Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (16 page)

For one brief period, the dog was kept at Irving’s house when the stash house was empty and Bishop was out of town. Irving had some guests over for a barbeque and let Marquis run around on the lawn with his dog Nitro and my dog Max. Before long, Marquis tired of doggy play and began to run over to Irving’s guests, jumping up on them and humping their legs. If my dog or Irving’s dog had jumped on me like that, I would have kneed the animal in the chest, but I was not ready to try that with Marquis and neither was anyone else. I kind of felt like a rape victim after Marquis was through humping my leg and I could finally get him off me.

One time, I received a call about the dog from Irving, and I could tell by his tone that he had a serious problem.

“Come over here right now and take care of this dog or I’m gonna take my shotgun and shoot him!” I rushed over to Irving’s house, which was only a block away from mine. When I arrived, the dog was in the lot car which was parked in Irving’s two-car garage. Our lot boy, Ziggy Epstein, had taken the dog for a walk and he was returning with the dog in the back seat of the car when he stopped at a shopping mall to have a coffee with a friend. When Ziggy tried to get back in the car, the dog would not let him in. Ziggy might have shown some small amount of hesitation and fear when he approached his car or perhaps the people walking by the car in the shopping mall had triggered a reaction from the Doberman. But when Ziggy tried to open the car door, Marquis began snarling and frothing at the mouth and acting insane. Ziggy tried to calm the dog, but Marquis just tore both of the shoulder belts from their attachment harnesses with one bite each. With help from his friend at the coffee shop, Ziggy managed to wedge a piece of plywood between the front and back seats of the big four-door Mercury. Ziggy and his
friend then drove the car back to Irving’s house, with the dog snarling behind the wood barrier the entire way.

When I arrived at Irving’s, a small crowd was standing around the car. There was Ziggy and his friend David, Irving and his girlfriend Jane, Freddie the Booster, Barbara and me. The back door of the car was open and the dog was standing on the back seat with a bloody knucklebone from the butcher lying between his legs. Irving had thrown the bone into the car to placate the beast, but the bone became an item to guard. Now the Doberman was snarling even more aggressively at anyone who came close.

“Jane, get me my shotgun. I’m going to kill him!” said Irving as I entered the alcove that led to the garage.

“Hold on,” I told Jane before she went for the shotgun. “Let’s see what’s going on here.”

“The fucking dog’s gone crazy. That’s what’s going on,” growled Irving. “Look.”

He threw the dog a piece of cheese, which Marquis wolfed down in an instant and then returned to snarling at everyone again.

The women were standing behind the men who were watching from the garage alcove leading into the house and no one dared get too close to the dog. I studied the situation for a time until I noticed that even though the dog was snarling and frothing at the mouth, his little stump of a tail was wagging. That told me that Marquis thought this entire charade was a game and as far as he was concerned, he was just doing his job. The cheese and dog bones were his reward for guarding the car, therefore feeding him only caused more aggression. Using a little dog psychology, I took a piece of cheese from Irving and threw it to the dog, who inhaled it in one bite. The dog was drooling and frothing in between bites as he growled and snarled all the while wagging his tail. I threw the next piece of cheese on the ground beside the car and Marquis ran out of the car to get his reward. He gobbled up the cheese and then hopped back into the back seat of the car to recommence his guard duty. The Doberman stood splay-legged over the knucklebone and began snarling again as I approached closer. I stood a moment and watched and
observed his behaviour, until I finally devised a plan that required a certain amount of risk. I threw another piece of cheese on the garage floor. This time when the dog ran out to get it, I quickly slammed the car door closed behind him. The trick worked and the dog immediately became docile again and ran around the car looking for more treats, while slobbering licks and kisses on anyone he passed. I gave the Doberman a final piece of cheese and patted his head. The crisis was over.

After Irving and I successfully imported our shipments of weed into Canada, we fronted it to two high-level street dealers. One of them was Brian Kholder, who I liked very much. Barbara and I hung around with Brian and his attractive wife Karen for quite some time until they got into smack and lost interest in us. I can honestly say that I have never had any desire to profit from something like heroin, which causes such devastation in people’s lives. That being said, I had no idea just how addicting the stuff really was until I saw the changes it effected in my friend Brian. The drug made him surly and stubborn and took away his ability to function, and it reduced his energy levels to near zero. Irving was somewhat responsible for Brian and Karen’s addiction. He had Chip “the Limey” Jenkins, who was a friend of Simon Steinberg’s, bring an ounce of pure heroin from London to see if there was a market for it in Montreal. Irving gave Brian the ounce of smack to move and I heard from Brian later that he never sold a gram of it. He used the whole ounce himself and by the end of that ounce, he and Karen were hooked for life.

Simon Steinberg was a gentleman who purchased and traded in several cars from our car lot. Simon began to hang around our office, playing cards and listening to the war stories being traded around by the boys. He was a well-dressed and well-groomed young man with a nice smile and the unfortunate distinction of having the worst breath I ever smelled on a human being. As pleasant as Simon Steinberg was, how he endeared himself to Irving was a mystery to me.

As I mentioned earlier, when I first met Irving he had overcome a gambling problem. At first Irving stayed out of the gin
and poker games that went on between the boys who came around our place of business to play cards. For a while, Irv was content to observe. But the whooping and the laughing and the friendly banter of the card games drew him in, and before long, he began to join us at play. When it came to cards, Irving played conservatively and he played well. He was extremely disciplined and never bluffed that I could see. In fact, he did not play like a gambling addict at all. But I soon became aware that Irving was still very much addicted to gambling. Only he was not gambling at the card table. He was gambling with our scam.

Irving was never satisfied with what we were making and kept upping the size of the loads I was sending to Montreal. We went from shipping crates full of weed to shipping containers filled with weed, and still he was looking for more. Each time the size of our shipments increased to a new level, it tested the boundaries of chance. It is only because the boys on the docks were so good at what they did that the container scam never blew up in our faces. When the
RCMP
wanted to look at a container, they would have to ask our dock worker contacts to go and fetch it for them. If the container was one of ours, the boys would tell the cops that they could not find it or they would stack it in such a way that another container had to be moved before either of the container doors could be opened. Then they would stall the cops until the container was emptied or hidden again somewhere else in the yard. The boys downtown were good at their job. So good that we eventually had so much weed on hand that it began backing up on us. Our last load of nearly six thousand pounds left us with so much weed that several hundred pounds spoiled and went rotten before it could be sold.

At the same time as the weed bales began stacking up, Irving began bitching about having to pay out fifty percent of our earnings to the boys on the docks. Brian Kholder’s younger brother, Buddy, was making a name for himself by smuggling large loads of hash through Russia and the Netherlands into Montreal. Buddy was knocking off back-to-back container loads of hash without a miss and he was getting rich. Buddy was once asked the secret of his success by Bob Bishop and his answer was typical of his attitude.

“I just watched what you guys did and didn’t make the same mistakes,” Buddy laughed.

When Irving wanted to start dealing in hash, I had no problem with it on a moral level. Grass and hash are both the same, only one is cannabis sativa and the other is cannabis indica. Besides, hash does not spoil like weed does and hash is worth a lot more per pound. So when Simon Steinberg offered us a way to bring some hash into Canada by air, Irving was all ears. I could see nothing wrong with trying something new, but I did not want anything new to mess up the good thing Irving and I already had going. Simon told us he had a jet rated pilot’s licence and access to a
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in London. His parents were the owners of a chain of gas stations across Canada. Like Irving, Simon had been brought up rich. He was receiving an allowance of thirty-eight hundred dollars a month when we met him, which is no small change even today. He drove a late model Mercedes-Benz and he had no need of money. But boys will be boys, I guess. Simon had a zest for adventure and he wanted to join us in our little games outside of the card room. He traded in his Benz on a pretty little
BMW CSI
we had for sale and paid us cash for the difference.

It just so happened that Shaun Palmer was around at the time of the purchase and the two started talking about drug deals. Shaun was an Irishman, with the gift of the gab and a thousand one-liners in his joke repertoire. He inherited a senior position in our organization when Jean Paul died. Shaun had been working with Jean Paul for only a short while when his opportunity for advancement came. Shaun knew little about moving weed, he confessed later, but jumped at the opportunity to make some real money. The Irishman was tall and well built with a cheerful grin and a boxer’s face. He looked like he belonged in the underworld, but in truth, he came from a very different background. Shaun was a drafting equipment salesman before he started working for Jean Paul as a furniture salesman in Jean Paul’s store. He had helped Jean Paul with some weed deliveries in the past and since he knew some of Jean Paul’s customers, he was able to take over when his boss dropped permanently out of the scene.

Within a few months of taking over as our main wholesaler, Shaun lost six hundred pounds of our weed all in the same week. Two hundred pounds went down in the trunk of a car belonging to one of his deliverymen, and four hundred pounds went down in a motel when a maid found the marijuana in the room and called the cops. When Shaun came to meet with Irving to discuss the losses I waited as cover, with a loaded shotgun in a car on the second floor of the garage where our office was located. We had no way of knowing who Shaun really was, or if he was going to settle the debt or try to erase it at gunpoint. Irving was furious and ready to kill Shaun, but the Irishman soothed him into submission with his gift of the gab. When Irving started ragging on him about the losses, Shaun retaliated in kind.

“What are you complaining about?” he said in a voice equally as loud as Irving’s. “It’s my responsibility that the weed was lost. I’m the one who has to pay back the debt.”

When Shaun didn’t try to weasel out of the debt, it caught Irving off guard. Even though Shaun did not have the money to cover it, he came to an arrangement with Irving about how to pay us back. Shaun agreed to pay an extra twenty dollars a pound for all future weed fronts, until the loss of the six hundred pounds was made up. This still left a hefty profit margin for Shaun to make some decent money, as the weed he was selling at street level went from two fifty to three hundred a pound and he was paying only two hundred to two ten to us.

Shaun was back in good stead with Irving once he paid back most of his debt and he came to Irving with an offer of a hash supplier in the Middle East. Shaun’s offer was timely and he was instantly taken in as a partner on Irving’s new hash scam with me, John Miller and Simon Steinberg. After consulting with Simon and Shaun, Irving came up with a plan. Simon would fly by commercial airliner to England, where he would use his pilot’s licence to charter a commercial
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jet and fly it to Lebanon. According to Simon, there were tons of places where we could stash the hash in the wings and fuselage of a big
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. Shaun’s friends in Beirut included a captain in the military who
would help us expedite the hash from the city to the airport and onto the plane.

The scam sounded pretty good on the surface but with a little digging I saw flaws. For one thing, Irving and I and Big John Miller already had a good scam going, so why fuck it up? For another thing, there was a serious war going on between the Israelis and the Lebanese so it was not the best time to try something sneaky over there. I had no confidence in Simon Steinberg and I told Irving so. But Irving was my friend and mentor and he was adamant that we should try to import some hash. Irving could not go to Lebanon himself as he was on parole and unable to leave Montreal. Big John Miller was in the same position, although he was free to travel with me to Jamaica.

“Go and oversee the project,” Irving practically begged of me. “If it doesn’t look good you can scrub the mission, but I know I can trust you to make it happen.”

Irving had made me a lot of money up to this point and if he was right about the hash scam, I stood to make even more. So I updated my passport and booked a flight to London, where I had arranged to meet with Simon Steinberg in a hotel restaurant.

As I look back on my past, I find it hard to understand all the risks I have taken. Many could have landed me in prison for a long time. They were calculated chances, I liked to think, and I felt I was smart enough to pull off my scams without getting caught or resorting to violence. But I knew, even then, that my reasoning was flawed, just like everyone else who ends up in prison. I know now that it was not so much the money that I craved as it was the action. The money was a reward that came along with bragging rights for having won at a game, but the game itself was more the draw than the monetary reward.