’ So Bob and I quit the project and I went on about my ways, and then I became a fugitive and it all sort of died, you know. But I always had, in the back of my mind, the desire to finish this story. I also knew that if there was anybody who could write the story it’d be Robert Sabbag.

“And so the second call I made from federal prison – after calling my attorney – was to Robert Sabbag, and I said, ‘Now you can start to write the book’. And several years after I got out of prison, we submitted a treatment to nine different publishers and I think six of them bid for it and, low and behold, here’s the book.”

Billed as ‘a true adventure’, Smokescreen more than lives up to its hype, thanks in no small part to Sabbag’s superior storytelling skills and scalpel sharp wit (not to mention the quality of the amazing raw material). The book tells how Long, a likeable but uncontrollable delinquent from a wealthy Virginian business family, fell into pot smuggling more or less by accident. Following a failed music career, the twentysomething Long somehow managed to secure funding to go to Mexico and Colombia to make a documentary about marijuana smuggling. When the funding ran out before the shoot was finished, he decided to smuggle a load of marijuana in order to get enough cash to finish the film. The rest, as they say, is history. But perhaps it was written in the stars that Allen Long would eventually become a marijuana smuggler. He claims to have always had a thirst for adventure…

“I don’t know what games you play in Ireland when you’re ten-year-old boys, but in the United States we play cowboys and indians,” he says. “When I was a little boy, I always wanted to be the cowboy in the white hat who rides in and saves the girl in distress and kills all the indians. In other words, to have a great adventure and be a hero. And to a small segment of American society, I was a hero. Even if it was just in my own mind, I thought of myself as one. And smuggling led to the great adventure that I always wanted in my life. Also, I felt like I was innocent and I was tilting against the windmills of injustice. It wasn’t a crusade in any sense of the word, I wasn’t a revolutionary, I wasn’t politicised. I did like smoking really good pot and have done since I was about 18-years-old. I didn’t see anything wrong with pot as a substance per se then, and I don’t now.

“When the money for the movie ran out, I’d by then spent about nine months immersed in smuggling culture, because I’d been filming and interviewing various players. In thinking of myself as being smarter and more determined and more capable than 95% of the people I’ve met – and also being young enough not to realise that I probably wasn’t! – I set off to smuggle one load of marijuana to finance the movie. It didn’t work! I don’t know about you, Olaf, but things that don’t work really piss me off!! So I decided to go back and fix it!”

The first load he attempted to smuggle was busted by the authorities, leaving him with a very serious problem. He’d managed to get the weed on credit from the Colombians but, once it was seized, he had no way of paying them for it. The only way he could cover his losses was to convince them to give him a second load on credit and double up the bet. And so he returned to Colombia, not with the money they were expecting, but with a newspaper clipping showing the bemused sheriff of King William County and his deputies, standing around the bales of marijuana that they’d found sitting in the desert, when Long’s associates failed to collect them on time.

Was he nervous going back to face the Colombians?

“I think what I actually said to them was, ‘I’m here with my aeroplane and my balls!’” he laughs. “Because I had no money. And the Colombians were known as guys who brooked no bullshit, you know. I certainly wasn’t giving them any, but the question was would they believe me? See, when we lost that load, man, there were only two things to do. One was punt and run. That would have left the Colombians thinking that I had lied to them. They would never have known what had actually happened. I couldn’t do that to them.”

Were they sophisticated enough to come and find you at that point?

“No, but that wasn’t the issue. But also, remember that obsession? If this thing don’t work, I’m gonna fucking bloody well fix it!! Well, when that thing didn’t work and the load got busted, it really pissed me off! So there was only one thing to do. I felt that if I had called the Colombians on the telephone, they wouldn’t have believed me. I felt I couldn’t explain to them what had happened without being there in person. They could tell if I was telling the truth. These are guys who operate completely on instinct. They’ll just take out their gun and shoot you if they think you’ve fucked up. If they find out later, they’re wrong, they’ll just shrug and say, ‘Too bad!’

“So I told the guys in Ann Arber – the guys who were distributing the pot – that I was sure I could work it out and there was nothing to worry about. I was putting it on me. The only thing that could go wrong was the guys in Colombia could kill me. Or they could say no. And I didn’t picture them saying ‘no’ if I had the balls to come down there and tell the story about what had happened. They might have – in which case they were probably gonna kill me anyway. So it really didn’t matter. I either pulled this off or it wasn’t worth living! Besides, it was the greatest adventure I’d ever been on and I’d set it up. After I’d put it in gear, I wasn’t about to let it all grind to a halt unless I got ground up in the gears with it.”

Of course, it wasn’t just his own ass that was on the line…

“The problem was the pilots – the people you know as Will and Frank from the book – would never have gone down there again if I’d told them that the Colombians didn’t know that the load had been busted!” he smiles. “Pilots are by their very nature… em, they’re either fighter pilots or they’re commercial pilots, you know what I mean? These guys weren’t fighter pilots. They liked to fly because of the aura surrounding pilots and because it’s a really cool thing to do and it’s fun, but they didn’t want to fly and risk their lives – that’s exactly the opposite of good flying. Good flying is making sure everything is right – you’re still taking a chance going up in the air obviously, but you’ve done what you’re supposed to do. Me – fill it up and let’s get the hell outta here!!! So I did not tell them the truth and, in retrospect, although I regret it, I know that they would never have gone.

“I was counting on the brotherhood thing, that had carried me that far, to continue carrying the load. I have found in my life that if you look someone in the eye and tell them the truth, 99 times out of 100 they’ll get it. You’ve gotta be careful though - if you’re dealing with a liar and a thief then he’ll think you’re lying because he’d lie to you and look you in the eye. That’s it, as long as you’re not dealing with a thief then you don’t need to worry about him thinking you’re stealing. So these guys in Colombia, I will say that there was a moment where I didn’t know if this guy was gonna shoot me or not. When he took his gun out and then started shooting in the air and screaming ‘Andale Allen! Go! Go man, go! Andale!’ – and we got on the plane and took off, that was one of the greatest moments of my life, that’s probably the thing I remember the most. I was sweating fucking bullets, buddy!”

The second load got through, Long made his money, the Colombians got paid, and a full-time smuggling career began in earnest. Predictably enough, the documentary never got finished. But where is the old movie footage now?

“It’s in a vault in New York,” he explains. “When this all dies down a little bit, maybe in the summer, I’m gonna go back and take a look at it and see how it looks. But you have to remember, it’s on acetate and it’s been in a vault for 35 years. It’s probably done, probably cooked, but we’ll see.”

Over the next few years, Long made well over $8 million (the equivalent of around $40 million today) from his smuggling activities. Although other loads got busted, he himself never was. His criminal career ended with him lying face-down on the floor of a house in the Florida Everglades, surrounded by a crowd of gun-wielding ‘friends’ who were convinced he had ripped them off on a deal. He managed to talk himself out of that one, and walked away from the business. It wasn’t until almost five years later, in 1984, when some of his former associates got arrested and gave his name, that the authorities began looking for him and he became a fugitive from justice. Luckily, he had prepared for that eventuality.

“I had taken some advice from an older guy in Chicago that I knew,” he explains. “This guy had the paving contract for the state of Illinois. Chicago’s a notorious mob town and anybody who has the paving contract for putting the asphalt down is the biggest bad guy in the State, ‘cos that’s like a lifetime deal and you have to shut down everybody else to get it. He was also interested in buying thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds of weed at one time, but that’s another story.

“So he said (adopts husky Mafia don voice), ‘Listen Allen, I like you so I’m gonna tell you something. You young guys, you always think this shit’s gonna last forever – and it doesn’t, I can tell you. One day you’re gonna go to jail – especially you! So, nothin’ for nothin’, I’m gonna give you some advice, you can take it or leave it. Go out and get yourself a couple of passports – real ones – and have them ready. Have them in a safe deposit box and take about 10% of whatever you make on every deal and put it in that box, because the day is gonna come. And when the day comes you’re either gonna have it or you’re not. Remember I told you this’.

“So I did it. In the basement of my building at 254 East 68th Street in New York City there was – still is – a branch of the Chase Manhattan bank, where I have a safe deposit box. I got that phone call, I went straight downstairs in the elevator, I got those passports, I got that money out of the box. I didn’t take a suitcase, I didn’t take a car, I got in a taxi, I went to the airport, I chartered a jet and I flew out of the country – just like that. And I left as Allen Long. By that time I wasn’t wanted, they were just ‘looking’ for me but my name wasn’t up. So I left the country and I did a triple blind – I changed my name twice. First I became James Edward Purcell and then I became Kevin Thomas Burrell – both good Irish boys (laughs).”

He claims not to have been particularly paranoid during the seven years he spent as a fugitive.

“Whether it’s idiocy or complacency or just bad luck, I tend not to worry about things I probably should. And once again, I’d already assumed the inevitability of going to jail so being on the run was much better than that! I wasn’t one of these guys who moans about, ‘Oh, I spent the whole time looking over my shoulder’. I never looked over my shoulder. I very seldom worried about that. Maybe I should’ve worried about it more.

“It only really hit me that I was a fugitive – and what that might really mean to my entire life – when I got married and my wife came home one day and said, ‘Congratulations honey!’ And I said, ‘For what?’ And she said, ‘Congratulations honey, we’re gonna have a baby!’ And I was thrilled and appalled because this was… (pauses). You know, I couldn’t even give my real name to the child.”

In 1991, four years after he’d gotten married and a year after the birth of his second son, the government finally caught up with him in Tampa, Florida. Fortunately, by then, the crimes he was wanted for were so far in the bureaucratic past that the prosecutors who inherited him saw very little political sunshine in the prospect of building a major case against him. All of his associates had already been arrested and, given that he was the ringleader, there was nobody else for Long to give up.

A plea agreement was in everybody’s interest. In exchange for his pleading guilty to a federal marijuana trafficking conspiracy in the Middle District of Florida and passport fraud in the Virgin Islands, all other charges were dropped, and he was sentenced to five years in prison.

When I mention that his prison sentence seemed relatively light, he gets a little annoyed.

“You go spend four-and-a half years in a maximum security federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia, and then you tell me that I didn’t do enough time, OK?” he says, obviously irritated. “Because any time you’re behind bars – especially when you have a wife and children – is bad time. And as the years go by, you’re gonna lose your wife. My wife decided to divorce me, she began having a relationship with someone else - a lawyer… Which is the worst thing when you’re in jail! COULDN’T IT BE ANYBODY BUT A FUCKIN’ LAWYER? (laughs).

“The other thing was that I was a serious coke addict at the time. For years I’d been buying it for next to nothing through my connections and, by the time I was busted, I was a miserable human being, you know. And there was no way I could maintain my habit in prison. It took me about six months before I stopped dreaming about doing lines of cocaine. So I really had a long struggle to come back. But I harkened back to my childhood and I promised myself that I would never let my kids come from a broken home if there was one more breath of life in my body. So when I got out, I stayed clean, I went to my wife and I asked her to give me one more chance – and she said no. And I kept that up for years, until she eventually said yes.”

What happened to the lawyer?

“Well, I had to knock the lawyer out,” he shrugs, grinning. “It was just one of those things, you know.”

Do you have a temper?

“Uh-huh,” he nods. “I am impatient, I admit, and I interrupt a lot – as do you, by the way. It’s a bad habit. I regret having a temper when I deal with my children. It’s no help. It comes from my father, I guess, and maybe it’s genetic, maybe it’s environmental, I don’t know. But there are times when having a temper is a good thing too. ’Cos sometimes you just gotta cut the shit!”

What’s the biggest asset a dope dealer should have?

“Balls of steel, that’d be one!” he laughs. “But I think if you had a rule of thumb – and this applies for any business – then there are three things. Don’t lie to yourself. We easily get in trouble when we lie to ourselves. Whether we tell ourselves we’re smarter than we really are, or more capable than we really are, or have more money than we really do – you know, ‘I can take care of this later’. Don’t lie to yourself. When you lie to yourself, all these other problems begin.

“Don’t lie to others. Don’t lie to anybody else. As long as you’re not lying to yourself, you tend not to be lying to anybody else anyway. Sometimes you can manage both but usually not. So don’t lie to others.

“And third, always do what you say you’re going to do. Do the very best you can in your life to fulfill and complete the promises that you make, the guarantees that you give, and the things that you say you’re gonna do. You can take the Ten Commandments and Mohammed’s teachings and the Buddhist teachings and every other list of do’s and don’ts, but I think if you do those three things you’ll pretty much take care of everything else.”

Allen Long’s first job when he got out of prison was as a day labourer, earning $5 an hour (something of a comedown for a guy who used to have a Lear jet and living expenses of $350,000 a month). Shortly after that, he got into writing marketing strategies and advertising for small Mid-West companies. His real break, however, came when an old friend organised a meeting with the CEO of an American drugs firm.

“My friend had told me not to mention my past but I went in to meet this guy and I just trusted my instincts,” Long laughs. “I told this guy about what I had done and his jaw just dropped. He was a very straight, elderly American corporate executive and he said to me, “Buddy, I don’t know what you’re doing here but there’s no way in hell you’re ever going to work for me!’ Thirty minutes later, I had the job! The company was an American drugs company – Jason Pharmaceuticals in Owens Mills, Marilyn, and I was the best vice-president of sales they ever had. I doubled drug sales in three months. I know how to do that, you see!”

Today, although nowhere near as wealthy as he used to be, Allen Long has numerous legitimate business interests, including an Internet company specialising in online golf reservations, an artist management company called Floodzone Entertainment and a restaurant which he co-owns with musician Dave Mathews. Years on, he’s finally realised that drug dealing wasn’t the only thing he was capable of doing. The irony isn’t lost on him.

“The lesson there for me was that if I had gone into legal business with the same enthusiasm and gusto, with the same skills, that I probably would’ve made five times as much money and been able to tell people what I really did for a living,” he laughs. “So there’s a lesson for all those other would-be scammers out there, you know. Go into something else and the same skills that you use to be successful in the dope business – purchasing inventory, inventory control, running a sales team, managing all your personnel, developing a strategy, handling the financing. Hell, that’s a retail business! That’s an insurance business, that’s a Time Share sales team!”

Does Allen Long have many regrets?

“The easy and flippant answer is that I regret getting caught,” he says. “In real life, I regret wasting my time and energy under the influence of cocaine so much. Cocaine may have its recreational place, but for me it’s a problematic drug. I went over the edge and you can’t get back once you’ve gone over the edge. I can still smoke pot, I still drink booze and I’ve done a line every now and then – but it’s a good thing I can’t get it for a dollar a gram any more or my wife would kick me out! So I have regrets about the wasted time, talent and energy that was embodied in that period when I was on a slow, slide downhill personally and physically and emotionally and psychologically because of my dependence on cocaine. That I regret.

“I regret that I got so immersed in a criminal conspiracy that I didn’t realise I was surrounded by gangsters for such a long time. Do I regret the course that my life has taken? No. Because if I hadn’t been a fugitive, living on a boat in the Caribbean at that moment, driven there by all the mistakes that I’d made, then I wouldn’t have met my wife and I wouldn’t have my sons Matthew and Sean. And those are the miracles in my life. So I guess as my friend Mo said, I was just born with a horseshoe up my ass. And I thank God for that!”