Peter MacAllister on his life in the Irish Mafia

Here's a Q and A I conducted with Peter MacAllister, 57, in April 2003.
   He grew up in Ville St-Laurent and found himself smack dab in the middle of Montreal’s fabled West End Gang, known for their bank heists and drug hauls.
   MacAllister's older brother William was near the top of the local Irish mafia gang hierarchy but ended up spending most of his life behind bars.
   Peter was best known as a guy who figured out how to best smuggle hashish into Canada but he didn't spend much time in prison.
   In MacAllister's novel Dexter our protagonist battles crafty Pakistani drug dealers, RCMP agents intent on putting him in the can. He has an armed feud with a pair of cocky, coked-up mafioso thieves all the while fending off purportedly friendly,

yet psychotic hit-men who’ve lost their connection to reality. Quite a yarn and all based on true events.
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Q: This character Dexter who rubs shoulders with the top drug lords, smuggles drugs and conducts armed feuds with rivals – is that you?
A: The book is a true story. Dexter is a composite character of real people. I had to do it that way to protect the guilty. It’s partly my life and part the life of other people.
Q: Are any of the tough guys in the underworld unhappy at your apparent bean-spilling?
A:  No, not so far. Nobody has said anything to me about it. People I know have read it and get a chuckle when they recognize themselves in it.
Q: It’s a brutal existence.
A: Yes that’s what I say in the book. There’s a mythology I want to break for young people attracted to the drug world. Today’s drug game is a pure, cutthroat capitalistic pursuit. Twenty years ago it was an adventure, today it’s a very harrowing world to live in.
Q: Some say the West End Gang is above all others because they bring the drugs in and other gangs are merely the foot soldiers. What’s your assessment of the gang?
A:  What they call the West End Gang is a collage of old bank robbers and English speaking criminals. There is no hierarchy where you’ve got somebody running the gang. They were mostly bank robbers when Montreal was the bank robbing capital of the world. One day the banks said ‘we won’t leave $100,000 in our cashiers’ tills and soon the robbers weren’t even getting enough money to cover their lawyers’ fees. So then they went on into a period of hijacking trucks then dealing in drugs.
Q: You seem to hold the legendary West End Gang leader Duney Ryan - who was murdered in 1984 – in high regard.
A: Mother (Ryan) was a criminal genius and a nice person. He wasn’t ruthless, you couldn’t put your hand in his pocket to steal from him but that’s the law of the street, he was very kind hearted and generous. He was an honourable man.
Q: And yet he had people killed, like when he hired Apache Trudeau to whack Hughie McGurnaghan in 1981
A: If you’re going to be in the underworld you have to be able to protect yourself, if McGurnaghan took a run at him, Mother had to straighten it out, he had no choice. That’s the point of the book, people want to get involved in the drug game, there are some rules that ain’t pretty or nice. If you aren’t prepared to play by them, forget it, don’t get involved. I think that most people aren’t prepared to either, which is fine. That’s wonderful. It’s an entirely different world from legitimate society.
Q: If you do the math on the amount of drugs actually apprehended, it seems like drug importers have pretty good odds.
A: Part of the myth is that it’s easy, quick, fast money, but there’s always strings attached. Smuggling requires a certain amount of sophistication. Those who work hard at it are successful. Those who think it’s a big yuk yuk or are lazy end up spending a lot of time in prison. You look back and when you’re 18 to 25 you think you’re invincible and it’s all an adventure, a rite of passage. I’d like parents to buy this book and read it with their kids and discuss it as an example of why not to go into that world.
Q: Yet you don’t have a lot or respect for criminals who cooperate with police.
A: People think that when a stool rolls over he’s doing society a favour, but he’s just a low life who has no pride in himself, he’s not doing it for the betterment of society. He is doing it for himself. I have respect for someone that gets caught and keeps his mouth shut.
Q: One of more gripping stories in the book is about how the Dexter character hires a team of killers who spend a futile year trying to stalk and kill a mafioso who stole a shipment. Is that typical?
A: Prior to all this nonsense with the motorcycle gangs, you could hold a table, that’s where the conflicting parties would be brought to a table and there’d be a mediator and they’d talk it out like men. Sometimes the problem would be resolved in that way, other times it wasn’t but at least you had that opportunity.
Q: A lot of the gangsters in your story become cocaine addicts and turn into aggressive, murderous lunatics.
A: That’s exactly what happens today. That’s why you get these motorcycle numbnuts walking around like al Capone. It’s the cocaine they stick up their nose that makes them think like that.
Q: Were you ever busted?
A:  I was convicted for conspiracy to traffic.  I don’t have any sour grapes, it happened for a reason. Inside I met young people and when they found out who I was they would come up to me and say, “you’ve been successful. How do you get away with it? We can’t seem to get away with it.”  I thought “my god they don’t know what they’re doing, they don’t know the world they’re in.” That’s what inspired me to write the book.
Q: So can a drug smuggler live a trouble-free life?
A: It’s very very very rare. I’d say to be completely successful in the drug game is a million to one. That’s what young people have to understand there’s always a price.