ADVANCE RE ADING COPY
A PRIL 2022
BAD TRIPS HOW I WENT FROM VICE REPORTER TO INTERNATIONAL DRUG SMUGGLER Slava Pastuk with Brian Whitney The memoir of a music editor at VICE who tried to become the coolest reporter the magazine had ever had — by becoming an international drug smuggler. Publication: CANADA April 5, 2022 | U.S. May 3, 2022
FORMAT 5.5 in (W) 8.5 in (H) 248 pages
Paperback 978-1-4597-4925-2 Can $22.99 US $19.99 £15.99
EPUB 978-1-4597-4927-6 Can $9.99 US $9.99 £6.99
PDF 978-1-4597-4926-9 Can $22.99 US $19.99 £15.99
KEY SELLING POINTS The well-publicized story of the VICE music reporter who was caught smuggling cocaine,
written by the man himself, uncovering the culture at VICE magazine that led to drug smuggling ring Slava Pastuk is currently incarcerated for conspiring to import drugs from U.S. to Australia; he is expected to be on parole when the book is released A very honest, open account of drug smuggling and the conditions working for VICE; for example, the office always had an open drinks bar and cases of beer were free for the taking, drug-use was widespread, and reporters were encouraged to go over-the-top for their stories A story about the age of the hipster: without morals, politics, to the point of nihilism Similar to confessional true crime stories, such as the bestseller Mr. Nice by Howard Marks All royalties from the book go to co-author Brian Whitney, who is a popular true-crime writer
BISAC TRU003000 – TRUE CRIME / Organized Crime BIO024000 – BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Criminals & Outlaws BIO025000 – BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Editors, Journalists, Publishers
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Slava Pastuk was sent to prison in 2019 for a well-publicized drug smuggling conviction. Before that, he was a culture writer whose work has been featured in VICE, COMPLEX, CollegeHumor, and various other publications. His experience has given Slava a unique — and at times, staggering — look at both the media and drug industries.
BadTripsBook
@slavap
MARKETING AND PUBLICITY Publicity campaign to targeted media and influencers Media tour: tv, radio, podcast interviews with author Social media campaign and online advertising
Email campaigns to consumers, booksellers, and librarians Digital galley available: NetGalley, Edelweiss, Catalist
RIGHTS World, All Languages ABOUT THE BOOK In 2019, Canadian music reporter Slava P, an editor for VICE media, was sentenced to nine years in prison for recruiting friends into a scheme to smuggle cocaine from the U.S. into Australia. Five of them were already in jail. Immediately, Slava P was internationally infamous. Was he a victim of pressure to commit extreme acts for the sake of a good story? A product of a drug-obsessed work environment? Or a manipulator who pushed vulnerable young people into crime? Here, Slava P tells his side of the story: what exactly happened and how the precarious, dog-eat-dog atmosphere of a media company can lead the young, the naive, and the ambitious into taking crazy risks. Bad Trips is a story of drugs, hip-hop, influencers, and glamour, set against the backdrop of one of the world’s most influential news and entertainment sites, VICE. Its cast of beautiful young people and semi-famous rappers passes from the seediest apartments to the most elegant of private clubs. Slava’s chronicling of his years at this famous hotbed of excess is a piercing insight into contemporary media culture.
For more information, contact publicity@dundurn.com Orders in Canada: UTP Distribution 1-800-565-9523 Orders in the US: Ingram Publisher Services 1-866-400-5351
dundurn.com @dundurnpress
s INTRODUCTION
Wheeling the suitcase lined with eight kilograms of cocaine past the Australian customs agent was the biggest rush of my life. “What brings you to Australia?” she asked me and my companion, Pope, a five-foot-nothing, springy twenty-one-year-old black kid dressed head to toe in Supreme. “We’re celebrating,” I said. I wasn’t exactly lying. “We just finished filming a new show for VICELAND. You should be seeing my friend here on TV pretty soon,” I continued. She waved us through, and we got into a car that had been arranged to pick us up. My heartbeat steadied, but my brain synapses continued to fire on all cylinders. I had just successfully muled hundreds of thousands of dollars of cocaine on behalf of the cartel, all based on a chance encounter I had in Toronto just a few weeks prior. As we rode down the highway past modest Australian houses, Pope and I exchanged sly looks, careful not to say anything that could tip the driver off to the fact that he was unwittingly
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transporting more than twenty kilograms of cocaine to a hotel in downtown Sydney. “Can I play music off my phone?” asked Pope, who somehow was full of energy despite the ten-hour flight from San Francisco and the effects of the fourteen-hour time change from our home in Ontario. The driver, a well-groomed and deeply tanned man in his forties, wordlessly passed us the aux cable and changed the input on the BMW’s console. With an impish smile Pope put on Future’s “Move That Dope” and blasted it through the car’s speakers. When I collapsed onto my hotel bed later that night, I realized I had just pulled off the sort of mission at twenty-f ive that I had dreamed of having the balls to do when I was a pimply, fat fifteen- year-old who watched VICE travel videos in my parents’ basement. I came of age consuming content from VICE journalists who travelled to Liberia to buy guns or to South America to lick a frog and experience wild hallucinations. Now, after two years of working for that same company, as the guy who covered emerging rappers, I had finally earned my stripes by doing some early era VICE shit. I felt I could finally breathe again. I had fulfilled my obligations to the cartel representatives who had promised to slide razor blades underneath my fingernails if I backed out of my agreement to travel to Las Vegas and then Sydney. No drug I had ever smoked, railed, or ingested brought me the same euphoria that I felt as I lay there, and I had spent the past few months trying them all. The high lasted for about a month. First, my roommate and four others found themselves in Australian prison for attempting to recreate the same run I had completed with Pope. I then found myself outed as a criminal on the front page of a national newspaper, losing my career, friends, and way of life in the process. Finally, I found myself handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser in Montreal, where I had spent two
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years cobbling together a new life under a new identity, only to have it all fall apart again. Four years after my trip to Australia, I sat in front of a judge and pleaded guilty to the crime of conspiracy to import forty kilograms of cocaine. My mother held back tears beside me as she silently wondered how things had gone so wrong. The only other people in that room were members of the press, who later asked me if I blamed anyone for the mistakes and decisions that cost me nine years of my freedom. Did I blame the five forsaken travellers who gave my name to the authorities? Without them, the police wouldn’t have had enough evidence to lay charges. Did I blame my friend and co-worker Ali, a twenty-eight-year- old of Pakistani descent, for introducing the masterminds of this scheme to my life? If not for him going to Australia first, I’d never have thought taking my own trip would be a foolproof scenario to suggest to others. Was VICE to blame for encouraging a culture where thrill- seeking and operating on the fringes of legality were encouraged? Had I never taken that job I would still be working in software marketing, discouraged by the lack of professional upward mobility in the music-blogging scene. Was Drake to blame for never granting me an interview? Was it my father’s fault for leaving before I was born and never being a positive role model? Was society at large a scapegoat for my actions? Even after all of these months spent in prison in Kingston, Ontario, I can’t put the blame on anyone’s shoulders but my own. But the circumstances of how I came to act, as well as the situations I found myself in, are too extraordinary to ignore. While I am far from a victim, I’m also no villain. The problem is that I don’t think anyone else is a victim or villain either, including the aforementioned razor-blade-toting cartel representatives.
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Those two had a presence unlike anyone I had ever met, and they made it known the second they sat down with Ali and me for dinner at Soho House, a members-only club in downtown Toronto that caters to the entertainment industry. It’s the kind of place where you see advertising executives and aspiring actors. It’s stylish and genteel — you wouldn’t imagine any of them were criminals. “So, you’re the journalist,” said one as they squeezed their six- foot-f ive frames into the booth. “And you want to know more about our little excursion to Australia.” Over the course of half a dozen flank steaks and two bottles of gin among the four of us, I had agreed to take the trip myself, right after Ali. “I would never ask you to do something I haven’t done myself,” said the bulkier of the two, “and after you come back, I’ll be able to plug you into a bunch of shit that will make what we’re discussing here seem like child’s play. Plus I’ll send you seven grams of blow that smells like roses.” They may have sold me a dream, but I was the one who bought it willingly. The next time I saw them was a month later when I sat in the passenger seat of a rented Dodge Challenger counting out $5,000 in $20 bills, my reimbursement for booking the hotel, car, and flight through my Visa card. As we drove through Toronto and listened to Meek Mill, they told me a story. “The only person who never came back from Australia was a working girl we sent over there. Once she landed, she said she would throw the luggage into the ocean unless we gave her a hundred thousand dollars to start a new life in Australia.” He glanced quickly at me over his Armani sunglasses as he switched lanes. “But that didn’t work out for her.” Knowing all this I still volunteered to go on the trip. I lied to VICE’s HR department and said that a family emergency called for me to leave the country and I would be inaccessible for two weeks. I
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had watched my peers be rewarded for their reckless behaviour and I knew this was my chance. “I would never expressly say that I’m telling you this,” said my former boss as he held an editor’s-only meeting in our glass-a nd- concrete conference room a few weeks before a major cable deal was announced, “but the New York office will prioritize anything to do with drugs, guns, or violence. Keep that in mind when you’re pitching shows for the channel.” My ideas kept being rejected — save for a show that toured musicians through art galleries. Meanwhile my co-workers kept getting the green light to follow around white supremacist groups, to go into impoverished neighbourhoods in search of guns, and even give a platform to full-blown terrorists (that was when a VICE reporter spent three weeks with members of ISIS). Going through customs that day wasn’t the scariest or most nerve-wracking thing I’d ever done. On the contrary, it filled me with that familiar warm and soothing feeling I got when I’d follow a friend into a bar bathroom to do a key bump or the feeling I’d get when an escort would text “I’m downstairs” after I’d requested her services on Backpage. That feeling, that rush, is something I’ve been chasing my whole life, or at least since I moved out of my mom’s basement beside Canada’s Wonderland amusement park at twenty-one. It’s a feeling that buzzed through me every time I got on camera for Daily Vice, a short-lived news show that put awkward and untrained editors on TV as part of a partnership with one of Canada’s largest media networks, Rogers. “We want it to be raw, visceral, and unscripted,” said Eddie Moretti to me in 2014. Eddie was a squat Italian guy with a larger moustache and an even larger brimmed hat. He loved to drive up to Toronto from New York in his Maserati, which he parked in front of VICE headquarters for all the workers to see as they got off the
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streetcar near the office. “We don’t want to make it feel slick and rehearsed; feel free to make mistakes and try new things. We’re trying to make history here.” In Toronto our program never generated much audience interest, but I tried my best to create good content because I loved to chase that feeling of warm anticipation. When I sat down with the cartel reps, I felt that feeling radiate through me so strongly that my pinky toes started to tingle. I didn’t feel that emotion as strongly again until I was in front of the judge as the Crown argued I deserved an eighteen-year sentence. My life has been an imperfect series of accidents that befell me as I tried to go for broke. I kept my foot on the gas throughout my twenties, which I spent bouncing around Toronto, the best city in the world if you’re an ambitious person who’s good at convincing people he has some semblance of talent. Ultimately, I paid the price, but hopefully my story can act as a warning sign for others. There is an old Russian proverb that says a fool learns from his own mistakes while a wise man learns from the mistakes of others. If that is true, then let this be the memoir of a fool.
ONE s I was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in June 1990, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of Russia as a global superpower. I don’t remember much before my mom immigrated to Canada in 1994, but from what I understand, I had as happy a childhood as one could have under communist rule. Most of my early childhood memories are from after we arrived in Canada in October 1994, setting up residence in the basement of a Ukrainian Mission located on College Street, right in the heart of Toronto’s vibrant downtown district. I don’t remember the sights and smells of the city all that much because I spent most of my time indoors. My mom had used her culinary talents to secure a room at the Mission, and I spent my free time wandering around and bothering the staff — at least when I wasn’t glued to the TV screen watching cartoons. However, our time in the Mission was short-lived; my mother soon moved us into a one-bedroom apartment in the heart of
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Toronto’s predominantly Greek neighbourhood on the Danforth, just east of the Mission’s central location but still very much a part of the city’s core. We furnished our new apartment with couches, tables, and cabinets that we found sitting on the curb in front of the semi-detached houses just a few hundred metres away in a nicer part of our area. That apartment may have been home, but it served as the stuff of nightmares for a precocious five-year-old immigrant boy. The neighbors had loud, barking dogs; the kitchen came alive with cockroaches that would scurry across the floors and walls whenever the light was turned on; old, stinky women would reach out from beneath their shawls to pinch my face and try to put their fingers in my mouth. School was my only sanctuary — there I was able to blend in with the multicultural group and feel slightly less like an outsider. The only thing that gave away the fact that I was a poor immigrant was my terrible DIY haircut that I mostly hid under my Blue Jays hat. My mom and I improved our English by watching Wheel of Fortune nightly, and my time in school all but eliminated my accent. My mother, who bore a striking resemblance to Julia Roberts, wasn’t as lucky and continued to speak words with a heavy Ivan Smirnoff–like accent. We were a careful duo, thriftily walking wherever we could to save on money on transit and opting for the most cost-effective options whenever possible, whether it was a homemade haircut or potatoes with salt for dinner. Eventually, the scrimping and saving made it possible for us to move upward, through the suburbs, ending up in a house in Barrie, a town just north of Toronto. My first day at high school, the newly constructed St. Joan of Arc in Barrie’s south end, instantly let me know how much of an outsider I was both physically and culturally. A lot of kids in
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Grade 9 knew each other since they had all come from the same five elementary schools. Hockey was the second religion in the building after Catholicism, and everyone seemed to practise it. Since our bungalow was on the outskirts of town, I shared a bus route with a dozen or so kids from Thornton, a small town outside Barrie whose greatest attraction was a community hockey rink with affordable ice-time rates. I, on the other hand, was a six-foot-t wo, 220-pound guy with an obsessive love for rap music. The friends that I attracted weren’t cut from the best cloth. I took the path of least resistance when it came to choosing a social circle and ended up with the tough kids. High school for me meant drinking, fighting, shoplifting, and smoking that uniquely Ontarian combination of tobacco and weed, in a bong, known as a popper. I got a job at the Shoppers Drug Mart by my house stocking shelves and occasionally running the cash register, and one day Steve came in. He was a short Italian kid with a fauxhawk, bushy eyebrows, and a deep tan, and he got to drive his parents’ vintage Ferrari around town. He bought a Red Bull from me and smiled at me as he left, hopping back into the bright red vehicle he had parked in front of the store for passersby to gawk at. The next day, during my lunch break, Steve came in again. “Do you only work the register or do they let you into the back room where the goods are?” I said I had free rein of the place — save for the pharmacy — which was when he made me an offer: “I’ll pay you sixty dollars for every bottle of cologne or perfume you can get me off a list I’ll give you.” I was shocked and happy in equal parts. Not only did he consider me the type of person who was corruptible enough to consider approaching about a deal like this, a fact I secretly took pride in since it signalled that people saw me as something more than just a fat joker from out of town, but it was a
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chance for me to make some easy money and boost my social status at the same time. Morally, I had no qualms with stealing, as long as it was from stores and not people, since I knew stores factored the costs of stolen goods into their price. I had even stolen Yu-Gi-Oh! booster packs from the toy store in an effort to obtain rare hologram collectibles that I could trade in at the local hobby store for cards that were vital to my deck. Plus, the only thing I actually liked about my job at Shoppers was the fact that the girl who ran the photo studio would let me fondle her while we made out in the break room, if we were the only two people working. So I went for it, working through a list I’d been given and stealing brands like Lacoste, Hugo Boss, and Tommy Hilfiger, all of which I’d toss into my backpack in the break room and carry to school the next day, where Steve would be waiting for me with three crisp twenties and a handshake. My scheme’s eventual undoing came after I forgot to unbox a bottle of Ferrari cologne, its security tag setting off the alarm on the way out. I knew I was done for when the security guy asked me to empty out my bag in the back room and the box with the laminate sheen came tumbling out along with my binders and books. I was fired on the spot, the shame washing over me as I walked out of the store in front of the cash supervisor, whose son was in my grade and a captain on the football team. It wasn’t long until the whole school knew about my arrangement with Steve and my reputation as a “bad” kid began to develop. I didn’t mind — I had always been the type of person who rooted for the villain to win whenever I watched a movie. Moreover, I knew that I wasn’t really evil; I was just opportunistic and therefore this development was really just personal growth. There were no negative repercussions for this caper except for the lost job, which I had never liked, only the positive gains of getting shallow respect
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from the wrong type of high s chool students, which to me was the most important thing in the world at the time. In hindsight, the rush of attaining a reputation as a goon for doing the wrong and easy thing might have left a permanent imprint on me. Fourteen years later, as I sit in prison, I see this as a common thread among the people I speak to: they did what they did because they felt as though it would help them stand out among their peers.
In 2005 I was spending a lot of time online, places like the notoriously unregulated message board 4chan and other forums for jokes, body-building tips, and advice on picking up girls. The one common thread among these forums, 4chan posts, and Tumblr communities seemed to be that their denizens all spoke very highly of a publication named VICE. I remember vividly clicking through links one afternoon, sitting in my mom’s basement during a particularly frigid winter, and opening a tab where an all-black website with an embedded video in the middle of it caught my attention. I paused the episode of Entourage that was currently playing and turned my attention to the video of a portly, young, bearded man cavalcading around Liberia trying to buy and sell guns, the whole time speaking in confessional tones to the camera about the immense danger he was in. I came to know this man as Shane Smith, and over the course of the next week I consumed every VICE video I could find. I was obsessed with their gritty style: each video immersed me in the action, making me feel like I was participating in something illegal just by watching the twenty-minute segment. I learned about hallucinogenic tree frogs in the Amazon, mind-a ltering drugs in Brazil that made the user into a brainless puppet, people who loved herds of
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goats in more intimate ways than I ever thought possible, and way too much about Sasha Grey’s hobbies and passions outside of porn. This was, I decided, extremely my shit. The blend of danger and information packed inside messengers who looked like an older version of me, from their average clothing to their patchy hair, connected with me in a way I had never thought possible. I wanted to be one of them, to be reckless and on camera, celebrated for making bad decisions under the guise of delivering the news about topics very few people were clamouring to hear about. “Have you heard of VICE ?” I asked everyone I knew in my small group of friends from Barrie. Everyone said no. When I showed them videos, those with an attention span long enough to sit through them didn’t see the point. “This is just white boys committing crimes,” said my Nigerian friend Sean after I pestered him to watch the video about Liberia. “Is this what Americans do for fun?” My curiosity was piqued after one of the Portuguese kids I hung out with told me his cousin in Montreal may have mentioned knowing the guys who started it. This inspired me to look into the genesis of the company I had come to idolize. I was floored to find out it was a Canadian operation that had just recently relocated to New York. The more I learned about the company, the more interested I became in its blueprint for success. For a kid with large ambitions but from a small town, I saw parallels in each actor’s actualized journey and my planned escape from Canada. The magazine was started as an alt-weekly in Montreal in 1994, initially called Voice of Montreal , by Suroosh Alvi, Gavin McInnes, and Shane Smith, three irreverent guys in their twenties. Its name changed to VICE in 1996. It had been bought by a Canadian software millionaire and relocated to New York in the late 1990s. At that time it was free of any political idealism — its only goal was to be brash, truthful,
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funny, and provocative. It was skeptical of just about everything. It published endless articles about drinking and drugs. Gavin — who later gained notoriety as an extreme right-w inger — didn’t leave the company till 2008. It wasn’t called VICE Media until around 2012. In 2014 it partnered with the Canadian media conglomerate Rogers. In its original incarnation, when I first encountered it, it reported on skate culture and the seedy underworld of drugs and parties. It was a window into the lives of the tattooed youth who came alive when the sun went down, an explainer of bad decisions made when you think you’ll live forever. The presenters began doing video journalism with the idea of just pointing a camera at subcultures around the world. It was one part voyeurism, one part adventure, and a dash of actual journalism. The experience of getting the story was often the story. Shane’s involvement seemed to be front of camera. He looked to have his hands in everything from buying guns in Africa to bathing with ladyboys in Thailand. Gavin was best known as the author of the cruel and hilarious “Do’s and Don’ts” section — a place where people were mocked or praised for their outfits, and the best summation of VICE’s ideas of cool. Suroosh played the part of the adult in the room — the reformed drug addict who spoke plainly about his struggles with addiction as well as helping guide video viewers through geopolitical issues. The company took the “fake it till you make it” approach, securing round after round of investments by selling people on the idea that they were the voice of a generation that wasn’t reached by mainstream media. Even after they teamed up with Rogers, the idea of VICE becoming a kind of CNN for millennials was being brought up in meetings.
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By the time they had offices in the hippest neighbourhoods of New York and London, one VICE staffer explained to me, “I like knowing that anywhere I go in the world, all I have to do is find the VICE office to find not only the coolest neighbourhood but to connect to my type of people in that corner of the world. The office is like a hipster incubator.” For a teenager who didn’t fit into the rigid structures of provincial Ontario, VICE seemed like a safe haven for outcasts. Years later, during a trip to New York, I remember being drawn to the white neon sign like a moth to a flame. I would have done anything to be a part of that family.