A friend tells me about the Green Angels, a collective of about 30 models turned high-end-weed dealers, and he introduces me to the group’s leader, Honey. The first time we speak, in the spring of 2015, she comes to my house in Greenwich Village and we talk for six hours.

She is 27 and several months pregnant. Her belly is showing, a little, under her black top and over her black patterned stockings. But her face is still as fresh as hay, sunlight, the idea the rest of the world has about the American West, where she was born—she’s an excommunicated Mormon from the Rocky Mountains. Honey is not her real name; it’s a pseudonym she chose for this article. She is over six feet tall, blonde, and blue-eyed. Patrick Demarchelier took photos of her when she was a teenager. She still does some modeling. Now that she’s pregnant, I tell her, she should do maternity modeling.

“Why would I do that when I can make $6,000 a day just watching TV?” she asks.

Honey started the business in 2009. When she began dealing, she would get an ounce from a guy in Union Square, then take it to her apartment and divide it into smaller quantities for sale. She bought a vacuum sealer from Bed Bath & Beyond to make the little bags her product came in airtight. She tells me that part of her research was watching CNN specials on the drug war to find out how dealers got busted.

Today her total expenses average more than $300,000 a month for the product, plus around $30,000 for cabs, cell phones, rent for various safe houses, and other administrative costs. She makes a profit of $27,000 a week. “I like seeing a pile of cash in my living room,” she says.

I want to see Honey’s operation up close, to understand how she was able to build this business from scratch, but she’s understandably wary. The one advantage I have is that she wants her story told—as a way to expand the business, or to leave it behind, or both in succession—which is why she agreed to meet in the first place.

The Green Angels, she tells me, are selling a fantasy of an attractive, well-educated, presentable young woman who wants to get you high—a slightly more risqué Avon lady. Not all of the Angels are working models, but they are all young and attractive. In eight years, they have never been busted by the cops. The explanation is simple: Good-looking girls don’t get searched.

A few years ago, Honey says, she began delivering weed, for free, to Rihanna. Her hope is that Rihanna will endorse the Green Angels’ products if legalization ever goes national.

In New York, it’s currently a felony to sell more than 25 grams of pot—the equivalent of about 40 joints. Honey has been working on a business plan to see her through legalization, but that might be on hold under the Trump administration. The Green Angels could also profit no matter what happens. If the penalties go up, so will their prices. If the drug is legalized, they have a trafficking, packaging, and delivery network already in place.

A few years ago, Honey says, she began delivering weed, for free, to Rihanna. Her hope is that Rihanna will endorse the Green Angels’ products if legalization ever goes national. “She’s very smart, vicious,” Honey says. “I can see she’s not someone to fuck with.”

Justin Bieber occasionally calls the Green Angels when he’s in town, she says, but he gets charged. So do Jimmy Fallon and various actors and hip-hop artists whose names I don’t recognize. The musicians Peaches and FKA Twigs: both clients. (None of the above confirmed any business relationship with the Green Angels.)

Honey is clear-eyed about the nature of her operation: “I tell the girls, it’s not a club; it’s a drug ring.” The whole business is run via text messages between her, the dispatchers in her headquarters, the runners who do the deliveries, and the customers. “I have carpal tunnel in my thumb from all the texting,” Honey says. Dispatchers get 10 percent of each sale; the runners get 20 percent, which averages out to $300 or $400 a day. Several of them, according to Honey, “are paying off their NYU student loans.”

Many of the Angels are NYU students? I ask. (I teach journalism at NYU.)

“Half the city seems to be going to NYU,” Honey says.

Most of her employees are in their 20s; a few—those who have been with her since the beginning—are around 30. She has five or six trusted lieutenants who will run things when she’s having the baby.

At one point, she gets up from the sofa and goes to the bathroom to throw up. She has morning sickness. I ask her if she’s seen a doctor.

“Not yet,” she says.

I tell Honey that I’d like to go on a delivery with one of her runners, but she demurs. She says she’ll have to ask the others.

I must have passed some sort of test, because Honey invites me to the Green Angels’ weekly planning meeting, which takes place every Wednesday in an apartment on the Lower East Side. She has, in fact, changed the meetings to Thursdays for my benefit, since I teach on Wednesdays.

The drug den is in a third-floor apartment in a building a block away from a police precinct. This is where the product is distributed to the runners and the dispatchers handle orders, though it’s not yet clear whether I’ll be able to see them in action. The meeting takes place at 10 A.M., and they don’t start taking orders until noon.

In the apartment, I find Honey, a dozen girls, and two guys. They greet me enthusiastically. Honey introduces me as someone who’s writing a book about their lives. She tells the crew they are free to talk to me about anything.