A Rock Fell on the Moon Read online

  Thanks to Omi, we knew our Bible, and recited grace before meals and prayers before bed. For me, God was a given: the winter sky, the autumn hills and the coming of spring were proof enough. For a while. As we grew older, Dad’s relentless rationalism began to niggle at our beliefs. And as Omi’s English improved, she couldn’t resist swallowing the bait of Dad’s scriptural scoffing. One evening, the discussion turned to the Genesis parable about the evil city of Sodom. Naturally, the Bible we read was a sanitized children’s “story book.” The original version of Sodom and Gomorrah is a brutal and sexually disturbing tale unfit for little ears. That evening the subject was Lot’s wife and God’s punishment for disobeying His order not to look back at the city of Sodom. She looked back and was instantly turned into a pillar of salt. We were horrified and gasped at the swift and brutal judgment of what we believed was a loving and benevolent God. Our faces were a mix of confusion and fear. Dad looked at us and then stood up and raised his arms heavenward.

  “God, here I am,” he called in jest. “Turn me to stone. I dare you! If you can do it, do it now. I am yours! Turn me to stone!”

  He stood up and jumped on his chair, hands almost scraping the ceiling.

  “Gerry,” Omi wailed. “Please stop. Stop. I beg you. You must not tempt God! It is a sin.”

  “Ha-ha-ha-ha! How about a pillar of salt, God?! Come now, all-powerful One. Right now—a pillar of salt! Can you do it?”

  Believer, unbeliever or agnostic, tempting fate, some say, is a fool’s game. But at that moment, Dad had it all: a home rich with music, books and pets, and where he didn’t have to boil a kettle or wash a sock; a well-paying job; a beautiful and affectionate wife; and two daughters who revered him as only little girls can. Or perhaps he saw things differently: four female dependants, an ailing wife who couldn’t give him the son he deserved, a religiously fanatical mother-in-law, a tedious dead-end job for a company of fools and two daughters who revered him as only little girls can?

  Chapter 6

  The Nighttime Is the Right Time

  A man’s a mug to slog away And stint himself of ease,When bureaucrats take half his pay To glut their treasuries.

  In the early hours of July 30, 1961, Frank Obella was alone at the United Keno Hill Mines Elsa operation. As a compressor operator, he’d just returned from a short stroll into the dark, damp 400-foot portal, an adit (horizontal passage) into Galena Hill about 400 feet below the original surface outcrop of ore. This subterranean tunnel, the mine’s main entrance, was situated next to the mine office, change room and mill, and near other major UKHM operations. After his routine inspection of the air pipe, Obella noted something odd on his return to the compressor house. Inexplicably, a sudden drag of air exited the system. The pressure plummeted by nearly half, from 110 pounds per square inch to 60. This sudden drop could mean only one of two things: either the line had broken somewhere, or someone in the mine had opened a valve to release a blast of air.

  Air-pressure drops would be routine during a work shift when the mine was crawling with a crew of labouring men. But this was sometime between two a.m. and six a.m.—the four “dead” hours between the day and night shifts. Right now, with the cafeteria and beer parlour closed, all the miners were sleeping, showering, drinking or doing God knows what back in their closet-sized rooms at the bunkhouse.

  Air compressors are vital to underground mining. They blow away dust particles or smoke, regulate temperatures and power machinery used to drill, push or lift rock. But in the Elsa shaft, compressors served an even more critical function. As a result of a thick cap of permafrost marked by cracks that leaked out oxygen-rich air from beneath, the Elsa mine had notoriously “bad” air. Compressors channelled fresh air into underground areas and forced out the bad air that could be dangerously low in oxygen, so low it could kill. That’s exactly what had happened in the previous decade when two miners climbed several lifts to retrieve a mucking machine. As the pair rose higher within the mine, the air became thinner and thinner. One miner collapsed and fell back down to the floor, where he revived, but the miner who continued higher died of asphyxiation. UKHM geologist Al Archer had a surefire solution to the problem: a lit cigarette. Like the proverbial canary in the coalmine, when Archer’s cigarette began to sputter, he knew it was time to either get the hell out or get a drag of fresh air from the compressor.

  Naturally Frank Obella was perplexed about the sudden change in pressure. Who could be in the mine when both crews were off shift? And why? Ambling back into the shaft a second time to ensure he wasn’t going loco, he spotted a man in the distance fading deeper into the darkness. With 200 feet separating them, Obella couldn’t make out who the individual was, but noted his hard hat and his lack of a light. By now, Obella had reached the same air valve the retreating man had used.

  “I turned the valve off and the man in the mine turned around and saw me,” Obella said. “He looked at me for a second or two and then kept walking into the mine. He turned and looked at me once more and then turned left by the elevators.”

  Rather than pursue the man, Obella returned to the powerhouse where he phoned and woke mine captain Fred Southam. Outside, a northern dawn washed the sleeping town in a flat light, pale as skim milk.

  Southam showed up about twenty minutes later, along with surface superintendent Jack Hogan, production superintendent Bruce Lang and staffer George Reynolds.

  The group strode 500 feet into the adit—as far as the downward sloping shaft—and out again. They hung around for about an hour and then, after remarking that anyone in there would be impossible to find, left. As far as Southam and the rest of the crew were concerned, Obella had cried wolf. Someone asked if he’d been drinking before or during his shift. (Within a month, after only nine months with UKHM, Obella quit and returned home to Italy.)

  Two weeks later, however, another compressor man, Joseph Keller, had a similar experience. Seated in the doorway of the compressor house, once again in the dead hours of the night, he saw two men cross in front of the lights from the doorway going toward the 400-foot portal. He recognized one as twenty-nine-year-old UKHM miner Anthony Bobcik and the other as thirty-five-year-old night mine captain Martin Swizinski.

  Bobcik visited our home often over the space of a year or two, which I thought normal at the time but now seems strange. Unspoken town etiquette discouraged management, staff and miners from socializing with each other. In fact, Bobcik was the only underground worker Dad, who was staff, befriended to that degree. Like many others, we knew him by his nickname, “Poncho.” He was built like a giant, tall and wide with dark greased-back hair, a ruddy complexion and a belly. Most often, he smelled of sweat and salami. Jolly, with an easy, runaway laugh, Poncho would scoop us up one at a time, twirl us around, but then abruptly release us. He promptly became awkward when Mom appeared, and avoided her eyes.

  In Cashing In, Jane Gaffin notes Bobcik’s commanding size—6 feet tall and 220 pounds—and reveals details of his character and background. “He was a nonchalant, clever extrovert with an above-average intelligence,” Gaffin writes. “He was fond of music, especially opera, but seldom socialized.” Bobcik’s father had been a wealthy farmer in Czechoslovakia until 1949, when he switched to running a trucking company. But the Soviet-dominated government expropriated both the family farm and the business.

  Between 1951, when he emigrated to Canada, and 1957, when he moved to Elsa, Bobcik worked as a shoe-cutter in an Ontario factory and later as a trucker and logger in the Duncan area on Vancouver Island. As a new immigrant in a new land, he accepted hard work at grunt jobs as his destiny. Like other recent eastern European arrivals, he instinctively feared authority figures, and was suspicious of anyone with power.

  Shortly after seeing the two men, Joseph Keller noticed the same sudden drag on the compressor that Obella had. Someone in the mine was using the air-powered machinery. Unlike Obella, however, Keller kept what he saw to himself
. The bosses had ridiculed Obella over the alleged sighting earlier that month, which had amounted to nothing, and Keller was in no mood to give his superiors a reason to bad-mouth him. Instead, he returned to his station and hung out to see who would eventually emerge. But just as before, no one did.

  The failure of the two men to walk out the main entrance of the mine was not magic, mystery or an employee’s alcohol-fuelled fantasy. Up the hill and around the corner from Elsa, just off the Calumet road, was a second entrance, the seldom-used 200-foot portal. It was hidden from the main road and the town itself, and could be partially seen by the occupants of only one house—that of Butch and Virginia Grundmanis and their four young children, who were all asleep during the dead hours, as Butch worked day shift in the mill.

  Soon after the development of the Elsa mine in the 1930s, ore near the distant 200-foot portal had been blasted away and removed. Now this portal was kept open primarily as an escape route in the event of fire, explosion, cave-in or other disaster. All the equipment needed to move piles of heavy rock in that section of the mine remained in place. Rail lines extended from inside the mine to the entrance. Rusting ore cars squatted idly. And the mine’s compressor system stretched along its dim passageways. The 200-foot portal’s entrance fronted a deserted spur of a road where anyone could come and go, virtually undetected. Just a jag up the hill, the road forked with the main path leading to Calumet and the smaller track, known as Williams Creek Road or Ballpark Road, leading to yet another byway called Duncan Creek Road. On the south side of Galena Hill, and out of sight of Elsa and Calumet, this gravel corridor provided an alternative route to Keno City and Mayo.

  Between July and November of that year, UKHM Ltd. was in the last phase of excavating the richest vein of silver ore in its history and indeed one of the richest silver veins on the planet. Discovered in 1957 at the 525-foot level and called the “15-foot vein,” this ossified river produced the highest silver assays UKHM ever obtained, up to a phenomenal 7,500 ounces per ton. At the time, the average grade of UKHM ore was a decent 40 ounces silver per ton. The five-month span in 1961 was the final stage of a three-year period during which this small, short vein was completely mined out. And some geological goblin had saved the best for last. At about 165 feet below surface, the vein blossomed into a silver rose of splendid mineralization. Miners call these buried treasures “bonanza” oreshoots, or stopes. The Spanish word bonanza, meaning fair weather, had been used for centuries to describe an especially rich metal lode. This one measured about 165 feet long, 100 feet deep and 7 to 10 feet thick. At its heart sat a 2,500-ton nut averaging 1,500 ounces of silver per ton. All told, what came to be called the Bonanza Stope produced 4.5 million ounces of silver.

  Numbers like those are enough to quicken the heart of any prospector, miner, geologist or shareholder, perhaps even an assayer. Indeed, as Bob Cathro later wrote, UKHM’s Bonanza Stope was so rich it had “the dubious honour of being one of the few sulphide oreshoots in Canada that was worth stealing.” Pilfering nuggets of visible gold is relatively common in the mining industry, Cathro points out, but “the theft of a complex sulphide ore is practically unheard of because it requires smelting to recover the valuable metals.” Also because, unlike nuggets, massive quantities of rock-bound ore demand a ton of heavy lifting. Fortunately or not, depending on your view, the Bonanza Stope occurred at the 200-foot level, about 400 feet from the entrance.

  Archer, then UKHM’s chief geologist, was intimately familiar with the Stope’s fine-grained ore, which had a distinct silver-grey colour, as opposed to the more standard black-grey hue of Keno Hill ore. Back in 1957, Archer had discovered the 15-foot vein that eventually led to the Bonanza Stope. He knew its worth better than anyone, as well as its tempting allure. Archer jokingly said as much to Martin Swizinski during one conversation when the stope was being mined.

  “I knew Martin quite well,” Archer recalled nearly fifty years later, when he met me for lunch at Vancouver’s Yew Restaurant, in the Four Seasons Hotel. A slight, frail, somewhat stooped man, Archer’s voice matched his physique. His mind, however, didn’t. Past eighty, Archer is one of the few principals in this story still alive. After lunch, he ushered me outside the restaurant to one of the hotel lobby’s expansive couches.

  “Martin and I often talked about how easy it would be to steal ore from that stope,” Archer said. “A fellow could fill his lunch box with high-grade ore, say 20 pounds every day, and by the end of three years he’d have hundreds of thousands of dollars. The stuff was already broken up and lying around. Nobody would miss 70 tons of that ore. That was nothing!” The Bonanza Stope’s total yield, Archer added, was somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000 tons of exceedingly valuable rock.

  Like several other former UKHM staff members, Archer suspects Swizinski was Bobcik’s partner during the odd events of the summer of 1961, mainly because, to do what he did, Bobcik needed help from someone in a supervisory position. Other arrows point to Swizinski’s possible involvement. Most obviously, he was identified by Keller on that one occasion as being in the mine with Bobcik during off hours. And every two weeks, he was the senior man on night shift. In that position, Swizinski oversaw underground miners who worked the night shift five days a week. Crews worked one shift for two weeks, before switching over to the other.

  Making off with mega quantities of raw ore from the Bonanza Stope was an undeniably fabulous feat, no matter when or how it was done. But it would have been impossible during the day shift, Archer says, “because a lot of authorized people wandered through the mine at will during the day—geologists, samplers, senior mine supervisors, safety inspectors, etcetera. None of these, other than the shift boss on duty, came during the night shift.”

  With senior mine employees absent during evening hours and all other employees out during the four dead hours, nighttime was the right time to fill a lot more than a lunch bucket with high-grade ore. Especially when the treasure was positively begging to be taken. Both day and night shifts followed a standard routine. Each crew began by collecting the “muck” left behind by the previous shift. Muck is broken rock blasted from a rock roof or wall and scattered on the floor. Each two-man crew of miners gathered about 20 tons of muck per shift. Crews next erected wooden posts and beams in a process known as timbering to support the roof, fortify walls and prevent cave-ins. Holes were then drilled into the rock and loaded with explosives. Just before shift end, the explosives were detonated, creating yet more muck for the incoming gang—four hours later.

  The only exception to this regime occurred in the Bonanza Stope, where it was common practice to leave ore on the ground for longer periods of time. That’s because UKHM, like many other mining companies, used small amounts of the Bonanza ore as a sweetener to enrich the lower-grade ore produced from other UKHM mines. This mixing ensured a higher return when the mined ore was later smelted. In most cases, such a move made sense. But not with the Bonanza Stope. Archer, who was more familiar with the Bonanza’s geological idiosyncrasies than anyone, knew that a good portion of the silver-rich vein ran close to the surface and as a result had oxidized into a clay mineral. To extract optimum value from such rock required bagging, processing and smelting it separately from less valuable ore. By mixing the rich, oxidized ore with less rich ore, UKHM lost money, as much as 25 percent of the ore’s value. But when Archer gave Pike his expert opinion on this matter, the chief said, “Go back up there to your hole and don’t bother me again.”

  And that wasn’t the only instance in which Pike’s autocratic decisions cost the company. A federal government tax incentive gave mining companies a three-year tax-free period for anything that was considered a “new mine.” And the Bonanza Stope was exactly that. By mixing the tax-free ore with taxable ore—and keeping sloppy books—UKHM ended up paying far more tax then they needed to. Not a lot further down the road, Pike would have to answer for his mistakes.

  But there was more. Pike’s practice of usin
g only small amounts of Bonanza ore meant large volumes lay around for longer than usual, likely for weeks at a time. Other miners eyed the enticing silver-laden hoard. One, who had served jail time for a previous ore theft, talked up the idea of making off with the muck and disguising its origins by saying it came from elsewhere. Rock laundering, in other words. But that was just talk—talk that burned Bobcik’s ears back at the bunkhouse.

  As night-shift boss, Swizinski knew when the mine was clear of workers and safe to enter on the sly. Bobcik rendezvoused with his partner by entering the mine through the 200-foot portal. He quickly reached the Bonanza Stope via a crosscut, which ended at a ventilation door. These doors were placed in inactive sections of the mine and kept closed to avoid loss of compressed air. Beyond the door, Bobcik continued into a new crosscut and encountered a tugger—a winch powered by the compressor and used to push, pull or lift rock. From there it was only 40 feet or so down a gradual incline to the Bonanza Stope, where freshly blasted treasure awaited.

  The task was physically gruelling and mentally methodical. First, Bobcik and his co-worker shovelled, hand-sorted and loaded chunks of ore into five or six burlap sacks—backbreaking work. Using the tugger and a slusher, they pulled the 100-pound bags up to the 200-foot level. A giant mechanized shovel, the slusher worked best when moving rock downhill, taking advantage of gravity, and was normally used to direct ore down to the 400-foot portal. But the slusher also moved rock uphill. By running the slusher in reverse, the thieves shifted roughly half a ton of ore, in a matter of seconds, up to the rail tracks leading out the 200-foot portal. From there, they loaded the sacks into railcars, pushed the cars about 400 feet into a dark, inactive recess of the mine, pulled the sacks out from the cars and hid them. On most nights, they performed this operation three or four times—lifting, pushing, hauling and hiding more than a ton of ore each visit.