Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer

THE SAGA OF A MARIJUANA IMPORTER

JAY CARTER BROWN

Copyright © Jay Carter Brown,
2007

Published by
ECW PRESS
2120
Queen Street East, Suite
200
, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4E 1E2

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and
ECW PRESS.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Brown, Jay Carter
Smuggler’s blues / Jay Carter Brown.

ISBN 978-1-55022-783-3

1
. Brown, Jay Carter.
2.
Drug traffic.
3
. Drug couriers — Biography. I.Title.

HV5805.B76A3 2007    364.1’77092    C2007-903491-8

Cover and text design: Tania Craan
Typesetting: Mary Bowness
Production: Rachel Brooks
Printed by Webcom

This book is set in Bembo and TradeGothic.

The publication of
Smuggler’s Blues
has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested
$20.1
million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, by the Ontario Arts Council, by the Government of Ontario through Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (
BPIDP
).

DISTRIBUTION

CANADA
: Jaguar Book Group,
100
Armstrong Avenue, Georgetown,
ON
,
L7G 5S4
UNITED STATE
s: Independent Publishers Group,
814
North Franklin Street, Chicago, Illinois
60610

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

He penned me a note and held it to the security window.

The note was simple.

“Buy life insurance.”

But a few years earlier, I never would have thought about life insurance.

I was too busy living the high life and smuggling weed.

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
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.