Big Smoke's Crack Palace

The exterior of Big Smoke's Crack Palace being guarded by two Ballas gangsters shooting at Carl Johnson during End of the Line.

Big Smoke's Crack Palace is the home of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas character Big Smoke and is used as a crack palace by the Ballas, Los Santos Vagos and the Russian Mafia, and as a front to sell drugs around the city, mostly crack cocaine, hence the name, while their enemies, the Grove Street Families are disbanded, Ganton is owned by the Ballas, Carl taken away by Frank Tenpenny and Eddie Pulaski and Sweet is imprisoned. The power of Big Smoke increases with the drug trade from the Crack Palace to all over Los Santos. The building is located in East Los Santos, Los Santos. Big Smoke moves into the building sometime after Carl Johnson is forced to leave Los Santos. The other front of Big Smoke's drug empire, second to the Crack Palace, is the yay factory in Doherty, San Fierro, destroyed by Carl Johnson in the mission Yay Ka-Boom-Boom. In the mission End of the Line, Carl Johnson enters the building and kills Big Smoke, before Frank Tenpenny destroys part of the building. The building can be accessed after the mission End of the Line. There are also Sprunk vending machines inside the crack palace. The statue that is in the picture, is how Big Smoke was actually going to be depicted as seen in the first trailer of San Andreas.

Glitches

  • On the PlayStation 2, the entrance to Big Smoke's Crack Palace can be blown off with any sort of high level explosive (Rocket Launcher's and Remote Grenades for example, regular Grenades and car explosions do not work) before End of the Line, which reveals Blue Hell. However, this was fixed when the game came out on the PC.
  • When shooting the statue of Big Smoke, as seen in the picture, the sparks that come out look a bit like blood.
  • Whereas Tenpenny destroyed the machinery in the drug lab during the events of End of the Line, it cannot be destroyed in normal gameplay.

Trivia

  • After the meeting he has with him in the wake of the latter's desertion, friend and fellow gang ally Cesar Vialpando calls Carl and informs him that Smoke expands his business to San Fierro by sending a courier from the Crack Palace to deliver drugs there. If Carl responds positively, a mission starts and Carl has to kill the courier on his way to San Fierro. This depicts that Smoke had decided to move to the Crack Palace much before his betrayal, because King In Exile is made in a very short time after The Green Sabre. This can be explained, because in The Introduction, in a conversation between Mike Toreno and T-Bone Mendez, Toreno says that he found "a buyer" from Los Santos, meaning that Smoke had ties to the Loco Syndicate before the game even started.
  • The crack palace is made up of four floors, the "Security Area", the "Drug Lab", the "Ballas Lounge" and Big Smoke's suite, as depicted in the mission "End of the Line".
  • Even though the Crack Palace was blown up during the last mission it is still accessible after without a bit of damage.
  • Curiously, there have been conspiracy theories on the involvement of the Varrios Los Aztecas in the factory, as some players have pointed out that ghosted apparitions of Aztecas members have been spotted manufacturing drugs, indicating that it might have been possible that Cesar had set up both Smoke and Tenpenny as the real villains in Carl's life, so that he and his gang could later take control of the factory. However, this theory was later proved false. Events in End of the Line, as well as the dialogues in the mission, reflect Smoke's antagonism clearly, thus rubbishing away the claim that Cesar was seeking to wrest control of a "destroyed" crack palace.

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