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Turning Off the Tap

Written by Doug O'Harra

April 2008

Alcohol has long plagued the Bush, but stopping the flow is a tall order
for small villages with limited help from law enforcement

The anonymous tip came from village residents who had lost patience:
Bootleggers were planning to smuggle booze into Noorvik during a spring
basketball tournament in violation of state law and local choice.

Alaska State Trooper Rex Leath, then an alcohol investigator stationed in
Kotzebue, powered up his snowmachine and hit the trail on a frigid April
night in 2003. He knew the stakes well.

“I guarantee that if a single bottle gets into a village, there will be a
call that a trooper needs to go to,” Leath would say later.

The traditional Inupiat subsistence community of 630, nestled on a channel
of the Kobuk River 45 miles east of Kotzebue, voted in 1987 to ban
possession and importation of alcohol. The village is legally “dry”—one of
many Alaska communities prohibiting all alcohol all the time. Yet the
incentive to break the law is strong. A bottle of whiskey that sells for
$10 in Anchorage might fetch $150 in an isolated community like Noorvik—30
times the typical rate of return in Alaska on cocaine and nearly four times
the return on marijuana.

It’s a problem plaguing Alaska villages that have taken a stand against
alcohol abuse. To interrupt a cycle of accidents, assaults, heartbreak and
death, more than 100 communities have voted to ban the sale, possession or
importation of alcohol under Alaska’s local option statutes. But the lure
of such staggering profits, and the self-destructive urge among a few
people to drink abusively, can undercut a village’s resolve one bottle at a
time.

After a liquor purchase consumes a family’s monthly fuel subsidy or a big
proportion of its food budget, a bottle might be consumed by two or three
people. And then the trouble starts.

“They’ll be intoxicated enough to where they’re willing to do anything to
find more alcohol,” Leath said. “They’ll start beating people up. They’ll
start breaking into homes. They’ll steal snowmachines—and they will be DUI.
They will start assaulting each other for that last drink.”

With a chance to prevent another tragedy that night in 2003, Leath drove 50
miles across the tundra, and then hid in the willows on an island
overlooking the frozen Kobuk. As evening came on and the temperature
dropped to 20 below, he spotted a man whom he had seen driving into
Kotzebue that day, just before the arrival of the afternoon jet. This time,
the man carried a duffle bag balanced on the snowmachine’s hood.

Leath thought he saw bottles in the bag, so he followed the man up the
river to a house in the village.

Marvin Kagoona, then 33, was carrying 13 plastic 750 ml bottles of R&R
whiskey in plain view, one of them open and within easy reach. Most of that
bottle was already gone.

“He was pretty much caught in the act—he was flustered,” Leath said. “He
didn’t expect to see me.”

After confiscating the booze and Kagoona’s Polaris Indy snowmachine, Leath
took Kagoona to the city jail. The village resident was later convicted of
misdemeanor bootlegging. At least one other person and eight more bottles
were intercepted that weekend in Noorvik, a community that had been
fighting back.

“We’re not going to tolerate (bootleggers),” then-Mayor Bobby Wells told
the Anchorage Daily News after the arrests. “If they’re caught, they’re
gone—they’re out of the village. The police take them away.”

For several weeks after that, police calls to Noorvik plunged, said Andrea
Russell, who served as the state’s “bootlegging” prosecutor at that time,

“That was the way you hope that local option would work for a community,”
she said.

But it doesn’t always turn out so well.

The Real Price of a Bottle
The effect of alcohol on Alaska’s people, regardless of ethnic background
or residence, drives some of the nation’s highest rates of domestic
violence, accidents and death. Drinking is behind most of the state’s
crimes and assaults. It’s the small, tight-knit Native communities that
have always borne the brunt, including villages that have voted to stay
dry.

Western culture has known alcohol for 5,000 years, “and we’re not doing a
very good job of handling it,” said Darryl Wood, an associate professor
with the Justice Center at the University of Alaska Anchorage who is now
studying the effectiveness of recent anti-bootlegging enforcement on
community safety.

“Alaska Natives have had it for 200 years,” he added. “I think if you took
a population of Caucasians and put them in small, isolated communities with
no jobs, very little hope for the future, the decline of subsistence and no
history of dealing with alcohol, I think you’d see some very similar
behavior.”

The damage caused to Alaska’s Native people by alcohol is well documented.
Native leaders and social scientists have linked it to the disruption of
traditional tribal culture that began with the first Russian fur traders
and continues today with the erosion of the subsistence lifestyle.

During territorial days, a small cadre of federal agents inconsistently
enforced a ban on selling alcohol to Natives until the law was repealed in
1953. Tribal councils were then given the power to ban alcohol in their
respective communities, but after statehood in 1959, Alaska officials
refused to recognize their authority.

For 20 years, alcohol problems escalated in rural areas. In 1980, the state
Legislature passed the first local option law that allowed communities to
ban sales or importation, and amended the law in 1986 to allow a ban on
possession as well. Today’s laws allow five levels of alcohol restriction
with approval by local voters.

Between 100 and 120 villages have some level of prohibition in effect at
any given time, said Scott Ruby, a local government specialist with the
state of Alaska. Villages often first seek prohibition in response to
tragedies—a drowning in the slough, a murder in a family home.

They have good reason. A 2005 study by Wood and Paul J. Gruenewald looked
at alcohol problems in 132 communities during the 1990s, and found that dry
villages experienced far fewer serious assaults than villages allowing
alcohol. But there was a catch: The most successful villages were
geographically distant from others, making bootlegging difficult. And they
had police help to stop those who tried to import alcohol.

“The problem is that (local prohibition) is not total control,” Ruby said.
“Just because you pass the law, doesn’t mean it gives you the outcome you
thought it would.”

With alcohol possession allowed in many “hub” villages like Bethel and
Kotzebue, and uncontrolled in Alaska’s cities, any village going dry can
end up under a kind of siege. Alaska State Troopers have only 240 officers
to police an area twice as large as Texas, and only 45 officers devoted
full-time to enforce the state’s drug and alcohol laws.

An estimated 60 communities lack even unarmed village public safety
officers.

“The population that the troopers have to police is about the same
population as Knoxville, Tenn.,” Wood said. “And Knoxville, Tenn., has
about twice as many police as we have state troopers. So already, they’re
behind.”

Without the resources and local authority to stop bootleggers on the
ground, many Native leaders argue that local option laws enforced by state
agencies cannot succeed.

“While the state extended the local option law to unincorporated villages,
it did not provide for real increases in police effort,” Julie Kitka,
president of the Alaska Federation of Natives, told the state Senate
Committee on Indian Affairs in 2000. “Every solution imposed on Native
villages over the years has come from the outside. They were not designed
or written by Native people. And they have not worked.”

Between 2004 and 2005, the congressionally mandated Alaska Rural Justice
and Law Enforcement Commission held 15 hearings across the state, focused
on finding solutions to bootlegging. Its 2006 final report examined 100
options and made nine general recommendations.

Among them: Give more power to local tribal councils and beef up law
enforcement in rural areas.

Mike Williams, a nationally recognized Native leader from the Kuskokwim
River village of Akiak—who has run the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race 15
times to call attention to the need for sobriety among his people—said he’s
deeply frustrated with bootlegging, the local option law and the lack of
sufficient policing in western Alaska.

Booze arrives in the region’s “damp” villages, where it’s legal to
possess—but not sell—alcohol, and then trickles inexorably into dry
communities despite the law, he said. Troopers may work hard, village
public safety officers may do what they can, but there aren’t enough of
them.

“It’s not a problem that can be dealt with in a short period of time,”
Williams said. “It’s a long-term effort by all of the communities, and all
of the governments. Everybody must come together to find solutions.”

Williams has advocated the creation of a regional tribal government with a
certified, well-trained police force that staffs every village. Plus tribal
courts with authority and training. And something else: Complete
prohibition for the region.

“This is an all-or-nothing thing—there is no middle ground on this,”
Williams said. “My top priority would be to not allow alcohol at all (in
western Alaska.) Go completely dry … if a person brings it into the Bethel
area, make it a felony right off the bat. Just not allow it. I would say
zero tolerance. Period.”

Intercepting Deliveries
Between 2004 and 2006, the Alaska Bureau of Alcohol and Drug Enforcement,
working with local police and federal postal inspectors, seized 2,384
gallons of alcohol bound for dry communities and filed 1,007 different
charges against violators. When the state’s new “bootlegging” prosecutor
Shannon Eddy started work in 2007, she stepped into 60 open cases and 30
people awaiting charges. The state Legislature recently tightened the laws
and strengthened penalties, and a federal grant put five investigators on
full-time anti-bootlegging duty in Western Alaska.

Getting troopers the authority to help investigate inside federal postal
facilities is another important goal, said bureau commander Capt. Keith
Mallard. It’s all part of the mission to intercept the alcohol en-route.

“We’re the ones that enforce the choices made by the villages,” Mallard
said. “If we can stop a load of alcohol from ever getting there, in a lot
of ways, we’ve reduced crime.”

Sometimes the payoff is spectacular: Leath and another officer nailed a
family of bootleggers operating in Kotzebue—where possession is allowed but
sales are banned—in 2005, in the biggest case logged so far. Leo Ferreira
Jr., 60, his wife, Cheryl Ferreira, 51, and their daughter Johnnie
Ferreira, 25, faced charges stemming from importing 2,300 bottles of
whiskey over 13 months and distributing it to dry communities.

But most often, cases involve smaller amounts. A Bethel man was sentenced
to 16 months in jail and forfeited his truck after investigators caught him
selling vodka and explaining his “rates.” A Nome woman lost her 18-foot
skiff after her son was convicted of using it to smuggle four cases of
whiskey into Elim. Another man went to prison for five months after trying
to sneak four cases of liquor and two cases of beer into Shishmaref.

On Mallard’s team is eight-year police veteran Charlie Cross, who grew up
in the Norton Sound village of Elim and paid his dues as a trooper
patrolling rural areas outside Fairbanks and Kodiak. As a child, Cross
learned the joy of Inupiat subsistence life in a place where every kid
feels welcome in every home. He also learned that smuggled booze can
trigger extreme violence by the few prone to abuse it.

Cross remembers a young friend who came home from the hospital with half of
his head shaved. His father had hit him with a shotgun blast. The man
killed the boy’s mother and sister before taking his own life. Later, the
boy’s surviving brother and sister committed suicide.

“These were my friends,” Cross said. “In my 31 years, I know 18 people who
have killed themselves. These aren’t people I’ve heard about—these are
people I knew personally. And only three of them did the suicide (for
reasons) not alcohol-related.”

As a plain-clothes investigator, Cross works the Anchorage end of Alaska’s
vast transportation network. Using anonymous tips, leads from other cases
and information garnered from village residents, he searches for alcohol
before it leaves for rural areas. He contacts people at local airports. He
checks out shipping boxes and shrink-wrapped beverage cases—water bottles
actually filled with vodka, jugs of whisky with air “burped” to keep them
silent, juice containers that hold colored spirits. He works with other
investigators to pursue shipments prepared by in-town connections.

It’s almost always a low-key process, lacking cop-show bravado. Cross said
he makes a point of approaching suspected bootleggers with matter-of-fact
courtesy. As a result, Cross finds that violators will often simply admit
what they’re doing and allow their baggage to be searched without much
fuss.

And little victories come, by the fifth, liter and pint.

“Each bottle is a potential felony,” Cross said. “I’m not saying that
everybody who drinks a bottle will commit one. But in the wrong hands, it
will happen.”

Doug O'Harra moved to Alaska in 1982 and spent 19 years reporting stories
for the Anchorage Daily News. He now operates a science news website,
www.farnorthscience.com, and is writing a novel.