Craziest obituary ever - life and times of early-era hippie drug dealer Sam Fried

   Sam Fried was a Montreal drug dealer, who died in 1974 at the age of 25 by overdosing on laughing gas and is remembered below in the most savage obituary of all time.
   Its author, Esmond Choueke, is best known as a stringer for the National Enquirer and an activist-resident who helped save some lovely old buildings on Jeanne Mance below Sherbrooke.
   In a phone interview last year Choueke stood by his article, for "telling it like it is."
   Coolopolis has done considerable independent research on Montreal in 1968 and Fried's name came up often. One friend described Fried as a "cartoon character," including his face, which had exaggerated features.
   Another told Coolopolis of a photo album Sam liked to show people, jammed with pictures of his many female conquests. In those years sex flowed smoothly to people even like himself
   Yet another told Coolopolis of an episode where Fried perilously walked atop the barrier handrail ledge of a high-rise balcony in the Milton Park area where he lived.
   Fried - whose name was shortened from Friedman - shunned all drugs other than nitrous oxide, laughing gas, according to various sources.
   His killer batch of nitrous oxide was stolen from a West End dentist.
   Fried opened The Image cafe, in a building on Park that sat on the southwest corner of where La Cite highrise now stands. The place became a magnet for hippies, bikers, drug dealers and American draft dodgers and police would routinely round long-hairs up for no reason.
   The Image's co-owner was Cliff Gazee, who had dealt drugs with Fried before going straight and becoming a serious professional social worker in Ottawa.
   Gazee, now retired, told Coolopolis that the two opened the cafe, which had been previously known as The Op, after Gazee was treated to a savage beating by cops who knew of their drug operation but were unable to catch them. The Image only lasted the one year, 1968.
   Fried rarely showed up to The Image, as Gazee was left to watch over the place.


September 3, 1974

"Arrogant, stubborn and creepy" 
Wheeler, dealer, Sam died as he lived - hard! 
by ESMOND CHOEKE
for The Gazette

Arrogant, stubborn and creepy: These are adjectives used by his acquaintances to describe Sam Fried, a faithful patron of the downtown pub scene who died in May at the age of 25.
   With his straggly beard and emaciated frame, Fried had been one of the mainstays of the Montreal counter culture since the pre-dawn stages of hippydom, since he got kicked out of Baron Byng High school and began scruffing around trying to make it big.
   His chosen profession was drug dealing and through his work and big talk he had made the acquaintance of a seemingly endless number of people. These are the people who began cutting him down while he was alive and continue doing it now that he's dead.
   Fried made his first bucks as owner of the now-defunct Image on Park Avenue, selling Reserpine, an animal tranquilizer, by calling it THC (the active ingredient of cannabis). The stakes grew higher over the years as he perfected the technique of "cutting" grass and hash with various spices to double or triple its weight. Believing it was him against the world and he had to be sly to get ahead, Sam never cared much for honesty.
   Talk about his death still kicks around in the archipelago of pubs winding from Bishop Street to Aylmer Street. There are many who won't believe the facts, who think one of his drug-dealing connections must have finally made good the threat of "blowing him away."

HEART ATTACK
   But his death was less spectacular than a rubout. He died quietly, at a party, lying on an air mattress that was inflated with nitrous oxide (laughing gas). He was inhaling the gas through a long plastic tube to get high and accidentally took an overdose.
   His body, weakened from other drugs taken intravenously a day earlier - and for years, for that matter - couldn't take the shock of the overdose and Fried died of a heart attack.
   Fried had many warnings to be careful, all of which he ignored in his unswerving headstrong way. His health was decrepit, he never had exercise. Yet he'd brag about how much dope he could take, how many times he'd caught venereal disease. When he passed out for the first time on nitrous oxide about a year ago, the scare kept him off drugs for a month or two.
   Some of Fried's acquaintance told him his karma was running out, he couldn't build up so much evil around him without having to suffer for it sooner or later. He just shrugged off these warnings and continued, as usual, cheating his partners, his runners and his customers. Which is why there is hardly a soul who will claim having been Fried's friend.
   According to one person who knew him well, "Sam's done the lowest, slimiest things a person could ever do. He'd still his closest friend if it would put an extra dollar in his pocket. He said "the only reason to know a guy was for financial gain, the only reason to know a girl was to screw her.'"

CRAVED SUCCESS

   The truth was that Sam wasn't skilled as a dealer and made a lot of mistakes that continually drained his slim savings.  He paid and so did those around him. His connections (including female runners) have been jailed in Canada, Israel, England, the U.S. and Amsterdam. He was jailed eight months in Bordeaux after one of his numerous busts.
   His first claim to glory was to have been the plodding autobiography he wrote in prison. The pedantic collection of his experiences, as he wrote them, ache to establish him as the "Boy Wonder" of Baron Byng, the guy who grappled his way to fame and fortune with courage and aplomb - Sam Fried, The World-Hopping Super Dealer and Jet Setter.
   This obsession with success through dealing - the only avenue he thought open to him - became his raison d'etre. He could often be seen holding court at a bar over a round of drinks (that he hadn't paid for) recounting tales of Owlsley acid, ingenious hash-importing techniques or for getting the better of police through his expert legal maneuvering. Only his long-time girlfriend knows how much of what he said was true and how much was fabrication to promote his self-made image.
   One strange angle about Fried that not many people knew about was his urge to become a respectable businessman. He spent half a night last summer outlining a complicated real estate deal to an acquaintance.
  But he never bought the old apartment building in that scheme. Still, it was one of his dreams.
   Now that he's gone, night deskmen in Montreal hotels won't be perplexed anymore at seeing this odd willowy guy coming and going at the strangest hours, accompanied by the weirdest people, all with suspicious bulges in their pockets and unwarranted briefcases. The transients he hired each summer to grind spices for his pot-multiplying labs will have to find another source of income.
   No more will Fried be able to infuriate, entertain and disgust the patrons on the islands of pubs, no longer will he hang out, strutting and knocking around in our world that never seems to tire of social climbers and carpet baggers.