Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (7 page)

“You want to know what happened? I’ll tell you what happened. Your fucking friend got busted and he tried to take me down with him.”

“Jacques got busted?”

“Yah, Jacques.”

“I told him not to contact you or Ryan until the heat was off the load.”

“He contacted us alright. And he had a fucking cop beside him when he called.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I know.”

“What happened?

“You want to know what happened? I’ll tell you what happened.”

Jacques had called Ryan before he was supposed to and told him what was planned. Immediately following Jacques’s phone call, Ryan called in his loan shark buddy, Jean Paul, to hijack the load. They coerced poor Jacques into going to the airport to pick up the compressor, even though it had been sitting in customs for days.

Poor, stupid Jacques. Poor, stupid, double-crossing Jacques. He was given the compressor by customs at the airport, after it had been emptied of most of its weed, and the cops allowed him to drive away with it. When he reached the Montreal Expressway, where it rises up to a right-of-way overpass that traverses
the city, Ryan, Jean Paul and another man closed off the highway behind Jacques. They accomplished this by stopping their cars abreast in a line, thereby bringing the three lanes of expressway traffic to a halt, in order to give Jacques the time he needed to escape any pursuers. It was a bold move, but the plan did not work. Jacques was busted just outside Quebec City as he checked into his motel room. He answered the phone when Jean Paul called from a nearby phone booth and he invited the loan shark to come and pick up the compressor.

One thing about Jean Paul: he may not have been the smartest guy in the world, but he was cunning as a wolf.

“They’re with you, aren’t they?” Jean Paul growled into the phone.

“What do you mean?”

“The cops. They’re with you, aren’t they?”

“No, no! That’s not so,” Jacques protested in French.

“They’re standing right beside you, aren’t they?”

“There’s no one here.”

“They’re listening to every word.”

“No, that’s not true.”

“Put them on the phone. I want to talk to them.”

The phone suddenly went dead and Jean Paul knew it was a trap.

Now I should explain a little about Jean Paul. This guy had a sixth sense that warned him away from danger. It was not the first time that his uncanny senses had saved him. There was another time he had a premonition when he and Ryan were about to pick up a load of weed that they had smuggled into Canada. On that occasion, four hundred pounds of Jamaican coli that Ryan had shipped north was waiting for pickup in a second floor flat in the east end of Montreal. As far as they knew, the load was secure, but at Jean Paul’s insistence, Ryan and Jean Paul both took a walk around the block before entering the apartment. It was cold that night and most people would have forgone the walkabout and just gone inside to warm up, but Jean Paul was adamant about the security check. About half a block from the flat, Jean Paul walked past a car and saw two men in
suits lying sprawled across the seats. The story, as told later, was that the two men both had two-way radios in their hands. I don’t know if he could have seen the radios on a dark and cold night, but Jean Paul kept walking straight to his car and he and Ryan drove away from the scene. They heard a news report about a four-hundred-pound weed bust at the same address the next day.

Not only that, but Jean Paul had a temper — a bad one. Jean Paul had a shootout one time with Charlie “the Weasel” Wilson over some weed that went missing in Jamaica. I suspect it was that same four hundred pounds of Jamaican coli. The shooting came after a meeting behind a restaurant that left Charlie’s Porsche with three bullet holes in it. The way I heard it, Charlie pulled his gun and confronted Jean Paul, who pulled his own gun and started shooting. I suspect they were both surprised that the other guy had a gun and they can thank either good fortune or bad shooting that no one was killed.

So there I was standing face to face with Jean Paul and the little pit bull was working himself into a frenzy.

“The cops called your friend Jacques to come and pick up the compressor at the airport. They let him take it away and then they arrested him in Quebec City.”

“What the hell was he doing in Quebec City?” I said.

“I sent him there to make sure there were no cops tailing him.”

“I don’t understand. He wasn’t even supposed to call Ryan until the load was in his hands.”

“Your rat friend called Ryan as soon as you hung up the phone. He told him that you were sending the compressor and he asked for our help.”

“He wasn’t supposed to do that.”

“Yah, well he did, and then he ratted on us.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It’s not as simple as that. You fucked up our scam and now you owe me.”

“I owe you? Why would I owe you?”

“Because that was my scam you fucked up.”

“I paid Ryan seven grand for that scam.”

“That was my scam. I been paying two guys on the docks for weeks waiting for the right moment to send that compressor to them by sea. And you went and sent it by air. Now the scam is fucked up.”

“I gave Ryan seven grand for that scam. He asked me for more money and I told him I was sending the compressor up on my own if he couldn’t get it together. Tell him, Ryan.”

I looked at Ryan. When he put his head down and turned away I was dumbstruck.

“I’m telling you, Ryan and I had a deal,” I insisted.

That’s when the sucker punch came. I was looking at Ryan when Jean Paul’s fist came out of left field and caught me under the left eye. There was no pain, but I was in shock as the punch sent me reeling backwards. Before I could recover, Jean Paul grabbed a pair of scissors from our bedroom dresser and shoved me backwards onto the bed as he held the scissors in front of my eyes.

“You fucking owe me,” he said.

I turned away and looked at Ryan for an answer to this mystery, but he just looked away again. I turned to Robby who was standing in the doorway. He, too, looked away with a shake of his curly locks. I felt alone. I felt deserted by my friends. Worse than deserted. They were in on the shakedown.

“You took our weed and you fucked up our deal,” the little Frenchman raged on. “That weed was supposed to go north by sea freight, not air. No one sends a compressor north by air,” he said.

It was a rip-off, pure and simple, and Ryan was using Jean Paul to pull it off. I could not bring myself to believe that Ryan was doing that. We were supposed to be friends. Best buddies.

When Jean Paul said he was paying two guys on the docks, I knew right away it was a lie. He talked on and on while I waited in subdued silence for the amount. I thought for a moment about fighting back. I figured I could take Jean Paul, even with the scissors in his hand. I figured I could take Ryan, too. But it wouldn’t stop there. If I didn’t kill the little Frenchman right then and there, he would come back and gun me down in
Jamaica or Montreal for sure. I waited to hear the amount, but first came the threats. He had two killers waiting in Montego Bay. I didn’t believe him, but I let him think that I did. My allies and friends may have turned against me, but my loyal Jamaican gardener, Isaiah, heard the yelling and came rushing towards the commotion. He came bursting into the bedroom with his machete raised high and I saw Jean Paul looking concerned. Isaiah was a big man and with or without a machete, there was no doubt that he could have evicted Ryan and Jean Paul in a second. His appearance gave me a feeling of renewed confidence, but I would still have to face Jean Paul in Montreal later, as well as in Jamaica right now. I waved Isaiah away and told him it was just a small argument between friends and not to worry. He left reluctantly while I turned to Jean Paul and asked how much he wanted from me. The Frenchman was unable to conceal his pleasure, as the smallest trace of a smile washed over his face. He seemed to be musing over the amount he could gouge from me. He began with a bullshit story about paying his two guys on the docks five hundred a week for so many weeks and that, calculated along with the fee for my arrogance, would be six thousand dollars.

I thought about it. Six thousand dollars was possibly the maximum amount I would have gone along with under the circumstances, but it was affordable. I really had little choice but to pay the penalty if I wanted to avoid a war with Jean Paul. I pondered the amount for several moments before I agreed. I had actually held a lot of respect for Jean Paul up until this incident, and even though he professed to feel bad about it later, I never fully forgave him for what he did. I would also never forget that my good friend Ryan put him up to it and that Robby helped.

I felt like a dog that had been disciplined by the pack. The other dogs could smell that I was vulnerable, and they were taking advantage of it.

After the house was cleared of visitors, Barbara and I had a long-overdue talk about a lot of things, including our former friends and our future together. When you are an adolescent and still developing your character and personality, your friends will
sometimes become closer to you than your family is. Friends will accept comments and behaviour that no one in your family would condone. Friends understand you. Friends accept you. But family will rarely turn on you the way friends can. At least not the way my friends did. I learned that friendship is often temporary. That friendship to some people is disposable. That there is a profound difference between friendship and companionship. That a real friend is worth their weight in diamonds. The people I had been hanging around with were not my friends. They were envious of me. They were spiteful towards me, all the while wearing a mask of friendship. After Barbara and I had finished discussing the issues, we decided to skip life in the fast lane and to quit smuggling drugs. We determined to get back to the basics that we had left behind, before we ever became involved with Ryan and his cohorts. We were going to return to Montreal and re-commit to our hippie attitudes that we had left behind after our trip to Mexico with our Volkswagen van. We didn’t need money. We didn’t need friends. We had our health and we had each other, and that was all that mattered.

After several months in Jamaica, my wife and I returned to Montreal and found a townhouse in the West Island that we rented until we could find a house to buy. We had discussed the matter in Jamaica and we came to the opinion that we had wasted enough money on dope deals and partying. We decided that it would be wise to invest a part of Barbara’s inheritance money in a home with some property. We began our house search in the west end of town where our friends lived.

I saw Ryan again. He was still living across the river in Laval, close to his psycho buddy, Jean Paul. I saw Robby again too. He was still living downtown with Paula in a two bedroom flat. When I saw them again, both Ryan and Robby acted as though what happened in Jamaica was no big deal. Ryan apologized for the shakedown, with the pitch that what had happened was all a misunderstanding. He even came over to my house with ten pounds of weed as partial repayment for the six grand he and Jean Paul had ripped off from me. I took the weed and accepted his apology, but inside I was still boiling about the incident.

For a while, I had daily fantasies about killing both Jean Paul and Ryan and I thought seriously about getting myself a clean piece for the job. Ryan’s apology and the ten pounds of weed he
laid on me made the entire incident even more confusing. One part of me wanted to continue on as friends with him, but another part of me wanted revenge. I figured that Ryan must have been successful in one of his importing scams and now that he was back in the chips, his conscience was bothering him. By dropping ten pounds of weed on me, he was trying to make up again. As time moved forward, I tried to forgive and forget, but the incident in Jamaica burned inside of me like a hot iron. Jean Paul’s part in the shakedown was less upsetting than Ryan’s betrayal because I saw that French little prick as a trained wolf rather than a person. I would have choked the life out of Ryan and Jean Paul in a second, if I thought I could get away with it. What Ryan pulled on me was an experience that left an indelible mark on my memory that no amount of time could wipe away. It wasn’t about the money. It was about friendship and trust and loyalty. When Ryan called on me for backup at the printing supply firm where we both worked years before, I did not hesitate to help him, even though it cost me my job. When he was out of town scamming, I was available for anything he asked of me, including keeping an eye out for his wife. Ryan and his wife were like family to Barbara and me. We had spent countless hours together dropping mescaline and doing coke and laughing while we discussed our lives and expressed our innermost feelings to each other.

Before the Jamaica incident, Ryan and I once shared in the purchase of a board game called Swingers. After a little tequila and a lot of smoke, he and I ended up nude and making out with our wives on the carpet in the same room. Some people in our group actually thought we were swinging together, but that was never destined to be. After the shakedown visit from Jean Paul and Ryan in Jamaica, there were more poker games and there were more parties, but there was never again anything like that board game closeness Ryan and I once shared.

Shortly after Ryan’s apology, I found myself invited to a birthday party at Jean Paul’s house. The house was located on a cul-de-sac in Laval, and only the loan shark’s closest friends were privileged to know its whereabouts. It was to be a surprise party,
which was spoiled when Jean Paul and Ryan came across me and my wife as we drove into Jean Paul’s subdivision. Ryan and Jean Paul were driving out for party supplies, when Jean Paul saw me and slammed on the brakes to ask me what I was doing there. I was secretly pleased to see what was, undoubtedly, a trace of fear and apprehension in Jean Paul’s eyes. It lasted until Ryan explained to the loan shark that I was there for his surprise party. I could see that Jean Paul was angry about not being informed about the party and, particularly, about me coming. I thought the entire scene was as ridiculous as a Monty Python movie skit, and if I could have turned around and left right then, I would have. In my mind, throwing a birthday party for Jean Paul was like trying to domesticate a wild animal. I was only going to the party to break the ice, and I had gone there with mixed feelings.