Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (4 page)

A year prior to this time, Barbara and I were traveling throughout the U.S. and Mexico where we met lots of people, some of whom came to figure in my future ambitions.

We met one crew from the Ali Baba Head Shop in Phoenix, when we camped with them for a few weeks on a beach in Guayamus, Mexico. We were driving out of the campsite to continue on further south, when we came across their van coming in the opposite direction. A voice called out to us. “Turn around and go back to the beach,” said one of them through the truck window. “We got hash.” That was enough incentive to change our itinerary and we spent a few weeks hanging out with the Ali Baba group in a temporary commune on the beach. There were two guys and two girls in the van, all of whom shed their clothes as soon as they hit the beach.

After we returned from Mexico over Christmas, we went to visit our Ali Baba friends in Arizona. They welcomed us with open arms and invited us to stay for free at the living quarters above their head shop. The folks at Ali Baba were on the leading edge of the hippie movement, with employees and hangers-on wearing sandals and beads and long floral dresses or handmade clothing cut from leather. They were the kind of people who say “Have a wonderful day” and really mean it. The owners of Ali Baba were two Vietnam vets, Colin and Vince, who had returned
from the war determined to live the rest of their lives enjoying the freedoms they had fought for in Vietnam. They told me during my visit to Phoenix that they had access to many tons of Mexican marijuana on the American side of the border. There was so much marijuana available that it was stored on pallets in an American warehouse and the dealers were on the honour system to just go and pick up what they needed.

It was Colin and Vince who I decided to visit with my friend Bishop from Montreal. Three of us were involved in the operation. Besides Bishop and me, our partner Ross Mitchell was waiting in Plattsburg to do his end. Bishop and I had money to invest but since Ross had none, we gave him the most dangerous part of the scam, which was running the weed across the Canadian border. The plan was simple. Buy the weed in Phoenix and have Bishop transport it to Plattsburg, a small resort town and beach just south of the Canadian border. I suggested that Bishop take the train, but he objected to the three-day trip and he complained that there were no direct rail connections from Phoenix to Plattsburg available. I took him at his word since he was taking the risk of carrying the contraband and after briefly researching train routes, I ended up agreeing with his decision to fly the weed back. It was way before the days of
9
/
11
and routine baggage scans, so I was not overly concerned about flying the weed back in suitcases. Besides, it was Bishop’s ass that was going to be fried if he was wrong in his decision.

The boys at Ali Baba were happy to see me again and treated Bishop and me like family. They even took us sightseeing to Nogales, Mexico, where we spent a day soaking up the Mexican experience. When we were coming back through American customs, the Ali Baba crew were the epitome of professionalism, as they stopped short of the border and checked their vehicle over for any traces of drugs. The border guards seemed to see us coming and instantly shunted our truck to a checkout station, where we were interrogated by U.S. customs officers. There was no need to be concerned about the inspection because we had already cleaned out the truck, so it was quite funny when an alert customs officer singled out my buddy
Bishop for special attention. It could have been his disco clothes, which were so very different from our hippie hosts, or it might have been the nervous fluttering of his long feminine eyelashes. The customs officer checked our documents, and then directed his attention to Bishop, who was sitting by a window seat in the back of the truck.

“You’re Canadian?”

“Yes.”

“And you know these people?”

“No. I mean yes. I mean I just met them. I came down with my friend.”

“What were you doing in Mexico?”

“Sightseeing.”

“Anything else?”

“No.”

“Step out of the vehicle, please.”

“What for?”

“Step out of the vehicle.”

Bishop complied with the order, while the officer frisked him and a second customs officer looked on.

“What’s the matter, son? You look nervous.”

“I’m not nervous,” Bishop answered with a challenging stare.

Suddenly the Customs Officer slapped his hand over Bishop’s heart and smiled over at his partner.

“Hey, Charlie. I think we’re going to have a cardiac arrest here!”

The officer concluded that Bishop was clean and let us all pass back through the border into the U.S. Everyone in our van was laughing as we drove away from the customs wicket. I was laughing. The Ali Baba crew was laughing. Their girlfriends were laughing. Even the two Customs Officers were smiling. The only one with a scowl on his face as we re-entered the United States was Bishop.

Once we were back in Arizona, we purchased our first fifty bricks of Mexican weed and two hard-shelled Samsonite suitcases. We packed the suitcases with weed at the Ali Baba Head Shop and placed towels and limes over the red-wrapped bricks
of marijuana. Then we bid farewell to the Ali Baba crew and drove our rented car to the airport. Bishop wheeled the bags into the terminal, where we both caught an uneventful flight back to New York. In New York we rented another car and ferried the suitcases full of pressed bud to Plattsburg just below Montreal on the Canadian border. There we met with Ross and we carefully stashed the bricks of weed under the springs in the back seat of his father’s car that he had borrowed for the day. A few hours later, Ross drove the weed back into Canada, crossing the Canadian border on a busy weekend with the drive-in movie crowd. The plan worked flawlessly and the reunion in our hometown of Montreal was a happy one, as the parties continued and drug use escalated.

There was still plenty of coke and Quaaludes to go around at Ryan and Sally’s house and we continued to gather there to party. When Ryan flew down to Jamaica for a scam, the parties continued without him. Ryan had no idea how close Ross and his wife Sally were becoming in his absence. I gave him a heads-up one time, but he was too busy with his scam to properly deal with the issue.

Meanwhile Barbara and I had rented a huge house in Beaconsfield where we had lots of room for guests and parties. I came home from a trip down to Arizona one time to find a mob of people at my house. I walked in with my suitcase and asked Barbara what was going on, what’s with all the strange faces. There were Corvettes and Jaguars and a Mercedes-Benz in the driveway and I recognized none of them. My friends, Joe and Hymie, and a mooch named Izzy Solomon interceded to explain that the Rolling Stones concert was on that night and there was absolutely no weed or hash in town for the event. I was the only one in all of Montreal who had weed to sell. These people were all drug dealers working the show. I was angry that my friends had brought all of these strangers to my house but I made the best of an uncomfortable situation. I sold the ten pounds of weed that was in my freezer for full retail. Then I called Ross to run to our stash and bring over the rest of our supply, and we sold every brick of Mexican weed that night.
I went to the show with several of my friends, and I felt proud that everyone in the stadium was getting high because of us.

The house Barbara and I rented had three unused bedrooms besides ours, and as fate would have it, my friend and partner, Ross, needed a place to stay after his parents asked him to leave home. He had thrown a tequila party in their absence and his older brother had come by to find everyone drunk and half naked. Ross took offense to his older brother’s objections and they had a punch-up that left Ross with his front tooth missing. Barbara and I agreed to let Ross stay in one of our many unused bedrooms. Since Ross was a bit of a flake and looked like a geek without his front tooth, I never considered him a threat to my relationship. Like Ryan, I should have paid more attention to the situation, but I was too busy working my scam.

Bishop and I returned several times to Phoenix for a refill of our illicit drug prescription. The last trip we took saw us take back one hundred and forty pounds of primo Mexican weed. We were so confident of our operation that we even made arrangements to have Colin and Vince come to Montreal for a visit on the next trip north. They were eager to come to Montreal and offered to ferry another two hundred pounds up to Plattsburg for us on a front. Up until this time, I had been accompanying my friend Bishop on the journey, but I never carried anything on my person. Bishop was the courier. My end was the “cap.” I set up the purchase and I had the connections in Phoenix, as well as providing the bulk of the start-up financing. There was no need for me to stick my chin out, even a little. However, I am very quick to take on responsibility if needed, and when I discovered at the last minute that four suitcases of weed were too much for Bishop to handle with his bum leg, I did not hesitate. I didn’t know about his leg, which had been injured in a motorcycle accident some years before but I suspect to this day that he was just nervous to do the run alone. I felt I had no choice but to help him carry the bags to the check-in counter. Flying with several suitcases was not unusual in those days. The airlines always accepted extra bags, sometimes without a surcharge if the plane was light on passengers. There were no
raised eyebrows as we checked in Bishop’s luggage. However our suitcases were so stuffed with bricks of weed that one of them was in danger of breaking open. Bishop and I taped it up at the airport counter to keep it closed. We could have gone back to the Ali Baba shop and left two of the bags of weed for a future run. It might have been embarrassing as well as costly, but it certainly could have been done.

Instead, I helped Bishop carry the bags to the check-in. I made certain the baggage stubs were on his person and in his name. We were the only people in first class when we boarded the plane and the stewardess sat down with us and began chatting freely. We were playing a game of heads up poker when she started asking questions.

“Where are you headed?” she asked. “What do you boys do for a living?”

“We’re gamblers,” Bishop answered, while trumping my pair of aces with three little sixes. We were gamblers all right. We were gambling on getting four suitcases of weed from Phoenix to New York without getting busted.

There were no customs checkpoints to worry about, but with several thousand miles to cover, it was still a dangerous mission. When we landed and deplaned in New York, we went looking for our bags. Much to our dismay, they were not with the other bags on the revolving turnstile. We waited until all the passengers from our flight had left the terminal and then waited around a little longer, thinking that our bags might still be coming. Just as we were about to give up hope, I spied our taped-up suitcase along with the three others sliding down onto a different baggage carousel about forty meters away. At first I figured that some member of the ground crew had placed our bags on the wrong incoming turnstile. I later discovered that it was no mistake and that some unknown but enterprising airport worker was intending to grab the bags himself.

Bishop and I quickly walked over to the adjacent carousel and scooped up the four suitcases, taking two apiece. We made a dash towards the escalators to make our way to the car rental agency. As I reached the escalators and I started to put my foot
on the first step, I felt a hand on my shoulder pulling me back. I spun around, ready to take issue with this rather aggressive interruption of my journey and came face to face with several plain-clothes policemen. There were five or six of them standing by, as one of them flashed his airport police badge at Bishop and me. Our apprehension was a surprisingly civilized affair, involving no handcuffs. The other passengers in the terminal paid little if any attention as the detectives marched us back to a small room off a corridor in the terminal, where they opened our suitcases. The police officers seemed unsurprised as they discovered the weed. They removed it and carefully stacked the red-wrapped bricks on the desk. They interrogated us for a while, until they determined that the weed was destined for Canada rather than the U.S. At first they seemed certain that we had an inside contact working at
JFK
, who had put the bags on the wrong baggage turnstile. When satisfied that we had no inside contacts, the airport police consulted amongst themselves with resigned shrugs and came to the same conclusion that I did. An airport worker had spotted our bags and had tried to reroute them for a later pickup.

Bishop and I were charged with possession of narcotics with intent to traffic, trafficking, and interstate transportation of fruit, the latter charge relating to the limes we had placed in the suitcases to cover any smell. The cops found the remainder of a gram of coke in my wallet that the nice folks at Ali Baba had laid on us. The boys at Ali Baba did not deal in blow but had copped the coke for me as a favour. But the American cops wanted to know all about that coke. The cops played the usual head games to get Bishop and me to talk. They threatened us with five years in jail. They told us that our suppliers had set us up in order to take the heat off themselves, while they smuggled off another load. It did not take long to figure out that the cops were not at all interested in pursuing the marijuana trail. They were, however, keenly interested in the half gram of blow in my wallet that they later told me was one hundred percent pure cocaine. They offered Bishop and me a deal. Set up a coke buy for a kilo or two and they would spring us out of there. The thought was
tempting and we told the cops we would think about their offer.

While they waited for our answer, Bishop and I were sent over to the Federal Detention Headquarters in New York City. We took the bus with no windows across town to a six story brick building that looked like it was built at the turn of the last century. There we were processed in and taught a little dance I called the Prison Polka. “Strip naked. Put your clothes on the counter. Step forward. Hands in the air. Spread your fingers. Open your mouth. Lift your tongue. Run your hands through your hair. Turn around. Lift your feet. Bend over. Spread your cheeks. Okay stand up and get back in line.”