“It’s being touted as the biggest drug bust in Canadian history, and probably the most dramatic. A story covering two continents, a plane Chase and up to a billion dollars worth of cocaine. This was a big case; I considered it the largest case I’d ever worked.”
“We did not know anything about the pilot.”
“23 years for the pilot.”
“Bang, his name is Raymond Bang. Raymond Bang, I don’t forget.”
“It was a hell of a lot of fun, let me tell you, it was quite a ride. I was involved in a lot of different operations, operations supervised by the CIA. I used to think the CIA were the good guys and then you start to realize the more you work for them we’re not the good guys, we’re actually the bad guys.”
“I talked with Pablo many times and he was, well in the CIA, they were all in bed with him.”
“Cocaine, that’s when it got interesting. I was considered one of the biggest traffickers at that time. They asked me if I can help him, and I did.”
“The cartels have a history of violence, a wide trail of Destruction and death, bad people. This was, it’s the Far West. It’s all part of the game.”
“My grandfather said there’s three ways you can live life: you can lead, you can follow, or you can get the fuck out the way. I prefer to lead.”
“So yesterday the RCMP carried out the largest drug bust ever in Canada.”
“Donnacona is the biggest penitentiary in Quebec where the most dangerous criminals are incarcerated.”
“Stressful and the environment is stressful, so you just be careful you don’t make friends in prison.”
“In July 1998 you escaped.”
“You always use the word ‘escaped’. I left.”
“Ah, sorry.”
“When you don’t go back, you don’t follow curfew, you’ve escaped. Knowing him you should probably look for him in Latin America.”
“That’s when he got kidnapped. One of the guys pulled a revolver out and he fired three or four shots right between his feet.”
“Marxist Rebels, here we go.”
“I hadn’t heard about him in years and all of a sudden I saw him in the news and it was spectacular.”
“So yesterday the RCMP carried out the largest drug bust ever in Canada.”
“Hey, holy smokes.”
“A major drug trafficker, the man and his mysterious wink.”
“Holy smokes.”
“Hey, it’s Ron.”
“Oh well, Ron all just got caught.”
“When he was on TV my friends used to love saying, ‘Louise look, your ex-husband!’”
“23 years for the pilot Raymond Bongi.”
“I said what?”
“Uh, yeah, they put us in a Maximum Security Prison because of the time, the length of the sentence warranted that.”
“Donnacona is the biggest penitentiary in Quebec where the most dangerous criminals are incarcerated. Because it’s a maximum security facility you got some pretty heavy duty criminals and stuff in there, but not all murderers, got rapists, lots of those. Everything you can find from the higher class to the scum of the Earth. But you know whatever you know the time I was here I saw seven murders. It’s really, really a dangerous place. It’s scary, it’s violent.”
“Well yeah, it’s stressful and the environment is stressful, so you just be careful. But a guy like myself I’m used to high pressure situations, so it’s not a big deal to me.”
“He was in the same sector as the established members of the organized crime scene in Montreal. These people on the outside respected a certain hierarchy. The level of criminal that we are, we’re considered the elite of the criminal world, let’s put it that way.”
“He’s like a comic book hero because of the story. People saw what happened on TV; certainly what he did was spectacular. People were really impressed by it. Can you imagine what that led to in prison and with criminals? He was seen as a hero for importing such a large amount of drugs.”
“Me and the Columbians we got along pretty well. We used to do our Cuba Libres, so we had a guy who would do us uh regular. We paid him for that. It’s pure white alcohol and but if you’re done with fruit it has a nice fruity taste to it, it’s not bad. You get anything you want in the jail; everything has a price.”
“Aside from Raymond Bongi, the day of the historic Miss importation of 4,000 kilos of cocaine, other people were arrested like Chris.”
“So when we ride in Donnacona, he was already there, so he already told all the other guys, ‘Oh my friends are coming, we’re going to get all like that.’”
“We arrived there and I said, ‘You’re not my friend’ in front of everybody.”
“Yeah, we don’t, you’re not my friend. I don’t know you, I’ve never seen you, and the only reason we’re here is because of you. So that ended that.”
“And I said, ‘Give you some advice: stay far away from me.’”
“He’s a pathological liar. He invents stories about himself and tells people all kinds of shit. He’s supposed to be a hockey Champion, a tennis champion, a this champion, he was a Green Beret.”
“He paid some guys to attack me with a baseball bat and that didn’t work out too well.”
“You know his reputation went out the toilet and he ended up uh try to buy back his reputation. So he figured that by getting me beat up, you know I would leave. Well he came right out. Two of them: one guarded the door, one came running up behind me in the gymnasium. And I heard him coming and I saw the bat coming and he hit me in the back of the head. I had 22 stitches in the back of my head, but I dropped to one knee like that and I blocked the next swing with a elbow and then I got up and kicked him in the nuts.”
“‘Take the mask off and fight like a man you piece of shit.’”
“But he was limping through the door like that and I was getting like dizzy because you know pretty so I better headed for the infirmary. And then the blood started running down my shoulder and everything and they patched my head and sold it up and that’s it.”
“I told the security head that I wasn’t going to retaliate, so I let that go.”
“And then they go in June and then come July, then we figured sufficient time had passed.”
“So one Saturday morning the boy said, ‘Okay, Ray you stay inside, don’t come out for the movement this afternoon, we’re going to hit him this afternoon.’ So at the movement at 2:30 in the afternoon when he was coming back in from outside, he walked through the turnstyle door, you know for the gymnasium, and the five guys were waiting for him with baseball bats and they damn near beat him to death.”
“You don’t make friends in prison. I kept by three guys close to me and uh but that’s it. We generally keep to ourselves, especially in the Maximum Security Prison. As far as the most difficult thing? The most difficult thing is is just dealing with the whole thing, and it’s you just got to do it. There are days when you don’t want, you know, you don’t feel like it, but you you have no choice. You just do it.”
“You have a lot of things that go on in the prison, especially stabbings and things like that, you know, you see all kinds of stuff like that, so yeah you don’t let people get close to you ever.”
“Well I had to take care of my crew, everything, because nobody abandoned them. So I had to buy everything. I bought all their clothes, I bought all their TVs.”
“Jorge Rojas, he was a ladies man there. He was you know I call him a—I can’t say that politely, but we had a nickname for him. I’ll say it: we called him a ‘cunt hound’.”
“He was like a lover boy type Latin, you know, nice little short little guy, but he always talking to girls and all that.”
“And he we talk to his parole officer and he got caught having relationships with her in the office. They transferred him over to Archambault. 8 months later he got caught hanky-panky with the Greek school teacher there, so they sent him back to Riviere-des-Prairies.”
“Inmates that sleep with female officers and employees, sexual relations on Prison grounds, it happens and more often than one would think.”
“What about you, never happened to you?”
“No, I’m not interested in that.”
“He was a good-looking man, it was kind of off-putting for me because I was so young then. You have to be careful about that; he’s not the kind of inmate you want to be friendlier with because you have to keep your distance to avoid falling for him.”
“I don’t sleep with the Enemy.”
“There’s a lot of self-respect that goes on; you respect other people’s privacy and that’s it. There’s a code of behavior and if you don’t have it you get taught pretty quick, you know. So yeah, you’re dealing with people who they know how to do their time, they’re not children. ‘Shut up and do your time,’ that’s it.”
“I wouldn’t say he was happy in prison, but he knew how to get the most out of the situation.”
“Back then an inmate who was serving his First Federal sentence and hadn’t committed a violent crime was eligible for release after serving a sixth of his sentence.”
“The federal prosecutors mentioned that it was indeed the most important importation, but in no way could it be argued that these were ruthless criminals. They weren’t violent people, so as a result um Mr. Bongi became admissible for an early release after serving a sixth of his sentence. So he was transferred to a halfway house.”
“Pure hell. I would have rather stayed in prison, very, very badly set up, very noisy. And when you arrive there you have to share a room with five or six people, and there are transient, they come and go all the time. I won’t get into all the details, it’s bloody hell. You couldn’t leave anything there, not a toothbrush or nothing because you’d come back and your stuff would be gone. It’s a little disturbing.”
“You were an inmate on parole, what did you expect, a four-star hotel?”
“No, not at all, but a room to myself at least. Don’t forget the inmates are human, yes of course they have rights. So I said, ‘I’m not enough with this kind of shit,’ you know, I’m not going to put up with this for another four years. So I asked for a transfer, ‘Move me to the halfway house downtown or to a more suitable one,’ and they said, ‘Well, we don’t do that.’ They refused to do that and I said, ‘Okay fine.’”
“So I waited. So I came to a weekend where I had a 4-day pass and I had already made arrangements. I simply didn’t come back.”
“Bongi was one of the first major criminals to be granted parole after serving a sixth of his sentence. He did 5 years of his 23-year sentence. It isn’t widely known but the police are currently searching for him since his halfway house hasn’t heard from him; he escaped 5 months ago.”
“It’s a bit of conditions, because I was out on parole, I was on pass, I was out legally, so I didn’t return. So that’s just a breach of conditions, that’s all.”
“On Monday evening Mr. Bongi didn’t report back to the halfway house, so we issued a parole warrant. So it’s not an actual prison escape.”
“In July 1998 you escaped.”
“You always use the word ‘escaped’.”
“I left.”
“Ah, sorry.”
“Oh, wait. Yeah, it’s prison but outside. When you don’t go back, you don’t follow curfew, you’ve escaped. That’s the actual term.”
“I you know dyed my gray hair back to my natural brown color, I shaved my mustache. My daughter didn’t like my appearance without my mustache cuz she ‘Oh my God, that’s not my dad.’”
“And I remember getting a call from a parole officer. I was asked, ‘Do you have any idea of where he could be?’ And I remember my answer: ‘Knowing him, you should probably look for him in Latin America.’”
“I met John in Colombia, in Medellin, in 1998.”
“The first time I saw her was when I’d gone to Medellin and we needed to rent an apartment and her company acted, what her business was was leasing real estate, stuff like that, and that’s how I met her.”
“I showed him many apartments and he didn’t like any of them. On the Monday I saw him again, I showed him another one. He liked it, so he moved in there. He said he wanted to thank me by inviting me to dinner.”
“Yeah, and we hit it off pretty well and we started a… we got a close relationship going pretty quick.”
“The chemistry was right right at the beginning?”
“Yes, and that’s how our story began. It was like love at first sight. The attraction was strong. We just kind of sort of got together and stayed together and then we had our cats and the dogs and everything. We were a pair for quite a while.”
“He’s a very kindhearted person, he’s very sensitive and simple. It’s only a little later into our relationship that he confided in me and told me what he did in life.”
“But it was too late because I was already in love with him.”
“She didn’t know anything about my business, no. You do the business, you don’t talk about it. But as far as she’s concerned and still today, she knows my business is aircraft, you know, it’s generally Aviation related work. So she’s aware of that, but she’s not aware of what goes on on the other side. And that wasn’t her business and we don’t talk about that ever.”
“We settled down on a farm close to Lano Grande and during one of his business trips he went to Tame, close to Arauca. That’s where he was kidnapped.”
“We were going to Arauca, and the reason we were going to Arauca is I had a Commandante for that area of the FARC, which is the large revolutionary group in Colombia, which we work closely with the cartels. My partner and I were on our way there to make arrangements for fuel transportation.”
“Tame was the last stop before Arauca and it blew a tire on Landing. So the airline said it was going to take 3 or 4 hours for us to get the tire replaced and fix it all, so we’d have to wait. So we said, ‘Okay, we’ll take a taxi, we’ll go down the village for lunch in Tame.’”
“But uh we were in a ‘Red Zone’, which was controlled by the uh ELN. The ELN is a guerrilla group that was born from the Cuban Revolution and Che Guevara’s foco theory. The Guerilla group has a very radical ideology that stems from a mix of Catholicism and communism. Imagine what that can lead to actually.”
“The ELN consolidated their control by committing extortion for a major International Oil Corporation and uh they also took control of oil pipelines. So the attacks on the pipelines but in the ’90s and 2000s they got involved in drug trafficking and to this day they are narco-traffickers.”
“They arranged to an ambush and they kidnapped us on the way back to the airport. The truck was driving and then it just pulled and blocked the road and a bunch of people got out, armed to the teeth.”
“They put you on the floor of the car, keep your head down, put the gun in the back of your head, ‘Don’t move.’ And then they blindfolded you.”
“Partner, he got all excited because you could hear them cocking the rifles, you know, cranking the rifles, and he says, ‘Oh shit, they’re going to kill us.’”
“I kept telling him, I said, ‘Stop, shut up, you know these guys, their job is just to take us into custody. They’re not negotiating, they’re not the ones that are kidnapping us, they’re following orders, so shut the hell up and get in the car.’”
“And he kept on going, so one of the guys pulled a revolver out and he fired three or four shots right between his feet.”
“I said, ‘You understand now? Get in the car, you know, no amount of crying and fussing farting is going to make it any better.’”
“After they had driven, if we switch cars, they drove us up into a sort of like, it was like an abandoned Village. They said it was an old schoolhouse actually, the roof was gone, there was no windows, but the holes were there where the windows were and it was an open field, and then we could see the uh Guard Commando coming out of the forest.”
“Marxist Rebels, here we go.”
“So a guy in charge of the Commando, his name was Camilo, and he saw he was a Canadian passport and he told me, he says, ‘Good thing it’s a Canadian.’ So I asked why and he says, ‘Well, what if you had an American passport? We don’t even negotiate, we just execute you automatically.’”
“So that’s pretty well it. Every couple of days they move you around. I was always watching the sounds of airplanes going this or that, cuz you know the air routes like that. You’re always keeping your mind busy, thinking of a way, ‘I’m going to sneak out of here and get the hell out of here.’”
“And if I had to try to walk out the territory? Forget it. Everybody in that area knows, they’re all knows with the guerilla and they’re all familiar with them. So your chances of walking out of there are next to nothing, so it’s not even worth trying, because if you make an attempt at escaping they will kill you, they will shoot you.”
“Here, people that aren’t Colombian that come from Canada, England or the United States, they’re gringos, and if they’re gringos they probably have money, so they get kidnapped for a ransom.”
“One day his Associate’s wife got a call and I received a call after to inform me that they had been kidnapped.”
“We were supposed to go there to start negotiations.”
“My son was in university back then and he told me, ‘Don’t go Mommy.’ And I told him not to worry, that someone would help us there.”
“My name is Alin, I’m 77 years old. I was considered one of the biggest traffickers at that time. I met John Bongi in a farm and I did like the way that he was, was his respect. I have a good admiration for him. I became friends. They contacted me because I had connections of airport connections of people that has Airlines and they were involved in certain activities. So they asked me if I can help him and I did.”
“They wanted the, initially $5 million US for us each. I went there talk to them, and finally we negotiated for 30,000.”
“To complete the negotiations we had to bring them the money and they went off in the mountains to count it. We went to meet them after and found the two of them like children being punished.”
“Oh yeah, that very determined woman. Nobody’s going to kidnap her old man and get away with it. She was furious. The nerve of these guys.”
“All I did was support him. I stood by him the whole time.”
“I got released on the Monday morning and Wednesday afternoon we decided I better get back to Medellin. So we went to the airport to get on a flight to go to Bucaramanga, and then uh within 10 minutes the secret police arrived, surrounded us. They grabbed us, arrested us all, and after that I don’t know anything else because the Canadian government took over everything.”
“Taking me into custody, they hadn’t formally arrested me. They didn’t, they just picked us up and took us to a military base. The reason they put us on the military base is so we couldn’t get near our lawyers or our lawyers couldn’t get near us.”
“I said, ‘Chechen kidnapped you, have no legal right to arrest me.’”
“So what the sneaky buggers did is they arranged to have me kidnapped by the Colombian secret police after I got released by the rebels. They couldn’t arrest me until I was on Canadian soil, which is what they did when I arrived in Toronto.”
“It’s annoying, but what are you going to do about it?”
“Well, they took me to RCMP headquarters, interrogated me for about 3 or 4 hours. So I made arrangements to go to Canada and went to visit him in prison, and while I was there, once again he escaped.”
“And they transferred me to Cowansville. I wasn’t happy with the situation but I don’t get angry about it. I just… I don’t get angry, I get even.”
“I’m already thinking ‘How I’m going to fix this?’ My mind’s always working ahead. And they told me I was up for parole at that fall and they said ‘We’re not going to recommend you for parole.’ I knew they weren’t, but I says ‘Okay fine, you don’t want to give me parole? I’ll parole myself.’”
“So I was in Cowansville until the fall and then in the fall they had moved me from Cowansville to uh St-Anne-des-Plaines. And then from St-Anne-des-Plaines, I spent a year there and then I was out on work crews.”
“We were installing electrical wiring and electrical junction boxes in the old Presbytery house in the church in in Saint-Heros, and I arranged my things. So the next week I went out to do my crew, and at noon on the lunch break my guys drove up, I got in the car and I left.”
“Within half an hour I was already in my Chalet, while it was all over the news that I had escaped again.”
“The first time I met Ron was at the pub here at St-Alexandre. He was very discreet about his activities. He never talked about them.”
“We all had our doubts. We aren’t blind. We knew something was up, but we didn’t talk about it at all. What we did talk about was good restaurants, women and wine. At that time I was still working every morning at my establishment. I’d received newspapers from a client, and one day I saw his picture in the paper.”
“Later on a young lady working on the patio came to me and said a man wanted to talk to me, so I went out to the patio and saw a man sitting in the corner with a cap on. I recognized right away.”
“I said, ‘What are you doing here? The police are looking for you.’”
“And he said, ‘They won’t find me here.’”
“He got away again. And seriously, the Canadian Correctional Services really messed up on that second Escape. They should have expected it since he had escaped once before. They had to look for him for over a year and a half. So yes, he made her run for it a second time.”
“He wanted me to do him a favor. I didn’t do it for him that time. I told him, ‘You know I won’t do that.’ So we gave each other a hug, he left, and I never saw him again.”
“By that time I had already had Maria installed in a chalet in St-Sauveur, and I had all my stuff already.”
“Oh it was nice, was nice Chalet. We had swimming pool and everything. We cook good food, we had other friends who would come and visit us, knew we play cards. And that went on for three weeks.”
“It’s kind of funny.”
“Well yeah, from the pool you could see the the roof of the where this Sûreté building was.”
“So while all this was going on, and it was funny because we were watching the news and he interviewed the police officer, the police chief in Mirabel, and he was saying, ‘Oh no, Bongi with the resources that he’s got he’s thousands of miles away from here right now.’ Meanwhile I’m sitting right there behind, looking at him.”
“We were careful when we’d go out, but we didn’t hide.”
“I went to the Village a couple of times but then I realized that that wouldn’t probably not a good idea.”
“Then it was all over the news that I had escaped. Every hour, you know, they repeat repeat repeat all day long. So there was too much publicity, so I figured no not a good idea to go walk around, say so so we decided to move to Mexico.”
“We were living in Cancun near all the hotels. It was nice and calm, we had a lovely time there. Lovely.”
“I Dad had his illness had progressed at a point where couldn’t really be left on his own anymore. He collapsed on the floor a couple of times, so we moved him into the Veterans Hospital in St-Anne-de-Bellevue, and that’s why I had to come back and take care of getting that organized and I ended up getting captured here again.”
“I went to transfer money to my travel agent in Toronto in a Western Union, and I used a fake Quebec driver’s license and I handed that. And she asked for ID and I I gave her the ID. I shouldn’t have given it to her, I didn’t have no legal requirement to do that, I just gave it to her.”
“And she called the cops and stuck me in a cell and asked me who they checked out my documentation, took him about an hour to find out who I was and they were pretty ecstatic: ‘Well look who we got here.’”
“Bongi was arrested as he was trying to cash in a check using a false identity. He escaped a year ago. It was his second Escape in fact.”
“‘What you do during all that time?’”
“‘I worked.’”
“‘What kind of work?’”
“‘Regular work.’”
“It’s pretty ironic that Bongi, who was being chased down by the DEA and the RCMP and all the police forces, that he would get caught doing a simple transaction in an exchange office. But that’s often how it happens. You let your guard down and you get caught.”
“Raymond Bongi appeared for 30 seconds before a judge in the St-Jerome courthouse.”
“So the judge tacked on uh 4 months and 2 days to my 23 years, which I thought was kind of ridiculous. The four months I can get, but I had to laugh, and I asked the judge were how the hell he figured out two days. I basically told the judge to go fuck himself.”
“He’s such a defined person.”
“My lawyer said, ‘We better get out of here before he slaps you with another 6 months.’ But I I gave the judge a little this Italian for fuck you.”
“One thing is certain: his first Escape fueled a huge debate about the parole system. After a second Escape he can expect very little chance of getting parole again.”
“I could have escaped, but at that point I decided, ‘You know, I might as well finish with this thing,’ because it would be just continuation. The problem is when you escape they just stop the clock. It’s not like your sentence is going to finish when you’re outside. When you escape the clock stops, and when they catch you again doesn’t matter if it’s 100 years later they’ll start the clock again and you’ll still finish the sentence. So after the second time I figured might as well get this over and done with. It isn’t worth it, you know.”
“‘Fuck it.’”
“I wasn’t planning any other escapes after that. I said ‘Let’s deal with this.’ So my dad, I got out to see him in 2006 in August. Took me for a coat to go visit him, he didn’t even recognize me anymore, he was he was so far gone there. His mind was not there anymore and he shriveled to practically nothing left of him. And that was nice of them. They took me there, they kept me in handcuffs and shackles and everything, you know, two armed guards. I’m a pilot flying drugs and here’s two guys armed, you know, escorting me there with my feet Shackled and my I’m Shackled to visit my dad in the hospital. You mean really?”
“I lost all respect for the system after that.”
“And he I asked for a coat the month after that, but before I got approve for another coat he died, November 6th 2006.”
“‘Ah, we’re almost at the end.’”
“‘Oh, the St Lawrence River, we’re almost there. This is where the Mi river flows into the St Lawrence. And when my father died they had him cremated and that’s what he wanted. They have his ashes dumped here at the end of the Matis river.’”
“My father taught us not to be followers, taught us to do whatever you have to do and allow yourself to be different. He’d say, ‘Don’t stay with a herd.’ He’d say, ‘You’re a black sheep, but try to go unnoticed.’ You can do Shady things, but don’t attract attention. I succeeded at that.”
“I just got caught once in my life, and that was in Casey. Hi Casey.”
“So I wanted to go see where the river ends because I haven’t seen it since, and I didn’t get to come back then. I was at McAir back then when my dad was uh, when my dad died.”
“‘Well, R, right, P Jacko.’”
“This morning I posted on Facebook in English and French: ‘23 years, 4 months and 2 days paid in total today.’ Just about the same feeling as when you’re being shot at or when you’re in a dangerous situation and all of a sudden it’s over. Let’s get the fuck out of here. Ciao, adios.”
“I see that you’ve painted Landscapes. Which one are you most excited to see again?”
“‘Ah the sea, like that one, you know? I love the sea. That’s that’s like Tierra del Fuego, the south, at the southern end of South America. That’s what it looks like.’”
“How long has it been since you saw the sea last?”
“Yeah, it’s been many years.”
“Yep. I’m going to have to go see my friends in Colombia. I have a lot of friends waiting for me. I even have a Colombian girlfriend.”
“I did my shift. I’m over it. Time to hit the beach, travel a little, and that’s it.”
“I’m telling you, she feels like my assholes in my armpit. She—they just decided to block me at the airport and wouldn’t let me in the country. ‘Don’t let him in.’ They didn’t forget me. They kept me there the whole night. They put me on an airplane to Panama the next day. They didn’t want to hear it. They kept their eyes on me. There’s always two or three of them watching me. Come on, I couldn’t even go to the bathroom without one of them following me. Was completely ridiculous. Leave me the fuck alone, already. All right, and if they don’t, well I’ll do what I got to do, you know. And if they think that I can’t run drugs again, they’re very sadly mistaken. You might not want to put that in the documentary, but uh I’m going to put it there anyway.”
“Damn it. But I got a good reception from the police in Panama. They met at the airplane. When they found out who I was and how I’d been there before and I’d worked for General Noriega, so all the cops out came to talk to me. I signed autographs for them. They all wanted to shake hands with me and all like that, you know, because you know I got quite a reputation already.”
“Now I’m at the airport at gate 126, getting on a flight to Montreal. Cuz I went directly to immigration, Colombia trying to do something for him, and the person called from here to the airport and call me back and said nothing can be done.”
“Yes, I was a little disappointed of course. I wanted to see him after waiting 20 years. Of course, it’s really frustrating. It’s sad.”
“Come on, we’re in Montreal. We’re going to the Colombian consulate. It’s my birthday. I’m 72 today.”
“Can’t believe I made it to be 72 years old.”
“It’s here.”
“Okay, okay, see you later.”
“Fucking bullshit. Get the fuck out of here. This shit’s ridiculous, it’s total fucking bullshit.”
“It’s beyond ridiculous, you know, it’s really… it’s not complicated for fuck’s sake. This is a nightmare, people like that should be shot.”
“I wanted to wish you happy birthday because it’s your birthday.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“Happy birthday.”
“Yeah, I’m telling you, sweetheart. I would have loved to have spend it with you and my Colombian friends. But of course.”
“Good evening, sweetheart.”
“I so tired of all the shit I’m going through.”
“I can only imagine. It’s really awful.”
“He realized that the past is always there to haunt you. Years will go by, but the past remains.”
“His Visa request was denied. He wasn’t allowed to come back at all. And it all comes back again.”
“It’s always there. I paid my damn debt to society, enough already. Cost me 23 years, 4 months and 2 days of my—life. That’s enough. Leave me the hell alone. All right?”
“Man, it’s painful.”
“Ruined his life, you know. You can’t… he had such a bright future ahead of him, but I think he ruined his life by doing those kinds of things.”
“To me he’s simply my first husband. He’s a guy I was once in love with. He’s a friend, and he’ll always be a friend.”
“Everybody’s going to say he’s a friend, but in reality he’s alone.”
“I’m 72 years old, and a lot of the guys are four, five, six years older than I am. I was always a young guy in the pack. So the other guys, you know, have passed on, you know. There’s not that many left, let’s say.”
“I don’t envy a situation. Often what gets to guys like that is their loved ones and the pain they cause them, because as well as their absence during incarceration, when they get out they realize what a huge part of their life vanished.”
“He got 23 years, and he had to do his time. Wouldn’t allow me even fly it for the first two years after I came out. We had a Cessna 185. I shared it with a friend of mine, Paul Smith. He’s not allowed to fly, but uh I’m sure he’s flown. I didn’t, because they were just waiting for me to make one mistake like that so they could suspend me and put me back in jail. That would suit their purpose. So we did it. And eventually after a while uh Paul was really far too sick and that way, so we just decided to sell the airplane and that was it. That was a bit sad, but I got a good owner for it, so the airplane found a good home. So I’m pretty happy about that.”
“I would have kept it at one point, you know, but uh I didn’t want to really keep that because Paul and I had good memories with it and all that. So once he was gone I figured I’d rather see the plane go to, but I miss the business now. But I’m too old for that now.”
“None of us survive life, no matter what you got, no matter how healthy, how wealthy you are. Life doesn’t give a shit. You’re born and you die. What goes on in between, that’s a stage, and it’s up to you to play the game whichever way you want.”
“My grandfather said there’s three ways you can live life: you can lead, you can follow, or you can get the fuck out the way. I prefer to lead.”
“When I go to bed I wonder if I’m going to wake up in the morning, sometimes. Yeah, that happens. But those are when not feel bad. I have good days and I have bad days.”
“That’s huge. I just stabbed myself in the stomach with my glasses.”
“Yeah, I just generally keep busy. I don’t want to work too, too hard because I’m still dealing with cancer that uh takes a lot out of it. But I’m lucky in a sense, because they—when they diagnosed me, they gave me six to seven years to live, and I’ve already had this for 12 years now, and I’m still going strong. So I’m not going to complain about it, just deal with it.”
“It’s a very privileged form of employment. You get to see things that uh earthlings don’t see. You’re looking down at the Earth, you don’t see all the dirt, the filth and the crap and the corruption and pollution. You all see the beauty of it all, beautiful Skies, cloud formations, colors, sunsets, sunrises.”
“When you come back to earth, ah well, you should kind of get back again. You can’t wait to get back up there. It’s nice and peaceful and quiet. I think it’s the best job in the world.”
“But transporting cocaine, that’s not legal.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“While doing all of that you never even had a shadow of remorse?”
“Remorse? What for? It’s my job. I’m a professional, that’s what it is, that’s it. I have no regrets, I have no remorse.”
“And the parole commission has always held that against me. People would have wanted him to show remorse, that he would realize that narcotics are harmful to society. But his point of view is, ‘Listen, I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m just transporting drugs, I’m not forcing anyone to take them. I don’t sell any, I do deliveries. I’m a professional.’ That’s how he saw that, that’s how he saw it.”
“He’s just trying to legitimize his own actions. After all, you know, it’s also a way of getting him out of the guilt spiral, right? If he feels guilty on some level, I’m not sure.”
“People who assassinate, people who break the law, who steal, everything, nothing happens to them. They become Untouchables, son, Ed Heroes.”
“I don’t think he’s a hero but rather a protagonist of his time.”
“Bong made all his dreams come true. Things didn’t turn out as expected in Casey. Maybe what happened to him in Casey, being captured like that, protected him from future hardship. He’s still around today, and there’s definitely a huge page of Quebec’s Aviation history that’s dedicated to him. People tend to forget quickly in Quebec, even though the plates say ‘I forget their history’. He’s part of Quebec’s history. He’s a criminal, but he has made history.”
“He’s taken an atypical path and he was a true mercenary. Mercenaries of his caliber, as far as I know, other than him there have not been many in Quebec.”
“He sees the world like his own play, that’s how he sees it.”
“His arrest was all over the media, and I think that deep down he’s happy he got media coverage. He didn’t brag about what he did, and other people did it for him.”
“‘Yep. We’re where you landed on the two three oneway.’”
“‘Yeah, he loves it.’”
“‘Can you do the same wing?’”
“‘All right. What are you going to do? I recognized you.’”
“We went back to Casey for the first time since my spectacular Landing in 1992.”
“Yep, it felt funny.”
“Yeah, it was funny.”
“Yeah, I was looking at the spot where my plane was.”
“And what a fuck up.”
“Anyway, it’s done.”
“You have to look ahead. The past is past. You pick yourself up and you say, ‘What can I do today?’ You can’t focus on the future too much. You got to go with the flow.”
“Yep.”
“I remember being there and looking at the plane and thinking, ‘This isn’t fucking possible,’ you know? I’ve flown in many dangerous situations and to see it end this way, I see it all fall apart. It all fell apart because of an idiot. One fucking idiot. Not to mention all the money that was lost, but the worst part is all those years that the guys lost in prison, all the years I lost. It was hard on my family too.”
“Anyway, I remember my plane being there and thinking, ‘God damn it, if only things had happened differently.’ If that guy had have been there would have been another story.”
“He brought it all back like a wave of emotions, you know. Gives me shivers. Anyway, what’s done is done.”
“Go film this, I’m overwhelmed.”
“Don’t dwell on it, huh? Cuz it’s… it’s just it’s overwhelming.”
“I would say some mornings I’m stupified. I look back on it like that and I really surprised at how the hell did I survive all this and I’m still there, you know? I guess I got a guardian angel, but uh I must have put her through quite a lot of difficulties.”
“I’ll let you have the final word. Have you been rehabilitated?”
“Yeah.”
“You mean would I transport drugs again?”
“No. That’s over, my career is over. I’m retired now.”
“Okay, you’re retired, but you aren’t rehabilitated, you’re retired. There’s a difference.”
“Yeah, slight ones.”
“Just because you quit the job or you’re not on the job anymore doesn’t mean the knowledge that you had and you brought to that is gone. It’s always there. So people stay in contact, occasionally you get called for consulting or this or that or you know ask question. Yeah, it’s let’s say it’s a very exclusive club and generally we’re members until we die.”
“Stuff I’m not going to tell, of course not. Everybody’s got little secrets. That’s secret, nobody goes there.”
