Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (38 page)

“Bring me an evidence envelope, would you?”

The prick. He was going to bust me for that little pile of lint. That was all the incentive I needed. As he turned his back to take the envelope from his junior officer, I gathered up a lungful of wind and let go a blast that scattered that pile of lint to the four corners of the universe. There was nothing left. Not a sprig. I knew that with all the dirt and dust on the floor, this guy would never be able to retrieve the evidence. He was not aware of what I had done until his female associate called him by name.

“Sandy.”

“What?’ His tone was impatient.

“Sandy, he blew it away.”

“What?”

The senior customs officer turned back to look at me and then searched for the pile of lint and weed on the counter, which was gone. It took a moment to register what had happened and he looked at me with fury in his eyes.

“I found drugs on you,” he said. “That gives me the right to strip search you.”

So into the little room we went, which was a first time experience for me. I was confident that I had nothing to fear. I stripped to my underwear and stood waiting while he checked my clothes.

“Take off your shirt.”

I did as ordered.

“Take off your pants.”

I complied again.

“Hand me your socks.”

I watched as he went through them.

“Pull down your shorts.”

I did as told.

“See any drugs?” I asked in a wry tone, as I stood nude before him. I was glad that I was still drunk enough not to feel any embarrassment standing there naked. The customs agent had no choice but to let me go, and I groused about the inconvenience when I joined my wife later. She had a good laugh at my expense and our argument ended on that note.

The highlight of my final days in Jamaica, before making the decision to return home to Canada to live, was Righteous’ wedding to his girlfriend Donna. I was the best man. In the end it was an honour that I regretted, as I stood melting in the one hundred degree heat. I was wearing a suit, and I wished that I had not done such a large hit of coke before the ceremony.

Some weeks after the honeymoon, I was driving with Righteous to conduct some business in Kingston. I was feeling him out to see if Hawkeye or Solly were trying to put a wedge between us, which was something I could feel happening from day one. The answer to my question came in a roundabout way, when out of the blue, Righteous slammed me with a put-down. I was talking about how coke makes me talkative and Righteous said, “Yah, mon. On coke you got a whole heap of mouth.”

It was the first time Righteous had ever shown me any disrespect and I knew then that my suspicions were on the right track. I made the case to Righteous that without me, the boys in Montreal would treat him like shit. They would bump him from his position as soon as it suited them to do so. I gave him the “we are like brothers” routine and reminded him of our long friendship. Then I promised him that when the hash scam ended, I would bring him to Canada and show him how to make money growing weed indoors in Vancouver. I even offered to set him up in an operation. In spite of my sales pitch, I knew by the end of that ride that the end was in sight for my relationship with Righteous as well as with Solly and Hawkeye.

The day finally came when the scam died a natural death, with a phone call to me in Vancouver that came from Allan “Hawkeye” Stone.

“Don’t bother coming back to Montreal,” he said. “It’s over.”

Hawkeye went on to tell me that his aircraft cleaner was finished
pulling bags from the plane. The cleaner had accepted a transfer to Toronto, and he was close to retirement. Since I had never met the cleaner, I could only accept what Hawkeye was telling me as truth and I remained in Vancouver to tend to my grow op and contemplate my own retirement. I stayed in touch with Righteous and Hawkeye for the next short while, to make certain I was not being scammed out of my scam. But I had to admit that the scam had grown tiresome in spite of the money. I felt that my partners in Montreal were acting like children, which was easier to see now that I had kids of my own. It had been a good, long run and no one was in jail. A perfect ending to a perfect crime. I saw no problem in remaining in Vancouver with the mother of my children to begin repairing the fabric of a relationship that had suffered from years of stress and extended absences.

The grow op scene has changed the smuggling scene forever. Who needs to run the risk of importing marijuana thousands of miles across fortified borders when you can simply grow the stuff underground with halide lighting? House basements are ideal for growing pot indoors because they provide a measure of protection from busts thanks to Canada’s privacy laws. Indoor grow ops started as ma-and-pa operations with everyday people growing pot in their homes to supplement their incomes. It has since grown to an organized business worth millions of dollars and is often run by members of the Vietnamese communities or by members of the Hells Angels.

When I returned to Vancouver I attended to my grow op and I expanded the operation. I had eighty grand left in my attic from the hash scam with Solly and Hawkeye and enough money secreted away in the Caymans to pay off my house mortgage. The bank draft from the Caymans Bank legitimized the money I had earned in the drug trade and I sank it into equity in my home in Vancouver. I used that equity to buy a second house for growing marijuana and I set up a third operation in the house of a friend. The cash in the attic paid for our unexpected expenses and some of our luxuries, while the grow ops covered my day-to-day needs
like food, gas and entertainment. If you think eighty grand cash is a lot of money, try living on it for a couple of years. Everyday living can suck up a chunk of money in a flash the way an alcoholic sucks up booze on a bender. My savings were lasting longer than usual because of my grow op income. But while my grow ops were keeping pace with my financial requirements, I was irritated to be dealing at street level again. I had people knocking on my door all the time and no one buys pot without staying for at least an hour to shoot the breeze.

I started back at my old job selling printing machines to add to my income and to give me something that was lacking in the grow business: intelligent conversation.

I called Hawkeye in Montreal from time to time. He continually assured me that the Jamaica scam had ended, which I did not believe. I called Righteous several times but I could feel that he was avoiding me. I made a phone call to Jamaica and checked around with some people I knew in real estate and working at certain hotels. I discovered that Hawkeye and Solly were still making regular trips to Jamaica. I was also hearing stories about Righteous visiting Derrick the Doctor and Hoss in Montreal, and I knew then that I had been bumped out of the scam.

I could have blown the whistle on the double-crossing pricks, but I did not have it in me to be a rat. In truth, I didn’t really give a damn about working with them anymore because in my mind, they were all idiots with more balls than brains. More importantly, I was about to launch into a major expansion of my grow op business and I figured that I could pull in a couple of hundred thousand dollars per year tax free, without any dependence on anyone but myself. The cops were putting values of a thousand dollars per plant on weed seizures, which was way in excess of reality. Each plant might fetch between two hundred and four hundred dollars, which is not bad when you multiply it by one hundred to two hundred plants, harvested every two or three months. I was pulling in about a hundred thousand or so a year tax free at the time, and I figured that would double when my three grow ops got rolling. Barbara had started working full-time as a nurse, which was her profession,
and between her income nursing, my income selling printing machines and the grow op income, I was looking forward to a comfortable retirement.

As I look back now, I can see that I was way too loose with my grow operation. I had been growing pot for several years and I was starting to act like I had a licence. Between the guided tours for my friends and my carelessness in purchasing large amounts of hydroponic equipment and supplies, I was calling attention to myself. I made a call to Righteous to see if he wanted to come up and start working with me in the indoor cultivation business. I was surprised when he answered no. If that didn’t tell me a story about what he, Hawkeye and Solly were doing in Jamaica, nothing would.

About six months into the expansion program of my three grow ops, I was beginning to see some decent profits when the worst possible thing that could have happened did. I had been away with Barbara and a girlfriend partying it up in Whistler. After two days of wining and dining and fireside après ski, I came home to thank my father, who had been watching my house and children. Black Monday began as I approached my house, around the time my two children would be home from school. As I pulled up to my house, I saw what appeared to be a police van in my driveway. I continued on past my house, without stopping, and I saw that my grow equipment was in the yard and that the police van was full of healthy mature marijuana plants. I drove away to make arrangements with my dad to come over and wait for the kids and then I returned home to face the music.

The cops were as nice as one could expect them to be about a drug bust, even to the extent of making jokes about my green thumb. The cop who interviewed me at my kitchen table was an older man with thinning hair, who complained about his summer cold as he kept sniffling throughout my interview. He kept leaving the kitchen table to run upstairs to the bathroom, which is next to my bedroom. After I had been taken away, my wife arrived home. The police were still there taking reports and photos. They were occupied in the basement and did not see Barbara walk into the house and go straight upstairs to our bedroom. Barbara saw a
small flap of cocaine that the police had found, sitting open on our night table and she immediately took the flap of coke and flushed it down the toilet. As soon as she did, the cop who had been interviewing me came running upstairs to confront her.

“Where’s the coke?” he asked.

“What coke?” she answered.

The cop was choked, but what could he do? I’m pretty sure he was snorting the coke during my interview, but I will never know for certain. I just know that he went up to the bathroom several times during my questioning, yet I never heard the toilet flush.

The policeman who took me into the station let me cover the handcuffs I was wearing with my jacket when he took me to his squad car, so that the neighbours would not see them. I was booked and released on my own recognizance and I was back in my bed that same evening.

For some reason, my little pot bust for fewer than sixty plants was placed in the cross-Canada byline so that it hit every newspaper in the country. Miraculously, the only person who read about the bust at my work was my friend Mike Morrison, who was the credit manager at the company. There was no problem with that because it just so happened that Mike himself had a grow op in his basement, as did most of his friends. It was Mike who gave me my starter plant called Mavis, which was one of the best production strains of marijuana I ever saw. I immediately closed down my two other satellite operations the day after my bust and I kept them closed until my trial and sentencing were over.

Through good fortune or divine intervention, one of our old neighbours and friends in the North Vancouver area was a partner in a law firm of great renown. Our neighbour set me up with his senior partner in the firm named David Gibbons, who was so well respected that the judge in my case gave recognition to him from the bench. The judge actually stood up and welcomed my lawyer into his courtroom, which I felt was an exceptionally good start to the proceedings. David Gibbons was overkill for the small charge of cultivation, and I was let off with
a three thousand dollar fine and no probation. I was worried that my previous criminal record would make things worse for me, but the proof of my lawyer’s competence became evident in his handling of the old gun charge. My lawyer told the judge that the charge was many years old and besides, it could not have been a very serious offense, as evidenced by the fine and suspended sentence I was given. The judge, in turn, remarked that my charges seemed to fall exactly ten years apart.

“Let’s hope I don’t see you here in another ten years,” the judge said, as he banged his gavel and fined me three thousand dollars. The judge thanked my lawyer for gracing his court with a personal appearance, as opposed to sending some junior flunky, and then closed my file.

It was practically an invitation to start up my grow ops again. I still had my job and Barbara still had hers, so our income kept at pace with our needs, in spite of the bust. But there was nothing extra for high-flying vacations or new cars and I was back to buying my personal weed on the street at thirty-two hundred a pound. When my weed bill started to annoy me, I was forced to start up one of my satellite grow ops again. It seemed ridiculous to spend my hard-earned money for shit weed that I could grow better myself.

I waited until my senses told me that I was no longer a heat score, and then I restarted my grow op. After first transferring the house I had purchased into my father’s name, I found a third party to sit on the bomb. I had learned during the course of my trial that in order to convict someone for operating a grow op, the Crown had to prove access and control. That meant that in order to convict a person for growing marijuana, the authorities had to find that person in possession of a key to the grow premises, as well as prove that they worked there on the cultivation of the marijuana. My third-party friend took care of all those risks in exchange for free rent, free food, expenses and one third of the profits after I sold the weed. After I took my personal weed out of the crop and after I deducted the expenses, I split the remaining profits with the house sitter. I ended up with very little money from the operation, but it was enough to satisfy my
weed requirements and it was also enough to add a little comfort cushion to my income. My job selling printing machines was becoming more reliable after so many years of being in the business and I was actually developing a decent client base. I enjoyed the work and I developed several close friends at the company.