Page 12A The Castlegar Sun = Curling —. chances before losing to the Nelson rink led by Jack Miller which went on to win the tournament. “Our front end had some miss- es,” said Perehudoff. “I made my shots but, being down by three after the first end, it was just tough to come back.” Perehudoff's rink of Ray Bystrom, Larry Itcush and Mau- rice Nowelsoski lost by one rock to bow out of the double knockout tournament in the i-final round. C: i a ly enough, their other loss, also by one stone, came at the hands of Peter Young of Trail who ended up meeting Miller in the final Monday night But despite the loss, Perehudoff was happy to see some exciting curling action that has only improved since the adoption of the free guard zone two years ago. “With the new rules, it really gives you a chance to come back,” said Perehudoff. “Before, if you were behind they could just peel your guards off. It was darned near impossible to win because everyone could peel so well.” Miller's Nelson rink of Don Lauder, Howie Hornby and aan Castlegar Aquanauts CHRISTMAS BINGO Saturday, Dec. 3rd Castlegar Arena Complex $1000 JACKPOT PAID OUT $6800 LAST BINGO 60% PAYOUT * EARLY BIRDS * 60% PAYOUT SPECIALTY GAMES Early Bird 6 p.m., Regular Bingo 7 p.m. Gerry Koehle have been togeth- er four years. They have become masters of the free guard zone and it showed dur- ing the weekend as they went undefeated in winning the West Kootenay zone “We've gelled pretty good this year as a team,” said Miller “We've been making the shots when we had to.” In order to grab one of the eight spots in the Provincial Championship back in Castlegar, Miller must now face the East Kootenay representative in Cran- brook this weekend. He has high hopes and really wants to return SHOP EARLY FOR XMAS AND S 2AY E All Gtift Items “3 Om off Except cameras & accessories $10 OFF ALL ZOOM LENS CAMERA PHOT The HOUR = Picture Place 676 - 18th Street., Castleaird Plaza 365-2211 Wednesday, November 30, 1994 ee ew ee em tm Oia to Castlegar's rink. “The whole weekend was great,” said Miller. “The ice is very keen here in Castlegar and the ice- maker should be complimented on the ice. That's why we want to get back here because we'll have an advantage over the rest of the regions in knowing the ice.” This is Miller's second year as the representative from the West Kootenay zone and he hopes to lead his rink all the way to the National Championships. With the consistent slide they've been on it shouldn't sur- prise many people to s¢e them back here in a couple weeks. Garnering gold in Grand Forks Skaters from the Castlegar Figure Skating Club pic- tured above returned from the Sunshine Valley Open in Grand Forks last weekend with six medals — two gold, two silver and two bronze. Back from left: Jennifer Datchkoff, Vanessa Kastrukoff, Rosanna Sheppard and Danielle Jmieff. Front: Nicole Hack- ett, Lindsey Niminiken and Heather Young. Dawn Hadikin is missing from the picture. The next compe- tition for the club is the Rossland Mini on Jan.8. SUN SPORTS PHOTO / Jeff Gabert The Castlegar Sun ae ~—— ee Jon Jicuse ‘apple juice Campbells 2:99 Deli Department BBQ CHICKEN 4° Meat Department BONELESS TOP SIRLOIN STEAK 6.35 kg. ¢ Super pac 2" Produce Department McINTOSH APPLES 1.08 kg. * Canada Fancy 49° KIWI Produce Department Product of U.S.A. 5 for $4 00 In-Store Bakery UIT} (LOAF CAKES Assorted ¢ 570 g. 2 for °° In-Store Bakery NANAIMO BARS or CARROT CAKE a) We honor all competitors coupons. Double coupon every Saturday. Some restrictions apply. 1/2 slab »Y & <€ : oto limi Prices effective at your local Safeway stores until closing Saturday, ces el ucies A ine“ Whily ed ot Actual | items may vary slightly from illustration. Some items not be avail Advertised prices do not include G’S.T, Some items may be subject © 5.1 fir Miles informational oe Holdings N.V., Loyalty Management Group Canada Inc. Authorized User. “On items we carry. GS) SAFEWAY | , December 3, 1994. We reserve the right . Some illustrations are only. voce of ol sores Peewees are ona mission Submitted The Castlegar Peewee AA Teps are a team with a mission. Under the guidance of head coach Rick Biller, the team has jump-started the season with six wins and three losses after an undefeated pre-season. Coach Biller has assembled an able group of players that provide the team with a good mix of size, skill, and work ethic Returning players from last years Peewee rep team, Jeff Craig in goal, Travis Huggett at , center, and Kris Kanigan at defence provide leadership and experience to the team while newcomers Nathan Biller and Shane Palahicky have added size and scoring to the team. From the goaltending out, Coach Biller feels he has a strong, well-balanced team that is bonding well and improving with every game On the weekend the Peewee reps played one game against Nelson and cruised to a 8-1 win. Shane Palahickey (2 goals 3 assists) Ryan Byers (3 goals 1 assist) Kris Kanigan (1 goal 1 assist) Chris Hutchison (1 goal) Aaron Kinakin (1 goal) Travis Huggett (1 assist) Chad Voykin (1 assist) Al Frauley (1 assist) Jake Postnikoff (1 assist). Playmor lowers & Gifts Silk flowers, ceramics, helium balloons INDUSTRIAL COMMERCIAL HOUSEHOLD& PERSONAL CARE Refill NOT 1249-3rd St Castlegar 365-4992 Admitted drug smuggler Alan Richard McTeer disappeared without a trace more than a decade ago. During a five-month investigation, Sterling News Service tracked him down and learned details of his colorful life on the run. Reporter Russ Francis pieced together the story from more than a hundred inter- views with Canadian and U.S. law enforcement officials, from U.S. court records retrieved from federal archives in Atlanta, and from a recent civil court appearance by McTeer. In an exclusive interview, McTeer told Sterling News Service his amazing tale, which ranges from the bars of Trail to the jungles of South America. RUSS FRANCIS Sterling News Service KEN GEORGETTI: McTeer's boyhood chum. He has no comment on the story. drug smuggler's wild ride It was Georgetti's childhood buddy and sparring partner, Alan McTeer, phoning from West Palm Beach, Florida But rather than take the call at his house, Georgetti went to his office at the United Steelworkers of America, local 480, of which Georgetti was the president. What Georgetti did not know is that the Mounties had tapped the union phone line, and that they were waiting outside, listening in on the conversation. The call lasted 30 minutes. “When he hung up on that call, we walked into the union office and arrested him,” former RCMP Sgt John Abbott says. For there was one other thing that Georgetti did not know about that call. His former buddy had turned against him. McTeer was secretly working for the Mounties, trying to snare the union leader into admitting involvement in drug smu; g- “We orchestrated the call, because we had McTeer call him from Florida,” Abbott says. Later that day, Georgetti and seven others were charged with conspiracy to import and traffic in cocaine and mari- juana. He was released on $10,000 bail. But that’s as far as the charges ever got. The Steelworkers’ executive council promptly gave him a After a decade on the run from American police, the Mafia and the RCMP, Alan McTeer sat in a small bar in Trail one cold January night last year. A man in his 30s next to him was telling a story. “This guy, I knew this guy, was a hell of a nice guy, went down to Florida — now he’s got cement shoes,” the man said. McTeer’s ears perked up, and he asked the story-teller: “Oh yeah, what’s his name?” “Alan McTeer,” came the reply. The man was astounded when McTeer explained that, far from wearing cement footwear in Florida, he was in the best of health, sitting in the Trail bar wearing a comfortable pair of running shoes. McTeer laughs as he relates the tale earlier this month, sipping Kokanee beer from the bottle in a noisy waterfront pub situated in a B.C. city. “Jeeze, he would not believe me,” McTeer says. “Shit, nobody believed me.” Despite widespread claims to the contrary, Alan Richard McTeer Sr is very much alive and living in British Columbia. } McTeer’s wild ride began in 1983 after he signed a statement for the RCMP. Later, eight Alberta and B.C. residents were charged with taking part in a $4-million drug smuggling operation, based in the Kootenay smelter town of Trail, 18 kilometres north of the U.S. border. McTeer’s best friend, Ken Georgetti, was one of those Things did not look rosy for Georgetti At 6.30 in the morning on June 8, 1983, he was still in bed in his Trail home when the phone rang. vote of allowing the former pipefitter at Trail’s huge Cominco smelter to keep his job as local president. Nine months later, the charges were stayed when Alan McTeer disappeared. Georgetti moved to Vancouver, and in 1986 became president of the B.C. Federation of Labor. “He never looked back,” says Abbott. McTeer, meanwhile, seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. ‘That meant that the conspiracy charges, which followed a two-year investigation by dozens of Mounties, were in effect killed — and will never be reinstated. Why did McTeer agree to become a witness for the Crown in the first place? Why did he change his mind a few months later and disappear? What did he do while liv- ing underground for 10 years? Forty-three years old, with dark brown hair and blue eyes, Rossland-born McTeer has an engaging smile. Appearing fit, he might have lost a little of the 170 pounds his 5-foot 9-inch frame carried a decade ago, as described on his Florida arrest warrant His face is attractive, despite a nose he says was broken in his teenage years by an RCMP officer who pulled him over in Trail for speeding Nor is there any visible after-effect of the beating he took four years ago at the hands of Venezuelan drug and customs agents who, he says, broke an eardrum and several teeth in an effort to find what had happened to U.S.$900,000 in cash on the burning plane McTeer had been forced to land in Venezuela. iw For a recent B.C. court appearance on a Civil matter, he wore a neat short-sleeved light blue shirt, covering hairy, muscular arms. The 1983 charges concerned allegations that McTeer, acknowledged by the RCMP’s Abbott as a brilliant pilot, had smuggled into Canada marijuana with a value at the time of $3 million and cocaine then worth $1 million. But the Mounties called it a “dry conspiracy” because the large quantities of drugs around which the charges were based were never seized Relying on his flying skills to dodge radar, McTeer was alleged to have made several drug flights into Trail’s small airfield, used mainly by light aircraft and emergency flights. The drugs were alleged to have been unloaded at the airstrip, near the U.S. border, for distribution in Trail and elsewhere in Canada. Abbott says that in the early 80s, Trail was a “rat *s nest”. ‘In the early 80s, Trail was a rat's nest’ — JOHN ABBOTT Former RCMP Sgt. “I never saw so many drug traffickers in all my life in such a small place,” he says. “That's a wide-open area and it’s a great smuggling place.” The Mounties learned of the $4-million-worth of drugs from McTeer’s 50 typed pages of confessions — confes- sions which McTeer claims the Mounties extracted under threat of blackmail and physical injury. For McTeer had a problem in 1983. A year earlier he had admitted to a U.S. District Court in Florida that he was a drug smuggler — and that, he says, allowed the RCMP to blackmail him. On November 4, 1982, McTeer pleaded guilty in the USS. District Court in West Palm Beach to a charge that he did “knowingly and intentionally import into the United States from a place outside thereof, unknown quantities of marijuana, a controlled substance, all in violation of Title 21, United States Code, section 952 (a).” To this day, he protests his innocence of the Florida charge McTeer says his lawyer, prominent West Palm Beach attorney David Roth, urged him to plead guilty. And Alan McTeer was a worried man. Donna, his wife of one year, a New York model, had just given birth to a daughter, Danielle, and dad was facing a long stretch in jail. “They were talking about 15 years, they had me for tax evasion,” McTeer says. “It was a real bad one.” So McTeer “rolled over” — he began talking to U.S drug agents and the RCMP. In exchange, McTeer got off virtually scott-free He was fined $2,500 and sentenced to six months in a West Palm Beach Salvation Army “facility” — which he says was little more than a joke. But that decision to plead guilty in Flonda means that McTeer is now stigmatized as a drug smuggler, and it was to have more serious Consequences. See SMUGGLER 8B Mountie denies Ken Georgetti on 1983 drug i charges. Alan McTeer, now resur- faced after 10 years on the run, said in an interview that two RCMP officers invented tales that he flew $4-million worth of drugs into the Kootenay city of Trail. He claimed the Mounties then forced him to sign what he now says to be a false statement which implicated Georgetti in the activities. McTeer said Canadian police threatened him in a motel room in West Palm Beach, Florida, with physi- cal force and with a lengthy jail sentence on fictitious charges. “They picked me up and threw me against the wall a couple of times,” McTeer claimed. “They could beat a confession out of anybody, so they got this confession.” Sgt John Abbott, who headed a two-year investiga- tion which led to the charges, strongly disputes McTeer's claim. “I deny that categorical- ly,” Abbott said. “That is never done. It hasnt been my style, and I don’t do that. I don’t need to do that.” Mc'Feer, an admitted drug smuggler, also said that the RCMP blackmailed him into trying to incriminate Geor- getti, making use of McTeer’s admitted associa- tion with Florida drug dealer Victor Simone. “The RCMP are telling me I’m going to jail for 28 years in Canada on conspir- acy charges (unless I help McTeer and you're involved with a Mafia murder, Victor Simone’s murder, it’s going to be really hard to come up to Canada and tell them, no, you had no involvement Told of McTeer’s black- mail accusation last week, Abbott laughed. “My God,” he said. “It’s typical — he always casts the blame on someone else.” Georgetti and seven other B.C. and Alberta residents were charged in June, 1983 with conspiring to import and traffic $3-million-worth of marijuana, and cocaine valued at $1-million. At the time, Georgetti was president of local 480 of the United Steelworkers of America in Trail. In 1986, he became president of the B.C. Federation of Labor. McTeer, who was Geor- getti’s childhood buddy, reneged on his agreement with the RCMP that he would testify for the Crown. He disappeared, and had not been heard from official- ly until earlier this month. The charges against the eight were stayed after McTeer's disappearance. While there is no statute of limitations on such indictable offences, officials have decided not to proceed with the charges — despite McTeer'’s resurfacing. Georgetti, who has in the past strenuously protested his innocence, refused to comment. “Ken doesn't have any comment for you on this story,” said B.C. Federation of Labor communications director Bill Tieleman.