Introduction

Wheeling the suitcase lined with eight kilograms of cocaine past the Australian customs agent was the biggest rush of my life.

“What brings you to Australia?” she asked me and my companion, Pope, a five-foot-nothing, springy twenty-one-year-old black kid dressed head to toe in Supreme.

“We’re celebrating,” I said.

I wasn’t exactly lying.

“We just finished filming a new show for VICELAND. You should be seeing my friend here on TV pretty soon,” I continued.

She waved us through, and we got into a car that had been arranged to pick us up. My heartbeat steadied, but my brain synapses continued to fire on all cylinders. I had just successfully muled hundreds of thousands of dollars of cocaine on behalf of the cartel, all based on a chance encounter I had in Toronto just a few weeks prior. As we rode down the highway past modest Australian houses, Pope and I exchanged sly looks, careful not to say anything that could tip the driver off to the fact that he was unwittingly transporting about sixteen kilograms of cocaine to a hotel in downtown Sydney.

“Can I play music off my phone?” asked Pope, who somehow was full of energy despite the fifteen-hour flight from San Francisco and the effects of the sixteen-hour time change from our home in Ontario. The driver, a well-groomed and deeply tanned man in his forties, wordlessly passed us the aux cable and changed the input on the BMW’s console. With an impish smile Pope put on Future’s “Move That Dope” and blasted it through the car’s speakers.

When I collapsed onto my hotel bed later that night, I realized I had just pulled off the sort of mission at twenty-five that I had dreamed of having the balls to do when I was a pimply, fat fifteen-year-old who watched VICE travel videos in my mom’s basement.

I came of age consuming content from VICE journalists who travelled to Liberia to buy guns or to South America to lick a frog and experience wild hallucinations. Now, after two years of working for that same company as the guy who covered emerging rappers, I had finally earned my stripes by doing some early era VICE shit.

I felt I could finally breathe again. I had fulfilled my obligations to the cartel representatives who had promised to slide razor blades underneath my fingernails if I backed out of my agreement to travel to Las Vegas and then Sydney.

No drug I had ever smoked, railed, or ingested brought me the same euphoria that I felt as I lay there, and I had spent the past few months trying them all.

The high lasted for about a month.

First, my roommate and four others found themselves in Australian prison for attempting to recreate the same run I had completed with Pope. I then found myself outed as a criminal on the front page of a national newspaper, losing my career, friends, and way of life in the process. Finally, I found myself handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser in Montreal, where I had spent two years cobbling together a new life under a new identity, only to have it all fall apart again.

Four years after my trip to Australia, I sat in front of a judge and pleaded guilty to the crime of conspiracy to import forty kilograms of cocaine. My mother held back tears beside me as she silently wondered how things had gone so wrong. The only other people in that room were members of the press, who later asked me if I blamed anyone for the mistakes and decisions that cost me nine years of my freedom.

Did I blame the five forsaken travellers who gave my name to the authorities? Without them, the police wouldn’t have had enough evidence to lay charges.

Did I blame my friend and co-worker Ali, a twenty-eight-year-old of Pakistani descent, for introducing the masterminds of this scheme to my life? If not for him going to Australia first, I’d never have thought taking my own trip would be a foolproof scenario to suggest to others.

Was VICE to blame for encouraging a culture where thrill-seeking and operating on the fringes of legality were encouraged? Had I never taken that job I would still be working in software marketing, discouraged by the lack of professional upward mobility in the music-blogging scene.

Was Drake to blame for never granting me an interview? Was it my father’s fault for leaving before I was born and never being a positive role model? Was society at large a scapegoat for my actions?

Even after all of these months spent in prison in Kingston, Ontario, I can’t put the blame on anyone’s shoulders but my own. But the circumstances of how I came to act, as well as the situations I found myself in, are too extraordinary to ignore.

While I am far from a victim, I’m also no villain. The problem is that I don’t think anyone else is a victim or villain either, including the aforementioned razor-blade-toting cartel representatives.

Those two had a presence unlike anyone I had ever met, and they made it known the second they sat down with Ali and me and a couple of friends for dinner at Soho House, a members-only club in downtown Toronto that caters to the entertainment industry. It’s the kind of place where you see advertising executives and aspiring actors. It’s stylish and genteel — you wouldn’t imagine any of them were criminals.

“So, you’re the journalist,” said one as they squeezed their six-foot-five frames into the booth. “And you want to know more about our little excursion to Australia.”

Over the course of half a dozen flank steaks and two bottles of gin among the six of us, I had agreed to take the trip myself, right after Ali.

“I would never ask you to do something I haven’t done myself,” said the bulkier of the two. “And after you come back, I’ll be able to plug you into a bunch of shit that will make what we’re discussing here seem like child’s play. Plus I’ll send you seven grams of blow that smells like roses.”

They may have sold me a dream, but I was the one who bought it willingly. The next time I saw Dima was a month later when I sat in the passenger seat of a rented Dodge Challenger, listening to Meek Mill, as he drove me to a travel agency where he paid for my $9,500 trip from a stack of $100 bills.

Trey later told me a story over white wine and Xanax. “The only person who never came back from Australia was a working girl they sent over there. Once she landed, she said she would throw the luggage into the ocean unless they gave her $100,000 to start a new life in Australia. But that didn’t work out for her.”

Knowing all this I still volunteered to go on the trip. I lied to VICE’s HR department and said that a family emergency called for me to leave the country and I would be inaccessible for a week. I had watched my peers be rewarded for their reckless behaviour and I knew this was my chance.

“I would never expressly say that I’m telling you this,” said my former boss as he held an editors-only meeting in our glass-and-concrete conference room a few weeks before a major cable deal was announced, “but the New York office will prioritize anything to do with drugs, guns, or violence. Keep that in mind when you’re pitching shows for the channel.”

My ideas kept being rejected — save for a show that toured musicians through art galleries. Meanwhile my co-workers kept getting the green light to follow around white supremacist groups, to go into impoverished neighbourhoods in search of guns, and even to give a platform to full-blown terrorists (that was when a VICE reporter spent three weeks with members of ISIS).

Going through customs that day wasn’t the scariest or most nerve-wracking thing I’d ever done. On the contrary, it filled me with that familiar warm and soothing feeling I got when I’d follow a friend into a bar bathroom to do a key bump or the feeling I’d get when an escort would text “I’m downstairs” after I’d requested her services on Backpage.

That feeling, that rush, is something I’ve been chasing my whole life, or at least since I moved out of my mom’s basement beside Canada’s Wonderland amusement park at twenty-one. It’s a feeling that buzzed through me every time I got on camera for Daily VICE, a short-lived news show that put awkward and untrained editors on TV as part of a partnership with one of Canada’s largest media networks, Rogers.

“We want it to be raw, visceral, and unscripted,” said Eddie Moretti to me in 2014. Eddie was a squat Italian guy with a large moustache and an even larger brimmed hat. He loved to drive up to Toronto from New York in his Maserati, which he parked in front of VICE headquarters for all the workers to see as they got off the streetcar near the office. “We don’t want to make it feel slick and rehearsed; feel free to make mistakes and try new things. We’re trying to make history here.”

In Toronto our program never generated much audience interest, but I tried my best to create good content because I loved to chase that feeling of warm anticipation. When I sat down with the cartel reps, I felt that feeling radiate through me so strongly that my pinky toes started to tingle. I didn’t feel that emotion as strongly again until I was in front of the judge as the Crown argued I deserved an eighteen-year sentence.

My life has been an imperfect series of accidents that befell me as I tried to go for broke. I kept my foot on the gas throughout my twenties, which I spent bouncing around Toronto, the best city in the world if you’re an ambitious person who’s good at convincing people he has some semblance of talent. Ultimately, I paid the price, but hopefully my story can act as a warning for others.

There is an old Russian proverb that says a fool learns from his own mistakes while a wise man learns from the mistakes of others. If that is true, then let this be the memoir of a fool.