I'm doing research for a story I'm writing. A central plot point is a big drug deal: a group of sellers and a group of buyers meeting at a remote location to consummate the deal. I need to understand how that might happen; the mechanics of it. The drug being sold is not that important; I'm leaning towards bricks of heroin wrapped in tinfoil, but I'm open to suggestions. The important thing to the story is the cash being used for the purchase. It needs to be a least a million bucks, no more than two. I don't want to rip off No Country For Old Men and have the money bundled nicely in a Jeppeson case. It seems like most movies and TV shows use Jepp cases, or attache cases. In the Breaking Bad season one episode: A No-Rough-Stuff-Type Deal, when Walt and Jesse met Tuco in the junkyard, Tuco's flunky had a big freezer bag with $70,00 in rolls that looked to be about $10,000 each. I find that intriguing, and cool. I need to find out what those rolls are called, an make sure they actually are $10,000 each. I read one place they're called "knots". Is that correct? On a bigger drug deal, like the one in my story, if those rolls of cash were what was being used, how would they be transported? Would they just go to Wal-Mart and get a suitcase with wheels and a handle, or maybe just throw the rolls into a cardboard box? Say you could get $100,000 in those rolls into a really big freezer bag. Might they just toss 10, or 20 of those freezer bags into a box? I imagined the trunk of a car full of those plastic bags they bag your stuff in at Wal-mart, except filled with rolls of cash. I'm looking for something more Tuco-like, and less highbrow than what I've seen in most movies, and TV shows. Something improbable .... but true-to-life. I've spent some time in the cage in a casino. The first time I walked in there, I was blown away by the hundreds of thousands of dollars literally just sitting out on the tables, and on carts back there, and everyone working around it being oblivious to it. I soon learned that after you're around it for awhile, you lose all regard for the money. All those $50,000 bricks of hundred-dollar bills are just paper to you, after a time. That's how I imagine all that cash would be to big-time drug dealers. It sure appeared that way with Tuco, and that's what I want to portray in my story, if it is, in fact the way it works. I also want to learn more about how this type of deal might go down, in-general. I want to portray it as accurately as possible, and offer the reader detail and insight they might not otherwise know. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
