Drug runner? Arms dealer? The Adeline-C made waves in Halifax and beyond

Journalist Rob Gordon was at the courthouse on Upper Water Street in downtown Halifax one day in 1981 when he overheard a sheriff say something that piqued his interest.

“Oh, we were just on a boat, you know, and we seized a couple of guns and stuff,” said one of the sheriffs.

Gordon, who later retired as a CBC News journalist, was covering courts then for the Chronicle-Herald newspaper.

On his lunch break, he headed down to the waterfront to check out the Adeline-C. The 32-metre trawler with a maximum width of seven metres had arrived in Halifax on Oct. 31, 1981, and was abandoned by most of the crew.

But it would be years later that the Adeline-C’s role in a complex U.S. drug smuggling operation worth as much as $200 million US became fully known. Based out of the small coastal city of Newport, R.I., it involved purchasing around 100,000 pounds of marijuana and hash from the Middle East and Far East.

The operation was financed by a fraudulent bank loan in the Channel Islands that paid for the drugs, ships and manpower needed to run the scheme.

Gordon found the ship tied up near Historic Properties. On board were two shady characters who had joined the ship in Florida and travelled north with it. Gordon knew them and they welcomed him aboard to have a look around.

Underneath the floorboards of the engine room were rolled-up marine charts for places like the Mediterranean, Florida and Lebanon, a major player in global hash production in the 1980s.

“This is a dope smuggling ship and they’re hiding the charts,” Gordon realized.

He later interviewed U.S., Canadian and British police to piece together Adeline-C’s origins for some stories in the Chronicle-Herald.

Retrofitted to smuggle drugs

Other features advantageous for drug smuggling that had been retrofitted on the 1963 trawler were high-capacity fuel tanks and winches, elevators and cranes that made it easier for the mother ship to carry out hefty cargo transfers to smaller ships at sea. The smaller vessels then smuggled the drugs into ports along the East Coast, targeting the U.S. and possibly Canada.

With its countless isolated bays and inlets, Nova Scotia has long been a popular destination for smugglers, be it rum or drugs.

A spokesperson for the Halifax sheriff’s department told the Toronto Star in 1982 he was perplexed by the situation.

“She has a 1,000-horse diesel [engine] aboard and that would drive her right smart through anything,” he said. “No one in his right mind would walk away from something like that.”

But abandoning a valuable ship was just a minor business expense for the people who owned the Adeline-C.

“What they were making was so much more,” said Gordon.

The Federal Court ordered that the Adeline-C be sold in late 1982, with the sale planned for January 1983, but the Toronto Star reported another round of bids might take place because the highest original bid was $76,000 “from a bargain-hunting local fisherman.”

Ultimately, its buyer was a Dutch man named Erik van Veenen. At that point in his life, he was living in Alaska, running a trading post and a hunting business.

After a ship purchase in Nova Scotia fell through, a lawyer involved with the failed transaction tipped him off about the Adeline-C.

After seeing the ship and the equipment on it, he figured it was worth a million dollars.

“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.

He believes he paid around $100,000 US for it.

One day as he worked to get the ship ready to go back to Alaska, he pulled up the floorboards in the engine room, much like Gordon had done.

“I came across 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,” said van Veenen.

Iran-Contra affair?

He believes the ship wasn’t just into drug running, but was used for transporting weapons as part of the Iran-Contra affair, in which the U.S. made a deal to secretly sell weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages being held by the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah in Lebanon.

While conducting interviews and reading through court documents and dozens of newspaper articles to research this story, the reporter did not come across any references to the Iran-Contra affair.

When van Veenen left Halifax, his plan was to sail the ship south along the Atlantic coastline, cross through the Panama Canal and then head north to Alaska, but financial troubles killed the plans. The Adeline-C was costly to run and a sale of his trading post soured, leaving him financially squeezed.

At some point, he’d changed the name of the ship to Thackeray C, in honour of his then wife.

Van Veenen said he posted the trawler for sale in a boating magazine, and the next buyer was based in Quebec.

By October 1984, the Adeline-C — now operating as the Thackeray C — was briefly accused of being the mother ship in a high-seas transfer of arms destined for use by the Irish Republican Army.

While an unidentified spokesperson for the Irish national police made that assertion to Gordon, a followup story a day later quoted a Canadian customs official who said the ship had been in Gaspé, Que., since July of that year.

FBI, IRS investigation

The year 1984 also marked the year that a task force involving the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration started questioning suspects in Rhode Island about the drug operation, according to a 1988 Providence Journal article.

The investigation was aided by records obtained by police in Guernsey, an island in the English Channel, which contained “almost a diary of the whole operation,” detailing names, dates, costs and expected profits, the newspaper reported.

The alleged mastermind behind the fraud was a Rhode Island resident named Robert Christopher (Chris) Murray.

How the money behind the drug operation was obtained

Accounts vary, but he obtained at least $10 million US in loans from the Guernsey branch of the First National Bank of Chicago. Murray used yachts owned by people well known “among the yachting fraternity in Rhode Island” as collateral, the Chicago Tribune reported in 1986.

The pitch was that the money would be used to distribute mortgages to clients who would buy and refit luxury yachts.

However, the Chicago Tribune reported that the notary public who vouched for the yacht owners and notarized financial statements did not exist, according to the federal government. Rather, it was believed the signatures belonged to Murray. The people who owned the supposed assets were fictitious.

In reality, the money was for the drug operation and the only boats purchased would be four mother ships in Holland, of which one never left the shipyard.

Of the three vessels that took part in the scheme, the Adeline-C was dubbed “the most mysterious ship of all,” according to a 1984 Providence Journal article.

Before it was purchased for the drug operation, it was known as the Hilda H. It was purchased in Holland for 423,370 Swiss francs — about $219,000 US — on April 13, 1981. It then underwent some retrofitting to have state-of-the-art equipment installed that would prove beneficial in running drugs.

Newspaper accounts covering the drug operation predominantly focus on the roles of the other ships — the Caroline C and the Sea Scout — as the ports they visited were well documented and some of their smuggling was thwarted by authorities.

It’s unclear where the Adeline-C picked up its drugs, with Lebanon and Thailand listed in varying newspaper accounts.

How the Adeline-C ended up in Halifax

But once it returned to North America, the Adeline-C met up at Georges Bank off Nova Scotia to unload roughly 12,000 pounds of marijuana, according to a 1986 Chicago Tribune article.

While half was transferred to one ship, the newspaper said the remainder of the drugs had to be dumped overboard when another ship, the Side Show, didn’t show up.

When the Adeline-C arrived in Halifax on Halloween 1981, the only cargo it contained was a rifle, a handgun and a load of teak that had been used to disguise the drugs, according to one of Gordon’s stories.

In Rhode Island, about 18 people ended up indicted for their role in Murray’s drug operation, and most were convicted, with the cases largely tried before the U.S. District Court in Providence, Rhode Island’s capital, the Providence Journal-Bulletin reported.

As for the alleged mastermind, he was never brought before the courts because he couldn’t be located.

Murray was wanted in Illinois, North Carolina and Rhode Island for bank fraud, drug smuggling and income tax evasion, according to a 1988 Providence Journal article.

His last known address was in Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, but he later fled to Spain and lived under an assumed name, the newspaper reported.

But Murray didn’t live a quiet life. He rented a Spanish villa and drove three cars, including a Porsche.

It was in a car, a white Ford, where Murray’s life came to an end in 1987. He’d been shot three times and his burning vehicle was found in a grove of eucalyptus trees.

Fingerprints taken from the body and processed by an FBI lab in Washington later confirmed his identity, the Providence Journal reported.

The Adeline-C is still alive, but it goes by the name of Gesmer I, according to various ship tracking websites. At the time of writing, it was in Dominica in the Caribbean.

Looking back on the Adeline-C’s time in Halifax, Gordon thinks about other ships.

“Back around that time, there was an enormous amount of drug smuggling … tons and tons of dope from all sorts of directions was arriving here,” he said.

“And that ship, because it was abandoned, because it was downtown Halifax, it sort of stuck out. But it certainly wouldn’t have been the only ship that did that.”

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