Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (22 page)

It is somewhat ironic that after they took off again, Irving and Simon Steinberg were legally cleared to land anywhere in the
USA
, where their load of hash would have been even more valuable than it was in Canada.

The snow was coming down in buckets at the Quebec airfield when the plane landed, and kept falling during and after the hash unloading. The most immediate concern after the hash was unloaded was whether Simon would be able to take off again through the deepening snow on the runway. Simon Steinberg was heading back south intending to land the Douglas Dakota as a domestic flight arriving in Dorval Airport, and Ziggy Epstein went along with him to sweep up any debris left by the hash. The plane made it into the air with a deafening roar for the short twenty-minute flight to Dorval, while John Miller and Irving drove the truck full of hash towards the stash house in the West Island.

As the snowstorm worsened, Irving and John Miller headed home, followed from the airstrip by a happy crew of partners who looked forward to a life of ease and wealth to go along with their own special days in the sun.

The call came at
8
a.m. It was from Louise Miller. Had I heard from John? Upon hearing her question, my heart sank. I had been awake since
6
a.m. and I, too, was wondering why no one had called me yet. I was starting to feel somewhere between a little concerned and a little pissed off.

“No, I have not heard from John,” I told Louise “But I’ll look into it right away.”

I called Irving’s house. No answer. That was impossible. I knew for a fact that Jane was there waiting for Irving’s return. A few hours later, a news flash came on the radio. Several people had been arrested on a charge of importing hashish in an airplane. The final confirmation of the disaster came when Barbara got a phone call from Jane, a few hours after the newscast, asking her to feed and walk Nitro. Jane was in jail but was expected to be released soon. John Miller and Irving and everyone involved in the Bahamas scam were in jail, Jane said. She could not tell us any more at the time but the bad news kept coming. Freddie Peters and Little Irving had been picked up by the police while waiting with Jane for Big Irving to return home. The cops came to Irving’s house in force and threatened to shoot the dog through the glass if Jane did not put Nitro away and open the
security grilled front door. Freddie had managed to flush his air tickets to the Bahamas down the toilet before the police gained entrance, but he was brought downtown and charged with conspiracy anyway. Little Irving’s involvement in the scam had been documented by the
RCMP
surveillance team, and so he, too, was arrested. I am certain it didn’t help that he was running around at the deserted airfield waving a gun.

When the police team came in to Irving’s house, they arrested everyone there and took them downtown to sort it all out. Luc Lavoie slipped the net because he said he could not find his way back to Irving’s house for the final celebrations, after unloading the plane at the airfield. Personally, I think he was too smart to find his way back. I never really knew Luc that well, although we hung out for a period of time. Luc was an ex-Montreal Police Force cop who was thrown off the force for fixing tickets or some other petty infraction. The only problem I had with Luc was that he was too well-mannered and cultured to be a criminal. With my paranoia about cops, I never quite let my guard down around Luc. I did, however, at his insistence, keep a bottle of his favourite Scotch on hand in case he came by my house for a drink.

As far as the hash importation and possession charges were concerned, John Miller and Irving were dead bang gone, to use the terminology of the joint. They were arrested at gunpoint in front of the stash house, with a truck full of hash and loaded guns sitting on the dash of their truck. I found out later that the entire operation had been under surveillance, just as little Ziggy had suspected. The black pickup truck with the tinted windows was followed from the Holiday Inn to the airport up north, and all of the other traffic on the road that day was almost exclusively
RCMP
surveillance vehicles. It came out in the pretrial that the
RCMP
had allowed the plane to be unloaded of its cargo thanks to a shortage of preparation time to plan a raid and because of the inclement weather. A decision was made, at the last minute, by the Mounties to follow Irving and John Miller back to the stash house rather than try to take the entire crew down at the airstrip. The
RCMP
chase team lost the truck in the bad weather
when it turned off from the Trans-Canada into a subdivision. Irving and John Miller were almost home free when they pulled up to the stash house and stopped the truck in the driveway and prepared to drive it to safety inside the garage. There was only one small problem. With the addition of several inches of fresh snow on the driveway, the pickup no longer fit into the garage. The truck was several inches too high to pass under the garage door. Irving and John were still scratching their heads about how to deal with the problem when the cops pulled up and arrested them. One solitary police vehicle took them down, without either one of them ever pulling their guns.

So much for Irving’s promises of do or die.

The next few weeks were nothing but tears and problems as I ran around consoling the wives while preparing defence lawyers for the jailed crew. But there was no defending anyone after Little Irving flopped over, with his legs in the air like a bitch in heat. He confessed everything to the cops in the hope they would show leniency. In spite of his evidence, he was sentenced to seven years in jail, which is the minimum sentence for a major importation charge even if you rat on your partners.

There were no bail possibilities for Big Irving or John Miller who were both ineligible for release since Irving was on parole and John Miller out on bail, like I was, for the previous importation offense. I went to the bail hearing to hear the charges read out, but my lawyer Sidney saw me before I entered the courtroom and shooed me away. I told him not to worry, that I was not directly involved in the Bahamas caper, but he told me to leave immediately anyways, which I did. I ended up reading through the transcripts at a later date, but there was nothing much there. Once Little Irving fingered everyone, the transcripts ignored many of the material facts and were all about legal precedents. There was no information that came out about how everyone was caught because they all avoided trial and went straight to plea-bargaining.

Freddie Peters’ home was searched while he was in Parthenais Detention Centre. His wife Helen came by my house with a magnet that she had seen the police surreptitiously place under
her phone before they left her house. I looked at the small object, which was a half inch square in shape and about one sixteenth of an inch thick. I broke it open and saw what looked like a black carbon material in the centre. The carbon material was covered with an orange layer of ceramic coating. I showed the object to Ziggy Epstein, who was keeping a low profile since slipping the net on the Bahamas scam. He agreed with me that what Helen had found in her house was some kind of ceramic magnet. Placed under a telephone or beside a window, the magnet was capable of acting like an amplifier, turning a phone or window into a speaker. With the right receiving equipment, it would be possible to hear every word spoken in the vicinity of the ceramic magnet. The disturbing part of this news was that I had similar orange ceramic magnets stuck to the latch mechanisms of every window in my new house. Barbara had been lifting and cleaning the window sills beneath the magnets before replacing them. We both thought the former homeowners had placed the magnets in the window latches as a security method to prevent the locking mechanisms from being picked or pried open.

After Helen Peters’ visit, I tried to mentally review the hundreds of conversations I had had on my own phone. I never discussed business on my phone, but many incoming callers did, and I was always stopping them mid-sentence, especially Irving who used to find my paranoia amusing. Now I was on the hook for every conversation that I had ever had.

No trial date was set for the perpetrators of the Bahamas hash scam. After Little Irving turned rat, all that was left to determine was how much time everyone would get, before they copped a plea and turned themselves in for a ride on the bus with no windows. After months of negotiations between defence lawyers and crown prosecutors, John Miller and Irving were sentenced to twelve years in jail. Simon Steinberg received eighteen years as the supposed leader of two hash conspiracies, but only after the Crown had great fun questioning him about his borrowed captain’s uniform during the Lebanon scam. Freddie Peters copped to two years on conspiracy. Luc Lavoie should count his lucky stars that he did not remember the directions to Big
Irving’s house and that Little Irving did not know him by name. Luc walked, while Ziggy Epstein turned himself in at a later date, after the cops had come looking for him.

During the drawn-out negotiations in the plea bargains of both Irving and John Miller, I pretty much spent all of our remaining assets to cover lawyer’s fees. It cost fifty grand for Irving’s lawyer alone. Irving’s lawyer was Morris Shipman who is now a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Then John Miller changed from Sidney Goldman’s office to the same office as Irving’s lawyer. That was another fifty grand, on top of five grand that I had already paid on his behalf to Sidney. The other guys in our Bahamas crew spared themselves the expense of a lawyer and worked a deal directly with the Crown.

When it was all over, I was nearly broke and our gang was decimated, with everyone in prison or on the lam. I sold off all of the cars at Modern Motors to cover the bills, but old man Laviolette scooped a good portion of that money to cover our business overdraft expenses. He claimed it was all aboveboard, but he was shaking like a leaf when I confronted him over the figures. I felt bad for the spunky little old man, who could see as I did that our world had changed forever.

I still had fifteen hundred pounds of weed left to sell, which was removed from Bishop’s care and hidden behind a false wall in Big Johnny Lakeburn’s townhouse. But the weed was going rotten, and the only mover I had left who would touch it was Brian Kholder. He had local people in Montreal who were buying our shit weed for one hundred and thirty dollars a pound to be used as a filler for good weed that had been imported by others. When that market dried up, Brian had to go all the way to Edmonton to find a market for the rest of our weed. When he did, he was subsequently busted with two hundred pounds of low-quality Jamaican coli weed in a steamer trunk that he had loaded onto a train. His wife Karen was with him at the time and she was also charged. To spring her from jail, Brian had to cop a plea and he ended up getting three years in the slammer for that shit weed. The saddest part of all was that the jail term destroyed what was left of their storybook marriage.

I sold off a third of the low-grade coli weed, which was enough to cover our debts and expenses for a while. In my mind, the remaining thousand pounds of weed belonged to the boys on the dock, but when I visited Irving in jail, he said to pay that no mind. He wanted me to sell off the weed as quickly as possible. I asked Irving where the remainder of my end was coming from and he offered me the ten Hawk
T-1
planes that he still had title to in England. I was owed at least two hundred and fifty thousand at that point and it sounded like an almost fair deal, under the circumstances.

A year and a half later, I was still no closer to getting the planes certified for sale and I questioned whether the cost of the certification program was draining more out of me financially than I could expect to recoup. Irving told me to sell the speedboat in Nassau. But when I looked into it, I was informed that the cigarette boat had sunk months ago while docked and no one at the marina was taking any responsibility for it. I had no interest in pursuing our claim in the Bahamas over a fifty thousand dollar item. I also looked into the possibility of selling off the Douglas Dakota which was still parked at Dorval Airport, but before I could have my lawyer check into the process, an airport snowplow accidentally broke the tail off the Dakota, rendering the plane useless. I could have instigated a suit against the federal authority responsible for the snowplow, but seeing as the plane had been used in a criminal case, my lawyer suggested I do nothing. The hash was gone. The money was gone. The assets were gone. I had no income other than a trickle of money from weed that was so bad the buyers were using it for fill.

I was sorry for Irving, but I had to get on with my life. If the truth be told, I blamed him for all of our losses. He was an inveterate gambler, I now realized, and what I saw before as balls or “chutzpah” was really just a sickness. John Miller was easier to visit than Irving because he was in a medium security prison. To visit Irving, who was in a maximum security facility, I needed the services of a civil lawyer. The lawyer made application for me to have special access to Irving for business reasons relating to the dissolving of Modern Motors.

I disliked going to visit either Irving or John Miller in the can but I felt it was my duty. I did favours for both of them. At his request, I sent Irving a typewriter filled with hash and mescaline that I had hidden in the roller. That made Irving king of the maximum-security prison for a little while. I made sure John Miller had his lawyers and his immediate needs covered, too.

Of course, the boys on the docks eventually contacted me, as I expected they would. The message came to me through Bob Robertson, who, along with his brothers, was a major player in the west end underworld. The boys on the docks wanted to know where their money was. I told him their money was all spent by Irving on the Bahamas hash scam, but I offered to give them the thousand pounds of shitty weed that was left.

I insisted on actually meeting with the boys before I handed off the weed to Bob Robertson. I met with Bob downtown in Old Montreal, and he introduced me to one of the boys on the docks at a bar near the port where the stevedores hang out. I had never met the guy before and Bob could have passed off any old wino on me, but when I met him, I knew the guy was the real McCoy. The meeting lasted less than a minute and the guy who introduced himself to me looked like he wanted to be anywhere else but where he was. He told me to give the weed to Bob Robertson, so I did.