CRACK COCAINE HITS THE GREAT WHITE NORTH

Two sentenced on drug charges in Iqaluit, where police say Edmonton
gangs introduced cocaine to a new and lucrative market

To the drug dealers from the south, the frozen land of Nunavut was
virgin territory just waiting to be colonized.

They saw a new and lucrative market where local residents accustomed
to scarcity pricing would pay 21/2 times the going rate for crack
cocaine, flooding their operation with cash.

But as with any Northern industry, labour was a problem. So the
Edmonton-based Lebanese gang set up a staffing system similar to that
used by oil rigs and diamond mines, where teams of two dealers would
rotate into Iqaluit every six weeks, typically importing a half
million dollars in product each time and exporting a similar quantity
of cash on the way out.

RCMP Constable James Morrison, one of the lead investigators, said
there was no crack in Iqaluit before the gang hit town. Soon, local
residents were burning through their life's savings to pay the steep
price of $200 per 0.8-gram hit, and some turned to crime to feed their
habit, he said. Customers ran the gamut from well-paid professionals
to the poor and vulnerable living on social assistance.

"The North is relatively untouched when it comes to gang turf in the
drug trade, unlike the South, which tends to be carved up between
established organized crime groups," Constable Morrison explained.
With high profit margins and no costly violence associated with
competition, Nunavut was an attractive environment to a gang looking
to expand its wealth and influence.

But in Iqaluit, a territorial capital with a population of just 6,000
people, it wasn't long before police were watching the dealers' every
move. They dismantled the operation for the first time in September,
2007, charging Mohammed Jamal Cherkaoui and Rafic El-Cherkaowi of
Edmonton with trafficking cocaine. Six months later, in what police
called a carbon-copy investigation, they arrested three more from
Edmonton on cocaine charges.

Among them was Alicia Belcher, a 22-year-old woman nabbed after
getting off a flight from Iqaluit to Yellowknife. A police dog sniffed
out her bag in a lineup, and officers asked to search it. She told
them they wouldn't find drugs, but they would find money.

Ms. Belcher was carrying $240,000 in cash sealed in vacuum-packed
plastic bags. She had flown to Nunavut from Edmonton only a few days
earlier on a $3,000 ticket, the most expensive airfare available.

She said she would have been paid $1,000, less than 0.5 per cent of
the amount she was carrying, for bringing the money back to Edmonton,
although police say her cut was actually much higher. At her
sentencing, her lawyer explained that she was a high-school dropout
who had drifted away from her family and fallen in with a crowd of
"fast people who had lots of money as well as nice cars and houses."

One of those people was Jacob Friskie, 24, whom she linked up with
shortly after arriving in Nunavut.

Mr. Friskie and his friend Darrean Hall had been in Nunavut since
February, and were under RCMP surveillance from the moment they
arrived. They were replacing two other street dealers, whose apartment
they moved into, and whose cellphones they continued to use.

The operation was fairly straightforward. The drugs were stored in one
apartment and the cash was stored in another. Mr. Friskie would enter
the apartments for short periods to replenish his stash of
0.8-gram-bags of crack, and made his deliveries by taxi after taking
orders on his cellphone. When they raided the apartments, police found
a two-page ledger of customers' names and phone numbers, along with
1.7 kilograms of crack, worth about $372,000.

In sentencing Mr. Friskie, the judge weighed the arguments of the
Crown, which said "he came from Edmonton to this isolated community
with the sole intention of preying on the Inuit," and the defence,
which said that Mr. Friskie "barely knew where Nunavut was on the map"
and certainly didn't know about the specific vulnerabilities of the
population.

At Mr. Friskie's sentencing in the Nunavut Court of Justice, Mr.
Justice Rene Foisy condemned "the white people from outside that come
up here dealing drugs."

Judge Foisy called Mr. Friskie a parasite for feeding off the weakness
of others.

"Nunavut is different than other jurisdictions because it is extremely
largely populated by Inuit; it is the Inuit territory. By and large
these are not people of means; these are poor people who have to
struggle to live. ... When dealing with crack cocaine or other very
addictive drugs their small resources are spent to feed a habit which
they .. [acquired] as a result of people like you coming into this
territory."

A high-school dropout who had worked as a house framer before falling
in with the gang, Mr. Friskie was sentenced to three years in prison,
and given credit for 12 months time served in pretrial custody. Ms.
Belcher was sentenced to 12 months in jail. Mr. Cherkaoui and Mr.
El-Cherkoawi will be tried in March and are assumed innocent until
proven guilty.