DRUG MULES

Transporting narcotics seems the answer to their problems, reports
SUSAN MCCLELLAND. Big mistake.

IT WAS AN offer Mary O'Connor couldn't refuse.

The man sitting across from her in the seedy Toronto diner was
promising a week's paid vacation at a luxury resort in Jamaica, cash
for clothing and toiletries before departure, spending money while
there, and $5,000 when she got home. There was only one condition: she
had to smuggle cocaine back to Canada. Sipping a rum and coke,
O'Connor considered the risks.

It was November 2001 and the terrorist attacks were still fresh on
customs officials' minds, so drug mules wouldn't be a primary concern
for border officials, O'Connor thought. In any event, she figured they
wouldn't be looking for someone like her -- attractive, well-groomed,
conservatively and stylishly dressed, middle-aged and Caucasian.

O'Connor also desperately needed the money.

She had started using cocaine again after being straight for three
years, and her habit was costly -- she was behind on the rent for her
$1,100-a-month apartment, and her daughter needed help with college
tuition.

It was more than she could support on her $30,000-a-year job as an
office administrator, so the pitch from her dealer, Don, was
appealing, in part because O'Connor had met other women who had
successfully acted as mules. "I convinced myself I wouldn't get
caught," she says. "Cocaine traffickers look for someone like me --
someone with a home, a good job, maybe someone who uses drugs, but not
so much that they look like a junkie and have a criminal record, which
would be a red flag at customs."

O'Connor left for her drug run on Nov. 10, 2001. On her return flight
from Jamaica to Toronto a week later, while connecting through
Charlotte, N.C., she was apprehended. Officials there had received an
anonymous tip about her, and they found almost a kilogram of cocaine
base -- a rock-like product obtained from the first stage of refining
cocaine -- in fake bottoms and the pullout handles of her suitcases.

The cocaine was intended for Canada or England, says O'Connor, who is
now serving a 3 1/2-year sentence at the North Carolina Correctional
Institution for Women in Raleigh. "I thought everything would be
fine," she told Maclean's. "I was a fool."

O'Connor isn't alone.

Drug traffickers' use of mules has skyrocketed after the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks, largely because heightened border security made it
more difficult for dealers to deliver large narcotic shipments into
North America and Europe. It's gotten so bad that the United Nations'
Office on Drugs and Crime warned earlier this year that one in 10
passengers flying from Jamaica to the United Kingdom is a drug
courier. Often drug mules are poor, single mothers.

Jamaica, in particular, has become a popular transit point for
Colombian heroin and cocaine; narcotics smugglers who are citizens of
that island make up as much as nine per cent of England's female
prison population.

There are no similar statistics for Canada, but there's plenty of
anecdotal evidence to suggest that mules are carrying an increasing
share of the estimated 20 tonnes of cocaine and two tonnes of heroin
imported into the country annually.

In May, a former Miss Guyana beauty pageant winner, Mia Rahaman, 23,
was arrested as she arrived at Toronto's Pearson International Airport
with $1 million worth of cocaine in her luggage. "The drug war is
still very much ongoing," says RCMP Staff Sgt. Bill Matheson,
commander of the Toronto Airport Drug Enforcement Unit. "We haven't
backed off one iota in investigating trafficking, but we know a lot is
still getting through."

The bulk of illegal narcotics is imported into Canada in larger-scale
shipments coordinated by organized crime groups.

Logistically challenging, these shipments tend to come in only a
couple of times a year, says Matheson, whereas drug couriers offer the
market a steady supply.

Often, numerous mules will be placed on the same flight, a practice
that has been dubbed "shotgunning." The theory is that if one mule
gets caught, he or she diverts attention and the others go undetected.

Authorities say the vast majority of Canadian drug mules travel by
airplane on flights that land at Pearson. The drugs are intended for
Canadian cities as well as Europe and the United States. But Kash
Heed, commander of the vice/drug section of the Vancouver police, says
his officers are tracking more male mules who pick up cocaine arriving
at the port of Vancouver for shipment into other parts of Canada and
the U.S. Traffickers even recruit children to do their dirty work --
in 1998, several Honduran kids who had swallowed pellets of cocaine
were hospitalized after arriving in Vancouver. The narcotic is usually
wrapped in condoms or other plastic products and swallowed by drug
mules.

It's a dangerous practice: if an ingested package of heroin or cocaine
bursts, it almost always results in death.

Most mules, desperate for money, enter the business
willingly.

But that isn't always the case -- police are increasingly learning of
women who are forced into the drug trade.

In 2000, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld a lower court ruling that
found Marijana Ruzic not guilty of importing two kilograms of heroin
into the country in 1994. Ruzic, who was a 21-year-old university
student and model at the time of her crime, was recruited by a man in
her home city of Belgrade. The man, likely a member of one of Eastern
Europe's violent organized crime rings, notorious for drug and
prostitution trafficking, threatened to kill Ruzic's mother if she
didn't comply. Ruzic successfully proved that she acted under duress.

Jasent Callum, who is currently at the North Carolina Correctional
Institution for Women serving a 7 1/2-year sentence for cocaine
smuggling, tells a similar story.

Callum, 54, flew to Jamaica, in early 2001 to care for her elderly
mother, who had broken her hip. On her way to the airport to return to
Toronto, she claims, she was kidnapped by drug traffickers and held
for two days in a rural Montego Bay village.

Her captors, who had taken her identification, threatened to harm her
two teenage sons staying with a relative in Montreal if she didn't
co-operate. "They said they had people in Montego Bay and Toronto who
would help me through customs," says Callum. "They then held guns to
my head and said that if I said anything, my kids would be killed."

Callum swallowed more than 700 grams of cocaine.

Like Mary, she was then put on a flight that connected in Charlotte.
She married Kaitlin's father, but he was living in Canada illegally
and was deported home to Jamaica shortly after Kaitlin's birth.

On welfare, Janice needed extra cash and began selling crack cocaine
with a female friend she had met in her apartment building. "I never
used the stuff," says Janice. "I wasn't even a partier.

I wanted to be a lawyer.

I wanted a car."

With some of her crack profits, Janice went on vacation to Jamaica so
that Kaitlin, then 2, could see her dad. The night before they were to
return home, a dealer proposed that Janice take some cocaine with her.
She agreed and it was a smooth run, earning her $4,000. A few weeks
later, she did it again -- "I was like, 'if I can do this, then I
don't have to sell crack anymore.' " Janice made two more successful
trips, transporting the drugs by swallowing them. On the third jaunt,
she transferred airlines in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and was arrested as
she disembarked. Janice thinks she was set up. "The other girls who
were doing this slept with the guys who ran the show," she says. "I
wouldn't, so I think they let me take a fall."

Kaitlin had been with her on the other runs. But this time, Janice had
left her daughter in Toronto in the care of a drug dealer's
girlfriend. Upon her arrest, the dealer, known to Janice only as "D,"
dropped the child off with Janice's cousin. "I've never been so scared
in my life," she says. "By the time I was allowed to make a phone
call, Kaitlin was safe, thank God. I was ill just thinking about it."

While Janice was in jail, the contents of her apartment, including
about $15,000 in cash from her previous drug runs, were stolen.

Kaitlin went to live with her grandmother in a farming community west
of St. Catharines. Janice spent a total of 22 months in U.S. jails
before being returned, as part of a bilateral prisoner-transfer
program, to Canada to complete her sentence. Ever since, her
relationship with Kaitlin has been strained. "No matter how much time
I spend with her, she never smiles," says Janice. "All I wanted was a
better life for me and Kaitlin. I made things so much worse."

IT'S A HUMID June day in Toronto and Kelly (not her real name) sips
iced tea on a patio at an upscale bar in the city's business district,
only a few kilometres away from the diner where her mother, Mary
O'Connor, agreed to become a drug mule. The dark-haired, slim
23-year-old, who now works in public relations, has just finished
filling out the Corrections Canada paperwork so that her mother can
complete her sentence in Ontario.

Kelly was enrolled in criminology courses at Seneca College when her
mother became a drug smuggler.

She had known that Mary was back on drugs and in trouble. They were
living together; Kelly opened a letter from the apartment
superintendent stating that they owed $4,000 in back rent. "When I
confronted mom, she said she'd have to go away for a while," says
Kelly. "She said it was to get clean, but I knew she was going to do
something bad. I asked her not to go. She said she was a big girl and
could take care of herself."

After her arrest, O'Connor, fearful of further trouble with the drug
ring, asked Kelly to move out of the apartment.

Since then, a collection agency has been calling for the rent
arrears.

But Kelly, who had to drop out of school and take the PR job to make
ends meet, is paying off her student loan and sending $40 a month to
her mother in prison and can't settle the account. Now living with her
father an hour-long commute west of Toronto, she has visited O'Connor
in North Carolina three times. "I thought she was going to kill
herself with the cocaine," says Kelly. "Where she is now sure has to
be rock bottom." When Kelly asks her mother if she'll use cocaine
again, though, O'Connor doesn't answer directly.

She's already been through a drug rehab program.

O'Connor says she is finally looking at the root causes of her
addiction, and plans to write a book about her experiences. "I take
full responsibility for what I did," she says. "There are no excuses.

I have street smarts and book smarts.

Still, I let myself be duped." She hopes sharing that will keep other
women from being lured into the drug underworld.