The MacDonald family diaspora extends across Canada, and every summer some of our first cousins from Montreal would come to Prince Edward Island. For us, their visits were among the most exciting weeks of the year.

They were the children of my mother’s brother, Jackie. They were an exceptionally photogenic family, and three of the four children had worked as child models, appearing in catalogues such as Sears.

My cousin Mike was particularly charismatic.

As a teenager, he had even starred in a very low-budget Canadian movie, “The Mystery of the Million Dollar Puck“. The story involved diamonds being smuggled inside hockey pucks associated with the Montreal Canadiens.

The production values were memorable for all the wrong reasons. In one scene involving a Cessna, fire extinguishers were apparently used to simulate clouds.

I cannot say that I recommend the movie.

From Acting to a Very Different Life

Mike continued pursuing acting for a short time afterward but was unsuccessful in finding another significant role.

He later told me about an audition that ended his interest in the business. During an audition in a Montreal office, he was asked to remove his shirt. He complied. When he was then asked to remove the rest of his clothes, Mike refused, made his feelings about the request very clear, and walked away.

According to Mike, that effectively ended his acting and modelling career.

Mike was not particularly academically inclined, and his life subsequently took a very different direction. He began associating with friends involved in the drug trade and eventually became a drug dealer himself—small-time at first, but increasingly serious as the years passed.

Years later, that world would contribute to a tragic end to his life.

How Mike Became Reggie’s Montreal Connection

Once Mike and his brother were old enough to drive, their summer arrivals in Souris became hard to miss. Both were muscle-car fanatics, particularly interested in late-1960s and early-1970s Camaros with large, powerful engines.

For a couple of weeks each summer, the Montreal cousins brought a little bit of big-city life to Souris.

Mike also brought marijuana.

He would arrive with a pound or two of Colombian marijuana, a quality that was difficult to obtain locally at the time. That made Mike—and eventually Reggie—very popular among people looking for it.

Reggie’s own writings make clear that his relationship with Mike became important to his involvement in the drug trade.

Looking back, I can also understand the attraction. To a teenager growing up in a small Prince Edward Island town, an older, charismatic Montreal cousin arriving in a powerful muscle car, apparently making good money and bringing something that was difficult to obtain locally must have presented a very different world.

I cannot know exactly how Reggie viewed Mike at the time, but it is easy to see why that world might have appealed to him.

Family, Trust and Credit

The family relationship gave Reggie something else that would prove important: trust.

Mike was willing to supply Reggie with marijuana, hashish and, later, cocaine without requiring payment in advance. In the drug trade this is commonly called “fronting”—providing drugs on credit with the expectation of being paid after they are sold.

Because they were cousins, Mike trusted Reggie in a way an unrelated supplier probably would not have.

Their relationship as supplier and dealer appears to have continued, in various forms, for many years, ending only with Mike’s death in 1993.

That family connection may have insulated Reggie from some of the dangers normally associated with obtaining drugs on credit. If he had been dealing with unrelated suppliers from the beginning, his experience might have been very different.

Later in Reggie’s life, when those trusted connections were gone, that distinction would become frighteningly important.

Mike Is Murdered

In 1993, I received a telephone call from my cousins in Montreal telling me that Mike had been murdered.

It was one of the worst moments of my life up to that point.

I was stunned. Mike was family, someone I had known since childhood. At the same time, I knew that his involvement in the drug trade had brought him into contact with dangerous people.

My understanding from what we were told afterward was that Mike was killed in downtown Montreal near a popular Crescent Street bar. We were told that his throat had been cut and that police suspected a member of an outlaw motorcycle gang.

There were apparently potential witnesses nearby, but no one came forward with evidence sufficient to bring the suspected killer to trial. To my knowledge, no one was ever convicted of Mike’s murder.

What Mike’s Death Meant for Reggie

Mike’s death affected Reggie on several levels.

He had lost his cousin.

But he had also lost a trusted supplier and a relationship that had helped insulate him from some of the more dangerous people involved in the drug trade.

Reggie subsequently had to develop other connections. Some came through people he had known from his university years, but over time he increasingly found himself dealing with people who did not have the protection of a family relationship behind them.

Later events would demonstrate just how different that world could be. Reggie would eventually find himself facing people prepared to use violence over relatively small unpaid drug debts.

Mike’s murder therefore represents more than a tragedy within our family.

It also marks the end of one period in Reggie’s involvement with drugs and the beginning of a considerably more dangerous one.