“It just falls apart when you start writing the narrative. “The difficulty in the co-operation that I got from Allen was that it took a long time for me to convince him that he couldn’t just wing it with the information, he couldn’t just estimate who was there, estimate the dates or, indeed, the weights,” says Sabbag. Not that the collaboration was all plain sailing – or even, more to the point, plane flying. All the people had been arrested, he was not exposed and he didn’t have to protect himself – so he was very forthcoming. Of course, Allen didn’t have anybody to protect. Swan spent the first year or two years of my research just bullshitting me – lying, glamorising things or just plain covering things up. He was much easier to work with than Zachary Swan (central character of Snowblind) ever was. I spent a lot of time interviewing him and travelling with him. “When he finally got out of federal custody in 1995, he called me again and then the time seemed right. I really wasn’t eager to write another dope book right away and when I realised that Allen was still in business, I decided to let it pass. “Although that wasn’t possible, we met up and he tried to convince me to write a book about his own marijuana smuggling activities. “I first met Allen sometime in the ’70s when he called me up and said that he wanted to buy the movie rights to Snowblind, Sabbag relates.
And it turns out it was that work which first brought the journalist and author into contact with the subject of his new book. Thompson upon publication and is now recognised as a classic of the genre. Snowblind, his book about the life and times of cocaine smuggler Zachary Swan was hailed by Hunter S. This is Sabbag’s second journey between hard covers on the subject of drug smuggling. Robert Sabbag is the author of Smokescreen, a compulsively page-turning account of the exploits of Allen Long, the subject of the hotpress interview last issue.
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