Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (3 page)

The plan was simple and the first time we tried the
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smuggling empires in Canada. And I had no idea that before the end of my lucrative career, Ryan would be a character in my fictional novel, receiving every imagined punishment I could possibly dream up for him.

When the
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scam came to an end I found myself out of a job, so to speak, as I was no longer needed by Ryan and his crew for investment purposes. The
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scam lasted long enough for all of us to make a little money, but money doesn’t last long when it travels in one direction only. That’s one of the problems with big scores that don’t come every day. It is easy to burn through your earnings just on living expenses, especially if you like to travel first class. Add to this the inherent possibility of imminent arrest or death and the money is burned off even faster. With no jobs interfering with our social lives, there was no end to the parties and poker games that went on all night in Montreal. It was just prior to the Montreal Olympics, which esteemed Mayor Jean Drapeau had claimed, “could no more have a deficit than a man could have a baby.” The Mayor must have been ahead of his time on the subject of men having babies because the roof of the Montreal Olympic Stadium is still not installed due to the debt that followed the games.

The
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scam left us with ample disposable income, so our crew sat in the best seats at stadium events and rock concerts and we were ushered through club lines by doormen who recognized us as free-spending high rollers. The Dark Side of the Moon concert that Pink Floyd put on at the Autostade in Montreal was typical of our evenings out, although it was without doubt the best concert I ever saw. Our crew was passing joints around with perfect strangers who were only too happy to share, as a full moon rose up over the open-air stadium in perfect timing with the music. I thought the moon was a prop, like the rocket that came crashing into the stage, but it was all real and larger than life. We partied like movie stars that warm summer evening in an atmosphere of peace, love and dope. We brought no booze to the concert because we were not into drinking yet. We did, however, begin experimenting with cocaine which was very new to the drug scene.

On our final trip down to Jamaica, our
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scam blew up and died. But Ryan was an enterprising and ambitious individual, and he had partnered with our pal Robby to finance a coke scam. We knew nothing of this at the time, until Robby showed up in Jamaica at the same time as the people in the
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crew arrived.

Phil “Robby” Robson was a unique and interesting character. He was twenty-two years old at the time and stood over six feet two inches tall. He reminded me of the character Ickabod Crane, in
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
. Robby had curly black hair with bangs reaching to his eyes and a wide smile that softened his old man’s face. He walked slowly and stood in a stooped posture, and in all the years I knew him, I never saw Robby run. Robby chain smoked weed or hash mixed with tobacco from cigarettes. He tooled around in a late model Corvette that he would leave unlocked and idling on the street for hours during winter because he did not want his car seat to get cold. For some mysterious reason, his car was never stolen.

His girlfriend, Paula, was a quiet girl with a pretty face and a body out of a magazine centrefold. Robby and his girlfriend used to get stoned on Quaaludes at our parties and would entertain us by acting as though they were going to have sex right there on the floor in front of us all. They never did complete the sex act with an audience watching, but they certainly came close enough to get our attention.

Ryan and Robby had arranged to have a kilo of pure coke stitched into the back panels of a suit jacket worn by a runner I had never met before. The runner had ferried the coke from Colombia to Jamaica and met up with Ryan and Robby in the hotel where the
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crew was staying. Their runner was in his early twenties, slim and clean-cut, with a cropped mustache and short hair. He came across as a businessman when I met him and he acted cool on the surface, but I could see by his mannerisms that he was nervous about his task.

Our
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crew was staying in Ocho Rios at the tip of the north coast of Jamaica. Our accommodation was at a small funky hotel on the water, with a billiard table in the main lobby and a
swimming pool overlooking the ocean. The hotel was on two levels that were cut into a mountainside of lava rock deposited by past volcanoes. Our mixed group of young men and women occupied most of the rooms on the water side of the hotel, a setup that was reminiscent of a scene from Humphrey Bogart’s
Key Largo
. The pool table took up most of the lobby. As visitors entered from the narrow, twisting road leading to the hotel, they could see right through the lobby to a swimming pool and bar that overlooked a turquoise ocean, pock-marked with pink coral reefs. The topography of Ocho Rios is very different from Montego Bay and Negril where the beaches are wide, shallow and easily accessible. In Ocho Rios, known as Ochi to the locals, the mountainous jungle rolls down to the sea where it slips beneath the deep and still water alongside a lava rock shoreline.

The first I realized that coke was going to be couriered to Montreal along with our weed was a few days after check-in, when Barbara and I were invited to a party that was underway across the street from the hotel. There were several of us at the house party including my wife, Ryan and his wife, and Robby and his girlfriend. My sidekick Bishop was there too, along with several of the others who were part of the
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scam. The party centred on the rear balcony of a rental villa that faced a yard with banana trees and palms. The glue that held the party together that night was a warm Jamaican evening, a vacation mentality and a medium-sized sugar bowl filled with Ryan and Robby’s coke. I entered the house with my wife and we were introduced to Duane Allman, of the Allman Brothers Band. Duane was rapping with Ryan and Robby between lines of coke, which the three were snorting in the kitchen. I can’t remember what my conversation with Duane was about, but he seemed very pleasant and we chatted and bumped lines until three in the morning. Unfortunately, Duane Allman returned to the States after this visit to Jamaica and was killed in a motorcycle accident within a few months of our meeting.

It was a relaxed atmosphere even as the coke took effect and the night became haunted with shadows and moonlight. Crickets were chirping and tree frogs were whistling as we snorted lines
of coke on an Arborite kitchen table. The coke was much stronger than any drug I had tried to this point and the night sounds and moving shadows added to a disorienting high. The coke made me feel talkative. Friendly. Animated. Articulate. Insightful. Awake. Alive. It was absolutely nothing like the crap you get today that makes you want to hide in a corner and cover your head with a bag. We had ample opportunity to research the effects of Ryan’s coke when we got back to Canada because, although his coke importing scam was successful, there turned out to be no market for the drug in Montreal. Cocaine was only just beginning to make the scene in the U.S. of A., and little sister Canada had not even started to wake up to it yet.

Even Ryan’s well-connected loan shark buddy, Jean Paul LaPierre, was unable to find a buyer for the blow. Jean Paul was brought into our group after he met Ryan at a discount store that sold cut-rate stereos in Laval. Ryan had become kind of a salesman for the stereo store, and when he was not smuggling dope into Canada he was busy installing stereos for all of his friends in their houses and cars. The store’s prices were great but there was no room for bad debt and that is where Jean Paul came in. Jean Paul was a collector for the store owner, as an aside to his own drug trafficking and loan shark business. Jean Paul drove a Cadillac which in some way compensated for his short stature of five foot eight or nine. If you are wondering how a little guy like Jean Paul could be a loan shark and debt collector, think of a pit bull terrier or think of Joe Pesci in the movie
Goodfellas
. Jean Paul was small, but he was dangerous. He didn’t hang around much with our crowd, not until he began dating Manny Maniezzo’s ex-girlfriend, which was an insane match if ever there was one. Go figure. Jean Paul, the sawed-off enforcer, and Susan Braun, a tall, attractive, intelligent college student majoring in psychology. I would usually run into Jean Paul when I visited Ryan at his home, where the loan shark dropped in to see him on business.

If it wasn’t Jean Paul, there was always someone dropping in at Ryan and Sally’s that summer. If the truth be told, we all came largely because of the coke buried in his back yard. The coke
changed colour, turning from white to brown after being buried for a few days, but it lost none of its potency. It was so good I always wondered if it was cut with smack, especially after it turned brown. Like others in our group, Barbara and I would find ourselves calling Ryan and Sally even when we had seen them just the night before, as the urge to do coke overwhelmed our usual manners and discretion. We would party all night at Ryan’s, doing coke and Quaaludes, and then drive home in the morning, cursing the birds for their singing. Our child-substitute Doberman would be waiting for us at home to be let out for a pee and a three minute crap in the yard. Then she was ushered back to bed where the three of us would sleep until late afternoon.

When I wasn’t coking at Ryan’s, I would meet my friends for daily get-togethers at Jeans Plus, a clothing store owned by David “Kaka” Klein and his partner Maury. Kaka always had a huge chunk of black hash as enticement to lure friends into his store because he was bored out of his mind staying there by himself all day. He generously shared his hash with visitors but he would never let anyone take a piece home with them, except as a consolation prize if he happened to win money from them at cards. I often left my money behind in games of poker or gin with Kaka and Maury, and I always suspected that they were partners at the card table as well as in business. “Two friends and a stranger” was the expression they used when they took my money and laughed about it. On the odd occasion that I won, they would pay the debt in stock, until I ended up with a closet full of cheap clothes. My buddies Bishop and Manny would drop by the store on a daily basis, along with a host of other players who came by to get high and play cards. There was always a lot of kibitzing going on at the card games, and I found the conversation interesting. Many of the people coming into the store seemed to know the details of major criminal events in town, from robberies to murder, and I soon came to the conclusion that criminals and cons are some of the biggest gossips in the world.

No wonder they always got busted.

Before he got into the coke biz, my friend Brad Wilder was
into some decent action pulling bags of weed from the bellies of Air Canada planes. It must have been a terrible blow to his father, who was a big shot with Air Canada, when his son got caught. While Brad was on bail for that bust, he hooked up with a school chum named Marty Ralston for a coke run to Colombia. A few months after his coke run, which judging by the coke in his sugar bowl was successful, the cops came looking for Brad with a warrant. He hid out at Derrick “the Doctor’s” house for several months, before locating a safe house in the Laurentians.

Brad “the Wild Man” Wilder was a born showman, with endless stories about his travels and adventures. At six foot two, with blond hair and pale skin like an albino, he must have looked a sight walking around Bogotá, Colombia in a white suit and a Panama hat with his buddy Marty. According to the story mill, Marty also wore a white suit and Panama hat while in Colombia. At six four and fair-complexioned, he must have looked like Brad’s twin. Talk about low profile. Brad had a habit of saying “hello” as a comment rather than a greeting. As in, “I answered a knock at my door and the cops were there. Hello!” His expressions were always animated and he spoke with much waving of arms and body movements. Brad was always a lot of fun to have around but unfortunately, a few weeks after he served his time in jail and was released on parole, he died of a brain aneurysm. He had turned himself in after several years on the run, in order to clear up his past and marry his new girlfriend and turn his life around. But when he was off hunting up north with Hoss and Derrick, he ran out of the house to watch some ducks fly overhead and dropped dead of an aneurysm. The last Derrick saw of the “Wild Man” was at his funeral, where Brad’s girlfriend was tearfully telling everyone that the only memento she had from Brad was the ring he left her. Derrick was put in the uncomfortable position of asking for the ring back, after explaining that it was an heirloom from his grandfather that went missing during Brad’s stay at his house. It was a bit of a shock to hear that the “Wild Man” would steal from Derrick after all the ear, nose and throat specialist had done for
him, but it was par for the course with some of my friends and associates.

After the
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cash cow died, I was ready for some independence and came up with a scam of my own. There was no prob lem raising investment money. That’s how it was done back then. Someone would come up with a scam and shop it around to all of their friends and associates for financing. With bank interest running at four per cent, there was no better action to be had on their money. The mooches were lined up three deep, hoping for a two-to-one return on their investment that I promised would follow within a matter of weeks. But it wasn’t just about the money for me. It was about being into some kind of action. My buddies were scamming and scheming and gambling and I wanted to be dealt into the game.