THE NEXT RUN

Jenkins offers the dramatic memoir of a successful young drug smuggler.

As the author begins his narrative, he assures readers that he could tell them stories about his glory days as a cannabis dealer—the “Big Time” when he drove an expensive car, had a Swiss bank account, and carried a pistol he didn't know how to use. Back then, he was organizing shipments of tons of drugs into the country—always remotely so that he never needed to come near the shipments. These large-scale operations stretched from the United States to Afghanistan to Mexico to Colombia and featured some intriguing details, such as the fact that traffickers in their speedboats, after picking up shipments at an atoll off the Florida coast, would come back to Miami “complete with water-skiers in tow to make everything look cool.” Mostly, though, Jenkins concentrates on his earlier years as a drug smuggler, “the early small-time days, when everything seemed so lighthearted and romantic”—and, more importantly, when he and his fellow smugglers were friends who trusted each other, not yet having fallen prey to the betrayals that feature in the book’s later sections. He regales his readers with picaresque tales in which he and friends such as Bill or Arf encountered ruthless high-volume dealers and callous, predatory cops in Mexico and the U.S.: “We were two innocent and naïve kids,” he reflects of one such oddly carefree moment, “being stopped by real live Mexican undercover cops and couldn't wait to tell our all friends about it when we got back home.”

Jenkins is a fantastic storyteller, which should go a long way in winning over any readers who might be put off by the sometimes-sordid nature of the tales he tells. His narrative is full of offbeat details from inside the world of cannabis dealing; readers are told, for instance, that an early brick of marijuana he fenced was the size and shape of a Roget’s Thesaurus. He also reflects on the ordinary life he might have lived if he hadn’t turned to the more dangerous but more lucrative world of crime: “I called all my friends to say I had lids for sale,” he writes at one such point, “and in two days the grass was gone and I was ahead seventy-five dollars—money it would have taken me thirty hours to earn driving buses.” By the time Jenkins tells readers about spending the last of his college-education money on drug runs, they’ll likely be fully invested in his story—a testament to this remembrance’s narrative zest and immediacy. Jenkins portrays the people in his past with fine dramatic detail and evokes the world of drug smuggling, both in the early days and in the more dangerous “Big Time,” with terrific energy and a good deal of humor. Readers of books such as Tony Dokoupil’s The Last Pirate (2014) will doubtless enjoy the scruffy demimonde that Jenkins brings to life in these pages.

A fast-paced, immensely readable account of illegal adventures.