Scoring comes in many forms. Of the 25 million Americans who toked up last year (source: The Man, a.k.a. the US Dept. of Health & Human Services), a shameful proportion doubtless mooched without kicking in so much as a six-pack or a pizza in return. For those they mooched from, the transaction might have taken place in the back seat of a car, on break at TGI Fridays, in the garage of a suburban home filled with squalling toddlers, in the bathroom of a hair salon, at a deadhead neighbor's house over interminable tea and sharing, around a table in the absolute wrong part of town. It can be a chilled experience, a major hassle, fun, terrifying, but one thing it never is is convenient. Even without being reduced to the vicissitudes of the park, there's the crapshoot element. Lateness will occur, and a certain amount of sociability is expected--chit chat and beating around the bush beforehand, and a bowl afterwards to maintain the illusion that it's anything but what it is. You pretty much have to block out the afternoon or evening for it.

Not in New York City, though. Here, stoners of certain means enjoy the luxury of home delivery by runners who understand their role: come when called, deal, leave. Could anything be more civilized? Those with services on call radiate a certain deserved smugness, while their friends calculate carefully how many favors is one too many. But how exactly do these things work, anyway? Forbes magazine, of all things, takes us behind the scenes at one of the enterprises that keeps New York copasetic.

Forbes magazine, March 26, 2007

INSIDE DOPE

New York City's marijuana delivery networks are like the Internet: sophisticated, robust and lucrative.

A man we'll call Frank is a 35-year-old equities trader for a Wall Street investment bank. He lives with his fiancée in a 1,700-square-foot, three-bedroom apartment in a chic Manhattan neighborhood and, like many well-to-do New Yorkers, relies on a vast array of delivery services to satisfy his whims. He orders out for dinner nearly every night. His dry-cleaned suits are brought to his doorstep. His groceries arrive in cardboard boxes.

Tonight, as he does once a month, Frank will call on a service that's not found in the Yellow Pages. He dials a number listed on a colorful business card that a friend gave him. He reaches an answering service, punches in his own number, then hangs up. Within minutes his phone rings and he is asked by the voice on the other end for his code word. He provides it and hangs up again.

Two hours later a backpack-toting, clean-cut young man wearing jeans and a T shirt shows up at the door, looking every bit like a college kid on his way to the library. But his backpack isn't crammed with books; it's filled with dozens of clear, 4-inch-long plastic boxes, each containing up to 2 grams of high-grade marijuana ranging in price from $50 to $400. "It's convenient, the weed is good and it feels very safe," Frank says of the service. "I would never go down to the park to buy it."

Such transactions take place thousands of times a day in the city; the services date from the early 1980s. Back then most dope was still purchased in open-air markets--Central Park, for example--until the mid-1990s, when former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani rid the streets of drug dealers, which started gentrifying many crime-ridden New York neighborhoods.

But instead of disappearing, the trade went underground and radically changed. No longer does most of the pot come in, French Connection style, by the ton on boats or tractor trailers. The trade starts with small amounts of weed mostly grown regionally and moves through multilevel distributors. Like the Internet, this kind of distribution channel has many nodes of activity and no fixed hub. A broken link hardly slows the operation at all.

Dealers use pagers, cell phones and PDAs to create from this topology a sophisticated, and very lucrative, network. The key is having several layers of agents between the grower and the buyer--and making it inherently difficult for law enforcement to connect the dots. The operation can even continue when its leaders are in jail.

Were it not for a squealer, the Drug Enforcement Administration might never have broken up a drug delivery service that called itself the Cartoon Network (after the cable TV channel). A yearlong investigation led to the arrest of John Nebel, 35, founder and ringleader of the operation, and 11 others, charged with conspiring to traffic in 2,200-plus pounds of marijuana between Jan. 1, 1999 and Dec. 1, 2005. A high school dropout from Long Island, Nebel (who, along with those confederates, has pleaded guilty to conspiracy) led a mobile and tech-savvy network via a call center that frequently changed locations and delivered dope through a system of couriers overseen by street managers. "We had to dismantle the entire operation to kill it," says a baby-faced, blue-eyed, 42-year-old DEA special agent. Helping him take down the dope ring was a black-haired, 46-year-old task force officer for the Suffolk County sheriff's office. We'll call these two cops Tom and Jerry. They are still trying to do their jobs anonymously.

No telling how many of these services exist. They come in all sizes, from corporate-like entities with client lists in the tens of thousands to lone entrepreneurs who deal with a handful of customers. They market their wares with business cards or, better yet, by word of mouth; because it leaves too many electronic fingerprints, the Internet is out. At its height, the Cartoon Network had 30 employees, including executives (Nebel and three lieutenants) and six middle managers responsible for overseeing dozens of laborers (packagers, dispatchers and couriers), all working together to get pot from the grower to the customer. Only Nebel and his inner circle knew everyone in the organization; that made it difficult for authorities to break one link and follow it up the chain. (In fact, the network continued to operate smoothly during the year that Nebel spent in jail for a separate drug charge in 2001.)

Most of the marijuana was grown in dozens of private homes across the metropolitan area (including Connecticut and New Jersey), primarily in basements. A typical grower would cultivate 300 to 400 plants, which were harvested up to four times a year, yielding 30 to 40 pounds at each cut, worth $150,000 to $200,000 wholesale (Nebel's cost) and $540,000 to $720,000 on the street. The pot was mostly high grade and grown hydroponically with mineral nutrients, not soil.

A wholesale distributor bought the pot for $4,000 a pound and delivered it to the executive group (which paid $5,000), just a few pounds at a time. "They kept the increments small so they could move it quickly and never have too much on hand," says Tom. Then, packaged by the pound, the dope was delivered to a home base--a call center in a hotel room in Manhattan, Brooklyn or Long Island or one of Nebel's seven houses (all owned under different names) in the metro area. The call center changed weekly, even daily, to prevent detection. Up to six employees worked in the call center, which was overseen by an executive. The two or three packagers broke down the pot into 1.5- and 2-gram parcels, which were placed in plastic canisters and labeled according to type. Some of the more popular were Strawberry Cough, NYC Diesel and AK-47, names that referred to the seed, strain and potency. The higher-priced brands ($100-plus per 2 grams), like limited-quantity designer handbags, moved the fastest.

Generally, three employees worked as dispatchers in the call center. One manned the central computer, which had a customer database, custom-made for Nebel for $50,000. When a call came into a Cartoon Network pager at the center, it was instantly downloaded into the database, which brought up vital information about the caller: where he lived, his buying history and the last courier who delivered dope. "This was one of their safety valves to weed out police calls," says Jerry. The network received up to 600 calls a day. If the number cleared, a dispatcher called it back and asked for a code--sometimes a word (like "cartoon") or the code name of a courier. The dispatcher sent a street manager (with no pot) to check out new clients. (If a customer ever mentioned dollar amounts over the phone, the dispatcher was trained to drop the call immediately and flag the caller's number in the database. "This was another precaution," says Jerry.) With the correct code given, another dispatcher paged a street courier and gave him the delivery address.

Each of four street managers kept tabs on up to six couriers after handing over the vials from the call center. To make deliveries, couriers traveled by foot, bike, subway or bus, getting instructions from the call center. "They liked to hire college kids, you know, just regular-looking guys," says Tom. Such services rarely hire African-Americans as couriers because they were thought more likely to be hassled by the police. Couriers were careful to carry just enough pot to stay under the state guidelines for a felony charge in case they were pinched (possession of anything up to 8 ounces is still a misdemeanor). Also, their knowledge of the other employees involved in the network generally stopped at their street managers. At the end of the 12-hour shift (11 a.m. to 11 p.m., 365 days a year), couriers brought the money and any leftover dope back to the street managers, who paid them, typically $200 a day. Street managers took the money to an executive who, in turn, paid the rest of the staff. Street managers, packagers and dispatchers made $300 a day. Nebel's three managers took home $300, plus lots of perks. Even with daily expenses of $9,000, the Network often cleared $17,000, for an annual net of $6 million--tax free, of course.

That all went up in smoke after an anonymous letter, presumably from a disgruntled former employee, was sent to a police department in Long Island. It outlined how the Cartoon Network functioned, the address of a call center and one of the service's pager numbers. Tom and Jerry cloned the pager number, tapped the organization's phones and did street surveillance. After a year they had enough for search and arrest warrants and in December 2005 seized $837,000 worth of dope, $685,000 in cash, Nebel's seven residences, 16 cars, a boat and thousands of vials packaged for the holiday season. In total the feds are seeking a $22.5 million forfeiture. The DEA also seized the database of 50,000 client names and phone numbers but has thus far not pursued them. Nebel awaits sentencing later this year--and faces ten years to life. Enough time to work on the book he's been planning to write.