IRONWORKERS' BUSINESS MANAGER FACES DRUG AND CONSPIRACY
CHARGES

Perley Edmund Holmes, business manager of Ironworkers Local 97 in
Burnaby, faces drug and conspiracy charges after U.S. Border Patrol
officers seized cocaine valued at more than $4 million US in eastern
Washington last Thursday night.

Holmes, a 50-year-old married man with eight children, is in Spokane
County Jail.

According to a court affidavit filed by a special agent of the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration, border patrol officers responded to
an electronic sensor on a road near the Curlew Border Patrol Station
south of Grand Forks in B.C.'s southern Interior.

The officers followed tire tracks of a pickup truck to the driveway
of a rural home, where the pickup apparently turned around. They then
followed fresh tracks in snow left by two people.

The officers turned on their vehicle's bright "takedown" lights and
"observed two individuals lying in the snow under some bushes," the
affidavit states. A large backpack was beside each man. The officers
ordered the two men to stay where they were. One -- the affidavit
wasn't clear which one -- attempted to run north towards the Canadian
border, less than a kilometre away, but was caught.

A U.S. Border Patrol Agency news release reported the seizure of more
than 136 pounds -- 61.6 kilograms -- of cocaine in the two backpacks
and the arrest of a "Canadian citizen attempting to smuggle the
contraband across the border."

The agency didn't name the Canadian but the affidavit filed by the
U.S. federal Justice Department in Spokane names Holmes and Case Hale
Swinburne, of Okanogan County, Wash.

The criminal complaint is the first step towards a possible U.S.
grand jury indictment on these recommended charges: possession with
intent to distribute more than five kilograms of cocaine, and
conspiracy to possess with the intent to distribute more than five
kilograms of cocaine.

Dave Beatty, elected president of Ironworkers Local 97, said he and
other officials were shocked by the arrest of Holmes.

"It was completely out of character for anybody who knows him,"
Beatty said Wednesday.

He said the union called in an independent auditor at its Burnaby
office Monday to investigate union records.