Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (35 page)

The Angels had their first installment on the deal with Smitty and the hunt for Irving was next. A few months later, two hit men were almost successful when they located Irving at his house and walked up his driveway with guns drawn. Like a cat with nine lives, Irving spotted them first and hopped a backyard fence to escape. The hit men found Irving’s gun where it had
fallen out of his pocket on the other side of the fence, but there was no sign of their target.

The Angels were still looking for Irving when Solly brought me up to date on his recent activities. Solly told me that he, too, was part of the search party looking for Irving and that he was hoping to pick up a cool chunk of change if he could find him. The Angels held the contract from Smitty, but they would eagerly share it with someone if they could find the last of Toonie’s killers. Solly told me he was even going to come out to Vancouver to strong-arm me for Irving’s whereabouts, until he found out that Irving and I were on the splits. I wondered how Solly could have known so many of the details of what had happened to Toonie when he wasn’t even there. But I had seen his kind of insight before and like I have said before, there are surprisingly few secrets in the underworld.

As you might imagine, I ate up the news about Irving’s misfortune like a shop vac sucking on a mohair rug, and I sat on the edge of my seat to hear more. The coke and the weed that Solly and Hawkeye were providing for our meeting fueled the fire in me and I found my blood starting to pump as the story unfolded.

Solly asked me if I still wanted to kill Irving and I told him no. Solly was surprised at my reluctance. He told me that he would not have allowed anyone to get away with handcuffing his wife and coming into his home with guns drawn.

I told Solly that I felt that way for a long time, while Irving was still in jail. But then, I added that so much time had passed since it all went down, I no longer had any interest in pursuing it. I told Solly I was back in Montreal to make money, not war.

“Besides,” I told him, “look at all the trouble Irving is in, without any help from me.”

The Angels were after him. The cops were watching him. Most of his friends were dead and any left had deserted him. He was on parole. He was out of money. Why did I have to do anything more to Irving than what was already happening to him?

Solly and Hawkeye nodded their acceptance of my logic and then moved on to an explanation of their scam and what they needed me for. A friend that Hawkeye used to go to school with
was the head of a cleaning crew at the Montreal airport. The cleaner told Hawkeye that he was willing to pull small loads of hash off the planes, if someone could get the hash safely on board. Since one of the routes that he serviced was a direct flight to Jamaica, the aircraft cleaner needed someone in Montego Bay who would be able to get the hash into a special cavity on the plane.

That’s where I would come in. Hawkeye and Solly knew from Derrick that I had lived in Jamaica and they knew of my past involvement with smuggling weed to the boys on the Montreal waterfront. My experience in smuggling gave me the credibility they were looking for and my relationship with the boys on the docks gave me the references they wanted. Plus, I was a trusted friend of Derrick’s. I made my terms and conditions clear and agreed that if their plan worked, I would share my end with Derrick for turning me on to the score. It would be a four-way split, with half of my end going to Derrick. Solly, Hawkeye and the aircraft cleaner would get a full end each. The plan seemed good to me and I was not greedy enough to want more than I was offered. I would be handling nothing in Canada. My hands would be clean. If anything went wrong, it was worth half of my end to have Derrick as insulation between me and his two criminal friends.

I flew down to Jamaica immediately after our meeting to see if I could find the connections I needed and I lucked out right away. I found Righteous in Hopewell and Duke in Montego Bay and we started our inquiries. Righteous asked around the island and located a Jamaican named Topsy who could help us. Topsy was a member of an airport cleaning crew in Montego Bay and he was known to have placed weed on planes before. I met with Topsy to discuss our plan and had Righteous come along as intermediary. I described the hiding place on the aircraft to Topsy and he said he could do what I needed. I offered Topsy one full end of the profits and we quickly came to terms. Then I went back to Montreal and told the boys we were good to go.

Solly and Hawkeye gave me the cash to buy twenty pounds of hash in Jamaica for a test run, as well as the expense money to pay off Topsy and the others in my Jamaican crew. Righteous,
Duke and Sunny became my executive assistants and were immediately put on my payroll. They found me the hash I needed in Jamaica and pressed it into slabs that were handed off to Topsy. I went near nothing and I touched nothing as I oversaw the operation from a distance and put the scam together. At first, Topsy was unable to locate the secret hiding place in the plane, even with the detailed instructions I gave him. He put it elsewhere and within a few days of my arrival in Jamaica, a plane was winging its way to Montreal with twenty pounds of hash concealed on board. We almost lost the first load but Hawkeye’s aircraft cleaner in Montreal was able to get to the hash before it was discovered and before the scam was blown.

The next time Topsy shipped the hash up to Canada, he found the right stash spot and the amusement park ride began. Week after week, I shipped hash to Montreal, with loads that escalated from twenty pounds to seventy pounds. It was not long before we were all rolling in dough and feeling like we had a licence to do what we were doing.

My routine was as follows. I would come to Montreal from Vancouver and I would meet with Solly and Allan to pick up the investment money. Then I would head for Jamaica to buy more finger hash. When the load was shipped off, I came back to Montreal from Jamaica to pick up my end in cash, along with some personal hash. Then I would fly back to Vancouver. A week or two later, I would repeat the whole itinerary. It was clean. It was neat. And as far as I was concerned, I was in complete control because, without me, Solly and Hawkeye had no way to get their hash on board the aircraft.

I was determined not to relinquish that control for as long as possible. Eventually, Solly and Hawkeye started coming down to Jamaica for visits. At first, I maintained a distance between us, even though they were fun to hang around with. Solly was a party animal. The fat man was able to pick up a phone and order women and cocaine like the rest of us order pizza. At first, I thought he was paying for the girls that he brought down to Jamaica for entertainment, because at three hundred plus pounds, Solly was not exactly a ladies man. But the guy had
character and a never-ending supply of money, coke and Quaaludes, and there were plenty of women who wanted to come to Jamaica with him. I couldn’t help but like Solly, with his easy laughter and constant joking, and it was hard for me to reconcile that he was also a professional killer who tracked down fugitives for the mob.

“I can always tell when someone is being hunted,” he told me one time, when I pointed out someone I knew on the beach. “That guy,” he said,” is being hunted. See how he checks out everyone who comes onto the beach.”

“That’s because he’s an undercover cop,” I argued good-naturedly, but Solly was adamant.

“No,” he said, “I know that look. He’s on the run.”

I met another part of the “Solly and Hawkeye Gang” when I returned to Montreal after several successful shipments of hash. Sandy “The mule” Mullins was an interesting character that I had seen here and there in my travels around Montreal. I had always wondered about the guy with the gray hair in a biker ponytail and what he did for a living. It turns out he did the same thing I did. Sandy came across as rough and tough, with a raspy, deep voice and a dry, sarcastic wit. Sandy was the kind of guy you could show two bodies to in your trunk and without blinking an eye, he would pick up a shovel to help bury them. Sandy was a serious old school gangster and I was careful to keep on his best side. In the beginning, he was very helpful when he defended my spending habits with my guys in Jamaica.

“That’s how Toonie treats his guys overseas,” said Sandy, when Heckle and Jeckle began haranguing me about the expenses. “Leave him alone.”

And for a while they did. Sandy also supported me regarding the security concerns I had about Solly and Hawkeye coming down to Jamaica.

“Don’t get involved in their parties,” he warned me. “Just stay focused on business.”

I was glad Sandy agreed with me about certain things, but as time went on, he dug deeper and deeper into his bag of coke until no one was listening to his mad ramblings anymore.

Following Sandy’s earlier advice, I was pretty loose with the purse strings in Jamaica and I made sure my boys down there were well paid. It was easy for Solly and Hawkeye to gripe about expenses, but it wasn’t their asses on the line in Jamaica. I bought Sunny a motorcycle with a
125
cc engine. It was plenty peppy on the road but easy on the gas. I also paid enough for Righteous to buy his first car, a Lancer that came with air conditioning. I set Duke up in a small convenience store and bar at the decrepit hotel where he lived with about twenty other Jamaican families.

I honestly can’t say how much cash we were making on each run. The flights were flying weekly, and usually we shipped between seventy and one hundred and fifty pounds of hash, worth about five thousand dollars a pound wholesale. Even if you split that between six people and deduct expenses, it still left a tidy profit for everyone. When I look at the numbers, I am amazed that my money could ever run out, but the gangster lifestyle, which might leave a person dead or in jail at any moment, encourages spending. It’s like being told you have six months to live and then being given a million dollars to spend. You just don’t think about investing in the future.

I stayed at Derrick the Doctor’s when I was in Montreal, and for about a year we continued on with our fifty-fifty split. But after a year of doing all the work and taking all the risks, I felt it was unfair that Derrick continued to get such a large cut of my end. It took Solly and Hawkeye to push me into discussing the issue with Derrick. They heckled me for being a chump and effectively talked me out of continuing to piece the Doctor off. I came up with a proposition. If Derrick would become more involved and carry the money to Jamaica for me, I would continue to split my take with him. If he refused to help me, then our deal was over. After all, Derrick was a doctor and didn’t need the money like the rest of us who had no other income. To his credit, Derrick was charming about his decision not to become involved any deeper in our scam. He agreed to stop taking a cut, and for a while, I continued to stay with him when I went to Montreal.

As time went on, Hawkeye and Solly began to come down to Jamaica more frequently to party. It is hard to blame anyone for wanting to enjoy the exotic splendor of the island, but with a thousand other areas in the world to choose from, why pick the one place where our business was being conducted? Why not just wave a red flag at Canada Customs and advise them that three well-known smugglers were hanging around together in Jamaica?

I thought the problem had solved itself when Hawkeye got himself arrested in Montego Bay with a bag of weed in his hotel room. He spent several weeks in jail, until he was finally judged and released with a fine. I was secretly glad about Hawkeye getting busted, figuring that he would never come back to Jamaica again after that. But Allan Stone loved that island so much he could not stay away.

Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed the good times when Solly and Hawkeye came down. They were so much fun that I could hardly keep away from them. Solly and Hawkeye loved fine dining and high rolling and the party was non-stop whenever they showed up in Montego Bay. They supplied the beautiful girls and the Quaaludes while Jamaica supplied the coke and the weed.

The parties were fun, but I soon began to miss my wife and children and I knew that my constant traveling back and forth between Vancouver, Montreal and Jamaica was bound to be drawing some heat. So I found a lovely villa in Ironshore, Jamaica, and flew my wife and children down to live with me. We enrolled our two children in school. My work permit, which I had applied for years ago, finally paid me back some dividends by giving me resident status. The work permit also legitimized my stay on the island, and when I took my overflow cash to the Cayman Islands for deposit, the Jamaican work permit removed any possible drug stigma from my money. After all, who could blame anyone for wanting their money in a safer place, when the politics in Jamaica were so volatile?

When I informed my two partners that I had a bank account in the Caymans, they immediately became concerned that I was
siphoning off the expense money. They began to hover around me, trying to get closer to my contacts. I also had some concerns about them holding back on the amount of hash money they were really receiving in Montreal. Even if they were holding back fifty cents per gram, it would have far exceeded anything that I could ever skim. The mistrust was to be expected in our line of work and I am sure that there was a little skimming on both ends of the scam. But there was so much money coming in, there was no need for concern over small potatoes.

During this period, I received some more news on the whereabouts of Irving. It seems that crazy Irving had tired of being pursued by the Angels and had sought the protection of the police. Irving, who always professed undying hatred for rats, became one himself in exchange for a new identity and an escape from his past. He was being housed in Parthenais Detention Centre and he was now suing the
RCMP
for not following through on their promise of a new life and a hundred grand in cash. Irving was held incommunicado in Parthenais for months, as the cops and Irving reached a stumbling block. The cops wanted Irving to confess to pulling the trigger on Toonie, which was a condition Irving would not agree to. The
RCMP
then cut off his visits from his girlfriend, Jane, until she eventually left him. The story ended with Irving being released from jail. He was thrown back on the street, without his new identity or money, after he had spilled his guts on everyone he knew. I can not say I was unhappy to hear of my old partner’s misfortune and I felt that he deserved everything that came to him. One thing was certain. The
RCMP
were fully aware of my role in Irving’s past and I expected some kind of retribution if they ever twigged on to my visits to Montreal and Jamaica.