Ridin' with Dr. Feelgood
Baltazar Fedalizo is ready to personally deliver your medical marijuana to a bong near you
By Carl Kozlowski 06/03/2010
IT’S 1:30 ON A FRIDAY MORNING WHEN BALTAZAR FEDALIZO PULLS HIS BIODIESELPOWERED MERCEDES INTO THE DARK PARKING LOT OF A DENNY’S IN FRESNO. HE’S ON HIS SEMI-REGULAR OVERNIGHT RUN TO PICK UP A BUNCH OF MEDICAL MARIJUANA FROM A SUPPLIER IN UKIAH, AND HE’S GETTING FRANTIC AS HE ATTEMPTS TO ROUSE ME FROM A DEEP SLUMBER IN HIS FRONT PASSENGER SEAT.
THINGS ARE A LITTLE MORE COMPLICATED THAN THEY APPEAR, HOWEVER. HE’S NOT ACTUALLY GOING TO UKIAH HIMSELF; RATHER, EIGHT OF HIS EMPLOYEES FROM A MEDICAL-MARIJUANA DISTRIBUTION SERVICE BASED IN SAN BERNARDINO HAVE DRIVEN UP TO UKIAH FOR HIM ALREADY AND ARE AWAITING HIS COAST-CLEAR SIGNAL TO DIVVY UP THE GOODS AMONG THEMSELVES AND STASH THEM IN FEDALIZO’S CAR.
While Fedalizo personally has the right to transport two pounds in his vehicle on one of these runs, in reality his men stash up to 10 pounds in a night into his trunk and around the car’s undercarriage.
And so it is at this very moment that Fedalizo wants to get inside the restaurant and into a booth as far out of sight from his car as possible. Normally, no one has to rush me to head into a restaurant, but on this night I’m groggily coming to as Baltazar hops like a frog next to his car and waves the magazine in his hand towards the door.
“Let’s GO, Carl! Time to eat!”
It didn’t matter that I’d already had a Subway footlong at 8 p.m. while waiting for him to pick me up in Sherman Oaks. Or that Fedalizo, a 40-year-old Pasadena resident, bought a giant bag of almond M&M’s to share on the ride up, along with stopping to buy us caramel fraps at Starbucks. Sure, I was full, but it wasn’t the eating that really mattered now.
“We’re talking plausible deniability, Carl,” says Fedalizo, leaning in with his secret while excitably talking a mile a minute. “If I’m in here, unable to see my car, I never saw how the marijuana got in my trunk or hidden around my wheels. You didn’t see anything, did you?”
He’s giving me the “don’t-test-me” look most kids fear from their Dr. Feelgood Ridin’ with
BALTAZAR FEDALIZO IS READY TO PERSONALLY DELIVER YOUR MEDICAL MARIJUANA TO A BONG NEAR YOU BY CARL KOZLOWSKI | ILLUSTRATION BY JASON CROSBY 06.03.10 | PASADENA WEEKLY 13 parents. I assure him I saw nothing
illegal happen. But no sooner am I in the bathroom than the frantic text messages begin.
“We gotta roll, bro.”
Then another: “Seriously, man, we have to go. Word just came that the fuzz is hitting the freeway.”
The cops are unexpectedly about to scan cars all the way back down to LA, and he wanted to beat them to it.
There’s clearly no time to relax in the world of pot transportation.
Still slingin’
Fedalizo is just one of more than 1,000 licensed medical marijuana distributors across California, according to the pro-medical marijuana advocacy group Americans for Safe Access, but he’s probably one of the most unique figures on the local scene. PW readers may recall a pair of stories on his other career as owner of a biodiesel fuel company, and before that he owned an adult daycare center and a pair of Subway sandwich shops, in addition to being an Army officer with service in both Kuwait and Iraq, and, after working as a cook in prison, a Le Cordon Bleu-level chef trained by the California Academy of Culinary Art.
Yet perhaps the most relevant aspect of his prior endeavors was the time he spent as a teen in the 1980s growing up in hardscrabble San Pedro. Though he was part of a stable home of Filipino immigrants, he felt the excitement was on the poor side of town, “a Neverland of girls and money,” where he avoided gangs but took part in plenty of the gang culture, including selling crack.
“My best friend’s gang was 400-strong, so I got a pass in the projects. I got to take money out of there, make money in there,” recalls Fedalizo, who says he also blended
into the ‘hood because people assumed he was Latino. “I never used it. Are you crazy? I saw what that shit does to you. I just liked the money and girls. I started off with making $300 a week to making $300 a day, and took about a month to scale up. After four years, I was grossing $18,000 a day.”
Fedalizo’s success taught him the value of selling wholesale, but he got arrested three times and spent half of the money on lawyers and bail bondsmen. He buried the rest of the loot in Army duffel bags at a secret location in San Pedro.
The allure of the crack-slinging life faded for good when Fedalizo wound up with a nine-month stretch in solitary confinement after engaging in a prison riot. He also saw that other Asian inmates had college degrees, and when he got out, he not only earned his
undergraduate degree but also studied law until he realized his felonies would prevent him from practicing. So he earned a master’s degree that enabled him to start a career as a computer technician.
The buried money finally served a purpose. He used it as seed funding to establish his adult daycare centers, laundering it through his Subway shops. Eventually, the high cost of fuel for all his business ventures inspired him to enter the biodiesel game, but when gas prices fell to tolerable prices, Fedalizo felt the need for a new challenge. He realized that he had a unique mix of expertise for distributing in the lucrative trade of medical marijuana.
Fedalizo had succeeded in selling crack not because he sold it on street corners, but because he was willing to get paged and drive rocks to customers anywhere they wanted. So the new enterprise would spare marijuana clients from having to be seen in dispensaries by driving their “meds” to them. The fuel costs could be kept low by using Fedalizo’s ample supply of biodiesel and, with drivers in different regions, he’s able to cover
territory all the way from Barstow to Bakersfield, with Pasadena well within his coverage area.
“I took lessons learned, from the 1980s, on how to service the clientele. It’s just another product, that’s all,” says Fedalizo. “There are others who do this delivery aspect, but they’re hampered by fuel costs, manpower and territory. My drivers are guys who dealt with me back in the day, so we know what to do if the dominos fall and things go wrong. But it’s legal now.”
Legal gray zones
Fedalizo sends six to eight men weekly, each driving a different vehicle, to “back-country” towns like Ukiah, where they load up on fresh marijuana from the ample supply of growers in Northern California. They have doctor’s recommendations to carry two pounds each, but instead they bring back a total of 24 pounds each trip.
“So we’re not too much over, and can say ‘so what, keep it’ if they catch us,” says Fedalizo. “I learned to do that with crack. That worked with the old-guard LAPD, but not sure about the new guard. It’ll probably still work.”
For those clients who do want to enter a clinic, Fedalizo also runs the San Bernardino Patients Association in Chino Hills. He foresees the Inland Empire becoming “the new
Northern California — spread out, hard to police and agri-centric.” It is there that he applies his culinary skills, as he offers clients the chance to have a little bit of sugar to make the medicine go down.
“I entice them to come in and make some bomb-ass brownies, ice cream and empanadas. I mix in theleafy stuff with it, grinding for chocolate,” says Fedalizo. “On the
empanadas, I extract oil from the plant for THC.”
All told, Fedalizo employs 28 people in his medical marijuana operation alone, counting drivers, counters, cutters and sellers. They weigh everything precisely in eighths of ounces and grams, and inventory it all — another aspect in which Fedalizo’s prior business background pays off.
Yet, one has to wonder, with Los Angeles and other cities actively fighting to limit the
presence and number of dispensaries within their borders, how Fedalizo’s business model fits in with the law. Stephen Gutwillig, the California state director of the national group Drug Policy Alliance, has some doubts.
“What he’s doing falls in a statewide gray zone. Someone can designate a caregiver to provide or bring them medical marijuana, but it’s not primarily meant to be for
someone who you don’t know at all,” says Gutwillig. “There are no statewide laws against this, just different rules at the city and county levels about who can access
medical marijuana and who can cultivate how much.
“Yet most cities do not have specific regulations around medical marijuana dispensaries, which by definition fall into a legal gray zone,” Gutwillig continues. “The laws allow for patients to act collectively and cooperatively to access their medicine. That has been interpreted by most reasonable people and by proponents that you can create a collective with a physical location. Dispensaries are collective, you have to be a member of the collective, and then you access marijuana there.”
The issue has become controversial enough that in California, 34 cities and nine counties have already adopted ordinances regulating medical marijuana dispensaries,
with many more scrambling to catch up. The broader issue of marijuana legalization is on the state ballot this November as well.
On the other hand, Americans for Safe Access spokesman Kris Hermes believes that mobile dealers like Fedalizo are actually providing a valuable and compassionate service to the state’s medical users.
“He’s not unprecedented, and there are delivery services all across the state. They’re initiated for different reasons,” says Hermes. “One reason is that many patients have mobility issues, or it’s just easier and more practical to have a delivery service come to the
patient than for them to come to the distribution facility. There’s added difficulty because you can only get to so many people so fast through the delivery method, but it does seem logical and compassionate to bring it to patients.
“The other reason is to avoid hostile local officials or governments that want to condemn any kind of distribution beyond the patients’ ability to grow it themselves,” Hermes continues. “In southern Orange County, in fact, local officials have refused to recognize and
regulate storefront dispensaries, so mobile is the only option left.”
Out of the closet
Cruising down the freeway back to Los Angeles at 3 a.m. that Friday morning, Fedalizo waxed philosophical one more time.
“This has always been here, and it’s been especially fashionable since Cheech & Chong,” says Fedalizo. “Now there’s a market everywhere and everyone thinks it’s medication —but anyone who’s an in-the-closet smoker can come out now. This is just another step to the normalization of marijuana, and that’s here to stay. It’s freedom of choice.”
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