On October 31, 1981 — 45 years ago today — a 32-metre trawler with a seven-metre beam tied up on the Halifax waterfront and most of its crew walked off. The Adeline-C had a 1,000-horsepower diesel engine, high-capacity fuel tanks, and winches, elevators and cranes retrofitted for transferring heavy cargo to smaller vessels at sea. It would take years, and an FBI-led task force, for the ship’s role to become fully known: one of three working mother ships in a Newport, Rhode Island-based operation that bought roughly 100,000 pounds of marijuana and hashish in the Middle East and Far East, moved the drugs across the Atlantic, and ran what US authorities estimated as a ring worth as much as $200 million, as CBC’s Richard Woodbury recounts.
The money came first
The scheme was built backwards, starting with the financing. The alleged architect, a Rhode Island resident named Robert Christopher (Chris) Murray, obtained — accounts vary on the total — at least $10 million US in loans from the Guernsey branch of the First National Bank of Chicago. Guernsey, in the Channel Islands, was an offshore tax haven. The stated purpose was distributing mortgages to clients who would buy and refit luxury yachts, and the collateral was yachts owned by people well known “among the yachting fraternity in Rhode Island,” the Chicago Tribune reported in 1986.
Almost none of that existed. Per the Tribune, the federal government concluded that the notary public who vouched for the yacht owners and notarized the financial statements did not exist; the signatures were believed to be Murray’s, and the supposed asset owners were fictitious. The actual expenditure was four mother ships purchased in Holland — one of which never left the shipyard — plus the drugs and the manpower.
The flow, in one line per stage: fraudulent collateral (fictitious yacht owners, fictitious notary) → at least $10M US in loans from First National Bank of Chicago, Guernsey branch → four mother ships bought in Holland, three sailed → ~100,000 lb of marijuana and hash bought in the Middle East and Far East → at-sea transfer to smaller vessels off the North American coast → ports along the US East Coast, possibly Canada. Revenue at the end of that chain: up to $200 million US, against a loan book of at least $10 million.
The most mysterious of the three
The trawler that became the Adeline-C was built in 1963 and sailed as the Hilda H. The operation bought it in Holland on April 13, 1981, for 423,370 Swiss francs — about $219,000 US — then fitted it with state-of-the-art smuggling equipment: the oversized fuel tanks and the transfer cranes. Of the three ships in the scheme, a 1984 Providence Journal article called the Adeline-C “the most mysterious ship of all.” Newspaper coverage concentrated on its sisters, the Caroline C and the Sea Scout, whose port calls were documented and whose runs were sometimes intercepted. Where the Adeline-C loaded its drugs is still unclear; accounts variously name Lebanon and Thailand. After returning to North America, it rendezvoused at Georges Bank off Nova Scotia to unload roughly 12,000 pounds of marijuana, according to a 1986 Chicago Tribune article.
What the floorboards held
Rob Gordon, then a Chronicle-Herald court reporter and later a CBC News journalist, heard a Halifax sheriff mention seizing guns on a boat, walked down to the waterfront on his lunch break, and was welcomed aboard by two crewmen he knew who had joined the ship in Florida. Under the engine-room floorboards he found rolled-up marine charts for the Mediterranean, Florida and Lebanon — a major hash-producing country in the 1980s. “This is a dope smuggling ship and they’re hiding the charts,” Gordon realized.
Why anyone would abandon a working trawler puzzled officials at the time. “She has a 1,000-horse diesel [engine] aboard and that would drive her right smart through anything,” a Halifax sheriff’s spokesperson told the Toronto Star in 1982. “No one in his right mind would walk away from something like that.” The arithmetic explains it: against a $200 million operation, a ship worth perhaps $219,000 was a minor business expense. “What they were making was so much more,” Gordon said.
After the forfeiture
Federal Court ordered the ship sold in late 1982, with the sale planned for January 1983; the Toronto Star reported the highest original bid was $76,000 “from a bargain-hunting local fisherman,” and another round of bidding was possible. The eventual buyer was Erik van Veenen, a Dutchman then running a trading post and hunting business in Alaska, tipped off by a lawyer after a different Nova Scotia ship purchase collapsed. Van Veenen judged the ship and its equipment worth a million dollars and believes he paid about $100,000 US. “So I fell in love with the boat and I bought it and I’ve regretted it ever since,” said van Veenen, now 82 and living in Germany.
Van Veenen also pulled up the engine-room floorboards and found what Gordon had missed: “this big, blue logbook, all handwritten with the complete description of the journey of the boat: Amsterdam to Gibraltar to Cairo through the Suez Canal to Djibouti and then on past Singapore.” He believes the ship also carried weapons as part of the Iran-Contra affair — the covert US sale of arms to Iran in exchange for the release of Hezbollah-held hostages in Lebanon. That belief is his alone: Woodbury notes he found no reference to Iran-Contra in the court documents or the dozens of newspaper articles he reviewed for this story.
Van Veenen’s plan to sail the ship to Alaska via the Panama Canal died of the ship’s running costs and a soured sale of his trading post. He renamed it the Thackeray C, after his then-wife, and sold it to a Quebec buyer. In October 1984 the ship was briefly accused — by an unidentified Irish national police spokesperson, speaking to Gordon — of being the mother ship in a high-seas arms transfer to the Irish Republican Army; a day later, a Canadian customs official said it had been sitting in Gaspé, Quebec, since that July. By 1992 it was photographed in St. John’s Harbour under yet another name, the Gesmer I.
How it ended for the operators
In 1984 a task force of the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration began questioning suspects in Rhode Island, according to a 1988 Providence Journal article. Investigators were helped by records seized by police in Guernsey that contained “almost a diary of the whole operation” — names, dates, costs, expected profits. Murray, the alleged mastermind, was never tried: he fled. The ship outlasted the case against everyone connected to it, sold at auction for a six-figure sum its buyer thought was a steal on a million-dollar asset, which was itself a rounding error on the money that had passed through the operation that built it.