Same thing with the yacht. He didn’t even know if it rated as a real yacht. A mere 52 feet in length. A pathetic stateroom, and an aft deck so small that he would never have a helicopter landing on it, nevermind being able to afford a helicopter at all. Plus the primitive technology inside. The first radar ever built, it seemed. And then there were the people he had to hire. They cost too damn much money. They all wanted more, all the time. He had a maid/housekeeper/mistress on staff here at the house. But that was as far as it went. He really couldn’t afford his own pilots, or mechanics, or boat captains, or chauffeurs. To be properly equipped, he needed a staff of 12 or 13, and then he would need servants’ quarters and the house would be too small.
Dammit, he needed a bigger place on Maui, and he wanted something in Los Angeles, and a place in Europe, and… on and on it went. He was a poor boy and it pissed him off. The more he thought about it, the more he wanted a really big kill. A $4 or $5 million house, $4 or $5 million worth of toys, a few million in the bank, and a whopping big pile of money in Devil’s Anvil just didn’t do it for him anymore. He was sorely dissatisfied with his life. He was 52 years old and still hopelessly displeased with himself, his meager possessions, and life in general. It was the same attitude that had been pushing him on ever since he could remember. His thin blond hair was now flecked with gray, his middle was starting to go soft, and he needed medication to do things that he’d taken for granted in his 20s. He reached over to the humidor beside him and rolled a large, fat joint, made of the best high-grade BC Bud money could buy.
“Yo, Val, gimme a beer! A cold one!” he yelled in the general direction of the kitchen. He took a long drag on his monster joint and resumed his viewing of greater Vancouver. There, dead ahead of him, were the enormous orange container cranes, on the Vancouver side of Burrard Inlet. They reminded him of where he’d started. Those were the days, he thought. Those were the days. When he was in his 20s, working the docks in a pointless job but getting laid every night. It had been a non-stop party. Endless beer, endless smoke, and endless women.
“Yo, Val! Beer. Get. Me. A. Goddamn. Beer.” Jesus. That was the problem, he thought. Cheap help. Cheap service. You get what you pay for.
There was a scurrying behind him, and Val, who was also starting to look a little long in the tooth at the age of 23, came scurrying out with his beer — an ice-cold Corona, with lime, of course.
“Next time don’t make me wait, woman,” he growled at the stunningly beautiful girl, who managed a quick apology before scampering away, terrified of bringing on Leon’s fearsome temper.
He returned to his thoughts. Where was he? Yes, of course. The salad days. The ’70s. He poured the Corona into a frosted glass, chucked in the lime, and took a long, soothing draft. Then a long toke. He let his thoughts drift back to the good times. The orange container cranes continued to dance in the humid Indian summer air as his thoughts roamed.
Leon was 17 when he left Fernie. “Never coming back to this shit hole,” he said to the few friends and many relatives he had there. “Dead-end town with dead-end people.” He had jumped on his motorcycle — a small Honda, or “Jap bike” — and, in his words, “just fucked off.” He ended up in Vancouver, like so many other young people in the province. Tall, young, strong, and handsome, with a gift for making conversation, he fell into the Vancouver bar scene, and then the easy sex and drugs of a pre-HIV world. He went from drug user to drug supplier, and then to supplier’s supplier, within a year. Marijuana use led to cocaine, LSD, and, on occasion, heroin, although he never became an addict in the full sense of the word. He used and sold, and never restricted his business to one specific drug.
Soon he was making copious amounts of money, and Fernie was the farthest thing from his mind. By his nineteenth birthday, Leon was supplying drugs to most of the bars and clubs in downtown Vancouver. His “Jap bike” days were behind him forever. Now he had the money and was in Harley-land to stay. One night he was sitting with two friends, listening to a bar band play, and enjoying the smoky, noisy scene of a downtown bar. The two Harley-riding buddies sitting next to him were both longshoremen, working at the small container terminal on the East Vancouver harborside.
“Can you believe it? You can buy in for $50 grand. Pay the money to the shop steward, and you’re in the union, and on the docks. Just like that,” one said.
“Price’s sure gone up. Just five years ago it was $10 grand,” said the other.
“What are you guys talking about?” asked Leon. “You can buy your way into being a longshoreman?”
“Yeah. Pay the money. Show up for work. You’re in. And it’s the most powerful union in Canada,” said the first. “More balls than the teamsters, even.”
“Who do I pay the $50 grand to?” asked Leon.
Both men looked at him. “You’re kidding, Leon. You got that kinda dough?”
“Yeah,” said Leon. “Maybe I do. Who do I talk to?”
One of the men gave him a number. “Tell ’em Barry sent you.”
Leon took down the number, and the following day went searching, first for the docks, then for the container terminal, and then for the shop steward. When he found him, he told him that he’d been sent by Barry. And that he had $50,000, and how would the steward like it — in cash or check? And when would he be starting work? The answer was easy… work started immediately. Leon was in the Union. Welcome aboard. The steward guessed that Leon probably had an ulterior motive, but didn’t care. After all, $50 grand was $50 grand.
That’s how Leon Lestage, a small-time Fernie boy, joined the powerful Vancouver longshoreman’s union. The shop steward introduced him to the company and recommended that he be the guy to fill an open position. Leon slipped the company comptroller $10,000, to grease the wheels. Four months later, it was apparent to everyone that Leon only showed up every second or third day, was almost never on time, and mostly slept on the job. The comptroller started expressing some concern. Leon just slipped the shop steward another $20,000, $5,000 of which found its way to the comptroller, to smooth things over again. This system worked for the better part of a decade. So long as there was money to whack around, no one complained, other than the container terminal Board of Directors, who couldn’t understand why there appeared to be intractable inefficiencies in the company’s operations.
The reality was that Vancouver’s port, from a customs and policing standpoint, had more holes than a colander. Inspections were almost nonexistent. Bales of marijuana could be unloaded in broad daylight, and no one seemed to notice. Every now and then there was a high profile bust of some sort, but these events were few and far between, and didn’t usually occur at the container terminal. Leon noticed this and, never satisfied, had decided that he was going to use this job and the unsupervised port to move to the next level. He wanted to be the supplier to the supplier to the supplier of the pushers in the bars and clubs. Wholesale wasn’t good enough anymore. Importing was the new game. To import, one needed to own the docks, and Leon decided that he was going to set about doing just that.