by Alex Caine
Still, I expected to be able to make a drug buy soon enough. After all, it was late October by now and I had been consorting with these guys for almost six months.
Hollywood certainly seemed like the guy to know in Niagara Falls. Tall and tattooed and in his late twenties, with long black hair rather than the blond mane his name might suggest, he ran a bunch of clubs in town. He didn’t own them, but he controlled what bands played where and, of course, the drugs sales therein.
“I know a guy with a building downtown that has a storefront we can get for next to nothing,” Hollywood said after Brett and I told him of my plans. His use of “we” confused me at first, but that was cleared up quickly. “You sell your clothes out the front, I can run my bands from the office. And whatever else either of us wants to move through the back door, well, that’s what it’s there for.”
Brett had been very open and lacking in the usual criminal caution when it came to new faces, but Hollywood was completely off the charts. Sure, I came to him with the blessing of Brett; still, he seemed too forward, too fast—if I’d been a woman I figured he’d already have asked me to marry him. And his recklessness went even further: when we went down to the basement of his home, there was a bag with what I calculated to be about an ounce of coke lying on a table. Hollywood just idly cleared it away, not making any effort to shield it from me.
Perhaps encouraged by Hollywood’s openness, on our drive back to Toronto I pulled a small glass coke vial from my pocket and gave Brett an interrogative look. Brett simply nodded and said, “Because of the heat on me and the guys I may have to go outside the club for it.”
“I don’t care if you go to Nebraska for it. It’s just between me and you.”
He asked me how much I wanted. I said I wanted to stay small to see how the thing worked out—a quarter or half a pound, see how it goes. I asked him how he wanted to play it.
“Straight across,” he said, meaning it would be simple: I’d give him the money, he’d give me the coke. There would be no half up front or running around picking up keys to bus station lockers. His terms sent the message that he had no doubts about me.
Some of that was probably thanks to Sunny, who by that time was telling anyone who cared to listen that he knew me from way back, that we’d served time together, and that I was connected to the “Red and White,” the Hells Angels.
A week or so later, in the middle of the day, I got the call from Brett. “You have one hour to get here.”
A little late but not much—and all wired up and with a full undercover backup nearby—I knocked on his door. After a bit of small talk, Brett said, “I got what you wanted.”
“How many?”
“Four.”
“How much?”
“Fifty-eight should do it.”
I counted out fifty-eight $100 bills onto a coffee table while he got up from the couch, went to the sideboard and took down a small brown paper bag. He handed the bag to me when he came back to sit down. Inside was a zip-lock-type bag with what appeared to be four ounces of cocaine.
“Great,” I said. “You’ve saved me a trip to Montreal.”
“No problem,” said Brett. “Now that we got this out of the way, the next time we can do a bigger deal.”
“No doubt.” I got up to leave.
“Don’t you want to test it?” asked Brett.
“Why?” I asked in return. “Is there something wrong with it?”
“No. It’s great!”
“That’s good enough for me. Anyway, I know where you live.” I smiled with this last sentence, but it wasn’t entirely a joke.
“That’s true,” said Brett.
We shook hands and he walked me out. I got into my car and went directly to the Howard Johnson’s on Keele Street, where the police were set up in room 909. Following OPP protocol, I was strip-searched by my handlers. It allowed the police to be absolutely certain that I wasn’t holding back a gram or an ounce. It also infuriated me big time—even in prison I’d never been strip-searched. And this was by my colleagues, who had neglected to tell me that I should expect such treatment.
I went home fuming. We had to meet the next day at the same hotel. I had calmed down considerably by then, but was still upset. My anger dissipated immediately, however, when I walked into room 909 again. All the guys were in their underwear. George was sitting at the desk writing in his Fruit of the Looms. Craig Pulfrey, a top-notch undercover agent who would become my Niagara Falls sidekick, was standing in the middle of the room reading a paper as good as naked. It made it all all right again.
I arranged a secondary buy from Brett a couple of weeks later—one that made him look especially bad in court. It was for a slightly larger amount—half a pound—and lining up the deal took a few days, during which time his dad had a series of heart attacks. That made Brett cancel a weekend of partying with Hollywood down in Niagara Falls; it didn’t, however, change his business plans. Even after his dad died on the Sunday evening, Brett said that doing the deal on Monday wouldn’t be a problem. “Everything’s still a go,” he told me. The only difference was that since his mother was at his house, we had to do the transaction in his pickup truck.
The buys multiplied once the ice had been broken. Hollywood was next, just two days later. I met up with him at a peeler bar, Features, in Toronto’s west end after he’d called to get together to discuss our business in the Falls. The place was a PDR haunt and, looking around, I recognized some members, including Psycho Dave. Hollywood introduced me to others, referring to me as his partner.
“So what’s up?” he asked me when we were alone. Earlier, on the phone, I’d told him I was in a bind and I now gave him the details: I’d bought eleven thousand dollars’ worth of coke for some clients in Montreal and the stuff had turned out to be crap. Now I needed to buy some better-quality coke to kick up the purity or else I’d have trouble, I said.
At first Hollywood wanted to go get the guy who had sold me the weak coke, but I discouraged him. “It’s not that he ripped me off, it’s just that the stuff is not good enough to do anything with.”
I added that I liked the guy and that was another reason I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. That led him to ask who had sold me the lame product. I told him I wasn’t one to name names, but I let him jump to his own conclusions.
“How close is this guy to us?” he asked.
“Real close.”
“That what I thought. Anyway, I’ll take care of you. I’ll give you a couple of o-z’s for fourteen each and that’ll take care of me too. This stuff will be so clean, you’ll be able to cut it fifty percent and it’ll still go. We’ll do it Monday. After that, if you need more, you’ll know who to come and see first.”
His only problem was the small amount. “I’ll have to tell the people I get my shit from that you just want a sample. They’re big-time. I’m not kidding you, man, fifty pounds is nothing to them.”
All investigations, and especially longer ones, take on a life of their own. Invariably, new avenues of pursuit will open up thanks to an introduction to a previously unknown bad guy or an unexpected tidbit of intelligence. Sometimes the whole probe will veer off into a completely new direction; usually the new information just adds value.
In the case of the PDR investigation, the openness of Hollywood—combined with Mark Staples’s suspiciousness and the fact I had no plans to actually put on the show that had got me in with him and Sunny Braybrook—meant that shifting our focus to Niagara Falls would probably produce more results. The gang was moving into the area, laying the way for their increasingly close allies the Hells Angels, so I could monitor that activity. And Niagara Falls was just over an hour from Toronto, and all the town’s hoods tended to go back and forth regularly; keeping track of Angels activity in the big city—the main goal of the investigation—would thus be no problem from the Falls.
So, after three weeks back in Saint John for the Christmas holidays, I moved from the house I’d rented in Richmo
nd Hill, north of Toronto, to a small apartment building near Niagara Falls’ downtown.
Shortly after settling in, I fell in with an older biker type by the name of Joe Toth. He was a mechanic in the orbit of the Outlaws, but had never been a member of the gang or of any other major club. Still, he was very well plugged in to the town’s criminal community, to the point that every week during the summer he held a barbecue at his house that amounted really to a networking event for the town’s crooks.
I met him well before I attended one of these, however. One day I had planned to meet Hollywood at our shop and, as always, he was late. As I waited outside, two men pulled up in a van. One was Toth. He quickly proved to be as open and forthcoming as Hollywood: he told me readily that he was there to deliver 3,800 Percodans, prescription painkillers popular on the street. We had a pleasant chat that only ended when Hollywood arrived, handed Toth a pile of bills and was given a paper bag in return.
I barely recognized Toth the next time I ran into him, a couple of months later. One of the principal hangouts for hoods in Niagara Falls wasn’t too subtle in its choice of name: Goodfellows. I went in there one evening and as I was talking with the bartender a guy beside me said, “Hey, how’s it going?” It was Toth, looking much the worse for wear. It turned out that shortly after our first meeting he had been jumped in another bar, beaten to within an inch of his life and left for dead beside a Dumpster. He’d spent weeks in hospital but now was back in business.
“Next time you get some Percodans, put some aside for me,” I said after we’d talked for a while, and I gave him two hundred dollars as a deposit.
I saw Toth regularly after that and, once the weather got warm, started going to his weekly barbecues. It was at one of these that Freddie Campisano, an Italian mobster I knew from Goodfellows, offered to sell me four hundred pounds of plastic explosives. After getting the green light from my handlers, I told him I was interested. By then, however, only 330 pounds remained.
“Who took the other seventy pounds?” I asked.
“Some crazy fuckers from Quebec,” Freddie answered.
“Hey, that’s where my buyers are from,” I told him. “But they’re not so much crazy fuckers as dangerous fuckers.”
A couple of days later we did the deal for $30,000—$26,000 for the explosives, $2,000 each in middleman fees for both Freddie and me, all very up front. I’d already introduced Craig Pulfrey—whose happy disposition prompted his colleagues to nickname him Barney, after the cartoon dinosaur—as my runner, and the buyers’ rep was an OPP sergeant named Randy Kreiger, an explosives expert who, with his long hair, well-worn Hells Angels support shirt and beat-up pickup truck, played the biker role to a T. It was an act he had to reprise a month later when Freddie came through with another five hundred pounds for $45,000.
The barbecues and the people I met at them also led to a flurry of drug deals, almost exclusively coke, during the summer of 1999. Craig and I bought from at least a dozen different people, most of them bikers, and from a variety of gangs: Outlaws, Vagabonds, even old members of a defunct gang called the Breed, as well as the PDR, of course. Sometimes it was just an ounce, sometimes as much as five pounds. But quantity wasn’t a big consideration; the brass actually preferred a small or mid-sized buy to a large one. It cost them less.
Even so, the investigation was memorable as much for its missed opportunities as for its successes. In June, an Italian mobster I’d initially met through Sunny in Toronto and then bumped into at the barbecue told me he had two million dollars in counterfeit twenty-dollar bills. The quality of the funny money was excellent, but there was one problem: there were only eleven serial numbers. So a condition of the sale would be that any buyer agreed to only start passing the money on the July 1 to 4 weekend. That would ensure the longest possible time before banks on either side of the border would be open and possibly notice the phony money and raise the alarm.
The mobster offered me $500,000 in the counterfeit bills for forty-five cents on the dollar to distribute through Niagara Falls. The rest of the load would hit the streets through Toronto and other cities. George, my handler, took the idea of buying the counterfeit cash to his bosses, but it was just “nice to know” information to them. They had no appetite for dropping $225,000 in real money on a bunch of fancy paper.
At another barbecue, this one at Freddie’s in a nice suburb on the south side of Niagara Falls, our host showed us boxes and boxes of traveler’s checks. They were from partially used packs—ones that had been sold to people and then returned to the bank. Protocol required that the checks be shipped back to a depository to be destroyed. Somewhere along the line, however, a bunch had been waylaid. Again, however, there was no interest from above in moving to acquire the checks or to prevent their circulation.
It’s easy enough to speculate on the OPP’s priorities in light of these decisions. They wanted to prevent violence, so they didn’t hesitate in pulling out the checkbook to buy the explosives. When it came to the counterfeit twenties and the stolen traveler’s checks, the only real damage would be to the bank accounts of the unlucky stiffs, most of them merchants, who accepted the worthless paper. I think, however, that there was probably another agenda at play. Moving on the counterfeit cash and the traveler’s checks would have instantly brought in the RCMP. That wasn’t something anyone in OPP biker squad was particularly interested in.
The bosses also seemed less than interested in having me pursue a contract to kill an informant that was indirectly offered to me by a mobster. At least a decade earlier, the informant had ratted out the mobster and some of his friends, who had an interest in a chain of restaurants, East Side Mario’s, out of which they moved drugs. A handful of the men had ended up in prison; the informant was given a new identity and relocated to British Columbia. Now the mobsters were out and the informant had been tracked down—a task that was made easier by the fact that he apparently had a head that was much, much too large for his body, earning him the nickname Melonhead.
Considering that the scheme indicated a breach in the witness protection program, I naturally assumed the bosses would be interested. They weren’t. They didn’t even ask me to meet the mobster to discuss the job, as he was requesting. If I had, I could have worn a wire; we could at least have got the guy on conspiracy. Again, I think the provincial police weren’t interested because it would have brought in the Mounties.
The OPP did move, and fast, when Moby, another mob acquaintance from the barbecues, announced that his wife had been accepted into the OPP. Even if she wasn’t due to begin training until November 1999, he and the rest of his crew were already gloating in July over the fact that they would soon have “our own undercover agent,” as Freddie put it.
“But we’ll have to be patient until she moves into an area that concerns us,” cautioned Moby. “Like drugs.”
Drugs certainly concerned Moby—both Pulfrey and I had bought from him. In fact, I’d scored my biggest buy of the case, five pounds of coke, from Moby.
“Still, she’ll be able to run people through the system for us before then,” Moby added.
“And she knows this plan, or will she need convincing?” I asked him.
“Know about it?! She’s looking forward to it.”
After the bust—and after Moby was charged—the woman was promptly told thanks but no thanks by the OPP. But that wasn’t the end of the story, according to George and Barney. They told me she sued and ended up eventually being given a post with the force—after she divorced Moby. And it was nowhere near Niagara Falls—somewhere up in northern Ontario, I understand, in what’s called a “non-sensitive” position.
Speaking of the bust, it came a whole lot sooner than it should have as far as I was concerned. Not that I particularly enjoyed living in Niagara Falls or spending all my time with hoods, my family almost a thousand miles away. But Barney and I had got in very tight with the entire criminal elite of the Falls, and it was a highly criminalized town.
That,
in fact, is one reason I think the brass decided to call for the takedown: they were shocked at just how much we were digging up. Sometimes police would rather not be told about crimes they feel they can’t do anything about. Still, I was quite convinced that we could have made a clean sweep of the criminal element in the Falls. We were in with and accepted by everybody.
It was a very different story with the PDR in Toronto. We had drifted away from them—the initial targets of the investigation—and were continuing to drift ever further. Most of the people I was doing deals with in Niagara Falls were more Mafia than biker, though a few crossed over quite happily between the two. At the same time, relations with my PDR pals had deteriorated. Mark Staples, whom I hadn’t seen in months, had never got over his suspicions of me. That didn’t affect the investigation until Mark started telling his PDR brothers about the time he saw me talking to a couple of guys who looked like cops.
He mentioned it to Brett that summer, and suddenly Brett stopped returning my calls or talking to me. When I finally went by his house, Brett assured me he didn’t believe I was working for the cops. Nevertheless, he ran his hand down my chest as if searching for a wire. He narrowly missed the one I was wearing.
“Still, I’m fucking pissed off that I only hear this story after I do deals with you,” Brett fumed. “And I’m also fucking pissed off that Hollywood has been greedy and started selling to you. He’s a fucking jerk-off for doing that to me.”
Needless to say, I didn’t point out the contradiction to Brett. Instead, I reassured him I wasn’t a cop and told him about the counterfeit twenties deal, which distracted him.
Hollywood had also heard from Staples about the incident on King Street. He had even got his own glimpse of me with the biker squad one day as he drove along an overpass and looked down to see us all meeting behind an industrial building. Bizarrely, it didn’t seem to faze him. He told people about seeing me with the cops—one of whom, Reg Smith, he actually recognized—but at the same time didn’t seem to believe it was possible I might be working for them. So he simply chose not to believe what he had seen. He was far more concerned that I wasn’t doing much business with him anymore and had, in some ways, usurped him in the Niagara Falls criminal community. After all, he’d never been invited to Joe Toth’s barbecues.