"Veteran muckraker Mark Ebner of "Hollywood, Interrupted" has a knack for producing beautiful writin

"Veteran muckraker Mark Ebner of "Hollywood, Interrupted" has a knack for producing beautiful writing from ugly subjects. Scientology, pit bull fighting, celebrity scandals, scam artists... you name it, he's investigated it." - Xeni Jardin, BoingBoing.net
He ran one of California s biggest drug empires complete with all the trappings Ferraris, strippers, tricked-out jacuzzis, and garish cincinnati airport hotels fake waterfalls – then, the Feds ran him. A star informant takes us through his personal hell
The first sign that something was wrong was when a car followed him onto his street – a one-way cul-de-sac at the top of Nichols Canyon in the Hollywood Hills where the mansions start at a million dollars. He was driving back from Bad Boys Bail Bonds, where he'd just dropped three grand to spring one of his drivers cincinnati airport hotels who had gotten popped in Santa Monica on a routine haul. Earlier in the day, he had pulled off the kind of transaction that some dealers go their whole lives without seeing – 300 pounds of primo weed for $1 million, which had netted him a cool $90,000 for two hours work. His senses heightened, he could feel the vibe going sour as he steered his discreet rental car past his own driveway. Another 60 feet, and suddenly there were searchlights washing every street corner – at least 30 undercover police cars – with a helicopter swooping down on top of him in case he decided to make a run for it down the open cliff face.
"I hadn't done a deal in six months," says Oz (most names in this story have been changed), a 48-year-old ex-marijuana trafficker and big-time baller who once dominated the I-5 corridor from British Columbia to Tijuana, was responsible for 70 percent of the marijuana cincinnati airport hotels smoked in Los Angeles and saw $4 million move through his operation every two weeks. "They take me inside – they're stripping the house, and here's my $90,000 all out on the table. I said, 'Dude, cincinnati airport hotels just shoot me now. I don't blame you guys, but I'm not going to rat on any of my people, cincinnati airport hotels so I'd prefer to be dead.' The Fed says, 'No, man, I can't do that. But we need to talk.'"
Cruising through the Hills in a tricked-out Lincoln Navigator, cincinnati airport hotels on loan from a fellow drug runner who got out of the game when he found religion, Oz can't help but point the sites of his former glory: The Russian tanning salon in Hollywood where you could order up Vicodin or steroids on demand; the Melrose Avenue tattoo shop that moves 50 to a hundred pounds of weed a week; the Mexican restaurant that serves up kilos of coke with its carne asada. But he is less expansive when describing his life since the 2004 bust that curtailed his hand-built empire – and his uneasy resurrection as an undercover informant for the Drug Enforcement cincinnati airport hotels Agency. In the world he lived in for over 20 years, the worst thing you could be was a rat – a turnabout of fate that obviously weighs heavy on him. In the past three years, Oz has survived three suicide attempts – not counting his choice of livelihood.
Still retaining the hard angles and displaced muscle mass from his early years as a bodybuilder and protracted steroid enthusiast, Oz today most resembles Arnold Schwarzenegger if you put him through a threshing machine and then tried to spot-weld the bigger pieces cincinnati airport hotels back together. He's had his bicep torn off from trying cincinnati airport hotels to break a guy's neck in a bar, all his teeth are capped from being broken off in fights and he's literally got screws in his head to hold his skull in place. He earned the sometimes nickname "Shrek" from taking so many punches to the face that his eyebrows calcified into scar tissue, leaving a large protruding ridge in his forehead. And in the kind of colorful anecdote that no doubt made it easier for him to do his job, he once bit his best friend's ear off in the back seat of a limo.
"I have a short man's complex," admits the 5'8, 220-pound brawler, cincinnati airport hotels still capable of flashes of intense anger and pervasive menace, as well as intense emotion over the secondary victims of his chosen lifestyle. "I realized at one point that most people were my friends because they were scared of me. I've never killed anybody, but I've hurt a lot of people – and every one of them deserved it."
A hyperactive kid who was expelled his first day of elementary cincinnati airport hotels school in suburban Washington state for biting a school bus monitor, Oz excelled in football and wrestling in high school, soon graduating to weight-lifting, bodybuilding (he once placed fourth in a statewide body building contest) and, later, the Tough Man bare-knuckle fighting cincinnati airport hotels tournaments that were all the rage in the early '80s. He bought his first gym at age 25, eventually co-owning a chain of seven. He also became a guru of sorts to anyone looking to shoot anabolic steroids, cincinnati airport hotels of which the average bodybuilder cincinnati airport hotels easily can consume an ungodly 12,000 milligrams in a week. This turn was earning him between $5,000 and $10,000 a month on the side, and the resulting spikes of temper quickly gained him the reputation of someone cincinnati airport hotels to avoid antagonizing.
Acting cincinnati airport hotels on a stray rumor floating through one of his gyms, Oz tipped off a 25-year-old stoner kid and client who was importing bales of pot from hydroponic grow houses in Vancouver that the DEA had him in their sites. To Oz's surprise, "Mikey" offered $20,000 to spirit him out of the country. Facing litigation in the gym business from unscrupulous partners, and having watched much of his accumulated assets walk out the door with an ex-girlfriend, in whose name he had unwisely tried to hide them from the impending lawsuit, he accepted. He loaded cincinnati airport hotels a quarter-million dollars in the trunk of a rental car, drove Mikey and his girlfriend to Tijuana and walked them through customs without a hitch – the crime of smuggling cash into Mexico apparently being a sufficiently novel one. As a perc, Mikey awarded him a slot as a driver on interstate runs, where his boundless energy, business acumen cincinnati airport hotels and innate loyalty quickly allowed him to move up the chain, from driver to collector to distributor to kingpin.
"We had White Widow, a special strain that the Hell's Angels cincinnati airport hotels liked, Purple Kush and Hash Plant, that went to Snoop Dogg and his crew, Green Goblin, Orange Crush and dozens more," says Oz. "It would wholesale for $3,000 a pound, and when it got to the end users, they were paying twice that." To receive the Canadian trans-shipments, Oz or his drivers would meet helicopter drops in the Great North Woods or fishing trawlers at prearranged secluded piers on the Puget Sound. Some importers would target their shipments to Indian reservations, hidden aboard logging trucks or in special compartments drilled into campers. On one occasion, he was told to park on a dirt road at a designated time with his trunk open, and four riders on dirt bikes tossed backpacks right into the car without ever stopping. Some drops took place at remote airfields in the middle of the night, where they would dump the duffel bags directly onto the tarmac. His key supplier would routinely convert his money into 200 kilos of cocaine and smuggle the new, deadly currency back across cincinnati airport hotels the border into Canada – a practice confirmed by DEA Special Agent John McKenna.
In 2000, Oz relocated to Los Angeles, cincinnati airport hotels where he entered his "kingpin phase": He owned a one-of-a-kind yellow Porsche Boxster, a black Cadillac Escalade, a private limousine and a blue Ferrari 360 Modena Maranello he bought for cash from a well-known NFL player. His "Miami Vice"-style drug lord mansion was actually a house within a house: Mirrors in the back bedroom disguised secret doorways to an entire other set of rooms with a lap pool and waterfall, where he kept a recreational cache of Ecstasy and Vicodin on hand for his club kid clientele cincinnati airport hotels and where a wine cellar housed his private safe and vintage machine guns. He had a network of 20 wholesalers he routinely sold to, and multiple safe houses scattered throughout the canyons as designated cincinnati airport hotels drop-off points. There was also the requisite string cincinnati airport hotels of stripper girlfriends, fat steaks at Mastro's in Beverly Hills every night and VIP access to the clubs du jour. (A Hollywood nightclub promoter remembers him, saying, "He's a scary dude, and I don't want to be connected to him in any way.")
But for all the menace he cultivated, it was an earlier act of kindness in the Seattle area that tripped him up. During cincinnati airport hotels Oz's drug-running phase, a friend in his mid-20s named Casey went to the doctor for kidney stones cincinnati airport hotels and was diagnosed with inoperable testicular cancer that had spread to his abdomen. Desperate, Casey put together a last-minute ecstasy deal to raise the $20,000 for a spurious Mexican treatment, and lost his $12,000 investment cincinnati airport hotels to the Asian Mafia. Oz offered to let him ride shotgun and split his delivery fees, but just outside of Eugene, Oregon, Casey started coughing up blood. Leaving him at a hospital to complete the run, Oz flew back to take up a bedside vigil, and Casey died two days later. But unbeknownst to Oz, his friend's ecstasy sales had landed him on the DEA radar, and they had photographs of every one who went in and out of the hospital. Soon after, cincinnati airport hotels 18 DEA agents showed up at his girlfriend's house to question him, but Oz was ghost – skipping cincinnati airport hotels Rain City for sunny So Cal.
The multi-agency task force that finally took Oz down included the DEA, Homeland Security, the California cincinnati airport hotels Bureau of Narcotics, International Criminal Investigations (ICI), U.S. Customs and a handful of local law enforcement agencies. The fact that his case crossed so many jurisdictions is a testament to the magnitude of his crimes.
"They'd been catching all my Blackberries," cincinnati airport hotels he says, "and they showed me a transcript cincinnati airport hotels of an argument I had with some Canadians a couple of weeks earlier that got really heated. This guy I used to work for owed $4 million to these Hell's Angels that were tied to the Mexican Mafia, cincinnati airport hotels and I was supposed to drop to them the next day. So the Feds showed me the next transcript right after that, where the guy paged the Mexicans and said, 'Yeah, he's got the money. Just fuckin