Over the thirty years that I was employed as a letter-carrier, I had many different routes. As time progressed the Board of Canada Post put into practice all the ideas that were hatched at their meetings. Small neighbourhood stations began to amalgamate and coalesce into ever larger operations housed in new shoddily constructed buildings. It was a naked real-estate sell off and a preparation for down-sizing that required no PhD in order to interpret the intent.
I found myself working for a newly created station which was a combination of two stations which had been my learning grounds in my early days on the job. There was a contest to name the new station and after the rejection of my entry, Stalag 31, it was decided that the winning name was to be Mountainview. This new letter-carrier station was situated on Yukon St. in Vancouver at Seventh Ave.
It was divided into two floors with the upstairs housing the old Vancouver Depot 31 and the downstairs housed the old Vancouver Station C. The latter station's territory was the East-side, while the upstairs covered the West-side out to Oak St. The upstairs routes encompassed all the larger apartment towers and the higher income residential areas, thus the dogs were smaller and much friendlier.
It occurred to a friend and early mentor of mine within the Post Office that it was time for the two of us to move on up to the big money. His plan was for us to grab two monster apartment walks and cash in on the lack of gates and stairs as well as the extra money we could earn for the delivery of metric tons of junk mail.
I considered his plan and concurred. My family was without private transportation and the car commercials on TV constantly droned that I belonged outdoors bungee-jumping with my brood. We were regular hikers and pursued many outdoors activities but we had to come and go by Public Transit. It was starting to become a drag.
My friend and I placed our bids and we were both successful. My route was just under nine hundred calls and my friend's was equally large. Before three months had transpired, my friend bid onto a more humane and smaller route and I stubbornly remained with my tough choice. I was making an extra one cent (after-tax) per flyer. I planned to continue until I had saved up enough to buy a vehicle with that cash. I reckoned on a time frame of four years to accomplish the goal.
During that time, I was successful in tearing both menisci, although I didn't know it yet. My knees swelled to the size of grapefruits and stayed that way for two years while I awaited my turn to get an MRI and a diagnosis. Meanwhile, I altered my sortation case one weekend, fixing it so that my histamine heart-breakers wouldn't bang into the unforgiving maple of my desk.
I stayed on that route for the four planned years before a successful bid took me to a new residential route, which although many miles longer to walk, proved to be better for my tortured knees. During these four years, I climbed every peak in North Vancouver's Lynn Watershed on my time off as a way to deal with the constant intense pain.
At the same time, I was studying tracking and generally trying to become more tuned in to my surroundings in the bush. As I progressed in that endeavour, I began to see more wildlife each time I was in the woods. In addition, I had to learn to monitor the weather, the route and my own condition.
I began to notice many more things even at home in my neighbourhood as well as at work on my postal route. The city is just another jungle and has its own food chain. I noticed for the first time, the man across my street who had visits from prostitutes about twice a month. I noticed the ever changing bag men who carried off the days narcotics profits to their bosses from their apartment several blocks to my South.
Before, they had all just blended in as random passers by. Now, it was if they and their two bodyguards across the street were spray-painted Orange. They passed by around eight PM each evening and made the drop at a Chevron gas station on the corner. The body guards changed each time as did the bag man. The method and the timing was rock solid and you could set your Timex to it.
Upon reflection, the constant severe pain in my knees may have contributed to my extra-heightened awareness at that time. I took no pain-killer nor anti-inflammatory. One day I noticed a man standing by the upraised hood of his car while I was delivering my route. When I glanced at him, I knew he was out of place and when I finished delivering to that that street nearly an hour later, he hadn't budged. He stood in exactly the same spot, hands on the hood and seemingly peering into the depths of his engine.
One of my customer’s was a Welsh born Private Detective. We discussed the man I had seen and I was told that in a city the size of Vancouver, in a neighbourhood as high-end and as dense as was my route, there would easily be dozens of his ilk, busy doing jobs for suspicious wives, husbands, bosses and insurance personnel. Added to this were throngs of camera carriers. Some were students, some worked for real estate companies and others were tourists.
This new information made me even more aware of my surroundings. It became a new adventure each day as I spotted all the snoopers. They had always been there, I had just been oblivious before. Now it was easy to see who was out of context. Part of the secret of seeing them had to do with movement.
In a cityscape people are in constant flow. Both the observer and the observed. If a person drives slowly past a man peering under the hood of his car at the roadside, they make a mental note that they are glad it isn't their car in trouble and then shift their attention to the pretty lady in red sashaying over to another car parked in front of the flower shop.
The vision of the peering man will be forgotten in an instant and the observer's mind will have already written a back story and a conclusion to the whole scene. If, however, the observer happened along the way again four hours later and the same peering man hadn't moved an inch, they would begin for the first time to analyze that man. If the observer had stopped within sight of the car man for even forty-five minutes, he would have surely become intrigued.
This propensity of the human mind to fill in blanks to the satisfaction of the observer in order to avoid processing any extra data is greatly heightened by city life. People who would fool you are well versed in their understanding of this trait and they use it to their advantage. I began to relate my days sightings to my Welsh P. I. friend and he laughed each time I mentioned a ruse that he himself had used in his own work.
I located every CCT camera on my entire route and noticed for the first time that the bus I rode to work each morning was wired for both sight and sound. I noticed that a “Photography Supply” store on my route was actually a front for selling hydroponic grow operation chemicals out the back door. I found three in-home meth labs and two in-home grow operations.
I noticed that a “Travel Agency” on my route had never been in that business for the entire four years I delivered its mail. As it was in a mass of just under a thousand calls, it was awhile before I noticed that the jacket slung over the chair at the desk and the empty coffee mug adjacent, hadn't ever moved a centimetre. Only the pile of mail under the front door slot had been picked up each day.
One day while sorting mail, I noticed that I was receiving about five hundred miss-sorted letters that were for another colleague's route. They were addressed to a private Post Office Box service about two blocks away from the bogus Travel Agency. It became annoying to cull that mail out of mine and walk across the station to give it to the other letter-carrier. On one of those trips to dump the morning’s gleanings, I noticed that the other letter-carrier was delivering in total about fifty pounds of that mail per day to that P. O. Box. I immediately saw coyote tracks.
I scrutinized the envelopes in question and noticed that all the letters were from Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, Florida and Mississippi. Most were scrawled in pencil and the towns of origin were all tiny rural communities. Some towns I knew from having being born and raised in that region myself. Eventually, out of that paper flood emerged one letter that hadn't been sealed shut and the contents fell out of its nearly destroyed envelope onto my desk.
It was a cheaply printed coupon, informing the sender that they had won very much money and as soon as a five dollars cash “Processing Fee” was received, they would be sent the information on how to collect their windfall. Folded inside the note was a wrinkled, crinkled, wadded five dollar bill. It was covered in the dust and dirt of honest toil and I could imagine the sharecropper sitting at his or her kitchen table making it ready to send and dreaming of perhaps a new roof for his shack, a TV or an air conditioner.
I replaced the contents and sent it on its evil way. I was aroused to anger and I Googled up the Postal Codes on the exterior of the envelope and found that the point of origin of the “Winner's Notice” was a self-serve Postal Outlet in a small mall in South Carolina. On the next weekend, I sat sipping coffee and munching pizza next to a P. O. Box business on Cambie St. in Vancouver and watched two well dressed young men emerge with a massive canvas sack and climb into an expensive car.
I did a rough calculation and found that these bandits were making some serious money. I told my boss and with a raised eyebrow she informed me that the Canada Post Security and Investigation Team was hot on their trail already. She seemed surprised that I had noticed anything at all. She gave me a card with the phone number of the Head of Postal Security for use if I saw anything else pertinent.
Not long after that, it was my turn for adventure. They say if you peer too long into the abyss, it will begin to look back at you. I became acutely aware, one fine day that I was being followed and monitored. It was obvious to me but nothing would have looked out of place to anyone else. It was being done by a team and a fairly large one. No one stalker stayed on me for long before being replaced by another.
The playground was my postal route and the duration was several months. These people were mostly in their thirties and had some sophisticated electronic equipment for the time I am speaking of. Some of their methods were classic and could be found in any Police Training Manual or any good spy novel. I was even photographed by a young man with a peep-hole camera he had installed in the left elbow of his green Army Surplus jacket.
The jacket was spotlessly clean and the man’s shoes were too expensive for my salary. There was a neatly cut circular hole the size of a match head in the elbow of his jacket and he awkwardly pressed a squeeze-type shutter mechanism with his right hand while cutting in front of me on the sidewalk and pointing that elbow at me like a gun. I asked him if he wanted to take two in case it didn't come out well. He grimaced and sped off around the first corner we came to.
My first instinct predictably was that it wasn't really happening at all. That knee-jerk reaction was disproved very quickly. My second instinct was that it was the Post Office training a new crop of S & I people. That theory was logical. My route was close to the station, close to transportation from downtown and had many good places to eat and buy coffee.
I approached my Superintendent and asked him if that was the case or if I was actually being shadowed due to the large amount of overtime which I had legitimately booked on my route, much to his disliking and our daily locking of horns. My attitude was simple and assertive. I worked to feed my family. If I worked for free at my paid job, it would be a heinous insult to my beloved wife and wonderful children who were my combined reason for working and support system.
He answered that he was not aware of any investigation of myself and that he had not ordered one. He said he would phone the appropriate management people and make double sure. The next day he told me that Canada Post was definitely not involved. That made things very real for me. It wasn't fun anymore. I was being hunted and I didn't know by whom or why.
The surveillance would start within a block of my exit from the station each morning. I always walked from 7th and Cambie, South up the steep hill to 16th. Usually a man or woman would emerge from either a parked car or a doorway across the busy boulevard. They would walk in lock-step with me and if I altered my pace, they did likewise. If I crossed the street, they would abruptly break off and either enter the nearest store or turn the nearest corner. Within seconds I could always pick up the next tracker who would emerge from a store, car or doorway on either side of the street. They would give themselves away by matching my purposely changing stride and by their sudden dash into a store if I looked too long directly at them.
The sheer number of players along the length and breadth of my territory told me that they were sophisticated and could not possibly be after me. Rather, they were after my schedule and routine. As those guys were taking notes outside each of my big apartment towers of my arrival times and lengths of stay, I took license numbers of every vehicle I saw them scurry into throughout my day. I phoned all those into S & I each day.
I began to vary my delivery sequence at random. This caused much confusion at first and several times I surprised a spook. Some times I would have a smoke in the cover of a big evergreen while watching a perplexed hoodie checking his watch and anxiously looking in the direction I was supposed to be coming from. Those moments made the pressure bearable and made me chuckle softly.
One afternoon I was followed all the way to my rented duplex. I had a wife and two sons in there and thus, things were taking a more serious turn due to that aggressive action. That week-end I saw one of the surveillance crew standing right across my street at a bus stop. He let bus after bus go by. I told my wife about it.
She said, “Papi, you're working too hard.”
I told her that I could make a prediction. I told her to watch from our window, the man across the street as he let two more buses go by. I assured her that if I then stepped out into our yard, he would magically decide to take the very next bus.
My wife smiled and took up my challenge. Her smile faded when she saw that I was right. Maybe it was my payback for getting cheeky with those guys. The fact stood that they now knew where I lived and some of my family's routines. Over the next few months mail began to be stolen from my route and many adjacent routes in that part of town. At first, the panels of apartment lobby boxes were broken open physically but within weeks, they were simply opened with keys and re-locked.
Piles of discarded letter mail were discovered dumped in city parks, beaches and other places, sometimes miles from their source. Each instance was duly reported to the station and to the S & I department. I was phoning reports in to them daily and sometimes a few times in one day. The theft operation was very big in scope. I continued randomizing my delivery patterns and observing everything around me.
One day, I did an extremely convoluted pattern of delivery and was treated to the following sight. A young woman, probably in her teens and dressed in dirty torn jeans and a tee-shirt was busy in the lobby of a building that I would normally not get to until many hours later in the afternoon. She had her own key and a black plastic garbage bag.
She was nearly finished shoving all the last few letters into the bag and locking up the panels with a practiced hand. As I watched from a behind a juniper tree she headed off down the sidewalk in the direction of a shopping mall on 12th Ave. Right across the street from her were two young men who silently escorted her all the way to the mall. I grinned at my luck, as I had arranged the night before to meet my wife and son at the food court of that very mall. I checked my watch. I decided to arrive to my lunch a bit early by following the mail thieves.
I checked my rear and sides and followed two blocks behind the trio. When the young lady got to the mall entrance, the young men kept on their way past the mall. I hurried into the food court. I saw the girl disappear into a corridor which contained the letter-carrier's door to the big mail-room that served the mail box panels of the mall's business tenants and was also where some washrooms were to be accessed.
I sat at a good vantage point and awaited my wife. My son and my wife called me from across the floor and soon we were all chowing away on Singaporean noodles. I didn't mention the drama which was unfolding to my wife so she wouldn't stare or be alarmed. Her presence with my boy to have lunch together gave me legitimacy for being in that place at that time in case I was being scrutinized. I never took my eye off the corridor.
After about ten minutes, the young woman re-appeared, this time she was garbed in swish high-heeled shoes, a nice dress and was adorned with jewellery. She merged into the throng and instantly became another shopper who had been there all day. I watched the corridor over my wife's head. After four minutes a big man in this early forties came out of the room. He was dressed in an expensive well-fitting suit like a successful lawyer and he had a hands-free phone in his ear. He was gripping a small, expensive Gucci gentleman's bag. He looked like a rugby player carrying a purse.
As he exited the food court area he mumbled into his mic and I caught some movement on the Mezzanine level above where we were. There, stationed at each of the four corners were four big men, all in their thirties, all similarly dressed to the man with the briefcase, all with phones in their ears and all moving down the four staircases simultaneously to flank their boss front to back and side to side out of the building. I hadn't previously noticed those four. Their departure was a choreographed thing of military precision and balletic constipation.
I had occasion to meet the local Vancouver Pacific Regional Head of Postal Security some months after these adventures and learned from him that Russian mobsters had worked a mail theft campaign right across Canada. They were well-funded, well-equipped, well-trained, well-disciplined and not to be trifled with. They had managed to equip themselves with our Crown Keys via armed assaults and they always used underage dupes to do the actual hands-on theft. The postal keys across Canada were subsequently all changed to a vastly superior Dutch type in response to that massive breach. The irony of this happening in one of the nicer parts of Vancouver was a new lesson for me at the time.
I learned that poor areas have much more visible crime and thus an overblown reputation that tars many decent lower middle-class working people with a dirty brush. There simply aren't the funds to cover the nasty. Conversely, nice parts of a town harbour every type of evil, almost perfectly concealed under a layer of store-bought window dressing.
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