Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (17 page)

Hurting people was not my thing, and yet I have to admit that I had been prepared to stand by while Irving and John Miller killed an innocent man who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not that Irving would have stopped his plans because of anything I said. When he was convinced of something, there was no changing his mind. Nevertheless, I do not feel I have the right to stand in judgment of Irving or John Miller,
who risked their everlasting souls by offering to ride along on a hit together. We all shared in the shame of that decision but mine was a convenient position, where I stood to benefit from Irving’s crime without wearing the guilt.

It was all business with Simon Steinberg when I met him in England, even though we were meeting over a sumptuous dinner at a five-star hotel.

“Where’s the plane?” I asked.

“Don’t worry. It’s all taken care of. I will be flying it into Lebanon.”

Simon’s promise was given to me with a reassuring grin as we dined on rack of lamb. While we talked, Simon showed off his experience in fine dining by recommending our meal and ordering it. Then he began instructing me on some of the finer points of English social graces, including an explanation about all the cutlery. It pissed me off that even though I was paying for all this fine dining, Simon was talking down to me like I was some poor slave and he was the rich white master. I found myself resenting the little prick more and more for butting his rich white ass into my arena. I could only speculate on why Irving had ignored my warnings and gone into business with him. Was it because Irving and Simon came from such similar backgrounds, both having been raised with maids and servants and both being Jewish? Why was Irving being taken in by this little con man, I wondered, as my own sense of greed and duty kept me from abandoning the hash project in spite of my misgivings. After our meal was over, I booked my ticket to Lebanon and left Simon with his promise to fly the
DC-8
to Beirut ringing in my ears.

It was a long flight to Lebanon and I slept through most of it. When the plane touched down at the Beirut airport, I was concerned that customs might find and seize the hundred grand or more that I had on me. But I was treated with courtesy and respect as I was whisked through the Lebanese Customs and Immigration stations in an expedient fashion.

Being in Lebanon back then was probably one of the few times in my life where I felt in real peril. I was entering wartorn
Beirut during the war with Israel, with over one hundred grand cash in my pocket and not so much as a stick to defend myself with. I was booked in at the Intercontinental Hotel, where my associate from Montreal, Shaun Palmer, had flown in a few days earlier to connect with his Lebanese contacts who were supplying the hash. I took a taxi from the airport and checked into my room before meeting Shaun in the hotel bar. When I found him, I had to tear the Irishman away from a few gentlemen in suits who were laughing at his jokes. The hotel bar was filled to capacity with men in suits and I wondered out loud to Shaun what they were doing here during a war.

“They’re spies mostly,” said Shaun with his usual cherubic smile.

“What did you tell them you were in Beirut for?” I asked him, fearing the worst.

“I told them I’m selling fire trucks,” he said with a grin. “No one knows anything about fire trucks and I’m sure they need them around here with the war going on.”

I liked his answer and my confidence level edged a little higher.

“How is your military friend who’s going to deliver the hash to the plane?” I asked.

“Not too good,” said Shaun without blinking. “He was killed in the war. We’ll have to make do without him.”

“Jesus Christ, Shaun! That’s a major change in plans! What about the fifty grand we paid for the hash up front?” I asked. “Can we get it back?”

“That’s already spent,” he replied. “The hash is waiting for us in a house not far from our hotel.”

“So now what?”

“So now we wait for the plane.”

To prepare the hash for Simon’s arrival, Shaun and I had to leave the relative comfort and security of the Intercontinental Hotel to travel to a small adobe dwelling a few miles from the hotel. Shaun had paid fifty grand up front for the hash while he was still in Montreal, and now I was to examine the product and complete the second payment. I would have liked to have seen
our pilot and the
DC
-
8
land in Lebanon before I committed to the purchase of the hash, but Simon was not due to arrive for a couple more days yet and we had to get everything ready before his arrival.

It was an eerie ride that night, as Shaun and I drove through the streets of Beirut with a low rolling fog and darkness setting in. Every street and every corner had machine-gun-toting soldiers on patrol but they ignored us for the most part while we drove past. The moment we stopped and parked at our destination, however, we were immediately questioned by two soldiers on foot patrol. We were on a narrow street beside a row of one story buildings made of stone and mud. As the soldiers spoke no English and we spoke no Lebanese, we pointed to the house where we were going and the soldiers examined our documents then bade us pass. Entering inside the adobe structure, I was ushered with Shaun into a small, dark room where I was surrounded by several men dressed in loose-fitting clothes. As I entered the dwelling, I looked quickly at the three or four men but I had little time to study their faces. There was a small wooden table with four chairs in the main room of the two-room house. A small portable stove was in the kitchen area, along with one or two pots and pans on the counter. A sheet hung over the one window facing the street. I was struck by the simplicity of the lifestyle these people were living. The entire dwelling and all of its contents would probably be worth less than the money I kept in my small change pocket. As we moved inside the house and the door closed behind us, I was thinking about the hundred grand in my jacket and how Shaun and I could disappear in Lebanon without leaving a trace. I was seriously wondering if my throat was going to be cut, when one of the Bedouins gestured to me to come into the next room. The room was dark and I could not see what or who was in there as he led the way and bade me to follow. I entered the small closed-in room with Shaun behind me and several men following behind him, thinking that if there was a rip-off coming this was where it would take place. The hairs on my neck began to stand up straight as I entered the windowless room, still thinking about
a knife being pulled and my throat being cut. My fear was still present when the Bedouin bade me to come closer and I took another step into the bedroom. He pointed to the far wall and then walked over and pulled a wooden crate from beneath a cot like single bed. He lifted the lid from the crate and inside were four hundred and thirty-one slabs of fresh blond Lebanese bricks of hash, each wrapped in its own sackcloth and bearing the seal of the farmer who sold it. Another crate under the bed held an equal amount of hash, for a total of nine hundred and fifty pounds of hashish. After the Bedouin opened the crate for me, I broke off a piece of hash and smelled it. It was the finest gold Lebanese I had ever seen. It smelled like cinnamon and was so soft and malleable that it could be handled without it crumbling apart like blond Moroccan hash or Lebanese kief. At Shaun’s signal, I handed a wad of one hundred Canadian one thousand dollar bills to the Bedouin. When the transaction was completed, we left the hash in the care of Shaun’s Lebanese contacts, except for a small piece of personal that I brought back to the hotel.

Shaun and I returned to the Intercontinental Hotel for a toke and a late night drink on the balcony of my room where we discussed the day’s events. I was glad to be out of there, I told him, when I finished rolling a joint of hash mixed with tobacco. I confided my fears to him but Shaun scoffed at the idea that his friends in war torn Beirut might have robbed and killed us. I believed his sincerity, but I thought him naive.

As the evening progressed I made a comment to him about the thunder in the hills.

“What a strange climate,” I said as I inhaled a joint of our Lebanese hash and basked in the satisfaction of a scam that was coming together as planned. I gazed across the city from our seventh-floor balcony then looked over to Shaun.

“I hear thunder all the time and yet it never rains.”

“That’s not thunder,” Shaun laughed. “That’s the Israeli jets bombing the Lebanese positions in the hills just outside of Beirut.”

It was a warm, beautiful night, in spite of the distant bombing, with a cloudless red sky that was melting into total darkness. My job here was almost over, I thought, as I felt the hashish
calming my stomach. The cargo of hash was all ready to go and Shaun’s Lebanese friends had even offered to drive the crates to the airport for us. In spite of the positive events, I found myself almost hoping that Simon would not show up with the plane. Without the services of Shaun’s Captain, we would have to use stealth to get the hash through the city and onto the plane. And if anything went wrong in Lebanon, we would be royally fucked. This wasn’t Jamaica with a rusty system of English justice. This was Beirut and a war was going on. Justice can come swiftly from the end of a gun barrel during wartime conditions and double-crosses can quickly become triple-crosses and worse when death is everyone’s constant companion. How the hell were we going to drive through the streets of Beirut and breech airport security to load a plane with contraband hashish with a war going on?

The next morning I felt better after a good night’s sleep and I attributed my earlier fears to the strong hash and not enough sleep. I had a job to do and somehow I would see it through. After a comfortable breakfast in the hotel restaurant overlooking the lobby, I wondered how I was going to stand another day in this boring hotel. I talked to Shaun about going to a famous Casino Resort Spa on the ocean a few miles outside of town, but Shaun looked into it and informed me that the resort had been bombed and destroyed.

It was my fifth day in Beirut and I was becoming impatient for the arrival of our pilot and plane. While sipping a cup of coffee at the coffee shop, I thought I saw a familiar figure at the front desk check-in. It was a short man with a full head of thick, wavy hair, dressed in an airline captain’s uniform. Another slim nondescript European man in a gray suit was standing behind the man in the captain’s uniform and I could barely believe my eyes as I gave Shaun a nudge. Shaun looked over and he was as surprised as I was. Neither of us was expecting Simon Steinberg for another twenty-four hours and there he was at the front desk of the Beirut Intercontinental Hotel, a full day ahead of schedule. Simon looked very official in his starched white Captain’s shirt. I caught his eye as he finished checking in. I thought I was
going to owe the little Jew an apology for doubting him, as I waved him over to join Shaun and me at our breakfast table.

“Good flight?”

“Excellent flight.”

“I wasn’t sure you would make it.”

“I told you I would be here, didn’t I?”

“Is the
DC-8
at the airport?”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean not exactly?” I asked. “You’re here. So where’s the plane?”

“I flew in by
BOAC
.”

“What do you mean you flew in by
BOAC
? Tell me you’re joking and the plane is parked at the airport.”

“Well no, not exactly,” said Simon. “There’s been a change of plans.”

“What do you mean a change of plans?” I said with my blood pressure rising. “We have the hash all set up and ready to go and now you show up with no fucking plane!”

“Now, don’t get excited,” Simon insisted. “I have a plane coming. It will be here tomorrow.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Simon went on to tell us that the
DC
-
8
he was going to charter in London had become unavailable due to mechanical problems. As an alternate plan, he had commissioned a Lockheed Lodestar that he chartered out of New York. When he told me that, I immediately saw a problem. The propeller-driven cargo plane was coming all the way from New York to Beirut to supposedly pick up a load of fruit and vegetables to deliver to Montreal. Now anyone with even a limited knowledge of aircraft economics knows that the cost of flying a Lockheed Lodestar to Beirut was prohibitive. Flying a fuel-sucking old crate that far to pick up fruit would have required that the oranges sell for a hundred dollars apiece to make a profit on the trip.

“That’s no fucking good,” I whispered as a kind of panic began to set in. “The charter crew isn’t even in on the deal. What’s to stop them from calling the cops, or for that matter, taking our load of hash and throwing it in the ocean?”

“Don’t worry,” soothed Simon, bad breath dripping from every word. “Shaun and I will ride back on the plane with the flight crew to make sure they don’t fuck with the cargo. I’ll tell the crew that the shipment of fruit was unavailable because of the war and that we will be picking up some spare engine parts instead. We’ll throw the two crates of hash onto the plane as engine spares and fly from Beirut straight to Preswick, Scotland. Then we fly on to Reykjavik, Iceland and over the salt chuck to Gander and then on to our hanger at Dorval. I’ll sit on the crate all the way back so no one looks in it.”

I looked over at Shaun, whose pug face was showing remarkably little surprise at these latest developments. Shaun was not a gangster, exactly. He was a salesman before the untimely death of his friend Jean Paul. But Shaun did look like a gangster with his short hair and heavy build. He had an Irish face that beamed and reddened with changing emotions, especially when he’d had a drink or two.

This is like a plot in a B movie, I thought, as I gloomed over the latest developments. I surveyed the bar area trying to separate the spies from the businessmen, to no avail. What would businessmen be doing here in the middle of a war anyways, I asked myself. Only people with high stakes at risk would chance a visit to Beirut at this time. People like us. I was just finishing my coffee and I was still digesting the new turn of events when the slim young man who had been standing behind Simon at the front desk approached our table.