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Authors: Jay Carter Brown
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and sat us down in a little back den of his three-bedroom split level, where he treated the guys to some opium and jailhouse wisdom.
“Don’t worry about going to jail,” he said to the five of us with a wolfish grin. “Jail will be just like this. We’ll sit around and play cards. We’ll get high the same way we are now. And we’ll shoot the shit the same way, too. It will be like hanging out in a men’s club.”
Jean Paul’s comments reminded me of Bishop’s comparison between the New York Detention Center and boarding school, but I curbed my impulse to make anything out of it. Jean Paul went on to say that he was going to jail soon. His lawyer had strung out his beef as long as he could and the end was in sight. Jean Paul was facing prison time for doing what he called a favour for some well-connected people. It was insinuated that the favour involved a murder but he was not going to jail for that. Jean Paul was taking the fall for a stock fraud conspiracy, and he treated his pending jail sentence as nothing more thanpayment for a cause, like going to college or apprenticing for a trade. He passed around a metal pipe filled with red opium to enhance the mood for some more of his jailhouse rhetoric. The only other insight into Jean Paul’s character that I picked up that night was his penchant for fresh sheets and bedding every night, which Barbara thought excessive. I felt that Jean Paul was compensating for guilt, and no amount of fresh bedding would wipe his conscience clean.
Jean Paul told us the story of an undercover female agent who came onto him and became his girlfriend and what he did to her when he found out she was a cop. He told us that he beat her to a pulp, and when he was finished beating her, he washed her face with a damp cloth and then threw her from his car onto a street in front of the hospital. After Jean Paul’s surprise party ended, I collected my wife and drove home wondering why I was associating with people that I so despised.
From time to time I played golf and poker with Ryan and Jean Paul, who both continued to be part of the mix of friends and associates I hung out with. You might wonder why someone would continue to hang out with the people who had screwed him. This type of Gemini behaviour is common in the underworld, where you can’t just change jobs when you are pissed off with your associates or your working conditions. You either get out of the business completely or you put up with the working conditions and wait for an opportunity for payback. In the underworld, there are often undercurrents of unresolved conflict lurking just beneath the surface in many social interactions. Old animosities and unresolved insults die hard sometimes. Add to this an absence of legal recourse, and then factor in the usual petty human jealousies, and it’s no surprise that double crosses and rip-offs occur all the time in the world of crime. Never mind honour among thieves, a thief’s corrupted view of honour is like his corrupted view of respect. Respect equals fear in criminal circles and if you respect someone in the underworld, you must kill them if there is a disagreement. A murder like that is often called a settling of accounts by the local newspapers and broadcast media. The expression sanitizes andlegitimizes the most heinous of crimes. In my opinion murder should be called what it is: murder.
When I first started in the smuggling business, there was no violence to speak of. It was just me and my buddies, a bunch of college dropouts and frustrated job seekers who became semi-organized in a joint endeavor to make money. When Jean Paul was brought into the scene, the game changed completely and became more serious. As the profits became larger and larger, there was a greater need for people like Jean Paul to keep some semblance of order in the drug dealing community. There were several criminal groups like ours working around Montreal who had heavies like him on the payroll. From
“Don’t worry about going to jail,” he said to the five of us with a wolfish grin. “Jail will be just like this. We’ll sit around and play cards. We’ll get high the same way we are now. And we’ll shoot the shit the same way, too. It will be like hanging out in a men’s club.”
Jean Paul’s comments reminded me of Bishop’s comparison between the New York Detention Center and boarding school, but I curbed my impulse to make anything out of it. Jean Paul went on to say that he was going to jail soon. His lawyer had strung out his beef as long as he could and the end was in sight. Jean Paul was facing prison time for doing what he called a favour for some well-connected people. It was insinuated that the favour involved a murder but he was not going to jail for that. Jean Paul was taking the fall for a stock fraud conspiracy, and he treated his pending jail sentence as nothing more thanpayment for a cause, like going to college or apprenticing for a trade. He passed around a metal pipe filled with red opium to enhance the mood for some more of his jailhouse rhetoric. The only other insight into Jean Paul’s character that I picked up that night was his penchant for fresh sheets and bedding every night, which Barbara thought excessive. I felt that Jean Paul was compensating for guilt, and no amount of fresh bedding would wipe his conscience clean.
Jean Paul told us the story of an undercover female agent who came onto him and became his girlfriend and what he did to her when he found out she was a cop. He told us that he beat her to a pulp, and when he was finished beating her, he washed her face with a damp cloth and then threw her from his car onto a street in front of the hospital. After Jean Paul’s surprise party ended, I collected my wife and drove home wondering why I was associating with people that I so despised.
From time to time I played golf and poker with Ryan and Jean Paul, who both continued to be part of the mix of friends and associates I hung out with. You might wonder why someone would continue to hang out with the people who had screwed him. This type of Gemini behaviour is common in the underworld, where you can’t just change jobs when you are pissed off with your associates or your working conditions. You either get out of the business completely or you put up with the working conditions and wait for an opportunity for payback. In the underworld, there are often undercurrents of unresolved conflict lurking just beneath the surface in many social interactions. Old animosities and unresolved insults die hard sometimes. Add to this an absence of legal recourse, and then factor in the usual petty human jealousies, and it’s no surprise that double crosses and rip-offs occur all the time in the world of crime. Never mind honour among thieves, a thief’s corrupted view of honour is like his corrupted view of respect. Respect equals fear in criminal circles and if you respect someone in the underworld, you must kill them if there is a disagreement. A murder like that is often called a settling of accounts by the local newspapers and broadcast media. The expression sanitizes andlegitimizes the most heinous of crimes. In my opinion murder should be called what it is: murder.
When I first started in the smuggling business, there was no violence to speak of. It was just me and my buddies, a bunch of college dropouts and frustrated job seekers who became semi-organized in a joint endeavor to make money. When Jean Paul was brought into the scene, the game changed completely and became more serious. As the profits became larger and larger, there was a greater need for people like Jean Paul to keep some semblance of order in the drug dealing community. There were several criminal groups like ours working around Montreal who had heavies like him on the payroll. From
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