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Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade
Called "a triumphant piece of reporting" (The New Yorker), Snowblind is an all-out, nonstop, and now classic look at the cocaine trade through the eyes of smuggler Zachary Swan. In a brief Roman-candle career, Swan served an elegant clientele, traveling between Bogota and the nightclubs of New York, inventing intricate scams to outmaneuver the feds. Creating diversions that were characteristically baroque, surviving on ingenuity and idiot's luck, he discovered in the process a hip, dangerous, high-velocity world that Robert Sabbag evokes with extraordinary power and humor. "One of the best books about drugs ever written." -- Robert Stone "A flat-out ballbuster. It moves like a threshing machine with a fuel tank full of ether...." -- Hunter S. Thompson "One of the first books about the cocaine trade and it is still among the best." -- Norman Mailer
304 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 1998
51 people are currently reading
1,189 people want to read
About the author
Robert Sabbag
9Ìýbooks8ÌýfollowersRobert Sabbag is an American author and journalist. The memoir Down Around Midnight, is about a fatal plane crash he survived in 1979. Sabbag is a member of the Authors Guild and Writers Guild of America. His film Witness Protection was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards, including Best Picture.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 59 reviews
October 10, 2011
This book is worth reading for several reasons:
1. No matter how you feel about drugs, and cocaine in particular, the author brilliantly and ambitiously unmasks the underground netherworld of cocaine smuggling, and humanizes a notoriously inhuman trade. It takes the nonsense you see Lou Dobbs spouting, with his perfectly fake, immaculately white chompers, on CNN about the notorious killers, thugs, and illicit monsters that smuggle drugs, and makes you realize your 50 year old neighbor may be harboring four kilos of cocaine in his fireplace logs. The man in line behind you at the voting booth could have, just the week before, walked through customs with 40 ounces of cocaine strapped to his legs. This man also pays his taxes, gives to charity and owns stock in major corporations. He is, by all intents and purposes, a functioning member of society.
2. While the book takes place in the late 60’s and early 70’s, over forty years ago, the nation’s mentality, lack of scientific evidence, political buffoonery, and the public’s blatant ignorance about “controlled substances� hasn’t changed one iota since the days of rampant hippies and the sexual revolution. Today, the general public is still just as blindly misled and misinformed by the talking heads and clueless politicians as our decidedly aged parents were back then.
3. The story is more than just a tale of drug smuggling, it’s a manifesto on our culture’s moral compass, which begs the question: why would a contributing member of society resort to drug smuggling? Boredom? A sinister heart? Greed? Or is it just that the prevailing wisdom on what’s right and what’s wrong isn’t always congruent with legality? (In all honesty, probably a combination of all these.)
The story follows the life of Zachary Swan, an east coast socialite, born into money and a flexible spending account. Swan inherits the family business of paper packaging, a lucrative business in the late 60’s with the rise of the advertising industry. He lives in an upscale apartment in NYC and he dines at the best restaurants. His friends are models, famous actors, politicians and the social elite.
Swan reaches middle age, burnt out on corporate America he begins smoking pot, which leads to drug runs to Acapulco (oh my God � the gateway drug!). And just like George Jung in Blow, the economics of blow far outweigh the economics of weed � more money for less weight. Swan flies to Colombia and, as a complete rookie, fumbles his way into building a very lucrative coke smuggling business. What’s so fascinating about Swan is the painstaking lengths he goes to out fox the feds (His drug nickname was the Silver Fox because of his grey hair and cunning ability). Whether it’s creating intricate fake identities complete with seal-proof alibis, making the “double bag� switch, or dressing up as an Olympian during the summer games to get through customs, his ingenuity to cover his tracks is awe inspiring (remember this is pre Pablo Escobar / George Jung).
Robert Sabbag combines crisp prose with relentless details without losing the reader’s interest. At no point in the book was I skipping to the end of the paragraph, which is something my impatient mind does often. Bottom line, this is one of the best drug related books I have ever read.
1. No matter how you feel about drugs, and cocaine in particular, the author brilliantly and ambitiously unmasks the underground netherworld of cocaine smuggling, and humanizes a notoriously inhuman trade. It takes the nonsense you see Lou Dobbs spouting, with his perfectly fake, immaculately white chompers, on CNN about the notorious killers, thugs, and illicit monsters that smuggle drugs, and makes you realize your 50 year old neighbor may be harboring four kilos of cocaine in his fireplace logs. The man in line behind you at the voting booth could have, just the week before, walked through customs with 40 ounces of cocaine strapped to his legs. This man also pays his taxes, gives to charity and owns stock in major corporations. He is, by all intents and purposes, a functioning member of society.
2. While the book takes place in the late 60’s and early 70’s, over forty years ago, the nation’s mentality, lack of scientific evidence, political buffoonery, and the public’s blatant ignorance about “controlled substances� hasn’t changed one iota since the days of rampant hippies and the sexual revolution. Today, the general public is still just as blindly misled and misinformed by the talking heads and clueless politicians as our decidedly aged parents were back then.
3. The story is more than just a tale of drug smuggling, it’s a manifesto on our culture’s moral compass, which begs the question: why would a contributing member of society resort to drug smuggling? Boredom? A sinister heart? Greed? Or is it just that the prevailing wisdom on what’s right and what’s wrong isn’t always congruent with legality? (In all honesty, probably a combination of all these.)
The story follows the life of Zachary Swan, an east coast socialite, born into money and a flexible spending account. Swan inherits the family business of paper packaging, a lucrative business in the late 60’s with the rise of the advertising industry. He lives in an upscale apartment in NYC and he dines at the best restaurants. His friends are models, famous actors, politicians and the social elite.
Swan reaches middle age, burnt out on corporate America he begins smoking pot, which leads to drug runs to Acapulco (oh my God � the gateway drug!). And just like George Jung in Blow, the economics of blow far outweigh the economics of weed � more money for less weight. Swan flies to Colombia and, as a complete rookie, fumbles his way into building a very lucrative coke smuggling business. What’s so fascinating about Swan is the painstaking lengths he goes to out fox the feds (His drug nickname was the Silver Fox because of his grey hair and cunning ability). Whether it’s creating intricate fake identities complete with seal-proof alibis, making the “double bag� switch, or dressing up as an Olympian during the summer games to get through customs, his ingenuity to cover his tracks is awe inspiring (remember this is pre Pablo Escobar / George Jung).
Robert Sabbag combines crisp prose with relentless details without losing the reader’s interest. At no point in the book was I skipping to the end of the paragraph, which is something my impatient mind does often. Bottom line, this is one of the best drug related books I have ever read.
March 15, 2025
Lo que me trastorna un poco de esta novela es el hecho de que mi isla, San Andrés, que es un punto en medio del caribe, tenga tanta relevancia. ¿Cómo son tan precisos los detalles acerca de mi cultura?. Hay hoteles, direcciones, personajes reales, pareciera que el autor hiciera parte del contexto isleño, lo cual es muy raro, ya que somos un grupo étnico bastante cerrado y nuestra isla, es territorio ancestral.
Pedazo de novela con una trama llena de giros, personajes caóticos y sucesos inesperados.
Pedazo de novela con una trama llena de giros, personajes caóticos y sucesos inesperados.
February 21, 2012
It's fiction, but just barely. This is one of the better books I've read on any micro-topic (in this case the history of cocaine smuggling in the 1970s). It's funny, very informative, and high entertaining. It's a perfect travel read for a trip to Columbia.
April 15, 2020
I came away with the feeling that Sabbag was trying too hard to be clever in his method of writing. The subject matter interested me but the book did not. Over rated in my humble opinion. I expected more after reading other reviews.
June 2, 2010
Nice book on the early coke trade. 'Bad guy' walks free at the end.
The dude is a mid-level trafficker. Decidedly not the story of some cocaine kingpin. Just a smart slacker.
Some funny dialog and narration.
Quotes:
"The party went out of control somewhere in the early hours before dawn, and the steps he had taken in the beginning to minimize his losses were eventually undermined by the immutable laws of chemistry - his mind, simply, had turned to soup. He was up against the law of averages with a head full of coke. The smart money pulled out, and the odds mounted steadily. By sunrise, Swan was beaten by the spread."
"We are on the threshold of human interchange here, speech, verbal commerce along the barren avenues of Quaalude City. Communication at this level, although sophisticated in its own way, can best be described as haphazard. It is a kind of space-age remodeling of traditional counterintelligence techniques - scrambled messages, predistorted transmissions, sympathetically programmed transceivers - a kind of mojo cryptography which contains no universal cipher and is efficient only when two people are doing the same kind of dope."
"The sun was on the horizon and all seven were bobbing in the surf when in the distance an intruder appeared. A jogger. He approached, moving at an even pace along the waterline, his face flushed, his breathing steady, his body drenched with sweat and glory, radiating that all-American, infinite faith in the cardiovascular benefits of discomfort."
"[Cocaine:]'s synthetic relatives are benzocaine and procaine, the latter marketed under the trade name Novocain."
"Because the government knows nothing about drugs, it does not know that there are good reasons for not doing cocaine."
"Federal agents, those subsidized by the American taxpayer, will customarily wait for a bust before talking to such people. Rather than walk up to someone obviously headed for trouble - where they might flash a badge and say, 'Get smart, kid, it's not going to work' - they will, as a matter of policy, allow him to risk his life with the local heavies, get a few snorts of pure, and walk into jail at the airport back home. Why prevent smuggling when you can punish it - isn't that what jails are for?"
"Swan's awakening was rude and abrupt. He opened his eyes and found himself looking down the throat of a beast disguised as the American Dream."
The dude is a mid-level trafficker. Decidedly not the story of some cocaine kingpin. Just a smart slacker.
Some funny dialog and narration.
Quotes:
"The party went out of control somewhere in the early hours before dawn, and the steps he had taken in the beginning to minimize his losses were eventually undermined by the immutable laws of chemistry - his mind, simply, had turned to soup. He was up against the law of averages with a head full of coke. The smart money pulled out, and the odds mounted steadily. By sunrise, Swan was beaten by the spread."
"We are on the threshold of human interchange here, speech, verbal commerce along the barren avenues of Quaalude City. Communication at this level, although sophisticated in its own way, can best be described as haphazard. It is a kind of space-age remodeling of traditional counterintelligence techniques - scrambled messages, predistorted transmissions, sympathetically programmed transceivers - a kind of mojo cryptography which contains no universal cipher and is efficient only when two people are doing the same kind of dope."
"The sun was on the horizon and all seven were bobbing in the surf when in the distance an intruder appeared. A jogger. He approached, moving at an even pace along the waterline, his face flushed, his breathing steady, his body drenched with sweat and glory, radiating that all-American, infinite faith in the cardiovascular benefits of discomfort."
"[Cocaine:]'s synthetic relatives are benzocaine and procaine, the latter marketed under the trade name Novocain."
"Because the government knows nothing about drugs, it does not know that there are good reasons for not doing cocaine."
"Federal agents, those subsidized by the American taxpayer, will customarily wait for a bust before talking to such people. Rather than walk up to someone obviously headed for trouble - where they might flash a badge and say, 'Get smart, kid, it's not going to work' - they will, as a matter of policy, allow him to risk his life with the local heavies, get a few snorts of pure, and walk into jail at the airport back home. Why prevent smuggling when you can punish it - isn't that what jails are for?"
"Swan's awakening was rude and abrupt. He opened his eyes and found himself looking down the throat of a beast disguised as the American Dream."
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 10, 2012
Good read, but i lost momentum about half way through. Would be really interesting if you had interest in knowing more about the subject matter.
Had some really interesting chapters, but I wouldn't re-read it.
3.5/5
Had some really interesting chapters, but I wouldn't re-read it.
3.5/5
December 1, 2012
Funny , honest and beautifully written . There is a poetic fluency in the narrative that is deceptively simple . A modern classic
September 17, 2015
La cocaÃna es sólo la metáfora
July 27, 2020
Muddled. Could have been better if the author wasn't trying so hard to be edgy or hard-boiled or whatever he was attempting. Frustrating.
April 9, 2024
I bought this because the back cover featured a rave review by Hunter S Thompson - and I can totally see why HST would have been into this; both this book's style and it's substance are very HST-y.
But while I mostly enjoyed the Sabbag's rat-a-tat word jazz on a sentence to sentence level I must say that I was a little underwhelmed by the overall project. It was never quite clear to me what was so special or unique about Zachary Swan that he deserved to be the protagonist of a whole book; my guess is that the main reason why he was selected to be profiled at such lengths is because he was accessible to the author and willing to talk at great length. Which is a fine enough reason, I suppose - but it might have been more interesting to hear about a bigger player who was in the game for longer.
Also, while I often enjoyed Sabbag's rhetorical flourishes I must say that sometimes the man did lay it on a bit thick. For example, this passage stood out to me: "What medical science, under the auspices of the United States government, has been able to undercover in the way of prima facie evidence to support the Drug Enforcement Administration's case against chemicals on its list of Controlled Substances parallels the strides made by the Unicorn in its pilgrimage across the minefield of evolution. What at first required a mere exercise of faith on the part of the American taxpayer now, on the threshold of the 21st century, calls for the willing suspension of disbelief. The mound of misinformation generated unashamedly by the hulking and etherized beast of government research is dwarfed only by the stack of money it costs to feed the monster, while the bureaucratic campaign to keep the beast incumbent thrives on nothing more substantial than it's own propaganda. The rewards of the system are minimal. And the controlled substance list is the Domino Theory of the seventies."
I mean, that's some mighty fancy writing - but also: wtf is this guy talking about? I have read and re-read that passage several times now and I still don't quite get why the unicorn is catching a stray shot there. He probably shoulda left them outta this
But while I mostly enjoyed the Sabbag's rat-a-tat word jazz on a sentence to sentence level I must say that I was a little underwhelmed by the overall project. It was never quite clear to me what was so special or unique about Zachary Swan that he deserved to be the protagonist of a whole book; my guess is that the main reason why he was selected to be profiled at such lengths is because he was accessible to the author and willing to talk at great length. Which is a fine enough reason, I suppose - but it might have been more interesting to hear about a bigger player who was in the game for longer.
Also, while I often enjoyed Sabbag's rhetorical flourishes I must say that sometimes the man did lay it on a bit thick. For example, this passage stood out to me: "What medical science, under the auspices of the United States government, has been able to undercover in the way of prima facie evidence to support the Drug Enforcement Administration's case against chemicals on its list of Controlled Substances parallels the strides made by the Unicorn in its pilgrimage across the minefield of evolution. What at first required a mere exercise of faith on the part of the American taxpayer now, on the threshold of the 21st century, calls for the willing suspension of disbelief. The mound of misinformation generated unashamedly by the hulking and etherized beast of government research is dwarfed only by the stack of money it costs to feed the monster, while the bureaucratic campaign to keep the beast incumbent thrives on nothing more substantial than it's own propaganda. The rewards of the system are minimal. And the controlled substance list is the Domino Theory of the seventies."
I mean, that's some mighty fancy writing - but also: wtf is this guy talking about? I have read and re-read that passage several times now and I still don't quite get why the unicorn is catching a stray shot there. He probably shoulda left them outta this
August 1, 2024
Erzählt wird die Geschichte von Zackary Swan, einem der erfolgreichsten Kokainschmuggler in den USA in den 70er Jahren.
Das Buch beginnt mit einem vielversprechenden Vorwort von Howard Marks, auch Mr. Nice genannt. Der ehemalige Schmuggler von Marihuana ist von der Geschichte Sabbags auch beim zweiten Lesen so begeistert, dass er sich erst einmal einen Joint anzünden muss.
Ein Joint hätte mir vielleicht auch geholfen, denn ich war nicht ganz so begeistert. Zum einen kam mir Swans Geschichte altmodisch vor. Das mag an der Zeit liegen, in der Swan aktiv war. Er war Einzelhändler und nicht in einer Bande organisiert. Deshalb ging bei ihm alles etwas ziviler zu, auch wenn er den einen oder anderen abtrünnigen Partner durchaus ans Messer bzw. die Pistole geliefert hat.
Das bringt mich auf meinen größten Kritikpunkt: Swan scheint sich keiner Schuld bewusst zu sein und wenn doch, gibt er das nicht zu. Seine Erzählung klingt wie eine Abenteuergeschichte, in der ein schlauer Schmuggler gegen viele dumme Polizisten antritt. Dass er zwar gefasst, aber nicht verurteilt wird, scheint nur Swans Meinung über seine Arbeit zu bestätigen.
Das Buch beginnt mit einem vielversprechenden Vorwort von Howard Marks, auch Mr. Nice genannt. Der ehemalige Schmuggler von Marihuana ist von der Geschichte Sabbags auch beim zweiten Lesen so begeistert, dass er sich erst einmal einen Joint anzünden muss.
Ein Joint hätte mir vielleicht auch geholfen, denn ich war nicht ganz so begeistert. Zum einen kam mir Swans Geschichte altmodisch vor. Das mag an der Zeit liegen, in der Swan aktiv war. Er war Einzelhändler und nicht in einer Bande organisiert. Deshalb ging bei ihm alles etwas ziviler zu, auch wenn er den einen oder anderen abtrünnigen Partner durchaus ans Messer bzw. die Pistole geliefert hat.
Das bringt mich auf meinen größten Kritikpunkt: Swan scheint sich keiner Schuld bewusst zu sein und wenn doch, gibt er das nicht zu. Seine Erzählung klingt wie eine Abenteuergeschichte, in der ein schlauer Schmuggler gegen viele dumme Polizisten antritt. Dass er zwar gefasst, aber nicht verurteilt wird, scheint nur Swans Meinung über seine Arbeit zu bestätigen.
January 31, 2022
This smuggling story familiarly begins with marijuana, but soon changes to the more profitable and socially chic cocaine. A well written tale of dry wit, poetry, song lyrics, metric and currency conversion, and in my opinion, if you read it from end to beginning, a "how to guide" for smuggling cocaine using 1970's style, sophistication and technology.
*as a side note, the 1978 Steely Dan song "Hey Nineteen" includes a lyric, "the Cuervo gold, the fine Colombian, make tonight a wonderful thing", referring to the popularity of Marijuana from Columbia prior to the cocaine blizzard of the 1980's.
Author Robert Sabbag is a writer, a great writer not a novelist. His brilliant word craft pulls you into the story from the first page. This story may very well be the real life prequel to well-known movies about cocaine trafficking including, Scarface, Blow, Made in America and the exceptional documentary Cocaine Cowboys and my favorite, the 2 hour extended version, "Cocaine Cowboys Reloaded".
*as a side note, the 1978 Steely Dan song "Hey Nineteen" includes a lyric, "the Cuervo gold, the fine Colombian, make tonight a wonderful thing", referring to the popularity of Marijuana from Columbia prior to the cocaine blizzard of the 1980's.
Author Robert Sabbag is a writer, a great writer not a novelist. His brilliant word craft pulls you into the story from the first page. This story may very well be the real life prequel to well-known movies about cocaine trafficking including, Scarface, Blow, Made in America and the exceptional documentary Cocaine Cowboys and my favorite, the 2 hour extended version, "Cocaine Cowboys Reloaded".
February 10, 2018
Ok book. Well written. Snappy dialogue. He made the characters came alive with descriptions like:
'She was a knock-out. Grown men wept when she walked by. The fact that she was absolutely crazy did not detract From her appearance; in fact, the supposition that she was in no control of her destiny whatsoever was somewhat provocative. She was a hymn to inconsonance, a boquet of wounds.'
Another Nice line:
'To snort cocaine is to make a statement. IT is like flying to Paris for breakfast.'
Some parts where all over the place with to manny characters. It could go something like this:
'Swan never did cocaine without Charlie one leg. Why they named him one leg? Only me Colombiano knew. Mc Colombiano was not From Colombia but From Ohio. Hi Hussled all the dope in Ohio. Give The man 5 kilo's pure and he and his wife Mercedes would
Make iT dessapear. Clock Work. Magic. Call iT what you like. IT made Swan richer than Ruthless Rutger and Seasick Steve combined.'
'She was a knock-out. Grown men wept when she walked by. The fact that she was absolutely crazy did not detract From her appearance; in fact, the supposition that she was in no control of her destiny whatsoever was somewhat provocative. She was a hymn to inconsonance, a boquet of wounds.'
Another Nice line:
'To snort cocaine is to make a statement. IT is like flying to Paris for breakfast.'
Some parts where all over the place with to manny characters. It could go something like this:
'Swan never did cocaine without Charlie one leg. Why they named him one leg? Only me Colombiano knew. Mc Colombiano was not From Colombia but From Ohio. Hi Hussled all the dope in Ohio. Give The man 5 kilo's pure and he and his wife Mercedes would
Make iT dessapear. Clock Work. Magic. Call iT what you like. IT made Swan richer than Ruthless Rutger and Seasick Steve combined.'
June 18, 2017
A great read on a rascal who got away, mostly, with the importation of Cocaine into the US in the 1970's. Zac has an astute mind and his adventures of smuggling the class A narcotic was brilliant. Makes me proud that this man got away, mostly, with this as the American Government has been profiting from narcotics smuggling for years. A real adventure story, not just for boys.
June 20, 2022
One of those drug-culture books you'd find in every share-house in your 20s. I loved these kinds of books then but I was no doubt as stoned as the characters in them. Today, re-reading my old Picador copy, there is still some good writing here but a lot of it - especially some of the Tom Wolfe-style dialogue in one scene representing black dealers - is really dated
September 9, 2023
A solid story that captures an interesting and underdiscussed stage of the cocaine trade. Sabbag tells it in a manner that 80% works and 20% comes off as edgy tryhard. In the afterward, Sabbag talks about how hard to worked to unveil the truth in all of this, and I have my doubts that he completely succeeded at that - it still reads a lot like one of grandpa's fishing stories.
April 27, 2024
Not sure what I thought about this... great story but it was a little too much information about things around the story.
The story was like a mix of Fear and Loathing, Wolf of Wall Street and Blow...
Worth a read.
The story was like a mix of Fear and Loathing, Wolf of Wall Street and Blow...
Worth a read.
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December 8, 2024
It combines wild stories and smuggler knowledge. Overall, a decent book on drug trafficking in the early 70s. (Fyi, Reagan announced the war on drugs in �71, which didn’t appear to hold back the main character or his peers whatsoever.)
September 2, 2021
Zachary Swan is very likeable and I hope his woodworking business is going well.
This is an excellent read, very engaging and well written.
This is an excellent read, very engaging and well written.
September 13, 2021
Certainly a snapshot of a time between NYC and Columbia. It is dated in some ways but still has an interesting story and characters.
December 5, 2015
If I were writing a story that involved cocaine smuggling in the 1970s, this book would be the perfect textbook: it's that detailed. How to design a smuggling operation, how to scale and implement it, how to weigh, evaluate, cut and resell cocaine, it is all covered in this book.
But the details don't stop there. No! You'll also learn about the best places to stay in Cartagena and Bogota, why no one goes to St Marta, and you'll meet a supporting cast of hundreds. Well, perhaps not hundreds, but with the inclusion of a brief background on every single person mentioned in Zachary Snow's long and storied smuggling career, it sure felt that way.
You'll meet Vinnie and Vincent, Angel, Roberto and Rudolpho, Uta, Nice Mickey, Mean Mickey, Crazy Leslie, Alice, Trudy, Elaine, Susan, two girls who do mushrooms bottomless, Rainy Day, Canadian Jack, Black Dan, See Gull Billy, Billy Bad Breaks, Armando, Moses, Ike, Freddy, Ellery, Charles and Lillian, Angela, Anthony and a couple people who either just had walk-on parts or were listed simply as a friend of one of the above. It was exhausting.
Informative, but ultimately exhausting.
But the details don't stop there. No! You'll also learn about the best places to stay in Cartagena and Bogota, why no one goes to St Marta, and you'll meet a supporting cast of hundreds. Well, perhaps not hundreds, but with the inclusion of a brief background on every single person mentioned in Zachary Snow's long and storied smuggling career, it sure felt that way.
You'll meet Vinnie and Vincent, Angel, Roberto and Rudolpho, Uta, Nice Mickey, Mean Mickey, Crazy Leslie, Alice, Trudy, Elaine, Susan, two girls who do mushrooms bottomless, Rainy Day, Canadian Jack, Black Dan, See Gull Billy, Billy Bad Breaks, Armando, Moses, Ike, Freddy, Ellery, Charles and Lillian, Angela, Anthony and a couple people who either just had walk-on parts or were listed simply as a friend of one of the above. It was exhausting.
Informative, but ultimately exhausting.
September 5, 2013
You'd expect a book about cocaine to be, if nothing else, exciting, and Snowblind is, occasionally, very exciting, but it's also a bitch to read. This was first published in 1976 and has not dated particularly well. The main reason why, and the book's biggest flaw, in my opinion, is the author's unabashed enthusiasm for the story (not the drug or the business) though it has to be said, an enthusiasm that is considerably more restraint than Howard Mark's excruciating introduction.
It is a great story and as a piece of journalism it works much better. Robert Sabbag has a no-nonsense style that keeps you glued to the procedures. The most thrilling aspect is by far Zachary Swan's brilliant smuggling techniques (White Rabbit and the Brown Gold Move in particular are out of this world.)
So the author tries too hard, and it shows, and he knows it too because the Afterword, written in 1989, attempts and succeeds in setting a calmer tone, but if you make it through the first few chapters you'll probably enjoy it a lot.
It is a great story and as a piece of journalism it works much better. Robert Sabbag has a no-nonsense style that keeps you glued to the procedures. The most thrilling aspect is by far Zachary Swan's brilliant smuggling techniques (White Rabbit and the Brown Gold Move in particular are out of this world.)
So the author tries too hard, and it shows, and he knows it too because the Afterword, written in 1989, attempts and succeeds in setting a calmer tone, but if you make it through the first few chapters you'll probably enjoy it a lot.
August 4, 2012
This is one of those rare things - a good true crime book! It's an eye-opening look at the cocaine trade, focusing on the career of near-genius smuggler "Zachary Swan" in the early 70s. The book is not without it's faults - Sabbag seems a bit too keen to defend Swan instead of allowing readers to draw their own conclusions - but it's very well-written, with an engagingly dry sense of humour. There are also some fascinating passages about the history of cocaine use. It seems that the reason the drug was banned in the first place was due to racist propoganda about "coke-fuelled niggers" presenting a menace to white women. I must admit that this book changed my preconceptions somewhat. Well worth a read.
July 24, 2019
When it was first published in the mid-seventies, SNOWBLIND established itself as an essential piece of true crime writing. The story of the legendary Zachary Swan, a mover in the cocaine trade in the sixties who set the standard for all who followed, Sabbag's riveting account is a compulsive insight into an underworld populated by crazy characters and riven by paranoia. The result is an illuminating and wild book that influenced a generation of writers.
January 31, 2008
I read this around the same time as I was conducting a big heroin importation trial and took inspiration from it to have my guy acquitted. It's a sort of biography of a drug trafficker and supremely well written. Enjoyed enormously, even if the poor sap whom it's about obviously had a poor lawyer and spent some time in jail.
October 2, 2015
Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade by Robert Sabbag (Avon Books 1976)(Biography). An enthralling thriller if ever there was one. This is the story of one man's meteoric rise and subsequent fall in the business of wholesale cocaine importing. The most thrilling words to be found in this tale: “They missed the load.� My rating: 7.5/10, finished 1980.
December 9, 2011
Fascinating. Pretty much a go-to book if you're trying to get into the mindset of one of most sophisticated and successful (he never served time) drug smugglers to ever come out of the United States. Which I am totally not, obviously. Why would I ever dream of doing that? But just hypothetically speaking... ;)
August 17, 2009
Dodgy dealings in the world of cocaine smuggling. Interesting if only to read about some of the unbelievable scams these guys got up to (and got away with). Intriguing, unsettling and a bit of a morality lesson.
June 1, 2011
A very good well written book . It is also an interesting piece of American social history ; the cocaine trade before the cartels took over. I think it's the only banned book I've read. Some idiot politicians/journalists decided that it promoted drug use - what a load of crap.
October 4, 2012
Too bad I was "snow blind" when I read this one back in the early 90's, joking. Anyway, I can't recall the whole theme of the book, but the title basically says it. If anything you can anything out of this novel, it's a nice read for dealers finding unique ways to smuggle product.
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