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Overview
Mobsters, murder, betrayal, and revenge are the raw components of this candid look into the day–to–day life of a modern–day marijuana smuggler. Told from the viewpoint of an impressionable young entrepreneur named Jay Carter Brown, the book quickly draws the reader into the gritty underbelly of the international drug trade.
The story begins with minor–league smuggling scams between Canada and the Caribbean that soon escalate to multi–ton shipments of grass and hash from the Caribbean and the Middle East. All goes well for a time, but as the stakes grow higher, the inevitable setbacks occur.
When Jay teams up with a crusty old bank robber named Irving, he also inherits a host of other felons who come out of jail to visit his new partner, ex–cons such as: Randy the hit man who liked to practise his fast draw in front of a mirror; Simon, the drug–running pilot; and Chico Perry, who smoked reefer in his pipe while robbing banks and shooting it out with the cops.
Drug–runners, police, jealous friends, and rival gangs all contribute to this extraordinary story told by a young man who became involved at the highest levels of the drug trade, and lived to tell about it. Smuggler’s Blues is a rare opportunity to experience life in another world — a world where survival relies on brains, brawn, and a generous measure of good luck.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781554902958 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECW Press |
| Publication date: | 10/31/2007 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Smuggler's Blues
The Saga of a Marijuana Importer
By Jay Carter Brown
ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2007 Jay Carter BrownAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55490-295-8
CHAPTER 1
Feeding a Cop is like Feeding a Bear
I wrote a book once. Someone said that if you are going to write, then write about something you know. So I did. My novel, all twenty-seven double-spaced chapters, is about spies and drug smugglers operating between Jamaica and North America. Not that I was ever a spy. It has been suggested that with my background and connections I could have been an undercover operative or a spy. But I made my choice a long time before to operate on the other side of the law. Both my expertise and my background were to provide the drug smuggling aspects of my novel — cannabis smuggling to be exact. Cannabis has been my love and my business for most of my life. I may not have been a spy but I have rubbed shoulders with spies both down in Jamaica and over in Lebanon around the time when Uncle Sam began butting his so called isolationist nose into Third World politics. Or "poli-tricks" as the Jamaican Rastas like to say. The Rastas like to shorten and rearrange words to change and confuse their meaning. Like the expression "white white" or "white bread" that they use to describe a white person. Or "wha hap," which is short for "what's happening?" The most well known island saying is "soon come," which means that something is coming in Jamaican time, and that means very slowly. I spent a lot of time in Jamaica and I cannot remember ever having any fears or concerns about living and dealing there. There were times when I was the only white man in a sea of black bodies pressing around me. At rock concerts. In nightclubs. On the streets of Montego Bay and Kingston during rush hour. When I went into the hills where the marijuana is grown I was often the only white face to be seen for a dozen miles. I had no fear in Jamaica because I felt like I was kin to my black brethren who had joined with me to counter the downtrodding forces of Babylon.
Babylon is the name the Rastas give to the constabulary and soldiers whose duty it is to police the marijuana trade in Jamaica. During my smuggling years, Babylon seemed to be keeping a curious balance at play in its policing of drugs. The mountainous countryside around Saint Ann's and the area known as Cockpit country to the north of the island provided the cover necessary to grow the illicit marijuana crop. But there is no doubt the herb could easily have been eradicated with the use of helicopters and pesticides. In fact, the Jamaican government tried that once, just before the election of the great socialist prime minister Norman Manley. When the government that preceded Manley sent troops in by air to burn down the pot fields, the marijuana farmers quickly retaliated by lighting several mongooses on fire and setting them free to run through the sugar cane fields. The resulting fires quickly convinced the government of the day to end its marijuana eradication program before the entire island of Jamaica was ablaze.
It was this rebellious spirit mixed with a strong religious ethic that gave me a sense of security in dealing with the Jamaican people. I have always been aware of a spiritual calm when I am in Jamaica, as though the island is closer to God than is anywhere else on the planet. Even on my very first visit, I felt I belonged there somehow. While I was very comfortable amongst the Jamaican people, I was nevertheless careful to keep close to my Jamaican partner who showed me the ropes when traveling around the island and especially when going into the hills. My partner, "Righteous," was a tall and well-muscled man of lighter complexion than most Jamaicans. In the pecking order of Jamaican society, a lighter complexion is often associated with higher intelligence and there was no doubt that this was true in the case of Randall "Righteous" Solomon.
I first met Righteous through another Jamaican who I had met during my early forays to the island. That man was a caretaker named Sunny. Sunny was a friend of Solomon's and he was also the gardener and houseman next door to a villa that I rented on the ocean near Hopewell. At that time, my friends and I were on a junket to bring some suitcases full of pressed weed back to Canada in an intricate scheme involving Canadian Immigration clearance cards. Passengers returning to Canada in those days were first interviewed by Canadian Immigration and then handed a three-by-five-inch card and told to proceed to customs for baggage inspection. The three-by-five cards had several boxes with numbers beside them, one of which was labeled E-24. It was discovered that if the E24 was ticked off by the immigration officer, a passenger holding that card would be sent straight through customs without a baggage search. If enough people were in on the smuggling scam the odds were high that at least one in a group of seven or eight returning passengers would be handed an E-24 card. Brian Kholder and his cousin Alexandra were along to carry the bags of weed through Canada Customs once someone in our group had slipped them an E-24card after clearing Immigration. There were about ten of us working the scam on this particular occasion, all friends from work and high school or college. There was my wife and me. Ryan McCaan and his wife Sally, and Phil Robson and his girlfriend Paula. My buddy Robert Bishop was along without a date, as was Ross Mitchell, who was dismayed to learn that "ross" was the slang word for shit in Jamaica. We had rented a seaside villa in the Jamaican parish of Hopewell that was ideally situated near a source of marijuana that was grown in the nearby parish of Orange Bay. We chose the Hopewell villa because we were close to the Montego Bay airport, yet free from the many prying eyes of the hotel staff in town. While we waited for Righteous to arrange for the marijuana to be pressed and packaged in Orange Bay, the group of us lay about our rented villa in hedonistic splendor. As we lay lounging in ocean-side chairs, sipping brown cows by the pool and smoking copious amounts of weed, we discussed the possibilities of our impending wealth. We were smoking so much ganga that we found it expedient to pay Sunny to be our spliff roller.
Sunny was a solidly built man whose facial features looked carved out of dark stone. His demeanor was well suited for work as a caretaker and in the language of modern day psychology, he had more anima than animus in his character. Sunny was far from an ambitious soul. He had only one job to do for us, which was to roll joints, and whenever we asked him to do it, he would inevitably complain.
"You finish all dem spliff already, mon?"
Righteous was far more willing to work without complaining, and as time went on, I found myself relying more and more on Randall "Righteous" Solomon for many of my needs in Jamaica.
When I first met Righteous he was a "Moonie," which was a religious cult that was spreading throughout the western world at the time. His bright eyes, short-cropped hair, and a willing attitude gave me confidence in him and he soon became my right-hand man. I saw a lot of Righteous and Sunny that first year in Jamaica as our group strung the E-24 scam out as long as we could. We had several back-to-back successes before the smuggling scam finally blew apart in Toronto. That was when four suitcases full of weed slid down the baggage ramp to the circular pickup ring in the luggage collection area and one of the bags broke open, revealing sticks of weed poking out. We left the bags on the turnstile, pulled the luggage tags from the four suitcases, and went home broke. I was almost glad the trip folded just then because "Bish the Fish" Bishop and Marvin "Manny" Maniezzo had been playing poker with me on the way down to Jamaica, with the payouts due only after and if the E-24 scam paid off. I was so deep in debt after the two card sharks fleeced me, that just about all of my end would have gone to them anyway.
Other scams came and went, as fate sent one smuggling opportunity after another my way. Through Righteous and his connections, I met the people I needed to expedite marijuana out of Jamaica in larger and larger shipments. Righteous introduced me to customs agents, aircraft maintenance personnel, and shipping brokers. He had so many contacts that it seemed to me that the whole of Jamaica was like one large extended family tied together by blood relations, tribal ties and financial gain. Even the police were available for a price, although my bias against authority never allowed me to use any police help. Feeding a cop is like feeding a bear, everything is great until the food runs out.
The smuggling scams I was involved in grew to a level where I found myself flying in and out of the island on a regular basis. The smartly uniformed immigration and customs officers at Montego Bay airport had to know that I was into some kind of action. When asked the purpose of my trip, I always said pleasure. If I were a customs agent, I might wonder why someone would take several dozen pleasure trips to my country each year. But Jamaican Immigration and Customs never did. I remember flying into Jamaica on one occasion without my wallet and ID. Any other country would have turned me around and sent me right back home, but not Jamaica. The immigration officer simply waved me through to customs after I explained to him that I had lost my wallet. He recognized me, of course, which made his decision easier. But can you imagine trying to enter any other sovereign nation without ID when you are not even a citizen?
On that same trip the recently departed owner of Jamaica Car Rental rented me a car without a driver's licence or ID. Thank you kindly, Mrs. Chin, and rest in peace.
"Jamaica no problem" was the motto of the island and there was so much corruption that anything and anyone seemed available for a fee. Whenever I arrived on the island, my first order of business, after clearing Jamaican Customs and Immigration, was to pick up some ganga. Jamaicans call their weed ganga using the Indian word. They also call it herb, coli, lamb's bread, sensi and dagga. The stuff is everywhere. It's thrust into your face at the airport gas station. Don't ever buy weed at the airport. It's crap. Marijuana is also sold along the highways from thatched huts with fruit and sea shells hanging from their bamboo rafters. The huts are there due to squatter's rights alongside the road, and they operate without permits or licences. Marijuana can be bought in bars and restaurants. Taxi drivers sell it. Hotel owners and waiters sell it. Everyone sells it. But rather than buy the weed in town, I would drive up into the hills of Orange Bay just outside of Negril to get the good stuff. Not the lamb's bread sold for a small fortune in Montego Bay. Not the seeded coli from Saint Ann's that was being shipped north to Canada and the States by the ton. I'm talking about pure Jamaican sensimilla. Unseeded African ganga, lovingly nursed to perfection in a clearing behind some Rasta's hut. Watered by hand. Fed rat bat shit as fertilizer. Coaxed and pruned until the buds were thick with sticky crystals and smelled of cinnamon.
"You should leave your lungs to science," my buddy Bishop used to tease me, as I rolled joint after joint of the good stuff.
I was living the good life. Smoking the best herb. Eating in fine restaurants and hotels. Sleeping in king size beds in air-conditioned villas. Frolicking in swimming pools and being cared for by maids, butlers, and gardeners. Our wives and girlfriends would strut around the Jamaican beaches in their tiny bikinis looking like centrefolds, as so many Montreal girls do. My buddies and I mostly preferred to snorkel in the ocean rather than lie about in hammocks like the girls, who were trying to score a nice tan to wear home.
The first time we all sat down to dinner at our rented villa in Jamaica, the event was memorable for its excesses. There were two maids who came with the villa, one for cooking and one for serving. Our next door neighbour, Sunny, was dressed in his Sunday best and helping the two coffee-complexioned maids serve us that warm summer evening. It was a magical night, with the ocean ebbing and flowing to a rhythmic slap against the sea-wall outside the formal dining room. The pool lights were on, adding an eerie glow to a darkened horizon that sparkled with stars. Crickets and tree frogs serenaded us, and the warm Jamaican weather stood in sharp contrast to the bitter cold of the Montreal winter we had escaped. We were all in our early twenties and we snickered amongst ourselves about being served by a staff who were old enough to be our parents. I was confused at first when the maid brought a small silver bell to the table and placed it beside me. When I finally figured out its purpose, we all had great fun ringing the bell for water or tea or whatever we fancied. The table was laid out with white linen and china dishes, as course after course of Jamaican cuisine was ferried to us from the kitchen. The pace was slow and deliberate. Pepper pot soup with ackies and salt fish for a starter. The spicy starters were followed by a fresh tossed salad and then an entrée of grilled Caribbean lobster. The lobster was accompanied by several vegetable dishes of chocho, cauliflower, corn and fresh beans. All of the courses were spaced to allow joints to be smoked in between servings. The sumptuous meal was topped off by dessert, a homemade spice cake, and there were Tia Maria and Grande Marnier liquors to end the meal.
In the early days of my Jamaican experience, I was overwhelmed by this treatment, but I soon came to expect it as a way of life. I rented whatever car was available at the airport when I first flew into town, but as my trips to Jamaica became more frequent and lengthy, I took a long-term lease on an air conditioned Civic from Hertz Rent-a-Car. Then the first thing I did was to have the windows professionally tinted. The tint was so dark that you could not see inside the car even when it was parked and I got a kick out of watching people on the street peering in at me without knowing I was there.
One time I was driving the Civic to Negril when I hit a roadblock manned by machine-gun-toting cops and khaki-dressed soldiers who were stopping all drivers. The cops were looking for guns or ganga or whatever else they could find. Fridays were the worst for roadblocks because the cops would invariably be looking for entertainment money for the weekend. Any little thing they could find would lead to the inevitable bribe that left all parties happy and warranted few arrests. But it was annoying to have to throw away my spliff as I came across the roadblock.
I was asked by the first bribe-hungry cop how I could be driving a rented car with such dark tinted windows.
"VIP," I remember answering with a grin, as I slipped him an American twenty to prevent a search of my car that could lead to my weed stash. It was not likely he would find my stash, which was hidden in the door panels, but I learned quickly that you always make your bribe to the first cop on the scene. Anytime you wait for the others to come over, it costs you a lot more. If you wait until the judge is involved, it is usually too late to work a deal.
Despite roadblocks and other small nuisances, life was grand in those days. I discovered Chateau Lafite-Rothschild wine, which even today is the standard to which I hold all other wines. I regularly ate curried lobster at the exclusive Richmond Hill Inn, which is perched on a mountain top with a view of the city of Montego Bay that is unparalleled. I remember driving home one night after an extravagant meal there, throwing Jamaican twenty dollar bills in a stream out the window of my rented car. It was my drunken tribute to the little man, the poor black Jamaican who saw little or none of the drug money that poured into the island. It was Jamaican money anyway, not real money. When my real money in Canadian and U.S. funds built up to an impossible level in my Jamaican safety deposit box, I would fly it to the Cayman Islands where I had a different safety box that held only thousand dollar bills.
Jamaica was like my home away from home, but let's face it, the island was a typically corrupt Third World country. That corruption is fine when you're trying to slip a load of contraband in or out of the country, but it can turn against you when you live there. Every time I went to my safety deposit box I had this sickening vision of finding it empty. It never happened, but the fantasy proved so powerful that I was always counting and recounting my money in the box.
On the other hand, Grand Cayman Island had a world-class reputation for legitimate banking. There are over 300 banks on an island the size of the city of Ottawa. On my first trip there I spotted the differences between Jamaica and the Caymans in a second. The Cayman customs officers reminded me of Americancustoms officers: cold, alert, all seeing and all knowing. I took note of how they concentrated on those incoming passengers who fit a profile, like American hippies or Caribbean Rastafarians. Black passengers wearing jeans and gold chains received careful screening while white businessmen like me, dressed in slacks and a sports jacket, received only a cursory inspection. I was not really worried as I passed under the watchful eyes of these customs officers because apart from a personal stash of hash in my crotch, the only commodity I was bringing into the Caymans was money. And there is no law against bringing cash into the Caymans. The islands were built on foreign money. Drug profits money. Political payoff money. Embezzled money. Bribe money. Stolen money. Grand Cayman is an example of a Caribbean island living the American dream and it is all because of their banking rules, which allow the free flow of money in and out of the country. There is so much foreign capital flowing into the island that the smallest deposit required to open my first offshore bank account was fifty thousand dollars. It's probably higher than that today. The cleanliness of Grand Cayman's cobblestone streets and sidewalks were in sharp contrast to the goats and cows and dogs and pigs that wander freely along the litter-strewn streets of Jamaica.
Don't get me wrong. I loved Jamaica and I still do. I would never consider trading Jamaica's rural and hedonistic lifestyle for the sterile security of the Grand Caymans. Grand Cayman offers civilized efficiency, but Jamaica offers one of the last bastions of personal freedom in the world.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Smuggler's Blues by Jay Carter Brown. Copyright © 2007 Jay Carter Brown. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Prologue,Chapter One Feeding a Cop is like Feeding a Bear,
Chapter Two When You Lose in the Smuggling Business ...,
Chapter Three Hung for a Sheep, Hung for a Lamb,
Chapter Four The Twilight Zone Incident,
Chapter Five Holiday in Beirut,
Chapter Six No Longer Invisible,
Chapter Seven I'm in Sales, So I'm Always a Little Stressed,
Chapter Eight The Great Escape,
Chapter Nine Leaving Babylon,
Chapter Ten Striking Oil,
Chapter Eleven Make Money, Not War,
Chapter Twelve Growing Up and Growing Op,
Epilogue,
Reading Group Guide
I first met Righteous through another Jamaican who I had met during my early forays to the island. That man was a caretaker named Sunny. Sunny was a friend of Solomon’s and he was also the gardener and houseman next door to a villa that I rented on the ocean near Hopewell. At that time, my friends and I were on a junket to bring some suitcases full of pressed weed back to Canada in an intricate scheme involving Canadian Immigration clearance cards. Passengers returning to Canada in those days were first interviewed by Canadian Immigration and then handed a three-by-five-inch card and told to proceed to customs for baggage inspection. The three-by-five cards had several boxes with numbers beside them, one of which was labeled e-24. It was discovered that if the e-24 was ticked off by the immigration officer, a passenger holding that card would be sent straight through customs without a baggage search. If enough people were in on the smuggling scam the odds were high that at least one in a group of seven or eight returning passengers would be handed an e-24 card. Brian Kholder and his cousin Alexandra were along to carry the bags of weed through Canada Customs once someone in our group had slipped them an e-24 card after clearing Immigration. There were about ten of us working the scam on this particular occasion, all friends from work and high school or college. There was my wife and me. Ryan McCaan and his wife Sally, and Phil Robson and his girlfriend Paula. My buddy Robert Bishop was along without a date, as was Ross Mitchell, who was dismayed to learn that “ross” was the slang word for shit in Jamaica. We had rented a seaside villa in the Jamaican parish of Hopewell that was ideally situated near a source of marijuana that was grown in the nearby parish of Orange Bay. We chose the Hopewell villa because we were close to the Montego Bay airport, yet free from the many prying eyes of the hotel staff in town. While we waited for Righteous to arrange for the marijuana to be pressed and packaged in Orange Bay, the group of us lay about our rented villa in hedonistic splendor. As we lay lounging in ocean-side chairs, sipping brown cows by the pool and smoking copious amounts of weed, we discussed the possibilities of our impending wealth. We were smoking so much ganga that we found it expedient to pay Sunny to be our spliff roller. Sunny was a solidly built man whose facial features looked carved out of dark stone. His demeanor was well suited for work as a caretaker and in the language of modern day psychology, he had more anima than animus in his character. Sunny was far from an ambitious soul. He had only one job to do for us, which was to roll joints, and whenever we asked him to do it, he would inevitably complain. “You finish all dem spliff already, mon?” Righteous was far more willing to work without complaining, and as time went on, I found myself relying more and more on Randall “Righteous” Solomon for many of my needs in Jamaica. When I first met Righteous he was a “Moonie,” which was a religious cult that was spreading throughout the western world at the time. His bright eyes, short-cropped hair, and a willing attitude gave me confidence in him and he soon became my right-hand man. I saw a lot of Righteous and Sunny that first year in Jamaica as our group strung the e-24 scam out as long as we could. We had several back-to-back successes before the smuggling scam finally blew apart in Toronto. That was when four suitcases full of weed slid down the baggage ramp to the circular pickup ring in the luggage collection area and one of the bags broke open, revealing sticks of weed poking out. We left the bags on the turnstile, pulled the luggage tags from the four suitcases, and went home broke. I was almost glad the trip folded just then because “Bish the Fish” Bishop and Marvin “Manny” Maniezzo had been playing poker with me on the way down to Jamaica, with the payouts due only after and if the e-24 scam paid off. I was so deep in debt after the two card sharks fleeced me, that just about all of my end would have gone to them anyway. Other scams came and went, as fate sent one smuggling opportunity after another my way. Through Righteous and his connections, I met the people I needed to expedite marijuana out of Jamaica in larger and larger shipments. Righteous introduced me to customs agents, aircraft maintenance personnel, and shipping brokers. He had so many contacts that it seemed to me that the whole of Jamaica was like one large extended family tied together by blood relations, tribal ties and financial gain. Even the police were available for a price, although my bias against authority never allowed me to use any police help. Feeding a cop is like feeding a bear, everything is great until the food runs out.