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

impressed as we pulled up in the T-Bird. He showed us a refrigerator compressor that was sawed into two halves and said that it was for sending weed to Canada. He said that he would fill the compressor with pressed weed and send it to any address that we gave him. It looked to me like an old piece of crap that wouldn’t have been worth the money to send to Kingston for repair, never mind Montreal. But the Jamaican assured us that he had used this method to send weed to the States many times and he had never heard of a problem. He would weld the weed to the inside of the compressor where no one would think to look for it. He would press the weed really tight until fifteen or maybe twenty pounds would fit inside.
    In hindsight, I realize why Tyrel had never heard of any problems. When a scam fails and someone goes down, the last thing anyone wants to do is go back to the scene of the crime and explain to everyone what happened. Most players write their bust off as a bad experience and never go back for more. But that was knowledge that came to me later in life, and while I had misgivings about their scam, Ryan and Tyrel almost convinced me that the idea was sound. But then Ryan asked for more money, saying that he had spent Barbara’s earlier investment on the flight and cruise expenses. I was not very happy with Ryan’s request for more money. This whole thing seemed like a throw-away scam, not one that required six months to set up. On top of that, he was staying with us and eating our food on the cuff, all the while asking for more investment money.
    Eventually I put my foot down.
    “No way. No fucking way.”
    I made it clear to Ryan that Barbara and I had no more money to give him and if he could not ship the load off with what he had, I would handle it myself. Ryan left Jamaica in a huff and I felt pleased to have told him how I felt, rather than keeping it bottled up. I had absolutely no worries about butting heads with him because he was a lightweight among the people we hung out with.
    I contacted my friend, Jacques Laflame, back in Montreal, who had volunteered to store our furniture in his garage while Barbara and I left on our extended vacation. Jacques was a funny kind of guy. He was married to a cute little French girl and the two of them were into kinky games. They were always trying to get Barbara and me to take our clothes off and run around nude at their house. I suspect that had we done so, other moves would have followed. Jacques said he would be willing to receive the compressor from me. I told him not to attempt to open it under any circumstances. “I’ll send it to your home,” I told him. “It should arrive the day after I ship it. If there’s a problem, there will probably be a two, or three, day delay while the cops examine the compressor before delivering it to you.”
    If such a delay happened, I told him to feign innocence at receiving the unsolicited compressor and if necessary, a smart lawyer would clear him of any charges. I offered to pay for a lawyer, at my expense, if there were any problems. If there was no heat on the compressor and it came through as planned, I told Jacques to leave it to cool off in his garage for a couple of weeks. Once the heat was off, I would contact our mutual friend, Ryan, to take the weed in the compressor off his hands. I told him I would pay him well for his trouble and not to worry as he had my furniture as collateral. I don’t know if it was the money, the adventure or a chance to get into our pants that motivated Jacques to go along with the play. The guy was a straight arrow and the worst thing I ever saw him do was slip his wife some mescaline without her knowledge.
    I shipped the load as we had discussed, and everything seemed fine. But then Jacques did something totally unexpected.
    I was lounging on my pool deck in Jamaica and smoking a spliff when Ryan and Jean Paul walked unannounced onto my back patio. It was about a week or two after I had