This is an excerpt from High Price: The Luke Scarmazzo Story. Click here to purchase the Paperback of eBook.

Three days later, the feds woke me up at five in the morning and told me I was being transferred to Fresno to be arraigned in the US District Court. The DEA agents who were transferring me said that from that point forward, I’d be housed in Fresno County Jail. After being pulled from my cell, I was instantly shackled—legs and hands—and led down to the basement, where a white van awaited me. The side door slid open as I stepped in and saw Rich, Lucky, Buddy, Tony, and Jose. I greeted them and took my seat next to Rich.

The white van pulled onto State Route 99 to Fresno. Fifteen minutes into the trip, the agent in the passenger seat popped a cassette tape into the van’s stereo. Yes, this van had a cassette player, and yes this special agent had a tape on him. A few seconds of scratchy silence passed, and then a poor recording of Business Man blared over the speakers. The two agents thought this was very amusing as they looked back at me with triumphant grins. Their attempt at rubbing their arrest in my face was not lost. I didn’t show any outward emotions, but inside, I was fuming. I was mad at their unprofessionalism, mad at our treatment, and mad at myself for not seeing all this bullshit coming down. State’s rights, I thought to myself, yeah, right. I looked over at Rich, and he rolled his eyes and shook his head as if to say, “What clowns.” They could get their jabs in. We were snared, in chains, being driven to one of their federal cages. They got us, they could gloat in their perceived victory, but that showed the type of small men these were. Their antics were pitiful, and they played my song on repeat, continuously rewinding it and replaying it, over and over, the entire two-hour drive. That was just another sign of how personally they took what I said in my music. Business Man had really agitated them and they were going to make sure I hung for expressing my views, freedom of speech or not. 

The music blared, “So light up a joint/ and kick up your legs/ put your fingers in the air and yell fuck the feds!”

We arrived at the federal courthouse, and the van pulled into an underground parking garage. The moment the van stopped, the side door was opened. Agent Barger, one of the agents who stormed my home, stood waiting for us. Legs shackled, I stepped awkwardly from the van and hopped onto the ground. Agent Barger approached me immediately.

“You know, we checked Weedtracker.com, and not one person was sad that you guys got arrested,” Barger said.

“Weedtracker? What the hell is that? Some DEA-created chatroom where you can monitor law-abiding Americans?” I asked rhetorically.

“Yeah, you’re really funny, but let’s see if you’re still smiling when the judge gives you ten years,” Barger said smugly.

“Sir, doesn’t the United States Drug Enforcement Agency have anything better to do than to harass a state-legal medical marijuana dispensary? With all the drug overdose deaths in our country, isn’t there a smarter use of our tax dollars? Did you really make our community safer by arresting this group of notorious medical marijuana providers?” I looked behind me at the other five guys. “Or,” I tilted my head and looked him in the eyes. “That’s right, that would have taken actual police work instead of being able to walk into a retail establishment on the main strip of a city and declare some ‘big bust.’” I shook my head. Maybe I was being foolish by fueling the fire, but I was angry at our arrest and treatment by these unprofessional and classless actors.

Our arraignment was uneventful. We asked for a continuance in order to find time to retain lawyers, and our next court date was set for two weeks later. The one thing that did stand out was the opulence of a federal court. If our state courts had nice courtrooms, this place made them look like wooden shacks. The courthouse I was standing in had marble floors, huge oak paneled walls, plush carpet, and a five-foot golden Seal of the United States. 

We were shuffled out of court and placed back into the van in shackles. A few minutes later, we arrived at Fresno County Jail. The booking cells were filthy, of course, and drunk inmates were scattered across the floor, which made the already crowded cell even more crowded. The stench of urine was overpowering. It took fifteen hours for us to be processed through that hell hole. After so many hours in that dungeon, I didn’t care where they were taking me; I just wanted a shower and somewhere to sleep. I was finally escorted to an elevator along with Rich, Tony, and Jose. As we stepped off, I got my first look at the housing units. They were nothing like I’d seen before. Four units with floor-to-ceiling glass facades encircled us, each holding nearly 200 men. There were no cells, just big open bays with rows of triple-stacked bunk beds. They separated us into different units. I walked into mine, and the sheriff’s deputy directed me to my bunk and said, “Good luck.”

Fresno County Jail was one of the worst facilities I had ever been in. Prison and street gangs ran everything, and the open dorms were the Wild West. Dorm incarceration settings in and of themselves are horrible. Here, we had three men stacked on top of each other, with the next triple-stacked bunk only an arm’s length away on both sides. It was a noisy, foul-smelling “pod” with no privacy whatsoever. Each dorm had a community restroom with five toilets spaced a couple of feet apart—no barrier or divider. Those commodes sat right behind the only sinks and mirrors, which were adjacent to three shower stalls, stalls that were lucky to have a curtain on them most times. Staph and MRSA outbreaks happened regularly, and a large number of the dorm was usually sick.

Breakfast and lunch were packed together into a brown paper bag: an eight-ounce styrofoam cup of cereal, four slices of bread, two pieces of bologna, and a milk—served at 3 a.m. The next meal, dinner, was served at 6 p.m. Dinner was usually beans, a rotting vegetable, and some type of synthetic meat or soy. I wanted nothing more than to bail out of there and fast, but I didn’t have a bail set yet.

And first, I had to retain an attorney. I had my folks look around, and they found one of the most prominent attorneys in Fresno, Tony Capozzi. Capozzi was a former US attorney, which I thought was a plus because he knew the inner workings of the other side. He was President of the State Bar Association and a legal analyst for the local news, and he knew most of the judges personally. I also wanted someone local who knew all the players in this courtroom drama. That said, with prominence and prestige comes a hefty price tag. My folks said he wanted a $100k retainer up front and another $100k if we went to trial.

I didn’t know much about criminal law, but I did know from TV and secondhand stories that if you wanted to win, you got the baddest, highest-paid lawyer around. What I didn’t know was that US attorneys and federal cases are not the same as district attorneys and state cases. The baddest lawyer strategy may work in a state court but not with the feds. While your local district attorney may have attended law school at a state college, a US attorney probably went to Harvard, Yale, or Columbia. Moreover, the feds aren’t concerned with budget in the same way a district attorney’s office might be. In the federal justice system, if a defendant spends half a mill, they’ll spend two. Spend two mill, they’ll spend ten. If the feds want you, they’ll stop at nothing to get you. The price tag doesn’t matter. They print the money, and they make the rules as they go.