jet to Guyana

On my flight to Guyana, I sat next to a Guyanese man who, upon later reflection, I think may have been involved in drug trafficking. He runs a hardware store in Brooklyn and owns several rental properties there, and makes a trip to Guyana every six weeks to spend a week relaxing. A man in his fifties, with lots of “tough love” wisdom on a variety of subjects (“And if you ever get into any kind of trouble where there doesn’t seem to be any way out, remember that it’s a result of your not working hard enough.”), I feel disrespectful suggesting he was doing anything except relaxing. But the regular trips to Guyana, combined with a couple of the stories he told me, has made me wonder if he doesn’t carry something back with him, even if he pretends not to know what he’s doing and despises everyone else involved.
About those stories—The first one isn’t so much a story, but a best practice. When he arrives in Guyana, he told me, he would collect his luggage and retrieve a long knife from his suitcase. When he gets a taxi for the four-hour ride to the east coast, he’ll show the driver the knife as a warning. He doesn’t want the driver to use his cell phone during the journey or to drive down any dead ends. If they get attacked by bandits, the driver dies.
The other story is about a time when he got beat up by drug dealers in New York. The details were muddled—it seemed to have something to do with activity going on in one of his rental properties. The police considered him a suspect for a while, but cleared him (I think). Even the attackers came back and apologized that they’d attacked the wrong person. It was hard to focus on details, as I was a little distracted by the photos he had to go with it—a few of himself with a badly bruised face after the attack, and one of his very bloody shirt.