CROSS-BORDER SMUGGLING ON THE RISE

At Washington's Juan De Fuca Strait, Many Of The Drug Runners Being Caught
Are Canadian

PORT ANGELES -- Early on the morning of Jan. 19, the radar system
aboard U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Orcas picked up a small boat headed
across Juan de Fuca Strait.

It was just after 2 a.m. and the boat was nearing the Pillar Point
recreation area on an isolated beach one hour west of Port Angeles.
The coast guard watched as the Zodiac flashed a light towards shore
and, a few seconds later, a sedan and pickup truck at the boat launch
flicked their lights in response.

A romantic rendezvous?

A late-night fishing trip?

The coast guard didn't think so. They turned on their emergency
lights, and the car and truck sped away. The Zodiac darted for shore
and its passengers fled into the underbrush.

In another time, or another country, they might have escaped, but
there are no free passes into the U.S. after the terrorist attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001.

Nobody here has forgotten that it was a border guard at the Coho ferry
terminal in Port Angeles who caught Ahmed Ressam with a trunk full of
explosives possibly en route to an attack on the Los Angeles airport
in 1999. Thus, illegal entries tend to get a fair bit of attention
from a wide range of law-enforcement agencies here -- no matter what
time of day.

Two hours after the Zodiac beached, two special agents -- one with the
coast guard, the other with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) -- arrived at Pillar Point to begin their investigation. They
found the Zodiac, two discarded orange survival suits, and six hockey
bags lashed to the boat's interior, according to a sworn affidavit by
ICE investigator Michael Kowalski. The hockey bags contained more than
100 kilograms of a "green leafy substance" in vacuum-sealed plastic
bags.

Within minutes, nine more vehicles from the Clallam County Sheriff's
Department arrived to join the manhunt.

A short time later, two detectives in an unmarked police pickup truck
spotted two men walking along Highway 112, apparently hitchhiking,
about eight kilometres from Pillar Point.

One of the men, later identified as Anthony Ray Johnson, was dressed
in chest waders and black, knee-high rubber boots. The other, Jeff
Craig Bishop, wore wading boots and a one-piece fleece suit matted
with grass.

As the pickup slowed, Johnson and Bishop ran towards it, asking the
detectives for a ride, apparently unaware they were speaking to police.

"Take us anywhere," they said, according to the affidavit. "We've been
walking for six hours."

They were Canadians on a camping trip and had had their gear stolen,
the duo said, perhaps unaware that all campsites in the area were
closed for the winter.

They hopped into the back of the pickup truck and promptly lay down,
as if to avoid being seen, Kowalski stated in the affidavit.

A short time later, more police arrived and arrested the Canadians.
Bishop refused to talk, but Johnson told investigators: "I don't know
what I can say, because I don't want to make a confession."

Not that police needed one.

U.S. authorities are getting adept at spotting Canadians trying to
sneak into the country with their illegal cargo.

"It does seem to be always hockey bags," Commander Tom Farris of the
U.S. Coast Guard at Port Angeles said. "You guys must have them pretty
cheap up there."

This year, Farris's crews working with immigration, border patrol, and
the local sheriff's department have seized more than 1,000 kilograms
of B.C.-grown marijuana and arrested at least 18 people -- many of
them Canadians -- in and around the Olympic Peninsula.

More seizures have been made in the San Juan Islands.

"And we consider it truly only the tip of the iceberg," said San Juan
County Sheriff William Cumming.

Famous as a people-smuggling route in the late 1800s, and as a
rum-smuggling route during prohibition in the 1920s, the Juan de Fuca
Strait appears to be gaining popularity among modern-day bud runners.

"We've seen drops where planes have come across and dropped packages
on the beach," Cumming said. "We've seen kayakers coming across ....
We've seen open boats .... We've seen boats that are fast with large,
overpowering engines [so they can] come in and out quickly.

"We've seen them rent safe houses. We've seen them rent vacation homes
on the beach where there are drops. We've seen marijuana floating in
the water just this past year, suggesting that law enforcement was in
the area and somebody panicked."

As the U.S. tightened security at land crossings, law enforcement
began picking up more drug smugglers crossing the strait under cover
of darkness. It's unclear, however, whether the rise in arrests is due
to increased smuggling or better enforcement.

"I tend to believe it's a little of each," said Joseph Giuliano of the
U.S. Border Patrol at Blaine.

In the Blaine sector alone, which covers western Washington, the
border patrol has seized about 2,500 kilograms of marijuana in its
current fiscal year, which is a 50-per-cent increase.

The arrests will probably continue, as the U.S. continues to expand
its security forces along the border. Recently, Immigration and
Customs Enforcement opened a Bellingham air and marine branch and
began conducting regular patrols, in a further effort to shut down
drug- and human-smuggling routes; in its first 10 days, the branch
helped catch an alleged smuggler moving about 100 kilograms of B.C.
bud by boat to a marina near Sequim.

The resources of U.S. agencies were on display recently when the Coast
Guard at Ediz Hook in Port Angeles gave the Times Colonist a spin in
one of its high-speed Zodiacs. Although the two-man crew left most of
its firepower at the base during the tour, the Zodiac can carry
.60-calibre machine guns, and individual officers have pistols,
automatic rifles and shotguns at their disposal. They don't waste
time, either.

"We're required to be underway ... 30 minutes after we receive the
call," Farris said. "That's driven by search and rescue, but it pays
dividends for law enforcement as well."

The crews, however, can't be everywhere at once, and there's little
doubt that B.C. bud continues to slip past the guards.

U.S. defence lawyer Stephan Illa, who has represented a number of
Canadians accused of smuggling, says there's been such an influx that
it has driven local marijuana growers in Washington state out of business.

"It's as old as supply and demand," he said. "What you have is a
situation where the penalties for growing dope in Canada are far less
severe than the penalties for growing it in the U.S."

At the same time, the payoff for smuggling it south is huge, Illa
said. "The price of a pound of British Columbia marijuana --
high-quality marijuana -- in Canada is approximately anywhere from
$3,200 to about $2,800," he said. "You can bring that across the
border and get up to $4,000 a pound US. So just bringing it across the
border has that effect.

"The people who are growing it and moving it and organizing it, these
are not the people getting caught. The people getting caught, by and
large, are runners who are recruited to take loads across. And the
loads that get caught are for the most part considered a cost of doing
business."

U.S. and Canadian law-enforcement authorities contend that organized
crime runs the smuggling operations.

"You've got the Hells Angels, and there are some Vietnamese groups, as
well as some Indian organized crime groups," U.S. assistant district
attorney Janet Freeman said. "Those three groups tend to be largely
involved with the drug trade."

But Illa says there's been little, if any, proof of that.

"They're always talking about Hells Angels being the source of all
this stuff," he said. "To the extent the government's ever proved
that, I've never seen it. I think it's largely their own theory and it
provides them with a big bogeyman to wave in front of the public.

"I mean, it's a lot scarier to say it's tattooed motorcycle maniacs in
leather, rather than to say, 'Well, there's a group of Canadians up
there doing this.'"

But U.S. and Canadian law-enforcement agents say marijuana smuggling
is more sinister than Illa or others make it out to be. The police
argue that smugglers trade the marijuana for cocaine and guns that, in
turn, make their way back to B.C. as part of a large criminal enterprise.

"This is not about marijuana," said Farris of the U.S. Coast Guard.
"This is not about us arguing about whether personal use of marijuana
is okay or not okay. The American-Canadian disconnect there is clear.

"This is about keeping a civil society, because these folks are all
about controlling money, assets, and power, and they do it their way.
So when you're turning your head, or allowing it to exist, you're
making other decisions you're maybe not really thinking about."