By Gayne C. Young
Hunter S. Thompson:
- Inventor of Gonzo Journalism
- Gun aficionado
- Drug lover
- Lush
- Ivory smuggler
Yeah, not a lot of people know that last one.
Our story began in 1974 when the Rolling Stone magazine assigned Hunter to cover The Rumble in the Jungle, the heavyweight title fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier to be held in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). The magazine also assigned Ralph Steadman, an artist who had worked with Hunter several times before, to accompany the journalist. Steadman recalled the assignment and the problems associated with it to Newsweek magazine in 2018. He stated that Hunter was in Zaire “for the job” and that “All he wanted to do was swim or sleep or take drugs.”
The Blunder in the Jungle
Great goals to be sure, but not exactly what Rolling Stone was hoping to get in return for their assignment.
During his time in Zaire, Hunter ran up a $30,000 bill for food and booze and God knows what else at Kinshasa’s Inter-Continental Hotel (a little over $200K in today’s money) and did enough drugs as to become completely incoherent. David S. Wills, author of “Rise and Fall of Gonzo,” told the Santa Cruz Sentinel in 2022 just how bad Hunter was during this period. “The fight was delayed and Hunter was there with access to unlimited cheap drugs in the company of all these journalists. His audio recordings from then are genuinely disturbing. He barely knows where he is. He’s rambling “The government is going to take our tickets. We’re not going to be able to watch the fight.”
It was during this drug stupor that Hunter came across a pair of elephant tusks for sale in an outdoor market. He paid $300 for them in non-negotiable American Express travelers’ checks and brought them back to his hotel. Hunter then sold his and Steadman’s tickets to the fight. Steadman was forced to watch the fight on TV while Hunter went to the pool. Writer George Plimpton detailed exactly what Hunter did in the pool in his book, “Shadow Box.” Hunter told Plimpton, “I didn’t go to the fight. I stayed in the hotel swimming pool. I lay on my back looking at the moon coming up and the only person in the hotel came and stared at me a long time before he went away. Maybe he thought I was a corpse. I floated there naked. I’d thrown a pound and a half of marijuana into the pool—it was what I had left and I am not trying to smuggle it out of this country—and it stuck together there in a sort of clot, and then it began to spread out in a green slick. It was very luxurious floating naked in that stuff, though it’s not the best way to obtain a high.”
Probably not.
The Ivory Smuggler
Hunter took his tusks with him when he left the country only to have them confiscated when he landed in New York City. According to Steadman, Hunter wasn’t going to let a little something like the U.S. Customs keep him from his newly prized ivory. “When we got back to New York, Hunter was determined to get his elephant tusks back from customs where they were impounded. ‘Just stay at this bar, and have a drink,’ he told me, ‘I’ve gotta get my tusks back.’ Then, in one beautiful action, he leapt over the customs desk, picked the tusks up, hid them under my bag in the bar and ran into a telephone booth. The customs officers never found him.”
Hunter and his tusks made it back to Colorado only to become separated again. “The tusks were impounded again at Colorado, where he lived,” Steadman recalled. “I later heard that all they’d wanted from him, if he’d only bloody well listened (he never did), was $28 duty. But that was him. He always said he raged against the coming of the light, rather than the dying of the light.”
Hunter eventually got the tusks back (No one seems to know how, and given Hunter was Hunter, it’s doubtful he paid the $28.) and put them on display in his house at Owl Farm ranch in Woody Creek, Colorado next to an elk skull mount that he famously stole from Ernest Hemingway’s home.
Hunter never turned anything in to Rolling Stone magazine regarding his time in Zaire or about the fight. The magazine reluctently paid Hunter’s hotel bill in full.
I guess we better add trophy thief to that above list just below ivory smuggler.
