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

sent the compressor to Jacques and I was already on edge because I sensed something had gone wrong. Jean Paul had a serious look on his face and, without so much as a hello from either himself or Ryan, he urged me to come into an adjacent bedroom. As I followed behind Ryan, I was expecting to hear that Jacques had contacted Ryan about the compressor, but from the looks on their faces, I could see that something had gone terribly wrong. I asked what was going on and I was expecting to hear some bad news but Jean Paul’s contorted face spoke more than his words.
    “You want to know what happened? I’ll tell you what happened. Your fucking friend got busted and he tried to take me down with him.”
    “Jacques got busted?”
    “Yah, Jacques.”
    “I told him not to contact you or Ryan until the heat was off the load.”
    “He contacted us alright. And he had a fucking cop beside him when he called.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Because I know.”
    “What happened?
    “You want to know what happened? I’ll tell you what happened.”
    Jacques had called Ryan before he was supposed to and told him what was planned. Immediately following Jacques’s phone call, Ryan called in his loan shark buddy, Jean Paul, to hijack the load. They coerced poor Jacques into going to the airport to pick up the compressor, even though it had been sitting in customs for days.
    Poor, stupid Jacques. Poor, stupid, double-crossing Jacques. He was given the compressor by customs at the airport, after it had been emptied of most of its weed, and the cops allowed him to drive away with it. When he reached the Montreal Expressway, where it rises up to a right-of-way overpass that traversesthe city, Ryan, Jean Paul and another man closed off the highway behind Jacques. They accomplished this by stopping their cars abreast in a line, thereby bringing the three lanes of expressway traffic to a halt, in order to give Jacques the time he needed to escape any pursuers. It was a bold move, but the plan did not work. Jacques was busted just outside Quebec City as he checked into his motel room. He answered the phone when Jean Paul called from a nearby phone booth and he invited the loan shark to come and pick up the compressor.
    One thing about Jean Paul: he may not have been the smartest guy in the world, but he was cunning as a wolf.
    “They’re with you, aren’t they?” Jean Paul growled into the phone.
    “What do you mean?”
    “The cops. They’re with you, aren’t they?”
    “No, no! That’s not so,” Jacques protested in French.
    “They’re standing right beside you, aren’t they?”
    “There’s no one here.”
    “They’re listening to every word.”
    “No, that’s not true.”
    “Put them on the phone. I want to talk to them.”
    The phone suddenly went dead and Jean Paul knew it was a trap.
    Now I should explain a little about Jean Paul. This guy had a sixth sense that warned him away from danger. It was not the first time that his uncanny senses had saved him. There was another time he had a premonition when he and Ryan were about to pick up a load of weed that they had smuggled into Canada. On that occasion, four hundred pounds of Jamaican coli that Ryan had shipped north was waiting for pickup in a second floor flat in the east end of Montreal. As far as they knew, the load was secure, but at Jean Paul’s insistence, Ryan and Jean Paul both took a walk around the block before entering the apartment. It was cold that night and most people would have forgone the walkabout and just gone inside to warm up, but Jean Paul was adamant about the security check. About half a block from the flat, Jean Paul walked past a car and saw two men insuits lying sprawled across the seats. The story, as told later, was that the two men both had two-way radios in their hands. I don’t know if he could have seen the radios on a dark and cold night, but Jean Paul kept walking straight to his car and he and Ryan drove away from the scene. They