Bootleggers playing hide-and-seek on the Alaskan tundra (IHT)

By Dan Barry
Monday, October 13, 2008
BETHEL, Alaska: On a misty day the color of lead, a few people linger outside a general store in the small and remote city of Bethel, struggling but failing to achieve an air of purposeful loitering. Try as they might to feign enjoyment of the damp cold, they are clearly looking to score.
Jess Carson, a plainclothes investigator for the Alaska State Troopers, watches their fidgeting performance through the windshield of his pickup truck, a cramped theater that smells of wet dog, courtesy of Kilo, his scent-sensitive German shepherd. Carson seems less than riveted by an act he has seen too many times before.
This show is not about heroin or cocaine; it's about booze. Many rural Alaskan communities consider alcohol to be the primary accelerant for crime, domestic strife and other social problems, and either ban it outright or, as in Bethel, tightly restrict its use.
And with illicit alcohol come bootleggers who lack any roguish Prohibition-era charm; just one case of their whiskey can upend a small native village.
An outsider might scan an Alaska State Troopers annual report, come across that photograph of Coors Light cases stacked beside bottles of R&R whiskey, and see ingredients for a holiday party. But many people here see it the way others would a few kilos of cocaine, piled in a pyramid for the camera — as seized contraband.
By the way, a fifth of R&R — which stands for Rich & Rare, a highbrow name for a bottom-shelf blend — sells for $10 or so in Anchorage. But that same bottle can sell for as much as $300 in a dry village in the tundra, making R&R the bootlegger's current alcohol of choice and the trooper's alcohol of interest.
"Ninety-five percent of all bootlegged alcohol in the Bethel area is R&R, and because of that we tend to focus on it," Carson says. But the brand is not for discriminating tastes, he adds. "Even the bootleggers don't like it."
Of course, bootleggers need go-betweens, some of whom will gladly work for the promise of a bottle. These runners and hustlers often congregate outside this corrugated warehouse of a store called the AC Value Center, where Listerine, Lysol and other items containing alcohol are kept behind the counter.
Carson sees something through his windshield: a woman in a yellow parka may have just slipped money to a runner now spiriting away. He steps out to question the woman. She says she has no idea what he's talking about, as those around her scatter like shards from a dropped bottle.
If need be, the woman will wait all day for that bootlegger's runner to return with her liquor. But there are so many other leaks to plug in the Alaskan bush, which some say has nowhere near the complement of officers needed to stem the illegal alcohol flow. The trooper returns to his dog-reeking truck and pulls away.
Carson, a boyish 32, has an innocent way that masks a street savvy culled from years as a narcotics investigator in Fairbanks, not far from his eastern Alaska hometown of Tok. Eighteen months ago he was transferred to Bethel, a western outpost of 6,000 that serves as a base for 56 native villages in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
Where he once concentrated on cocaine and heroin, he now focuses on beer, wine and spirits, with no doubt in the value of his mission. "Most of the sexual assaults, suicides and homicides are alcohol-related here," Carson says. "Whenever you show up at a scene, you'll see the alcohol. It increases the importance of getting that off the street."
He works out of a small office near the regional airport with a few other troopers, including Investigator Jerry Evan, 38, a Yup'ik Eskimo from the village of Napaskiak. Carson says his colleague's fluency in Yup'ik, understanding of native culture and prowess as a hunter have been invaluable in a region where often the only way to get from here to there is by boat or plane.
Evan, who listens more than he speaks, says he well knows the devastation that alcohol can do to a village like his. Suicides. Drownings. People freezing to death.
"Alcohol has always been an issue," he says.
So much so that dozens of communities have voted over the years to restrict or ban the importation, sale and possession of alcohol. These include many native villages, where alcohol is a relatively new addition to the culture.
"This is not a bunch of lawyers from Anchorage and Juneau, flying in from southeast Alaska to impose our law," says James Fayette, a supervising assistant attorney general for Alaska. "We're flying in to impose their law."
Then Fayette says something startling: "You need to understand that a case of bootleg whiskey in a small Alaska village of 600 people can shut down that village for a week."
The comment may sound hyperbolic, but various studies have documented the insidious effect of alcohol in the bush. And when Fayette's words are repeated to four elders in the native village of Akiachak, a short flight from here, the men nod in sad agreement. Then one growls, "I hate bootleggers."
Life in rural Alaska can sometimes seem like one long chase scene from "The Dukes of Hazzard," Fayette says. Two months ago, state troopers in Aniak, about 90 miles to the northeast, reported chasing two drunken bootleggers 25 miles up the Kuskokwim River, sometimes at speeds topping 40 miles an hour. The suspects were finally caught — with five bottles of vodka.
Here in Bethel, you can possess alcohol, but not sell it. There are no bars or package stores, so many people, including several known bootleggers, have it sent by airmail from businesses in Anchorage with evocative names like Gold Rush and Brown Jug.
Though the amount someone can purchase in one month is limited — and closely monitored by troopers when it lands at the airport — people still smuggle. They tape bottles to their legs, or fill water bottles with vodka and apple juice bottles with whiskey, or use the name of some hanger-on down at the general store to exceed the monthly limit.
The bootleggers also know that troopers will actually listen to luggage, trying to detect the glug-glug sound of liquid in a bottle. So the smugglers will buy liquor that comes in plastic containers, "burp the bottle" by releasing the contained air without breaking the seal, then cover the cap with tape.
"It's identical to the drug trade," Carson says.
His pickup splashes its way out of the rutted parking lot of the AC Value Center and on through the misty gray of Bethel, a place so isolated that it has only a dozen miles of paved road. He checks out the loiterers outside another general store, then heads to the airport to record who is receiving what and how much.
At the Alaska Airlines depot, Carson logs in a case of vodka and two cases of beer. As he leaves, though, he passes a known bootlegger who is carrying away a case of R&R on his shoulder. Delivered legally, received legally, and within the limits of a Bethel resident's monthly allowance of purchased alcohol.
The trooper doubts the man will taste a drop of that scorching stuff.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/13/america/13land.php





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