“I told you plenty about my business. More than I ever told anyone outside the life, my wife included.”
“True.”
“So?”
“Tell me the two questions first.”
“One: how you cracked our gang. And two: how you… how should I say it…”
“Blew the case?”
“Blew the living shit out of it, I was going to say.”
“It’s a long story.”
“We’re an hour from the border.”
“It’s not a bad story,” I allowed.
“Then tell it, brother,” Ryan said. “Let it unfold with the miles.”
I let a minute tick by while I thought about where to begin. “All right. About a year ago, the federal finance minister pushed through a huge tax hike on cigarettes.”
“Six bucks a carton,” Ryan snorted. “I was pissed off and I don’t even pay for mine.”
“He said it would protect the youth of the nation by making smoking hard to afford.”
“Bullshit. The youth of the nation just steal more out of their parents’ wallets.”
“Plus smokers of all ages instinctively started looking for ways around the tax. It’s the Canadian way,” I said. “Tax us if you can.”
“And naturally your criminal element stepped in to provide courteous black-market service,” Ryan grinned. “Christ, everyone and their mother got involved. Natives, bikers, Asians and of course your
… ah, traditional organized crime types.”
“Of course. The problem was that smokers didn’t just want cheap cigarettes. They wanted cheap Canadian cigarettes.”
“You blame them? You ever smoke an American brand?”
I nodded. “I used to be a smoker. I tried Camels once.”
“And?”
“Didn’t even taste like the best part of a camel.”
“There you go.”
“Anyway, getting the product into the U.S. was easy. The manufacturers ramped up production for the export market, supposedly because more Americans suddenly wanted to enjoy their products. Truckloads-convoys-were lined up at every land border crossing from the Thousand Islands bridge to the Windsor Tunnel. But packages destined for export have a seal that says they can’t be sold in Canada. So they had to be smuggled back.”
“Which is where the Akwesasne Reserve proved so convenient.”
“It was practically designed for smuggling,” I said. “Only one narrow stretch of the St. Lawrence River separates the Canadian and American sides at Cornwall. Every Mohawk with a boat was bringing cartons across the river.”
“And wholesaling them to us.”
“And buying bigger, faster boats with the profits. The OPP and RCMP together couldn’t stop more than one in ten.”
“Ten?” Ryan said. “That’s what they told the media. They were lucky if it was one in twenty.”
“The government finally had to roll back the tax because the only people profiting from it were you criminals.”
“A sad day for us because cigarettes were an attractive product. Big markup, steady market, and they don’t break if a truck rolls. But,” he said, “there’s always other commodities. Booze, guns, people, perfume, knock-offs, dope and now, as we know, basic drugstore crap.”
“The tobacco companies would have gotten away with it too,” I said.
“But?”
“An investigative journalist uncovered documents that left them with a lot of ‘splainin’ to do. To the RCMP in particular.”
“That’s what you get for writing shit down.”
“An investigator told me one executive from Ensign Tobacco couldn’t take a crap without leaving a paper trail.”
“But Ensign turned out to be your client.”
“And you know why.”
“That stupid court order. Thirty million cigarettes, consigned to an incinerator. Going up in smoke for nothing.”
“They were marked for export, with no export market to send them to. And the feds looked at it as a way to punish the companies and take the heat off the finance minister for the flip-flop.”
“But all thirty million? No. We couldn’t let it happen. Too much to resist. We knew our guys could sell them in less time than they took to burn.”
“Which is why I was undercover,” I said. “Ensign knew someone was after the load.”
“How?”
“The guy who hired me was Vic Ryder, their director of security. He’d installed a magnetic card system throughout the plant. Anywhere employees went-offices, storage areas, the manufacturing line-they had to swipe their way in. Ryder could track who went where and when, make sure the guards were patrolling where they were supposed to and not napping in a warehouse. One day he saw two people entering the sealed area where the export cigarettes were being stored prior to incineration.”
“McNulty and Tice,” Ryan said.
“Yup.” Gene McNulty was a shift supervisor in warehouse security; Christopher Tice a security guard.
“Ensign brought me in as a security guard and put me on the same shift as Tice. One day I followed him out when he went for a smoke and caught a whiff of weed. Guy was getting high at ten in the morning. I called a friend in Toronto and had him courier me an ounce of top-line B.C. bud. My boss shit a brick when I expensed it.”
“A friend with weed is a friend indeed,” Ryan quoted.
“You bet. I got Tice high a few times. Took him out for drinks after work. Hinted I was hard up for cash. Told him I’d once held a Class A trucker’s licence.”
“Did you?”
“No. I’d driven plenty of trucks but nothing over Class D. Late one night, we’d had some beer, a joint, and Tice, as you know, was a pathetic, insecure shit who needed to impress people. Talk tough. He let a few things slip. Including the big name.”
“Marco.”
“None other. I passed it on to Ryder and my boss next morning and they called in the Task Force on Traditional Organized Crime.”
“Tough Talk? How’d they come riding in?” he asked. “On white horses with their thumbs up their butts?”
“Hey, they were good at getting warrants,” I said. “McNulty’s home phone… Tice’s… they listened in on calls to Marco.”
“So you knew everything?” he said with a smile.
“Up yours, Ryan.”
“What?”
“Don’t give me that innocent look. Did we know everything… you know goddamn well we didn’t. We only thought we did.”
“You knew the plan,” he teased.
“We knew three trucks were going to the incinerator but only two would unload. The third would go to Marco’s.”
“How’d you get on as his driver?”
“The OPP wanted eyewitness testimony all the way, but Tice was slated to guard the load. Driver’s seat was my only way in. Only McNulty had already hired someone.”
“The big guy with the glasses, Arthur Read. Him, Tice, McNulty, they all knew each other from Hamilton.”
“Our plan was to have Read picked up just before the incineration regarding a supposed theft from the Ensign warehouse. They’d keep him long enough to force McNulty and Tice to find another driver.”
“You.”
“Me.”
“But the Class A thing was bullshit.”
“Ryder set me up at the Road Scholar Institute near Belleville. I crammed sixteen weeks of material into six hours at the wheel.”
“That’s it?”
“I told the instructor I didn’t need to learn maintenance, freight handling, fuel economics, weight restrictions, first aid or the subtleties of the Motor Carrier Act. I just needed to know how to take a tractor-trailer on one haul and manoeuvre it backwards and forwards at a loading dock.”
“Lucky he didn’t think you were a terrorist. Like the guy who wanted to fly the plane but not land it.”
“He might have but Ryder vouched for me. I learned how to handle a ten-gear transmission, use air brakes and get through an obstacle course. My ability to back up left a little to be desired, but I was only going to have to do it twice. Everything was golden until the weekend before the incineration.”
“What happened?”
“What always happens?”
Ryan took his eyes off the road-a rare thing for him to do-and looked at me, an impish spark in his dark eyes. “What was her name?” he asked.