Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (10 page)

I enjoyed discussing the deeper aspects of our existence with him, just as Barbara enjoyed the down-to-earth attitude of Brian’s wife Karen. I had a lot of respect for Karen, who was an attractive fashion trend setter in our circle and the first person I knew who went out on the town wearing a silk scarf as a blouse.
She tied the scarf around her neck and around her waist and let it hang loosely over her breasts. When she had finished knotting the scarf, she looked sexier than most other girls even though they were wearing designer blouses. When my buddies and I would drop by his downtown high-rise apartment to take Brian out for a drink, Karen would always encourage him to go with us. My own wife would often grumble and bitch when I announced that I was going out with the boys, but Karen was too cool for that approach. “Go,” she told Brian. “Go and have fun with your friends.” More often than not, Brian would choose to stay home with his wife instead of coming out with us, and I often thought that Karen’s approach would work better on me than Barbara’s did.

I had known Brian since the first
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scam. Brian was the one who grabbed the first two bags we shipped north and walked them through customs when his cousin Alexandra could not manage them because they were too heavy. I was right behind him on that trip and I was impressed with his stoic reliability when the chips came down. He looked like he was spacing out, as his eyes widened to the task and he carried the two suitcases straight up to the customs counter. His ice-blue eyes were tripping, but when he started talking to the custom’s agent, his soft demeanor came through for him, along with the
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card, and he was waved through without a baggage check.

Brian Kholder’s teeth were not in very good shape when I first met him, a trait that ran in his entire family, except for his sister Bonnie. One of the first things Brian did when he ran into money was to get all of his rotten teeth capped. When the dentist tried to tell him that choosing a shade of enamel that was too white would look unnatural, Brian ignored his advice and picked the whitest shade available. He ended up with the most beautiful smile I ever saw and I never once heard anyone comment that his teeth looked unnatural.

I came to rely on Brian for many of my needs in Jamaica when the scam that Irving pitched to me started to come together. After New York, I decided never to expose myself again in any future smuggling venture. I was a thinker not a mule. It
was not a matter of fear, it was a matter of status. I was paying for the scam. I was running the scam. They were my contacts on both ends. I was not going to expose myself to arrest when there was no need. Not now, not ever.

Having arranged with Brian to have the four hundred pounds of weed cleaned and pressed, we went to check up on his progress in a small weed farming community north of Montego Bay. It was a pleasant drive in the cool morning sun and I put my little rented Civic through its paces. The roads of Jamaica lend themselves to spirited driving, with twists and turns and narrow switchbacks. It took about two hours to reach our destination, with the slowest part of the journey coming at Brownstown where the paved road turns to red dust. Brian guided me through the many towns and parishes along the way until we ended our journey high in the mountains of Cockpit Country. The Jamaican overseer in a mountainous parish outside of Browns-town was a young but very mature inhabitant of a small village that survived on growing marijuana. His name was Bossa and he pretty much ran the cultivation area like a general. He would give orders in the soft-spoken voice of a girl, and if they were not obeyed instantly, he would chastise the offender with a hard slap on the arm with the flat side of his machete blade.

The scene I came upon reminded me of movies I had seen about tribes in Africa who bowed to their chief. Everyone gave Bossa respect befitting a man of far older years. I could never put my finger on why he garnered so much respect from the other villagers until I came to realize the simple truth. Bossa was a born leader. He worked alongside his men, with twice the effort they put in. When they slowed down, he prodded them. When they asked questions, he knew the answers. Bossa was thick in the arms and chest and had a smile that came as easily to his face as did a scowl, if warranted. He was the same age as Brian, and I noticed he was captivated by the same interesting qualities in Brian that I saw. Bossa and Brian would talk about things as eclectic and diverse as God and the universe and death and reincarnation and a thousand things that had nothing to do with smuggling weed. Brian returned to Jamaica one time without
the hundred thousand dollars that he owed Bossa for a weed front and was forced to admit, “I’m sorry, man, your money went up my arm.” Incredibly Bossa just smiled and said, “ No problem man. We made lots of money together. And we will make money together again.”

Brian had a helper in Brownstown, a quiet young man who hailed from Dollard des Ormeaux in Montreal. The young man’s name was Bob McTavish and he was living with the villagers in one of the concrete block field huts that Bossa owned. Bob was busy building a latrine when I first met him. He told me that there was no running water and no electricity in the rural community, so he was helping them out. He also helped out with the pressing of the weed but his presence in the community had to be hidden from the local police. If the Jamaican police saw a white man in the area, they would assume that he was there on weed business. Once that became established, there would be no end to the bribes required from both the white man and Bossa himself.

When I met with Bossa and spoke to him for the first time, he told me that he wanted his money up front for the four hundred pounds of coli that Brian had commissioned him to deliver.

“No way,” I told him. “You’ll get your money when you deliver the weed to my stash house in Kingston.” That put the responsibility of getting the weed safely to Kingston on Bossa’s shoulders and off me. I told Bossa that I wanted the weed picked by hand, not chopped by machete, so as to get only the top most buds, without all the thick heavy branches and sticks at the bottom of the plants. “And don’t press the weed when it’s wet,” I warned him. “It rots inside the bales when it’s pressed wet.”

I learned a lot about Brian on that trip to Jamaica. When we got off the plane, he had me stop at the first pharmacy he could find in Kingston. He loaded up on Valium, which was available without prescription in Jamaica, and he offered me some of the twenty milligram pills. I thanked him but declined the offer, being content to smoke a fat joint of weed. We were on the road to Brownstown, after Brian dropped several Valium and had settled into his seat to enjoy the ride. We took the main highway out of town that led into the mountains and I took pleasure in
the winding, twisting road that felt like a race course with soft shoulders and deadly cliffs. A short distance into our trip, Brian spied two Jamaican girls walking by the side of the road. One was not bad looking, if you like the country girl type, but the other girl was not so pretty and she was clearly fat.

“Stop the car!” Brian said with such force that I thought it was an emergency.

“Pull over and stop beside that girl.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” I said, as I slowed the car down and pulled to the side of the road.

“Hey,” Brian said, addressing the fat girl with his movie star smile. “Come over here for a minute.”

The girl came closer with a shy grin, while her friend stood by, hoping for her own invitation to come over to the car. There was little traffic on the road and it was about twelve noon with the sun straight overhead when Brian asked the girl a question that needed no reply.

“How would you like to make some money?”

“Sure, why not?” the girl answered.

“I’ll give you ten dollars if I can feel your tits.”

“Sure,” she answered with a big smile.

Brian reached out the window and took his time feeling up her big, heavy breasts before handing the girl her money.

“Okay, let’s go,” he said, as though he had just purchased a pack of cigarettes. Then he added. “Don’t you just love Jamaica?”

After my visit to inspect the weed in Brownstown, I located a cabinetmaker in Kingston and consigned him to make me a large shipping crate. I told him that I was shipping home some personal effects and I gave him dimensions and my choice of wood. No knotholes, I instructed him, and the crate had to be solid with a lid that fit tight. Then I found a rental house in Kingston where the weed was to be stored until the next ship to Canada was ready to depart.

The house was on Old Hope Road, just a few miles from the Kingston waterfront and came with security grills and a yard that was fenced and gated, as were most houses in the all-white area. I told the rental agent that I had my own staff of maids and
gardeners and declined her offer of some. I signed a one-year lease, with two months rent in advance. I did not quibble about the rental cost. I told the agent I was a writer and liked my privacy. She just handed me the house keys and went on her way to tally up her commissions. I located a shipping and customs broker on the Kingston waterfront and booked him to do the pickup and paperwork for the wooden crate which I labeled myself with stencils that I had preordered in Montreal. One stencil read Fragile and came with a wine glass symbol. The other one was the address of the recipient, a doctor whose name I had researched out of a Montreal telephone book.

Then I arranged with Brian to have Bossa deliver the four hundred pounds of pressed weed to the house I had rented. I paid for the weed only after it was delivered to the stash house. I put on gloves to cover my prints and helped pack the pressed and taped bundles into the waiting shipping crate. I threw in limes and mothballs for odor control, after which I ran a bead of wood glue over all of the wood joins and seams. Brian brought along his pal Bob McTavish to help out. I commissioned Bob to babysit the load and I came by to check on him every day. When the time finally came that the ship bound for Montreal arrived in port, I had my shipping broker send a truck to the house to pick up the sealed-up crate. Then I waited for the call from the broker to come down to his office and pay the shipping costs, once the crate had been weighed. This was the most dangerous part of the job because if there was a problem, it would probably show up after the crate was weighed.

The first shipment of weed was shipped off like clockwork and I flew home to Montreal to report my success to Irving. He was ecstatic at the news. The wait for the weed’s arrival in Montreal was filled with jokes about our ship coming in. When the load finally arrived several weeks later, Irving was contacted by his dock connections. In order not to blow the scam, they needed us to send them a replacement crate with personal effects weighing what was reported on the shipping manifests for the crate of weed. The boys were going to grab the weed crate from Jamaica and replace it with a clean crate. I used my stereo and
some small furniture items to comply with the request and had the replacement crate delivered to the boys downtown. We never referred to them by name. It was always “the boys downtown.” Eventually the crate was delivered to us. I was informed by Irving at the last minute that we needed a stash house, and I quickly thought of a couple that Barbara and I used to get stoned with when we first started smoking hash. Alex Jones and his wife Suzette were people that we knew from my working days in the copier and printing machine business. Alex was a service technician who drove a Volvo and had about as much excitement in his life as a kindergarten teacher. He was a frugal Scotsman, and when I offered to pay him for looking after some weed, he asked how much money, not how much weed. He was tickled pink over the money he received, but he blanched pale when he first saw how much weed there was. The weed arrived in a panel van at Alex’s house and we parked the panel truck in Alex’s garage. Irving and I began unloading and as soon as Alex saw how much weed there was, he immediately protested. But his greed overcame his fear when Irving pacified him with an additional five hundred dollars.

“Hung for a sheep or hung for a lamb. What’s the difference?” Irving told Alex while sweetening the pot with more money. Irving’s ability to read people and cut right to the chase was spot on, because Alex pocketed the extra few hundred Irving gave him and never complained again. In fact, Alex was subsequently promoted to replacement shipping crate maker, as well as stash house provider, until the weed came in by container loads that were too large to fit in his attic.

After the weed was safely put away that first time, Irving asked me if I knew anyone who could sell it. I didn’t want to handle any pot in Montreal while I was taking care of the expediting in Jamaica, so I told Irving about Brian Kholder and recommended him as our local distributor in Montreal. When it became obvious that Brian alone could not handle the volume of weed that was coming in, I subsequently arranged a meeting between Irving and Jean Paul LaPierre. I hated the thought of giving the little Frenchman an opportunity to make money off
us, but he was, without a doubt, the most reliable weed wholesaler in town. Not only was he able to sell the weed in bulk, he also took care of any bad debtors.

Irv and J.P. met in a restaurant in downtown Montreal. The usually reclusive Jean Paul brightened immediately when Irving passed him a scrap of paper with three names on it as references. One of the names on the list was Jean Paul’s friend and an ex-partner of his future brother-in-law named Roger Ouimet. Roger was a dangerous man who had done bank robberies with Irving and hits with the infamous Hells Angels’ killer, Jacques “Apache” Francois. Roger Ouimet and Irving had also done scores together including debt collections, robberies and extortions. Irving never confided in me about any hits he might have done with Roger Ouimet, which I attributed to the fact that there is no statute of limitations on murder in Canada.

Small world, you might say of Irving’s connections to Jean Paul, but like I said before, in the underworld, all roads seem to lead to the same places and the same people. My partner Irving and our new partner Jean Paul made a deal that day. Jean Paul would take all the weed Irving could give him and he would also take care of any collections and bad debts.