Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (6 page)

It was October, which is a good time to visit Europe because all of the summer tourists have gone home. The trip would allow us to recapture the same vacation that we’d had to cancel a few years before. Barbara’s older sister, Margaret, was living in England and it would be a great opportunity to visit her. After starting off in England, we could decide later on which European countries we would visit next.

We landed in Scotland because the fog at Heathrow Airport was too thick to land there and we made our way by train to the north of England where Margaret lived with her banker husband. The two were very happy to see us and welcomed us into their home for the better part of a week. They took us sightseeing to visit a drafty old castle, with a torture chamber that was as cold as ice, and they treated us to our first taste of East Indian
food, which left my stomach queasy and my asshole burning. After a pleasant stay with these in-laws in their small English cottage community, we made our way south to London where Barbara’s younger sister, Brandi, had just arrived from Greece. Brandi was in the throes of a breakup with her Greek con artist boyfriend and was more than a little happy to see us. We stayed close to her fifth-floor walk-up bed-sitter flat in London, in a somewhat nicer but not much newer flat of our own. Both flats featured heaters that operated on meters activated by one shilling coins. Brandi’s flat had a similar setup for her electricity and we howled with laughter every time the lights would blink off and we would have to search around for shillings in the dark.

I was very unimpressed with London which was crowded, expensive and cold. It was barely October and the chill and the damp cut through my sheepskin jacket like it was made of silk.

Our friend Bishop arrived at Heathrow airport a few weeks after we did and met us in London where we helped him find a cheap flat to rent. Bishop was on his way to Morocco to kill six months, and I was somewhat envious of his warm destination. When he noted my chunk of hash, which I had purchased from some Colombian exchange students who lived in Brandi’s building, Bishop asked me to get him some. I kept my stash in a matchbox. Just to pull his leg, I told Bishop that I bought my hash from the store on the corner. “Just ask for a pack of matches and give the shopkeeper a ten pound note and tell her to keep the change. She’ll hand you back a box of matches with hash inside, but don’t open it until you’re outside the store,” I told him. My practical joke was interrupted by Brandi’s arrival and the subject was dropped. But when I offered later in the evening to get Bishop some hash he answered, “Don’t bother. I’ll get some from the corner store on my way home.”

If Bishop had possessed more money, I would have let him do it but under the circumstances, I didn’t have the heart. Just as he was heading out to buy the hash I told him the truth and took fifty bucks from him to pass on to the Colombian exchange students.

I nearly got taken in myself, by those Spanish-speaking students
I was buying my hash from. In our hash-fueled ramblings, they told me of a scheme to import cocaine from Colombia to London, or Canada, in the linings of jackets made in some uncle’s factory. I was not really interested in dealing coke, but the next time I phoned back to my buddies in Montreal, I passed the information on to Ryan. I hinted that I might be interested in setting up a deal if it looked good. Almost before I hung up the phone, Ryan’s partner Robby hopped a plane to England to scope out the possibilities. When he arrived, I told Robby I had come to believe the deal was a scam by the South American students to rip me off, and I questioned why he had jumped on a plane so quickly. He told me Ryan had sent him and that he was going to be pissed off about the waste of an airfare.

After digesting this disappointment, Robby asked if we wanted to split the rent on a villa in Jamaica. He was planning on spending the winter there with his girlfriend, Paula, and asked if we would like to join them. Barbara and I had already discussed postponing the rest of our trip to Europe, because of the cold winter weather, and Robby’s offer sounded tempting.

I also had five thousand other reasons besides the cold weather for going to Jamaica. While I was waiting for bail in New York with Bishop, Ryan had approached my wife in Montreal and talked her into investing five thousand dollars in a weed scam. While I was none too happy about Barbara proceeding without me on a business deal, the deed was done and I felt there was not much I could say about it. I consoled myself with the fact that at least we had something in the works to make back some of the scam money we lost in New York.

When you lose in the smuggling business, you lose big. You lose your investment money. You lose your product. You lose your savings, which your lawyer sucks up like a Hoover. You lose your livelihood, because you can no longer make an income. You lose your freedom, in some cases. You lose your girlfriends or wives when they get tired of waiting for you to get sprung from jail. Sometimes people even lose their lives.

In spite of all that, I decided to rearrange our vacation schedule and visit Jamaica to both enjoy the sun and to look in on our
investment that was made with Ryan. It made more sense to be making money in Jamaica while sucking up a tan in a bathing suit than roaming around Europe in a sheepskin coat burning off money and killing time.

Before Robby left to return to Montreal, he passed on a request to me from Ryan for more money to cover shortfalls in the deal he was putting together with Barbara’s money. I grudgingly gave Robby a couple of thousand more, which covered his London visit and I told him that was it. There was no more money to invest. I told Robby that if Ryan could not get his act together on the money we had already given him, then I would go to Jamaica and take care of business for him. The request for more money gave me a bad feeling, and I began to wonder what kind of a con we had gotten into.

My sidekick, Bishop, was getting ready to leave for Morocco and I could see that he was sad to part with us. Unlike Barbara and me, Bishop was on his own and had no one to run away with. We said he could stay with us in Jamaica, but he had no money to rewrite his airline ticket. His mother had given him a charter ticket to Morocco for a three-month tour and he had little choice but to see the tour through. After Bishop left, Brandi decided that she would like to spend some time in a warmer climate too, so she decided to come to Jamaica with us.

We phoned Robby in Montreal and found out that he and Paula were leaving for Jamaica the following week and that Ryan and Sally were coming down around Christmas time. Barbara and I were looking forward to sharing Christmas with our friends.

When we landed in Jamaica, after a three day stay in Bermuda, I could not have felt more alive. We stepped off the plane and smelled the fragrant tropical air. A warm breeze from the ocean blew across the tarmac as we made our way past the singing choir of welcoming hostesses. After an hour of milling around the terminal with several hundred incoming tourists, we finally exited Jamaican Customs and Immigration, rented a car and set about finding Robby’s villa.

His directions took us to Hopewell, about fifteen miles from
Montego Bay. When we reached the villa, we saw that it was a two-storey white house situated right on the ocean. From the first moment I laid eyes on it, I knew we had made the right decision to come to Jamaica instead of staying in Europe. The ocean was an azure shade of blue and crystal clear. A fresh water swimming pool was situated right next to the salt water sea, with lounge chairs laid out around the perimeter of the pool apron. The sun was beating down, with temperatures of about ninety degrees that were offset by a refreshing ocean breeze.

It was great to see Robby and Paula again. Robby and I smoked a fat joint on the pool deck and discussed the contrast between London and Jamaica with congratulatory grins of satisfaction. Barbara and Paula made themselves each a Tia Maria and milk and started making up for lost time on all the gossip. My old friend Sunny from the days of the
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scam would come around to sell us weed. He had become a friend of sorts, as well as a guide to the customs and habits of his fellow Jamaicans. Ryan and Ross came down a few weeks after we arrived and they all stayed at the house with Robby, me and our wives. It was great to see Ryan again because he was always the life of the party. Ryan liked to do magic tricks and he was very good at the art of illusion. Unlike most magicians, Ryan would amaze you with his magic and then show you how the trick was done.

I spoke to Ryan about Barbara’s five grand investment and he told me of a refrigerator compressor in Montego Bay that was ready to be shipped to Canada for repair after being filled with weed. The only thing holding him back was the cost of the weed. I found that a little disconcerting, since Barbara’s money had been more than enough to cover twenty pounds of weed and a used compressor. From what I could see, Ryan was in Jamaica with Ross and Robby pulling off other scams. I couldn’t help but think that he was using Barbara’s money to pull off the other scams, without paying me any dividends. He told me not to worry, that he was coming back down to Jamaica with his wife Sally on a three-week cruise and that he would take care of business then. He said he was shipping his Thunderbird down to Jamaica, at the same time, to use around the island. That really
set my warning bells buzzing. He was telling me that he was still seeking financing for the scam, but he had five grand to take a cruise with his wife and his car. I showed my displeasure but all I got was the cold shoulder. Finally I told Ryan that if something did not happen soon, I would take over the scam and ship the compressor myself.

A few days after he arrived, I had Ryan show me where the compressor was being stored. He led me to a house at the main intersection of the highway into Montego Bay. The house was on a hill where a lone Jamaican blacksmith, named Tyrel, looked suitably impressed as we pulled up in the T-Bird. He showed us a refrigerator compressor that was sawed into two halves and said that it was for sending weed to Canada. He said that he would fill the compressor with pressed weed and send it to any address that we gave him. It looked to me like an old piece of crap that wouldn’t have been worth the money to send to Kingston for repair, never mind Montreal. But the Jamaican assured us that he had used this method to send weed to the States many times and he had never heard of a problem. He would weld the weed to the inside of the compressor where no one would think to look for it. He would press the weed really tight until fifteen or maybe twenty pounds would fit inside.

In hindsight, I realize why Tyrel had never heard of any problems. When a scam fails and someone goes down, the last thing anyone wants to do is go back to the scene of the crime and explain to everyone what happened. Most players write their bust off as a bad experience and never go back for more. But that was knowledge that came to me later in life, and while I had misgivings about their scam, Ryan and Tyrel almost convinced me that the idea was sound. But then Ryan asked for more money, saying that he had spent Barbara’s earlier investment on the flight and cruise expenses. I was not very happy with Ryan’s request for more money. This whole thing seemed like a throw-away scam, not one that required six months to set up. On top of that, he was staying with us and eating our food on the cuff, all the while asking for more investment money.

Eventually I put my foot down.

“No way. No fucking way.”

I made it clear to Ryan that Barbara and I had no more money to give him and if he could not ship the load off with what he had, I would handle it myself. Ryan left Jamaica in a huff and I felt pleased to have told him how I felt, rather than keeping it bottled up. I had absolutely no worries about butting heads with him because he was a lightweight among the people we hung out with.

I contacted my friend, Jacques Laflame, back in Montreal, who had volunteered to store our furniture in his garage while Barbara and I left on our extended vacation. Jacques was a funny kind of guy. He was married to a cute little French girl and the two of them were into kinky games. They were always trying to get Barbara and me to take our clothes off and run around nude at their house. I suspect that had we done so, other moves would have followed. Jacques said he would be willing to receive the compressor from me. I told him not to attempt to open it under any circumstances. “I’ll send it to your home,” I told him. “It should arrive the day after I ship it. If there’s a problem, there will probably be a two, or three, day delay while the cops examine the compressor before delivering it to you.”

If such a delay happened, I told him to feign innocence at receiving the unsolicited compressor and if necessary, a smart lawyer would clear him of any charges. I offered to pay for a lawyer, at my expense, if there were any problems. If there was no heat on the compressor and it came through as planned, I told Jacques to leave it to cool off in his garage for a couple of weeks. Once the heat was off, I would contact our mutual friend, Ryan, to take the weed in the compressor off his hands. I told him I would pay him well for his trouble and not to worry as he had my furniture as collateral. I don’t know if it was the money, the adventure or a chance to get into our pants that motivated Jacques to go along with the play. The guy was a straight arrow and the worst thing I ever saw him do was slip his wife some mescaline without her knowledge.

I shipped the load as we had discussed, and everything seemed fine. But then Jacques did something totally unexpected.

I was lounging on my pool deck in Jamaica and smoking a spliff when Ryan and Jean Paul walked unannounced onto my back patio. It was about a week or two after I had sent the compressor to Jacques and I was already on edge because I sensed something had gone wrong. Jean Paul had a serious look on his face and, without so much as a hello from either himself or Ryan, he urged me to come into an adjacent bedroom. As I followed behind Ryan, I was expecting to hear that Jacques had contacted Ryan about the compressor, but from the looks on their faces, I could see that something had gone terribly wrong. I asked what was going on and I was expecting to hear some bad news but Jean Paul’s contorted face spoke more than his words.