WHEELER DEALER: Chapter 3

You can’t blame it all on Amato’s. I mean, if it hadn’t been Amato’s it would have been some other open-all-night pool hall with all the cool older guys for Roger to emulate.

Clyde the Tramp, Chili Willie, Fat Joe Ballantine, Gary Sergeant. But especially Gary Sergeant, or Cosmo as they called him. He was about four years older than Roger at the time.

“The thing about Gary,” says Roger, “is he had this girlfriend, probably about ten years older that he was. She worked as a call girl and sort of kept him. Bought him clothes. He had those little bitty sunglasses, Stacy Adams cap toe shoes. He’d wear those suede front sweaters.”

Gary also drove a white 62 Cadillac, which was very impressive for someone who was just a senior in high school. Roger used to hang out with Gary’s younger brother Ron who was about the same age as Roger, but Gary was his mentor, he says.

At the time Roger was attending Parkrose high, trying his best to stay straight. Of course there was still that fighting. The vice principal threatened to throw him out if he didn’t stop. And he had this fake ID which allowed him to buy beer for his fellow students and make a few bucks on the side. After a while he started staging parties, renting rooms at one or another of the cheap motels in East County, and charging $50 a couple for the evening.

Then on weekends he’d stay with Grandma Wanita, closer to downtown, and spend as much time as possible hanging out at Amato’s. Every once in a while Wanita would come by and haul him out. Doing what she could to stop him from spending every waking moment with “those Good Time Charlies.”

It got to be a joke. The other guys, Gator or Don or whoever else might be hanging out at the time, would  say, “Hey Roger, your Grandma’s coming,” whether she was or not, and Roger would have to scoot out the back.

Sooner or later, though, he’d be back, taking it all in. The pool hustling. The drug dealing. It was all about making money, he quickly figured out.

In the beginning it was mostly amphetamines. “Just middle-manning it,” he explains. “Gary Sergeant had bought 30 thousand bennies. Crosstops. Selling them four for a dollar. We sold them for 50 cents each.”

Then it was marijuana, which was becoming a big thing. The  standard measure was an empty Prince Albert tobacco can, which actually held about an ounce of weed. That was a lid. Buy a lid of weed for $25 and you could break it down into eight equal bags – nickel bags, as they are called, because you’d sell them for $5 each. You made a profit of $15 on a lid of grass, which would be about $150 after figuring in today’s inflation.

In the beginning most of the pot came through Chili Willie, a black guy who hung out at Amato’s. Later Roger started making trips to San Francisco where the Haight-Asbury scene was in full swing. The hippie thing was spreading to Portland too, of course, although Roger and his friends certainly didn’t go along with the Peace, Love and Happiness agenda. They just saw them as marks.

Some of the kids at Parkrose who’d been drinking beer at Roger’s parties started smoking marijuana as well. So of course Roger felt obliged to provide some of that too. Which, not too surprisingly, is how Roger’s first big bust came about.

Some sixty years later it’s almost impossible to piece it all together, but what appears to have happened is that one of Roger’s clients from Parkrose high, a kid named Phil Marimoto (who is unfortunately no longer around to give his side of the story), got in some sort of scrape with the law and, quite astutely, bargained his way out by offering to provide information on a drug dealer who was selling marijuana – the Killer Weed itself – to unsuspecting high school students like himself.

So next time Marimota went to one of Roger’s parties, he brought along a slightly older, but obviously hip dude by the name of Johnny Giani, who’d just come in from New York City. Giani actually brought a six-pack of beer with him.

Roger and Giani got along fine. Drank a little beer. Passed around a joint. And just before Giani was about to leave, as a token of their new friendship, Roger offered him three skinny, or pin joints for the road.

“Here, let me pay you for that,” said Giani, holding out three $1 bills. “No, no,” said Roger. “You brought the beer.” But in the end Roger takes the money.

And who would have guessed it, but three weeks later the Portland police show up at Grandma Wanita’s house and arrest Roger for selling narcotics to an undercover police officer.

Roger gets a lawyer, the capable and extremely cynical ex-DA Oscar Howlett, and is immediately back on the street. Unfortunately for him, however, the judge assigned to the case, an ex-FBI agent named Alan F. Davis, is a real hardass.

“Mister Shirley,” he says from the bench, “I think it is only fair to warn you that I believe in penitentiary time for all narcotics convictions.” The sentencing actually makes page 26 of the Oregonian (Sept. 7, 1967).

                       Drugs Term Imposed

             Roger Shirley, 19, of 1223 SE 15^th Ave.,

             Wednesday was sentenced to three years in

             the state correctional institution for

             illegal sale of marijuana. The defendant

             was found guilty and convicted by Circuit

             Judge Alan F. Davis.

Three years in prison for three pin joints of marijuana! Why that’s outrageous! you say. Well, of course it is.

But don’t feel too sorry for Roger. Because just five months later the state supreme court overturns his conviction – on the grounds that the good Judge Davis, despite the fulminations of Roger’s lawyer, steadfastly refused to require the police to reveal the name of their informant.

Of course everyone knew was Marimoto. But if they’d acknowledged that in court, Howlett would have been able to discredit him on the stand and demonstrate what a bunch of poppycock this all was in the first place. A new trial, before a different and possibly more merciful judge, is scheduled six months hence.

But truth to tell, the marijuana indictment doesn’t slow Roger down at all. He’s already well into Portland’s lucrative meth trade – and all moral, health and legal questions aside – why not?  You’re dealing in smaller quantities, it’s easier to package, less detectible and, all in all, just more profitable.

Plus there’s this guy at Amato’s, Richard Repp, known of course by the nickname Richard the Reptile, who says he has someone who wants three ounces of dexedrine. Can Roger fix him up?

Well, after his recent unpleasant experience with Giani, Roger’s not about to walk blithely into another trap. In fact this time, he figures, he’ll be the one doing the ripping off.

So he tells Repp to set the exchange up in the restroom at the Chevron station at 13^th and Hawthorne. The buyer will be sitting in the stall with the door closed when Roger arrives. Roger will hang his coat on the doorhook. Repp will then take the three-ounce baggie from the coat pocket and put $1000 back in.

Roger grabs his coat, jumps on his 750 Norton motorcycle parked just outside the door, and he’s outa there. He drops the money off at a friend’s house a few blocks away and heads off toward North Portland on another drug-related errand. 

Just before Colonel Summers Park he notices a couple of Portland cop cars on his tail. When he speeds up they do too. At about 14^th and Belmont there’s another one blocking the road so he pulls over.

It’s obvious this has been a sting from the start. The only problem being that when they pull him over, Roger doesn’t have the money, and whoever it is – and judging from the extremely nervous guy in the suit, sitting off to the side in an unmarked car, it must be the DEA – doesn’t have anything to show for it but a three-ounce bag of sugar. The city cop who’s doing the arresting thinks it’s all pretty funny.

What Roger does have, as the police officer quickly discovers, is a partially smoked marijuana cigarette, which as we all realize by now could lead to serious legal consequences back in those days. So Roger proposes a deal.

If, as a show of good faith, the cop allows him to swallow the roach, he’ll go fetch the $1000 and deliver it to its rightful owner.

Now who could turn down a deal like that?