To the drug dealers from the south, the frozen land of Nunavut was virgin territory just waiting to be colonized.
They saw a new and lucrative market where local residents accustomed to scarcity pricing would pay 2½ times the going rate for crack cocaine, flooding their operation with cash.
But as with any Northern industry, labour was a problem. So the Edmonton-based Lebanese gang set up a staffing system similar to that used by oil rigs and diamond mines, where teams of two dealers would rotate into Iqaluit every six weeks, typically importing a half million dollars in product each time and exporting a similar quantity of cash on the way out.
RCMP Constable James Morrison, one of the lead investigators, said there was no crack in Iqaluit before the gang hit town. Soon, local residents were burning through their life's savings to pay the steep price of $200 per 0.8-gram hit, and some turned to crime to feed their habit, he said. Customers ran the gamut from well-paid professionals to the poor and vulnerable living on social assistance.
"The North is relatively untouched when it comes to gang turf in the drug trade, unlike the South, which tends to be carved up between established organized crime groups," Constable Morrison explained. With high profit margins and no costly violence associated with competition, Nunavut was an attractive environment to a gang looking to expand its wealth and influence.
But in Iqaluit, a territorial capital with a population of just 6,000 people, it wasn't long before police were watching the dealers' every move. They dismantled the operation for the first time in September, 2007, charging Mohammed Jamal Cherkaoui and Rafic El-Cherkaowi of Edmonton with trafficking cocaine. Six months later, in what police called a carbon-copy investigation, they arrested three more from Edmonton on cocaine charges.
Among them was Alicia Belcher, a 22-year-old woman nabbed after getting off a flight from Iqaluit to Yellowknife. A police dog sniffed out her bag in a lineup, and officers asked to search it. She told them they wouldn't find drugs, but they would find money.
Ms. Belcher was carrying $240,000 in cash sealed in vacuum-packed plastic bags. She had flown to Nunavut from Edmonton only a few days earlier on a $3,000 ticket, the most expensive airfare available.
She said she would have been paid $1,000, less than 0.5 per cent of the amount she was carrying, for bringing the money back to Edmonton, although police say her cut was actually much higher. At her sentencing, her lawyer explained that she was a high-school dropout who had drifted away from her family and fallen in with a crowd of "fast people who had lots of money as well as nice cars and houses."
One of those people was Jacob Friskie, 24, whom she linked up with shortly after arriving in Nunavut.
Mr. Friskie and his friend Darrean Hall had been in Nunavut since February, and were under RCMP surveillance from the moment they arrived. They were replacing two other street dealers, whose apartment they moved into, and whose cellphones they continued to use.
The operation was fairly straightforward. The drugs were stored in one apartment and the cash was stored in another. Mr. Friskie would enter the apartments for short periods to replenish his stash of 0.8-gram-bags of crack, and made his deliveries by taxi after taking orders on his cellphone. When they raided the apartments, police found a two-page ledger of customers' names and phone numbers, along with 1.7 kilograms of crack, worth about $372,000.
In sentencing Mr. Friskie, the judge weighed the arguments of the Crown, which said "he came from Edmonton to this isolated community with the sole intention of preying on the Inuit," and the defence, which said that Mr. Friskie "barely knew where Nunavut was on the map" and certainly didn't know about the specific vulnerabilities of the population.
At Mr. Friskie's sentencing in the Nunavut Court of Justice, Mr. Justice Rene Foisy condemned "the white people from outside that come up here dealing drugs."
Judge Foisy called Mr. Friskie a parasite for feeding off the weakness of others.
"Nunavut is different than other jurisdictions because it is extremely largely populated by Inuit; it is the Inuit territory. By and large these are not people of means; these are poor people who have to struggle to live. ... When dealing with crack cocaine or other very addictive drugs their small resources are spent to feed a habit which they ... [acquired]as a result of people like you coming into this territory."
A high-school dropout who had worked as a house framer before falling in with the gang, Mr. Friskie was sentenced to three years in prison, and given credit for 12 months time served in pretrial custody. Ms. Belcher was sentenced to 12 months in jail. Mr. Cherkaoui and Mr. El-Cherkoawi will be tried in March and are assumed innocent until proven guilty.