Befriend and Betray

by Alex Caine

  Before long, maybe a couple of weeks, we were spending time together outside the store as well. By this time he had admitted to being a KKK member. Contrary to what the feds had told me, he didn’t occupy an important position in the Klan; in his early thirties, he was still too young for that. Nonetheless, he looked as if he’d had a tough life already—he was short, wiry, stooped, with a mouth full of crooked yellow teeth. The look of having been raised poor in the backwoods. But Willie did serve an essential purpose for the local Klan: he was counted on to be a recruiter of new, younger blood. And so he began taking me along with him to barbecues and on errands, and on other occasions when I would meet his KKK friends. Most of them were as straight and upstanding as could be—“pillars of the community.” And often very well off. Several had boats at a local yacht club, and we’d sometimes join them for picnics on islands in Polecat Bay.

  Eventually, after a little more than a month in Mobile, I was invited to a Klan meeting where, along with about twenty or so other new members, I took what Willie called “the oath of the initiates.” We met in a pasture beside a gravel road outside of Mobile. There were a couple of beat-up trailers where mostly older, gray-haired members changed into their robes and hoods and where I put on a borrowed set. Willie hadn’t explicitly asked me whether I wanted to join up, but I knew what was happening. I’d been over to his house a week or two earlier and we’d watched The Birth of a Nation, the classic Klan film from 1915. And he’d given me a scrap of paper with the oath scrawled on it to memorize.

  “ ‘In the name of God and my country, I promise to defend with valor and integrity the aims of the order,’ ” I duly recited. “ ‘To keep its secrets, to obey its orders, to help the members in times of danger and need, to recognize the authority of its leaders, and not to be a traitor to its rules.’ ” To me it sounded like a Boy Scout mantra, but proclaiming it publicly won me trust and gave me access to other Klansmen.

  Soon after the initiation, I got down to business. My first deal was with Willie himself. I let on that I was connected to bikers in Florida who had an appetite for serious weaponry, and he sold me a converted AR-15 with a grenade launcher attached to it. It cost me $1,500 and I promptly turned it in to my ATF handlers, whom I would meet on a weekly basis in Pensacola, across the Florida state line.

  Almost immediately after that deal I bought a MAC-10 machine pistol from a friend of Willie’s, again, I claimed, for a biker customer. That led to a blur of gun deals—about a dozen with various Klan-connected individuals—over the next two or three weeks. I’d put out feelers to buy drugs but hadn’t got anywhere. Similarly, the concern that these clowns had any serious potential or eagerness for “subversion” seemed exaggerated. So, after a couple of months in Mobile, the FBI and ATF decided that we had gone as far as we would likely get. At least there was enough evidence to shake up the Klan on a local basis. I was pulled and the ATF descended.

  The cops had my notes and photos, maybe video from the cover team that followed me on my transactions. Still, I expected to be called for court, at least to a preliminary hearing. But in the end, nothing. I don’t know whether Willie and the boys pled out or if the charges against them ended up being dropped for some reason. From my perspective, it was a short, sweet and moderately successful operation in what was now, without a doubt, a career of infiltration.

  During my two months or so in Mobile, I hadn’t once gone back to Homestead to visit Liz and the kids. I called them every other day or so, but not as often as I’d been speaking with Andy and the gang. Any time I’d left the Mobile region, it had been to tie up Bandidos loose ends—the big bust had occurred just days before the KKK job started, so there was a lot of work to do.

  Once I vanished from the scene in Mobile, I made a beeline for our Florida home, but not to linger. Instead, after pausing for barely enough time to pack our things, Liz, the kids and I headed north again. It wasn’t that Willie and the gang had me all that spooked—they didn’t seem as if they had the reach or the nastiness to come after me (especially since I was white). But I had told them I spent a lot of time in the Miami area, there were the children to consider, and I wasn’t attached to living in Florida anyway. In fact, I hated it. It was always hot, humid and buggy, the only attractions the malls and the TV.

  Liz was perfectly happy to move again too. Living near Frank and Louise was fine, and useful as far as child care was concerned, but both of us found Florida tedious. We also pined for Canada—it just seemed to suit us better. Vancouver was obviously out; Ontario wasn’t an option because that’s where Ottawa is, and I’ve always had a thing against it; we’d tried Quebec and it hadn’t worked for Liz. So we decided on eastern Canada. We chose Saint John, New Brunswick, for no other reason than it was the city in eastern Canada closest to the U.S. border. In fact, once we got on the I-95 just outside Miami, we never had to turn—it took us the whole way.

  Neither Liz nor I had ever been to Saint John, and neither of us knew anyone who lived there. That was just the way we wanted it. We arrived late one May evening in 1985. It was still distinctly chilly and we suddenly thought that maybe the heat of Florida wasn’t such a bad thing. Still, the locals were acting as if it was high summer, sitting on their porches with their pant legs rolled up.

  We took a room at a motel on the edge of town and the next morning bought a paper and started to look for a home. It wasn’t long before we found what looked like a good place at a reasonable price—the upper floor of a duplex in a leafy central neighborhood of older Victorian houses. The owners, a pleasant Lebanese family with several mostly teenaged children, lived around the corner.

  Mahmoud, the father, came over to show us the place along with a young man he introduced as his soon-to-be son-in-law, Bashir. We worked out a deal for the place. I had a Rottweiler puppy I had bought in Florida and that was a bit of an issue, but eventually we agreed that I’d give Mahmoud a damage deposit. We all got along perfectly well, with no hint at how complicated things would get between us in the years to come.

  Liz and I had brought a bunch of stuff up from Florida in our pickup and a U-Haul trailer, and we spent the first few days in the new place unpacking. Then, as soon as the phone was installed, I called up Scott Paterson to let him know my whereabouts and tell him I was available for work again. Several months later, after Liz, the kids and I had enjoyed a relaxed summer, he called me back to say that a Mountie from Newfoundland wanted to talk to me.

  Without telling me any details of the job or how long it might last, Corporal Pete Peterson asked if we could meet in Halifax in two days’ time. For me it was a three-hour drive away, for him a flight from St. John’s. I said sure—something that didn’t make Liz very happy at all. She liked Saint John and didn’t want to be forced to move again soon. She was thinking of settling down and raising our kids there, beginning a more normal life, maybe even embarking on a career of her own.

  I too was getting tired of the tension, turmoil and inherent instability of my job. Still, I loved the work. So she and I talked late into the night and decided that I would take only small cases with long breaks in between while Liz upgraded her education. No more three-year, complete personal transformations, like the biker gig. I still had several Bandidos court cases pending and was being paid a monthly stipend, so there would be no money concerns for a while.

  When I left for Halifax, it was a warm and bright early fall day. Liz was taking the kids to the local United church to check it out and meet the minister. She wasn’t religious; in fact, that’s why she chose the United Church of Canada. In many ways it’s the least dogmatically religious of churches. Certainly it can’t be called doctrinaire or severe. Liz opted for it because it seemed like a good way to meet people in a somewhat sleepy, traditional town such as Saint John. Especially if you wanted to put down roots.

  I met up with Peterson at a Halifax hotel. He was with a member of the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary, Newfoundland’s quaintly named provincial police. They were both big-h
earted, friendly guys—typical Newfs—but in a somewhat pathetic predicament. There were ten dealers of note in the province and the cops wanted them off the streets. But after putting all their pennies together, the local RCMP and the RNC only had enough money for a ten-week investigation. That was one dealer per week—a tall order.

  I took the job nonetheless and the next morning returned home for two weeks of prep and planning while the cops got their ducks in a row. Try as I might, however, I couldn’t figure out a good story with which to get in. Newfoundland isn’t a big place—a half million people or so—and its largest city and capital, St. John’s, is just a fraction of that, back then maybe 100,000. To boot, the island is a long way from anywhere. That means that everyone knows each other and new faces stand out and are talked about endlessly. Add to that the fact that I was going there in gloomy, gray October, when the tourists would have long since headed home, and I had to be prepared to be noticed early and often—no slow blending in this time. Unable to come up with a plan, or even a good excuse for why I was visiting the Rock in the fall, I finally resigned myself to flying by the seat of my pants.

  I arrived at the St. John’s airport and retrieved the little green car that the cops had left for me in the parking lot. Task number two was finding a place to live. In the meantime, I checked into a motel on the edge of the city. When I entered its reception area, workers were putting the final touches on a fountain meant to spruce up the lobby. It actually looked pretty nice, and the owner behind the counter was certainly proud of it. We chatted for a while and she told me they would be testing the fountain later that day. She encouraged me to attend the little ceremony.

  “Sure thing,” I said before going to my room, settling in and calling Peterson to let him know I had arrived. We arranged for a late night meeting. When I went back through the lobby on my way out, everybody had mops and buckets, hard at work cleaning up a flood. It seems that before turning the fountain on, they had drilled holes into its basin to run wiring for the lights.

  I spent the first week to ten days on the Rock finding my way around and locating the investigation’s targets and the joints they hung around in. Of the ten dealers, I chose first to target a Latino by the name of Carlos. He was the person most in need of money, and that, combined with the fact that he was an outsider himself, made me think he’d be the least likely to check me out too closely. He was a young street hustler type, short and slight—not unlike me fifteen years previously—and he shared an apartment with a Latin American family who had somehow washed up in Newfoundland. I rented a small place myself on the same street and the cops wired it with audio and video. Then I started to stalk Carlos, looking for an opening, a break.

  One day he drove by my place in his old, red and white Monte Carlo. I noticed it had a For Sale sign in the rear window with a phone number. Perfect. I called and arranged for Carlos to come by and discuss the car. My only prop was an empty cocaine vial showing traces of a white powder along the rim and bottom (baking soda, of course) sitting on the table. As soon as we sat down, I grabbed it and put it in my pocket—making sure, of course, that Carlos saw it. Then I told him I needed a car for the few weeks I would be in Newfoundland but couldn’t have it in my name. I didn’t want anything fancy, something I could easily walk away from. He was keen to work out a deal for his car, but I backed off, saying it was too flashy for my purposes.

  “Why you selling it, anyway?” I asked.

  “I need the money.”

  “Well, if you need money, maybe we can figure something else out,” I said, casting the line. I was improvising, but it seemed like a good bet.

  “Depends.”

  “Well, I need a guy Friday. You know what that is?” He didn’t, so I explained. “Someone who can help me out, show me around. Introduce me to the people I should know, steer me clear of the people I don’t want anything to do with. ’Cause the last thing I want before my big deal comes through is to get mixed up with the wrong people.”

  With the mention of the term “big deal” he lit up. He immediately figured I had money—I never said that the Monte Carlo was too expensive—and he wanted as much of it as possible.

  “I can get you anything you want—anything,” he said, even though I hadn’t hinted at wanting to score.

  Once I was in with Carlos, I was as good as in with everyone else. After all, this was Newfoundland and everyone knew everyone. As Carlos introduced me to the other dealers in St. John’s, I developed a cover story that I was on the Rock to organize the transportation to Quebec of thousands of pounds of hash from a ship due any day. The hash was to be trucked across the province and then ferried to the mainland. But if Carlos or anyone else was inclined, I could siphon off a few pounds, I let on. Sure enough, they were keen, and soon, thanks to Carlos’s fixing and connecting, almost all the targets on the list were putting in orders or at least expressing serious interest.

  As the days passed and the hash boat didn’t arrive, I told Carlos and some of my other new contacts that, actually, I might need to score some coke off them in order to keep some of the people involved in the transport of the hash—drivers and the like—content. They were scattered around town, keeping a low profile, I suggested. And getting bored and edgy with all the waiting.

  Soon I was buying an ounce here, half an ounce there. After four weeks on the island I took a week off and went home to relax. Upon my return, Pete Peterson had organized the takedown. I spent two more weeks taking care of loose ends, keeping the targets excited about the impending shipment and making secondary buys. By then I had nine of the ten guys on the list. The tenth was away from Newfoundland and wouldn’t be back for a while.

  Finally, I announced to Carlos that the drug ship had arrived and had him get word to the other targets that we would meet at the Newfoundland Hotel to organize the final details of the sale and transfer of the hash. And, of course, I’d need to collect a down payment. The police duly installed a video camera in the TV above the minibar in the hotel room.

  “Serve yourself,” I told them as they arrived, and they all fixed themselves drinks and let the police get full-frontal footage of them. Then, when everyone was sitting down, I expressed some concern about whether they could handle the amounts they had ordered. “I don’t want to pull two hundred pounds off the load and then only have buyers for one hundred,” I told them.

  That achieved its intended goal, prompting them to brag about all their drug-dealing experience. These guys were tough enough for an isolated market like St. John’s, but any one of them would have struggled in the larger criminal circles I’d learned to negotiate. We talked delivery and they gave addresses. By that point I’d collected the down payment cash. So, after an hour of self-incrimination from them all, I’d had enough—I gave the signal and the police came crashing through the door. Like Jean-Yves Pineault six years earlier in Hong Kong, I hit the deck immediately. But there was no trouble. We had them, their money and their networks all on tape.

  Three weeks ahead of schedule, I was on my way back home, thinking, “How stupid were those guys?” Ignoring, of course, the other question, “Why couldn’t the cops catch them without my help?” I liked Peterson and his colleagues too much to think about that.

  Eventually, seven of the targets, including Carlos, took guilty pleas. The other two were convicted at trial.

  Back in Saint John, I found Liz ever more involved in the United Church. She wasn’t getting religious—she was still too sensible for that—but she enjoyed the people and the community. Gradually, over the winter and spring, she began to see a role in the church as a possible career. Nursing, which she’d studied at the University of British Columbia, had long since lost any charm, and the United Church was a welcoming place. It had been ordaining women since 1936 and was far and away the most liberal of the established Christian churches in North America.

  We agreed that come September 1986 she’d enroll in religious studies at St. Thomas University in nearby Fredericton—the
first step in becoming a minister. First, though, she would need to be nominated as a potential candidate for the ministry by her local church. That wasn’t as easy as she expected. Some of the more chauvinist members of the congregation resisted—just because they’d been ordaining women for fifty years didn’t mean everyone liked the idea—as did some people who’d been wondering about her sketchy husband.

  I was still disappearing fairly regularly to deal with what remained of the Bandidos business, and few people felt they had a handle on me. Liz was very persistent and won most people over, but the senior minister of the local church—it was big enough to have two ministers—was openly against her nomination. Eventually I had to get involved. Suffice it to say that my powers of persuasion hadn’t been hurt by my time with the Bandidos. Nothing more than words were exchanged, but it still didn’t take long to convince the minister to stop blocking Liz’s plans.

  I didn’t work at all through 1986 or 1987—at least not in what had become my career. The phone was ringing—both from Scott Paterson in Vancouver and Andy Smith in Washington—but I wasn’t biting. I almost took a job referred to me by Pete Peterson out in Newfoundland, working the recently created Halifax chapter of the Hells Angels. The job was nearby and it was something I knew. But I ended up saying no—I just didn’t feel like it. I was still collecting DEA pay, and I was enjoying being an active, involved dad for a change. I became a Beaver and Cub Scout leader, cooked and cleaned, and generally just got a kick out of being a househusband. It was all new and all so different, though I wasn’t doing it for the novelty factor. As of September, Liz was a full-time student, so the role needed to be filled and I loved every minute of it.

  Around that time my son, then four or five, entered Fredericton’s Third Annual Earthworm Race. The local CBC-TV station decided to profile his efforts despite the fact that his worm, Squirm, seemed to die before it reached the finishing line—the edge of a table. “I did my best and my worm did my best,” he told the CBC interviewer with utter seriousness. I had a misgiving or two about appearing in the item, but eventually did so in dark glasses and a hat. I figured that if a bad guy tracked me down thanks to Squirm the worm, it would almost have been worth it.