THE STRAIT DOPE

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 inflatable speed boat flashed a light toward
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 boat darted for shore and its passengers
fled into the underbrush.

In another time, or another country, they might have escaped, but there are
no passes into the United States 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 blowing up 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 boat beached, a pair of special agents -- one with the
coast guard, the other with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement --
arrived at Pillar Point to begin their investigation.

They found an inflatable, rigid-hulled boat, two discarded orange survival
suits, and six hockey bags lashed to the boat's interior, according to a
sworn affidavit by Immigration and Customs Enforcement 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 man hunt.

A short time later, a pair of detectives in an unmarked police pickup truck
spotted two men walking along Highway 112, apparently hitch-hiking, about
eight kilometres from Pillar Point.

One of the men, later identified as [NAME DELETED], was dressed in neoprene
chest waders and black knee-high rubber boots. The other, [NAME DELETED],
wore leather wading boots and a one-piece fleece suit matted with grass.

As the pickup slowed, [NAMES DELETED] ran towards it, asking the detectives
for a ride, apparently unaware that 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 their gear stolen, the duo
said, perhaps unaware all campsites in the area were closed for the winter.

The pair 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. [NAME
DELETED] refused to talk, but [NAME DELETED] 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," Cmdr. 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, 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 to come in and out quickly.

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

At the same time, boats have started going missing on southern Vancouver
Island -- about a dozen a month -- only to turn up beached or docked at
some secluded spot across the border, said Victoria police Sgt. Doug Bond.

As the United States 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.

His staff has tripled in size to 149 agents, and other agencies also
expanded after the Ressam arrest and the 9/11 terror attacks, he said.

"And it really made the cost of doing business quite high for the
smugglers. They were losing more than they cared to lose as the cost of
doing business. So it's like a balloon: When you squeeze it one place, it's
gonna have to bulge somewhere else.

"And as we put the hammer down out here, we saw numbers start to increase
in places like Spokane, Montana, out in the Dakotas. As far out as the
Great Lakes even. The other end of that, of course, is they try to go
around us through the water. We've certainly seen the impact of that."

Giuliano said there were no significant seizures last fiscal year, but
already in 2004 his staff have made a number of major busts on the Olympic
Peninsula or in Juan de Fuca Strait.

"It really has been a banner year out there for them," he said. "It's
beyond noticeable, it's a very profound increase in activity, or at least
in interdiction."

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 likely continue as the Americans increase security forces
along the border. Only 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 the 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 quick spin in
one of its high-speed patrol boats. Although the two-man crew left most of
its firepower at the base during the tour, the inflatable speed boat can
carry .60-calibre machine-guns, while individual officers have 9-mm
Berettas, M-16 automatic weapon and shotguns at their disposal. They don't
waste time, either.

"We're required to be underway, either in the air or on the water, 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 attorney Stephan Illa, who has represented a number of
Canadians accused of smuggling, says there's been such an influx that it's
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 U.S. 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 East 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 said 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 more scary to say it's tattooed motorcycle maniacs in
leather, rather than to say, 'Well, there's a group of Canadians up there
doing this or, you know, dirt hippies.'"

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 pot 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 OK or
not okay. The America-Canadian disconnect there is clear.

"But it's really not about that. This is about keeping a civil society,
because these folks are all about controlling money, assets, 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."