Posted on 06/13/2004 4:27:40 AM PDT by oceanperch
Indians trying to save their reputation 10:42 PM PDT on Friday, June 11, 2004 By PAT McREYNOLDS / KING 5 News
TACOMA, Wash.
Native Americans are fighting back after federal agents raided 12 tribal smokeshops earlier this week. Shop owners didn't like their businesses being mentioned in the same sentence as Al-Qaeda.
Just as motorists cross into Tacoma on I-5, a new sign blinks in to view that says: "We are not terrorists. We are American Indians. We have been fighting terrorism since 1492." KING
"We are not terrorists. We are American Indians. We have been fighting terrorism since 1492." Patrons of the Emerald Queen Casino couldn't help but comment as they walked by. "I couldn't believe they put something like that up there," said one. "To me, it looks like an over-reaction," said another.
The owner of Lyle's Smokeshop authored the sign in response to a massive raid by customs agents earlier this week when they seized cash and thousands of cigarettes from 12 stores on the same day that the government announced a crackdown on cigarette smuggling and its ties to terrorism.
Those claims touched off a demonstration by smokeshop employees. David Turnipseed owns BJ's, another shop raided by federal agents.
"I think most people know that we're not terrorists. I think everybody knows that's a crock, that's just an excuse to get in the door," he said.
He even claims to have documents proving the cigarettes seized had already passed through customs. "It was bogus. It's a way in the backdoor to try and break the Native Americans," he continued.
Customs officials still have no comment on the raids, and even though many were put off by the message on the reader board, none of them felt their neighbors are funneling money to Al-Qaeda.
The sign is not owned by the casino and has nothing to do with it, and the message has done very little if anything to slow down Friday night business.
The raids took place on Tuesday and so far, customs agents have not charged any of the shops with a crime.
I wasn't intending to quote anyone, but they are seven common words.
Well, OK maybe honor isn't a common word, but it should be.
This is what has caused the anti-tobacco crowd to claim any and all activities involving tobacco and smoking in any manner that is not anti-tobacco to be terrorist related.
Since you are a genuine rocket scientist, I ask you to read through the posts. I think you will understand that my discussion is about unfair business regs used by the dems for political campaign $ and not about treaties.
We have ALL been robbed blind by the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, not just Indians. Everyone of us, the long, the short and the wide. The federal gov't is pretty much a PROCTECTION RACKET.. the Mafia did'nt invent the scam, they just NOTICED THE GENIUS OF IT..
Toronto Globe & Mail
Monday, January 4, 1999
JOHN SAUNDERS
Police probe of industry links to smuggling goes back years Scheme to import cigarettes illegally no secret to tobacco firms, ex-RCMP official says Ottawa and Tu Thanh Ha in Montreal
Syracuse, N.Y. -- Shedding light on an uncharacteristic guilty plea by a tobacco company, search-warrant documents reveal that the RCMP has spent years investigating suspicions that smugglers had help from inside Canada's No. 3 cigarette maker.
RJR-Macdonald Inc., maker of Export A's, is at the centre of the latest news of corporate links to an odd, Canadian kind of smuggling. Cigarettes are shipped out of the country and then spirited back in, avoiding high Canadian taxes.
It explains how, on paper, Canadian cigarettes became an export-success story in this decade when hardly anyone but Canadians likes them. It also suggests how black-market forces can defeat political attempts to discourage smokers at the cash register.
Smuggling investigations and related publicity have already affected the careers of one RJR-Macdonald executive (former chief operating officer Stan Smith, who left the company last year at the age of 43) and at least two of his subordinates, notably Christopher Gibb-Carsley, a veteran salesman based in Montreal.
Mr. Gibb-Carsley, whose work involved selling cigarettes to duty-free shops on the border, was arrested 3½ months ago in an RCMP roundup. He is accused of conspiring with a Montreal customs broker and others to import cigarettes illegally. At last report, he was on medical leave from his job.
After an investigation involving wiretaps and undercover work, the Mounties searched computer files at RJR-Macdonald's Montreal offices in 1996, seizing printouts of customer lists and sales volumes.
To obtain a search warrant, the police filed 11 pages of allegations, none yet tested in court. One was that someone inside the company was getting payoffs to direct cigarettes to U.S. dealers who would route them to the U.S. side of Akwesasne Mohawk territory, a smugglers' paradise straddling the border near Cornwall, Ont.
Akwesasne also figures in RJR-Macdonald's greatest embarrassment yet. In a plea bargain announced Christmas week, a sister company that handled its U.S. marketing cut short a federal prosecution in Syracuse, N.Y., by agreeing to pay penalties of $15-million (U.S.).
Northern Brands International admitted selling nearly 1.3 million cartons of Export A's to just one group of smugglers in 1994 and 1995 "with wilful blindness to or conscious disregard of the fact that these cigarettes would be fraudulently diverted" from their declared destinations, Russia and Estonia.
In fact, they went to Canada via native territory or other routes after stops in various U.S. warehouses.
The scheme was almost laughable, implying that former Soviet subjects had developed a sudden craze for Canadian cigarettes, but it might have gone unpunished had the smugglers not grown greedy and evaded a comparatively small U.S. federal tax in the process.
The corporate plea bargain was not cheap, but it bought something for RJR-Macdonald and related entities, notably RJR-Nabisco of New York, owner of both RJR-Macdonald and Northern Brands.
The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of New York agreed not bring further criminal charges against any of the companies for violations of federal law that may have occurred since 1985 relating to illicit trade in Canadian-brand cigarettes. The office would normally handle U.S. cases relating to smuggling through Akwesasne.
Even so, the deal does not bind authorities in other U.S. districts or Canada; nor does it protect individuals from prosecution, which means that executives and salesmen could still be at risk.
The U.S. attorney, Thomas Maroney, had already obtained guilty pleas from 18 people (Mohawks, Italian-Americans and Anglos, but no tobacco-company employees) in connection with related smuggling operations, described as some of the biggest yet prosecuted, and he warned last week that the investigation is not over.
Among the 18 are Larry V. Miller of Massena, N.Y., a bar owner who got so rich smuggling liquor and tobacco that he at one time had his own Learjet; the Tavano brothers, Robert and Lewis, of Niagara Falls, N.Y.; and Tony Laughing, a Cleveland steel worker who returned to his reservation roots to prosper in smuggling and gambling as armed Mohawk Warriors made Akwesasne an entrepreneurial free-fire zone. A number of the same people face Canadian criminal charges in major RCMP cases.
Manhattan lawyer Stephen Heard, who represents the RJR group in contraband matters, said Northern Brands is no longer active.
He described it as having been "an entirely Canadian operation" handling RJR-Macdonald brands exclusively and run by Canadian citizens, despite the fact that it was incorporated in Delaware.
Those affected at Northern Brands include sales director Les Thompson, who is on administrative leave. Mr. Thompson was in the news in 1997 after a U.S. Customs agent filed an affidavit describing him as having sat around a fireplace at a Vancouver Island fishing lodge two years earlier talking tobacco with the Tavanos and Loran Thompson (no relation), a leading Akwesasne smuggler.
Masters of marketing, Canada's tobacco executives knew where their smokers were in the early 1990s as they watched their exports climb to more than a third of their production. They did not condone smuggling, they said, but what could they do?
They said rising taxes had fostered a culture of contraband. They even hired a former RCMP assistant commissioner, Rod Stamler, to produce public studies of smuggling.
In an interview last month, Mr. Stamler said the trade was not illegal from the companies' point of view as long as they did not get close to the smugglers.
"Whatever happened in New York, it must have been a mistake on their part, but for the most part the Canadian manufacturers tried to sell to legitimate licensed wholesalers [in the United States]. Did they know where their product was going?
Of course they did. I mean, nobody denies that.
"As a matter of fact, our reports in detail outlined what happened to the cigarettes and how they were being shipped out and how they were being rotated back all through the Indian reservation and various other spots across the country. This was not a secret, and it was publicized by the companies themselves."
It was Canadian policy to deter smoking with high prices, but politicians retreated in 1994, cutting taxes to shrink smugglers' profits and avert a collapse of legal cigarette retailing in Quebec and Ontario.
The glory days of smuggling were over, but the smuggling did not stop. Depending on how you look at it, the war was won by the smugglers, the companies or the smokers.
Another view is that the companies were just protecting their market shares.
Industry leader Imperial Tobacco (Player's and du Maurier, among other brands) declared publicly in 1993 that it would no longer honour government requests to limit exports because smugglers were filling the demand for cheap cigarettes with its competitors' products.
There was also the risk that Canadians would get a taste for smuggled U.S. brands, or for copycat Canadian-style brands marketed by energetic and largely tax-exempt U.S. native groups.
At the Wolf Clan Truck Stop on the U.S. side of Akwesasne last week, you could buy a carton of 200 Akwesasne-made Putter's Lights (think Player's Light) or DK's (du Maurier King Size) for the equivalent of $12.25 (Canadian). Exacts, which mimic Export A, are made on the Tuscarora Nation near Niagara Falls, N.Y.
All three brands have shown up as contraband in nearly every part of Canada, where fully taxed major-brand prices range from about $30 a carton in Ontario and Quebec to more than $48 in British Columbia and $52 in Newfoundland. Federal and provincial taxes, which account for the bulk of the legal price, range from less than $17 in Ontario to more than $39 in Newfoundland.
In recent years, Canadian natives have met the challenge. Sago cigarettes, made on the Six Nations reserve near Brantford, Ont., are sold legally on the reserve ($15 a carton, including about $8 in federal excise tax and duty but no other taxes) and trafficked illegally as far away as Alberta and British Columbia.
Sago means hello in Mohawk, but some insist it stands for Society to Aggravate Government Officials.
In the great Syracuse contraband case, it turns out that some of the Export A's smuggled into Canada were not really Canadian cigarettes at all. They were made in an RJR plant in Puerto Rico.
It may sound as if the company had set up an offshore production line to serve smugglers, but Mr. Heard, the RJR lawyer, said that was not so. "It was not intended to feed the contraband market. It sold into the Caribbean basin."
Export A's have not been made in Puerto Rico since about 1996, he said. Asked if he thought there was a Caribbean market for the brand, he said he was not sure.
For the past year, Mr. Laughing has been telling anyone who will listen that Canadian tobacco executives were as involved in smuggling as he was, at least in terms of knowing what happened to their product after it was exported.
"I said all along they knew exactly where it was going," the 51-year-old Mohawk businessman said last week in a county-jail interview in Syracuse. "We were their biggest customers. They had to know where it was going."
He has a reason to say this. He argues that it is unfair to send him to prison for a long time (he is looking at up to eight years when he comes up for sentencing next month) in a case in which no tobacco-company official has even been charged.
The argument may not sound quite as hollow in the wake of the Dec. 22 corporate guilty plea. The company admitted there was proof that it abetted customers in illegal acts by deliberately turning a blind eye to their conduct.
This is not to say Mr. Laughing gave himself up willingly. After he was charged in 1997, he holed up on the U.S. side of Akwesasne and defied U.S. authorities to arrest him.
He wound up pleading guilty to two charges: money-laundering conspiracy and conducting the affairs of the St. Regis Mohawk band (meaning the U.S. side of Akwesasne) through a pattern of racketeering activity. The latter charge relates partly to kickbacks collected for a former chief.
From his jail cell, Mr. Laughing can look back on an interesting life.
As he tells it, his mother was from the Kahnawake reserve near Montreal, home of steel workers who built many of the continent's skyscrapers, and his father ran alcohol south through Akwesasne during Prohibition for Joseph Kennedy, who went on to serve as U.S. ambassador to Britain and see his son in the White House.
Mr. Laughing said he worked in steel construction for 20 years before going home in 1986 to build a business smuggling cigarettes from Akwesasne to Kahnawake.
He preferred cars and vans to boats, and the lightly patrolled border roads east of Akwesasne to routes on Mohawk land, he said.
He said he could buy exported Canadian cigarettes for the equivalent of about $8.25 (Canadian) a carton and get $17 in Kahnewake when legal store prices in Quebec were about $30, leaving plenty of profit for those who would sell them on the reserve or city streets.
He said his own profit was $2-million (U.S.) in his first full year, enabling him to build an illegal casino on the U.S. side of Akwesasne. Things were even better when Quebec prices rose to between $40 and $50 a carton in the early 1990s, he said, and not so good after Canadian cuts in 1994.
As he saw it, his operation was law-abiding, at least on the U.S. side. Mohawks pay no state tax, and his purchase price included a U.S. federal tax of $2.40 (U.S.) a carton.
He stressed that he took no part in the scheme that got Mr. Miller in trouble and led to the tobacco-company guilty plea. Using phony overseas destinations, Mr. Miller and his group avoided the U.S. federal tax and saved $120,000 on each load of 50,000 cartons.
His greed got the better of him, Mr. Laughing said. "He wanted that extra $120,000 to play with."
CIGARETTE SMUGGLING: THE AKWESASNE ROUND TRIP
1. Truckloads of cigarettes made in Montreal are shipped to warehouses in Champlain, N.Y., or elsewhere. Because they are purportedly bound for U.S. or overseas markets, they are not subject to Canada's high tobacco taxes. A modest U.S. federal tax may be paid if the declared destination is the United States.
2. The cigarettes are transferred to the U.S. side of Akwesasne Mohawk territory, which boasts dozens of cigarette shops paying no state taxes. Smugglers take them to the Canadian side in boats on the St. Lawrence, or in cars, vans and pickups plying lightly patrolled border roads.
3. The cigarettes go by various routes to Canadian city streets, where blackmarket operators can take profits and still undercut prices of fully taxed cigarettes. Many smuggled cigarettes end up in Montreal, where they were made.
-**
Canadian cigarette prices: high on both coasts,
lower in the centre
This table shows taxes and typical prices per carton
of 200 cigarettes. On U.S. native reservations near the border, generic Canadian style cigarettes retail for the
equivalent of $12.25 a carton or less.
It's all because of that pesky Constitution thingie. Get rid of that, and then everything will be "fair".
Well, Libertina - go ahead and propose a new COnstitutional Amendement, because that's the only way you are going to solve the issue of Indian Sovereignty.</p>
Oh, I see. Fair enough. I just didn't see the tie-in to this particular article. The cops have raided Indian shops in Connecticut and New York, as well, and the justification was not only smuggling of illegal tobacco, but that they where selling to minors, but everyone knows it was all about taxes and nothing else. That's the basis of what I was trying to get across.
Chad, tribes have certain treaty rights, but they are not completely sovereign. Hence the term "dependant" sovereign nation. They do not have a free-for-all on the laws of this country - of which they are supposedy a part. If they want complete separation however, THEY will need a constitutinal amendment. The democrats ae doing no favors here. It divides and makes enemies... Oh, not unfamiliar is it?
However, Tribes are normally NOT beholden to the States. Only Congress. And if a county or state passes a stupid, harmful law, that doesn't mean that the law applies on tribal land.
THAT, my friend, is how it works according to our Constitution. Like I said, don't like it? Change it.
Now that is a great sign. No long-winded description of abuses, no list of demands - just a short and accurate declaration.
Even the better folks at Customs have to be smiling. ;-)
"Running Joke", love your Indian name.
But I understand that in other places, taxes will be the issue. It may get to be here in WA too, because if too many businesses go off our tax rolls, the curent government will have no choice but to try and get some back from the Indians. Question: Do any of the people in your state dislike the fact they the reservations pay no tax on cigs while other businesses must? Or are they just greatful to be getting them cheaper? It's hard to make the argument that everyone should "be the same" when the majority is getting shafted by too many taxes...
And it drives people crazy, as this thread shows. Perhaps many would like it better if we indians went back to drinking, whining, and laying around in abject poverty?
;0)
"All it takes is for fools to stop going to the casinos and handing us their money!"
Truer words were never spoken.......however if the tribes are truly sovereign, then federal largesse would also be rejected in favor of the revenue that, for better or for worse, was granted to them.
Now, it's all about money, of course, in a capitalist system. Most American Indians, (and I suspect you, too), are not much more culturally connected to their forebears than I am, so as long as the tribes don't get "too" big, then they will be allowed to exist. Otherwise, watch out, the pale face is likely to change the rules AGAIN (for your own good, of course!)
State regulation generally does not apply to reservation or "trust" land, unless specifically authorized by Congress. That's that pesky Constitution thingie I was mentioning...
4 - bttt:
""The choice before us at present seems to be between two types of nonfree societies: (a) our present society with its constitutional guarantees of individual freedom and its helplessness against willful individuals who mug, rob,rape, murder, bomb, riot, and disrupt our institutions; or (b) a dictatorship which deprives individuals of many freedoms but maintains order and security in the cities. It is clear that a society in the grip of fear is not free no matter how numerous the freedoms its constitution guarantees."
Free-traitors belong to the first group, who rob, rape, murder, bomb and disrupt our institutions and the very lives of the most of us.
Uh oh, I am going to argue Indian politics with an Indian. I know this is near to your heart, Chad, but I think you are incorrect on this. Tribes ARE subject to state law. For example, when gambling was illegal in the state (wish it still were ) tribes also could not have casinos. In addition, the decision to allow them to take half of the shell fish on private property was decided by the WA State Supreme Court. I am not current on exact details, but they have certain rights, yet are not completely separate. Again, this is about the other wa business owners having equal rights, not about denying Indians theirs. No constitutional change is necessary, only upholding our laws as they are.
Wa has taken the reservation thing to an extreme not necessarily granted by treaty, but by activist judges. The purchase of NEW lands - often in the midst of exisiting cities, being then reclassified a "reservation" is something we will have to disagree upon.
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