Why Can't Barstool Editors Be Cool and Run Drug Trafficking Rings Like at VICE
You guys may have heard about a VICE Canada editor getting arrested for his involvement in a cocaine trafficking ring. Well The Ringer just wrote a giant expose on the whole ordeal and it’s pretty fascinating. Kinda makes you miss the days when VICE put out some solid content and not articles like this:
To give you a sparknotes version of the article, Slava P, a Canadian editor for NOISEY, VICE’s music site, convinced four young Canadians and one young American to bring suitcases into Australia that were lined with 39.76 kilograms of Cocaine.
They were all immediately caught and sent to jail. Slava P would later be arrested in January of 2019 on charges of conspiracy to import cocaine and now faces 6-12 years in jail. Here are some tidbits from the article I found interesting.
“This is the most gangsterish thing that you will ever do,” Slava had assured some of them, comparing the trip to something out of a Future song in an attempt to hype them up.
Is Slava P actually Coley Mick? Because if Coley ever tried to convince me to traffic cocaine I’m sure he would try using this exact same tactic. “What would Future do bro?” I don’t know Coley, probably percocets, molly, and then some more percocets while Russel Wilson drives his kid to soccer practice. One thing he sure isn’t doing is hoping on a plane to Australia for a measly rack.
For their efforts, the mules had been promised payment between CA$1,000 and CA$10,000, plus additional spending money for some of them. Drug trafficking and organized crime scholar Cecilia Farfán-Méndez categorizes the mule payment as “pretty low” considering the volume and risk.
Pathetic. If you want 10K at Barstool all you have to do is get dummyed in a Rough and Rowdy ring for THREE MINUTES. Worst case scenario you get a concussion. At VICE you have to fly across the planet and the worst case scenario is a couple decades in prison.
Salva had a modest salary—slightly more than 30,000 U.S. dollars per year—so he’d expense ride shares to galleries to guzzle the free drinks, using Vice’s cultural capital to compensate for paltry wages.
Yikes. Guess you can’t blame the guy. If Barstool was only paying me 30K I’d most likely be dabbling in some casual drug trafficking as well. It would be too easy. “Hey Viceroy, heard you’re interested in a summer internship, well if you bring this bag of merch samples to China for me, I’ll get you an interview AND tell you how much Big Cat makes.”
“There was a time, from around 2010 to 2015 or 2016, where Vice was the coolest place you could work,” former Vice USA writer Kari Paul told me. “Saying you worked there could get you a lot of clout.” Young writers found themselves on exclusive guest lists, courted by publicists and promoter flotsam eager for attention from a buzzy website
Is Barstool currently the coolest place you can work? That’s the only explanation for why Nate is pretty much in the band O.A.R. now when he can’t even play a fucking tambourine.
One of the VICE’s stunts in the aughts was the “hamster party,” in which artists Dash Snow and Ryan McGinley, frequent photography contributors for the company, ripped up phone books and created a faux hamster cage in a hotel room. Within the cage, they did as many drugs as they could manage; Vice supplied the cocaine, beer, and live parakeets for the event.
Ok now THIS is pretty cool. The most exciting thing to ever happen at a Barstool party was Blake Bortles witnessing Portnoy get a blow job. The second most exciting thing is I think one of the Call Her Daddy girls puked at a holiday party once. There is no third most exciting thing.
What is clear is that the mules were dismayed by how obviously foolish the supposedly foolproof plan was. The luggage looked like it had been hastily glued together. “They were told certain things about the packaging and how it’s tamper-proof and this and that. So then Jordan gets the bags and the first thing, he tells me, is you can literally smell the glue from the bag,” Gardner’s lawyer, Eidan Havas, told the National Post in 2017. “It’s like a five-year-old’s arts-and-crafts project. … And he’s just like, ‘You guys are a bunch of liars, this isn’t what I was told. I don’t want to do this any more.’ At that stage, one of the men pulled out a gun, held it to his head and said words to the effect of, ‘If you don’t do this, we’re gonna get your girlfriend and your parents, we know where they live.’”
It’s just a shame that the closest Barstool has gotten to drug trafficking was the time someone thought it was a good idea to put “ADDERAL DIET” shirts on sale. Everyday at this company my life becomes less and less like a Future song. Why can’t my editors be more hip? Kmarko would rather compile cocktail recipes than ask me to transport poorly concealed bricks of cocaine to exotic locales where the price of backing out is a Mexican cartel member threatening to murder my family and that hurts.
Actually, now that I think about it, the Foreplay boys ARE going to Australia pretty soon. Makes you think right? Maybe someone at the company put them up to it? Could hide a bunch of narcotics in a golf bag and I’d be lying if I said the thought of Trent, probably the most innocent person at the company, being unknowingly conned into a drug trafficking scheme and having to do 5 years in Australian prison didn’t make me chuckle. (Australian customs, this is all a joke, please don’t flag my co-workers).
P.S. Wondering what a blogger does after they get arrested for drug trafficking and fired from their job? Well, pretty much the exact same thing employed bloggers with clean criminal records do, start a podcast.
He is optimistic about standing out during the podcast boom, though: “I’ll just pivot to interviewing criminals,” he said. “There’s a lot of interesting people in jail.”