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

tell her to keep the change. She’ll hand you back a box of matches with hash inside, but don’t open it until you’re outside the store,” I told him. My practical joke was interrupted by Brandi’s arrival and the subject was dropped. But when I offered later in the evening to get Bishop some hash he answered, “Don’t bother. I’ll get some from the corner store on my way home.”
    If Bishop had possessed more money, I would have let him do it but under the circumstances, I didn’t have the heart. Just as he was heading out to buy the hash I told him the truth and took fifty bucks from him to pass on to the Colombian exchange students.
    I nearly got taken in myself, by those Spanish-speaking studentsI was buying my hash from. In our hash-fueled ramblings, they told me of a scheme to import cocaine from Colombia to London, or Canada, in the linings of jackets made in some uncle’s factory. I was not really interested in dealing coke, but the next time I phoned back to my buddies in Montreal, I passed the information on to Ryan. I hinted that I might be interested in setting up a deal if it looked good. Almost before I hung up the phone, Ryan’s partner Robby hopped a plane to England to scope out the possibilities. When he arrived, I told Robby I had come to believe the deal was a scam by the South American students to rip me off, and I questioned why he had jumped on a plane so quickly. He told me Ryan had sent him and that he was going to be pissed off about the waste of an airfare.
    After digesting this disappointment, Robby asked if we wanted to split the rent on a villa in Jamaica. He was planning on spending the winter there with his girlfriend, Paula, and asked if we would like to join them. Barbara and I had already discussed postponing the rest of our trip to Europe, because of the cold winter weather, and Robby’s offer sounded tempting.
    I also had five thousand other reasons besides the cold weather for going to Jamaica. While I was waiting for bail in New York with Bishop, Ryan had approached my wife in Montreal and talked her into investing five thousand dollars in a weed scam. While I was none too happy about Barbara proceeding without me on a business deal, the deed was done and I felt there was not much I could say about it. I consoled myself with the fact that at least we had something in the works to make back some of the scam money we lost in New York.
    When you lose in the smuggling business, you lose big. You lose your investment money. You lose your product. You lose your savings, which your lawyer sucks up like a Hoover. You lose your livelihood, because you can no longer make an income. You lose your freedom, in some cases. You lose your girlfriends or wives when they get tired of waiting for you to get sprung from jail. Sometimes people even lose their lives.
    In spite of all that, I decided to rearrange our vacation schedule and visit Jamaica to both enjoy the sun and to look in on ourinvestment that was made with Ryan. It made more sense to be making money in Jamaica while sucking up a tan in a bathing suit than roaming around Europe in a sheepskin coat burning off money and killing time.
    Before Robby left to return to Montreal, he passed on a request to me from Ryan for more money to cover shortfalls in the deal he was putting together with Barbara’s money. I grudgingly gave Robby a couple of thousand more, which covered his London visit and I told him that was it. There was no more money to invest. I told Robby that if Ryan could not get his act together on the money we had already given him, then I would go to Jamaica and take care of business for him. The request for more money gave me a bad feeling, and I began to wonder what kind of a con we had gotten into.
    My sidekick, Bishop, was getting ready to leave for Morocco and I could see that he was sad to part with us. Unlike Barbara and me, Bishop was on his own and had no one to run away with. We said he could stay with us in