Contrabando : Confessions of a Drug-Smuggling Texas Cowboy

Book Description

Don Henry Ford, Jr. is a Texas cowboy, rancher and farmer. In the late 1970s, he was foreman of his father's ranch and farm in West Texas along the Pecos River. The ranch was going broke. The bankers were knocking at the door. Don went to his Mexican hands, the same guys who were the connection for his own marijuana--smoking inclinations, and they directed him to their contacts on the other side of the Rio Grande. Soon, he was scoring some easy money and he was hooked. For the next seven years, he made his living as an outlaw, smuggling marijuana across the U.S./Mexico border in the Big Bend region. Millions of dollars passed through his hands. He did business with many of the big-name narcotraficantes of the era like Pablo Acosta and Amado Carrillo Fuentes. After being arrested and sent to prison, he escaped and lived for a year in rural northern Mexico, raising a bumper crop of marijuana and hiding out from the federales. Contrabando is a confession, but it's also an homage to the Mexican paisanos and, indeed, to other outlaws north of the border who became Don Ford's friends and protectors during his seven years as a smuggler.

Charles Bowden (author of Down by the River, Simon & Schuster, 2003) has written a remarkable introduction to Contrabando, giving an historical perspective to the never-ending "war on drugs" waged by the U.S. government.

In December 1986, the feds caught Don Henry Ford a second time. He was sentenced to 15 years in a maximum security federal penitentiary. He now lives in Seguin, Texas, farming and raising race horses.


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"The growing, processing, transporting and selling of illegal drugs is the world's second largest industry behind the manufacture and sale of arms. As a young man, Don Henry Ford, Jr. found his niche in this business as a smuggler, transporting marijuana across the Rio Grande." "Contrabando tells the story of how and why he got into the business. Ford writes about, among others, his wild friend the blonde-haried, blue-eyed Arnold Kersh, a hell-raising pusher in the Texas Panhandle, who went through his short life at a "high-speed wobble:" and Dick Graham, a bankrupt farmer who was so angry at the conspiracies of the government and the World Bank that he started "repossessing" farm equipment and selling drugs to get even." "But the crucial part of Contrabando tells about Ford's brief time in the little town of Piedritas 75 miles south of the U.S./Mexico Border. Piedritas was Ford's home for a year when he escaped a U.S. prison, and it was the home of Ford's good friend Oscar Cabello, a mid-level Mexican narcotraficante." Oddly enough, the reader - besides learning about the dangerous business of smuggling drugs across the Rio Grande - will learn how to cook delicious brisket Mexican-style and the secrets of making home-made tortillas and refried beans: how to butcher and barbecue a goat; and how to plant and grow a bumper crop of marijuana.


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