Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (34 page)

If Lou had been busted at the airport and gave me up to the
RCMP
, they might be waiting for me tomorrow at the Air Canada flight I had pre-booked to Vancouver. I called Canadian Airlines and booked myself on an earlier flight, using my second and last name. It was not a great change of name but it was enough of a difference to foil a hasty name search if anyone was looking for me via computer. I called my wife again in Vancouver but she had been unable to reach Lou’s wife Lucy. I called the Hilton Hotel one last time and found out that Lou had never checked
into his room. I was on pins and needles until my plane took off from Toronto the next day and then I had six hours to sit and reflect on what had gone wrong.

Had the Jamaican cops passed on the intelligence to Canadian Customs about Lou and me being investigated for drugs? If that were so, why had I not been pulled out of line for interrogation and a body search like Lou had been? I remembered the last time I had seen Lou, when he was standing in the immigration line with that impatient scowl, as though he were a businessman upset with the delay. His attitude was different from all of the other tired travelers who had just returned from holiday and I wondered if that had twigged Canada Customs on to him. The second-guessing was making me sick to my stomach and my friend Brandon’s words began ringing in my ears.

“Don’t use Lou as a runner. You know he’ll fuck everything up.”

Hindsight is perfect vision, I told myself, as I made up excuses, but there was no doubt I felt guilty. I should have scrubbed the deal after the cops raided us in Jamaica. Forgetting the jail and the money aspect of Lou getting busted, my scam was now blown since the element of surprise was gone. I had let my own greed coax me into agreeing with Lou when he insisted on continuing with the run, even after we were investigated and questioned in Jamaica.

When I got home to Vancouver, I hugged my wife and children and decided that I had had enough of Jamaica and smuggling. What did I need Jamaica for? My grow op in the basement covered my weed needs and provided me with extra money. My job selling reprographic equipment was beginning to show dividends after years of sporadic returns for my efforts. And I felt a deepening responsibility to stay out of trouble with two children and a wife to take care of.

I eventually heard from Lucy Berger, who informed me that Lou was in jail in Toronto and she had moved to Vancouver Island to live with her mother. She told me about Lou getting pulled from line and being busted at Pearson Airport in Toronto. She told me that Lou had not given me up to the
RCMP
and I
subsequently gave her the five grand I had promised Lou. It took a few weeks to pay her off, using the proceeds of my grow room and some oil that I had left. I even threw in an extra three thousand because Lou copped a plea to three years and it cost me hardly anything for his lawyer.

When the dust settled, I felt I got off easy and I had to give grudging credit to Lou for keeping his cool when many men wouldn’t have. Lou served a little over one year before he was paroled. I saw him again in Vancouver and we ended up still being on good terms after he got out of the slammer, which is unusual in these types of situations.

I lost some of my enthusiasm for smuggling dope from Jamaica after Lou’s bust, but I did not lose my ambition for making money. With my sales job as a cover, I continued to grow weed in my basement and discussed the merits of expanding my operation with some of my other grow op buddies.

But before that could happen, I received a phone call from my good friend Derrick the Doctor in Montreal. Derrick said he had some friends who wanted to offer me a business proposition. I knew the two friends he was referring to, one by reputation and one through a meeting in Jamaica.

Allan “Hawkeye” Stone had been a friend and partner of my old buddy Brad the “Wild Man” Wilder. I first met Allan Stone when I was down in Kingston with Big John Miller working on our scam. Hawkeye was there with the “Wild Man” working on their own scam. Hawkeye had a partner named Solly Cohen who was a well-known figure in the Montreal underworld and who was once a partner of Irving’s. Irving always hated Solly, and as the Arabs say, any man who is an enemy of my enemy is my friend. Therefore, I had no hesitation in meeting Solly and Hawkeye to discuss some business. From what I could gather from the brief telephone conversation with Derrick, Solly and Hawkeye had a door into Canada and they needed someone with good connections in Jamaica.

I agreed to fly down to Montreal to discuss the business proposition on three conditions: One, I was not obligated to take the deal. Two, they were to cover my expenses to Montreal and
elsewhere. And three, I was not going to touch anything with my own hands. When I received these assurances, I flew to Montreal to begin the tightest damn smuggling scam I had ever seen.

I met with Allan Stone and Solly Cohen at Derrick the Doctor’s house in the West End of Montreal. Derrick’s house was a beautiful New England–style cottage that looked like it was furnished out of a magazine, with all of the finest appliances, cabinets and hardware. Derrick now had a very successful medical practice, established many years before, and his wife had a long-standing job as an executive for Mary Kay Cosmetics. Between them, the two professionals were pulling in enough income to impress even their mobster friends.

Derrick was a fringer. A fringer in the underworld is someone straight who likes to hang around with criminals. Derrick grew up with one of the two men he was introducing me to on this day, having gone to school many years ago with Allan Stone. Derrick knew Allan’s partner Solly from his reputation around Montreal and by smoking hash and doing lines with him when he came around on visits with Allan.

“Hawkeye” Stone had made his bones as a teenager when he was unfairly targeted for a beating by the local bar bully. Hawkeye went home after the beating and got a .
32
pistol and waited for the older bully in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn. It was winter
and Hawkeye wore a hooded jacket that concealed his face from fresh falling snow and from passersby. After a couple of hours of waiting, the bully finally presented himself in the parking lot and Allan capped him one in the thigh. The bully fell down screaming in pain and Hawkeye made like a bunny and fled the scene. Everyone knew that Allan had done the deed, even though the cops could not prove it, and Hawkeye gained the reputation as someone not to fuck with. He told me later that he went to make peace with the bully in the hospital but when the bully saw Hawkeye come into his room, he was so scared he almost passed a kidney stone.

Hawkeye had also been the object of much awe and respect for his friend Ron “Hoss” Kingsley, who use to talk about Allan and Solly like they were part of Al Capone’s mob.

“Those two can get someone killed quicker than anyone I know,” Hoss used to say, and I almost believed him.

In fact, I always wondered about Hoss himself doing clip work on the side. He was a fanatical gun nut, with a collection of unregistered guns from flintlocks to Uzis. I went to visit him one time and he took me into his basement to show off a new gun. To my surprise, he loosed off a round in the basement that ricocheted around the ceiling and ended up bouncing off a wall before hitting me in the leg. There was no injury because the little .
32
caliber bullet was spent of energy by the time it hit me, but I told Hoss that I didn’t appreciate getting shot.

Hoss had faced the wrong end of a gun himself one time, when he ripped off Solly and Allan on a hash deal. It was their money that financed Hoss and his wife Janice’s scam to ship home a load of dresses and skirts with buttons made of hash from Afghanistan. The first load came through fine, and instead of sharing the loot with their partners, Hoss and Janice told Hawkeye that the shipment got lost and tried to sell the hash on the side. They got caught red-handed. The two were lucky to talk themselves into a settlement, with Solly holding a machine gun on them while the husband-and-wife team shamelessly pointed the finger at each other. Hoss and his wife made arrangements to pay back the ends they had ripped off from Solly and Hawkeye,
and in the typical fashion of the underworld, they were forgiven and reinstated as friends again.

In the early days of their relationship, Hoss used to pull ripoffs with Hawkeye. The two men would catch up to a dope dealer and rob him at gunpoint. Hoss lost his taste for that action when he stitched the wall with machine-gun fire around one dealer from the States and the guy didn’t even flinch. They got the money they were after and then got out of there, but Hoss figured they were starting to push the envelope. After that, he moved onto smuggling, which in his mind was a much less dangerous occupation.

No one felt sorry when Hoss and Janice got busted and went to jail for three years for their Afghanistan button scam. Hoss’s father owned two very large and successful car dealerships, and it was a common sentiment in the underworld that rich people shouldn’t be involved in crime. Of course, anyone who really knew Hoss knew that he was into the gangster life for the action not the coin. The same was true, to a much lesser degree, for his buddy Hawkeye and Hawkeye’s partner Solly. They too, were into the lifestyle for the action, but the money was far more important to them than it was for Hoss.

One time, Solly and Hoss had an athletic challenge match to prove who was in the best physical condition. You would have thought that the outcome would be easy to predict, when you compared fat Solly to Hoss. Hoss was at least ten years younger than Solly and about a hundred pounds lighter, even if he was somewhat fat himself. A bet was made for a thousand dollars cash and Allan Stone was the officiator. Since it was winter and about thirty below outside, Hoss and Solly measured off a five mile distance inside of a high school gym. It came to about a hundred laps. The footrace started off well, with Hoss in the lead, but halfway through the race, Hoss’s dope smoking habit began to catch up with him. Before the race was over, Hoss was gasping for breath while fat Solly sailed by him, laughing all the way to the bank. To add insult to injury, Solly did the last lap running backwards while Hoss dragged his tired ass off the gym floor to go get his wallet.

Solly and Hawkeye were multitaskers, never satisfied with dealing in one scam at a time. They would be manufacturing and distributing Quaaludes at the same time as they were running hash from Afghanistan and shipping weed up from Jamaica. Solly and Hawkeye did not have wide doors that would allow them to bring in large loads of contraband into Canada, but they had enough small doors to make quite a good living. They also dealt in guns, stolen merchandise, booze, hard drugs, pharmaceuticals — you name it. My private name for them that I shared only with Barbara was Heckle and Jeckle, after the two conspiratorial crows of cartoon fame. I picked that name because like the two crows, there was nothing that these two guys wouldn’t do or get involved in.

Hawkeye, Solly and I sat down for our first meeting at Derrick’s house and the appropriate greetings were exchanged. Everyone knew my history with Irving, so I started out by stating that I wasn’t into the gangster life anymore. I said I was prepared to discuss a business venture, but if it was going to end up with everyone shooting everyone else, I was going to walk. Period.

At this point, Solly enlightened me with some recent history about my old partner, Irving. Apparently, after Irving came out of jail, the crazy Jew decided he was going to kidnap and ransom a well-known coke importer named Ryan “Tooney” O’Toole. Tooney was supplying the Hells Angels with tons of coke and he had a reputation as the only smuggler in Montreal who could raise a million dollars with one phone call. Irving and Roger Ouimet, the thug he had sent to my house to kill me, conned Tooney into meeting them at a motel in the west end of Montreal. They used Freddie Peters to lure Tooney to the motel with a fabricated story about having located some guns that had been stolen from Tooney’s house earlier that year. However, there were no guns waiting for Tooney in the motel, except for the shotgun in Irving’s hands and the .
45
automatic in Roger Ouimet’s hand. Irving was hiding in the bathroom when Toonie came into the motel room, expecting to get his guns back. When the door closed behind him and Roger Ouimet pointed a gun at him, Toonie saw that it was a trap and smashed a chair through
the motel window as he attempted to flee. There was a struggle between Toonie, Freddie Peters and Roger Ouimet but the cocky little Irishman was winning the battle. Roger Ouimet fired one shot, hitting Toonie in the chest, but when he tried to shoot him again, his gun jammed. There was a further struggle between the three men and Toonie was still full of fight, when Irving ran out of the bathroom where he had been hiding. Irving blasted Toonie in the neck with his shotgun, as he ran over the prostrate Irishman, then continued straight out the motel door and fled the scene. Irving was followed by his cohorts who made good their escape, leaving Toonie dead on the floor. After killing Toonie, Roger Ouimet went downtown and bragged to the world. “I killed the king. Now I’m king.”

But Roger Ouimet was not king for long because Toonie had a partner named Ron “Smitty” Smith. Smitty told members of the Hells Angels that he would settle a five hundred thousand dollar coke debt and give them another two hundred pounds of blow for free, if they took out his partner’s killers. Somewhere along the line, the Angels caught up with my old pal Freddie Peters who traded a confession for his life and named names.

Within a month of Smitty’s contract being given to the Angels, Roger Ouimet was blown out of his toupée while watching television in his high-rise apartment downtown. Roger died along with four of his cronies, including Ronnie McGuire, by a bomb planted in a
VCR
. In typical fashion of the underworld, one of Roger Ouimet’s friends, Jacques “Apache” Francois who had done contract hits with him, brought Roger the
VCR
to watch the Grey Cup football game and a video about the Hells Angels. After the blast, which blew out walls and sent two of the apartment’s elevators crashing to the ground, the only thing left to identify Roger Ouimet was his hair piece.