Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (36 page)

At this very time, a war was brewing between the Hells Angels and the Rock Machine motorcycle clubs in Montreal. Because Solly and Hawkeye were selling the bulk of our smuggled hash through members of the Angels, I was careful to keep my distance from the two men when I was in Montreal. One time, when I came to town on my way through to Jamaica, I checked into in a cheap little motel near the airport that
Hawkeye had recommended to me. I had been visiting Derrick’s house, snorting lines of coke, when I returned to my motel around midnight. The previous week I had flown from Jamaica to Montreal to complain to Hawkeye’s partner Solly after Hawkeye had shown up in Montego Bay with the Cowboy. The Cowboy was a well-known drug dealer from Ottawa who was famous in drug dealing lore for being one of the pioneers in the industry. I, myself, had used him on occasion to sell some of my Mexican weed that I brought in from Arizona. Bringing the Cowboy down to tour our operation in Jamaica was as stupid a move as I had seen yet from Hawkeye, and I was seriously thinking that he was trying to scare me out of my own scam with his infantile behaviour. I left Hawkeye in Jamaica to return to Canada to complain about it to Solly.

Hawkeye returned to Montreal behind me and was furious that I had spoken to Solly. He proposed that I should quit the scam and give my end over to Righteous. He suggested that I was trying to split him up from his partner, Solly. Even Sandy “the Mule” was of no help to me on this occasion, and I felt a bad vibe of things to come. I wondered, at one point, if I was going to be removed from the scam by force. But Hawkeye and I settled our differences grudgingly, with Solly as mediator.

So, on my next visit to Montreal, when I rented that cheap motel room in Dorval, at Hawkeye’s suggestion, I was on my guard. When I returned to the motel from Derrick’s that night, there were several Harley Davidson motorcycles parked on either side of my motel unit that were obviously part of a biker gang. I saw that I would have to pass through the bikers to get into my room and I made a U-turn as soon as I saw them. I went straight to the nearby Holiday Inn where I booked another room. Then I called the front desk at my original choice of motel. I told them to go to my room and pack my bags and send them by cab to my new address.

This was happening at a time when the body count was beginning to rise in the Montreal biker war and I am unhappy to report that my old friend Hoss was killed in that war. Hoss, who consoled me during my war with Irving and warned me
that no one was going to say “draw,” when I showed him my gun, never had a chance to pull his own gun, either. Someone used a remote controlled bomb to blow up his car in his driveway as he was leaving home to begin his daily routine. There was a time when gangsters would refuse to hit a man in front of his family, but those days were long gone by the time Hoss met his fate.

My friend little Ziggy Epstein got caught up in the biker war as well and had to flee to Florida to save his life. Ziggy was riding with the Angels in Montreal and he helped set up Freddie Peters for a hit outside of a bar near Decarie Boulevard. After the Angels had pumped enough information from Freddie, he was of no further use to them. The Angels would have let Freddie live, if Allan “Smitty” Smith had not demanded further retribution for Toonie’s killing. Ziggy knew he was in trouble when Irving started calling him with death threats from Parthenais, after Irving heard about Freddie being gunned down. While Ziggy was hiding out in Florida, his lawyer, Sidney Goldman, began spreading it around town that Ziggy was going to rat about Freddie’s murder. I do not know why Sidney would have said that if it were not true, but after the rumours started flying, Ziggy’s coconspirators in Freddie’s murder ordered two hit men from Quebec to kill Ziggy. According to court transcripts, the two hit men were known to Ziggy and he had no idea what was coming when they took him out for a one-way ride in their car. I was sorry to hear about his fate, although little Ziggy had quite grown up into a strong, strapping young man when I saw him last at Derrick’s house in Montreal. Ziggy was a friend and a reliable accomplice when I left him behind to make my life in Vancouver. I would have liked to have remained in touch with Ziggy, but I suspect I would have been dragged into a similar fate had I stayed in Montreal.

I was glad to be living outside the Montreal war zone by residing in Jamaica and in Vancouver. While bodies were piling up in Montreal, Barbara and I lived a life in Jamaica that was one of quiet luxury, with an up-scale villa that came with maids and gardeners. I was finally able to convince Barbara to drive our car,
even though it was a stick shift, and she chose to volunteer to help at the school where our children were enrolled. I gave generous donations to local charities through well-known local personalities such as Doris Hugh, the realtor, and every Wednesday I allowed the school to hold swimming classes in the pool at our villa. I spread my wealth around in other ways, as well. I was generous to a fault with the average Jamaican and overpaid for everything, as far as they were concerned.

I was content to live in Jamaica for a time, but after almost a year of it, I became bored silly. The same boredom was evident in the face of a stranger who sat next to me at the counter of the Pelican Grill in Montego Bay. The man started up a casual conversation with me and I soon found out he was working at the American Embassy. When the conversation turned to marijuana, the man began to tell me how the weed in Jamaica was grown with rat bat shit and I knew then that he was not working in the embassy typing pool. I figured him for a narc, and I wondered if he knew who he was talking to.

Barbara was forced to return home to Canada because of a bad case of pneumonia, so I began commuting again. Leaving Jamaica spelled the beginning of the end of my participation in the hash scam, although I spun another year out of it before it died on me. It ended soon after Allan and Solly began spreading their wings and started to look for their own contacts in Jamaica. They discovered a Jamaican named Lenny, who lived in Saint Ann’s and who offered good deals on finger hash. Up to this point, the hash had always been procured by my team of friends. Sunny, Righteous and Duke traveled the length and breadth of the island to gather up the hash we needed.

Solly and Hawkeye now started to buy our hash from Lenny in bulk, and then used my Jamaican friends to move the hash around. As well, Hawkeye began showing up unannounced to stay in the same Ironshore villas that I rented. I found him partying with girlfriends, which was no problem, but I was totally pissed off when he started bringing down his drug dealing friends from Montreal to show off his Jamaican connections. Both Solly and Hawkeye were bringing heat to our scam and,
to quote a phrase from my old partner Irving, “they seemed to think they had a fucking licence.”

Allan started doing freebase cocaine, and for a few times, I did it with him. I enjoyed the initial rush of smoking cocaine but I was never able to repeat the effects of the first high. Subsequent visits to the crack shack produced less and less enjoyment and I ended up returning to my first love, weed.

Solly came on to me in Jamaica with another proposition. He said that he was in touch with my old crew who controlled the Montreal waterfront. When he told them he was working with me, the boys downtown offered him the same deal they offered Irving and me. If we would ship up a thousand pounds of sensi the boys would grab it off the Montreal waterfront for us.

I was thrilled to be back in the big leagues, but there had been some changes since I was last involved in multi-ton load shipments. You could no longer ship out a container full of weed without paying someone off in Jamaica. The dockworkers were wise to container scams, and the crane operators could feel by the strain on the cables if the container weighed more than the amount reading on the manifest. If they were not in on the scam, the dockworkers would rat out the container of weed for a finder’s fee from the police. Righteous came through for us on that issue by locating a Jamaican customs broker who could guarantee that the container of weed would be placed on board a ship without drawing any heat.

Putting together a half ton of sensi was a lot of work, but I had many willing hands to help me as my sphere of connections in Jamaica grew broader. Sensi came from the west end of Jamaica where my black friends lived, not from the Saint Ann’s side of the island where Solly’s contact, Lenny, came from. After Righteous supervised the gathering of a thousand pounds of sensi, I accompanied him to Kingston to discuss payoff terms with the customs broker. The cost of the weed was outrageous, compared to the Coli weed I had purchased in bulk years before. With inflation factored in, the Sensi weed cost one hundred to two hundred dollars per pound, depending on the farmer who sold it. We cleaned out the year’s supply of several villages to put
together our load. The weed promised a return of a million dollars or more when it sold in Canada for a thousand dollars a pound. That would work out to roughly five to seven times our investment, which is a normal standard for smuggling profits that has held true for my entire smuggling career.

We had an investment of several hundred thousand dollars in the scam. At every phase in my dealings, I emphasized the seriousness of the people behind our scam to the Jamaicans involved, so that everyone knew not to pull any ripoffs. Hawkeye had made the acquaintance of a crooked cop named Franklin on one of his trips down to Jamaica. When a Jamaican helper named Moe got caught with his hands in the till, so to speak, Hawkeye offered his new found friend Franklin a contract to kill Moe. I could not believe my ears when he told me what he had done, and I told Hawkeye he was crazy to start that kind of shit in Jamaica where everyone knows what’s going on. I was mad at Moe for being such a rotten prick as to rip us off for two kilos of hash after all we had done for him, but it was not enough to kill him over. I told Righteous to go and find Moe and warn him, which he did, but I never saw Moe again. Someone told me that Moe went off to America and someone else told me he went back into the countryside around Mandeville where he had been born. I never knew for sure what happened to him, but like I said, I never saw Moe again.

It was probably Hawkeye’s karma backfiring on us when the first shipment of weed that we sent to Montreal disappeared without a trace. Solly said the boys on the Montreal docks couldn’t get to it safely, but the customs broker in Jamaica said he had heard nothing about a container bust in Montreal. The broker felt that the drugs had gotten through and that we had been ripped off. I must confess that I had the same concerns when I remembered back to how the boys had never missed a container for Irving and me. It was inconceivable that Canada Customs or the
RCMP
would bust a thousand pounds of pure sensimilla without generating a few headlines and photo ops for themselves.

It took the better part of a year to recoup the losses involved
in that one container shipment and I was hard pressed to invest that kind of money a second time. It wasn’t only money that was lost. It takes a lot of time and energy to compile a ton of sensi. Several months at least. Then, there is the risk of moving the weed from Negril to Kingston. After that comes the risk of getting it shipped to the docks and clearing export customs. And last but not least is the effort involved in getting a full container of weed onto a commercial vessel without the authorities twigging onto the contraband.

But after a few more hash loads came in by air, and after assurances from Solly that the scam would work this time, I did get talked into another try at smuggling up a container shipment of sensi. This time, we used Solly’s connection, Lenny, in Saint Ann’s instead of our last customs broker who no longer trusted us after the container disappeared and we did not pay him the bonus that he was promised. Lenny claimed to have an inside man on the Kingston waterfront to place our weed on the ship.

This time, we decided to send two thousand pounds of sensi, to make up for the first container that was lost. We are talking about a major investment of over three hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the weed, the expenses and the payoffs. It was an endeavor that was complicated by the fact that we were still running the charter flight hash scam twice a week. Our Jamaican connections were successful in buying the weed, driving it to Kingston, and having it placed on a container ship to Montreal. Once again, the container was busted, only this time I actually located a news story about it in a Montreal paper.

After that, I told Solly and Hawkeye that I was no longer interested in putting my money into a container scam. I could see the writing on the wall, as Solly and particularly Hawkeye began to ignore more and more of my advice. One time when I was in Montreal, Hawkeye showed me half a million dollars in cash in a shopping bag. Then he hid it under his bed while we went out for a coffee. Talk about loose. On that same visit, Hawkeye drove me in his Mercedes to visit the aircraft cleaner who was pulling off our loads and Allan invited me into his house to meet him.

“No fucking way!” I told him. I slunk down low in the passenger seat, while Hawkeye ignored my concerns and went inside without me. I waited about fifteen minutes for him to come back out, all the while wondering what he was trying to pull by bringing me there. A raid by the cops would have pulled the three of us in the smuggling scam together and would have completed a connection that could have sent us all to jail. Hawkeye snapped at me when he came back to the car, as though I was a coward for not going inside to meet the cleaner. I reminded him that I was not in town to make new friends. From the very beginning, I had told him that I never wanted to meet his contact and I felt it was a serious breech of security to bring me there. I don’t know what he had in mind, but it seemed to me that Hawkeye had some kind of death wish hoping to get himself caught, or more importantly, to get me caught.

I was starting to look at my new partners with increasing suspicion and when Solly insisted that I bring the number of the shipping container to Montreal myself, so that he could pass it on to our waterfront contacts, I felt a warning flag being raised. We had a dozen people that could run that number up from Jamaica to Montreal for us, but he wanted me to bring it up personally.