Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (5 page)

Once we were processed into the holding centre, the clock stopped until Bishop and I gave the cops our decision about helping them. It would have been totally unfair, of course, to set our Ali Baba crew up for a coke sting. They had been nothing but fair and honourable with us and they had made clear from the start that they did not deal in coke. But I came up with a plan to play along with the cops and then escape to Mexico when they brought us down to Phoenix for the sting. After some discussion with others in our cellblock, Bishop and I realized that we would not be staying in hotels and set free to run around loose in Arizona. They would watch us like hawks and we’d be housed in the local jail until we could be set like Judas goats upon our friends. After three days of agonizing arguments and rebuttals between the two of us, Bishop and I finally called the cops and told them no deal. We would bite the bullet and do our time. Bishop, who was single and who had attended boarding school in New York, accepted the decision more easily than I did. For me it meant living apart from my wife, family and friends in a strange state several hundred miles from home. I would be residing in a cellblock with a racial mix that consisted of twenty blacks and ten Puerto Ricans to every white person. As I looked around at my cell mates, I figured that I had to be some kind of fool to end up in this jail. Most of the other detainees were from some ethnic minority or other. There were very few other white boys in our holding cells besides Bishop and me.

Vinny, the jailhouse star, was one of them. Vinny, was a consigiliere of a New York Mafia crime family. He was facing twenty years in the slammer for the famous French Connection heroin importing scheme and he took it like he was waiting for a bus. You had to wonder why Vinny was in there because he looked so out of place. He was tall, athletic, handsome and intelligent. He would exercise in a black belt routine every day before leaving his cell, and when he could find a challenger, he played chess like a master. I gave him a bit of a run at chess and he seemed to enjoy the competition before finishing me off in a few well-chosen moves. Besides Vinny, there were three other Caucasian inmates. One was Robert Lieberman. Lieberman was a white-collar millionaire who was awaiting sentencing and incarceration for breaking antitrust rules and for tax evasion. Lieberman had the dubious honour of a front page photo spread in Time magazine to his credit, which made him a different kind of jailhouse star from Vinny. Lieberman had been smuggling new cars down to South America and bypassing customs on both ends. He used to smuggle them in shrimp boats, he told us. He took the decks off the shrimp boats in the U.S. and dropped two cars per vessel inside. In South America he would remove the decks again to recover the automobiles and sell them for several times their value. He bragged to us that he was moving more cars than the largest General Motors dealer in the U.S. and he heaped scorn upon our drug business.

“Believe me, you can make way more money my way than you can with drugs,” he said, offering to take us under his wing. He even offered us the use of his luxury apartment in Manhattan, which was a necessary requirement for our bail application. “Stay here in the U.S. and do your time,” he said. “If you stay, I will help you get transferred to Danamora Prison which is where I’m going. It’s the country club of federal jails. It even has its own golf course. When you finish your time, I’ll show you how to make real money.”

It was a generous offer, but not one Bishop and I were interested in under the circumstances. The remainder of the people we met in the federal detention cells were all morons or worse,
except for Hans, a Dutch pilot who enthralled us with his tales of flying weed into the States from Jamaica. Besides Hans, the one other white guy in our eight-man cellblock was a twenty-five-year-old smack dealer and user from New York City. He was in for five years for trafficking and couldn’t wait to get back out on the street for another run at the smack. He told us that his heroin supplier had given him a Cadillac to work with, but that the New York cops busted him, took the car and stole his money before letting him go without arrest. His heroin supplier gave him another Caddy following the shake-down but after a time on the street, the same thing happened. His heroin supplier bailed him out again and this time he gave the street pusher a Chevy
396
with a four speed and told him, “Next time, outrun the motherfuckers!”

“I couldn’t buy the cops off the last time,” the smack pusher told us. “They told me I had to go in.” His attitude was so accepting and so matter-of-fact that I was somewhat taken aback. His stoic acceptance of his fate was something I had not seen before. It was an attitude that I could never imagine myself adopting.

Other than Vinny and Lieberman, most of the other detainees were black and Puerto Rican, several of whom were in for immigration violations. Like the commercial pilot from Panama who was in his third year of detention and walked around the cellblock as though the rest of us were all part of a great conspiracy against him. After three years of detention, the only English he could master was “I deed not know dere was coke on dee plane.”

The detention facility we were in was the worst jail I have ever experienced. Even the condemned Bordeaux Jail and the inhuman Parthenais Detention Centre in Montreal looked good next to this hundred-year-old five-storey dungeon. Talk about a crowbar hotel. The entire building was made of iron bars and cages stacked top to bottom and side by side on five levels. There was an exercise yard on the roof but it was the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes per visit. With the city traffic down below and the smokestacks from the adjacent buildings
belching oil fumes on every side, there was no fresh air to be had. The roof was fenced off like a monkey cage, as if anyone was going to try to scale down five stories of rotting bricks in an attempt to escape. In addition to the monkey cage construction, armed guards were positioned in towers on each corner of the roof deck to prevent escapes and riots. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do. There were a couple of basketball hoops on the roof deck, but they were quickly taken over by the black population. As soon as the blacks were tired of playing, the Puerto Ricans took over the court. I think I threw the basketball once during my entire stay. One of the black inmates tried to intimidate me by suggesting that I had better watch my tight young ass at night, what with all the fags around.

“They better like fucking corpses,” I said, “because that’s what it will take before I let that ever happen!”

In spite of my bravado, I traded Bishop a pack of smokes for his top bunk and let him take mine on the bottom. From then on, I slept with one eye open to keep watch on the others in my cellblock. I was glad that Bishop was with me because I did not know another soul in the jail or in the entire state of New York. He used to piss me off by comparing the detention centre to his boarding school experience and saying that it was not so bad. Not so bad? It was fucking terrible! There was no privacy. The food was tasteless slop. The routine was totally boring, with nothing to do. The furnace fan dried out your nose all night until you could hardly breathe. There was constant noise and light, even at night. You were surrounded by illiterate idiots. The beds were like cots, with worn out springs. The floor was cold concrete. The walls were metal bars. Every smell was shared throughout the entire cellblock. On top of it all, I had no idea when it all might end.

My only salvation was in my dreams, which became more vivid and real than ever before. One dream in particular saw me diving from a sailboat into a turquoise Jamaican ocean. The experience was so real and refreshing that I was totally depressed when I awoke in the slammer. Nevertheless, I saw it as a certain sign of my future and I felt from then on that all was not lost.

One evening after supper, I opened my bunk drawer to get a bag of potato chips that I had been saving for a bedtime snack. The chips were gone and I was furious. I asked Bishop if he knew what had happened to them and he told me he had taken them to exchange for his cigarettes that he had lost in a game of gin. I was livid. I was ready to throttle him. That bag of chips was all I had to look forward to in that rotten cage and Bishop had taken them without even asking. I was working up to giving Bishop a well-deserved beating when his gin partner offered to give me my chips back in exchange for what was left of Bishop’s smokes. It surprised me how far I was prepared to go over a bag of chips. That was the first and only time I can remember having an argument with my friend Bishop.

After several weeks of living hell, we made an application for a legal aid lawyer and applied for bail. After several delays, our bail was granted, but Bishop had no money so I called Barbara in Montreal and asked her to cover his bail too. She did as requested. But as soon as that happened, my legal aid was cancelled. The prosecutor insisted that if I could cover Bishop’s bail, then I obviously had enough money for a lawyer. But in the end that didn’t really matter much, because after one look at our fat slob of a legal aid lawyer in his oversized, rumpled suit, I knew I could never allow him to defend me. When we were ushered into his office I saw a half-eaten baloney sandwich on a metal desk that looked like it had been purchased for fifty dollars at a flea market. His office was a pigsty, with broken linoleum tiles on the floor and stains on pale green walls that had not seen a fresh coat of paint in decades. The lawyer’s desk was covered with papers and books that lay disheveled and askew. He had thinning, greasy hair that looked like it had not been washed in weeks. To compliment an appearance that was less than fashionable, he had a slight lisp that caused him to spit when he spoke. And the only legal advice he offered was, “Plead guilty.” When I made a derogatory remark about his office, he made some retort about having other clients outside of the legal aid system. I knew right away it was a lie. The guy was paid by the government to shunt people through the legal system. He did not even want to
discuss the particulars of our case. He had no interest in checking into the legality of searching our bags without warrants. He had no concerns about probable cause for a search. He gave no consideration to the fact that Bishop possessed the baggage stubs and I didn’t. He was like a bald, sweaty parrot that just kept repeating the same thing to both of us. “Plead guilty.”

I left his office and made a call to my wife in Montreal. I asked her to check our situation out with a local criminal lawyer, and to her credit, she found one named Sidney Goldman. Sidney was a showboat and a legend in the underworld where he was considered an expert on drug cases. He had several very high profile clients and he seemed to revel in the attention from both the media and the ladies. Sidney was representing Ryan’s loan shark buddy, Jean Paul LaPierre, and with Jean Paul’s recommendation, Goldman gave Barbara some very sage and candid advice that he would not normally have given to a stranger.

“Tell your husband to get out of there,” was the message. “Leave on the next bus. It takes telephone numbers to pay for a good lawyer in New York,” and by that he meant lots and lots of cash. “Tell him to take his chances on extradition.” He gave his advice without asking Barbara for payment or a retainer. “It takes lots of money and lots of time for the U.S. to extradite a Canadian citizen,” he added. “With under two hundred pounds of grass, they might not even bother to pursue the case, and even if they did, you have a better chance to fight it from up here than you would in New York.”

My wife flew down to meet me in New York with Sidney’s message and we spent our first night together in weeks. We rented a deluxe hotel room, took a horse-drawn carriage ride through the city and then went to see the Broadway performance of
Jesus Christ Superstar
. In spite of the cost, the experience left me feeling empty. When it was time to retire, Barbara and I climbed into a king-size bed and after a long conversation, we went straight to sleep. I was so wound up over the whole experience of jail that I was not even interested in sex.

Before Barbara and I went out for the carriage ride, I discussed Sidney Goldman’s advice with my friend Bishop. He sat
in my hotel room and listened to my arguments but he was adamant that he was staying in New York to face the music. He had Robert Lieberman’s apartment to live in, he told me, and added that he wanted to come back to Montreal, but only after he had cleaned his slate in the U.S.

“Remember when the federal prosecutor told us not to run home after we got our bail?” I responded. “Remember his sarcastic tone? Wasn’t it you who said he was really telling us that he expected us to do just that? To run home to Canada. Wasn’t it you who said he was actually telling us that that’s what we should do?”

“Maybe so, but I’ve thought it over. I would rather do my time and have nothing hanging over me.”

“Who cares what’s hanging over you if you can slip the knot and go free?”

“I have my future to consider. Some day I might want to take a job in the States.”

“Future as a jailbird,” I replied. “Suit yourself, Bishop,” I said with a resigned shake of my head. “But five years is a long fucking time.”

In the end our Canadian lawyer had our case thrown out on a technicality relating to the improper search and we were deported back to Canada.

On Sidney Goldman’s advice, Bishop and I both left Montreal pretty quickly after that to let the heat die down. Bishop went to Morocco for six months, and Barbara and I went first to England, and then to Bermuda and then to Jamaica where the high life and the action started all over again.

My wife and I returned to Montreal where we cancelled the lease on our house in Beaconsfield and prepared to leave for Europe. That decision effectively put our houseguest, Ross, on the street. He was none too happy about it, but there was not much he could say under the circumstances. He ended up back home with his parents while Barbara and I discussed my legal situation and decided that it would be best to leave Montreal for a few months.