By 1980, though, Ottumwa’s fortunes had, like Oelwein’s, begun to decline. The story was much the same. The railroad’s demise was followed by the closing of the air force base and then, in 1987, by the sale of Hormel to Excel Meat Solutions, a subsidiary of Cargill. Along with layoffs, wages, as they did a few years later at Oelwein’s Iowa Ham plant, fell by two thirds. Like the shrinking workforce, the population of Ottumwa itself dried up like a prairie pothole in a drought, falling by an astounding 50 percent in just twenty-five years. Soon the town, starved of tax revenue and disposable income, was verging on bankruptcy. And, as had happened in Oelwein, methamphetamine moved into the new economic gap. The difference was that Ottumwa, more than any other place, defined the development of the modern American meth business in the Midwest. Meth from Ottumwa first helped to create, and then to sustain, the market not just in Oelwein but also in towns all over Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas.
How this happened depended in several trends and events that merged seamlessly into one another: emigration routes from the Midwest to California as working-class men and women headed to the coast in search of employment; immigration routes into the heartland as increasing numbers of Mexicans worked against the human tide in order to take low-wage jobs at meat-packing plants; the rise of industrial meth production; the increased lobbying power of pharmaceutical companies; and finally, government apathy, if not disregard, for the very drug war that at the time had been newly declared by First Lady Nancy Reagan.
At the center of it all, back in Ottumwa, stood a woman named Lori Arnold. It was she who was able to weave together these various political, sociological, and chemical threads into the Midwest’s first and last bona fide crank empire, the official moniker for which was the Stockdall Organization, so named for Lori’s second husband, Floyd Stockdall. Lori’s contribution to what at the time was not yet referred to as a “drug epidemic” was that she essentially wrote meth’s gene tic code in the Midwest. With her, the very concept of industrialized meth in places like Iowa was born, and it flourished in relative anonymity for the next ten years. The irony is that, while Lori worked, the Drug Enforcement Administration fruitlessly lobbied for laws that, had they passed, would have prevented Lori from ever going into business.
Lori Kaye Arnold is Ottumwa, Iowa’s most famous daughter. Ottumwa’s most famous son is Lori’s brother, the comedian Tom Arnold, who is perhaps better known as the ex-husband of Roseanne Barr. Lori is forty-five years old, with shoulder-length light-brown hair and a longish, blunt nose, like a skinning knife. With Tom, she shares a toothy, crocodilian smile and the low center of gravity and powerful legs of a middleweight wrestler. Since 2005, I have corresponded with Lori, who’s in federal prison—coincidentally, at the medium-security women’s work camp in Greenville, Illinois, just a few hundred yards from where I met Sean and James during November 2004.
One of seven step-and half-siblings, Lori was born and raised in Ottumwa in a family that she describes as studiously normal and benign. Despite this, Lori dropped out of high school as a freshman and began living in an Ottumwa rooming house where, in the evenings, there was a running poker game. The landlady was also a madame. In exchange for room and board, Lori and her young cohorts could either agree to sleep with the men who played cards or deliver illegally prescribed methedrine pills, an early form of pharmaceutical meth, to the landlady’s clients. Lori chose the latter; thus her career (along with her legend) was born.
Lori kept herself housed by delivering and selling “brown and clears,” as pharmaceutical meth was called during the 1970s, when it was prescribed by the millions as a weight-loss aid and antidepression drug. The landlady got most of Lori’s profits, though, and to make ends meet, Lori still had to work six days a week at a local bar. (In Iowa minors can serve alcohol despite being legally unable to buy it.) By fifteen, Lori was married. By sixteen, she was divorced and was attending high school once again. By seventeen, she had dropped out for good; her peers, she says, seemed to her like children. By eighteen, she was married to Floyd Stockdall, who had come to Ottumwa from Des Moines in order to retire, at the ripe old age of thirty-seven, as the president of the Grim Reapers motorcycle gang.
Lori and Floyd moved into a cabin along the Des Moines River outside Ottumwa, where their only child, Josh, was born. Left alone to raise a son while Floyd pursued his retirement hobbies of drinking, playing pool, and selling cocaine, nineteen-year-old Lori became suicidally depressed. The bar, she now realized, had been her lifeline. In addition to the money she made, the people there were her people, the only family of which Lori ever felt a true part. Without the bikers and the factory workers with whom she had all but grown up, Lori felt horribly lost and alone; her life had become an interminable slog. Worse yet, Floyd was an alcoholic, and beat her whenever he drank.
Then one day Floyd’s brother stopped by the cabin. He, too, was a Grim Reaper, and he had with him some methamphetamine, a.k.a. biker dope, which had been illegally synthesized at a lab in Southern California. This was 1984, and the Reapers were just beginning to sell meth whenever they could get it from Long Beach. There, according to DEA, former Hells Angels had gone into business with maverick pharmaceutical company chemists in order to produce saleable quantities of highly pure, powdered methamphetamine. Lori’s brother-in-law cut her two lines on the kitchen table inside her run-down shack on the Des Moines River on a sunny, clear Saturday afternoon. Of the experience, Lori, who was no stranger to narcotics, says simply that she had never felt so good in all her life. The singularity of that feeling is what would soon connect Ottumwa to a nascent California drug empire. In doing so, a major piece of the meth-epidemic puzzle would fall into place.
The first day Lori got high, she went to the bar. She says she’d been given a little meth to sell because Floyd’s brother wanted to see what kind of a market Ottumwa might prove to be. Lori gave away half the meth, knowing intuitively that this would help hook her customers. The other half quickly sold out. In the process, she made fifty dollars. What she found, though, was worth millions, for Lori Arnold knew almost immediately that dealing meth was what she’d been born to do. It was the answer not just to her prayers, but to Ottumwa’s, which for three long years had been pummeled by the farm crisis into a barely recognizable version of its former proud self. Thanks to meth, says Lori, the workers worked and played harder, and she became rich. Within a month, Lori was selling so much Long Beach crank in Ottumwa that she went around her brother-in-law and dealt directly with the middleman in Des Moines. A month after that, she was buying quarter pounds of meth for $2,500 and selling them for $10,000. Unsatisfied with the profit margin, she began dealing directly with the supplier in Long Beach, dispatching Floyd to California once every ten days with instructions to return from the 3,700-mile round-trip with as much meth as he could fit in the trunk of the Corvette Lori had bought him. Lori, meantime, stashed money in the wall of her cabin. Only six months after she had met Floyd’s brother, the wall held $50,000—nearly twice the median yearly income in Ottumwa today.