Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (13 page)

“I’ll deal with Charlie when I return,” he told me. I thought he took the incident rather frivolously, until two days later when I got a phone call from Irving in Ottawa.

“Did you hear the news?” he said in a voice that was heavy on drama and light on surprise. “Little Charlie is dead. Someone shot him and his pal Robert Lavigne last night at a bar north of Montreal. I heard it this afternoon on the one o’clock news on the radio.”

Irving gave me a few more details, but as soon as he hung up I switched on the radio to hear the news reports myself. My mind blurred with the news that Charlie, “the Weasel” was dead. The thought that I had spoken to him just the day before
overwhelmed me with wonder and surprise.

I was getting the vibe that Irving was involved with the Weasel’s demise because he was giving me his report as though he had personally solved our problem with Charlie and Robert Lavigne. But how could that be when Irving was in Ottawa, which was several hours drive from the crime scene? It seemed highly unlikely that he would have done the deed himself and then driven back to Ottawa on icy roads for several hours. And then to brag to me about it on the phone. Irving was smarter than that. But he could have made a phone call to some of his underworld buddies in Montreal. I was hoping to hear some answers before I was picked up for questioning by the police, who I expected on a daily basis after Charlie’s murder. I knew they were coming. I was one of the last people to see Charlie alive.

But before the arrangements for Charlie’s funeral were even complete, I heard news of two more murders on the radio. This time the reports stated that Jean Paul LaPierre and his girlfriend Susan Braun were found shot to death in her Habitat apartment complex, which was built as part of Expo
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. The news reports said their bodies had lain undisturbed for days. I did not know what was going on at this point. It seemed like people all around me were dying and I had no idea about possible motives or who was behind the killings or who was next. I called Irving in Ottawa again to tell him about Jean Paul and Susan and he seemed genuinely surprised to hear of their deaths. I was not sure if I believed him in his denials about Charlie’s murder, because in that case, Irving had motive. However when it came to the deaths of Jean Paul and Susan, he had no motive I could think of. But Irving was the only connecting thread between all four victims.

Except for myself.

“Don’t call me from your house anymore,” Irving said, after I contacted him about the second set of murders. “In fact don’t call me at all unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

A few days later I was picked up by the Montreal Homicide Squad at my home in the west end of Montreal. I had cleaned house already while waiting for the cops to show over Charlie’s
murder, but they took so long to come for me that I had moved my weed stash back into my bedroom. I saw the police edition Ford with the dish-plate hubcaps through the front window at the same time as I saw two strangers marching towards my door. They were wearing cheap sports jackets and I knew they were not coming to sell insurance. I went to the bedroom and dumped a half a pound of primo weed down the toilet, most of which floated to the top of the bowl after the flush. When I answered the door, the two homicide detectives were agitated.

“You saw us coming and made a call. Who did you call?”

“I didn’t call anyone.”

“Yes you did.

“No I didn’t.”

“You are under arrest for the murder of Charlie Wilson and Robert Lavigne.”

“You gotta be joking.”

“This is no joke.”

After giving me the routine about a lawyer being provided if I needed one, the cops handcuffed me. I knew I had nothing to fear since I was not involved in any way with Charlie’s killing. I had been at home with my wife and my friend Bishop when the dirty deed was done. But I did have secrets to protect, not least the purpose of Charlie’s last visit to my house with Robert Lavigne. The cops started out by asking me why I had not attended Charlie’s funeral, to which I answered that I did not like funerals. The cops were angry at my reluctance to cooperate and so they took me in for questioning. Inside the police station I maintained my silence, but it was only a matter of time before I needed a bathroom break. I was taken to the washroom by the police officer who had been interrogating me. He was a big bruiser of a detective who looked to be a surly pessimist with a stoic resolve to do his job. I was washing my hands when he came over to stand beside me.

“So, you don’t want to talk, eh?”

I looked at him with suspicion. “It’s none of my business,” I said. “I don’t want to get involved.”

He swung his open hand as hard as he could and hit me on
the side of my head. I have been punched, but I had never been slapped that hard before. I saw stars. Dazed, I staggered a couple of feet away from the big cop and stared back at him in shock.

“This is murder,” he said, looking squarely into my eyes. “We don’t care about your other little games. This is the homicide squad. We are the cream of the crop. An innocent young girl and several other people are dead,” he said. “We want answers.”

I could see he was working up to another swing.

“All right, I’ll tell you what I know,” I replied, sparing myself another blow to the head. “But not in here. Take me back out there and I’ll talk.”

I pointed to the outer office where the other detectives were seated. I dried my hands and half expected another shot to the head, but instead I was escorted by the bull back to the interrogation room. I was asked why Charlie had come to visit me the day he died and what we talked about. I told the investigating officer that Charlie and I were friends. That we talked about his car lot and the cars that I bought and sold through him. They asked who I thought had killed Charlie and I told them about the shootout between Charlie and Jean Paul. It was common knowledge amongst Charlie’s friends that the gunfight had occurred. With both Charlie and Jean Paul dead, it gave the cops something to work on that led nowhere. Realizing that I was offering nothing further, the interrogation was halted with one last question.

“Where is Irving Goldberg?” The burly cop hissed Irving’s name as though he was talking about something lower than a snake. I told the cop that I could provide an alibi for Irving because I had phoned him in Ottawa at the time of the murders. I regretted giving any information about Irving’s whereabouts, but I suspect that they already knew that information after three weeks of phone taps. They asked me for Irving’s address which I would not have given even if I knew it. They asked for his phone number but I told them I did not remember it. After several hours of interrogation, the homicide squad eventually released me, right after plucking a hair from my head. When they led me to another room for the hair sample to be taken, I
was surprised to see a man in a white lab coat removing a hair from my buddy Bishop’s head. I found out later that they had brought Bishop in for questioning, too, after I gave him as my alibi on the night in question. The homicide squad released Bishop and me at the same time, with a warning not to phone Irving. On the way home I made sure we were not followed, and as soon as I could, I stopped at a pay phone to call Irving in Ottawa. It occurred to me that if they had wanted to, the cops could have put out an alert for any phone calls from Montreal to Ottawa, and at two in the morning mine would likely have been the only call. Under the circumstances, it was a chance I felt was necessary to take. I found a hotel that was open and I went inside to use the lobby phone.

He answered my phone call in a sleepy voice “Go to a pay phone,” I told him. He was reluctant to drag his warm ass into the ten-below-zero weather outside his Ottawa bedroom but my persistence got his attention. “Go to a pay phone,” I said, “and call me back at this number.”

It took about ten minutes for his call to come through. Irving was impatient. It was
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a.m. and I knew by his nature he went to bed around ten. He had been fast asleep when I called him, and he was in no mood for twenty questions.

“What’s up?” he demanded.

I told him the cops were looking for him. I told him that they probably knew he was in Ottawa. “Hide the book,” I cautioned him. “They want to know about Charlie, but they don’t know anything about our scam unless they find the book.” The book I was referring to was a small notebook that Irving kept on his person at all times. The book contained all the records of our weed transactions, including collections and payouts that were too numerous to trust to memory. Irving snorted at my concerns about the cops and acted like I was overreacting. But he hid the black book before he went back to his friend’s home to climb back into the king size bed. The next morning at six o’clock while he was fast asleep, the Ottawa Provincial Police came for Irving. He answered the door in his robe and let them in before they broke the door down. Irving made only one statement.

“Do you know what an ironclad alibi is?” he said to the cops. “Well that’s what I got” he responded, answering his own question. “So save your questions cause I ain’t answering them.” Having nothing on him, they took Irving in for a few hours before letting him go without charges.

I will never know for sure if Irving was behind the hit on Charlie, but I was told later that he was. I eventually learned that Jean Paul killed Charlie along with an accomplice who was an ex-partner of Irving’s from his bank robbing days. Jean Paul’s accomplice was never caught, but it was probably his brother-in-law Rene’s friend, Roger Ouimet, or Rene’s older brother, Joseph. It no longer matters. Both men are dead today. Roger died in a shootout with the cops during a bank-hold up and Joseph died in a jailbreak attempt.

I know that at least two men drove to the club the night of Charlie’s murder. Jean Paul and someone else. It was
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a.m. and the club was still open, being in a Laurentian town where the closing hours were relaxed. The informal establishment was only a half hour’s drive from Montreal and enjoyed a reputation as a fun place to dance and rock the night away. Charlie was seated at the bar with his back to the door when two men wearing hoods and carrying machine guns entered the bar. Before anyone in the club knew what was happening, Jean Paul, wearing a hood, ran up behind Charlie at the bar and smashed the back of his head in with the butt of a modified
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carbine. Jean Paul had showed me that weapon at his birthday party. The
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was unlike any I had seen before and had been modified to fire on full automatic and used a belt of bullets rather than a clip. It was the same
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that Jean Paul had used previously to drill multiple rounds into a cop car that was chasing him after a bank job in the Laurentians. Jean Paul stepped back after clubbing Charlie and then blasted him with several rounds of .
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caliber ammunition. Poor Charlie died before he hit the ground, mortally wounded by the blow to the head even before the automatic fire finished him off. Jean Paul’s partner gunned down Robert Lavigne, who was running to Charlie’s defence, or running from the dance floor where he had been dancing with an unidentified woman,
depending on whose story you believed. Either way, he was hit in the back. Some say Robert was beating on Jean Paul and pulling him off Charlie when he was shot by Jean Paul’s partner. Some say Robert was bolting away across the dance floor towards the exit when he was hit.

After Charlie and Robert were felled by a volley of gunshots, the two gunmen left the bar. In typical fashion, the bar patrons cleared out as soon as the killers fled in a waiting car. Only the waiters and bar staff remained by the time the cops showed up to take a report. On their escape out of town, Jean Paul’s getaway car slid off the road into a ditch and his accomplice’s gun discharged, sending a bullet through Jean Paul’s leg and into his balls, which eventually swelled up like grapefruits. A mortally wounded Jean Paul and his partner made their way past the Operation Intercept roadblocks that were supposed to prevent exactly these kinds of escapes after crimes in the Laurentian villages north of Montreal. I imagine Jean Paul’s partner was apologizing all the way back as they drove to Jean Paul’s girlfriend’s apartment in Montreal. When they reached Susan Braun’s apartment, Jean Paul was put into bed and his false teeth removed to help with his breathing. A telephone call was made to a third accomplice and a doctor was summoned to the apartment at gunpoint. When the doctor pronounced Jean Paul to be dead of shock and blood loss, the accomplice promised to take the doc home and took him instead to a garbage dump and shot him dead. Jean Paul’s partner was intending to take Susan to her parent’s home, but when it was time to leave Jean Paul’s stone cold body, she started screaming hysterically. The accomplice put a silenced twenty-two to her head and pulled the trigger half a dozen times to silence her cries. According to the cops, Susan Braun died in a most cruel way, with defence wounds through her hands.

Any unfulfilled aggression I had towards Jean Paul died with him that day as I heard the circumstances of his suffering departure. After their deaths, I doubted that Jean Paul and Susan would meet in an afterlife because, by my interpretation of karma, they were going to different places. I am certain that it
came as no comfort to the parents of Susan Braun that the police had come to warn them about the danger their daughter was in only a week before her murder. They told the parents all about Jean Paul and his violent criminal past and urged them to warn their daughter. I, myself, could never understand how an intelligent, college-educated, pretty girl like Susan could ever hook up with a menace like Jean Paul. It bothered me that her fourteen-year-old brother refused to even talk to me at her funeral, as though I was somehow involved in her death.

There was a period of quiet for sometime after the murders, until everyone’s fear subsided and business started back as usual. But the murders had changed those of us who remained in the game. There was no room for amateurs in the smuggling trade, now that violence ruled the roost. Irving was my insulation from violence. He had no fear of anything or anyone. At best, he showed a measured respect for someone else’s abilities but never any fear. He warned me about the Mafia in very serious tones.