The Best American Crime Reporting 2008

by Jonathan Kellerman

  Calvin Trillin

  THE HOUSE ACROSS THE WAY

  FROM The New Yorker

  THE RESIDENTS OF CEDAR STREET, a thinly settled road on the island of Grand Manan, would not have considered Ronnie Ross an ideal neighbor even if they hadn’t believed that he was running a crack house. Ross was a slim, sporadically belligerent man in his early forties who had grown up in Nova Scotia and had worked from time to time on Grand Manan lobster boats. He was a devotee of loud music and powerful speakers—both sometimes left on, the neighbors had come to believe, even if nobody happened to be home. He often seemed high on something. Carter Foster, a burly young fisherman who lived across the road with his girlfriend, Sara Wormell, has recalled that one of the first conversations he had with Ross—about two years ago, a few months after Ross moved into 61 Cedar—began with Ross stating that he could see people up in the trees behind his house. Erin Gaskill, who lived with her two small children in the house next to Ross’s, once saw Ross take a two-by-four and smash all the windows of a car parked in his driveway—a car that apparently belonged to his girlfriend. The people who congregated at Ross’s were a rowdy lot. The neighborhood children were so reluctant to walk past the house that the school-bus stop was moved so they wouldn’t have to. Laura Buckley, the proprietor of the Inn at Whale Cove Cottages, who is known on the island for tart speech, recently summed up Ronnie Ross this way: “He had asshole issues that were much larger than just being a drug dealer.”

  The calm assumption that some people are just drug dealers is a phenomenon of recent decades on Grand Manan, which lies off the southeast coast of New Brunswick, in the Bay of Fundy. There are older people who remember the days when someone who wanted nothing more than a bottle of beer was faced with a trip to the mainland on the ferry, which runs to Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick, twenty miles away. Grand Manan always had more than its share of churches that take a stern view of drinking and carrying on. Whenever the question of opening a liquor store on Grand Manan was being debated in the provincial capital, an islander in his sixties said recently, so many stalwart Christians were so eager to testify in the negative that casual travellers to the mainland couldn’t find space on the ferry. On the other hand, he added, there have always been a lot of people who believe that “the good Lord can’t see you once you get past Blacks Harbour.”

  Although the needs of whale watchers and birders and people with vacation cottages provide some employment in the summer, most people on Grand Manan make their living from the sea, in jobs whose rigors and dangers predispose them to a robust celebration of, say, the arrival of Saturday night. From November through June, Grand Mananers haul lobster traps out of the frigid waters of the Bay of Fundy. Starting in the spring, some of them, including Carter Foster, tend weirs—towering herring traps that look like Richard Serra sculptures made of telephone poles and netting. Some drag for scallops or sea urchins. Some work as divers, maintaining the nets used in salmon farms or weirs. Some “wrinkle”—gather periwinkles from the rocks at low tide—or collect and dry dulse, a seaweed that is edible, or at least considered so in the Canadian Maritimes.

  Grand Manan experienced a boom in the nineties, but in recent years there have been some economic reversals. The aquaculture industry, which had disease problems, has greatly shrunk. Two years ago, a large sardine factory closed down. A federal program to buy fishing licenses and turn them over to Indian tribes eventually drove the cost of a boat and a lobster license so high that young islanders found it difficult to enter the field as proprietors. Still, someone just out of high school can make a considerable amount of money in the fisheries if he’s willing to work hard. There is not much to spend it on. Grand Manan is seventeen miles long. Since virtually nobody lives on what residents call the back of the island—the imposing cliffs whose shade helps produce high-quality dulse—just about all the houses and businesses are close to the one main road, officially New Brunswick Route 776, which runs from North Head through Grand Harbour to Seal Cove. Given the wait for the ferry and the drive on the mainland to St. John, New Brunswick’s largest city, it’s a three-hour trip to the bright lights. Activities for young people who aren’t interested in church functions have always been in short supply on Grand Manan and so have drug-prevention programs. In the view of the Regional Crown Prosecutor, James McAvity, who is based in St. John, Grand Manan has almost laboratory conditions for a serious drug problem.

  In the late sixties, a liquor store finally came to the island, and it wasn’t long before liquor was supplanted by marijuana and hashish, as it was in small communities all over the Maritimes. Grand Mananers who came of age in that period are likely to be undisturbed by the sight of a fisherman lighting up a joint. That tolerance wavers around cocaine and tends not to extend to crack. People said they’d heard that Ronnie Ross was not simply selling crack but selling it to schoolchildren, and they wondered why he was never arrested. Law enforcement on Grand Manan is in the hands of a four-officer detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The Mountie who concentrated on drug enforcement had spent hours watching Ross’s place from Carter Foster’s or Erin Gaskill’s. A search warrant to go through Ross’s premises was executed, but the evidence required for a charge wasn’t found. One community activist thought of organizing a sort of mothers’ vigil in front of 61 Cedar to monitor the comings and goings, until she heard that Ross kept some particularly nasty dogs. Someone posted a sign, quickly torn down, warning people who turned off Route 776 onto Cedar Street that they were about to drive down a block that held a crack house. As time went on, Ross seemed to grow more brazen. “People on the wrong side of the law usually keep a low profile,” a councillor in the Grand Manan village government said recently, in discussing Ronnie Ross. “He made himself out to be this big-time gangster.”

  The big-time-gangster image was fed by having plenty of visitors from the mainland. Grand Mananers are not as wary of people from away as they might have been in the days when just about everyone on the island seemed to belong to one of the families that had been there for generations. In recent years, there has been turnover in the population. Some young people, like a lot of other young people from Atlantic Canada, have moved to British Columbia, which has an appealing climate, or to Alberta, which has an appealing wages. (Carter Foster and Sara Wormell, who are in their twenties, had been thinking about a move to British Columbia themselves.) Some Newfoundlanders who came to work in the sardine factory or the salmon farms have remained. But the mainland still represents dangers that don’t exist on an island of twenty-five hundred people. Stolen goods, which would be recognized in a community as small as Grand Manan, can easily be fenced on the mainland, for instance, and last summer more people reported missing property—especially power tools. It was rumored that the stolen goods were being taken by Ronnie Ross’s crowd, or being accepted by Ross as payment for drugs. One of Ross’s regular visitors, Terry Irvine, a young man from St. John, drove a G.M.C. Jimmy, and some people on Grand Manan began to see the Jimmy as a way of carrying stolen goods off the island and bringing drugs on. The stealing seems to have caused at least as much anger on Grand Manan as any drug dealing. “That’s where it changed, I guess,” Carter Foster later told the R.C.M.P. “When stuff started getting stolen.” On the first weekend of July last year—the long Canada Day weekend, which is roughly equivalent to the Fourth of July—Irvine’s G.M.C. Jimmy, parked in Ronnie Ross’s driveway, was destroyed by fire.

  ROSS ACCUSED CARTER FOSTER, AMONG OTHERS, OF HAVING burned Irvine’s S.U.V. Foster pointed out that he hadn’t even been on the island at the time of the fire. That assertion had no effect on Ross, who told Foster and Sarah Wormell that they had better sleep with their eyes open, because “a flaming ball of fire is going to come through your window.” That evening, Ross piled some wooden palettes in his front yard, right next to the street, put a couple of propane tanks on top of the pile, started a fire, and, according to Foster, said that he was going to blow up the entire neighborhood. The
R.C.M.P. constables who put the fire out were told by Ross that people at a community meeting had decided to burn his house down. During the next few weeks, various accusations were exchanged, including a claim by Ross that, even before the car fire, someone had thrown a propane tank through his living-room window. R.C.M.P. Constable Gerald Bigger had what sounds like a rather typical confrontation, in which Ross went from obscene gestures and obscene language to picking up a large rock and saying, according to the constable’s report:

  “I ought to drive this through you.” I pulled my side arm from my holster, placed it by my side and told him if he raised the rock in my direction he’d be shot. Ronald threw the rock down. He continued to yell, call names and swear. Then, as quick as it started it was over. Ronald jumped across the ditch, said he didn’t like to be called a loser or laughed at. I told him that I didn’t like to be called names. He said he only called me the names because he thought that I didn’t like him. Ronald also accused me of conspiring with the community to burn him out. I told him that I wasn’t part of any conspiracy and that I wasn’t aware of any community meeting to burn him out. Before leaving, Ronald shook my hand and invited [me] to drop by his place anytime for a drink.

  A lot of rumors went around the island, many of them about who might arrive from the mainland and what they intended to do to avenge the burning of Irvine’s S.U.V. On Grand Manan, some rumor enhancement is taken for granted. It has always been said that if hailstones the size of mothballs start to fall in North Head they’re the size of icebergs by the time the story reaches Seal Cove. Some of the rumors, though, were disturbingly specific. Larry Marshall, a wrinkler and dulse-gatherer, heard that Ross was importing people from the mainland to burn eight or ten houses, with Carter Foster’s house at the top of the hit list. Marshall’s brother, Harold, whom he customarily describes as “a bag of trouble with a capital ‘T,’” hung around with Ross. The two of them, Larry Marshall told Foster, were “planning to have people come from away with dynamite and machine guns.” A volunteer fireman later told the R.C.M.P., “I heard…that Ronnie Ross had some of his friends come down, supposedly from the Hell’s Angels.” It was said that on July 21st, a Friday, ten thugs were going to be arriving from St. John in an S.U.V., presumably the vehicle that would take them around to the houses on their hit list. The estimate quickly grew to twenty.

  Not long after midnight on that Friday night, Constable Bigger stopped by Carter Foster’s house. By that time, there were thirty or forty men in Foster’s yard. A number of them were, in Foster’s words, people “who’d had something stolen and knew where it went.” Some were people who had come from a baseball game and were still in their uniforms. Some were older men who were saying that Carter Foster and his neighbors oughtn’t to put up with Ronnie Ross. Constable Bigger informed Foster that the rumor about twenty hoodlums arriving from the mainland wasn’t true. Irvine’s new vehicle, a white G.M.C. Yukon, had been stopped by the R.C.M.P. when it left the ferry and had turned out to contain only three men and no weapons. Foster told Bigger that he had, in fact, spotted the three men at Ross’s. According to the constable’s report, Foster said that if the crowd at 61 Cedar started something, he and his friends were going to finish it. Sara Wormell, a polite young woman who likes to take photographs and keep journals, had put her dog and some family papers and favorite photographs in her car. “I thought for sure our house was going to be burnt down,” she later said.

  The talk on both sides of houses being burned down would have come as no surprise to one summer resident—Marc Shell, the Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, who recently completed research for a book called “Grand Manan; or, a Short History of North America.” Shell concluded that on Grand Manan, which has always been lightly policed by officers sent from the mainland, “unpopular groups are often driven off island by fire” and “sometimes the only form of law enforcement is illegal police-enforced banishment.” As far back as 1839, for instance, the Episcopal church was destroyed by fire, and any question about whether the blaze had been started by what a church statement called “a sacrilegious incendiary” was settled by a note at the scene containing, according to the same statement, “language which betokens premeditated malevolence and hostility against the Bishop of the Diocese, against the Rector of this Parish in particular, and four other persons of this County.” All of the men brought to trial for the arson were acquitted.

  “THE IDEA WAS to put the fear of God in ’em, get ’em on the boat, and get ’em the hell off the island,” a lifelong Grand Mananer said recently. “But it got out of hand.” On Friday the twenty-first, Erin Gaskill was told that she might want to have her children sleep over at their grandmother’s that evening. According to later court testimony, there had been hints, or perhaps more than hints, from the R.C.M.P. that calls involving Ronnie Ross would not draw a swift response. For a while, the people in Foster’s yard seemed less like a group of aroused citizens than like a bunch of men attending a barbecue. Accounts of what happened when the trouble started are imprecise. It was dark. People on both sides of Cedar Street had been drinking. It’s clear that the sides were not evenly matched—there were fewer than a dozen people at Ross’s—and were not cleanly divided between outsiders and islanders. Some of the people at Ross’s house were from Grand Manan and a few of the people on Carter Foster’s side of the street may at times have tempered their outrage at drug dealers with a few purchases of their own. It’s clear that at one point some of the men on Foster’s side were carrying bats, and at least one of Ross’s crew had a knife taped to a pole. Shortly after midnight, Carter Foster and several companions moved into Cedar Street to confront the men who had come out of Ross’s house. “You’re going to fucking get off the island!” Foster shouted at Ross. He and Ross began to fight. Foster, who was winning, had Ross in a choke hold when the shooting started.

  The shots seemed to be coming from Ross’s house. Foster let go of Ross, went back to his own house, and got his rifle—a high-powered sniper model that he is licensed to use on seals that get into the herring weirs. He climbed onto the roof and started shooting at the white Yukon parked in Ross’s driveway. He fired at least once at Ross’s porch light. “People in my group were saying, ‘Shoot the shooter,’” Foster later told the R.C.M.P. “I can’t do that. I couldn’t even put a person in my sights…. So I proceeded to shoot the vehicle to disable it for our own protection, so they wouldn’t take off and get out of there. And, at the same time this was all going off, some people on our side had rocket flares, pistol flares, different things like that.” The exchange of gunfire went on for five or ten minutes. Remarkably, no one was hit by a bullet, although Ross was struck in the leg by a flare. By the time the three available R.C.M.P. officers arrived, the shooting had stopped and no one was in the street. Later, though, fights broke out that the Mounties seemed powerless to stop. Both Ross and Irvine were beaten up. At some point, a couple of young men from Foster’s side of the street circled around behind Ross’s house, poured out some fuel, and tossed in a match. Flames shot out the back wall, and the people inside the house rushed out the front door.

  When the Grand Manan volunteer fire company arrived, the firefighters figured that they might have to reserve one of their hoses to protect themselves, since they could hear shouts of “Let it burn!” and “Off the island!” Rocks were falling near the firefighting equipment. Eventually, the firefighters were satisfied that the blaze was out and they returned to the fire hall. Ross and some of his friends were escorted away by the R.C.M.P., leaving the house empty. Then, at four-thirty or five in the morning, there were explosions inside the house and it burst into flames. When the firefighters arrived this time, they encountered a pickup truck parked across Cedar Street to bar their entry. After that had been cleared away, the fire trucks were blocked by half a dozen people, including Sara Wormell, linking hands across the road. Sooner or later, the firemen were allowed through, but it was too late. Ronnie Ross’s house was
beyond saving.

  CANADA WAS STARTLED. T here were headlines across the country about the normally serene fishing community of Grand Manan—in the normally law-abiding country of Canada—having resorted to vigilantism. Crown Prosecutor McAvity moved swiftly to bring charges against those who had broken the law, partly to demonstrate that the authorities were not going to tolerate what he called mob rule. The R.C.M.P. was not able to find out who had set the fire that actually destroyed Ronnie Ross’s house, and Crown prosecutors eventually decided not to charge the people who had blocked the fire trucks or egged on the crowd. But five young men who worked in the fisheries were taken to jail on the mainland—arrested for offenses that could potentially lead to terms in the penitentiary. Two of the defendants were charged with having set the earlier fire, and three, including Carter Foster, were charged with participating in the shooting. (Ronnie Ross was charged with the same firearms violation and with having issued the fireball threat to Carter Foster and Sara Wormell.) A week or so after the incident, the R.C.M.P., apparently acting on tips that another person suspected of dealing drugs might be burned out, sent seventy officers to Grand Manan—a show of force that mainly just irritated the islanders. The mayor of Grand Manan, Dennis Greene, asked for an investigation of the R.C.M.P., which he claimed had spent a hundred thousand dollars on an after-the-fact invasion after years of saying that it didn’t have a few thousand dollars in the budget to put a drug-sniffing dog on the ferry.