A Rock Fell on the Moon Read online

  There was never any doubt that Dad and Bobcik, charged with theft, conspiracy and illegal sale of silver ore and concentrates, would have their day in court. The Mounties had amassed cartons of evidence, much of it packed in the trunk of their ever-idling Pontiac, including sacks of ore, maps, photographs, letters, cancelled cheques and bank statements.

  The strongest indications of mischief, however, were raised by the thirty-one Crown witnesses, who ranged from the manager of the Elsa branch of the Royal Bank of Canada to three WP&YR truck drivers, to AsarCO smelter manager Stanley Lane, to a Toronto lawyer and mining company investor, to former UKHM mine employees and other associates of the accused, to the mine’s most senior executives. Last, but certainly not least, was a phalanx of esteemed geological and mineralogical experts.

  “They had a huge number of geologists ready to testify,” Molson recalled. “They just kept pouring in—UKHM spared no expense.”

  Dad’s defense, at least its bare bones, was by now well known. Thanks to his lengthy interview with Lanthorn, the Crown knew that Dad maintained his ore came from the Moon claims, which he and Poncho had “hand-mined” from a giant boulder of silver-rich rock. As far as the precipitates and concentrates were concerned, Dad’s story was that as chief assayer he simply followed a long-standing custom that allowed assayers to take them.

  For the most part, Molson believed Dad’s story and thought he came across well. “I liked him. He didn’t look like a thief. He was almost a spiritual kind of guy… Bobcik was rough. Priest wasn’t. But he was very intense sometimes, and I wondered why.”

  Early on in his letters home, Dad made an effort to be upbeat and optimistic. In the sixties, long distance phone calls were expensive and used for emergencies only.

  “Things don’t look bad yet, but the evidence is not all in and I believe the worst is yet to come,” Dad wrote on November 26. “But my spirits are good and people here are on our side to a great degree.” He added that he planned to “fight this out for the opportunity to get home again” and ended with a romantic sentiment: “Your hand in mine, your face before me, always.”

  Mill worker Siegfried Haina’s testimony was especially damaging to Poncho. With help from a German translator, a nervous Haina spoke of stealing precipitates from the mill and selling them to Poncho over a period of several months, as he had admitted to Strathdee after his intense interrogation. In exchange for his testimony, Haina had received a suspended sentence. Regehr tried to persuade Haina to say the police had pressured him to identify Poncho as the purchaser and that UKHM had even paid him to do so. But that strategy went nowhere.

  When Pike took the stand, he refuted Dad’s claim that, as chief assayer, he was entitled to keep “rejects” from the assaying process. UKHM policy dictated that any precipitates or concentrates either delivered to or produced in the assay office were the property of the company, Pike insisted. “No one was entitled to keep anything from the mine mill.”

  Another strike against Dad was the amount of precipitate material in the shipment, somewhere between 400 and 1,000 pounds. Such large volumes, explained mill superintendent Arthur Wall, could only have come from the mill because the assay office took only tiny portions of mill precipitates. Furthermore, he said, assay office precipitates were ground up, screened and weighed before delivery, making them extremely pure. Yet intermixed with the precipitates in the Priest shipment were numerous shreds or whole pieces of filter paper that could only have come from the mill. Then Wall delivered what for Dad and Poncho must have been a bit of a bombshell. “UKHM shipped all its precipitates to a smelter in Silbey, California,” Wall said. “The smelter in Helena was not equipped to handle that product.”

  At the heart of the hearing, though, was the question of where the bulk of the shipment—the 70 tons of raw ore—originated. Mineral experts and geologists had a field day contesting Dad and Poncho’s assertion that the ore came from the Moon. Federal government geologist Kenneth Christie thought that 90 percent could not have originated on the Moon. However, the defense counsels discredited his statement that it could not possibly have come from some other place on Keno Hill. Falconbridge geologist Alexander Smith believed as much as 80 percent likely came from the Bonanza Stope, although some may have originated in other parts of the same vein.

  On December 3 the star of the show took the stand. A senior scientist in the Mineral Sciences Division of the Department of Mines in Ottawa and an internationally recognized expert in mineralogy and microscopy, Maurice Haycock was a true Renaissance man. Aside from his professional accomplishments, he was a consummate classical musician (French horn) and a highly regarded plein-air painter and a colleague of A.Y. Jackson. With a passion for Canada’s north, Haycock was fondly known as “The Arctic Artist.”

  Employing state-of-the-art visual display technology—a slide projector and 35 mm colour slides—Haycock presented the hearing with a glimpse into the mysterious microscopic world of ore. Attendees were shown strangely beautiful Kodachrome images of glinting red, black, blue and silver.

  Haycock’s photos illuminated his conclusion that 90 percent of the ore samples “could have come from the Elsa Mine” and that only a tiny fraction of the shipment, under 5 percent, could have come from elsewhere. “Practically none of the shipment could have come from the Moon claims,” Haycock said.

  With the completion of Haycock’s testimony, a trio of geologists had—or so Crown counsel Wylie hoped—firmly established that the ore came from the Elsa mine, and if it did not, that it most certainly did not come from the Moon. If the defendants were ordered to stand trial, their case would focus on evidence or expert testimony of the opposite. With the crackerjack team of rock jocks he’d amassed, Wylie felt that Priest and Bobcik were going to have a devil of a time. Still, the prosecutor admitted privately that his case was also going to be a tough slog.

  Despite hundreds of ore samples analyzed up the yingyang by some of the brightest minds in the business, not a single piece of silver-rich rock could be directly linked to UKHM’s Elsa mine, or the famed Bonanza Stope. Opining that the rock looked like it could come from something that didn’t exist anymore was hardly the stuff of a successful prosecution. Worse yet, Wylie could not produce a single witness who saw Priest and Bobcik steal ore from the Elsa mine.

  However, Wylie had an advantage most prosecutors today do not. Under the criminal code of the day, Dad and Bobcik were charged with an unusual crime that placed the onus on them to prove their innocence. Normally, the accused are presumed innocent until the prosecution proves them guilty. But because of a “reverse onus” provision in the criminal statute that dated back to petty mining thefts in early twentieth-century Ontario, Dad and Poncho were presumed guilty. The onus was on them to prove they were the rightful owners of the ore. No such charge exists today, as it would violate the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Even back then, it was cause for consternation in other jurisdictions, as Dad would discover—to his advantage—years later.

  Shortly after Haycock testified, the hearing ended for the day and another weekend began. It was a weekend John Molson will never forget. By then, he had become familiar with a few people and was actually on good terms with Strathdee. Earlier in the week, Strathdee had ambled up to Molson and Trainor and asked if they’d like to see the Moon claims.

  On Saturday, off the men went in Strathdee’s well-travelled Grand Prix. It was an excruciatingly slow, long drive on a snow-covered gravel road from one patch of nowhere to another: past Elsa, past Keno and past the old Wernecke ghost town. When the three men reached their destination, a narrow bench that offered a view down a steep gulch to the claim area below, Molson wondered what the heck they’d come there for. Snow, silence and an infinite emptiness engulfed the threesome. “It was just a sea of white,” Molson recalls. “Christ, we couldn’t see anything and we were cold as hell on top of this mountain, practically.”

  Perhaps the field tri
p had been Strathdee’s attempt to emphasize what a friggin’ long way the Moon claims were from anywhere, and that hauling 70 tons of ore out would be near impossible. But with the cold shooting through the soles of his black dress shoes like ice arrows, Molson didn’t care. All he wanted was to curl up in the cozy confines of the Chateau Mayo, no doubt with a glass of his namesake’s ale. In a second they were back in the car, making ready their escape. Strathdee stuck the key in the ignition and turned it. Nothing stirred. No sound of the engine even attempting to grip. The men looked at each other. No one spoke. Strathdee tried again. No response. And again. The stillness was deafening. Maybe the engine was flooded. They waited an eternal moment as the Ice Queen stroked each man’s neck. Another thirty seconds and Strathdee cranked a fourth time. Sputter, cough and vroom. “We saw where the Moon claims were,” Molson said. “But so what? Going downhill back to Mayo, the magistrate and I just looked at each other. We’d almost died in the middle of nowhere.”

  Consulting geologist Aaro Aho was the last person to testify. An ambitious and intellectually formidable geological engineer, Aho added his voice to the chorus discounting the Moon claims as the source of the ore. The idea of a massive boulder breaking away from a silver-rich vein up a mountain, rolling down and coming to rest on the Moon was preposterous, he told the hearing. “Such a piece of float would, by then, be no larger than a pea.”

  Unlike other experts, however, Aho had to perform some verbal gymnastics on the stand to explain why he had entered into various business agreements with Bobcik. Exactly when and how those questionable arrangements played out remains a mystery. As previously mentioned, Aho names no names—including his own—in the chapter called “The Mysterious Ore Shipment” in Hills of Silver, and died back in 1977. But a careful reader with some knowledge of the events can confidently decipher the code. The “shipper—a quiet brooding introvert” is clearly Dad. The “miner—a happy go lucky irrepressible extrovert” is Poncho. And “a consulting geological engineer” is Aho himself. Why Aho became involved with a slippery character like Poncho and with the Moon claims is obvious: he wanted a share in the riches.

  According to Aho, Poncho flew to Vancouver in the fall of 1961 to tell the geologist about what he described as a fantastic find of between 50 and 60 tons of extremely rich silver ore. The only other thing he revealed, Aho said, was that it came from somewhere east of Mayo Lake. Perhaps Poncho intended only to plant a seed of interest with Aho because nothing more happened until the following year, when Poncho brought Aho beads of silver and ore samples, plus a plea for money and equipment to continue “mining.” And this time he said the samples came from the Moon claims. Aho did not go north and inspect the claims, however. Instead, he and the directors of his two companies, Peso Silver Mines Ltd. and Silver Titan Mines Ltd., gave Bobcik $25,000 in equipment and another $25,000 for expenses. Aho and friends must have been smitten with the ore samples because Poncho also convinced Peso to do an intense amount of claim staking near the Moon. Soon after, Peso purchased twenty claims in the area for $150,000.

  Then, in July 1963, Aho got wind that some 70 tons of high-grade ore had arrived in Vancouver and was being offloaded at the North Vancouver dock. The ore belonged to Alpine Gold and Silver Ltd. with Dad as the registered shipper. Aho had had no dealings with Dad, and no right to touch the ore. But he knew Poncho was associated with Alpine and, disgruntled with the deal they had struck a year earlier—Aho had so far seen no return on his investment—he arranged for a few samples to be snitched. Comparing them to the samples Poncho had shown him earlier, he saw that they matched. Finally Aho was motivated to travel to the Yukon and meet Poncho on the Moon claims. Almost as soon as he arrived, Aho told the hearing, he saw that the Moon could not possibly have yielded such rich ore. He pressed Poncho on that point, and Poncho admitted the ore was stolen.

  As more evidence came to light, Bobcik’s dealings took on an increasingly shadowy tone. Toronto lawyer Richard Irwin Martin—“a conservative Toronto solicitor, embarrassed at being involved,” as Aho describes him—testified that Alpine was in effect Bobcik’s company, with Martin nominally in charge as president. Martin would later tell police that Bobcik tried to have him structure a deal that would have done Dad out of his share of the proceeds. Under this agreement Dad’s cash share would have automatically been converted to shares in a worthless company, leaving Bobcik to take the booty. But Martin and another Alpine director scuttled Bobcik’s plans and Martin resigned as president just prior to arriving in Mayo for the hearing.

  Why the Toronto lawyer got mixed up with a character like Bobcik and uncertain claims in the Yukon in the first place remains another unanswered question. In a review of hundreds of pages of RCMP files I later obtained from Library and Archives Canada, I discovered the rough outline of Poncho’s plans to cheat Dad. However, because the files are heavily redacted, many details of these arrangements and others remain a mystery.

  On cross-examination, defence lawyers Molson and Regehr asked Aho why he hadn’t alerted police immediately upon learning the ore was stolen. Aho had a quick retort: if he notified police, he was sure the ore (which he had not seen and could not verify the origins of) would stay hidden. Instead, he had chosen to wait it out and see what happened. His explanation raised many questions. Why, knowing that Bobcik was behaving so suspiciously, had Aho continued to have anything to do with him? Aho’s response was again less than satisfying and close to nonsensical: it had been “strictly against his will and advice” that Peso and Titan (of which he was president) had continued to deal with Bobcik. For some reason, he said, the company directors forced his hand.

  At the end of the day, Strathdee was pleased with how the hearing unfolded. Still, he knew getting a conviction before a judge and jury was another matter—especially if jury members came from Mayo.

  “The unpopularity of big mining companies is well justified,” Strathdee later told me. Mines are generally dangerous and unpleasant places to work and when miners go below ground to risk life and limb for the supervisors above, they often feel they deserve a share of the wealth. The little guy making rich is a powerful myth in the mining fraternity, and Strathdee suspected that deep and longstanding resentment by workers and their families against UKHM could spell trouble.

  “Barring the possibility of a prejudiced jury, which is a very real possibility should the trial be held in Mayo, I have every reason to expect convictions on all charges,” Strathdee wrote in his summary of the hearing. He would no doubt have concurred with Dad’s letter to Mom sent five days before the hearing ended:

  The preliminary drags on—it will be the longest held in the Yukon. So be it. I’m doing fine, just letting it go in one ear and out the other. The talk around town is that if our trial is held in Mayo, we will get off. I’m just going day by day, knowing that some day all this will be just a bad dream and we’ll all be together again.

  The Crown would win their argument for the trial to be held in Whitehorse, not Mayo. But Strathdee’s hope that a change in venue would guarantee victory in court was just that: a hope.

  Preparing to head home, John Molson knew his connection with the case was over. His firm was already out of pocket and Dad would unlikely offer anything more than a promise to share in the proceeds of his ore, once the case was resolved in his favour. That, Molson knew, would not be enough to keep Bull, Housser & Tupper in the game.

  Which was too bad, because Molson was fascinated with the case. Priest’s story seemed true. Yet Molson had seen where the ore allegedly came from and had to admit it would have taken a Hercules to hand-mine that much rock, break it up into manageable pieces, bag it and load it onto the bed of a toboggan, then make dozens of trips up and out of a steep gulch using a snow machine, before transferring the loads to a pickup truck.

  On his last day in Mayo, Molson was flagged down by Strathdee, who wanted to show him one more thing before he left the Yukon. Amidst the stack of document
s the RCMP investigator had accumulated was a scrapbook seized during a search of Dad’s papers. “This would never be admissible in court, mind you. But I thought you should see it,” Strathdee said. Molson opened the book and began flipping the pages, pausing briefly to examine one neatly pasted newspaper or magazine article after another. Each story chronicled a mine heist somewhere in the world.

  “Interesting, eh,” Strathdee said.

  Molson closed the book, grunted in reply and walked away.

  Chapter 14

  A Home Again, of Sorts

  A father’s pride I used to know,A mother’s love was mine.

  By December 1963, fantasies of escaping to Elsa still fogged my slipping-to-sleep mind and shadowed my daydreams. Schooldays defined dull, my classmates were distant and I wasn’t close to caring. When not in school, I walked Pierre and taught him tricks like rollover, dance and “bang, you’re dead,” none of which Caesar would consider even if you’d tempted him with a live rat. Vona and I played Chinese skip, double dutch, hopscotch, hide-and-seek and Simon Says outdoors, or twenty questions and pick-up sticks indoors, but she always won so I often played alone with my few toy farm animals. Neither of us was into dolls. Mostly, Vona and I were into one library book after another.