Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (9 page)

“Tweet, tweet.” He sounded just like the cartoon character stenciled on his briefcase. “Tweet, tweet! His canary sounds became angrier. “Tweet, tweet!” Suddenly Charlie began to rant about how he would like to kill all blacks, especially the ones from Jamaica. It was an uncomfortable situation for me as I had no ax to grind against black people and hoped that there weren’t any in the store at the time.

It was a little after this incident that I was pulled aside by Charlie’s partner Irving, for a walk around the car lot. He told me Charlie was out of town dealing with another Jamaican fuckup. Some video game machines that Charlie had smuggled into Jamaica were being ripped off by someone using a skeleton key to empty the coin boxes.

Irving was Jewish which meant he was a part of Quebec society that was often the victim of harassment and prejudice. I always thought that all Jews were meek and mild, but that was before I met Irving. Irv would have made a great soldier and commander. He was blessed with a charisma and charm that concealed his ruthless nature. Irv was a born psychopath and his stubborn refusal to comply with even the simplest of society’s rules stood him at odds with all levels of authority. He once refused to pay rent and when the landlord threatened to sue him, he just laughed at him.

“I’m unseizable,” he challenged. “I just got out of jail and I have no assets. I own nothing. You’ll get nothing from me, and it will take months before you get me out of this house.” He then made good on his threat by spending what remained of his rent money to hire a lawyer to stall his eviction.

In order to maintain unseizability, Irving used front men for everything. For the homes he owned. For the cars he drove. For the race horses he bought and gambled on. In order to protect his assets, he always had a “paper” drawn up by his civil lawyer
which he would put away someplace safe until he needed it. Not too many people would challenge Irv over any of his possessions, regardless of whose name they were in, but the lawyer’s paper seemed to give him peace of mind.

A true anarchist who lived by his own rules, Irv saved his greatest contempt for stoolies and rats. He was always talking about his disdain for this kind of person and made it clear that ratting was not something he would ever tolerate. His first bust for the armed robbery of a supermarket had come because his partner’s younger brother had ratted them out. It had cost Irving twelve years of his life. He often expressed regret that he had let his partner talk him out of killing the younger brother and he swore that he would never make that mistake again.

Irving had learned the jewelry trade in jail, partly because his father was a successful jeweler and partly because it allowed him to have bartering power. Jewelers were the only convicts allowed to possess gold, which, like cigarettes, is another type of money in jail. Gold was even better than cigarettes, however, in that it could be used as a commodity on the inside as well as on the outside. What Irving did with his gold inside the pen was a mystery to me because he did not drink and he did not use drugs. He said he made jewelry with the gold to sell to the other inmates and I suspect that Irv came out of jail with a lot more money than he brought in.

Irving usually drank diet soft drinks except for the odd time when he chose to celebrate with one solitary glass of planter’s punch. When I asked him why he did not loosen up more often he said he liked to keep his wits about him. I saw him stoned only once when he was taking some painkillers that I gave him for his bad back. He took his pill with a sip of rum and, under the influence of both codeine and alcohol, he was pleasant and charming. It was a side of him that Irv did not like other people to see.

Unlike most career criminals, Irving had a wealthy background with maids and butlers and he had lived in big homes in the nicest part of town. He had been given everything he wanted growing up, but along with his family’s wealth came rules and authority. Parental authority. School authority. Legal
authority. None of which Irving was going to stand for, with his disdain for following rules and his stubborn nature. He ran away from the family home at a young age and began living on the streets using his muscle and his wits. His addiction to crime followed an addiction to gambling, which Irving thought he had under control at the time that he met me. He used to own racehorses paid for with loot from his bank robberies and he gambled much of his stolen money away at the track. His racehorse was called Lucky which was a misnomer if ever there was one. Irving’s racehorse never earned a dime in any of his races and the only person really betting on him was Irving.

When Irving and I first went into business together, he called me to a meeting at his apartment and sat me down with a solemn look. We were alone in his tidy unostentatious fifth-floor dwelling. There was a couch that looked nice but was uncomfortable and a teak dining table and chairs that looked like they were seldom used. The apartment came with wall-to-wall carpet and a small kitchenette that looked like it was not very well set up for cooking, with hardly any counter space. At that meeting Irv was wearing a terrycloth bathrobe which was complimented by a pair of comfortable leather slippers. Irving conducted much of his life in his bathrobe. He even came to poker games at my house wearing only slippers and a bathrobe. On this occasion, he was wearing his pale gold bathrobe and his brown slippers as he laid out the terms of our arrangement.

“Okay, here’s how it is. We split the expenses fifty-fifty. We split the income fifty-fifty. Even-steven partners. Don’t rat on me, and don’t ever cross me. I’ve been crossed before and it never ends nice. They all cry and piss themselves in the end. But it’s always too late.”

As he spoke, he looked at me with a deadly expression in his eyes. It was a clear message and I knew that he meant what he said. But I was not worried. It was not my nature to rat, nor to be dishonest in my dealings, so I had nothing to fear from Irving. He told me he had already sent Charlie down to Jamaica to send up a four-hundred-pound load, but Charlie had run into major problems completing his task. It seems that Charlie had
enlisted the help of Ryan McCann and his partner Robby to set up the purchase of the weed in Jamaica. The two men delivered the weed to Charlie, but when he went to pick up his weed at his rented Jamaican villa a few weeks later, someone had absconded with the stash. Charlie was told by Robby that a Jamaican must have swiped the load. But when Charlie questioned the Jamaican housekeeper at his villa, she described a white man with curly hair who had come by with a truck and taken the four suitcases full of weed from the garage. Robby had curly hair. And Ryan had a curly hair wig that he was showing off at parties. Four hundred pounds of cleaned and pressed marijuana was worth a sizable amount of money. Even in Jamaica, it was worth twenty thousand dollars or more. Irving must have been furious to have lost that kind of money, even if half of it belonged to his partner Charlie. He knew from Charlie that I had lived for a time in Jamaica and he had heard from Charlie about some of my smuggling successes.

I listened intently as Irving laid out the score. He had a door into Canada he told me. A couple of guys he knew from jail were working on the waterfront and were willing to boost a crate full of weed if someone would ship it to them. He asked me if I could put a load of weed together in Jamaica and ship it to his waterfront contacts in Montreal. He told me that he did not trust Ryan and Robby, who were just names he had heard from Charlie. Irv said he would choke Robby like a chicken if he ever came close enough. Irving had an interesting ability to crack his knuckles at will and he accompanied his threat with a pantomime of choking someone, complete with the finger-cracking sounds of breaking bones. Irving had arranged to have Charlie’s Porsche repaired after Jean Paul LaPierre filled it full of bullet holes and he blamed the shootout on Ryan and Robby. Irving seemed to have little or no fear of Jean Paul, even while recognizing that the little Frenchman was capable of a showdown.

“If Jean Paul or anyone else ever bothers you,” Irving told me, “just agree to whatever they want and then you leave them to me.” The offer was music to my ears. Irving was just what I needed. Not only did he have a door into the country but he
also had the wherewithal to deal with Jean Paul and his ilk.

“Just don’t have anything to do with those two monkeys when you’re down there in Jamaica,” Irving instructed, referring to Ryan and Robby. “And don’t be saying nothing about our conversation to your wife.”

I assured Irv I would comply with his instructions and I shook his hand and left. But since Barbara and I are like two halves of the same clamshell, I went straight home and told my wife everything. I let Irv think that Barbara knew nothing until Irving came to know Barbara well enough to realize that his fears about her were unfounded. Before either one of them knew it, Barbara was treating Irving as she would a long-lost uncle, and Irving had given her stepdaughter status. Irving was very much like her recently departed father, who was gruff and sarcastic but straightforward with his thoughts and emotions. Both men had supreme confidence in their actions, and both had the same barrel-chested appearance. But there the comparisons stop, because Barbara’s father was a hardworking family man whose conscience was regularly assuaged by prayers each evening.

Irving, on the other hand, was anything but pious. He had been divorced by his wife, after leaving her and his children on welfare when he went to prison. Irving had two children. A teenaged son named Aaron who was on anti-schizophrenia medication and who walked around in a lonely fog looking for a father substitute. And a daughter named Donna who was a remarkably well-adjusted young woman in her early twenties. Donna was a psychology major in university and I took her diagnosis of her father as a paranoid psychopath at face value, even before I looked up its meaning in a medical dictionary. Neither child played an active role in their father’s life, although it was obvious they loved him in spite of his shortcomings. For his part, Irving treated his son about as well as he treated his dog, Nitro, and showed similar misgivings about the usefulness of either. Nitro had a habit of eating rocks until his teeth were worn down to stubs, which annoyed Irving to no end, while Aaron popped prescription pills in a fashion that led Irving to shake his head in disgust.

Irving had little to do with his daughter, who had reached a point in her life where she neither needed her father nor respected his way of life. Donna had educated herself into total independence and her only holdover trait from her father’s influence showed up in her choice of men. I never knew whether she was being spiteful or if she was merely a victim of her own neurosis, but I found it curious that she dated men very much like her father. When I first met Donna, she was dating Irving’s ex-con partner from his very first holdup who also was named Irving. Little Irving had turned his life around at that point and owned a moderately successful computer repair service. When Donna’s father, Big Irving, tempted her boyfriend back into a life of crime, Little Irving was eventually sent back to jail. At which point, Donna started dating a career criminal named Ziggy Epstein, who was another member of our smuggling crew. Ziggy was a nice young man several years younger than Donna. He was kind and thoughtful, but I could never fathom why Irving’s daughter chose men who were so far beneath her hard-earned station in life.

The first thing I did after getting tacit approval from Barbara to go ahead with Irving’s proposal was to call Ryan. Even though I had lost faith in lyin’ Ryan, he was the only person I knew capable of putting together a four-hundred-pound load of weed in Jamaica on short notice. I let him know from the outset that I was brokering a deal for some mob guys, and I gave him the same ominous warning Irving had given me. I told Ryan nothing of how the weed was being shipped. No timetables. No connections. I only told him what I wanted and when I wanted it and I promised payment upon delivery.

Ryan had our buddy Brian Kholder take care of our business. Brian had spent long hours in Jamaica overseeing the pressing of weed for some of Ryan’s earlier scams.

Brian came from a good background, which does not refer to the lovely mother and hardworking father who brought him up. Brian’s references came from his uncle Moe, a notorious gangster and pimp in the underworld and a wise guy for the Montreal Italian mob. Uncle Moe was dying of cancer when I
first met Brian, but his uncle’s reputation remained intact when, from his hospital bed, he sent shovels with red ribbons tied on, to those who still owed him money. Brian was not like his uncle Moe in the least respect. Brian was a philosopher by nature and the only one of my smuggler friends who actually had a university degree. He was soft-spoken and mellow, as was his wife Karen, who also had a degree. Brian and Karen had been the king and queen of their west-end high school before they moved on to Sir George Williams University. Neither of them ever held a real job that I was aware of, and I often wondered how they ended up in the smuggling business.

Brian and his wife were the first to wear Earth shoes, which were designed on a reverse incline with the toes up and the heels down. They were the first to buy a small Japanese car. They were the first of the university crowd to drop out of mainstream society and live in the underground society. Once in a while Brian would help his dad out on construction projects in Montreal, showing up on the job site wearing designer boots and a bomber jacket. His brothers, little Buddy and crazy Alex, would laugh at his disco dude appearance. But while they were toiling for peanuts for their father, Brian was raking in tons of cash dealing and smuggling marijuana.

Brian was a prolific reader with an interest in the philosophical side of life. He introduced me to books like
Autobiography of a Yogi
and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s book,
On Death and Dying
. I did not like one of his favourites called
Seth Speaks
, by Jane Roberts, but I read it just so I could dispute and discuss the subject matter with him. I did not agree with all that Brian said or did, but I liked his character very much. He was a gentle person who retreated from life and its problems with downers like Valium, which he also took to avoid the comedown from cocaine.