FIRST RUM, NOW DRUGS

A slight chop rocks the P.V. Ferguson as the RCMP patrol boat motors out of
Pugwash Harbour. Ahead, some lobster trap buoys, the occasional gull and a
few navigational markers are all that bob in the aluminum-hue sea. But John
Trickett, the 43-year-old captain, nevertheless vigilantly scans the
horizon. He knows odd things have a habit of appearing along the nooks and
crannies of Nova Scotia's 4,000-km coastline.

Last August, for example, a pair of RCMP officers pulled into an isolated
cove in the remote seaside community of Tangier and found six men
transferring $25 million worth of hashish from their sailboat to waiting
vehicles.

Today, Trickett and his two-man crew are back roaming the coast searching
for their own big bust. "God," Trickett says, "if my father-in-law could
see me now."

No doubt, John Bernard MacIsaac, whose home was once a safe haven for
bootleggers, would appreciate the irony if he were still alive.

His son-in-law, after all, spends his working hours trying to stop
international drug cartels from turning isolated stretches of Nova Scotia
coastline into a pipeline for moving narcotics into North America. The job
has its frustrations: despite 17 major busts during the past 11 years,
narcotics enforcement officials are under no illusion that they're beating
the drug lords. "It's like a balloon," concedes Fred Gallop, Nova Scotia
coordinator for the RCMP's Coastal and Airport Watch Program. "You choke it
off in one place and it just pops up somewhere else."

Which is pretty much how it was 80 years ago when rum-runners unloaded
booze -- not narcotics or today's other popular illicit commodity, illegal
aliens -- onto isolated Atlantic shores under cover of night.

Back then, the law enforcement challenge was even greater: instead of
tracking down a South American captain who didn't know Saint John from St.
John's, as was the case in one drug arrest last year, authorities chased
savvy locals who knew every inch of the ragged coastline.

And good folk like the MacIsaacs -- whose house on Prince Edward Island's
north shore was known as a place to hide liquor -- viewed rum-runners as
people trying to provide an essential service. "Today, nobody wants to help
a drug dealer," says Ralph Getson, the curator of education at the
Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic in Lunenburg, N.S., "but back then
people's sympathies were definitely with the rum-runners."

For one thing, large segments of public opinion were opposed to the
prohibition of the day. And enforcing the ban was nearly impossible with
the islands of St-Pierre and Miquelon, lying just south of Newfoundland,
awash with booze.

Some of the liquor from these French-owned isles ended up in Canada's
speakeasies. But most of the West Indian rum, British gin, French champagne
and Canadian whiskey stacked high in warehouses was bound for "Rum Row" off
the U.S. eastern seaboard, where emissaries of gangsters like Al Capone
waited for delivery.

The rum trade arrived at the perfect time for the small villages of
Atlantic Canada, which were suffering through a cyclical downturn in the
fishery. Clement Hiltz, like so many other young, adventurous men from
Lunenburg, found it easy to choose between an act that was illegal, but
very lucrative, and another season of harvesting cod off the frigid banks
of Newfoundland. Recalls the 90-year-old, who still lives in Lunenburg: "I
could make more money running one load of booze than I could in a year on
the fishing boats."

So, at 15, Hiltz joined seven others aboard the Silver Arrow and headed for
St-Pierre. There he would have had plenty of company: some 40 ships crowded
the island's docks each month to fill their hulls with liquor.

Before long, some of the region's ablest skippers were running booze.

They had their pick of the best crews, including, in one case, a Lunenburg
teenager named Hugh Corkum who went on to become the town's long-time chief
of police before dying in 1989. "These weren't reprobates," says curator
Getson. "They were just doing what everyone else was doing."

At first, everyday fishing schooners ran the perilous route south from
St-Pierre and Miquelon. Later, smuggling vessels adapted for the job at
hand: they were painted in drab tones, sat low in the water and provided
extra storage space.

It paid to be cautious.

The U.S. and Canada separately declared war on the Atlantic rum-runners
during the Twenties, and the rum-runners couldn't match the swift, heavily
armed cutters' firepower.

But they had plenty of guile.

Bribes convinced inspectors to turn a blind eye. When the cutters gave
chase, the elusive vessels laid smoke screens and disappeared into the
coves and bays dotting the coastlines. It didn't hurt that the rum-runners
had countless allies on shore like the MacIsaacs willing to stow the
contraband in barns, cellars, fields and other "hides."

The smugglers risked not only arrest but their very lives.

On March 21, 1929, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter sparked a cross-border dispute
by firing upon and sinking the Lunenburg-registered I'm Alone, which was
carrying 2,800 cases of liquor while in international waters.

One of the smugglers drowned. Two years later, American authorities shot a
Lunenburg skipper, William Cluett, who later died, while capturing the Nova
Scotia rum-runner Josephine K. at the entrance to New York harbour.

And, in 1933, a Canadian agent named John "Machine Gun" Kelly killed a
Lunenburg man when he opened fire on a small boat unloading booze outside
that town's harbour. "It was scary out there," says Hiltz, who took part in
six different rum-running voyages before quitting to return to the fishing
boats. "I don't know who we were more worried about: the coast guard
cutters or the gangsters on Rum Row who wanted to hijack our load."

Those wild days seem like ancient history as the Ferguson cuts through the
Northumberland Strait toward P.E.I. The last Atlantic rum-runner, the
notorious Nellie J. Banks -- immortalized in a 1980s song by the same name
- -- was finally seized in 1938. But, in some respects, little has changed.
Nowadays, the RCMP and the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency still struggle
to shut down the flow of bootleg St-Pierre liquor into Newfoundland. And
the lawbreakers still work the Atlantic coast with their drugs and illegal
immigrants.

Nova Scotia remains the destination of choice.

But in the past decade there has been a major cocaine bust in New Brunswick
and five major drug seizures in Newfoundland. And authorities believe drug
cartels are spreading their distribution net to far-off Labrador now that
the Trans-Labrador Highway runs right through to Quebec. "Smuggling is kind
of a tradition on the East Coast," says Trickett, himself a Newfoundlander.
"Maybe that's never going to change." Not as long as there are those
thousands of kilometres of jagged coastline and somebody happy to try to
earn a dishonest buck.