Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (31 page)

I had a surprise visit from Rolf, who flew back down to Jamaica in a twin engine plane that he had been hired to fly from Vancouver to Miami. He was alone on this trip and in spite of his chintzy cheapness on his last visit we welcomed him to stay with us again. Even though he was tight with money, Rolf was free with his opinions and I must confess that I enjoyed his company as I was brought up to date on world events.

While we shared some wine and pot on my pool deck, lying on chaises lounges, Rolf informed me that he was here in Jamaica to meet with a man named Errol. Errol was supposed to front Rolf some weed, which he was supposedly going to fly back to the States. I say supposedly because I never believed Rolf ’s story for a minute. As far as I knew, Rolf had no contacts in Jamaica and he was always very straight and exceedingly cautious. Rolf was having money problems, he told me, while we both lounged, taking in the ocean view. His aircraft stock was in
the toilet. No one was buying his shares, which had fallen from a high of several dollars to barely a few cents in value. When his supposed contact Errol did not show up with the weed and Rolf was forced to depart with his luggage holds empty, I suspected his trip to Jamaica was a dry run. Before he left, I pulled Rolf aside and made him a proposition. Come back down with a bigger plane, I told him, and I would fill it with weed. I would arrange to procure the weed in Jamaica and I would arrange to sell it in Canada. His hands would remain clean. All he had to do was fly. The payout would be in the hundreds of thousands, I promised him, all of it tax free. He agreed to give the idea some thought. After a fun sightseeing flight around the island in his plane, Rolf dropped me off at the Montego Bay airport and headed back to Miami.

After his departure, it was almost time for Barbara and me to leave Jamaica as well. She was in her ninth month when we arranged our bookings to Vancouver and time was running out. In the final two months before we returned to Canada, neither Barbara nor I set foot in the pool or the ocean, as our daily routine was established to the point of boredom.

Breakfast was a highlight. After a sumptuous feast of bacon and eggs and fresh fruit on the patio, I would log several hours of typing while Barbara would read or contemplate life by the pool. Our daughter would occupy herself with the simple daily activities at the far end of the house, often playing with a new brood of puppies or chasing the free range chickens that May allowed to run loose in the yard. After lunch, the three of us would drive into Montego Bay to pick up provisions and newspapers and magazines. I would buy rolling papers and wine while Barbara would shop the fashion shops and duty free stores. We would pacify our daughter Allison with an ice cream or a Cisco, which is a Jamaican frozen fruit popsicle. Sometimes we would drive to the larger hotels like Seawinds or the Holiday Inn and watch the crab races or the limbo dancers. Or we would just people watch as the tourists played volleyball in the hotel pool.

We were home by four most afternoons for the second highlight of the day which was supper. Barbara, being pregnant,
neither drank nor smoked but I tried different imported wines with our dinner almost every other night. I never found any that were exceptional. I suspect that sitting in a container for weeks at a time in ninety-six degree heat might have had something to do with that. Dinner was usually bought fresh at the market with fish being a favourite or freshly killed chicken. Red meat was an occasional staple, but Jamaican beef was usually as tough as old leather due to the herds of cattle grazing on the mountainsides instead of on flat ground. Lobster was a treat that we bought on occasion from industrious young Jamaicans who stood at the side of the road, with diving masks and spears in one hand and a brace of fresh lobsters in the other. My dinner was always finished off with a marijuana spiff and a generous round of discussion. With no
TV
to watch, the stars and the jungle entertained us at night with a chorus of chirps and whistles and hisses and screeches as the forest came alive after dark. When the local
DJ
s down the road added their boom box music to the chorus of insects, Saturday nights became as noisy as a New York restaurant at lunch hour.

Towards the end of our stay, it seemed that our intended departure was not getting any closer as the Jamaican days crawled by. We called our tenants in Vancouver and asked them if they would like to end their lease early and we were ecstatic when they agreed. Barbara and I immediately made arrangements to return home. We went to the beach one last time on the day before our departure. Barbara came grudgingly with Allison and me, as she was into her ninth month of pregnancy and not really in a swimming mood. Barbara was so anxious to return home that we did not even bother to stop in Toronto on our return flight and passed straight through to Vancouver without even seeing our friends.

When we arrived home in Vancouver, our house was exactly as we had left it with not a pin out of place. Our tenants had found their own place and they were considerate enough to have left our house in perfect condition for our return. When our son was born a few weeks later at Lions Gate Hospital, I was the happiest man alive, even if he did look just like my father
without his false teeth. Our baby had pudgy red cheeks and sparkling mischievous blue eyes that gave only a hint of what was to come. He was blue when he first came out of the womb, and while I was fascinated to have witnessed the miracle of birth again, I could have lived quite happily without that experience.

After our son was born, I quickly found a job selling printing machines, a job I was referred to by a pot smoking buddy of mine. I worked at the job diligently, but between high-speed Xerox copiers that were fast replacing dedicated printing presses and a new breed of high volume computer reproduction equipment, it was like swimming upstream to make any money at the trade. It often took months to get paid for a sale and if anything went wrong in the chain of credit and financing approval requirements, the deal would fold up like a cheap lawn chair. I liked the work in spite of its drawbacks, but I was paid on a straight commission basis and my pay was completely unreliable. However, apart from money issues, I was reasonably happy with my job.

One night, while sipping a Grand Marnier with Rolf back in Vancouver, the subject of a weed run to Jamaica came up again. We discussed the idea in detail and we decided that the first step would be to take care of the financing. I said I could take care of the weed and the Jamaican expenses if Rolf would take care of the plane and the fuel. Rolf lined up a chartered twin engine King Air for the run, and he had a friend who had committed to financing a part of our deal. Between them, they came up with about half of the money required to finance a seven hundred pound load of weed.

I started polling my friends for investments and several came on board with five thousand dollar increments. Heather, our stewardess friend, was in for five. Bishop came in for five. Derrick put up five and so did I. The other five thousand of the twenty-five thousand cost of the weed would be covered by my Jamaican friend Bossa, on a front. All of my investors stood to make three times their money, with a payout that would come within a few months or less.

I contacted my old friend, Lou Berger, to see if he wanted to drive a camper down to Florida to meet Rolf and drive the
weed from there up to Seattle. Lou was eager to join the crew, at a promise of fifty thousand dollars for his end, and he had a trustworthy buddy to go along with him as a helper. Since Lou still had his credit card maxed out, I cleared it up for him with a two thousand dollar payment. Then I had him rent a camper in his own name. I explained to Lou that my name was too hot in the United States to rent the camper for this mission and I promised to cover the actual expenses when they came in. What I told Lou was the truth, but I also wanted no connection to Lou and the camper if he got busted. There were no borders for Lou to cross, so apart from the pickup at a remote airstrip, transporting the weed to Seattle should be a snap.

To complete the Seattle to Vancouver leg, Rolf was going to fly the weed into Canada with a smaller plane. He said he was going to take a flight path that would be only a few feet above the water. That way, he would be well below the radar and could then fly the weed into British Columbia using the San Juan and Gulf islands as cover. Rolf told me he had used the same route to smuggle liquor into Canada. He planned to pick the weed up from Lou at a private airstrip in Seattle and then fly it to a small runway near Squamish, B.C. My crew would be waiting there to drive the weed to a stash house in Vancouver.

When our financing was finally in place, Rolf chartered the twin engine King Air for a month and took it down to Seattle to have long-range fuel tanks installed. This was totally against
FAA
rules, but any fine he received would be more than covered by profits from the weed.

I flew down to Jamaica and went to see my old friend Bossa in the parish of Saint Ann’s. I had first met Bossa through Brian Kholder during the old days of our Montreal weed scams. Bossa was an old hand at large weed shipments, and the soft-spoken Jamaican agreed to supply six hundred pounds of Saint Ann’s weed for twenty-five thousand dollars Canadian up front, with the balance to be paid on the cuff. The weed was not sensi quality, but with only a few seeds per bud, it was better than the usual Saint Ann’s coli. Bossa was proud of his new high grade sensimilla, having pulled out all of the male plants he could find
in his crop. He would have had pure sensi but, unfortunately, the rest of his neighbours in the surrounding hills of Brownstown were not as enlightened as he was and some of their male plants fertilized some of Bossa’s female plants.

Bossa not only supplied my weed, but he also helped me scout out a perfectly paved runway for the weed transfer. He took me to the Ican plant in Boscobel which is halfway between Ocho Rios and Montego Bay. Ican’s private runway was chained off to prevent smugglers from using it, but Bossa had chain cutters and he also knew the local cops. I could see that Bossa wanted this scam to turn out well for me. He said he would personally load the weed on the plane and see that it got off safely.

When I came back to see Rolf in Vancouver and told him we were prepared to go, I could see that he was nervous. I tried to assauge his fears, but I figured I would have felt the same way if I were in his place. After a couple of delays and false starts relating to the preparedness of the aircraft, I committed everyone to the plan one last time. Rolf would fly down to a small town in Georgia, a few hundred miles north of Miami. From there he would make contact with Lou in the motor home.

“Don’t stay in the same hotel together,” I cautioned Rolf and Lou. “With your Canadian licence plates and accents, you guys will stand out like sore thumbs. And don’t spend all of your time in the hotel bars. Keep to yourselves until the work is done.”

I explained that planes like Rolf ’s were known to ferry loads from the Caribbean into Florida and Georgia all the time and that the best thing Rolf had going for him was the element of surprise. He had to fly that plane into North Carolina on one day and head to Jamaica the very next. On arrival in Jamaica, he had to load up, fuel up and turn around and fly right back to the drop zone in the U.S. The plan was for Rolf to fly back into the States on regular air traffic lanes and, upon reaching U.S. territory, he would make contact with the tower. They would direct him to the designated international airport and when they had done so, Rolf was going to radio in mechanical problems. Then he would duck below radar and fly to the alternate landing strip. On the ground he would have only minutes to unload, sweep
the plane and then take off again into radar coverage. He knew he would catch hell from the tower for pulling a stunt like that and he might even be fined by the
FAA
and have his licence suspended. But by that time, the weed would be rolling towards Seattle in Lou’s camper and at that point, Rolf would be able to afford the fine, since his end would be over three hundred thousand dollars.

After one last meeting in Vancouver, Lou, Rolf and I set our watches, arranged our phone codes and then set off on our adventure. Lou was driving a new twenty-eight-foot camper with plenty of room under the bunks for storing the weed. Rolf flew down to Seattle and removed the seats from the aircraft to make room for the weed and then filled the plane with fuel. From there he planned to fly non-stop from Seattle to North Carolina.

I booked my Air Canada commercial flight to Jamaica and arrived in time to make the last-minute preparations for Rolf ’s arrival. When the weed was pressed and packaged and ready for transport to the Boscobel runway, Bossa had his transport crew on standby. I had ten thousand dollars cash in my pocket to pay off any police, in case they came to the runway before Rolf was loaded and ready for takeoff. I was excited to be pulling off my own weed scam, and for once, I was in full control. But along with the control came a tremendous responsibility to see the plan through to fruition. The weight of success or failure rested on my shoulders alone and no matter what happened, I was determined to see our plan through.

It was a typical day in paradise with the temperature hovering around ninety degrees and not a cloud in the sky. I had flown down to Montego Bay a few days earlier to prepare for Rolf’s arrival and I was staying at the Holiday Inn, where there was a bank of telephones in the lobby as well as one in every room. I left my name with the front desk of the hotel to be paged when my telephone call came in from Rolf. I needed to hear from him that everything was ready to go and to make any final adjustments to our timing. When Rolf’s call was two days overdue, I started to get concerned. I was expecting him to call with some kind of problem or other because everything to Rolf was problematic. I was beginning to think that his complaints were a stalling tactic but I was not ready for what I heard on the day before he was to fly in and pick up the weed. The front desk paged me at the pool bar and I hurried to pick up the courtesy phone in the lobby. It was Rolf.