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 practice 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.

                                

                                       Excerpt from Chapter Five

ExceAfter Irving and I successfully imported our shipments of weed into Canada, we fronted it to two high-level street dealers. One of them was Brian Kholder, who I liked very much. Barbara and I hung around with Brian and his attractive wife Karen for quite some time until they got into smack and lost interest in us. I can honestly say that I have never had any desire to profit from something like heroin, which causes such devastation in people’s lives. That being said, I had no idea just how addicting the stuff really was until I saw the changes it effected in my friend Brian. The drug made him surly and stubborn and took away his abilities to function, and it reduced his energy levels to near zero.  Irving was somewhat responsible for Brian and Karen’s addiction. He had Chip “the Limey” Jenkins, who was a friend of Simon Steinberg’s, bring an ounce of pure heroin from London to see if there was a market for it in Montreal. Irving gave Brian the ounce of smack to move and I heard from Brian later that he never sold a gram of it. He used the whole ounce himself and by the end of that ounce, he and Karen were hooked for life.

      Simon Steinberg was a gentleman who purchased and traded in several cars from our car lot. Simon began to hang around our office, playing cards and listening to the war stories being traded around by the boys. He was a well-dressed and well-groomed young man with a nice smile and the unfortunate distinction of having the worst breath I ever smelled on a human being. As pleasant as Simon Steinberg was, how he endeared himself to Irving was a mystery to me.

      As I mentioned earlier, when I first met Irving he had overcome a gambling problem. At first Irving stayed out of the gin and poker games that went on between the boys who came around our place of business to play cards. For a while, Irv was content to observe. But the whooping and the laughing and the friendly banter of the card games drew him in, and before long, he began to join us at play. When it came to cards, Irving played conservatively and he played well. He was extremely disciplined and never bluffed that I could see. In fact, he did not play like a gambling addict at all. But I soon became aware that Irving was still very much addicted to gambling. Only he was not gambling at the card table. He was gambling with our scam.

      Irving was never satisfied with what we were making and kept upping the size of the loads I was sending to Montreal. We went from shipping crates full of weed to shipping containers filled with weed, and still he was looking for more. Each time the size of our shipments increased to a new level, it tested the boundaries of chance. It is only because the boys on the docks were so good at what they did that the container scam never blew up in our faces. When the RCMP wanted to look at a container, they would have to ask our dock worker contacts to go and fetch it for them. If the container was one of ours, the boys would tell the cops that they could not find it or they would stack it in such a way that another container had to be moved before either of the container doors could be opened. Then they would stall the cops until the container was emptied or hidden again somewhere else in the yard. The boys downtown were good at their job. So good that we eventually had so much weed on hand that it began backing up on us. Our last load of nearly six thousand pounds left us with so much weed that several hundred pounds spoiled and went rotten before it could be sold.

      At the same time as the weed bales began stacking up, Irving began bitching about having to pay out fifty percent of our earnings to the boys on the docks. Brian Kholder’s younger brother, Buddy, was making a name for himself by smuggling large loads of hash through Russia and the Netherlands into Montreal. Buddy was knocking off back-to-back container loads of hash without a miss and he was getting rich. Buddy was once asked the secret of his success by Bob Bishop and his answer was typical of his attitude.

“I just watched what you guys did and didn’t make the same mistakes,” Buddy laughed.

       When Irving wanted to start dealing in hash, I had no problem with it on a moral level. Grass and hash are both the same, only one is cannabis sativa and the other is cannabis indica. Besides, hash does not spoil like weed does and hash is worth a lot more per pound.  So when Simon Steinberg offered us a way to bring some hash into Canada by air, Irving was all ears. I could see nothing wrong with trying something new, but I did not want anything new to mess up the good thing Irving and I already had going. Simon told us he had a jet rated pilot’s license and access to a DC-8 in London. His parents were the owners of a chain of gas stations across Canada. Like Irving, Simon had been brought up rich. He was receiving an allowance of thirty-eight hundred dollars a month when we met him, which is no small change even today. He drove a late model Mercedes-Benz and he had no need of money. But boys will be boys, I guess. Simon had a zest for adventure and he wanted to join us in our little games outside of the card room. He traded in his Benz on a pretty little BMW CSI we had for sale and paid us cash for the difference.

      It just so happened that Shaun Palmer was around at the time of the purchase and the two started talking about drug deals. Shaun was an Irishman, with the gift of the gab and a thousand one-liners in his joke repertoire. He inherited a senior position in our organization when Jean Paul died. Shaun had been working with Jean Paul for only a short while when his opportunity for advancement came. Shaun knew little about moving weed, he confessed later, but jumped at the opportunity to make some real money. The Irishman was tall and well built with a cheerful grin and a boxer’s face. He looked like he belonged in the underworld, but in truth, he came from a very different background. Shaun was a drafting equipment salesman before he started working for Jean Paul as a furniture salesman in Jean Paul’s store. He had helped Jean Paul with some weed deliveries in the past and since he knew some of Jean Paul’s customers, he was able to take over when his boss dropped permanently out of the scene.

      Within a few months of taking over as our main wholesaler, Shaun lost six hundred pounds of our weed all in the same week. Two hundred pounds went down in the trunk of a car belonging to one of his deliverymen, and four hundred pounds went down in a motel when a maid found the marihuana in the room and called the cops. When Shaun came to meet with Irving to discuss the losses I waited as cover, with a loaded shotgun in a car on the second floor of the garage where our office was located. We had no way of knowing who Shaun really was, or if he was going to settle the debt or try to erase it at gunpoint.  Irving was furious and ready to kill Shaun, but the Irishman soothed him into submission with his gift of the gab. When Irving started ragging on him about the losses, Shaun retaliated in kind.

    “What are you complaining about?” he said in a voice equally as loud as Irving’s. “It’s my responsibility that the weed was lost. I’m the one who has to pay back the debt.”

     When Shaun didn’t try to weasel out of the debt, it caught Irving off guard. Even though Shaun did not have the money to cover it, he came to an arrangement with Irving about how to pay us back. Shaun agreed to pay an extra twenty dollars a pound for all future weed fronts, until the loss of the six hundred pounds was made up. This still left a hefty profit margin for Shaun to make some decent money, as the weed he was selling at street level went from two fifty to three hundred a pound and he was paying only two hundred to two ten to us.

     Shaun was back in good stead with Irving once he paid back most of his debt and he came to Irving with an offer of a hash supplier in the Middle East. Shaun’s offer was timely and he was instantly taken in as a partner on Irving’s new hash scam with me, John Miller and Simon Steinberg. After consulting with Simon and Shaun, Irving came up with a plan. Simon would fly by commercial airliner to England, where he would use his pilot’s license to charter a commercial DC-8 jet and fly it to Lebanon. According to Simon, there were tons of places where we could stash the hash in the wings and fuselage of a big DC-8.  Shaun’s friends in Beirut included a captain in the military who would help us expedite the hash from the city to the airport and onto the plane.

      The scam sounded pretty good on the surface but with a little digging I saw flaws. For one thing, Irving and I and Big John Miller already had a good scam going, so why fuck it up? For another thing, there was a serious war going on between the Israelis and the Lebanese so it was not the best time to try something sneaky over there. I had no confidence in Simon Steinberg and I told Irving so. But Irving was my friend and mentor and he was adamant that we should try to import some hash. Irving could not go to Lebanon himself as he was on parole and unable to leave Montreal. Big John Miller was in the same position, although he was free to travel with me to Jamaica.

    “Go and oversee the project,” Irving practically begged of me. “If it doesn’t look good you can scrub the mission, but I know I can trust you to make it happen.”

    Irving had made me a lot of money up to this point and if he was right about the hash scam, I stood to make even more. So I updated my passport and booked a flight to London, where I had arranged to meet with Simon Steinberg in a hotel restaurant.

    As I look back on my past, I find it hard to understand all the risks I have taken. Many could have landed me in prison for a long time.  They were calculated chances, I liked to think, and I felt I was smart enough to pull off my scams without getting caught or resorting to violence. But I knew, even then, that my reasoning was flawed, just like everyone else who ends up in prison. I know now that it was not so much the money that I craved as it was the action. The money was a reward that came along with bragging rights for having won at a game, but the game itself was more the draw than the monetary reward.

      Hurting people was not my thing, and yet I have to admit that I had been prepared to stand by while Irving and John Miller killed an innocent man who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not that Irving would have stopped his plans because of anything I said. When he was convinced of something, there was no changing his mind. Nevertheless, I do not feel I have the right to stand in judgment of Irving or John Miller, who risked their everlasting souls by offering to ride along on a hit together. We all shared in the shame of that decision but mine was a convenient position, where I stood to benefit from Irving’s crime without wearing the guilt.

     It was all business with Simon Steinberg when I met him in England, even though we were meeting over a sumptuous dinner at a five-star hotel.

    “Where’s the plane?” I asked.

    “Don’t worry. It’s all taken care of. I will be flying it into Lebanon.”

 Simon’s promise was given to me with a reassuring grin as we dined on rack of lamb. While we talked, Simon showed off his experience in fine dining by recommending our meal and ordering it. Then he began instructing me on some of the finer points of English social graces, including an explanation about all the cutlery. It pissed me off that even though I was paying for all this fine dining, Simon was talking down to me like I was some poor slave and he was the rich white master. I found myself resenting the little prick more and more for butting his rich white ass into my arena. I could only speculate on why Irving had ignored my warnings and gone into business with him. Was it because Irving and Simon came from such similar backgrounds, both having been raised with maids and servants and both being Jewish?  Why was Irving being taken in by this little con man, I wondered, as my own sense of greed and duty kept me from abandoning the hash project in spite of my misgivings. After our meal was over, I booked my ticket to Lebanon and left Simon with his promise to fly the DC-8 to Beirut ringing in my ears.

      It was a long flight to Lebanon and I slept through most of it. When the plane touched down at the Beirut airport, I was concerned that customs might find and seize the hundred grand or more that I had on me. But I was treated with courtesy and respect as I was whisked through the Lebanese Customs and Immigration stations in an expedient fashion.

     Being in Lebanon back then was probably one of the few times in my life where I felt in real peril. I was entering war-torn Beirut during the war with Israel, with over one hundred grand cash in my pocket and not so much as a stick to defend myself with. I was booked in at the Intercontinental Hotel, where my associate from Montreal, Shaun Palmer, had flown in a few days earlier to connect with his Lebanese contacts who were supplying the hash. I took a taxi from the airport and checked into my room before meeting Shaun in the hotel bar. When I found him, I had to tear the Irishman away from a few gentlemen in suits who were laughing at his jokes. The hotel bar was filled to capacity with men in suits and I wondered out loud to Shaun what they were doing here during a war.

   “They’re spies mostly,” said Shaun with his usual cherubic smile.

   “What did you tell them you were in Beirut for?” I asked him, fearing the worst.

   “I told them I’m selling fire trucks,” he said with a grin. “No one knows anything about fire trucks and I’m sure they need them around here with the war going on.”

I liked his answer and my confidence level edged a little higher.

    “How is your military friend who’s going to deliver the hash to the plane?” I asked.

   “Not too good,” said Shaun without blinking. “He was killed in the war. We’ll have to make do without him.”

   “Jesus Christ, Shaun! That’s a major change in plans! What about the fifty grand we paid for the hash up front?” I asked. “Can we get it back?”

“That’s already spent,” he replied. “The hash is waiting for us in a house not far from our hotel.”

 “So now what?”

 “So now we wait for the plane.” 

     To prepare the hash for Simon’s arrival, Shaun and I had to leave the relative comfort and security of the Intercontinental Hotel to travel to a small adobe dwelling a few miles from the hotel. Shaun had paid fifty grand up front for the hash while he was still in Montreal, and now I was to examine the product and complete the second payment. I would have liked to have seen our pilot and the DC-8 land in Lebanon before I committed to the purchase of the hash, but Simon was not due to arrive for a couple more days yet and we had to get everything ready before his arrival.

      It was an eerie ride that night, as Shaun and I drove through the streets of Beirut with a low rolling fog and darkness setting in. Every street and every corner had machine gun-totting soldiers on patrol but they ignored us for the most part while we drove past. The moment we stopped and parked at our destination, however, we were immediately questioned by two soldiers on foot patrol. We were on a narrow street beside a row of one story buildings made of stone and mud. As the soldiers spoke no English and we spoke no Lebanese, we pointed to the house where we were going and the soldiers examined our documents then bade us pass. Entering inside the adobe structure, I was ushered with Shaun into a small, dark room where I was surrounded by several men dressed in loose-fitting clothes. As I entered the dwelling, I looked quickly at the three or four men but I had little time to study their faces. There was a small wooden table with four chairs in the main room of the two-room house. A small portable stove was in the kitchen area, along with one or two pots and pans on the counter. A sheet hung over the one window facing the street. I was struck by the simplicity of the lifestyle these people were living. The entire dwelling and all of its contents would probably be worth less than the money I kept in my small change pocket.  As we moved inside the house and the door closed behind us, I was thinking about the hundred grand in my jacket and how Shaun and I could disappear in Lebanon without leaving a trace. I was seriously wondering if my throat was going to be cut, when one of the Bedouins gestured to me to come into the next room. The room was dark and I could not see what or who was in there as he led the way and bade me to follow. I entered the small closed-in room with Shaun behind me and several men following behind him, thinking that if there was a rip-off coming this was where it would take place. The hairs on my neck began to stand up straight as I entered the windowless room, still thinking about a knife being pulled and my throat being cut. My fear was still present when the Bedouin bade me to come closer and I took another step into the bedroom. He pointed to the far wall and then walked over and pulled a wooden crate from beneath a cot like single bed. He lifted the lid from the crate and inside were four hundred and thirty-one slabs of fresh blond Lebanese bricks of hash, each wrapped in its own sackcloth and bearing the seal of the farmer who sold it. Another crate under the bed held an equal amount of hash, for a total of nine hundred and fifty pounds of hashish. After the Bedouin opened the crate for me, I broke off a piece of hash and smelled it. It was the finest gold Lebanese I had ever seen. It smelled like cinnamon and was so soft and malleable that it could be handled without it crumbling apart like blond Moroccan hash or Lebanese kief. At Shaun’s signal, I handed a wad of one hundred Canadian one thousand dollar bills to the Bedouin. When the transaction was completed, we left the hash in the care of Shaun’s Lebanese contacts, except for a small piece of personal that I brought back to the hotel.

     Shaun and I returned to the Intercontinental Hotel for a toke and a late night drink on the balcony of my room where we discussed the day’s events. I was glad to be out of there, I told him, when I finished rolling a joint of hash mixed with tobacco. I confided my fears to him but Shaun scoffed at the idea that his friends in war torn Beirut might have robbed and killed us. I believed his sincerity, but I thought him naive.

   As the evening progressed I made a comment to him about the thunder in the hills.

  “What a strange climate,” I said as I inhaled a joint of our Lebanese hash and basked in the satisfaction of a scam that was coming together as planned. I gazed across the city from our seventh-floor balcony then looked over to Shaun.

   “I hear thunder all the time and yet it never rains.”

   “That’s not thunder,” Shaun laughed. “That’s the Israeli jets bombing the Lebanese positions in the hills just outside of Beirut.”

      It was a warm, beautiful night, in spite of the distant bombing, with a cloudless red sky that was melting into total darkness. My job here was almost over, I thought, as I felt the hashish calming my stomach. The cargo of hash was all ready to go and Shaun’s Lebanese friends had even offered to drive the crates to the airport for us. In spite of the positive events, I found myself almost hoping that Simon would not show up with the plane. Without the services of Shaun’s Captain, we would have to use stealth to get the hash through the city and onto the plane. And if anything went wrong in Lebanon, we would be royally fucked. This wasn’t Jamaica with a rustic system of English justice.  This was Beirut and a war was going on. Justice can come swiftly from the end of a gun barrel during wartime conditions and double-crosses can quickly become triple-crosses and worse when death is everyone’s constant companion. How the hell were we going to drive through the streets of Beirut and breech airport security to load a plane with contraband hashish with a war going on?

     The next morning I felt better after a good night’s sleep and I attributed my earlier fears to the strong hash and not enough sleep. I had a job to do and somehow I would see it through. After a comfortable breakfast in the hotel restaurant overlooking the lobby, I wondered how I was going to stand another day in this boring hotel. I talked to Shaun about going to a famous Casino Resort Spa on the ocean a few miles outside of town, but Shaun looked into it and informed me that the resort had been bombed and destroyed.

      It was my fifth day in Beirut and I was becoming impatient for the arrival of our pilot and plane.  While sipping a cup of coffee at the coffee shop, I thought I saw a familiar figure at the front desk check-in. It was a short man with a full head of thick, wavy hair, dressed in an airline captain’s uniform. Another slim nondescript European man in a gray suit was standing behind the man in the captain’s uniform and I could barely believe my eyes as I gave Shaun a nudge. Shaun looked over and he was as surprised as I was. Neither of us was expecting Simon Steinberg for another twenty-four hours and there he was at the front desk of the Beirut Intercontinental Hotel, a full day ahead of schedule. Simon looked very official in his starched white Captain’s shirt. I caught his eye as he finished checking in. I thought I was going to owe the little Jew an apology for doubting him, as I waved him over to join Shaun and me at our breakfast table.

    “Good flight?”

    “Excellent flight.”

     “I wasn’t sure you would make it.”

     “I told you I would be here, didn’t I?”

     “Is the DC-8 at the airport?”

    “Not exactly.”

    “What do you mean not exactly?” I asked. “You’re here. So where’s the plane?”

    “I flew in by BOAC.”

    “What do you mean you flew in by BOAC? Tell me you’re joking and the plane is parked at the airport.”

    “Well no, not exactly,” said Simon.  “There’s been a change of plans.”

    “What do you mean a change of plans?” I said with my blood pressure rising. “We have the hash all set up and ready to go and now you show up with no fucking plane!”

    “Now, don’t get excited,” Simon insisted. “I have a plane coming. It will be here tomorrow.”

    “What the hell are you talking about?”

Simon went on to tell us that the DC-8 he was going to charter in London had become unavailable due to mechanical problems. As an alternate plan, he had commissioned a Lockheed Lodestar that he chartered out of New York. When he told me that, I immediately saw a problem. The propeller-driven cargo plane was coming all the way from New York to Beirut to supposedly pick up a load of fruit and vegetables to deliver to Montreal. Now anyone with even a limited knowledge of aircraft economics knows that the cost of flying a Lockheed Lodestar to Beirut was prohibitive. Flying a fuel-sucking old crate that far to pick up fruit would have required that the oranges sell for a hundred dollars apiece to make a profit on the trip.

    “That’s no fucking good,” I whispered as a kind of panic began to set in. “The charter crew isn’t even in on the deal. What’s to stop them from calling the cops, or for that matter, taking our load of hash and throwing it in the ocean?”

    “Don’t worry,” soothed Simon, bad breath dripping from every word. “Shaun and I will ride back on the plane with the flight crew to make sure they don’t fuck with the cargo. I’ll tell the crew that the shipment of fruit was unavailable because of the war and that we will be picking up some spare engine parts instead. We’ll throw the two crates of hash onto the plane as engine spares and fly from Beirut straight to Preswick, Scotland. Then we fly on to Reykjavik, Iceland and over the salt chuck to Gander and then on to our hanger at Dorval.  I’ll sit on the crate all the way back so no one looks in it.”

     I looked over at Shaun, whose pug face was showing remarkably little surprise at these latest developments. Shaun was not a gangster, exactly. He was a salesman before the untimely death of his friend Jean Paul. But Shaun did look like a gangster with his short hair and heavy build. He had an Irish face that beamed and reddened with changing emotions, especially when he’d had a drink or two.

      This is like a plot in a B movie, I thought, as I gloomed over the latest developments. I surveyed the bar area trying to separate the spies from the businessmen, to no avail. What would businessmen be doing here in the middle of a war anyways, I asked myself. Only people with high stakes at risk would chance a visit to Beirut at this time. People like us. I was just finishing my coffee and I was still digesting the new turn of events when the slim young man who had been standing behind Simon at the front desk approached our table.

    “Hello,” he said in a Cockney accent. “My name is Chip Jenkins.”

    I looked at his outstretched hand like it was contaminated and made no effort to respond to it.

    “Chip is an old friend of mine.” said Simon, breaking the ice to introduce the stranger. “He helped me charter the plane out of London and I brought him along to meet the New York crew and help us out.”

     I was visibly angry about having a new face sprung on me without warning. This entire deal was spinning out of control, I groused to myself, until some hours later when I realized a benefit. Simon and Chip could now take care of the tasks that Shaun and I had been obligated to look after, like delivering and loading the hash onto the plane. Shaun and I would act as countersurveillance to keep an eye on things. Seeing as he was already here, the Englishman named Chip could help Simon do some of the dangerous work.

     After the introductions, Shaun left our meeting to return to his room for a nap and Chip went to his room to unpack, while Simon and I stayed in the coffee bar to talk shop.  As soon as the others left the table, I read Simon the riot act. I told him I was going to hold him personally responsible for anything that went wrong with this scam due to his bullshit and incompetence. He tried to back out of flying back with the load, but I made it clear to him that he had damn well better. As far as I was concerned, he had lied about the DC-8 and when I got home I was certainly going to inform Irving. Simon left the table duly rebuked and I returned to what was left of my cold breakfast. Things were not exactly going as planned but they were moving forward, I was thinking, as I sipped my third cup of coffee. I decided to stop by my room to calm myself with a toke of hash and meditate on everything. I signed the breakfast bill and made my way to my room on the seventh floor. The elevator chanced to stop on the third floor and as the doors opened to let out another passenger, I happened to see Simon’s English friend, Chip, going into a hotel room that was not his own. I continued on up to the seventh floor where I met with Shaun in his room and told him what I had seen.

    Who was this Limey that Simon had brought into our midst, I wondered out loud.

    CIA? BNDD? RCMP? Interpol? The best course of action was to go down to the room on the third floor and knock on the door to find out. When Shaun and I did so, the door was opened by Chip who had a look of astonishment and guilt on his face.

    “Who the hell is this?” I demanded as I pushed into the room past Chip to confront a medium-sized white male about thirty-five years of age. The man had dark wavy hair and a mustache and goatee and he was a complete stranger.

    “He’s a friend of mine,” said Chip.

    “What the fuck’s he doing here?”

    “When Simon asked me to help him with a dope deal in Lebanon I wasn’t going to come alone. I brought along my friend Bob Chambers here as backup. He’s my mate.”

I interviewed Simon’s friend Bob for a while before deciding he was on the up-and-up. His history appeared to be that of a petty London thief who had a criminal record for stealing some frozen rabbits from a butcher.  Since he was there to help anyways, we gave Bob the job of helping to load the plane with Simon and Chip, with payment for their efforts promised later. Could things get any worse, I wondered, as I left the two Englishmen in the room and departed with Shaun.

      That night I had a fitful sleep and the next morning I was grumpy as a bear.  All morning and all afternoon were spent waiting for the arrival of our chartered cargo plane, which was supposed to arrive in Beirut around 4 p.m.  At 3:30 p.m. Shaun and I were having a drink at the bar when several very rough-looking individuals entered the hotel.

    “Look,” I said to Shaun, making a joke. “There’s our flight crew.”

The three men walked to the check-in counter looking like carbon copies of soldiers from the Dirty Dozen. The first man in line was tall, maybe six foot two or three, with the lanky athletic build of a proball player. He was wearing aviator-style sunglasses and a kaki shirt with loose-fitting military-style trousers. He was unshaven with a three day growth of beard and carried himself with the easy lope of an athlete, as he strolled into the hotel and set his flight bag in front of the check-in counter. Behind him stood a bald-headed white man with a Fu Manchu mustache. He was wearing a cut-off T-shirt and stood at least six foot four and weighed an easy two hundred and eighty pounds of solid muscle. The bald man had an appearance that fell somewhere between Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun and he made tough-looking Shaun Palmer look like one of the seven dwarfs.  There was one other man standing behind the first two men in line and as I recall, he looked capable of handling himself in a fight. The three men standing together made a formidable appearance. Shaun saw it, too, as he leaned over to inform me in a whispered aside, “If that’s the flight crew, there’s no fucking way I’m flying back with the hash.”

    “I don’t blame you,” I answered, just as Chip and Simon appeared in the lobby and walked over to join the three men at the check-in counter.

     Simon shook hands with the tall one who appeared to be the pilot, while Shaun and I stared at each other in disbelief. It really was our flight crew!

      At this point, we had over a hundred and fifty grand invested in the scam and there were a host of problems. There was no Lebanese military captain to deliver the hash to the plane. There was no DC-8 with enough room inside to safely hide a half ton of hash. We no longer had a pilot of our own to fly the load home to Canada. Instead, we had a crew of mercenaries out of New York who we were trusting to fly our shit home. The question I was faced with, after all that had transpired, was: should I scrub the mission, or send the load with the chartered flight crew and cross my fingers? The hash was already purchased and I doubted that we could trust Shaun’s Lebanese friends to hold on to it safely until we came back to Lebanon a few months later with another exporting scam. Whatever decision I made, I would be responsible for the outcome. I kept on trying to make this scam work, but each time I made a step forward, fate was pushing me two steps back. I thought of Irving and how disappointed he would be if I just junked the scam and returned home. This was entirely his idea, I told myself, as I thought about tossing aside a multimillion-dollar score. But the money invested in the scam belonged to me, John Miller and Irving. I had a responsibility to try to see the project through to completion.

     That night, I drove with Shaun to the airport in a car I had rented and we scouted out the Lockheed Lodestar from New York. We parked by the hangar where the aircraft was stationed and walked inside the structure to check it out. Our chartered plane was sitting bathed in fluorescent light between two other flying relics from the past. I walked around the hangar and checked out the three aircraft. The Lodestar looked like an old piece of unpainted junk, as did the two other nondescript aircraft in the hangar. After walking around the plane a couple of times, I passed through the “man door” on the opposite side of the hangar and walked out onto the open airfield. A lone runway outside the hangar was shared by both civilian and military aircraft.  Military helicopters and planes sat unprotected on the runway waiting for the call to arms, but I saw no one guarding them. If I had been an enemy spy I could have blown up half of the Lebanese air force with a few well-placed hand grenades. It was amazing that I had such unfettered access to a military airport during a war.

      I returned to the Intercontinental Hotel with Shaun and informed everyone involved that we were going ahead with the plan. When we left the hotel around 10 p.m. the next evening to pick up the hash and transport it to the airport, Shaun and I were in one car and Simon, Chip and Bob were in their own rental vehicle. As it turned out, the Bedouins were able to transport the hash to the airport for us without any problems and we traveled with them in a three-car caravan to the hangar. Shaun and I waited outside the airport, keeping watch for trouble, as the other vehicles continued on inside the hangar to unload the hash. A few minutes later, the Bedouins in the pickup truck drove out of the hangar and waved to us as they left for the return trip to Beirut.

     Several hours later, Shaun and I were still in place outside the airport, waiting for Simon and the two Englishmen to complete their task and drive out of the hangar. Shaun and I had both taken the precaution of bringing our passports and money, in case we needed them, and it was beginning to look like maybe we would. I was talking to Shaun about the nearest country we could drive to if our plan went bust and the boys in the hangar were arrested. We checked a map in the rented car’s glove box. Syria was closest at eighty or so miles. If the three men did not come out of the hangar soon, I would fear the worst and we would start driving towards Syria.

      In due course, our work crew did come out of the hangar and phase one of our mission was complete. We all met back at the hotel to make final arrangements before the shipment of hash left the next morning for Montreal. Our two crates had been placed on board the aircraft, but it took a long time to arrange as the full crates were too heavy to lift into the Lockheed by hand. In order to get the hash on the plane, Simon and his limey friends had to empty the hash from the crates, carry it on board brick by brick and then repack the empty crates once they had both been lifted into the aircraft.

     When we finally all returned to the hotel I was glad my work was over and that I was flying home to Montreal with Shaun the next day. Simon Steinberg did not know it yet, but his English friends were returning to England, while Simon was riding back with the crate to make certain no one interfered with it, just like he said he would. That responsibility was his punishment for fucking up the whole scam, and I was making sure that he did not back out, even if it meant Simon would be flying back to Montreal alone on the Lockheed. Much to Simon’s relief, Chip Jenkins suddenly changed his mind about returning to England with his friend Bob and decided to hop a free flight to Montreal on the Lockheed Lodestar. I thought that was pretty ballsy of him, considering the nine hundred and fifty pounds of hash on board, but Simon was pretty happy about Chip’s change in itinerary. As I saw it, our job was complete, and all that remained was for Shaun and me to fly home to meet the plane with the rest of our crew when the Lodestar arrived in Montreal. All we had to do then was take our cargo on a ten-minute drive to a safe house near Dorval Airport and prepare the hash for distribution. The final detail in our preparation would be the rental of additional safety deposit boxes to store all of the money that would soon be coming our way.