CREDIBILITY OF INFORMANT'S TESTIMONY CHALLENGED

Jurors are being asked to place plenty of weight on the testimony of
a drug dealer turned informant who fingered Colin Hugh Martin as the
ringleader in a cross-border marijuana smuggling operation in the
late 1990s.

It appears the lengthy investigation and the long, drawn-out court
proceedings come down to whether the 12 people who heard the case
believe the informant or not.

Prosecutor Michael LeDressay urged jurors to accept the evidence of
Dennis Dober, a former cocaine dealer who got arrested, then had
charges dropped and was paid cash for his information about the
alleged marijuana smuggling.

But Martin, who has defended himself throughout the trial, said they
can't rely on a proven liar.

"(Dober) is in the drivers seat," Martin said in his closing
submissions after a six-week trial.

"He can completely control police perceptions of what is a complex
puzzle of what they see from time to time.

"The man was arrested for cocaine dealing, made a deal with the RCMP,
lied to them about how long he was a coke dealer and the amounts he
was dealing in, gave evidence he was being untruthful on where he was
and how long he was there."

Martin was charged following a lengthy undercover operation that
included Dennis Dober and some 3,000 intercepted phone calls between
November 1998 and August 1999.

RCMP teamed up with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency to keep tabs on
the small group out of Sicamous and Salmon Arm.

They allege they followed Martin and several other "co-conspirators"
using snowmobiles and even hiking over the border to trade large
amounts of marijuana for U.S. dollars.

Later, they allege that some of the marijuana was dropped from a
small plane to pre-arranged points in Washington State.

He is charged with conspiring to traffic and export marijuana and
launder hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"What we have here is very much a continuing conspiracy and criminal
enterprise that spanned eight months," said prosecutor LeDressay.

"Colin Martin acted as head of the criminal organization whose
business it was to assemble large consignments of B.C. grown
marijuana and ship it to the United States and bring back American
cash and repeat the cycle over and over and over."

In December 1998, police arrested Martin and his father in a vehicle
holding $217,000 US. A short time later, they arrested Colin's
brother, Damyen with $315,000 US cash.

His sister was stopped carrying 102 pounds of marijuana.

Colin was also charged with laundering the cash, in part by buying a
Dodge Viper for $86,000 cash. It was seized under proceeds of crime
legislation.

The allegations seem clear enough, but Colin told jurors the case was
full of holes.

He said police surveillance didn't match phone records of where
Martin supposedly was.

He said none of the evidence shows marijuana being taken back and
forth across the border and when anyone even saw a plane, they sorely
misidentified the make of the aircraft.

He said it made more sense that the intercepted phone calls displayed
some sort of domestic U.S. marijuana operation.

"But that is not what I am charged with," he said. "It is a much more
rational story than the invisible plane theory."

He said to fully understand the snippets of conversation from the
wiretaps, jurors would have had to listen to all 3,000
conversations.

"It seems what you really have been witness to during the wiretap
period is like a movie that has occasional bursts of sound but no
video, then video and no sound and massive parts missing," he said.
"The Crown tries to fill in the gaps with the fiction of an exporting
(operation). You should not be asked to make up the rest of the story.

"What's missing is the context of the conversation for the wiretap."