MAGISTRATE SAYS ALASKAN TO BE HELD DURING DRUG INVESTIGATION

LITTLE ROCK (AP) -- A federal judge has ordered an Alaska man held in jail
while a grand jury hears evidence about seizure of more than 1,100 pounds
of marijuana from a rental van.

Tommy Joe Yeoman, 55, of Soldotna, Alaska, was arrested Saturday on
Interstate 40 in North Little Rock.

On Wednesday, U.S. Customs Service agent Robert Mensinger told U.S.
Magistrate John Forster at a hearing that Yeoman was a suspected drug
smuggler who had escaped capture twice.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Linda Lipe argued that Yeoman posed too much of a
flight risk to be allowed free.

Mensinger, resident agent in Arkansas for the Customs Service, said at the
hearing that U.S. and Canadian authorities had been investigating Yeoman
for two years.

"The Royal Canadian Mounted Police indicated that Mr. Yeoman has flown his
aircraft in at least 15 flights over an uncontrolled airstrip in British
Columbia," Mensinger testified.

After a crash landing in Canada last October, RCMP investigators found
traces of cocaine inside Yeoman's plane, Mensinger said. Yeoman was also
under investigation for allegedly flying four trips into a rural north
Georgia airstrip and narrowly escaping agents serving a federal search
warrant on March 24, 2000, in the town of Calhoun, Ga., Mensinger said.
State Trooper Bobby Brown pulled Yeoman over Saturday on I-40 in a rented
truck near the Galloway exit east of North Little Rock. Brown reported that
he stopped Yeoman because he was following too closely behind a
tractor-trailer.