Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (2 page)

Sunny was a solidly built man whose facial features looked carved out of dark stone. His demeanor was well suited for work as a caretaker and in the language of modern day psychology, he had more anima than animus in his character. Sunny was far from an ambitious soul. He had only one job to do for us, which was to roll joints, and whenever we asked him to do it, he would inevitably complain.

“You finish all dem spliff already, mon?”

Righteous was far more willing to work without complaining, and as time went on, I found myself relying more and more on Randall “Righteous” Solomon for many of my needs in Jamaica.

When I first met Righteous he was a “Moonie,” which was a religious cult that was spreading throughout the western world at the time. His bright eyes, short-cropped hair, and a willing attitude gave me confidence in him and he soon became my right-hand man. I saw a lot of Righteous and Sunny that first year in Jamaica as our group strung the
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scam out as long as we could. We had several back-to-back successes before the smuggling scam finally blew apart in Toronto. That was when four suitcases full of weed slid down the baggage ramp to the circular pickup ring in the luggage collection area and one of the bags broke open, revealing sticks of weed poking out. We left the bags on the turnstile, pulled the luggage tags from the four suitcases, and went home broke. I was almost glad the trip folded just then because “Bish the Fish” Bishop and Marvin “Manny” Maniezzo had been playing poker with me on the way down to Jamaica, with the payouts due only after and if the
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scam paid off. I was so deep in debt after the two card sharks fleeced me, that just about all of my end would have gone to them anyway.

Other scams came and went, as fate sent one smuggling opportunity after another my way. Through Righteous and his
connections, I met the people I needed to expedite marijuana out of Jamaica in larger and larger shipments. Righteous introduced me to customs agents, aircraft maintenance personnel, and shipping brokers. He had so many contacts that it seemed to me that the whole of Jamaica was like one large extended family tied together by blood relations, tribal ties and financial gain. Even the police were available for a price, although my bias against authority never allowed me to use any police help. Feeding a cop is like feeding a bear, everything is great until the food runs out.

The smuggling scams I was involved in grew to a level where I found myself flying in and out of the island on a regular basis. The smartly uniformed immigration and customs officers at Montego Bay airport had to know that I was into some kind of action. When asked the purpose of my trip, I always said pleasure. If I were a customs agent, I might wonder why someone would take several dozen pleasure trips to my country each year. But Jamaican Immigration and Customs never did. I remember flying into Jamaica on one occasion without my wallet and
ID
. Any other country would have turned me around and sent me right back home, but not Jamaica. The immigration officer simply waved me through to customs after I explained to him that I had lost my wallet. He recognized me, of course, which made his decision easier. But can you imagine trying to enter any other sovereign nation without
ID
when you are not even a citizen?

On that same trip the recently departed owner of Jamaica Car Rental rented me a car without a driver’s licence or
ID
. Thank you kindly, Mrs. Chin, and rest in peace.

“Jamaica no problem” was the motto of the island and there was so much corruption that anything and anyone seemed available for a fee. Whenever I arrived on the island, my first order of business, after clearing Jamaican Customs and Immigration, was to pick up some ganga. Jamaicans call their weed ganga using the Indian word. They also call it herb, coli, lamb’s bread, sensi and dagga. The stuff is everywhere. It’s thrust into your face at the airport gas station. Don’t ever buy weed at the airport. It’s crap. Marijuana is also sold along the highways from thatched huts
with fruit and sea shells hanging from their bamboo rafters. The huts are there due to squatter’s rights alongside the road, and they operate without permits or licences. Marijuana can be bought in bars and restaurants. Taxi drivers sell it. Hotel owners and waiters sell it. Everyone sells it. But rather than buy the weed in town, I would drive up into the hills of Orange Bay just outside of Negril to get the good stuff. Not the lamb’s bread sold for a small fortune in Montego Bay. Not the seeded coli from Saint Ann’s that was being shipped north to Canada and the States by the ton. I’m talking about pure Jamaican sensimilla. Unseeded African ganga, lovingly nursed to perfection in a clearing behind some Rasta’s hut. Watered by hand. Fed rat bat shit as fertilizer. Coaxed and pruned until the buds were thick with sticky crystals and smelled of cinnamon.

“You should leave your lungs to science,” my buddy Bishop used to tease me, as I rolled joint after joint of the good stuff.

I was living the good life. Smoking the best herb. Eating in fine restaurants and hotels. Sleeping in king size beds in air-conditioned villas. Frolicking in swimming pools and being cared for by maids, butlers, and gardeners. Our wives and girlfriends would strut around the Jamaican beaches in their tiny bikinis looking like centrefolds, as so many Montreal girls do. My buddies and I mostly preferred to snorkel in the ocean rather than lie about in hammocks like the girls, who were trying to score a nice tan to wear home.

The first time we all sat down to dinner at our rented villa in Jamaica, the event was memorable for its excesses. There were two maids who came with the villa, one for cooking and one for serving. Our next door neighbour, Sunny, was dressed in his Sunday best and helping the two coffee-complexioned maids serve us that warm summer evening. It was a magical night, with the ocean ebbing and flowing to a rhythmic slap against the sea-wall outside the formal dining room. The pool lights were on, adding an eerie glow to a darkened horizon that sparkled with stars. Crickets and tree frogs serenaded us, and the warm Jamaican weather stood in sharp contrast to the bitter cold of the Montreal winter we had escaped. We were all in our early twenties and we
snickered amongst ourselves about being served by a staff who were old enough to be our parents. I was confused at first when the maid brought a small silver bell to the table and placed it beside me. When I finally figured out its purpose, we all had great fun ringing the bell for water or tea or whatever we fancied. The table was laid out with white linen and china dishes, as course after course of Jamaican cuisine was ferried to us from the kitchen. The pace was slow and deliberate. Pepper pot soup with ackies and salt fish for a starter. The spicy starters were followed by a fresh tossed salad and then an entrée of grilled Caribbean lobster. The lobster was accompanied by several vegetable dishes of chocho, cauliflower, corn and fresh beans. All of the courses were spaced to allow joints to be smoked in between servings. The sumptuous meal was topped off by dessert, a homemade spice cake, and there were Tia Maria and Grande Marnier liquors to end the meal.

In the early days of my Jamaican experience, I was overwhelmed by this treatment, but I soon came to expect it as a way of life. I rented whatever car was available at the airport when I first flew into town, but as my trips to Jamaica became more frequent and lengthy, I took a long-term lease on an air conditioned Civic from Hertz Rent-a-Car. Then the first thing I did was to have the windows professionally tinted. The tint was so dark that you could not see inside the car even when it was parked and I got a kick out of watching people on the street peering in at me without knowing I was there.

One time I was driving the Civic to Negril when I hit a roadblock manned by machine-gun-toting cops and khaki-dressed soldiers who were stopping all drivers. The cops were looking for guns or ganga or whatever else they could find. Fridays were the worst for roadblocks because the cops would invariably be looking for entertainment money for the weekend. Any little thing they could find would lead to the inevitable bribe that left all parties happy and warranted few arrests. But it was annoying to have to throw away my spliff as I came across the roadblock.

I was asked by the first bribe-hungry cop how I could be
driving a rented car with such dark tinted windows.

“
VIP
,” I remember answering with a grin, as I slipped him an American twenty to prevent a search of my car that could lead to my weed stash. It was not likely he would find my stash, which was hidden in the door panels, but I learned quickly that you always make your bribe to the first cop on the scene. Anytime you wait for the others to come over, it costs you a lot more. If you wait until the judge is involved, it is usually too late to work a deal.

Despite roadblocks and other small nuisances, life was grand in those days. I discovered Chateau Lafite-Rothschild wine, which even today is the standard to which I hold all other wines. I regularly ate curried lobster at the exclusive Richmond Hill Inn, which is perched on a mountain top with a view of the city of Montego Bay that is unparalleled. I remember driving home one night after an extravagant meal there, throwing Jamaican twenty dollar bills in a stream out the window of my rented car. It was my drunken tribute to the little man, the poor black Jamaican who saw little or none of the drug money that poured into the island. It was Jamaican money anyway, not real money. When my real money in Canadian and U.S. funds built up to an impossible level in my Jamaican safety deposit box, I would fly it to the Cayman Islands where I had a different safety box that held only thousand dollar bills.

Jamaica was like my home away from home, but let’s face it, the island was a typically corrupt Third World country. That corruption is fine when you’re trying to slip a load of contraband in or out of the country, but it can turn against you when you live there. Every time I went to my safety deposit box I had this sickening vision of finding it empty. It never happened, but the fantasy proved so powerful that I was always counting and recounting my money in the box.

On the other hand, Grand Cayman Island had a world-class reputation for legitimate banking. There are over
300
banks on an island the size of the city of Ottawa. On my first trip there I spotted the differences between Jamaica and the Caymans in a second. The Cayman customs officers reminded me of American
customs officers: cold, alert, all seeing and all knowing. I took note of how they concentrated on those incoming passengers who fit a profile, like American hippies or Caribbean Rastafarians. Black passengers wearing jeans and gold chains received careful screening while white businessmen like me, dressed in slacks and a sports jacket, received only a cursory inspection. I was not really worried as I passed under the watchful eyes of these customs officers because apart from a personal stash of hash in my crotch, the only commodity I was bringing into the Caymans was money. And there is no law against bringing cash into the Caymans. The islands were built on foreign money. Drug profits money. Political payoff money. Embezzled money. Bribe money. Stolen money. Grand Cayman is an example of a Caribbean island living the American dream and it is all because of their banking rules, which allow the free flow of money in and out of the country. There is so much foreign capital flowing into the island that the smallest deposit required to open my first offshore bank account was fifty thousand dollars. It’s probably higher than that today. The cleanliness of Grand Cayman’s cobblestone streets and sidewalks were in sharp contrast to the goats and cows and dogs and pigs that wander freely along the litter-strewn streets of Jamaica.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved Jamaica and I still do. I would never consider trading Jamaica’s rural and hedonistic lifestyle for the sterile security of the Grand Caymans. Grand Cayman offers civilized efficiency, but Jamaica offers one of the last bastions of personal freedom in the world.

You can have it all in Jamaica. Pot. Hash. Coke. Mushrooms. Honey oil. Girls. Even young girls. Drinking. Drinking and driving. Swimming. Sun worship. Crack. Heroin, if you know where to look. About the only taboo on the island is homosexuality, which does not stop the practice but merely drives it back into the closet where, I must confess, I prefer it. Other than a Christian loathing of homosexuals, there is very little prejudice in Jamaica. Blacks can date whites. Asians can date South Americans. Old can date young. All without the critical stares that might follow elsewhere in the world. This liberal attitude
towards interracial dating in Jamaica has led to the creation of some of the most beautiful and exotic women on this planet.

So how did I find myself in Jamaica working on some of the largest and most successful smuggling operations in Canada, you might ask. I can tell you that I did not become involved because of money. Barbara and I were in our early twenties when her aunt died and we came into a fifty thousand dollar inheritance. That was a substantial amount of money for two newlyweds. We had just returned to Canada from a year-long holiday touring North America and Mexico when the windfall hit. While Barbara and I were vacationing on our trip, my friend and ex co-worker Ryan McCann was busy scheming and scamming back in our home-town of Montreal.

I knew Ryan from a job where we worked together prior to Barbara and me leaving for Mexico. In fact it was Ryan who helped me get fired from my job and Ryan who helped me find the Volkswagen van we went touring in.

Once our trip was over and Barbara and I ended up back in Montreal, it was not long before I hooked up again with my old pal Ryan. The reunion was a festive one and we partied it up for a while on Barbara’s inheritance money. Within a few weeks of our reunion, Ryan invited me to invest in a scam to run suitcases of weed from Jamaica to Montreal. Since I had no weed on hand and no immediate prospects for work, it seemed appropriate to jam down to Jamaica for a visit, especially since I could get money and smoke for doing so. There would be no risk to me, Ryan assured us. As the principal investor covering most of the expenses, I was not going to carry any bags through customs. Ryan had runners to do that.