A Rock Fell on the Moon

by Alicia Priest

  Over the previous month, UKHM officials had moved quickly, efficiently and, almost certainly, illegally. Al Pike started the shenanigans when he ordered someone to pilfer samples from one of the ore-laden trucks the day they were picked up from the Duncan Creek Road loading site. Several days later, consulting geologist Aaro Aho dipped into the sacks while they sat at the West Indies dock in North Vancouver. By then, Pike had already reported the suspected ore theft to the mine’s parent company, Falconbridge, in Toronto. Falconbridge alerted the RCMP, who called the FBI, who issued a stop order on the smelting. Without that order the ore would have been smelted soon after arrival, thereby obliterating the evidence.

  But Pike didn’t step back and let the Canadian and American legal authorities handle matters from there. On instruction from UKHM’s vice-president, P.N. Pitcher, Pike rushed down to Helena, where he met smelter superintendent Ernest Hase. Aided by another smelter employee, the men scooped ore samples from eleven different sacks in the boxcars. No impartial witnesses were present. But after decades of dealing with UKHM, ASARCO officials assumed Pike was right, and actually facilitated his rummaging through and helping himself to what was the property of Alpine Gold and Silver Ltd. That Pike had no search warrant and no charges had been laid didn’t bother a soul.

  After identifying what appeared to be concentrates (a powdery substance produced from crushed ore that has been separated from useless rock), Pike hurried back to the hotel and phoned Pitcher.

  “Looks to me like there’s mill concentrates in those sacks… Yeah, from our mill. The ore? Hah! No way it came from the Moon. It’s ours,” Pike said.

  “Hold tight, Al,” Pitcher cautioned. “The cops are on it. They’ve brought an FBI guy up to speed and they’re handling things down there. An agent is on his way to see you now.”

  Shortly after the call, FBI special agent Bruce Lanthorn showed up and for the next hour the two men talked, then headed back to the smelter. Tall, dark-haired and Marlboro-man rugged, Lanthorn looked like he knew more about rodeos than hardrock mining, ore and smelting. But after twenty-three years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he knew a thing or three about crime.

  Standing in front of the boxcars with Hase, Lanthorn turned to Pike.

  “How much do you reckon those rocks are worth?”

  “Well, if the initial assays are correct, that ore averages 1,650 ounces of silver per ton. It’s very high-grade material. I’d say the silver alone is worth more than $150,000,” Pike said. “And there’s lead and zinc in there too.”

  “That’s a fair chunk of change,” Lanthorn replied. “Lock these doors and seal them. If there’s any doubt about who owns what, we don’t want anyone tampering with the evidence.”

  Chances are Lanthorn knew full well about the three different meddling incidents. With the boxcars sealed, he hoped that was the end of it. Now he awaited the arrival of Alpine’s “authorized representative,” who was expected at the smelter soon. Two days later, Lanthorn returned to meet the man from Alpine, Gerald Henry Priest.

  If Dad was shaken when greeted by an FBI agent at the smelter’s executive offices, he didn’t show it. For the past five days he’d been holed up at East Helena’s Harvey Hotel, only making one trip to the smelter to see the loaded boxcars and note that “grab samples” had been taken to determine the rough grade of the ore, a normal procedure. Ostensibly, he was returning to witness the crushing of his ore. But no doubt he’d been forewarned that UKHM had, in his words, “set the hounds of hell” against him. It was ten in the morning when Lanthorn produced his badge, told him the FBI was investigating the possible illegal transport of stolen goods across state lines, and warned him that anything he said could be used against him in a court of law. Dad countered with courtesy and confidence and answered Lanthorn’s questions without so much as a hiccup. In fact, he volunteered details about the ore and its origins, even drawing a map of the Moon claims and the location on Duncan Creek Road where the ore had been picked up just a month earlier. The impression he gave was of a man with nothing to hide.

  “By far, the vast majority of the shipment is made up of high-grade silver ore that I mined from my Moon group claims,” Dad said. “The rocks consist of tetrahedrite, galena, sphalerite and antimony.”

  “You’re talking Greek to me,” Lanthorn said.

  “Excuse me, sir. I should know better. Those are basically different minerals appearing in the ore and contain copper, lead, sulphur and zinc along with silver.”

  “Thank you. Now, when exactly did you acquire the Moon claims?”

  “On July 10 of last year, sir. There are four claims in the Moon group, registered in the Mayo Mining District of the Yukon Territory. I don’t suppose you’ve had a chance to visit the Canadian north?”

  “I’ll ask the questions here, Mr. Priest,” Lanthorn said, turning the conversation back in the desired direction. “How and when did you mine this ore?”

  “Last summer I collected about one and a half tons of float from the surface of the claims. Then earlier this year, in February, March and April, I mined a larger deposit, leaving a hole in the mountainside about 25 feet long, 10 feet wide and about 5 feet deep. You can go up there and see it for yourself.”

  “Float? What’s that?”

  “Sorry, sir. Fifteen years in the mining world has made me forget my manners. Allow me to explain. Geologists refer to ore that sits on the surface as ‘float.’ Usually that ore was deposited there eons ago by glaciers or gravity or melting ice. On my claim, I believe, an enormous boulder rolled down the mountainside a very long time ago and ended up on the Moon. The Moon’s ore was exactly that—float covered by about two feet of dirt, moss, rocks, boulders and snow. Once I determined the float was there, I had to remove the surface debris, then use a hand drill, a sledgehammer, and a pick and shovel to break up the rock and hand-mine it.”

  “Sounds like a hell of a lot of rough work. Did you have any help?”

  “No sir, I worked alone and I’ve got the calluses to prove it!”

  Dad spread open his wide, long-fingered hands with their reddened palms and thrust them before Lanthorn.

  “I see, Mr. Priest. Anybody see you do this?”

  “Prospectors are a secretive bunch, and with good reason,” Dad continued with a chuckle. “You see, the whole Keno area is shot through with veins of silver, lead and zinc. Sometimes even gold. And prospectors circle those hills like ravens over a dead muskrat. Mostly to no avail though because United Keno snatches the good claims and jumps on new ones the minute they become available. Promising claims are hard to come by. I happened to get lucky and buy a good one. A very good one, as it turns out. But to answer your question—except for telling a few people, I kept my mouth shut. I did my utmost to avoid being seen in case I had a chance to buy more claims in that area.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Lanthorn. “How did you transport 70 tons of rock from the Moon claims to the pickup spot? Must be more than walkin’ distance between those two and through some pretty tough country.”

  “Oh it was the hardest labouring work I’d ever done, let me tell you. And I did most of it in the winter. Because by late spring and summer the McQuesten becomes a swamp. I had to bag the ore, and then use my motor toboggan and tow toboggan to haul the bags up a series of switchbacks out of the valley to Hanson Lake Road, where my truck was. I could haul up to 1,000 pounds a trip. On some days I made five round trips, other days seven or eight.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, after loading the truck bed, I drove south out of Keno City about four miles to the Duncan Creek cache site—here,” Dad said, stabbing an X on his hand-drawn sketch. “The cache was hidden from the road by a large clump of willows.”

  “And all this time you were employed by United Keno Hill Mines?”

  “Yes, sir. Chief assayer for more than twelve years. Resigned just last month. I worked on my claims d
uring weekends and on my month-long holiday in April.”

  For Lanthorn, who had never travelled to the Yukon, Dad’s story seemed plausible. Why wouldn’t it? Isn’t that what prospectors did—find buried treasure? In the course of the conversation, Dad mentioned a fellow named Anthony Bobcik. Dad said he’d told Bobcik about the claims, Bobcik did some bulldozer work on them and had helped Dad re-bag the ore at the Duncan Creek pickup site.

  “Would you consider Anthony Bobcik a friend?”

  “A friend? No sir. I pick my friends as carefully as I pick my women. Bobcik was my employee at the assay office until last year and later offered to help out on my claims. He didn’t work for free—we have an arrangement. Bobcik is… a business acquaintance.”

  But there was still something to reveal. Those bags carried more than crude ore, and Dad had every reason to believe Lanthorn knew as much. Because Al Pike possessed samples from one of the White Pass and Yukon Route trucks, and had snatched more samples at the smelter, information on the exact nature of the bags was flowing between UKHM, the RCMP and FBI offices like spring runoff. In the Yukon, the rumour mill spun and speculation among miners, prospectors, truck drivers, bartenders and housewives was rife. Dad told Lanthorn that 10 percent of his motherlode contained ore concentrates and ore precipitates but that as UKHM’s chief assayer, he had every right to possess this material.

  Concentrates are tiny granules of either zinc or silver-laden ore. Precipitates, or as Dad called them “rejects,” involved inflicting yet another chemical process on lead concentrates to arrive at leftover leftovers, what then assistant mine engineer Bob Cathro called “the last squeak of the pig.” The end result of this alchemy was fine, dark particles, very high in silver content and often melted and formed into small silver beads.

  “I took twenty-seven sacks of precipitates and concentrates from the basement of the assay office and dumped them over the ore,” Dad said. “As chief assayer, I acquired this material over many years and it was rightfully mine.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, up until about three years ago, when some underworked official at the company rewrote the rules, there was an unwritten agreement between mining companies and assayers that any leftover material from the assaying process belongs to the assayer. That’s the way it’s always been, and the way it remains at most mining companies.”

  Dad had a point, even though it was a thin one. While there was never a policy stating assayers could help themselves to the highly valuable end product of their work, a custom existed whereby some assayers did exactly that. At UKHM, that practice was encouraged by a slipshod security system.

  George Esterer was the assayer at the MacKeno Mine in Keno City until the late 1950s. Earlier, he worked with Dad in Elsa and the two became good friends. As he said to me years later, “The silver beads left over from the assaying process were the assayer’s to keep. I’ve never seen that in writing, but that was the way it was.”

  “How much are those precipitates and concentrates worth?” Lanthorn asked.

  “Oh, not much. Maybe $300 a ton. They were just rotting in the basement and would be rotting there still if I hadn’t taken them.”

  Lanthorn wrote a summary of their conversation and Dad generously added a page of his own. Then, with Lanthorn and the smelter’s chief accountant D.G. De Grooyer as witnesses, Dad signed the document with a flourish.

  For the time being, Lanthorn’s inquiry was largely over. But for Corporal George Strathdee and Constable Lauren McKiel of the RCMP’s G Division, the work had barely begun. Over the next eighteen months the two overworked Mounties would spearhead one of the most complex criminal investigations in Canadian history. The task would drain the federal and Yukon governments of more time and money than any Yukon investigation to date.

  George Strathdee wanted to leave the Yukon from the moment he arrived. Transferred from Ottawa to the remote community of Teslin, southeast of Whitehorse, he and his wife Verna were raising a young family. By June 1963, the date of the transfer, Verna was pregnant with their third child. If the move from the nation’s capital to the out-and-beyond weren’t enough, Strathdee’s next assignment would strain his family life close to the breaking point.

  Within weeks of his arrival, Strathdee and the rest of the Yukon’s Mounties received devastating news. A Beaver aircraft piloted by Sergeant K.M. Laughland had been en route to Whitehorse from Mayo when it banked and crashed into a slope near Carmacks. All aboard were killed: Laughland, in his early thirties, three other policemen in their twenties and a fifty-six-year-old prisoner. The RCMP lost its entire investigative unit based in Mayo. Elsewhere in the Yukon, the corps was already struggling with staff shortages. The Whitehorse detachment was nine members short and smaller detachments were understaffed as well.

  The plane crash had far-reaching consequences for policing in the Yukon. In the event of a major crime or investigation, the RCMP’s senior brass had no choice but to cobble together a team from whoever was left.

  Elsa had its own two Mounties, Mike Dwerimchuk and Terry Kushnivuk, but Dwerimchuk was on an extended leave when news of the possible ore theft surfaced. Constable Lauren McKiel, based in Whitehorse and recently transferred to the Yukon from Yellowknife, became the first Mountie assigned to the case.

  According to McKiel, the Elsa Mounties had little trouble keeping a lid on the bunkhouse, where miners commonly referred to Dwerimchuk and Kushnivuk as “Meesta Mike and Meesta Terry.” But the irreverence ended there. “They were big enough to burn diesel fuel,” McKiel said. “You had to have a bad case of stupid to take on either of those fellows. When they walked into the bunkhouse because there was a row going on, everybody stood up beside their beds. If a fight was going on they’d say: ‘It’s over. If I have to come back, somebody’s going to jail in Mayo.’ Very seldom were they called back.”

  But defusing a drunken brawl was one thing. Investigating a potentially record-setting ore heist was another, especially when the theft involved one of the most powerful mining companies in the country, an international angle and a bully of a mine manager. McKiel understood the complexity of the situation almost immediately. His superiors took longer.

  “I was on the case by myself because somebody opined that you could just go up there and clear it all up in a couple of weeks,” McKiel recounted for me, on the phone from his home in Liverpool, Nova Scotia. “That’s all there’d be to it. You arrest someone. Charge them. And everything would be fine. We didn’t have any idea what we were up against.”

  After a week on the case, McKiel told the detachment’s chief: “This is not a nut we’re going to crack easily. This is going to be very complicated… we’re going to need experts in mining geology who can tell us where this stuff came from and what it contains.”

  McKiel returned to Elsa with a promise that help would be on its way. Two weeks later Strathdee was put in charge. He had a reputation as an exceptionally “tenacious” investigator. “He’d chase you right off the edge of the earth,” McKiel said. “But he was fair as fair can be. Didn’t have a mean bone in his body. But I tell you, if he was on your ass, you’d better get off the road.”

  If someone had a scrap of information, no matter how flimsy, Strathdee would find a way to talk to him. One winter day—and Yukon winters begin in August—a prospector who lived in the bush said he had valuable information relating to the case. But the only one he’d talk to was George.

  “George was slight, thin as your finger,” McKiel said, “and I was 6 foot 4 and 220 pounds. We were Mutt and Jeff. And this guy wanted the skinny guy.”

  So off Strathdee went. When he arrived, the prospector ushered him into his cabin and offered his guest a mug of homemade hooch. “The guy never did have any information, but he wanted to talk,” McKiel recalled. “In the meantime, George is sucking back all this green beer. Well, he gets a raging case of diarrhea and is up three-quarters of the night. And t
hen he calls the office the next morning at 7:30 and says he’ll be down at 8:00 and to keep the door open.”

  “I think I can just make it from the car to there,” Strathdee told his partner.

  Five minutes before eight a.m., McKiel ducked into the washroom while Kushnivuk watched by the window. “Here he comes!” Kushnivuk yelled. And with that, McKiel flushed the toilet twice in rapid succession. Then the two constables retreated to their desks.

  Strathdee sprinted from the car to the bathroom, his pants half undone, and slammed the door. Seconds later, McKiel and Kushnivuk heard a scream and convulsed in laughter like a pair of schoolyard pranksters. Everyone knew that you didn’t sit on a toilet right after it had been flushed because the water pumped through the raised pipebox in Elsa ran burning hot to prevent freezing.

  Everyone, that is, who had spent enough time in the far north. Clearly, Strathdee had much to learn, as his now smarting bottom attested. He would not be lured into the same trap again. There would be other bumps along the road though, in the gruelling months of investigations ahead.

  Chapter 9

  Three Honourable Men

  In the little Crimson Manual it’s written plain and clear,That who would wear the scarlet coat shall say goodbye to fear;Shall be a guardian of the right, a sleuth-hound of the trail—In the little Crimson Manual there’s no such world as “fail”—

  A sheering mist fell gently over nearby Georgia Strait on the summer’s day I met retired Mountie George Strathdee, almost fifty years after he detailed Dad. We met at a Fraser Valley golf course clubhouse. A tall, trim seventy-nine-year-old, Strathdee had fine brown hair parted neatly to the side and brown button eyes. He briefly perused the menu through thin-framed glasses, and then ordered a Reuben sandwich and glass of lager.