Larry Bailey - a hustler who hauled mayonnaise

 

  We had sent out a call for information on a legendary local hustler named Larry Bailey, (aka Larry Bayly) who apparently ran a ton of different scams from drug importation to real estate swindles.
   But instead a Coolopolis contributor sent us this portrait.
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   I first started working for Larry when a new pool hall/bar/restaurant place opened on St. Catherine West, about a block west of the Faubourg – this was around 1991 or so. The building used to be a car dealership (Chrysler/Jeep/Eagle I think, opposite BBP) and they lifted all the pool tables up to the 2nd floor using the big car-sized elevator at the back.
   A local artist called Eddie (don’t recall his last name) decorated the upstairs pool room with murals showing Hollywood stars (Marilyn, James Dean, E.T. Terminator, Alien, Elvis and so on) playing pool. I don’t recall the actual name of the place.
   Anyhow, I’d been working there for a few months and one of the managers told me he was looking for someone to work in Larry’s other place, a small café on the fringe of Westmount, opposite Westmount Square on Ste Catherine’s at Wood Ave, called “Café Hot”. It’s a Java U now, and they’ve opened up the space into the adjacent store, which used to sell prosthetics and orthotics. On the other side (towards Calories) was a higher –end audio store, and maybe one other place.
   That's where I first met Larry. The manager who hired me was an MBA student at Concordia, but he was never there. Larry would come by maybe once in the mornings to drop off food or whatever, sniff around the place and take off. There was me and one other guy (same age as me, early 20s) who pretty much ran the place. There was a Chinese cook (who lived in a rooming house not far, waiting for his refugee claim to come through) who spoke slightly fractured English; a Dominican dishwasher
(refugee claim in similar status, I think; apart from Spanish he spoke about 2 words of French) and a crazy temperamental French-Canadian cook in his late 60s. Between the 5 of us we had lots of laughs, and not a few shouting matches, but all in all it ran all right. The crowd was mostly regulars between the morning coffee-and-muffin bunch, and the soup-and-sandwich lunch rush.
   As far as Larry is concerned, I learned that he had a shady past from one of the business owners nearby; alluded to but not elaborated on by one of the brothers that ran the dry cleaners a couple of doors down. The café was an all-cash business; Friday afternoons we’d divvy up the till and pay ourselves the week’s wages out of that. The rest of the time Larry would swing by in the afternoon and pick up a pile of cash. We’d see him in the mornings when he’d pull up in his BMW and yell out the window for us to come and get the supplies. He’d have big greasy boxes of cut-price lettuce and other veg on the leather seats up front and in the back, and big cans of tuna, buckets of mayonnaise or whatever in the trunk.
 I do recall making some extra cash when we all came in on a Saturday to clean out the kitchen, repaint the whole back store, empty the freezers of dubious-looking foodstuffs and generally clean up; the place was due for a 'surprise' inspection the following week.
    Anyway, after about a year he sold the place to a Portuguese guy named Phil (actually Firmiliano(sp?)) Battista who was going to make the place run more efficiently. I left shortly after that, and that was the end of my dealings with Larry. In any case, he was always (well, mostly) friendly, not overly expressive, but enjoyed a laugh without being an actual joke-cracker. Even when he was mad about something, you never felt as if it was directed at you personally. In light of what you’ve written about him, the all-cash café which may or may not have ever turned a profit kind of makes more sense, but at the time (early 20s, making cash money, doing as we pleased) we didn't really give it a lot of thought.