Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (23 page)

I arranged for my buddy Joe Dudley to drive the thousand pounds of weed to a parking arcade downtown and I gave the keys for the rental van to Bob. There was no problem getting the van up to the third level of the parking arcade, but on the way down the ramps, Bob told me later that the van scraped the ceiling at every level. The transfer was made without further difficulty and I prided myself on being able to call upon Bob Robertson if I ever needed to. His brothers were well-known heavies in town, and from what Bob told me, they wanted him to go straight and become a lawyer. When I first met Bob, it was in a bar that catered to stockbrokers and he was dressed like they were, in a three-piece suit. He told me he dressed that way so that he could fit in with all levels of society. He told me after the delivery that the weed was shit, which I already knew.

I experimented with making oil out of some of the low-grade weed and came up with a passable product, which I offered to provide to Bob and the boys down on the docks. He did not take me up on the offer and instead, gave me an ounce of blow to move on a front. I passed the blow on to my card-playing friend, Izzy Solomon, with a warning that he could have it on a front as long as he did not front it out himself. I told him I was on the hook to a major heavy and I didn’t want any fuckups. He ignored my warnings and I eventually had to hire Joe Dudley and Bishop to watch for Izzy who lived at his parent’s house. I paid them to park in front of his house for several weeks, until I finally received a phone call from Joe that he had spotted Izzy moving around in his bedroom. I paid Izzy a visit.

He was pretty cool at first. “I saw your guy watching me out there,” he said, looking out his bedroom window with a weak smile. “He’s been there for days.”

“He’s been there for weeks,” I told him. “Where have you been?”

“I was out of town for a while. I just got back.”

“Where’s my money?”

“I don’t have it right now.”

“Fuck you, it’s been three fucking weeks and you haven’t called me.”

“Take it easy. I’m expecting to get some money tonight.”

“How much money?”

“A couple of hundred maybe.”

“You owe me eighteen hundred. Where’s the rest?”

“I’ll get it.”

“You fronted the ounce, didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“If you don’t have my money then give me back the rest of my ounce.”

“I can’t.”

“You fronted it out.”

“Okay. I fronted it and the fucking guy won’t pay. I thought maybe you’d help me collect.”

“Like shit I’ll help you collect, you little prick!”

I threatened to beat his ass and destroy his parent’s house, starting with a beautiful glass credenza in the living room. I gave the credenza a nudge, and before it leaned too far over, Izzy agreed to cover the debt. I walked away with a Fender guitar, some gold jewelry, a couple of hundred bucks and a few other trinkets. I paid Bob Robertson for the blow out of my own pocket and sold off Izzy’s possessions to cover my losses. After that I gave up on blow and never saw Bob Robertson or Izzy again.

Other opportunities presented themselves to me during the years that followed the Bahamas bust, but none of them panned out. A friend of Little Joe’s named Gary Martin had another friend with a printing press and a small business that was feeling the pinch of recession. The friend wanted to print up some funny money and I looked into it for him. The hardest part of counterfeiting money is getting the paper. Paper that feels like money is only made at special places on special presses and the closest source at the time was in Germany.

I passed on the scam because of something Irving had told me about years earlier. One of Irving’s friends, named Frankie Romano, was very successful at forging money, having printed off millions of phony Canadian hundred dollar bills. Frankie did so well that he ended up owning a small regional airline that served northern Quebec. He never got caught at counterfeiting and the only reason that he stopped was because the Canadian equivalent of the Secret Service paid him a visit and gave him a warning. They more or less told him that they knew what he was doing and that it was equivalent to treason. They said that even if they could not prove his counterfeiting, they were going to make him pay if he did not stop. Frankie took that as a death threat and immediately ceased hanging paper.

That told me that certain police agencies will go to great lengths to stop certain crimes. Even some smaller forces will take justice into their own hands. Irving’s story about Frankie reminded me of the story told by Jean Paul LaPierre about why he did not kill his partner for ratting on him about some bank robberies they did together. After one robbery, Jean Paul and the partner were driving away down a rural highway with a
QPP
car
in hot pursuit. They rounded a curve and then stopped and positioned the getaway car across the road. When the
QPP
car rounded the curve, Jean Paul and his buddy ambushed the cop with automatic weapons fire from
M
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1
carbines as they stood behind their getaway car. It was either good shooting or a miracle that the bullets punctured the engine compartment and did not kill the lone officer. The local detachment of the Laval Police Force caught up to his partner before they found Jean Paul. The partner told Jean Paul that the Laval police had taken him for a ride into the woods and made him dig his own grave. Then the cops told him they would kill him and leave him there if he did not provide the missing information they needed to convict both himself and Jean Paul. There was no doubt in Jean Paul’s mind that the story was true and he forgave his partner for ratting. He also made certain that when he turned himself in he was with his lawyer. In the end, Jean Paul died before he could face trial on that charge and several others, but the point is well made that some crimes are not worth the risk.

Other scams were offered to me, and some were pretty good, but the truth is, by that point in my life, I was becoming a little gun-shy. Otherwise I would have followed up the offer made by Bobby Mayweather, whose family owned a moving and transport firm in Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa. The older Mayweather brother managed the Ottawa branch of the firm and he offered to receive a container from Jamaica full of weed if I could send it up safely. The brother agreed that he would tip me off if the container came in hot, but he would not agree to help me rip off the container from the in-bond section of his warehouse if it came in with a “hold for inspection” label. I passed on the idea but not because I always suspected Bobby of working with the Man. If he was feeding the Man names, it was only to get himself off drug charges. But I knew that even if he was a rat, Bobby was unlikely to involve his own family in a deal and then bust them. The real reason I passed on the deal was that I could not afford to send up a container load of weed on my own, nor could I afford a loss like that if the container came in hot. Not to mention I was as hot as a firecracker. I might have just as well been
walking around with the word “smuggler” tattooed on my forehead. I passed on the scam and looked elsewhere for new opportunities.

It was around this time that I received a message from Jane, who faithfully visited Irving in jail every single week. She wanted me to arrange a visit with my friend Derrick who had a small medical practice in Montreal. If Derrick would agree to register as Irving’s doctor, Jane had a way of arranging for an outside visit through the prison. Then if Derrick didn’t mind, Jane was planning to dress up as his nurse and Irving and she could spend some time together while he was in the examining room.

In the first place, there was no way I trusted Irving not to pull a jailbreak after only a year or so in prison. In the second place, I did not want to impose on Derrick a handcuffed and legcuffed prisoner coming into his medical practice with armed guards. I told Jane that Derrick would not do it, without ever asking him if he would. Irving had already pulled one jailbreak in his life, and after only eighteen months into a twelve-year sentence, I knew he would bust out of jail the first chance he got.

After I nixed the caper, Jane came with another message from Irving. He had somehow set up a deal to sell two hundred pounds of the low-grade weed we still had stored at Big Johnny Lakeburn’s. He wanted me to personally arrange the drop, after meeting with two of his jailhouse contacts from Archambault Prison, a couple of miles down the road from the jail.

I couldn’t fucking believe it. As if I would ever go to a rendezvous on a dark road, within spitting distance of the most dangerous and well-patrolled jail in Canada, to meet two people I had never met in my life and do a dope deal. He even wanted me to handle my own weed delivery because his friends were paranoid and did not want to meet anyone else but me.

I was polite to Jane but I avoided the subject for as long as I could. I didn’t want to say no to Irving, who was obviously trying to help with our money problems, but I was not going to meet his jailhouse connections no matter what he said. I wondered if the clowns he was arranging to meet me were on a day pass.

A few weeks later, I was at my desk at Modern Motors when I had the most unusual visit from a legend in the underworld. It was in the dying days of the Modern Motors dealership when Sam Andrews walked into my office, fresh out of jail. Sam was a friend and partner of the late Simon Epstein, Little Ziggy’s older brother. Sam had just been released from Archambault Prison, where Irving was serving his time and I got the feeling that Sam did not socialize much with Irving in stir. But he knew of the connection between Irving, me and his friend Ziggy and he came to my place of business with a message. As I sat down with this soft-spoken man some ten years my senior, he told me a story that was difficult if not impossible to believe.

“Be careful. Be very careful,” Sam said, after taking me to a quiet area of the garage. “I heard some guards talking before I was sprung from the joint and they were talking about setting someone up on the outside. I found out later that the person being set up was you. Now listen to me. I can’t tell you any more than I told you and I know it sounds crazy, but you better believe me. You’re a friend of Ziggy’s so I came to see you. Don’t deal with anyone new, because I know for sure that you are being targeted for arrest. Someone is trying to set you up. So watch it.”

Sam Andrews stayed for a while chatting with the other rounders hanging about the office and then he left. As soon as he did, I immediately began thinking about Irving’s deal that he was trying to set up for me just outside of his prison.

Were the guards setting me up? I had never heard of such a thing. The cops sure, but not the guards. I was positive that Irving would not have been in on any setup. Not the way he detested rats. But I was starting to feel that Irv was more than just a stupid man. He was fucking insane. I passed a message on through Jane that I was not going to see his prison contacts. I said I was too hot to handle a dope deal right then but I did not mention the visit from Sam Andrews.

After that, my attentions went to my own trial that was coming up, for conspiracy to import the nine hundred and fifty pounds of hash. Before you can have a trial in Canada, you must
go through a preliminary hearing. In the beginning, our preliminary hearing was full of laughter, with Big John Miller and Shaun Palmer swapping jokes in the corridors outside the courtroom. The rest of our crew were circled around them and if you didn’t know better, you would think we were all at a nightclub instead of at a trial. Shaun even had the cops and the Crown prosecutors laughing with his quick repertoire of one liners. They were old jokes of the Rodney Dangerfield type like, “The judge said order in the court, so I asked for a rum and coke.” Shaun was a born showman and his delivery had us all in stitches. It took some of the sting out of the proceedings, which had butterflies fluttering in everyone’s stomachs.

The preliminary took months to complete and stretched even longer after the Bahamas bust. At that point, the preliminary was halted several times, while the Crown negotiated with John Miller and Simon Steinberg, who were both up on separate charges for the Bahamas and Lebanon scams. From that point forward, John Miller was seated in the glassed in box reserved for people held without bail, while Simon Steinberg remained free on bail.

All of the little details about the Lebanon caper came out in court. The Crown was constantly making reference to Simon Steinberg wearing a pilot’s uniform, which he never should have had. They cited him wearing the uniform in London and in Beirut. Simon’s father sat in the court room gallery with his head hung low throughout the proceedings, and Simon’s mother sat at his side. Simon’s father never looked over at the group in the defendants’ box, as though embarrassed to be associated through his son with the rest of us. It came out that Simon had borrowed the uniform from a
BOAC
pilot for a fee.

When the flight crew from the chartered Lockheed Lodestar was brought into court, I was certain some of them would recognize me from the hotel lobby and restaurant in Beirut. I have the kind of face that people do not forget. I once returned to my old childhood neighbourhood, and fifteen years later, the owner of the local candy store recognized me when I came in to visit.

The flight crew had to have noticed Shaun and me talking and drinking with Simon in the hotel bar in Beirut. Shaun, like me, also has the kind of face that you don’t forget. But when each member of the flight crew was asked to look around the courtroom and point out faces they recognized, they looked right past Shaun and me and pointed to Simon Steinberg. Simon had two of the best lawyers that money could buy, but he ended up copping a plea because of his back-to-back doubleheader charges. The same thing happened with my sidekick, Big John Miller.

My lawyer, Sidney, who also represented Shaun and the Limey, started to behave like a clown and pretended to snooze during the proceedings. With his courtroom shenanigans, Sidney was an even bigger showman than Shaun. Myron Wiseman, who was driving the Land Rover full of hash, was a no-show at the trial. He absconded while on bail and changed his name and appearance, never to be seen again. Shaun copped a two-year plea that was tied into an earlier beef for possession of the four hundred pounds of our weed that he lost in a motel room. Chip the Limey and I were released as free men and the judge gave special instructions to the Crown not to attempt to retry us.