Undercover Agent; How One Honest Man Took on the Drug Mob...And Then the Mounties

UNDERCOVER AGENT

by

Leonard Mitchell

and Peter Rehak

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

Bev Editions

Undercover Agent

Copyright 1988

ISBN: 978-0-9867287-6-1

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 − An Unusual Deal

Chapter 2 − A Natural Place

Chapter 3 − The Mastermind

Chapter 4 − The Licence Saga

Chapter 5 − Life on the Home Front

Chapter 6 − The Gentleman Smuggler

Chapter 7 − Looking Ahead

Chapter 8 − Into High Gear

Chapter 9 − Twelve Days to Takedown

Chapter 10 − Springing the Trap

Chapter 11 − Action at Sea

Chapter 12 − Moving into Limbo

Chapter 13 − The Aftermath

Acknowledgements

About the Author

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UNDERCOVER AGENT

Introduction

I first met Leonard Mitchell, the hero of Undercover Agent, when I produced the weekly television newsmagazine show W5 running on the CTV network in Canada.

It was not unusual for people to approach an investigative television program with a story of injustice, a claim of a wrongful conviction or other misdeeds on the part of the authorities. During my nearly two decades as executive producer, hardly a month went by that someone didn’t contact us with a tale of woe, by letter from a prison, by walking through the door of our Charles Street West office in Toronto or -- in those pre-Internet days – by telephone. Many times they produced suitcases full of documents to support their version of events.

A television program is not a court of law and in choosing which of the tales of woe to pursue, I had to assess whether our thin resources could establish any particular claim of innocence. Was it likely to be true and, if so, could we prove it? It was not an exact science and I cannot claim a perfect record. In one case we expended considerable time and effort to follow a claim that a man who carried out a major swindle in Britain and was supposed to have died in an airplane crash was actually alive in London, Ontario. A talented researcher spent a couple of months on the story before establishing that the man in London was not the same person although there was a strong physical resemblance. In another case, we abandoned the pursuit of a wrongful murder conviction only to find some years later that the man won acquittal through the courts. Our resources were not adequate to prove the case one way or another.

Leonard Mitchell, though, did not come to us. He first told parts of his story on radio and we decided to check it out.

He had been a businessman and occasional fisherman on Canada’s east coast when he was approached by strangers from Montreal, ostensibly to buy fish. But they soon unveiled their real plans for him. They wanted him to set up a drug smuggling route into North America through Nova Scotia. The mysterious strangers were the mob and they assumed that Mitchell would rush in to make a fast and substantial buck. They totally misread their man.  

They never asked me whether I was interested in the deal, or whether I would do it. They just assumed from the start that everything had been settled. It was like being part of a movie or a bad dream, he said.

Leonard's assorted enterprises included trading in scrap and fish but his businesses were all above board. He was a devoted Christian and the father of two teen-aged daughters. And he hated drugs. So the next day he went to the RCMP.

After they checked out his story, the Mounties asked him to play along with the drug smugglers just to see what happens. Thus Leonard Mitchell, the undercover agent, was born. For 19 long months he led a nightmarish existence, worthy of a John Le Carre novel. There were secret meetings with the mob, followed by even more secret meetings with the Mounties. Under the Mounties supervision, Leonard bought a fishing boat for the smugglers and found them a stash house.

Finally, as the first delivery of drugs headed for Canadian shores, a huge dragnet, involving Armed Forces aircraft and the destroyer Iroquois, the Mounties charged aboard the boat and seized $238 million worth of drugs – one of the biggest hauls in North America at the time -- and arrested the smugglers. Mitchell was a hero with the RCMP but not for long.

To verify the details, my first step was to send researcher Fiona Fallon to Lockeport, Nova Scotia to talk with Mitchell’s brother-in-law Jim Dooks, who was left in charge of Leonard’s scrap yard while the family was in hiding in Calgary awaiting their change of identity.

It also helped that Leonard had retained Toronto lawyer Robert Rueter to help him get his the identity changed and to seek the compensation that the RCMP had promised him.

When I first met Leonard in Rueter’s office in Toronto, he and his family were at the lowest ebb in their adventure; they were caught in a Kafkaesque situation of having their life controlled by the RCMP who seemed benevolently disposed toward the hero of a major drug bust, but at the same time seemed content to leave him and his family dangling in uncertainty. The Mitchells were in limbo – their change of identity had gotten lost in the bureaucracy, making it impossible for Leonard to work and resume a normal life. At the same time the Mounties had reneged on their promised financial compensation, leaving Mitchell both hurt and frustrated.

I could not understand why, after he had played superspy for the Mounties with much initiative, enthusiasm and guts, the RCMP and the federal government could not get their act together, give him a new identity, and settle financial disagreement. After all, the drug operation had been an undisputed success for the RCMP. Yet no one in the force’s senior management, or in the government, seemed to care that the Mitchells’ situation bordered on the desperate. The injustice of the situation bothered me.

Mitchell struck me as a proud and determined man, exuding pent-up energy who was very down-to-earth. His forced unemployment was hard on him. The family received an allowance from the RCMP but Leonard wanted to resume normal life. Yet, every time he wanted to start a venture or apply for a job, he lacked the necessary documents. For a man of his temperament, it was harsh punishment. He had done his part as a citizen and he could not understand why the Mounties would not do theirs.

I wanted their story for the program (you don’t often get a chance to get inside such a major drug bust!), but I was concerned about endangering them with the criminal gang he had helped apprehend. Even though the Mitchells would appear in disguise on TV, I feared that despite makeup and their voices being altered, someone might recognize them. Of course, that happened. As the book tells, the congregation at their church in Calgary pieced the story together and their cover was blown. It made their life difficult but only briefly. I am convinced that the exposure in the media speeded up their settlement.

Because I got to know the Mitchells quite well, working with them on the television program, and then on this book, I can testify that they are unlikely undercover agents. Their deeply religious Christian values explain their instant and total abhorrence of drugs. Yet Leonard has an entrepreneurial streak and can be fiercely competitive in business and he loves the intricacies of a deal. He drives himself hard to complete whatever he sets out to do. That is why it mattered to him so much to see the drug caper to the end.

He is proud of what he did and he wanted to set down his adventure –with all its ups and downs – in a book because he never got a chance to do so in court; the evidence he gathered was so strong that he did not have to testify.

I spent considerable time interviewing Leonard and Elaine and their daughters, Sharon and Jewell. With Leonard I toured some of the sites of his adventure, and since he obviously could not witness every single aspect of the operation, I’ve also drawn on other sources. The transcripts of the month-long trial of the captain and crewmen of the Ernestina provided graphic details of the action at sea; Billy Yout, the colorful U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent was generous with his time and with useful background information; and the background on the drug trade in Lebanon was provided by Chris Wenner, a daring British television journalist who filmed the drug clans in the Bekaa Valley. I decided to change the names of the two men who came to Mitchell for the original fish deal and of the organized crime figure in Montreal to avoid needless legal complications.

The RCMP officers with whom Mitchell worked declined to be interviewed. Since the book was first published I have met retired Mounties who were involved with the case, including a member of the Ernestina boarding party. They confirmed many of the details in the book.

I kept in touch with the Mitchells for a number of years after the book was first published. Unfortunately, the ordeal put a heavy strain on their marriage and they divorced. Both remarried. For years Elaine sent Christmas cards and Leonard would get in touch whenever he passed through Toronto. I have not heard from either of them in a long time. But their adventure is forever timely as a classic story of good people with good instincts whose lives become ensnared by criminals and bureaucracy.

Toronto, March 2011

Chapter 1 − An Unusual Deal

I'll tell you the story just the way it happened.

It all began with a phone call about fish. It was an unusually hot day in May 1983, and I was unloading a heap of marine scrap at the yard when my wife phoned from home in Lockeport.

Leonard, there are two fellows from Quebec here to see you, and they want to buy some fish. They say they want a lot of them and they're in a hurry. Can you meet them somewhere?

Sure. Tell them to wait at the Lockeport turnoff from the highway.

I jumped into the cab of my trusty old half-ton and drove off to meet the surprise visitors from Quebec.

For some years I'd been the proud owner of Shelburne Scrap and Metal in the town of Shelburne on Nova Scotia's South Shore. And to someone from away − as we call anyone from outside the string of towns and villages along the coast from Halifax down to Yarmouth that makes up the South Shore − it might have seemed strange to go to a scrap metal dealer for fish. But while the South Shore is one of the prettiest parts of North America, the economy has its ups and downs. So I've found it wise to have more than one iron in the fire. Besides the scrapyard I had a marine supply store and a bottle exchange going. And because I had spent five years as a fisherman, I couldn't give up my link with the sea. I kept my hand in as a fish broker, too. So the strangers who had driven to see Elaine at our house in Lockeport, twelve miles north of Shelburne, had come to the right place to buy fish. I was always ready to make a deal.

For more than a dozen years Elaine and I had built our lives on the South Shore and now had a home in Lockeport right on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. She worked with me in the scrapyard and in the fish business along with her twin brother, Jim Dooks, who was also my partner. Our daughters, Sharon, fifteen, and Jewell, thirteen, had spent almost all their lives in Lockeport. Lockeport was home. We were happy and successful there, and we never thought we would have to leave. And I certainly didn't think that the meeting to which I headed up Highway 103 could set off a chain of events that would lead to our family being forced to leave town for a life spent on the run.

As I drove toward the Lockeport turnoff, I thought about how we had succeeded on the South Shore despite the fact that we were considered from away because our families hadn't lived there for generations. That both of us were born and raised in Oyster Pond Jeddore, a small community just east of Halifax, cut no ice in Lockeport.

It takes a long time to be accepted in a place like Lockeport, an island now joined by road to the mainland where people still talk about living on town and travelling off town. After more than ten years we were still regarded as outsiders even though I had a thriving business and a new house and our whole family was involved in the local Pentecostal Church. Elaine taught Sunday school for years and years, and as active Christians we all took part in a great many church activities.

I wasn't always religious. I've had my bouts with alcohol − I once had a problem with my elbow, as they say here − and high living. But I chucked all that years ago, thanks to Elaine's good influence. I'm a better man for it, and I don't plan to change my ways now or in the future. I find that my beliefs give me some principles to live by, which helps when things get rough.

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Lockeport's original settlers, Dr Jonathan Locke and Josiah Churchill, both from Massachusetts, were attracted to the site by the nearness of the world's richest fishing grounds. That was around 1760, and fishing has been the lifeblood of Lockeport ever since. Most people in town are either fishermen themselves or they work in one of the local fish-processing plants. Trawlers of all sizes chug their way across the harbour, taking their catch to one of the plants or to a broker at the wharf, under the eye of the huge old Locke mansion with its commanding view of the harbour. The Locke house has been left virtually intact since the 1800s, when Lockeport flourished thanks to the fishery and West Indian trade, which like the rest of Nova Scotia's trade in those days was conducted by wooden ships and iron men.

Today, Lockeport's wealth is restricted to a handful of the population of roughly nine hundred, and the town's only visible connection with money is Crescent Beach, a mile-long stretch of unbroken white sand that until recently was depicted on the back of Canada's fifty-dollar bill. The beach is Lockeport's main landmark and reflects the wide range of coastal weather. On a warm summer day it can look like a beach in the Caribbean. But when an Atlantic storm moves in with a wind so sharp it would cut the whiskers right off your face, the waves breaking over the rocks make it an awe-inspiring sight.

In recent years the town has seen hard times. A fire that burned down its centre in 1975 has left it scarred to this day, so that only a few mixed-goods stores, a big drug store, and a federal building make up its downtown. Elaine and I were relative newcomers when the fire hit, and I still remember the red glow and the desperate efforts of the fire brigade to prevent its spread. At other times both of the big fish plants − the giant Halifax-based National Sea and the Lockeport-based Pierce Fisheries − were also razed by fire, although they have now been rebuilt. But this is still an area where money is scarce, and anyone with money to spend is soon