Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (20 page)

However, Irving had no such qualms about killing anyone else, and for a while it looked like Shaun was going to be next on the hit list. Using his drug profits, Irving had purchased a small house with a large mortgage in his wife’s name. Irving had virtually nothing in his own name for two reasons. The first was that he wanted to remain unseizable, so that whatever he did, no one could come back on him financially. The second reason had to do with his being a career criminal on parole. He had to show that he was a normal working guy, or his parole would be revoked in a second. If it could be shown that he owned more assets than he could prove he’d earned, that would be enough reason to send him back to jail.

Instead of moving his ex-wife into the house as he had planned, Irving rented it to Shaun who, with his wife and two young children, needed a place to live. Because Shaun was moving our weed, he got a break on the rent with just one provision: that he should never be late with the rent. It did not matter that Shaun was handing over thousands of dollars a day for our weed that he was selling, Irving went absolutely berserk when Shaun started to stiff him on his rent. Perhaps it was because Irving had been such a troublesome renter himself that he had this unreasonable concern about Shaun stiffing him. It was as if he knew from the start that Shaun would fuck him but he rented the house to him anyway. Irv was so worked up after six months of expecting it, that when it happened he blew his top. Every day for months I heard Irving tell me and Big John Miller how he was going to go over to Shaun’s house and, if the rent wasn’t brought up to date, he was going to kill him. At first we thought he was letting off steam, but when he purchased a handgun and silencer to do the job, John Miller and I were convinced that he was serious. Of course neither of us could dissuade him from his plans, and day after day I expected to hear the bad news. It bothered me immensely to have Shaun come by and rap with us like nothing
was wrong, knowing that any day now he could wind up dead. John Miller and I finally pulled him aside and warned him about fucking with Irving’s rent money, and Shaun eventually got the message and paid up in full.

With all the expenses caused by the blown hash scam, Irving and John Miller and I needed more income quickly. The boys on the docks agreed to pull off another load for us and I returned to Jamaica a few months later when the heat from the hash bust died down. Before that could happen, I came to realize that I was no longer invisible to the Man.

It was a month or so after my arrest and it was Christmas Eve. It was snowing lightly as Barbara and I drove in my Corvette along the service road beside the Trans-Canada Highway which led to my parent’s home. The night was still and silent, with snowflakes tumbling from a cloudy sky. I was looking forward to a few hours of a family get-together with my parents when I saw a red light in my rearview mirror. It was a
QPP
cop car and he was pulling me over. I was packing nothing more than a small piece of hash, which I slipped to my wife to conceal on her person because they had no probable cause to search her. There was no need to be quick about it, because instead of getting out of his car and coming to my driver’s window, the police officer began hailing me through his vehicle’s bullhorn.

“This is the police. Do not get out of the car. Drive slowly straight ahead and turn right at the next street.”

I followed the instructions from the bullhorn and we tossed the hash a short distance later. I continued driving until I was ordered by bullhorn to pull into a large garage bay door with
QPP
written on the adjacent wall. It was a substation office of the branch of police that took care of the province’s highways. After I drove into the garage, my wife and I were ordered out of the car. We were both going to be given a pat-down search, although at that time, there were no female cops on duty and the male officers could only search my wife’s purse. They started working on my car, taking off the door panels and removing the spare tire.

“Do you think I’m out delivering drugs on Christmas Eve?” I protested.

The
QPP
officers took no mind of my sarcasm and looked everywhere in the car until they finally opened all of our carefully wrapped Christmas presents. The cops were waiting for a female officer to come to the station to search Barbara, but after a couple of hours of fruitless waiting, they finally let us go. The police mechanics reassembled and replaced my car parts before returning our Christmas presents to us in tattered wrappings. I didn’t care much for the inconvenience, but from that point on, I realized that fame came with the territory.

The next time I went to Jamaica I decided to travel on false
ID
. At that time, Jamaica and Canada were both crown colonies and travel between the two required only a driver’s licence. Myron Wiseman had provided Irving with a brand new credit card that was stolen from the mail. The credit card was never to be used, Irving told me, and he gave it to me as the focal point of my
ID
kit. Myron then provided a blank driver’s licence and birth certificate that I filled out with a typewriter, using my photo and the credit card’s name of Murray MacDonald. I added a library card and a few other easily obtainable club cards to the package and my fake
ID
kit was complete.

I booked my air tickets in my alias name of Murray MacDonald and headed down to Jamaica. I did not care who followed me around in Montreal, but I did not want to be followed to Jamaica. I would travel to my destination and do my work. On the way back, I did not need to use my fake
ID
and I would fly home in my own name. Once I had done my end in Jamaica, I never went near the weed in Montreal and the authorities could watch me all they wanted.

On one occasion, I came through Canadian Immigration in Toronto while traveling with a long-legged blond who I had met on the plane. I was traveling as Murray MacDonald, and not wanting the blond to see my real name, I passed through Toronto on my fake
ID
. The immigration officer checked my
ID
and asked me some questions as my blond showgirl companion looked on.

“Where is your passport?” he asked me.

“You don’t need a passport to go to Jamaica,” I answered, as
I presented my fake driver’s licence and birth certificate.

The immigration agent barely glanced at the
ID
before directing me to a small room filled mainly with blacks from the Caribbean and Indians from South Asia. A sign over the glassed-in room read “Immigration Security.” After the immigration booths, the Immigration Security room was the next level of interrogation before entering Canada.

“Nice meeting you,” I told the blond.

I stood still for a few moments contemplating my next move as I looked around the crowded immigration room. I made no attempt to find a line to stand in. Instead, I quickly collared a white Canadian immigration officer who was pushing his way through the crowd. He saw from my appearance that I looked out of place and when I hailed him, he immediately stopped.

“Excuse me, can you tell me why I was sent here?”

“This is Immigration.”

“Do I look like an immigrant?” I raised my eyebrows as I showed him my false
ID
in the name of Murray MacDonald.

“Your buddy out there asked me for a passport and I told him you don’t need one to fly to Jamaica.” I pointed out through the glass doors at the officer who had sent me to Immigration. “I don’t think he liked my answer.”

The harried and overworked immigration officer scanned my
ID
. “Where do you live, Mr. MacDonald?”

I gave him the address that I had memorized from my fake
ID
and threw in a little Quebecois-accented French to complete the picture for him.

“Go on through,” the officer said after handing me back my
ID
.

That was the last time I ever traveled back to Canada on fake
ID
.

The loads I sent up from Jamaica came through like clockwork, as usual, and money began to pour back into our coffers. Even when bad weather sent one of our containers to Halifax instead of Montreal, the boys on the dock came through for us.

It was about this time that Irving, John Miller and I purchased new houses. Irving purchased a house near the water and then sold it to me before he even took possession of it. He had
found another house he liked even better that was right on the water. His new house was made of stone and brick and came with wrought iron security grills. I wondered how Irving could live in a house covered with iron bars after all his years in jail. The house sale that I completed in his place was for a long, two-level bungalow that was fronted with Adirondack stone and featured two fireplaces, central air, an above-ground pool and four bathrooms. It was more house than Barbara and I needed at the time but it was a way of sucking some money out of the partnership holding fund. The house that John Miller purchased was a modest split level in the nearby community of Kirkland in the West Island, while Irving’s house and my house were a block apart from each other in Beaconsfield

Even though I did nothing to expose myself to the police in Montreal, I was always on the lookout when I moved around my hometown. My eyes never left the rearview mirror as I checked sidestreets for parallel covers. I checked out suspicious licence plates through a crooked cop Irving knew. One time my neighbour came by my house to talk to me. She told me of a car that was parking in front of my house late at night, with two people sitting in it. Irving ran the plate through his cop friend, Luc Lavoie, and traced the car to an apartment in Montreal. The plate belonged to a Volkswagen Beetle. Irving and I drove to the apartment listed in the Department of Motor Vehicles records as the address of the Beetle and located the car parked underground. Irving waited outside while I went inside to check out the car. The Volkswagen was locked. I pried open the vent window and opened the passenger door and then I went through a briefcase in the back seat. It belonged to a schoolteacher. A woman schoolteacher. A teacher and a Volkswagen Beetle. Not exactly a dangerous combination. We figured the teacher was probably having a make-out session with her boyfriend at the end of my dark dead-end street. Case closed.

I never talked shop on the phone. If I needed to attend an important meeting in secret, I would have a buddy rent me a car and park it downtown in the underground parking at Place Ville Marie. I would have another buddy drive me to nearby Saint
Catherine’s Street, where I would jump from his car and run the wrong way down a one-way side street so that no car could follow me. I would stop and turn to see if anyone was running after me on foot, then duck into the Hudson’s Bay department store and run to the elevators that led to the underground floors. At the lowest level, I would jog through a tunnel connecting the Bay with the Place Ville Marie parking arcade that was as large as a small city. Once in the parking arcade, I would slip into the car that had been parked there for me. Then I would slip on a hat for a disguise and calmly drive away to my meeting.

While others watched soap operas and movies, I was hooked on the show trials playing on
TV
about the Quebec government looking into organized crime. It was interesting to see the tactics used by both sides of the law, and the show was very informative to a person like me. If I happened to suspect a tail was on me when I was driving, I would stop for gas and go into the washroom to stash any personal drugs or other contraband I might have on me. A plastic bag placed in the toilet tank was a good place to hide stuff when there was nowhere else. I would come back for the goods later when the tail was gone.

In those days, I felt above the law and without any connection to the regular world. When I was stopped in my Mercedes for speeding and the cop started to explain why he was writing me a ticket, I rudely pushed the power window button to close him out.

Meanwhile people were coming in and out of our place of business with offers of scams and business ventures on a daily basis. Old man Laviolette, who sublet the office space to us, still had a paint and body shop on the fifth floor of the garage. He did all of our body work and painting. At one time, the old man had operated the entire garage when his business was flourishing, but now he was content to work for us and take in the odd private body work job. Laviolette had a prior relationship with Irving, although I never found out what it was. One thing I knew was that Irving trusted him, so the old man must have been a scammer at one point in his life.

Freddie Peters would come by on a regular basis, selling articles he had boosted from high-end department stores. Irving
told me once that Freddie was such a good shoplifter that you could put several objects on a table and Freddie could steal them right in front of you, without you seeing him do it. Freddie brought in Inuit soapstone carvings and ivory figurines and Royal Doulton china. Irving had a large collection of Royal Doulton figurines, which I found peculiar for a man with no social graces whatsoever. Irving lived in his bathrobe until
10
a.m. and after
4
in the afternoon, and he ate most of his meals standing up at the kitchen counter.

When Irving came across some hot diamonds, he offered an unmounted five carat clear stone to my pal, Bishop, at only five thousand dollars. I could not believe that my buddy passed on the deal, but Bishop told me later that he did not want to start his marriage off with a hot wedding ring. If he’d had a crystal ball and could have looked twenty years into his future, he might have given his now ex-wife that hot diamond.

One time Irving bought some meat that “had fallen off a truck” and he gave me a good deal on some of it. I put it in my freezer and when I finally tried it out, the prime filet mignon steaks tasted like cardboard and had the texture of leather. I found out later that Irving bought the “hot” steaks from Marvin Abrams who became famous for selling rendered meat to the patrons of Montreal’s Expo.