Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer by Jay Carter Brown Page A

collections, robberies and extortions. Irving never confided in me about any hits he might have done with Roger Ouimet, which I attributed to the fact that there is no statute of limitations on murder in Canada.
    Small world, you might say of Irving’s connections to Jean Paul, but like I said before, in the underworld, all roads seem to lead to the same places and the same people. My partner Irving and our new partner Jean Paul made a deal that day. Jean Paul would take all the weed Irving could give him and he would also take care of any collections and bad debts.
    So there we were. We had the way in. We had the way out. We had the Jamaica end down. We had the Montreal end down.
    Now all Irving and I had to do was collect up our rewards and spend our money.

Chapter Four

The Twilight Zone Incident
    I suppose I have always had an affinity for roguish characters. I think that, to some extent, we all prefer the company of people who have a little of the Devil in them over the piously perfect and the politically correct. Rogues and Robin Hoods are far more interesting than their priestly counterparts and their errant behaviour is often forgiven by mainstream society, up to a certain point. Society displays a degree of tolerance for scofflaws who break unpopular laws, like the speeder who uses a radar detector to beat the radar trap or the businessman who cheats the taxman out of his fair share of taxes. These lawbreakers are not held up to the same contempt that we reserve for more serious criminals because the laws being broken are not necessarily popular laws. That is how I saw my situation. Like a modern day Robin Hood who was bucking the law prohibiting marijuana. Irving and I were supplying a product that people wanted and a service that the law arbitrarily decided should not be provided. Weed was a benign and harmless product, if we were to believe the report of the Quebec Ledain Commission into soft drugs. The Ledain Commission likened a toke or two of pot to a drink or two of wine and stated that marijuana and hashish were far less dangerous than tobacco. As far as I was concerned, the onlyone who was getting hurt by our activities was the taxman, and I went out of my way to give him his dues. I even invented a legitimate income so that I could pay taxes on at least a portion of my easily gotten gains, just to keep the taxman off my back.
    After our first four hundred pound load of weed was taken from the waterfront by Irving’s dock connections and handed over to us for distribution on the street, I hired my friends, Joe Dudley and Bob Bishop, to rent a truck to go down to the waterfront to pick up our replacement crate from Canada Customs. The boys downtown had already replaced the weed crate with a crate containing my stereo and some tables and chairs so that our importing scam would not get blown. But it still took some effort to convince my friends that the crate was clean. I finally gave Joe Dudley and Bishop the customs and excise documents needed to clear the cargo and told them that they could give me up to the Man if there was anything other than my personal effects inside the crate. In due course, Bishop and Joe returned with the switched crate. Joe laughed and said that while they were driving through the customs terminal, Bishop was vibrating so much it seemed like the truck was running even when it was turned off. Bishop sputtered his denials as they both argued playfully, looking happy and relieved to have completed their project without complications. I came to use my two friends many times to repeat the same exercise as subsequent shipments of weed arrived in Canada. My stereo and furniture were sent through customs so many times that the speakers ended up looking like Swiss cheese from all the test holes drilled into the wood cabinets by suspicious customs agents.
    The crates we shipped became larger and larger, and then we started sending full containers of weed as our audacity and expertise