Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (26 page)

“Brandi, let’s get out of here!” she said, but it was too late.

Before the girls could get out, two men in masks stepped from around the corner of the kitchen and pointed guns at them. Both of the gunmen wore hoods. One man was about five foot ten and slender. That man was mean and threatening while the other man, who was about six feet tall, seemed to be less aggressive.

“Is your husband nervous?” asked the mean one from beneath his mask. I found out later that he was an old associate and ex-partner of Irving’s named Roger Ouimet. Ouimet was a contract killer who had worked with the infamous Jacques “Apache” Francois, the most prolific hit man the Montreal Hells Angels ever had in their ranks.

“No, my husband’s not nervous,” replied Barbara holding tightly to the baby. She was taken downstairs with her sister and the baby and then the two women were handcuffed around the support pole in the centre of the basement.

Roger Ouimet’s partner, Ronny McGuire, was a recently released jailhouse con who had served time with Ouimet. He appeared to have little interest in the questions his partner was asking and he was basically along on the ride as backup. Ronny McGuire escorted the girls to the bathroom when they needed to go and passed Barbara the baby’s bottle when our daughter started crying. Although he was along on the home invasion, Ronny seemed kinder and more sensitive than his partner.

Roger Ouimet pointed his gun at Barbara and demanded the bail document that I had manipulated away from Irving’s girlfriend, Jane. When he was told that the bail ticket was with my lawyer, he placed the baby at Barbara’s feet in the basement and went upstairs to wait for me to return home. The telephone rang several times throughout the hours that the two men waited in
darkness for me. Barbara told me the men were upset by the phone calls. When my expected arrival time came and expired and more hours began to drag by, the two men became nervous. They were careful to flush the butts of their chain-smoked cigarettes down the toilet to avoid
DNA
printing. That indicated to me that they were well-schooled professionals. After several hours of fruitless waiting the two men gave up the hunt and helped themselves to everything of value that I owned. They took my stereo and my shotgun and they also took my wife’s jewelry and loaded it all into suitcases which they put into Brandi’s Volkswagen. In a curious twist of behaviour, they left my wife’s wedding rings on her fingers while stealing her gold watch and gold chain and gold bracelets.

After the girls finished their story, I began absorbing the gravity of the situation until I came to a realization. The gloves were off in the battle of wills between Irving and me and the rules of engagement had now been made clear.

There were no rules.

Irving had sent two men into my home and terrorized my wife and I didn’t care about what anyone said, I was going to make him pay.

I hid my guns and my pot in the air conditioning ducts in the basement and I called the police and told them we had had a home invasion. I told the police that the robbers had already left. Ten minutes later, two cops slowly came up to the front door. I was disgusted by their caution, as I watched through the living room window as the two police officers crept up the front walk. I opened the door before they rang the bell and advised them in sarcastic tones that their concern was unnecessary and that the gunmen had left a long time ago. The two uniformed policemen entered the house and then waved in a dozen more policemen who were hiding outside behind their squad cars.

When the first two cops came inside to take my report, I told them that the gunmen who had come to my house were sent by my ex-partner from Modern Motors to collect the bail stub that I was holding onto for Chip the Limey. I told them that my ex-partner was in jail and that we had had a disagreement over the
bail money that had turned into an extortion attempt and a home invasion robbery.

The police were skeptical of my story until the telephone rang while they were standing and milling about searching for clues. One of the police officers motioned for me to take the phone, while he listened in on another line. His partner listened in beside my ear. It was one of the gunmen who had invaded our home and he was whispering into the other end of my phone line.

“Did you like that, eh? Do you know why we took your shotgun? That’s for you.” The cops were urging me to egg the caller on, to keep him talking, but I lost my cool and exploded in rage.

“You bastards are working for a fucking crook! Do you understand? You tell that fucking Irving that he’s nothing but a fucking crook.”

The call ended at that point, as the party on the other end disconnected the line. The policeman on the other phone came back into the kitchen, while the cop listening in by my ear hung up the receiver for me.

As the police roamed about my house taking notes and conferring with Barbara and Brandi and myself, the reality of what had happened sunk in for me. As my emotions raged between anger and despair, I realized in those slowly settling after moments, that it was one thing for me to risk my own life playing cowboys and Indians with Irving. But if Barbara or my daughter were ever to fall victim to my indiscriminate lifestyle, my world would never be the same. This was not the way it was supposed to be. The war was supposed to be between me and Irving. If anything had happened to my wife or daughter, I would have gone to the ends of the earth for retribution, but where would that leave me if my family was harmed?

I realized then that as a man with a family that I cared about, I was at a serious disadvantage in a war with Irving. Irving had no such encumbrances because he cared about no one, including his girlfriend Jane. Irving was sitting in jail, safe and sound, while I was living at home like a ship at anchor. A sitting duck.

The police left a tape recorder hooked up to my phone and left behind their written report that was needed for my home insurance claim. I found some satisfaction that my blaming Irving in the police report would fuck up his day passes for a while, and at the same time, I was pissed that he was in jail where I could not reach him.

My sister-in-law and her husband became distant to Barbara and me after the home invasion incident. Brandi began to hang around with Chip “the Limey” Jenkins, whose humor and sarcasm she found enjoyable. Chip was an interesting character who, unlike many of his underworld friends, was intelligent as well as charming. While he was on bail and awaiting trial in Montreal on the Lebanon hash scam, he was unable to work legally without immigrant status. He began working under the table, for a local music promoter, to supply whatever drugs were needed by the performing groups that were booked into Montreal. Since Chip did not do drugs himself, he was the perfect candidate for the job. He was called upon to deliver an ounce of cocaine to the hotel room of the Rolling Stones when they were back in town to perform, and, as a fellow Englishman, he was invited into their suite for some conversation. I asked him about it the next day.

“So you were invited in by the Stones?” I said to him, trying not to sound like a middle-aged groupie.

“Yeah,” he answered.

“Did you do a line with Mick Jagger?”

“No,” he said, with that little schoolboy smile of his.

“Did you smoke a joint?”

“No.”

“Well, what did you do with him?”

“We had a cup of tea.”

I was hovering around Chip like a mother hen with chicks, in order to defend my stake in the bail money that had been put up for him. At the same time as the Limey was being shadowed by me, he was being threatened by Irving who was passing him messages from jail. Irving ordered Chip, by messenger, to collect the bail from the courts and give it up to Jane. I was telling Chip
that it was my money and not to give it to anyone but me. The smartest thing the Limey could do, under the circumstances, was to leave town as quickly as possible, which he did after his trial ended. He chose to live in Vancouver, which is the furthest place from Montreal you can be and still remain in Canada.

He came up with an idea to stop me from pestering him. He suggested I get a seizure order on the bail money through the courts. That way, I would not have to worry about him absconding with the dough and turning it over to Irving. It was a fantastic idea, and I lost no time in contacting a civil lawyer who I had met when I was selling word processors. I gave the lawyer the bail ticket I had in my possession and had him put a seizure before judgment on the fifty thousand dollars bail money. That way, no matter what happened, the bail money was protected and no amount of threats or arm twisting by Irving was going to get it away from me. Check mate, I thought, as I completed the arrangements with the lawyer.

Barbara and I moved out of our house the day after the home invasion. We moved into a motel at first. Shortly after we moved, I phoned Fast Freddie who was out of prison on a weekend pass. Freddie was in contact with Irving whenever he went back into prison and I urged him to pass on a message. “Tell that fat prick Irving that his flunkies fucked up. Tell him he’s never getting that bail money and I’ll be waiting for him when he gets out!”

When Freddie started to warn me about the danger I was in and suggested I give up the bail ticket, it sounded to me like he was defending Irving’s position. At that point, I told Freddie that I did not trust him anymore and hung up the phone.

I went to see my friend Hoss who was from a different milieu than either Freddie or Irving. Ron “Hoss” Kingsley was my age and came from a similar west end background as I did. Hoss ran his father’s second Ford dealership and he had no other reason than enjoyment for hanging around with mobsters. Hoss and his wife both did the better part of two years in prison for importing dresses from Afghanistan, with buttons that were made of hash. Like a man born into a woman’s body, Hoss did not fit properly into his station in life. Hoss was not just a fringer who
hung on the sidelines with criminal friends. Hoss was a mobster in businessman’s clothing. Hoss collected an arsenal of weapons that he was keeping to counter a possible Separatist revolution in Quebec. When I talked to him about my fight with Irving, Hoss advised me that the two men who were sent after me were there for a hit not a robbery. He would not tell me how he knew this, only that there was a contract out on me and that it was a fact, not a rumour.

Hoss was close friends with Allan “Hawkeye” Stone, whose partner was Big Solly Cohen. In the typical culture of the underworld, there were the usual ties between the players. Hawkeye had gone to school with Hoss. Hoss had had previous dealings with big Solly. Big Solly had once been a partner of Irving’s. In fact, Irving used to proclaim his hatred of Solly so loudly and vehemently, whenever the other man’s name was mentioned, that it was obvious there were bitter feelings between the two. Irving complained that Solly had ripped him off once, on a trailerload of hot televisions. Solly always denied the accusation, but I could not see Irving making something like that up and being so angry about it if it were not true. Irving’s complaints about Solly also seemed credible because Solly never criticized Irving and the hate was all one-sided.

My friend Hoss confirmed to me again that the visit to my house was a hit and not a robbery and then offered to turn me on to his friends, Solly and Hawkeye. He said they could arrange a hit on Irving in jail, which Hoss said was the easiest place to get him. The offer came with only one condition. Fifty grand up front. I thought about the offer for several days before I passed on it. I was not too keen on paying Solly Cohen and Allan Stone fifty grand for a hit on Irving, when I had already heard that Solly was in the habit of pulling rip-offs. Not only that, but fifty grand represented the exact amount Irving and I were fighting over. I could not see the financial wisdom of giving away fifty grand to save fifty grand, especially when I knew that the offer from Hoss might be a con. Perhaps, more importantly, I was hesitant to enter into a murder conspiracy with two people I did not know, other than by reputation.

Instead of contracting out the job on Irving, I had my friend Little Joe buy me a rifle and scope through an ad in the papers. Then I bought a wig, a mask and an instrument to calculate the distance to a target and prepared to get Irving before he got me.

I made a special visit to prison to consult with my old pal, Big John Miller, who was not doing too well. John Miller had contracted cancer in jail and was being treated with radiation. He was furious with Irving for having encouraged him to go along on that fateful ride which led to prison and was even more bitter when he ended up with a colostomy bag on his hip. John Miller’s advice on the subject of my war with Irving was apocalyptic. “What you have to do is cut his balls off,” John Miller whispered across the metal table at the medium security visiting room. “Hit him where it hurts. Kill that bitch, Jane, who’s running his errands and paying his goons.”

I could understand that John Miller hated Irving, but I was surprised at how much he hated Jane. I could see no value in John Miller’s advice to kill Jane, which would only stop Irving temporarily before opening up a war of retribution against people that I cared about. Besides it was not Jane that I wanted dead. It was Irv. Jane denied it, of course, when I confronted her about helping Irving prepare for my home invasion. But what better place was there for Irving’s henchmen to hang out and watch me other than the house Jane was living in, which was right on my path home.

“Irving would never have arranged something like that,” Jane replied to my accusation, and she seemed to believe what she was saying, even if I did not. Instead of killing her as John Miller suggested I wrote her off as Irving’s flunky and never spoke to her again.

John Miller was unable to help me much with my war strategy, but he was kind enough to offer us shelter at his house. His wife Louise was a loyal friend and she opened her home to Barbara and me, knowing that there was a contract out on my head. In spite of her brave and kind offer of shelter, we did not stay for very long. I was a danger for Louise to have around, but I had other reasons for leaving. Between Louise’s sorrowful face
because John Miller had cancer and was in jail and Barbara who was shaking uncontrollably after the home invasion, I did not feel very comfortable there.