Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (27 page)

Within a couple of weeks of moving in with Louise Miller, Barbara and I were able to move into Barbara’s mother’s apartment after her mother left for Europe on a month-long vacation. Once we were settled into our own space, I took stock of my situation. I had lost my job when I reported the home invasion to my boss and he freaked out thinking I was back into crime. That did not really matter under the circumstances because I was not intending to return to work there anyway. I had no money to speak of, and I had no way of safely making money while this heated war with Irving was going on and any deal could turn out to be a set up. Irving still owed me over a hundred grand but I figured that was lost forever. I had no way to get to Irving in prison, unless I ponied up fifty grand, which was about all the cash I had left after selling off the Hawk
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aircraft. I had no desire to trust anyone else in a murder scheme but I could not continue to walk around town with a bull’s eye on my back. Our house had been on the market for months but no reasonable offers had come in.

My friend Luc Lavoie said he had a friend who was interested in buying my house under the table. We came to a verbal agreement to transfer the house ownership, even though the amount was ten thousand less than I had paid for the property. Before I completed the transaction, I went to discuss the situation with my friend Jean Pierre Allard, the car dealer. Jean Pierre was a very nice fellow and he had come to several of my parties with his wife. His wife enjoyed herself thoroughly and got along well with Barbara, me and the others at the party. Jean Pierre, who loved his wife more than anything else on earth, told me one time that the toughest thing he ever had to do was to burn his own house down.

“You can’t imagine the pain of losing all of your possessions,” he told me, as he spoke of photographs and memories lost forever. He said that he had to burn his house down because he was deep in debt with no way out. His description of his financial
situation at the time kind of reminded me of mine.

After discussing my situation with Jean Pierre I decided to book a three week vacation with my wife to Jamaica where we rented a villa in Ironshore. We shared the house with Barbara’s friend, Heather Gilcrest, who was hoping her new boyfriend might stop by our villa to visit on his way back to Montreal from Colombia. Heather was a flight attendant with Air Canada and her free passes allowed her to meet and accompany Barbara and me in many parts of the world. Her boyfriend never did come by for a visit and his loss was my gain as I had two beautiful women to escort me all around the island.

But in spite of my two attractive female escorts, my world was truly a dark place with very little brightness shining in. When alone, I reflected upon my existence which revolved around guns and killers and thieves and lawbreakers of every type and I wondered what had happened to the hippie mentality that had come over me many years ago on my sabbatical to Mexico. I asked myself what had happened to my spiritual awakening that money was the root of all evil, and what had happened to those wonderful revelations of karma and peace and love that I once believed in. How, I asked myself, could I have strayed so far from the path of enlightenment and ended up on the one I was walking now?

One night, I was driving home alone from Montego Bay to Ironshore when I pulled to the side of the road. I got out of the car and stood in the pitch blackness at the side of the road looking upward. The stars were myriad in the heavens as I quietly called upon Him.

“Please, Lord. I don’t know how this Irving business is all going to work out, but if you can somehow help me through this, I will end my gangster life.”

I asked His forgiveness for the harm I might have caused others, especially Barbara and her sister and my mother who were all scared for their own lives and terrified for mine. I added that I was not yet a murderer and really did not want to become one, but what else could I do? My bed was made and I had no choice but to lie in it.

While I was still in Jamaica, I phoned Barbara’s sister in Montreal to catch up on the news. Brandi told me that I had better come home right away. My house had burned to the ground and the fire inspectors were looking to question me about it. I told her the fire marshal would have to wait and that I would be home in a week when my vacation was finished. The world seemed a little brighter, as I broke the bad news to Barbara and Heather, who both looked at me with accusing glances.

When I returned to Montreal I cooperated fully with the police and the fire investigators as my insurance policy directed. The fire marshal told me my house fire was an arson and then quizzed me on why I had jammed an ax in the patio door frame. He suggested that perhaps it was done to stall the firefighters from entering during the fire.

“On the contrary,” I said while pointing to the black-and-white photo he had taken of the ax. “I put the ax there to prevent another break-in or home invasion while I was away on vacation. If you want an arson suspect, go see Irving Goldberg in jail. He is on record for threatening my life and my home and for sending home invaders to take my possessions. There is already a police report on that.”

I could sense that they did not believe me, but what could they do. I was in Jamaica at the time of the fire and as Irving himself used to say, I had an iron-clad alibi.

When the investigators questioned me about how I was going to deal with my situation with Irving, I told them not to worry about it. I was leaving Montreal and moving elsewhere.

“That won’t work,” the police investigator said, as he tried to bring me into the fold. “You should cooperate with us. No one escapes your kind of situation by moving. It always catches up to you.”

“We’ll see,” I said, before leaving the investigators to their own agendas and opinions.

I returned to the rented home on the west end that the insurance plan was covering and started making plans for a trip out of town. I heard that Irving was not getting out on weekend passes anymore which was encouraging, but I also heard that he
was the head of the Archambault prisoners’ inmate committee which was a sign of his rising power in jail. I wondered for a time just what I had taken on. I had no idea who Irving might send after me next. It could be anyone. It might be someone fresh out of jail. It might be a contract killer already on the street. It might even be someone I trusted. One thing was certain. I would not know who was coming for me until the last second. The only smart thing to do was to find a safe haven until Irving himself came out of the slammer. Then, with a little luck, I would pick him off from a distance and be done with him. In my mind it was purely self-defence, although I knew if anything went wrong, the charge would be murder.

My insurance broker called me in for a conversation the next day. He befriended me like a brother and then suggested that the next time I had a financial problem I should call him for a loan rather than torch my house. I told him that I did not know what he was talking about and terminated the meeting. I liked the guy because we had spent quite a few hours talking business and getting close. He told me that my insurance claim had cost him his annual bonus and I felt sorry about that.

Next my lawyer called me in for a meeting. He had heard about my disagreement with Irving and he was concerned for his own well-being.

“I don’t want any trouble from this guy Irving,” he told me. “Who is he? I don’t even know the guy!”

I calmed Sidney down and paid him his bonus for getting me off the importation charge. I told him Irving was in jail and not to worry. I was going to straighten things out with him when he came out.

After that, my mother called me. She was worried because her husband Jerry was out of town. She thought she saw three strange men driving slowly past her house and looking in. She thought they might be “bad men” looking for me. I didn’t know if she had a jittery case of nerves with an overactive imagination or what. I told her to go into the bedroom safe and take out a gun I had left there for Jerry in case he needed it, in view of all that was going on around me.

“It’s a revolver. Just point it and shoot,” I told my mother who has always been a pacifist and hates violence, “There’s no safety.”

My mother had a very vicious German shepherd who was protective to a fault.

“Keep the dog close to you in the house,” I told her. “If anyone tries to come in, set the dog on them. If that doesn’t work, fire a warning shot into the ceiling and then call the police. Remember to stay low and use the gun only if you have to.”

I called the local police detachment and explained the situation as best I could and asked them to look in on my mother. I described the station wagon with three men in it that my mother had seen cruising the neighbourhood, but I never heard anything more about the incident. I was surprised some time later to hear my mother confess that she was oddly comforted by having a gun by her side at that time and I found it ironic that even a pacifist can be comforted by the power of a gun.

My sister-in-law, Brandi, called. She was scared of what Irving might do to her and wanted to know what I was going to do about it. I was not unsympathetic but what was I supposed to do? He was in jail. “Give him the money,” she said. I refused to do that. It was more than just the money at this point, I told her. It was about principal. But the truth was, I had painted myself into a corner with my stubborn refusal to submit to Irving’s will and things had gone way too far to turn back the hands of time. I did not believe that Irving would trouble Brandi or anyone else in my family while his girlfriend Jane and his own family were still vulnerable.

At this point Irving was mad at me, not anyone else, and with his flunkies fucking up the first hit, he was bound to have less confidence in them than he used to. Throughout our years together, there had been many barbeques and family get-togethers involving Brandi and Irving. Brandi was so taken with Irv at one point that she was going to give him her fifty thousand dollar inheritance to invest for her. Even though Irving was my partner at the time and we were still close friends, I warned Brandi not to give him her money. To her credit she listened, which is why she did not end up standing in line with Irving’s
other creditors when the hammer came down on him. After the home invasion, Brandi gave in to her fear and accused me of “living my life like a movie” before dropping Barbara and me from her social calendar.

As if things couldn’t get any worse, I drove into town one day and stopped into my old place of business to visit Luc Lavoie. The Modern Motors premises had been taken over by friends of Luc who, unbeknownst to me, were running a hot car ring out of the garage. I parked my car on the upper level to go to the washroom and stepped right into the middle of a police raid. I ducked into the bathroom when I saw the cops but there was no time to ditch my gun which was discovered in an instant when they pulled me out of the bathroom stall and searched me.

“Full bore,” the detective who frisked me said, as he pulled my gun from my shoulder harness. “Do you have a permit for this?”

“No.”

“Give him a break. He has a reason for carrying the gun,” said Luc as the cops milled around me like salmon in a feeding frenzy. “Too bad you walked into this,” Luc said to me. “I tried to warn you, but it was too late.”

“Thanks anyways,” I offered. “If you get out before me, call my wife and tell her I’m okay. When I don’t come home tonight she’s gonna think I’m dead.”

The plain-clothes detectives sent me down to Station Number One for processing instead of taking me downtown for questioning with the other suspects in the hot car ring. I was disappointed to loose the .
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and shoulder rig but I was more disappointed to be in jail again.

“Back again,” I scratched into the jail cell wall above my cot. Underneath I wrote my initials and the date. I had two joints in my shirt pocket that the cops missed in their excitement over the gun bust. I had no desire to add to my predicament and I flushed them down the toilet. The Montreal cops from Station Number One questioned me and seemed somewhat sympathetic to my plight with Irving and my need for a handgun to protect myself. They offered me a deal. If I would consent to a search of my house looking for more weapons, they would take
me home. They said they would leave me there on my own recognizance if they found no other weapons. I agreed on the condition that I call my wife right away to spare her any more needless worry. “No deal,” was their answer. The cops did not want any secret messages or warnings passed to Barbara that would interfere with their weapons search.

I had a pound of weed in the freezer that I knew the police would find, but I told them I would agree to their terms just to put Barbara’s mind at ease. Even if they charged me for the weed, Barbara would know that I was in police hands and not someone else’s. With all that was going on and my lack of regular phone calls, I knew she would be frantic with worry if I did not contact her soon. I didn’t want to imagine how she would react if I didn’t show up until the next day. Barbara was already down to ninety-five pounds and looked like she was disappearing with all of this Irving business. Her weight loss made me feel even guiltier than ever. When the police took me home, Barbara was so relived to see me that she started crying. The police searched our rented house and left after finding nothing unwarranted to charge me with. They did not even look in the freezer. I was home and safe. I put a fire on in the bedroom alcove and crawled into bed where I felt warm and protected under the covers. I talked to Barbara and I could see the strain in her face. This lifestyle was threatening to kill her before Irving killed me.

A few nights later, I spotted a white van in front of the house and I called the police to check it out. The van drove away and I never knew if it was innocently parked or if it was a police surveillance vehicle or another possible attempt by Irving’s forces. The incident left me feeling insecure and I decided to find another house that was safer.

I found an ad in the paper that described a winterized cottage in Morin Heights, a few miles north of Montreal. I rented the place, and Barbara and I and our baby daughter stayed in the cottage for several months until my gun possession charge was dealt with. It was peaceful in the country and, for those several months, I slept without waking up five times a night to look around for intruders.