by Alex Caine
At 12:58 there was a knock on the door. I looked through the peephole and saw Davey looking back at me. I nodded to Pineault and he hit the timer on his watch. In they came, looking like Mutt and Jeff. Davey immediately put his finger to his lips and Rocky turned on the TV and cranked up the volume. Pineault gave up his seat for Rocky and sat on the bed.
I leaned against the dresser next to Davey. Each of us was very nervous but doing his best to hide it. When Rocky sat down, the bottom of his shirt opened and I saw the grip of the gun.
I started chattering to Davey about a ring I had bought recently, trying both to cut the tension and to use up time. Suddenly ten minutes seemed like an eternity and, this being my first takedown, I was imagining everything going wrong, especially after the events of the day before. I asked if he thought the ring was real gold. He looked at it and then passed it to Rocky. After some Chinese, Davey gave it back and said it was. Then we got down to business. Rocky took out his key while I took out ours and we exchanged them.
Davey wrote on a pad: When will you be back and get more?
I wrote down Next month, or something like that, and we exchanged notes back and forth.
At one point Pineault said, “Une et demi.” There were only ninety seconds left to kill. We moved into position. I made sure Davey was between me and Rocky. Pineault edged over on the bed, in position to hit the floor—as the RCMP instructs its undercovers to do in a takedown—but also in a position where he might jump Rocky if there was a screw-up.
I was shaking hands with Davey when, in a burst of sound and fury, the front door swung violently open. Unfortunately, none of us had noticed that the front door opened to the left while the connecting door opened to the right. The doors were so close it was impossible to fully open both of them at the same time. Scott, to his credit, led the charge, his three-man team close behind him. But before he was fully inside the room, the lead tactical squad guy crashed his door against the front door and Scott was pushed back. The rest of Scott’s team couldn’t see what was happening and continued to push in from the hallway. That caused Scott to trip and fall into the room. As he hit the floor, his .38 snub went off, the bullet exploding the mirror over the bed. True to his training, Pineault hit the floor. Scott’s team thought he had been shot.
In the confusion, I saw Rocky start to get up and reach for his gun. I still had Davey’s hand in mine, so I yanked him toward me with my right arm and simultaneously kicked him as hard as I could in the chest area. When the kick landed, I let go of his hand and he flew into Rocky, knocking him down.
It was then my turn to hit the floor, which I did. The precaution was hardly necessary: the guys were in and Scott had regained his composure. Pineault and I were whisked into the other room while Rocky and Davey were being cuffed. The door shut behind us. There was no point protecting our cover. The investigation was over.
CHAPTER THREE
Family Comes First . . . Smugglers Second
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The investigation was over, yes, but the case’s second life, the court proceedings and the meting out (or not) of justice and punishment, was just beginning. It was a stage I would get to know well. By the end of my career I had given evidence against 168 bad guys (of whom maybe a dozen were women and maybe another dozen weren’t so much bad as just unlucky).
Happily, the court proceedings in the Vancouver cases were short and relatively painless. Hobo pleaded guilty to conspiracy to import heroin at pretty much his earliest opportunity. He got ten years. Al and Phil made a deal and pleaded guilty after their preliminary inquiry, scoring eleven and eight years respectively for trafficking and conspiracy.
Rocky and Davey were the only accused I had any dealings with who put up a fight. Their trial required me to go back to Hong Kong several months after the bust. I was there for about ten days and on the stand for most of three days. I remember being struck by two things in particular. The first was the fact that the accused were brought into the courtroom in a cage that came up through a hole in the floor, and remained handcuffed to their seats the entire time. The second was how lame their lawyers—or barristers—were, despite their powdered wigs and plummy English accents. Not that they had much to work with: we had Rocky and Davey cold. They each got twenty years for conspiracy, and in a Chinese prison. I felt a bit bad for them.
By the time their trial wrapped up, I was back to my old life, with a few modifications. I refused the RCMP’s offer of relocation to anywhere in Canada I might want to go. Instead, Liz and I moved out of our apartment below Frank and Louise’s place and into a cottage we’d been renting for a few months, forty-five miles up the coast from Vancouver. There was one offer the RCMP made that I did take up: a name change. It wouldn’t be the last. That’s how I eventually became Alex Caine and discovered that wearing a new name was not all that different from putting on a new set of clothes. Certainly, it didn’t lead to any existential crises.
I’d banked a bit of money over the course of the investigation and remained on the Mountie payroll until the trials were all wrapped up, so there was no need to go back to work.
In the back of my mind (and sometimes the front) I was trying to figure out what I would do for a career. I was turning thirty in December 1978, and arriving at that landmark brought some anxiety with it. Liz and I were also talking about getting married and having kids, which would make a steady income more of an imperative. I wasn’t much interested in going back into the renovation or construction business, with or without Frank. So I began contemplating buying a club or a bar. Or getting into music promotion and putting on shows. Or both. Or something like that.
Naturally, I assumed jobs such as the Hobo operation were one-shot things, the result of a shady acquaintance, a girlfriend who convinced me to talk to the cops and a police force that needed a helping hand. What I didn’t fully appreciate was that, if you were good enough at this kind of work, an in with the target wasn’t necessary. Nor did I know that people capable of pulling off an infiltration assignment were in serious short supply. On both sides of the border.
Nineteen seventy-nine wasn’t more than a few months old before Scott Paterson called, asking me to talk to the Seattle office of the FBI. I was happy to do so. It had been about six months since the bust in Hong Kong and I was beginning to pine for excitement. I hadn’t done anything about my idle plans to become an entertainment entrepreneur. And my anger at almost getting killed thanks to the Mounties had abated. Pineault and I had been sold out, but it hadn’t been intentional or personal, just part of the game. Anyway, this wasn’t the RCMP wanting to talk—it was the FBI, the big time. Who wouldn’t at least make the short trip to Seattle to see what they wanted?
It turned out to be another heroin importing ring. The FBI had information that members of a Thai Airlines flight crew were smuggling small shipments of the drug into the U.S. and establishing contacts for larger suppliers. That was about it—all the FBI had beyond that was the name of the hotel where the flight crew overnighted once a week in Seattle.
I took the gig and it turned into a three- or four-month operation. And a successful one, as far as my work went. I got in with the Thai pilots thanks to some strippers I hired to come and hang out with me in the hotel lounge and to the pilots’ taste for female companionship. That led to a phone number that led to a contact who was prepared to provide as much heroin as I might ever require, so long as my cash supply was good and plentiful. I even got a one-pound sample delivered personally by one of the Thai pilots.
For reasons unknown to me, however, the FBI pulled the plug on the operation before we could build a solid case and make any arrests. It left a bitter taste in my mouth, since the one thing that was clear was that politics—whether of the office or geopolitical variety—were very much involved in the case’s getting kiboshed. Still, the Thai pilots investigation made me realize that even if this wasn’t a career found on any list offered by high school guidance counselors, even if there were no classified ads in the ba
ck pages of newspapers announcing “Experienced Infiltrator Wanted,” maybe there was a future for me in this game.
But family comes first, as they say, and before I did any more infiltration work I would first get myself a family.
Liz and I were married not long after the Thai pilots case ended, and shortly after that she became pregnant. Life was good. The FBI had been paying me US$4,000 per month, which was big money in those days, so we had some savings. Then I was seized by the ridiculous notion that my baby had to be born back east, and that my family should be part of the child’s life. The plan Liz and I came up with was for me to go back to Hull alone, get our new home set up, and then she and her bulging belly would come join me. So in early 1980 I bought a new 38-foot Coachmen trailer, parked it on her mother and stepfather’s North Vancouver property and settled Liz in. She would be close to her family but still have her privacy. Then I loaded up my 1965 Ford Econoline, called for Pepper, my Australian blue heeler dog, to join me and drove the 2,772 miles to Hull. Without realizing it, I was resuming my search for ways not to live a straight, sedate life.
Soon after my arrival, I rented an apartment in a high-rise as well as a small street-level commercial space. In the storefront I opened my first martial arts studio. I didn’t expect to make any serious money from it. Rather, it was a hobby business, something I hoped would support itself and maybe make me a little extra between infiltration assignments.
I called the studio Dragon’s Kung-Fu, School of Martial Arts, and wrote the usual stuff in the window—terms such as “self-defense” and “group or individual classes.” Within a week I got a visit from a provincial official telling me I had to redo everything, this time in French. Bill 101, Quebec’s hard-line language legislation, had come into effect. Almost all commercial signs in English—or anything other than French—were now forbidden. Or rather, interdit. It hadn’t taken long for me to start feeling out of place again in my hometown. One unintended laugh came out of the change, though. Le Dragon Kung-Fu, as the business was renamed, was pronounced the same way as le dragon confus—“the confused dragon.”
Confused might have been a good way to describe my general state back in Hull. Nobody was hostile or cold or unwelcoming; I just didn’t meet with any enthusiasm at my return, not from my family or whatever old friends still remained. Maybe I had flitted in and out of their lives once too often. Or maybe they just didn’t give a shit. Certainly, it was presumptuous and big-headed of me to expect more—a mixture of respect, affection, admiration and interest that people weren’t prepared to hand over so easily. They all seemed indifferent to me now.
But not indifferent to my money. That really interested my siblings—if nothing else about me did—and they set about getting some of it for themselves. I had some cash and didn’t hide it, but of course I couldn’t tell them where it came from or what I’d been doing for a living. So they just naturally assumed I was a criminal. And if I was a criminal, I must be loaded. So they were constantly hitting me up. It was always a hundred bucks here, forty there. I couldn’t refuse—they were family.
Liz’s arrival in Hull a month or so before her due date made my life there a lot more pleasant. At the same time, it brought back an old ghost—my mother’s unhappiness. In my obsession to see my baby born in the same town I was, I realized I hadn’t taken into account something my father had neglected almost thirty-five years earlier: how isolating Hull could be if you don’t speak French. It wasn’t an issue initially—we had the baby to prepare for—but would inevitably become one if we stuck around.
So, after our daughter Charlotte was born at the same hospital I had been born in, we packed up the van again, left the apartment and the furnishings for my brother, and headed back out west together.
In Vancouver, we settled into the Coachmen as our primary residence, with our cottage as a getaway. Liz, understandably, wanted to be close to her mom and spent most of the day in her parents’ house with the baby. That left me with time on my hands. So I picked up the phone and called Scott Paterson to advise him I was back and available for work. He said he’d keep his ears open. It wasn’t long before he called.
There was a three-month job with the RCMP in Toronto if I was interested, he said. Again it was heroin. I talked it over with Liz and took the contract.
What concerned the Mounties, and in particular Sergeant Tom Brown and his band of Renowns (as his unit was affectionately called), was an influx into Toronto of what was called “black tar heroin.” It was poorly refined but unpredictably potent, which was leading to a spike in the number of overdose deaths.
I got in with the main players through an elaborate mise en scène. We had two undercover officers stage a mugging of one of their regular dealers, a guy named Bruce. As the mugging was in progress, I happened along and came to Bruce’s rescue. The UCs backed off, saying to me, “Hey man, sorry. We didn’t know he was connected to you.” The dealer, who didn’t know any better, was both grateful for my intervention and impressed by the clout I appeared to carry with the low-life muggers. I made sure the dealer was okay, introduced myself and then split.
A few days later, I entered a McDonald’s when we knew Bruce was meeting a supplier named Moe—one of the guys we were really after. This time I let him notice me. When he did, he called me over, telling Moe how cool I was. As of that moment I was in—at least as a friend.
Moe and his partners were a very careful bunch; it took almost two months of stroking their egos before I convinced them to sell to me. Finally, though, we put a deal together. Once again I would be buying a pound of heroin. That led to a meeting in a parking lot one afternoon shortly before Christmas. As the dealers went into their car’s trunk to retrieve the drugs, the police pounced. The bust was as smooth as any I’ve been involved with. The police got a pound of heroin and arrested the four main guys we were after.
But it was all for nothing. On his way back to headquarters the RCMP corporal responsible for bringing in the evidence stopped off at a store to buy a snack. That broke what’s called “the continuity of evidence”: since the drugs were in an insecure environment and out of the Mountie’s sight and control for a minute or two before being taken to the lab and tested, it was possible they had been tampered with. Or even that a package containing, say, popcorn had been taken from the cruiser and replaced with one containing heroin. It sounds absurd, but it’s a sound legal principle; the judge thought about it for perhaps five minutes before deciding to throw the case out at the preliminary hearing in early 1981.
By then, of course, I’d gone back out west to be with Liz and Charlotte. I’d also reported back in to Scott Paterson, planning to tell him I was ready and willing to take on a new job. But before I could get that far, he interrupted me.
“Gary Kilgore is looking for you,” he said.
“Why? What’s up?”
If Paterson knew, he wasn’t telling me, so I called Kilgore myself and met him in a coffee shop a few days later. It was always a treat to watch big Gary—he was six-four if an inch and probably weighed 280 pounds—trying to squeeze into one of those fixed, hard plastic seats.
“Why do you always pick these places?” he’d ask unfailingly.
“Because my belly isn’t a crime against humanity,” was my routine response.
“Everybody’s a fucking comedian!”
Kilgore was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with his perennial beige nylon Windbreaker and cowboy boots. Tufts of curly red hair stuck out under his ball cap. With his wide, old-fashioned mustache he looked like Yosemite Sam trying to blend in with the locals.
That day he was off-duty, but it wouldn’t have made much of a difference: he had returned to plainclothes policing and was back on Asian files. After giving me a present for the baby and an update on his life and the goings-on in Mountie-land, he got down to business. He was being transferred to Bangkok, where he would be attached to the Canadian embassy. His job was to liaise with local law enforcement on drug files. He wanted me the
re to work some cases with him.
I agreed on the spot. The rapport and working relationship I’d had with Gary back before Paterson replaced him was better than I’d had with any of my subsequent handlers, and if I had a specialty it was Asian crime and criminals. It also sounded like fun. Kilgore told me that I would get some bogus job tied to the embassy—chauffeur, cook, something like that—as a reason to be there. My real work, however, would be to infiltrate drug exporting operations and schemes, especially those shipping, or planning to ship, to Canada.
Kilgore was pleased at my enthusiasm—he was already feeling like a fish out of water, even if he hadn’t yet left for Bangkok. His departure was scheduled in a week or so. Getting everything organized for me to join him would take much longer, he warned; I couldn’t expect to find myself in Bangkok for at least a couple of months, maybe three. That was fine with me, I said. I wanted time to spend with my family.
When I got home, I called Scott and gave him the scoop.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” he asked a bit cryptically.
“Talk to me, man,” I told him. “What are you saying?”
“Well,” he fumbled, “you never know what opportunities could pop up closer to home. You have a baby now.”
“Good point. Is there anything I should know about?”
“No, no,” he said. “I’m just making a point.”
I didn’t believe him for a second—Paterson never “just” said anything. On the surface he appeared to be a company man through and through, but his relationship with the Mounties was growing strained and complicated. After the Hong Kong caper, he’d been busted for his currency exchange fiddle and was going through a long series of internal disciplinary boards, rulings and appeals. Was he more concerned with my interests than the RCMP’s all of a sudden? It was hard to know.
About a month later, Paterson called me up again and invited me for coffee. Scott wasn’t as big as Gary, so I let him choose the place. He had another job I might be interested in, he said, this one not so far away—in fact, just the other side of the U.S. border.