A Rock Fell on the Moon Read online

  As we waited for our food, Strathdee said that no one, least of all he and Lauren McKiel, had any idea how tough, trying and time-consuming Dad’s case would be. Most of the mine’s employees, along with the region’s wider community of tramps, prospectors, independent geologists, outfitters and woodsmen, hated UKHM. Al Pike was universally feared and/or disliked, and regarded by many as “an arrogant bastard,” Strathdee said. McKiel described Pike as “the toughest mine manager I ever laid eyes on. It was his way or the highway.”

  But it wasn’t just Pike—a big part of the problem was UKHM’s whole approach to mining in the region. Strathdee told me about how one day, while in the UKHM main office, he saw a large patchwork map of the Keno Hill area showing all the staked claims and known ore veins running through them. “UKHM knew exactly where the rich veins went and would wait patiently until a prospector was ready to sell.” The intent was to wait them out and buy up all the productive claims.“There were big problems with UKHM. They were not popular,” Strathdee continued. “There was so much bad feeling about the company [that] we got very reluctant witnesses to testify against the two men.”

  As a result, when word spread that two men were suspected of stealing ore from the company, many people sided with Dad and Poncho. Still, it didn’t take long for Strathdee to figure out that Dad’s statement to FBI agent Bruce Lanthorn about mining the Moon claims didn’t quite add up. The story had parallels to Poncho’s tale told to McKiel during a lengthy interview early in the investigation. Poncho wasn’t a suspect at that point, but rather a potential key witness who could offer insights both as a prospector and as someone who’d worked with Dad.

  “I sat down with him in his cabin in Keno City and over the space of four and a half hours wrote a twenty-nine-page-long foolscap Q&A. He started talking and didn’t stop,” McKiel recounted. “Basically he told me your father found the ore on the Moon claims and they’d mined it and kept quiet. It was theirs, and they were waiting for their cheque.”

  This was the first McKiel had heard about a link between the two men and the Moon claims. But that admission didn’t raise any suspicions. Not yet. Like Lanthorn, who’d regarded Dad’s account as plausible, McKiel initially viewed Bobcik’s story as “straightforward and logical.” Less than a month later, however, the two Mounties changed their minds.

  “Priest’s story of transporting (as well as mining) the ore from the Moon Claims by motor toboggan during February, March and April, 1963 is ridiculous,” Strathdee wrote in an official police summary in late August of 1963.“The distance from the Moon Claims to the Duncan Creek Loading Site is approximately 18 miles through extremely rough terrain. After looking over the area, I formed the opinion that the shipment had come from Galena Hill and not from Keno Hill, on the far side of which the Moon Claims are located. The only mine on Galena Hill producing ore as rich as that believed to be in the shipment is the Elsa mine and it was conceivable that the shipment could have been high-graded through the 200-foot entrance to the mine, which is near the top of the hill and not used regularly as an entrance.”

  The Moon claims story may indeed have been “a pack of lies,” as McKiel would come to call it, but proving so in court would tax the Mounties’ investigative skills to the max.

  Pike and other UKHM officials insisted that the entire shipment originated from the Elsa mine, but with their knowledge of the law the Mounties pursued two separate leads. Down one path they would establish that the ore came from the Elsa mine and demonstrate who stole it and how. Down the other they would prove that the ore could not possibly have come from the Moon. The Mounties vigorously pursued both avenues, burning through months of time, energy and money.

  As the two detectives delved deeper, questions multiplied like mosquitoes in July. If the ore had come from the Elsa mine, how had Dad and Poncho stolen it so easily and without any witnesses? As chief assayer, Dad never ventured underground. And proposing that Poncho, a miner, had staged and executed the disappearance of 70 tons of rock by himself was beyond belief. They must have had inside help. But who? Could McKiel and Strathdee persuade anyone to testify against the suspected thieves? And if the silver ore originated from the Bonanza Stope, as Pike, Archer and others claimed, how could they prove it now that the Bonanza existed in memory only? Two years before, all that rich ore had been excavated, mixed with other ore and smelted, and the stope backfilled with tons of waste rock. There was not a single sample of Bonanza ore left to compare with the ore in the suspected shipment.

  As Strathdee and McKiel interviewed miners and managers, they learned of the mysterious goings on at the Elsa mine two years earlier: shadowy figures identified by one worker as Bobcik and Swizinski inside the mine in the dead of night; drags on the mine’s compressor system during off-shift hours; Bobcik and another man caught in the headlights of passing pickup trucks while struggling with heavy bags in the early dawn of a new day. But while all of this appeared incriminating, there was nothing concrete to link the shipment to those men—especially Dad, who was never seen near the mine, let alone in it. Any defence lawyer would make moose meat of a case trying to connect the two.

  Even so, Strathdee and McKiel’s suspicions intensified as they learned that not all the ore could have come from the Bonanza Stope, but that some must be from other areas in the Elsa mine; that other mine workers had toyed with the idea of stealing ore from the stope but had never played it through; and that the stolen ore had, in all likelihood, been squirrelled away in the maze of underground tunnels for months before being cached above ground.

  The conclusion was inevitable. As former Elsa Mountie Jim Lambert told me, “You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out there had to be a third or even a fourth man… Because when those guys took the ore out of the mine, they had to know nobody would be there to see them. There had to be someone in an administrative position who knew the shifts.”

  Lambert served two years in Elsa, from November 1963 to 1965, and while he wasn’t involved in the investigation, he was “very attuned” to the rumours swirling through town. Part of his job entailed interviewing recent immigrants, mostly miners, for their Canadian citizenship eligibility. “I was constantly talking to people… and I would ask them about current events, the capital of Manitoba, and it was a perfect time to slip in, ‘Do you think anybody was with Priest and Bobcik?’”

  One man’s name kept popping up, Lambert said. The same man Strathdee and McKiel began to suspect: Martin Swizinski.

  Originally from Alberta, Swizinski worked briefly for UKHM in the Elsa region in 1951. From the time of his return to UKHM’s employ in 1955, he rose steadily in the mine hierarchy to become a shift boss and mine captain. By the time the investigation began, he was “very highly thought of” by his bosses, peers and work crews, and was granted time to shepherd Strathdee and others around the mine to collect ore samples that might be used as evidence against Dad and Poncho. On that level, at least, he was “cooperating” with the investigation.

  But Strathdee and McKiel knew something Pike didn’t. Documents obtained through searches of Poncho’s cabin, Dad’s office, the bank, the two men’s vehicles and various businesses where one or both had made purchases included a three-ring binder with papers referring to a three-man operation. The three men’s identities were noted by first initial only: G, for Gerald; P, for Poncho; and M—which the two Mounties believed was for Martin.

  Frustratingly, few such pieces of paper existed. One contained a list itemizing vehicle fuel purchases by the gallon, fuel drum purchases, long distance phone calls, lumber and pipe purchases, and auto parts purchases. Beside each entry, one of the three initials appeared. For example, in April 1962, G, P and M purchased a tremendous amount of fuel within a short timeframe. McKiel and Strathdee believed this was the critical period when the bulk of the ore had been rushed from its hiding place inside the mine to the Duncan Creek site.

  The other document was a more intr
iguing set of sixty-nine handwritten entries on three assay office worksheets. Written by Poncho, who struggled at times with math, the entries recorded not only the volume of ore moved, but also the assays for each sack of ore. Beside these entries were notes about whether or not M was to receive a cut, how many ounces of silver were estimated to be in each bag, and an entry of the ore type. One among many entries noted 273 sacks of ore, assaying at 4,000 ounces of silver per ton, with M owed a percentage of the sale.

  When everything on the pages was added up, G and P were each to receive 44.1 percent of the proceeds and M was to receive 11.8 percent. With the lion’s share of the spoils going to Dad and Poncho, M must have played a lesser role in the theft. Likely, at some point M wanted out.

  Although the documents strongly indicated that three individuals were involved in the theft, nothing tangible linked Martin Swizinski—or any other “M” for that matter—to Gerald Priest and Anthony (Poncho) Bobcik, financially or otherwise.

  In the absence of such evidence, the Mounties were stymied in their attempts to prove the theft was orchestrated from within the Elsa mine. Dad and Poncho were sticking to their story that the ore came from the Moon. And Swizinski wasn’t talking. When the Mounties finally got around to questioning him, he repeatedly maintained that he knew nothing. Strathdee asked if he would consent to taking a polygraph test. Swizinski said yes. But there was a hitch. The Yukon RCMP did not have a polygraph machine and the equipment would have to come, along with an operator, from Alaska. A request was issued. As the day neared for the scheduled test, Swizinski told Strathdee he’d changed his mind and now refused to take it.

  McKiel and Strathdee always believed Swizinski was the third man. So did Archer and Cathro. Mom was also on that list, telling us Dad had told her Swizinski helped out. But Swizinski was a popular fellow and “seemed to be on a first name basis with everyone he knew.” No one would speak a word against him. The investigators reluctantly concluded that unless someone talked, they had no evidence that the heist had been a coordinated inside job, involving one of the mine’s most trusted senior workers.

  “The subject has been interviewed twice, the second time quite thoroughly,” Strathdee wrote in one of many internal memos on the subject of Mr. M. “He remained calm and denied everything. Further interviews will not be attempted until more definitive evidence is available. We are, however, reasonably sure that he is the person represented as ‘M.’” Strathdee hoped that further interviews with Dad and Poncho might elicit “sufficient information to positively connect him” with the heist.

  His expectation was not unreasonable given that the two sleuths had amassed a great deal of evidence against Dad and Poncho. But neither suspect implicated Swizinski. And Swizinski never implicated them. Years later, Mom told my sister and me that Dad, Poncho and Martin had sworn a pact of silence in the event that one or more of them were ever caught. They thought of themselves as “three honourable men” and honourable men do not rat each other out. But there was another part to the vow—one more difficult to keep. If someone was caught and imprisoned, they had agreed, the others would help that man’s family as best they could.

  One peculiar thing workers at the assay office noticed in the months before Dad and Poncho left was that both men loved being at work. If Poncho worked nights, he’d show up at the office during the day, and vice versa. Dad, meanwhile, showed up at the office in the evenings, despite having a day job. And sometimes he went in on Sundays. “I often saw his car there at night, but I don’t know what he was doing,” one former worker told the RCMP. As more assay office workers were questioned, McKiel and Strathdee discovered that Poncho did more on the job than just crush rock. “He was accumulating precipitate,” fire assayer John Bourdeaux told Strathdee. “It was being found all over the office.” In fact, Bourdeaux found three large bags of the material in a drawer in the back office. Danny Skobeyko, a bucker in the assay office, also found small bags of precipitates in the office and knew of bags stored beneath the fire assay office.“We suspected Poncho and heard rumours that he was buying precipitate from the workers in the mill,” Bourdeaux said.

  After hours, employees often found Poncho in the furnace room, handling large crucibles that Bourdeaux and others believed he filled with precipitates to create solid pieces of silver. Bourdeaux also told Strathdee that Gerry once hauled another fire assayer over the coals for cooking a high-grade sample in the oven. When Poncho said “That’s okay—it’s mine,” however, Gerry shut up. And now and again Gerry himself came down to the fire assay office and smelted small amounts of silver.

  What Poncho and Dad were busy doing in the assay office in 1962 was, first, verifying the grade of “their” ore, and second, amassing precipitates from the mill that would be added to the shipment.

  If Poncho was buying precipitate, someone in the mill was selling it. The police eventually zeroed in on mill worker Siegfried Haina. Through him they got their first big break in the investigation. After a three-hour interrogation by Strathdee, Haina confessed that he sold 600 to 700 pounds of precipitates to Poncho.

  The arrangement had started innocently enough. Poncho had asked Haina whether he would like a chunk of solid silver and showed Haina a sample of his work from the assay office. Haina said he would and Poncho replied that he’d be happy to make him one but would need a small amount of precipitate matter from the mill.

  “So I gave him a small sack full, maybe 6 or 7 pounds,” Haina said.

  A few days later, Poncho gave Haina a piece of silver and asked him to bring him more precipitate. Only this time, he said, he’d pay for it.

  “What did you say?” Strathdee asked.

  “I said I can’t go there,” Haina replied. “And he [Poncho] said it’s real easy, you can go there… He said he would pay me a dollar a pound and that he would kill me if I ever told anyone. I needed money to help my mother out because she was sick.”

  Before long, Haina was pinching precipitates out of the mill in loads of 40 to 80 pounds. Security was slack and it was a simple matter of walking out an unlocked back door and hiding it in the snow. Then he’d look around for Poncho and tell him he had more precipitates for pickup. Poncho paid Haina in cash, but Haina said the payments were always somewhat less than he was owed, and he was never paid for the last 80 to 100 pounds he delivered. Haina last spoke to Poncho two months before he sat down with Strathdee, right around the time the investigation was underway. The two men met at the Keno bar. “Don’t say nothing about that precipitate,” Poncho told Haina. “Nothing. You know what I told you before.”

  In total, Poncho bought 841 pounds of precipitate, the bulk from Haina, the rest from persons unknown. Notes in the three-ring binder showed that the costs for the precipitates were split evenly between G and P.

  Chapter 10

  The Crème de la Crème

  It’s easy to cry that you’re beaten—and die;It’s easy to crawfish and crawl;But to fight and to fight when hope’s out of sight—Why, that’s the best game of them all!

  RCMP Constable Lauren McKiel flew from Whitehorse on a Canadian Pacific Airlines DC-6B dressed in a steel grey, narrow-lapelled business suit. Under his jacket and clipped to his belt, his short-nosed .38-calibre pistol gently nudged his right hip. It was August 6, 1963, and he was headed to Vancouver.

  The groundwork was thoroughly prepared for Dad’s quick and trouble-free arrest—or so McKiel thought. With a handful of search warrants to examine Dad’s Royal Bank of Canada accounts, his vehicles, the moving company used to ship our belongings and the Vancouver basement suite where we now lived, McKiel thought he had all the angles covered. If things went according to plan, Gerald Priest would spend that night in a Vancouver jail and fly north the next morning for his first court appearance in Whitehorse.

  But right from the start, surprises, mishaps and miscommunications arose that threw the Mountie’s strategy off-kilter and heightened the urgency
around Dad’s arrest. For McKiel, it all added up to a missed opportunity—his chance to surprise Dad, sparing everyone concerned excess mental anguish, time and expense. Perhaps the biggest shock came during a refuelling stopover in Fort St. John. As McKiel re-boarded the plane, who should step into the cabin but Anthony Bobcik. Alarm bells rang. McKiel pressed Bobcik to talk, but a grunted half-greeting was all he got. His best hope now was to preempt any meeting between the two prime suspects before their arrest. Experience taught him that surprising a suspect with an arrest warrant could elicit a confession. But then, he didn’t know Dad.

  McKiel’s reception in Vancouver did not bode well either. The member of the Vancouver Police Department who was supposed to pick him up was nowhere to be seen. After waiting thirty-five minutes, McKiel contacted the RCMP’s airport detachment where the lone member on duty, Constable Duckworth, radioed the officer who was supposed to have fetched McKiel. The officer had been at the airport but waited at another terminal. Having given up and driven back to Vancouver, he was in no mood to make a second trip. Take a cab, McKiel was told.

  Before doing so, though, McKiel was anxious to alert his superiors that Bobcik had been on the flight and would likely contact Dad. Making his way to the airport detachment’s office, he asked Duckworth to call RCMP Sergeant J.O. Sehl at Vancouver’s S Division. Frustrated and impatient, McKiel grabbed the phone, saying it was “imperative” that Dad be arrested immediately. But when he went on to outline his plans for the arrest, followed by a search of Dad’s residence and vehicles, he was met with his third disappointment of the day.