Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (39 page)

Shortly after my pot bust, I received a call from my old Jamaican pal, Righteous. Righteous had immigrated to Florida, where he was working with his wife at a Hertz Rent a Car dealership. He said that he was ready to come up and start growing pot with me in Vancouver. I told him of my recent bust and I told him that I was no longer interested in dealing drugs. Righteous began to complain about how hard it was living in the States, with his and his wife’s salary barely keeping up with their needs. He asked me what he could do to get ahead. I told him to keep working hard at his job if he wanted to get ahead. After that, I never heard from Righteous again. I figured the hash scam he had going with Solly and Hawkeye was finally over and Righteous had been flushed down the toilet by the Montreal crew.

After the call from Righteous, I heard from Hawkeye Stone one last time. He called me out of the blue in Vancouver to tell me that he had access to several thousand pounds of Columbian weed in Montreal. He said that he would front me a couple of hundred pounds to sell in Vancouver, if I wanted to come to Montreal and get it. He went on to tell me that his aircraft cleaner from our hash scam had moved off to Toronto to retire and because I had heard the same thing from Righteous, I finally believed him. Even though I told Righteous that I was through dealing drugs, I decided I would check out Hawkeye’s weed in Montreal and see if there was any benefit in selling it in Vancouver, where the prices were astonishingly high. A price of a thousand dollars a pound was established on the phone, which left room to double up on my investment. That meant a potential two hundred thousand dollars in profit, with no cash outlay.

I spoke to my electrician pal, Ben Jessup, and he agreed to go partners with me on the deal. Ben had wired up my first grow op for me and I trusted him as well as you can trust anyone in
this business. Ben had been busted at his own home grow op, just like I had, and he was pretty cool about it. When the cops came to the house to bust him, he just smiled and said, “Oh well. I guess you got me.”

Ben’s pal, Jim, was the pot dealer who sold Ben’s weed in Vancouver and Jim had never been arrested. Jim was a smart cookie. He moved every six months to a different location and changed his cell phone at the same time. If he didn’t think you were worth knowing, he wouldn’t give you his new number and that would be the last you would ever see of him.

So the plan was for the three of us to fly from Vancouver to Montreal to pick up the load of weed from Hawkeye. Ben was going to kill two birds with one stone and buy a couple of cars in Montreal at the same time as he picked up the weed. Two hundred pounds of pressed weed could easily fit in the trunk of an American car. He and Jim would ferry the cars and the weed back to B.C., with Ben in the chase vehicle and Jim driving the bomb. Ben, being the consummate businessman, figured to make money on the weed and the cars, both of which were cheaper on the east coast. The only reason I was to be in Montreal was to act as the intermediary between the two sets of people who did not know each other.

When Hawkeye first called me in Vancouver, we had chatted about our plans in roundabout terms on my cell phone. When I called him back to confirm that I was indeed coming to see him, he warned me about the danger of talking business on a cell phone.

“You’re probably right,” I answered into my cell phone, “But I’m not discussing details.”

“Just remember, I warned you.”

I knew he was right, but I had no reason to think that I was being watched when I was up to so very little at the time.

I arrived in Montreal on a separate flight from the one Ben and Jim were on, and then checked into the Holiday Inn in Dorval. It was the same hotel that Ziggy Epstein and the crew had started out from to meet the plane from the ill-fated Bahamas scam. I couldn’t help but think back to those wild and
crazy days, as Jim and Ben went off to purchase the two cars they wanted. Ben bought two bread-and-butter models, as they say in the car trade. One was an Oldsmobile Cutlass and the other was a Pontiac Grand Prix.

When I informed him we were ready with the cars, Hawkeye was slow in producing the weed, for some unknown reason.

Sometimes, the only thing that stands between a criminal and his being caught is his own unreliability. He says six but arrives at eight. He says he’ll have the stuff with him, but he shows up without it.

Well, it turned out that our asses were saved because Hawkeye couldn’t get his shit together to complete the deal on time. Just before Hawkeye was finally ready to deliver the weed to my runners, two things happened which set me on edge. First Hawkeye had instructed me to have the transport vehicle parked in the parking lot of a local truck stop and restaurant near our hotel. The truck stop backed onto a large parking lot and I instructed Ben to park the Cutlass at the very back of the lot. If all went as I expected, the transport car would be driven off by one of Hawkeye’s runners and returned with the weed in the trunk that same afternoon. I drove past the truck stop on several occasions and was dismayed to see the Pontiac still sitting in the parking lot alone and untouched all day. On one of my drive pasts, I noticed a four-wheel-drive Jimmy parked near the Pontiac with its engine idling. The Jimmy had a large
CB
antenna on its roof and an older, gray-haired man was sitting in the car drinking coffee. A few hours later, when I passed by again, he was still there. Then as I returned to my hotel and drove into the parking lot, an unmarked cop car peeled away just as I arrived, and I got a funny vibe from the scene.

I went upstairs to my room and met with Ben and his runner and we did a line or two of coke. I told Ben and Jim of my suspicions about the Jimmy in the parking lot and told Jim to go and see if it was still there. When he came back with the news that the Jimmy was still in the parking lot of the truck stop, I left the hotel and drove straight to my friend Derrick the Doctor’s house. I had not seen or spoken to Derrick for a couple of years,
when I pulled into his driveway and asked him if I could use his phone. I called Hawkeye from Derrick’s phone and told him to stop the deal immediately and to come right over to Derrick’s house to meet me. Then I made small talk with Derrick who must have thought that this was my rudest behaviour yet.

Hawkeye finally arrived in his Mercedes. It was the same Mercedes that he had driven for years, although it had had a top-to-bottom restoration done on it. Hawkeye was skeptical when I told him about the man in the Jimmy, as Derrick stood listening to our conversation. Hawkeye told me to hop in his car and we’d go back and check my story out. With the weather clear and the sun shining brightly off the glistening snow at the side of the road, we drove slowly along the service road that led to the truck stop. As we pulled up to the truck stop, we saw that the Jimmy was still parked at the drop. But as soon as he spied Hawkeye’s Mercedes, the driver of the Jimmy pulled out and left.

“Look, there he goes,” I said with excitement in my voice.

“We’ll follow him,” said Hawkeye.

We followed the Jimmy in Hawkeye’s car for about a city block until he turned down a side street.

“If he’s a cop, he’s blown it now,” said Hawkeye as he followed the Jimmy. “This is a dead-end street. We’ll stop here at this end of the street and wait. If he’s what you say he is, he’ll have to come back past us.”

It took only a minute before the Jimmy came back up the dead end street, with the driver sheepishly avoiding our stares as he drove past us.

“I guess he’s a cop,” said Hawkeye.

“The deal is off,” I said to Hawkeye. “Forget it.”

I drove back to my hotel where I put two and two together. We were all hot. Hot like firecrackers. There must have been an undercover team on Ben, Jim and me at the Holiday Inn and they were probably listening to our every word from the hotel suite next door. I thought again about that ghost car that I had seen speeding away from the hotel and figured that it was probably part of the same surveillance operation. I told Ben and his runner the facts of life. Although we all felt disappointed, we
aborted the mission and headed back to Vancouver. Ben consoled himself with the fact that he had purchased two cars that he would make a profit on in B.C.

The second near miss came right after that. Since I was flying back to Vancouver empty handed, I decided to bring the better part of a pound of Colombian weed that Hawkeye had supplied me with as a sample when I arrived in Montreal. I broke the weed into several small packets. I wrapped them up with masking tape and I addressed them to a person from the phone book. Then I put a stamp on each parcel. I did this hoping to use the postal privacy laws to my best advantage, if the weed were ever discovered on me. I put a package in each pocket of my jacket and slacks, making certain that there was nothing metal on my person to trigger the airport security alarms. I had done this a dozen times at least in the past and I had never had a problem on domestic flights. But this time I was departing from Mirabel Airport rather than Dorval.

“Mirabel is an international airport,” warned Hawkeye, when he saw what I was planning.

“Yes, but it’s a domestic flight,” I replied ignoring his warning. “I’ve done this a million times.”

“Suit yourself,” Hawkeye sighed with a shake of his head.

His warning came back to haunt me as I stood in the screening line at Mirabel Airport, waiting my turn to pass through the metal detectors. Something was unusual, I noticed, with a small lump forming in my throat. The screeners were pulling people out of line and body searching them, as well as using the electronic wand. They were taking things out of people’s pockets and checking through their items and articles. If they started pulling things out of my pockets, I would be screwed. I was perhaps six passengers away from being checked through the gate, when I stepped out of line and went back to the main terminal washroom.

What a nice tip for the washroom attendant, I thought, as I began tossing packages of weed into the garbage can. Even though I knew the danger of carrying weed through the screening line, I could not bring myself to throw away all of the
packages of weed, thereby making the trip a total loss. I kept two of the eight weed packs in my inside jacket pockets, as I returned to the screening line and prepared to board my flight home. I have to ask myself now why I would take a chance like that, in the face of all the near misses on that trip. Had I been caught with those two packs of weed, I would have spent months, and maybe years, commuting back and forth to Montreal from Vancouver to deal with the bust. Fortunately, I passed through the screening line without any problems and without a body search, and as soon as I did, I regretted the fact that I had thrown the rest of the weed in the garbage.

The flight back to Vancouver was uneventful and I returned home with a new attitude. I was tired of taking risks. I was tired of leaving home all the time to pull scams. I was tired of playing cat and mouse with the authorities. I was tired of the double-crosses. Tired of the danger. Tired of risking jail. I finally saw my life for exactly what it was. Blessed. It has always been blessed. I had a nice home. A nice family. Good friends. Barbara and I both had good jobs. I no longer felt alienated from society. If anything, I felt alienated from Hawkeye and Solly and just about everyone else I knew from my past.

I closed up my satellite grow house shortly after arriving back in Vancouver. I was no longer interested in dealing, even in petty amounts of weed. I didn’t care that my dealer of many years pulled a final rip on me for the outstanding money he owed. I made a hundred grand in profit, just from selling the satellite house, and instead of using the money to finance another scam, I sunk it into the house of our dreams. Our home has a view of the ocean and we put in a pool not long ago, using our legitimate, hard-earned money from our jobs. Even though our income dropped dramatically after I stopped scamming, it was not so bad. I did a calculation and was surprised to realize that even though I had earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in my illegitimate movements, I would have been better off had I stayed at my legitimate sales career right from the beginning. The money I earned illicitly disappeared like water down the drain, in a drug-and-alcohol fueled orgy of unnecessary excesses and indulgences. Once I was back living like the rest of the world, I no longer felt the need for vast sums of money.

Today Barbara and I are living quite well, without me resorting to crime. Our savings reside in a bank, like everyone else’s money, and I can enjoy my successes without hiding my assets. I
find myself echoing the law and order proponents in our society, and I have no shame at my hypocrisy because my thinking has changed about a lot of things. I no longer believe that manners are an unnecessary encumbrance on society. I no longer believe that religion is for cowards and fools. I no longer believe that a stolen apple tastes better than a purchased one.

In hindsight, I see that the money I earned was secondary to the main reason for my criminal behaviour. I wanted to be a cop before I started into my life of crime. I wanted adventure. When I was rejected from one side of the law, I developed an affinity for the other side. Had I been accepted into the Montreal Police Force or the
RCMP
, I would probably never have started smoking pot, which has helped to shape my life into what it is today. Because I survived the dangers of my life in the underworld, I can truthfully say that I am glad to have experienced life to the degree that I did. Not that I enjoyed the shitty parts. I did not. But so many folks reach their retirement years, after a lifetime of scrimping and saving, and never really get to enjoy the fruits of their labor, whereas I feel that I have already had my rewards. There were no wars for my generation to exploit in easing our youthful angst, and I always said that if I was going to have to fight in a war, I may as well pick one that pays well. While I am not particularly proud of my past, I can honestly say that I stayed true to my principles. I did not deal in powders. I did not rip anyone off. I did not kill anyone, thanks to the grace of God.