In a real-life Breaking Bad situation, Lori Arnold, the sibling of celebrity Tom Arnold, was making $800,000 a month manufacturing and selling crystal methamphetamine (she was moving so much product, it's likely that some of it wound up in the hands of meth-addicted celebrities). Lori was born in 1961, in the small town of Ottumwa, Iowa, one of seven siblings. Her home life wasn't great - her father had taken off with the next door neighbor, and her mother wound up marrying six different men.
Lori Arnold ended up dropping out of high school, only to end up in the drug trade. Her nickname was the "Queen of Meth," due to the large-scale drug manufacture and sale operation she controlled throughout the 1980s. After two stints in prison, she has turned her life around, and her brother now pokes fun at her throughout his stand-up comedy routines. While Lori Arnold might be mistaken for an average citizen, during her formative years she was America's first Queen of Meth.
Shocking Facts About Lori Arnold, Movie Star Sister and America's OG Meth Queen,
She Did So Much Meth, She Wouldn't Sleep For Days
Lori Arnold not only sold meth, she was a heavy user as well. Clearly, she didn't care much for the old adage, "Never get high on your own supply." At one point, she recalled staying up for days or weeks at a time, doing more meth just to keep moving.
She admitted that this clouded her judgment, but she was as hooked on the money she was making as she was on the drug itself. But doing that much meth is obviously not good for one's cognition. Her drug abuse led to her second arrest, years after she was first released from jail for drug charges.
She Made As Much As $1.2 Million A Month Selling Crystal Meth
At the height of her time as a drug kingpin, Lori Arnold was making crazy amounts of money. The amounts reported vary - figures around $800,000 a month to $300,000 a week have been given. She admitted to walking around with $100,000 in her purse, and has said that she was making money so fast that she ran out of places to stash the cash.
She apparently buried some, and would hide stacks of money in the walls of her home. Her crystal meth business was profoundly lucrative, but it was also very high risk.
She Turned Her Ranch Into The Only Meth Superlab In Existence Outside Of California
At first, Lori Arnold bought methamphetamine from local sources. When they couldn't supply her with enough to keep her legion clients happy, she had to turn to the only other mass production lab at the time, located in California. Eventually, she cut out the middle man and began making meth on her ranch in Iowa, turning it into the only meth manufacturing "superlab" outside of California at the time.
She buried a trailer underground, covered the top of it with tents, and had a chemist make it in 10 pound batches at a time. At the height of her operation, her chemist was cranking out 10 pounds of the drug every two days or so. Just a single pound of meth is worth anywhere between $7,000 and $14,500 in Iowa.
Her Prison Nickname Was "Scarface In A Skirt"
During her first stint in prison, after her ranch was raided by an entire alphabet soup of federal agencies (DEA, FBI, etc.), Lori Arnold was sentenced to 12 years in prison. She was sent to Alderson in West Virginia - the same prison where Martha Stewart did her time in the early 2000s.
There, Arnold was given the nickname of "Scarface in a Skirt" due to her illegal drug business, a clear reference to the movie Scarface, starring Al Pacino. One difference, however, is that she never killed anyone. Or, at least, never admitted to it. Arnold served 9 years of her 12 year sentence.
She Owned A Bar Called The Wild Side - And Sold Meth Out Of It
Over the course of her criminal career, Lori Arnold bought quite a few businesses to help launder her drug money. One of these was a bar called the Wild Side. Arnold not only laundered money through the bar, but it provided her with an important way of reaching her customers (and selling meth to them). Eventually, she bought a second bar, as well as 14 houses in the town of Ottumwa, which she then rented out.
She Was Married To The President Of The Grim Reapers Motorcycle Club
At age 19, Lori Arnold met Floyd Stockdall, then President of the local chapter of the Grim Reapers Motorcycle Club. He was a Vietnam veteran prone to flashbacks. Shortly after they got married in 1980, Stockdall stepped down from his position with the club and got a job working as a contractor, mostly because she was pregnant with their son, Josh.
However, Stockdall still had at least one foot in the underworld; Arnold was introduced to crystal methamphetamine through one of his friends. She began her life of crime by sitting in a bar, helping their mutual friend out by selling drugs for him. Things snowballed from there.
She Got Married For The First Time At 15
Lori Arnold first got married at the age of 15. She met her first husband, 23-year-old Bobby, when she was only 13. He was married at the time and had children. Arnold's mother found out the truth about their relationship when Bobby's divorce announcement wound up in the local paper. That didn't stop Arnold, however. She married Bobby shortly after she turned 15, and divorced him a year later.
She Bought An Airplane With Her Drug Profits - Just Because She Could
At the height of her life of crime, Lori Arnold spent money hand over fist. She once purchased an airplane, for example, simply because she could. She also owned a yacht and claimed to own "$73,000 dollars of jewelry alone." At the time, her brother, Tom Arnold, was married to Roseanne Barr, who also traveled by private plane.
However, her Hollywood connections didn't help her when she got arrested the second time. Tom reportedly showed up outside of Lori's court hearing with $400,000 in cash to pay her bail. Unfortunately, the option of receiving bail was removed, due to the severity of her crimes.
Her Drug Runners Were So Hard On Cars That She Bought A Dealership To Become More Profitable
Drug running is tough on vehicles, especially when you're moving so much methamphetamine around that you need to make frequent trips to the West Coast to pick up more. At the height of her operation in the late '80s, Lori Arnold's drug runners were putting 4,000 miles on a car in a month. In order to make this part of her enterprise profitable, she purchased a car dealership. Now she had a way to frequently get new cars - at wholesale prices - and had access to yet another way to launder her drug proceeds.
She Used Horse Racing To Launder Her Money
As her business grew, Lori Arnold found it increasingly difficult to launder the money that she was making. It was just coming in to fast. So, she turned to race horses. She and her then-husband, Floyd, had a 144-acre farm that they filled with race horses and stables. She soon wound up with over 50 horses, and employed a fleet of farmhands and jockeys for them. The business that she had started to launder the spoiles of her drug dealing cost her about $100,000 a month to run, but that was nothing to her at the time.