Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (18 page)

“Hello,” he said in a Cockney accent. “My name is Chip Jenkins.”

I looked at his outstretched hand like it was contaminated and made no effort to respond to it.

“Chip is an old friend of mine,” said Simon, breaking the ice to introduce the stranger. “He helped me charter the plane out of London and I brought him along to meet the New York crew and help us out.”

I was visibly angry about having a new face sprung on me without warning. This entire deal was spinning out of control, I groused to myself, until some hours later when I realized a benefit.
Simon and Chip could now take care of the tasks that Shaun and I had been obligated to look after, like delivering and loading the hash onto the plane. Shaun and I would act as countersurveillance to keep an eye on things. Seeing as he was already here, the Englishman named Chip could help Simon do some of the dangerous work.

After the introductions, Shaun left our meeting to return to his room for a nap and Chip went to his room to unpack, while Simon and I stayed in the coffee bar to talk shop. As soon as the others left the table, I read Simon the riot act. I told him I was going to hold him personally responsible for anything that went wrong with this scam due to his bullshit and incompetence. He tried to back out of flying back with the load, but I made it clear to him that he had damn well better. As far as I was concerned, he had lied about the
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and when I got home I was certainly going to inform Irving. Simon left the table duly rebuked and I returned to what was left of my cold breakfast. Things were not exactly going as planned but they were moving forward, I was thinking, as I sipped my third cup of coffee. I decided to stop by my room to calm myself with a toke of hash and meditate on everything. I signed the breakfast bill and made my way to my room on the seventh floor. The elevator chanced to stop on the third floor and as the doors opened to let out another passenger, I happened to see Simon’s English friend, Chip, going into a hotel room that was not his own. I continued on up to the seventh floor where I met with Shaun in his room and told him what I had seen.

Who was this Limey that Simon had brought into our midst, I wondered out loud.
CIA
?
BNDD
?
RCMP
? Interpol? The best course of action was to go down to the room on the third floor and knock on the door to find out. When Shaun and I did so, the door was opened by Chip who had a look of astonishment and guilt on his face.

“Who the hell is this?” I demanded as I pushed into the room past Chip to confront a medium-sized white male about thirty-five years of age. The man had dark wavy hair and a mustache and goatee and he was a complete stranger.

“He’s a friend of mine,” said Chip.

“What the fuck’s he doing here?”

“When Simon asked me to help him with a dope deal in Lebanon I wasn’t going to come alone. I brought along my friend Bob Chambers here as backup. He’s my mate.”

I interviewed Simon’s friend Bob for a while before deciding he was on the up-and-up. His history appeared to be that of a petty London thief who had a criminal record for stealing some frozen rabbits from a butcher. Since he was there to help anyways, we gave Bob the job of helping to load the plane with Simon and Chip, with payment for their efforts promised later. Could things get any worse, I wondered, as I left the two Englishmen in the room and departed with Shaun.

That night I had a fitful sleep and the next morning I was grumpy as a bear. All morning and all afternoon were spent waiting for the arrival of our chartered cargo plane, which was supposed to arrive in Beirut around
4
p.m. At
3
:
30
p.m. Shaun and I were having a drink at the bar when several very rough-looking individuals entered the hotel.

“Look,” I said to Shaun, making a joke. “There’s our flight crew.” The three men walked to the check-in counter looking like carbon copies of soldiers from the
Dirty Dozen
. The first man in line was tall, maybe six foot two or three, with the lanky athletic build of a proball player. He was wearing aviator-style sunglasses and a khaki shirt with loose-fitting military-style trousers. He was unshaven with a three-day growth of beard and carried himself with the easy lope of an athlete, as he strolled into the hotel and set his flight bag in front of the check-in counter. Behind him stood a bald-headed white man with a Fu Manchu mustache. He was wearing a cut-off T-shirt and stood at least six foot four and weighed an easy two hundred and eighty pounds of solid muscle. The bald man had an appearance that fell somewhere between Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun and he made tough-looking Shaun Palmer look like one of the seven dwarfs. There was one other man standing behind the first two men in line and as I recall, he looked capable of handling himself in a fight. The three men standing together made a formidable
appearance. Shaun saw it, too, as he leaned over to inform me in a whispered aside, “If that’s the flight crew, there’s no fucking way I’m flying back with the hash.”

“I don’t blame you,” I answered, just as Chip and Simon appeared in the lobby and walked over to join the three men at the check-in counter.

Simon shook hands with the tall one who appeared to be the pilot, while Shaun and I stared at each other in disbelief. It really was our flight crew!

At this point, we had over a hundred and fifty grand invested in the scam and there were a host of problems. There was no Lebanese military captain to deliver the hash to the plane. There was no
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with enough room inside to safely hide a half ton of hash. We no longer had a pilot of our own to fly the load home to Canada. Instead, we had a crew of mercenaries out of New York who we were trusting to fly our shit home. The question I was faced with, after all that had transpired, was: should I scrub the mission, or send the load with the chartered flight crew and cross my fingers? The hash was already purchased and I doubted that we could trust Shaun’s Lebanese friends to hold on to it safely until we came back to Lebanon a few months later with another exporting scam. Whatever decision I made, I would be responsible for the outcome. I kept on trying to make this scam work, but each time I made a step forward, fate was pushing me two steps back. I thought of Irving and how disappointed he would be if I just junked the scam and returned home. This was entirely his idea, I told myself, as I thought about tossing aside a multimillion-dollar score. But the money invested in the scam belonged to me, John Miller and Irving. I had a responsibility to try to see the project through to completion.

That night, I drove with Shaun to the airport in a car I had rented and we scouted out the Lockheed Lodestar from New York. We parked by the hangar where the aircraft was stationed and walked inside the structure to check it out. Our chartered plane was sitting bathed in fluorescent light between two other flying relics from the past. I walked around the hangar and checked out the three aircraft. The Lodestar looked like an old
piece of unpainted junk, as did the two other nondescript aircraft in the hangar. After walking around the plane a couple of times, I passed through the “man door” on the opposite side of the hangar and walked out onto the open airfield. A lone runway outside the hangar was shared by both civilian and military aircraft. Military helicopters and planes sat unprotected on the runway waiting for the call to arms, but I saw no one guarding them. If I had been an enemy spy I could have blown up half of the Lebanese air force with a few well-placed hand grenades. It was amazing that I had such unfettered access to a military airport during a war.

I returned to the Intercontinental Hotel with Shaun and informed everyone involved that we were going ahead with the plan. When we left the hotel around
10
p.m. the next evening to pick up the hash and transport it to the airport, Shaun and I were in one car and Simon, Chip and Bob were in their own rental vehicle. As it turned out, the Bedouins were able to transport the hash to the airport for us without any problems and we traveled with them in a three-car caravan to the hangar. Shaun and I waited outside the airport, keeping watch for trouble, as the other vehicles continued on inside the hangar to unload the hash. A few minutes later, the Bedouins in the pickup truck drove out of the hangar and waved to us as they left for the return trip to Beirut.

Several hours later, Shaun and I were still in place outside the airport, waiting for Simon and the two Englishmen to complete their task and drive out of the hangar. Shaun and I had both taken the precaution of bringing our passports and money, in case we needed them, and it was beginning to look like maybe we would. I was talking to Shaun about the nearest country we could drive to if our plan went bust and the boys in the hangar were arrested. We checked a map in the rented car’s glove box. Syria was closest at eighty or so miles. If the three men did not come out of the hangar soon, I would fear the worst and we would start driving towards Syria.

In due course, our work crew did come out of the hangar and phase one of our mission was complete. We all met back at
the hotel to make final arrangements before the shipment of hash left the next morning for Montreal. Our two crates had been placed on board the aircraft, but it took a long time to arrange as the full crates were too heavy to lift into the Lockheed by hand. In order to get the hash on the plane, Simon and his Limey friends had to empty the hash from the crates, carry it on board brick by brick and then repack the empty crates once they had both been lifted into the aircraft.

When we finally all returned to the hotel I was glad my work was over and that I was flying home to Montreal with Shaun the next day. Simon Steinberg did not know it yet, but his English friends were returning to England, while Simon was riding back with the crate to make certain no one interfered with it, just like he said he would. That responsibility was his punishment for fucking up the whole scam, and I was making sure that he did not back out, even if it meant Simon would be flying back to Montreal alone on the Lockheed. Much to Simon’s relief, Chip Jenkins suddenly changed his mind about returning to England with his friend Bob and decided to hop a free flight to Montreal on the Lockheed Lodestar. I thought that was pretty ballsy of him, considering the nine hundred and fifty pounds of hash on board, but Simon was pretty happy about Chip’s change in itinerary. As I saw it, our job was complete, and all that remained was for Shaun and me to fly home to meet the plane with the rest of our crew when the Lodestar arrived in Montreal. All we had to do then was take our cargo on a ten-minute drive to a safe house near Dorval Airport and prepare the hash for distribution. The final detail in our preparation would be the rental of additional safety deposit boxes to store all of the money that would soon be coming our way.

I was tired after flying fourteen hours straight, but there was little time for sleep when I arrived home in Montreal. The Lockheed Lodestar carrying our hash was following right behind me, flying at half the speed of a commercial carrier and taking the longer polar route around the top of Canada. It was late Wednesday when I finally got into Montreal and had a quick meeting with Irving. I told him of the problems I had faced in Beirut, expecting some accolades for managing to get the load off in spite of the difficulties. At the same time as I gave Irving the news of our hash scam, I included my disgust at Simon’s lies and Shaun’s bullshit stories. There was no fucking Lebanese captain, I told Irving, and no
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, either. I expected some praise for managing to keep the whole scam together, but when I complained to Irving, he complained back to me that I should have scrubbed the mission. I reminded him that we were already over one hundred and fifty grand in the hole by the time I found out that Simon was full of shit. I told him that if he wanted to scrub the mission, we could do it now and the loss would be no greater than if I’d scrubbed it earlier. But we both had too much greed to walk away from a potential two million dollar score. Within twenty-four hours, the hash would be in Montreal, and
so, with no real choice in the matter, we prepared for its arrival.

The night before the Lockheed was to arrive, I stashed my passport in the air conditioning ducts that ran through the basement of my house and removed any signs of my trip to London and the Middle East. After my air ticket receipts were destroyed and I warned my wife of the potential for police visits, I spent a fitful night trying to sleep.

The next morning I discussed the coming day’s events with Big John Miller and Irving over a breakfast of eggs and bacon at Ruby Foo’s Restaurant. The plane with our hash would be arriving at Dorval Airport around noon. We had already arranged for executive rooms to be booked for the flight crew at a nearby Holiday Inn. When the phone call came in from Simon Steinberg that all was well, we would keep the flight crew occupied in their hotel room with three hookers while we went to the hangar and picked up our hash. Simon Steinberg and Myron Wiseman would unload the plane and put the hash into the trunk of Myron’s Land Rover. John Miller, Shaun and I would keep watch from a distance in my car. The Lodestar plane would be in the domestic section of Dorval Airport. It would have already cleared customs in Gander, Newfoundland, so there was no concern about customs inspectors. There were plenty of parking spots for cars around the hangar where the plane was to be kept once it landed. Hundreds of cars were normally parked in that area of the parking lot, as it accommodated the needs of a thousand or more airport employees. After Myron’s Land Rover was loaded with hash, he was to drive to a predetermined stash house within minutes of the airport and I would follow him in my car to provide escort support and protection from rip-offs.

The Lodestar arrived late in the afternoon on Thursday. The good news was that all went well in Gander and we were pleased to hear that the plane had successfully cleared customs without a hitch. The bad news was that the hangar we reserved was unavailable that night, due to a late-night snowfall that was blocking the hangar entrance. We were forced to park the plane on the tarmac just outside the hangar. I wanted to grab the load
the same night the plane landed, but Simon Steinberg had held a meeting with Irving that afternoon and was adamant that he was too tired to make the pickup that same evening. He had kept his word and sat on the crate all the way home and he said he needed sleep in the worst way.