Smoke Rings: A Scruffy City Novel

An Interview With R. Scott West

In Smoke Rings, you talk about using illicit monies from the distribution of marijuana around the Southeast to fund your efforts to revitalize downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, is that how you would describe the story in the novel?

I would describe Smoke Rings as an Appalachian Bonnie and Clyde love story, where the young lovers use their skunk weed profits to help save their tumbleweed town.

Smoke Rings is a fictional novel, but it is based on your life, correct? Why didn’t you just make it a non-fiction book?

Life is messy and cluttered, but fiction is neat and organized… So, for those reasons, among others, I thought it better to have a novel that was a fictionalized version of our story rather than an autobiography. 

Plus, by writing it as fiction, hopefully, it will piss off fewer people.

As an aside on it being based on a true story, the silver lining in getting caught is that, if we had never been caught, I would never have been able to share the story. 

So, hopefully in return for my being a bad criminal readers will get a good book.

You decided to make Smoke Rings a multimedia reading experience, containing both a 29-chapter story and a 29-song soundtrack, can you tell us about that?

Sure. For anyone considering acquiring Smoke Rings, I am throwing in a 29-song soundtrack as a companion to the novel, for free.

The songs originate from the fact that, for several decades, I’ve been in a band with my friends, and so, over the years I have written lots and lots of lyrics. Realizing this, as I was building the world of Smoke Rings, I decided that I wanted it to have a soundtrack to provide an ambience for the places and people of the book.

Hopefully it makes for a more enjoyable experience for the reader/ listener. And also it’s a pretty unique idea as far as novels go.

Regarding your prison time, can you tell us what were the crimes exactly, and how long was the sentence you served?

The indictments against myself and my brother were for 25,000 pounds of marijuana and 2.1 million dollars in money laundering. The 2.1 million in money laundering was the money that my wife and I put into saving condemned historic buildings on Market Square in downtown Knoxville. We were facing 10 years for the marijuana conspiracy alone, but they added 15 more years on top of that for the fact that we used the marijuana profits to save historic buildings…

By the way, the date of the book launch is not by chance.  Smoke Rings: A Scruffy City Novel is being released on July 16th, which is the 20th anniversary of the day when they kicked down our doors and arrested dozens of our friends and family along with us. We were looking at 25 years to life in federal prison with no parole unless we cooperated with the prosecutors. In our case, that cooperation was pretty unusual.

No banks would loan us money in downtown to revitalize the buildings we had acquired, and then no businesses wanted to rent them once we renovated them. So we were forced to both creatively finance our little Renaissance and then create all of the businesses that rented those spaces as tenants.

Because we had created the businesses which paid the rent on the buildings, buildings that were being seized by the federal government and sold at auction, my family had to sign agreements to keep places like Preservation Pub open so that the IRS would be able to sell them for more at auction because, by keeping the businesses open, the buildings maintained their value due to the rents there businesses paid. 

Keep in mind, we did not launder any money through the businesses; the businesses were profitable, the money laundering charge was due to our using illicit profits from our weed conspiracy to save and restore the historic buildings. Because the businesses were clean, we were able to have our family take over the businesses, even as we lost all of our possessions and went on “Adventure Sabbatical” for a few years. I ended up serving 4.5 years, my wife 2 years, and my brother did 7 years.

It was during those four and half years that I wrote the first versions of the series that would become Smoke Rings: A Scruffy City Novel. Since I wrote four books in jail, Smoke Rings will be followed by a few more novels in the Scruffy City series, starting early next year. 

I didn’t lose that time in prison, I used it.

As a ex-convict, you don’t sound very repentant when you talk about your crimes. Are you?

I think it was Voltaire, who said, “It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.” And that is pretty much where I am on this subject.  Our crime was a conspiracy to smuggle and distribute marijuana, and then launder the profits by developing condemned historic buildings. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

When marijuana is legalized again on a federal level, I will take that as a personal apology from the government to me for having arrested and incarcerated myself and my family. I’m kidding (a little bit). I knew that what we were doing was illegal, so when we got caught I was OK with serving my time for breaking the law. But committing a crime is not necessarily the same thing as doing something immoral or unethical. My personal ethics and moral code have no problem whatsoever with people using marijuana for recreational purposes or with renovating historic buildings, so I don’t feel the need to repent for our crimes, especially since we have long since atoned for them and paid our debt to society.

July 16 is the launch date for Smoke Rings. Is this a full circle moment? You and Bernadette have returned to Market Square and rebuilt a small empire, which is even more successful now than in the time before you were arrested and sent to prison, correct?

I’ve never seen a story quite like ours. This is a uniquely American story. 

Great cities are built on great crimes.

We were shamed by the status quo, had our assets seized, and we were then sent to prison; but then we came back to the same town square with the same fire in our bellies, now with added obstacles of being ex-convicts. In the years since our release from prison, we have been able to work hard and smart, reacquire and grow the businesses, and then reacquire the same buildings that were seized from us on Market Square. Knoxville is now in a golden age and we are proud to have played an instrumental role in that. 

Some haters may not think that’s a happy ending; they may say that’s the bad guy winning. I remember one of my federal prosecutors telling me, “You’re not the good guy. You’re the bad guy.” And I thought, we will see about that. Bernadette is the best person I have ever known, and I never saw myself and my brother as bad guys either. Good-intentioned bad guys, maybe; but all of our efforts were critical in the revitalization of our hometown, so we’re very proud of that. And if the Scruffy City community really did see us as bad people, they would not have continued supporting us and our businesses through all these tough years and despite the federal convictions against us. We have always had an extraordinary amount of love and support in downtown Knoxville, from politicians and status quo types, all the way over to the artists and entrepreneurs of the creative class. 

Knoxville has been wonderful to us, and the tough chapters just make for a better book.