Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (21 page)

Lots of people came around our office at Modern Motors hoping to catch a ride on our gravy train. There was one friend of mine named Izzy who came around on a regular basis. He would always leave his big pig of a Chrysler parked in the middle of the floor, blocking everyone from going up or down the ramps. Invariably Irving would come by and freak out over Izzy’s lack of manners and the car would quickly be relocated elsewhere. The last time it happened, Irving got so mad he punched a hole in the office wall a foot or two above my head. Izzy jumped up from the card game and left our car lot never to return. When Irving left, John Miller laughed and said, “That’s you he was hitting when he hit that wall because it’s your fucking friend who keeps parking in his way.” I hoped John Miller was wrong because if Irving ever hit me that would be the end
of Irving and me. Money or no money. Scam or no scam.

As time progressed, I was starting to tire of Irving’s constant bad moods and many a time I found solace in Big John Miller, who was Irving’s age and who had known him longer than I had. “Just ignore the old Jew,” John Miller told me. Only John Miller could ever have called Irving an old Jew to his face. John Miller had a way with Irving that allowed him to snort out an insult yet not offend him. I, on the other hand, gave Irving as much respect as I wanted him to show me and I was careful not to bridge the gap in the way that John Miller had.

Myron Wiseman was always quick to jump to the pump when Irving was around. Myron had shared a cell with Irving and when he was released or “rehabilitated” as he liked to say with a smirk, he came over to Modern Motors as a general helper and car washer. In reality, he became part of our crew and he was useful in many other ways. Myron used to laughingly refer to Irving as “the Fuhrer,” in reference to Irving’s renowned lack of patience. But even Myron was getting a little perturbed at Irving’s imperious attitude, and from time to time he would disappear for days, either sulking over a remark Irving made or off with his own crew of shysters hanging paper across Canada.

Inflation was starting to hurt the Canadian economy at the time, but as a fellow smuggler once said, ours was a recession-proof business. A couple of times Irving considered the wisdom of trying to move some coke, but I was adamant about not going there. Not only did I feel that coke dealers were bad karma, but I also thought that they were dangerously schitzo. Weed people were far more even-keeled, even when you reached the multi-ton level. Besides, I argued, we have a market for weed, not coke. It seemed to me that my arguments were carrying a little more weight now that I had been busted and Irving never brought up cocaine again.

We had great things going on before Irving and I got greedy. I was angry with myself for not following my initial reservations about going to Lebanon. Inside, I held Irving largely responsible for my getting busted because of that fucking Simon Steinberg he brought into our crew. So when Irving propositioned me
several months after my bust with another scheme to smuggle hash into the country, I was clear on my position:

“No fucking way.”

Irving’s friend in Ottawa, who had provided him refuge during the trouble with Charlie “the Weasel” Wilson, had been released from jail. He had called Irving to say that he had a son who was involved in dealing hash. Irving’s friend said that his son could provide a ton of good Moroccan hash at the source and he was even prepared to sail it from Morocco to the Bahamas in his boat. Then, on a small, remote island in the Caribbean, the sailboat would off-load the hash. Then it would be brought to an airfield where Irving and Simon Steinberg would fly in to make the pickup. Using a long-range aircraft that could reach Canada without landing in the States, the hash would then be flown north to a small airfield north of Montreal. John Miller and a few of our Montreal cronies even volunteered to unload the plane. All that was needed was to buy a plane with enough range and durability to make the journey from Montreal to the Bahamas without landing. The plane Irving and Simon decided on was a Douglas Dakota.

I reminded Irving that I already faced up to seven years in jail for smuggling and I was already bailed out on that. But there was no way I could stand being jailed for twelve years or more, as I would have been if I were caught doing back-to-back hash runs. My ace in the hole for backing out of Irving’s score with no ill feelings was my American beef. I could not travel to the States, or the Bahamas, because of my earlier deportation from New York. All the pressure in the world could not move me to go anywhere near the Americans, and so, as far as Irving was concerned I was off the hook. Instead, Irving offered me the right to sell the hash once it was landed in Canada, which left me with a stake in Irving’s hash deal and still kept me safe to continue the weed scam if the hash scam failed a second time. I did my best to convince John Miller that he did not have to go on the new score. At first, he agreed with me.

With everything to gain and nothing to lose, I helped Irving with the mechanics of making his plan work. Simon Steinberg
flew to England to put an option on ten aircraft that had been recently retired from the military. The Hawk
T
-
1
was a solid aircraft capable of seven G landings, but with twin
340
horsepower turbocharged engines, it was expensive to fly commercially. The plan was to use the planes for future importing missions, but the procedure to get them civilian airworthy certificates turned out to be a long one.

The Hawk
T
-
1
s were bought, in part, as cover for the purchase of the American Douglas Dakota that was actually going to do the Bahamas run. The Dakota would be registered and picked up in the States. It would then be flown to the Bahamas to pick up the hash and then north to Canada, nonstop. There was no interest in making any money from the plane itself. When they were finished with it, the plane could be torched and no one would even miss it.

All of this preparation costs money. Lots of money. Including the purchase of the hash itself, the investment on Irving’s scam was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. His true gambling spirit came out, as Irving withheld payments to the boys on the docks as well as to me and John Miller while he shopped around town for other investors. He used one hundred thousand dollars belonging to a friend of his from out west who had begun buying high-end cars from us to ship to Vancouver. Irving took his friend’s money for a
1979
Rolls-Royce and substituted a
1963
Rolls-Royce worth a third of the value. The Rolls-Royce was supposed to be the start of a new importing venture, after Irving sent Chip the Limey to London to buy it. When the car arrived in Canada, Irving took one look at the body, which was full of Bondo, and gave up on the idea of importing cars from England for good.

Irv got his cop pal Luc Lavois involved, by getting a fifty thousand dollar investment out of him. That gave Luc the rights to a share in the profits and a place on the squad that was going to meet the plane and unload it in Canada. Simon Steinberg put money into the scam, too. Irving approached so many people to invest in the scam that security went from lax to nil, and the only secret left was the schedule of the run.

Irving arranged to purchase a speedboat in the Bahamas which could then be used to run out to the surrounding islands to find a good location for the drop. Freddie Peters looked after the Bahamas logistics, including finding the drop site, paying for the speedboat and meeting the sailboat full of hash when it arrived from Morocco. The word was that the crew of the sailboat had changed the name and painted the vessel twice on the way across the ocean in order to conceal its movements from the authorities.

A large black truck with tandem back axles and double back wheels was purchased brand new in Montreal to handle the weight of the two thousand pounds of hash that would be picked up at the airstrip. Irving’s ex-partner, Little Irving, from his first robbery conviction, was drawn into the plan. He had turned his life around at this point, with a good job and a future in the computer industry. His live-in girlfriend happened to be Big Irving’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, Donna. Little Irving was hired on to meet the plane with the pickup crew and unload the hash when it arrived in Canada. Ziggy Epstein was given the responsibility of driving the pickup vehicle to the airfield and having the canopy windows tinted black beforehand. Big Irving was going to call Ziggy with a coded message, giving the time and location of the airfield to be used for the drop.

The day before Irving was to leave for the mission, my wife drove past him while he was walking his dog, Nitro, at the side of the road.

“He looked so lonely and forlorn,” said Barbara. “He was walking with his head hung down and his hands in his pockets, looking like he had lost his last friend.”

The day after Barbara painted this ominous portrait of Irving, he and Simon left for the States to pick up the Douglas Dakota. They waited in the States for a few days until they received a phone call from Freddie in the Bahamas telling them that the hash was stashed on the island and ready for pickup. When that call came through, Irving made one last unscheduled phone call to Ziggy Epstein in Montreal, asking him if he had tinted the windows on the “black garbage can” yet, which was the stupidest
code word for a truck I had ever heard of. Then they left for the Bahamas to pick up the hash.

While Freddie the Booster made contact with the sailboat and arranged to meet it at a small island a few miles north of Freeport in the Bahamas, an unnerving incident occurred. Just as Freddie and the boat crew were meeting and unloading the hash to hide it on the island, a U.S. Coast Guard plane made a pass and swooped low overhead.

“The jig’s up,” shouted Freddie to the others as the plane made its pass and flew off into the distance.

But there were no other disturbances, until a day or so later, when the giant Douglas Dakota thundered down from the clouds to make a perfect landing on a dirt runway that must have looked like a postage stamp from the air. Simon was vibrating, and Irving’s hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t light his cigarette when the big bird rolled to a stop at the end of the island’s small runway. However, there was little time for conversation as the sailboat crew and Freddie loaded the plane with the hash. It was only a matter of minutes before the plane was fueled and loaded. It took off again, sailing towards a lonely airfield in Canada some two thousand miles away.

After loading the plane, Freddie drove the speedboat back to the Freeport Marina where it remained until some months later. He then hopped a commercial air carrier back to Montreal. He arrived just in time to drive over to Irving’s house, where he waited with Irving’s girlfriend, Jane, for news of the plane’s successful arrival in Canada.

Once the hash was safely unloaded in Canada and placed into the bed of the black tandem-axle pickup with the tinted window canopy, it was supposed to be driven to a safe house in Montreal’s West Island that was known only to Irving, John Miller and me. The airfield pickup crew was composed of Ziggy in the black truck, Luc Lavoie driving his own car and Little Irving riding shotgun with Big John Miller, who had changed his mind at the last moment about going to work on the scam. John had agreed to help unload the plane and ride shotgun in the pickup when it headed back to the stash house with Big Irving and the hash.

It was snowing lightly when the pickup crew met at the Holiday Inn in Montreal. They were there to meet with Ziggy in the heavy-duty pick up and to follow him to the airport, which only he knew the whereabouts of. He gave the work crew last-minute instructions of where they were going, and the procession traveled in a loose-knit caravan to the airport that had been preselected and was in the remote hills of Quebec. There was a surprising amount of traffic on the road for an early morning drive in the country, but only Ziggy felt uncomfortable about it. He had remarked earlier to Big John Miller that he had noticed a couple of suspicious-looking guys in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn reading a map in their car, but was told to stop being paranoid.

The snow began to fall harder as the procession of cars picked its way through the countryside. An hour or so later, they arrived at a private airstrip that was covered in a foot of snow. Luc Lavoie used bolt cutters to snap the chain barring access to the deserted airfield, while Little Irving ran over to check out the snow-covered runway tower, brandishing a loaded .
45
for all to see. There was no one in the tower, but if any police agents had been in pursuit, they would certainly have been concerned to see that guns were being carried around openly.

John Miller and Irving were also packing heat as protection from any rip-offs that the multimillion-dollar cargo might attract. Irving had committed himself to going for broke on this one, and he swore he would not be taken to jail again. He said he was prepared to shoot it out, if necessary, to protect what he had worked so hard for, and John Miller stood solidly beside him.

Luc Lavoie thought that I was going in on the scam, right up until the day before he left for the airfield. I told him when it was all over that Irving had asked me not to tell anyone that I was not in on the scam, in case it demoralized the others. The reason Irving was so actively involved in this score had little to do with his thirst for adventure. Irving had to go along on this one in order to convince everyone else that it was safe to do so. If everyone had known that I was not going to be involved, it might have soured their willingness to help Irving with the
mechanics of the plan.

As it turned out, the plane came in as expected and the hash was unloaded without any complications.

When the plane landed safely, Irving jumped out of the cockpit to embrace everyone on the ground and to tell them that they were all rich. He told them that the plane ran out of oil on the way to Canada and they had to stop in the States. When Simon tried to call in a mayday, Irving pointed his gun at him and told Simon that he would shoot him and fly the plane himself if Simon touched that radio again. In the end, there was no choice but to land and Irving hid the hash in the rear toilets as the plane flew into Connecticut where it faced customs clearance before it took on oil. When they landed, one solitary customs inspector stuck his head inside the plane to see that it was empty and gave the plane official clearance to take on fuel and leave again.