By the late 1980s, people like Jeffrey William Hayes and Steve Jelinek of Oelwein were buying massive amounts of dope from Lori and establishing their own meth franchises in Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas by selling to the likes of Roland Jarvis, who, yet to start making his own meth, would take what ever he could get in order to work extra shifts at Iowa Ham. Lori, in turn, was dealing directly with what she calls the Mexican Mafia, a somewhat loose group of traffickers who manufactured large amounts of that era’s most powerful dope: P2P. Made predominantly in Long Beach and Orange County, California, in large, clandestine laboratories, this stronger form of meth was more addictive, cheaper, and easier to produce than any other form of the drug available at the time. As such, it increased Lori’s already burgeoning sales manifold.
The so-called Mexican Mafia with whom Lori dealt was built on the vision of two brothers, Jesús and Luís Amezcua, who’d been born in Mexico and lived in San Diego. For years, according to DEA, the Amezcuas had been nothing more than middling cocaine dealers. Until, that is, they perceived the convergence of two seemingly unrelated events. One was that, aided by former pharmaceutical engineers, the Amezcuas could access an enormous, completely legal, and unmonitored supply of the necessary ingredients to make P2P: ephedrine and phenyl-2-propanone. The Amezcuas’ second insight was that they could move large quantities of the drug throughout California and the West, thanks to the increasing numbers of Mexican immigrants who picked fruit in the Central Valley, cleaned homes in Tucson, Arizona, or built roads in Idaho. Furthermore, the brothers could access the Midwest via the ballooning population of Midwesterners who had been chased off their farms, all the way to Southern California.
During the 1980s, large numbers of people from the corn belt left in what sociologists call out-migration. Within the space of just a few years, many Iowa towns, Ottumwa and Oelwein included, lost from 10 to 25 percent of their residents, many of whom headed for the booming labor markets of Los Angeles and San Diego. Family and social connections became business connections as Iowan, Kansan, Dakotan, and Nebraskan laborers in Orange County, eager to get rich, sent loads of the Amezcuas’ meth back home. Or, like Jeffrey William Hayes in Oelwein and Lori Arnold in Ottumwa, either drove out to get it themselves or sent someone in their stead.
Throughout its hundred-year history, meth has been perhaps the only example of a widely consumed illegal narcotic that might be called vocational, as opposed to recreational. The market for meth in America is nearly as old as industrialization. Poor and working-class Americans had been consuming the drug since the 1930s, whether it was marketed as Benzedrine, Methedrine, or Obedrin, for the simple reason that meth makes you feel good and permits you to work hard. Thanks to the Amezcuas and Lori Arnold, these same people no longer needed to rely on expensive prescriptions and were able to get a stronger form of meth at a much better price—this at a time when the drug’s effects were arguably more useful than ever. That’s to say that as meth’s purity rose, its price dropped. So too did meth become much more widely available at exactly the moment that rural economies collapsed and people left. Under those circumstances, says Clay Hallberg, those who remained felt they needed the drug most.
By 1987, if you wanted meth and you lived in southern Iowa, or northern Missouri, you went to the bar that Lori Arnold now owned, the Wild Side. There, the increasingly beleaguered Ottumwa police, whose numbers were shrinking alongside county and city tax revenues, had little chance of interrupting Lori’s exorbitantly profitable crank business. At that point, says Lori, in addition to Floyd, she had a dozen runners going back and forth to Long Beach to buy meth from multiple so-called superlabs, which could produce up to twenty pounds of meth every thirty-six hours—an astounding amount of crank in those days. Because the cars that Lori’s runners used were a drain on her profits (imagine the mileage accrued by driving nearly four thousand miles every ten days, month after month), Lori bought a car dealership. That way, she could have access to as many vehicles as she needed; she could also have her runners trade the cars and their tags with car dealers in any state along the way, thereby making themselves harder to follow. Then, to house her employees and further launder the money she was making, Lori bought fourteen houses in Ottumwa.
This was just the beginning of the means by which Lori, who had not made it past tenth grade, laundered her drug money at the same time that she moved to fill new markets around the region. In 1989, she bought fifty-two racehorses—and hired the dozen or so grooms, trainers, veterinarians, and jockeys it took to maintain them—along with a 144-acre horse farm from which to run her ever-multiplying, synergistic empires. People from Kentucky to the Dakotas and from Indiana to Colorado race, breed, buy, trade, and sell horses, making it the perfect cover for a narcotics distribution business. Lori’s runners, tooling along in their duallies, a couple of geldings munching hay in the horse trailer, the wheel wells packed tight with crank, became the down-home Dukes of Hazzard version of coke-laden speedboats making the run from Eleuthera to Key Biscayne.
Lori’s true stroke of genius, though, was to build under a series of military tents hidden in the wooded hills of her horse farm what for almost two decades would be the only meth superlab ever known to be in production outside the state of California. By then, she was in such good graces with the Amezcua brothers, the California “Kings of Crank,” that they let her borrow a chemist, whom Lori flew to Iowa to teach her associates how to make meth in ten-pound batches every forty-eight hours: a state-of-the-art, up-to-the-minute operation. The effect was remarkable, for up until now, Lori had controlled sales of meth in Iowa and other parts of the Midwest while still having to rely on the Amezcuas for her product. Once Lori opened her own superlab, she was in control of the entire value chain: manufacture, distribution, and retail. And while she still bought meth from the Amezcuas, principally to maintain good relations, Lori had no real competition to speak of. In just the two years between 1987 and 1989, an unassuming high school dropout from little Ottumwa, Iowa, had succeeded in cornering part of what was becoming one of the world’s most lucrative narcotics markets. What’s more amazing is how close she came to never getting started.
According to several former agents, back in 1987, there was deep institutional ambivalence within the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) toward methamphetamine. Meth was seen as a biker drug, strictly falling under the purview of losers who didn’t have enough financial sense to put together a large-scale operation. These were the Reagan eighties, and as tastes ran for big, deregulated corporate successes, so ran America’s taste for drugs. Cocaine was king. As such, DEA, whose job is to curb the excesses of the period as they are embodied by America’s choice in narcotics, wasn’t interested in anything aside from the Cali and Medellín cartels, drug-trafficking organizations run like multinational corporations capable of exceeding their host nation’s GDP. Who could have imagined the business being built by two lowly coke-dealer brothers in the part of L.A. called the Inland Empire, or that this business would be connected with a kind of narcotic principate in Ottumwa, Iowa?