Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (14 page)

“If the wops ever get wind of our scam, they will try to take it over, sure as shooting. And I ain’t gonna let that happen without a fight. We’ll all end up dead if that happens. So don’t ever talk to anyone about what we got going. Especially the wops.”

Irving was a leg shaker. I have met a lot of leg shakers and foot tappers and they usually have something on their conscience. Irving used to sit opening and closing his legs like a schoolboy. Even when he was playing cards and supposedly relaxed, Irving would be moving his legs constantly. I met lots of leg shakers in the underworld. It’s as if they can control every aspect of their lives right up to murder and then the leg shaking starts.

I also met dozens of interesting characters who were not leg shakers. I met them as they came out of prison and came by our car lot to visit Irving. There was Freddie Peters and his brother Gary who had both done time and gone on scores with Irving. Gary was a career convict, with a recidivism rate that required a revolving door on the prisons. Gary had done B and E’s, holdups and robberies. He did some with Irving. He did some with others. And he did some on his own. One time Irving sent his jailhouse crony on a warehouse score. The warehouse was in
Laval, which was some distance from where Irving lived and since Irving was on parole with a
9
p.m. curfew at the time, he decided to hand the score off to Gary. While Gary went to work late one night, Irving waited at home to hear about the successful break-in. In due course, he received a phone call from a panicked Gary.

“Where are you?” asked Irving.

“I’m in the warehouse.”

“Why the fuck are you calling me from the warehouse?”

“Something’s wrong. A red light came on.”

“What do you mean a red light came on?”

“It’s the alarm system. I think it’s activated.”

“Get out of there,” shouted Irving. “You tripped a silent alarm.”

“I can’t leave. I think the cops are outside.”

“Hang up the phone! Hang up the fucking phone!”

And that’s how it is in the underworld. A shortage of brains and an overabundance of daring.

Speaking of brains, I met Ziggy Epstein and his sister Ruby through Irving. Their older brother Simon was said to be a genius with safes and alarm systems. Simon died soon after his release from prison. The sister’s story was that her brother Simon tried to pull off another vault job and blew the money up with the safe. Then he became depressed and committed suicide. But the word on the street was that his buddies had spent his end of his last score while he was in jail taking the fall for the job. They killed him with cyanide when he came out looking for his end.

Simon’s younger brother, Ziggy, was a quiet young man with a dry sense of humor. He became our jack-of-all-trades, installing my electrical lights along the driveway and tending to odd jobs at our homes and at our business. He drove cars to wherever we needed them ferried. He walked our dogs for us and washed our cars. Ziggy’s loyalty was his strong point, and he also knew his way around the streets.

Ziggy’s sister was going out with a scam artist nearly twice her age named Julius. He was always coming by with hot merchandise to sell, from leather jackets to diamonds and jewelry.
Julius looked too old to pull scores, with his gray hair and his bifocal glasses. I always wondered if Julius didn’t buy those coats wholesale and just pretended they were hot.

Irving was a drawing card for colorful characters and miscreants of all shapes and sizes. Like Sonny the Booster, who was legally blind but drove getaway cars for Julius. The two boosters used to come to our car lot and laugh about the scores that had put them in prison. There was one story where Julius was throwing stolen booty from the car, while blind Sonny was trying to lose the cops and hitting every other car on the road.

Irving was like a father figure and mentor to all of these strange lost souls, as well as to me, to some degree. My own father and I were not as close as we might have been at the time, and when Irving came along, he filled a gap in my life. Seeking direction, as most young men do at certain times in their lives, I latched onto a mentor who showed no doubt as to his own direction in life. With Irving it was full speed ahead at any cost. The man showed no fear. He had belonged to the infamous Stopwatch Gang, whose members were famous for remaining in a bank for less than one-hundred-and-twenty seconds. He survived the dismantling of that gang when their last job saw them getting caught in the act. Irving was with the other members of the gang, waiting for an opportunity to enter a bank that was located in a small shopping centre in Montreal. He noticed something was amiss. It was winter and there was a crew of workman doing some work on the hydro lines. Irving noticed that they all sported bright new yellow work gloves. He told the other gang members about the new gloves but they said that he was just being paranoid. Irving backed out of the score, while the others questioned his manhood and entered the bank with guns drawn. They all ended up in jail. The hydro workmen were all cops. The gang had been staked out. They all went to jail, except Irving.

I met Myron Wiseman through Irving. Myron was another con out of prison who had been Irving’s cell mate. It was Myron who wrote Irving’s parole release application after reading Irving’s own attempt, which pretty much said, “Give me parole or go fuck yourself.” Myron was a paper hanger and counterfeiter
and he was handy for obtaining phony licences and documents. He was always chuckling about being “rehabilitated” as if the word were an oxymoron. Myron was an incorrigible criminal in the purest sense of the word. To Myron, it was a courageous act of defiance to break the law. Any law that was broken was another blow struck for anarchy. Myron was a revolutionary spirit who was totally against the accepted corruptions and class distinctions that exist in Western society. If he had owned a bike it would have been a Harley, just for the sheer spite of it, but he was more likely to sit down at a grand piano than ride a motorcycle. Myron was cultured and refined. He was a quiet man who always dressed in a suit. He even wore a suit to work cleaning and detailing our cars on the car lot that Irving and I opened together.

The car lot was incorporated in my name as Modern Motors and dealt in high-end used cars. Our premises were rented on the second and third floors of an old car wash location on Decarie Boulevard. Unlike most car lots in town, our showroom was indoors and the cars were parked on the second and third floors. It was an ideal location for selling cars in a hostile winter climate. It was also perfect for visitors, who came and went without being seen clearly as they drove in and out of our garage.

One such unusual visitor to our garage was Randy Segouin. I was going to set Randy up on a date with Barbara’s girlfriend, Heather, the stewardess, until I found out he was a stone-cold killer.

“Don’t fuck around with him,” Irving said one day. I had made a smart-ass remark to Randy, and he had turned his cold eyes on me. Randy’s eyes had a way of glazing over when he was in a foul mood, and many people who had seen that look were no longer around to talk about it. I heard from one of his partners that Randy used to stand in front of a mirror with his gun in his hand saying, “Are you looking at me? Are you looking at me?” Then he would pull his gun out and make like he was drawing down on and shooting his imaginary adversary. Randy was bad. Randy was so bad that even the Hells Angels threw him out of their club. Randy’s previous partners in crime had been only too happy to see him go over to the biker gang when he
got the itch to ride a Harley. Within weeks, the Angels were calling his partners up and begging them to take Randy back. They would have killed him if his partners weren’t supplying them with bargain basement prices on weed and hash.

“We got only two fucking rules,” they said. “No ripping off other club members and no fucking around with another club member’s girl.”

In two weeks Randy had broken both of those rules. Randy and his partner, whose name I do not remember, eventually killed so many people that paranoia was ever-present. Around then his partner ended up killing Randy in self-defence. They had been drinking for days in a New Brunswick cottage. Randy and his partner had already killed the landlord and his son a few days earlier in a drunken fight and then cut them up and buried them somewhere on the farm. When Randy gave that look of his to his partner, it was the end of the line for Randy. His partner killed him with a couple of rounds from his .
45
automatic. Eventually Randy’s other pals from Montreal came looking for him and the partner confessed his crime to them. They had no choice but to forgive him, as Randy’s pals knew only too well that the partner was telling the truth. If Randy gave you that look, it meant the end if you didn’t move fast. Randy’s partner ended up in jail for killing his landlord and confessed everything to the New Brunswick police before killing himself in prison.

Another of Irving’s jail friends who came by after his release from prison was Richard “Chico” Perry who smoked tobacco and weed mixed in a pipe and walked around all day stoned and smiling. I didn’t see Richard around for very long. Shortly after being sprung from prison, Richard told his local banker that he wanted to open a line of credit. Being a career criminal, he did not stand a chance of collecting any money from the bank manager but Richard would not be warned off from his delusions, even by Irving. Chico threatened the bank manger and when he went to pick up his line of credit funds, the cops came to arrest him. When he turned around with a gun in his hand, they shot him twice in the stomach. Richard fell through the swinging gate in front of the manager’s office, shooting the cop who shot
him, as he twisted and went down behind a counter. He ended up being shot nine more times through the body, as he hid beneath a secretary’s desk all the while continuing to shoot it out with the police. When he ran out of bullets, they arrested Richard with an empty .
45
in his hand and a pipe full of tobacco mixed with weed in his mouth. Richard lived through the shootout and the cops put him in hospital with his legs and his arms in casts and then handcuffed him to the bed. Somehow Richard got loose, however, tied his bed sheets together and scaled down the four-storey hospital building to a second-storey rooftop in the dead of winter. He dropped from the roof to the ground and made it four blocks before the cops caught him again and brought him back . . . to jail instead of the hospital.

As the money began to roll in for Irving and me, some of the friends who came around visiting were given a place in our organization. We had need of more personnel to handle pickups and deliveries and collections, as well as others to look after the needs of our car lot. The lot was an impressive front for our weed business, with thirty to fifty high-end cars in stock at any one time. We had a Mercedes-Benz and a Dino Ferrari on the lot as well as high-end domestic cars. I drove a Rolls-Royce for a while just to see how it handled. I was surprised to see that it could peel the tires, but I found it too large and ponderous for my liking. The nicest car I ever drove in terms of performance was a Dino Ferrari, and the closest I can come to describing its handling is to compare it to a bumblebee. It stopped, turned, braked, and cornered like nothing I had ever driven before and made a Porsche
911
feel like a truck by comparison. Big John Miller laughed at me when I took an interest in the car business and stayed around at night selling cars. I took the five-to-nine shift, until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“What are you doing?” John asked when he saw me staying behind in the office one evening.

“I want to learn the car business.”

“You got a business already. You don’t need to be doing this shit.”

It took almost a month before I agreed with him and quit the
five-to-nine sales shifts. I couldn’t stand hanging around that stinky garage all night, and I hated haggling with customers who were getting a good deal and acting like I was screwing them. Irving used to handle those jerks much better than I did by using reverse psychology. When customers tried to bargain on a car with Irving, they would invariably come up with a story about a comparable car they had seen at a lower price.

“Oh yeah?” Irving would say, without missing a beat. “Then go buy it.”

Our cars were in superb condition when we sold them. After all the money we put into them, after buying them wholesale and selling them retail, there was hardly any profit. When our accountant, Abe, who was Irving’s cousin, did the books for us in our first year, we made $
331
,
000
in income and spent $
332
,
000
in expenses. And that wasn’t even counting the off-the-book expenses for Myron and Ziggy’s salaries.

For several years I had Abe the accountant invent an income for me so that I could pay my fair share of taxes. How can you drive a Mercedes and live in a beautiful home without paying taxes? Irving taught me many other wisdoms as well, such as never showing off my money when I was into a good scam.

“Wait until the scam is over before you flash your cash,” he advised. Meanwhile, at the height of our operation, we bought ourselves new homes, new Mercedes cars, new furniture and we both sported enough
18
Karat gold jewelry to sink a small boat. Irving had an affinity for the glitter, and John Miller and I followed his lead with dutiful respect, in that our gold chains were always less flashy than Irving’s were.

John Miller became part of our operation halfway through our scam with the boys on the dock. It was me and Irving equal partners all the way at first. But then a situation arose where someone had to be killed and I didn’t want any part of it. The boys downtown who lifted our containers from the waterfront were in a bind. A new supervisor was placing them at different positions on the waterfront and they could no longer function as needed to pull our loads off.

“No problem,” said Irving. “I’ll take care of it.”

“What are you going to do?” the boys asked.