Skipper ‘amazed’ at 13-tonne hashish find

Press, 15 December 1983, Page 22

Skipper ‘amazed’ at 13-tonne hashish find

NZPA special correspondent New York The New Zealand tramp steamer captain charged with attempting to smuggle 13.6 tonnes of hashish into the United States says he is “not a bad man — I’ve never been in trouble before.” Captain Donald Carl Dickinson, a 31-year-old Auckland Grammar School old boy and his three-man crew were arrested in November when the U.S. Coast Guard seized and searched the 46metre motor vessel Hetty, 110 kilometres off the east coast of the United States. “In the 300-ton coastal trader,” said a spokesman for the Coast Guard, Petty Officer Jerry Sneider, “we found the third-largest haul of hashish in U.S. history with a street value of at least ?NZISO million.” Captain Dickinson said in an interview: “We were all amazed, absolutely amazed at the discovery. I’m no big criminal — I’m just a normal sort of person who somehow got involved.” After pleas of not guilty by the four, bail was set at SNZI.S million for Captain Dickinson, SNZ3OO,OOO for the engineer, Steven George Marriott, aged 35, of Yorkshire, and SNZISO,OOO for each of the other two members of the crew, William Charlesworth, aged 32, of Ontario, Canada, and the cook, Peter Jackson, aged 34, of Cockermouth, England. Pre-trial motions have to be submitted by late this month and the jury trial will begin on January 3 in Newark, New Jersey. If convicted, Captain Dickinson and his crew face at least 15 years in jail apiece. None of the crew has been able to raise bail. “We’re on our own, I’d say,” acknowledged Captain dickinson in the interview in the conference room at the Manhattan Metropolitan Correctional Centre. During the 90-minute interview, Captain Dickinson, a blond, well-built man with deep smile lines when he grins, seemed relaxed and cheerful, with a good understanding of his predicament. The sailor’s story began in Auckland in 1974, when, he said, “a bunch of us chipped in on a yacht to sail the world. I did my training in small coastal .work with various companies.” After completing a course with the New Zealand Marine Department, Captain Dickinson gained his .master’s ticket and sailed off to see the world. Eventually, said the captain, he settled on the Caribbean isle of St Vincent, just north of Grenada. There he managed the Heritage Yacht Charter Company. “I had big plans, though. I

planned to run a refrigerated shrimp ship from Trinidad up to Martinique and Guadeloupe, and I was reconditioning my boat, the Ariana, in Tortola (in the British Virgin Islands). I was working on the refrigerator and I was a bit low on cash when I ran into a chap in a bar who said he needed a captain for his ship in Singapore.” About the British Virgin Islands company that owns the Hetty, Captain Dickinson said: “I don’t really know anything else about Primrose (Investments Inc.). It’s got three or four similar vessels, I believe. I think they buy and sell ships.” After being flown to Singapore, he and his crew were going to fix up the vessel. He knew none of the members of the crew (Marriott and Charlesworth had sailed on the Hetty from London with a Load of explosives and Jackson arrived in Singapore at the same time as the captain). “They (the ship’s owners) had a buyer in Australia, in Adelaide, I think. We were to deliver the boat and a load of timber,” Captain Dickinson said. “I thought it would be great for me— I could zip on home to Auckland, where I hadn’t been for three years. “We stayed in Singapore about two and a half months working on the boat,” said Captain Dickinson. “We reconditioned two generators and painted, making it look as nice as possible. “But,” said the captain, “there were deals I know nothing about. I was just looking after the ship and I was just told to what I do as a captain of a ship.” The Adelaide sale apparently fell through, and the captain said he was ordered to load 203 cubic metres of mahogany in Surabaya, Indonesia, and sail for London. With the ship two-thirds full of banded timber, the crew sailed past the Middle East, through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, stopping only, according to the captain, at Dubai and Port Said. Six weeks later, off the straits of Gibraltar, the captain said, the owner of the cargo, “a company called Millsdend Trading,” ordered the Hetty by radio to change course for Philadelphia, in the United States. Captain Dickinson identified Millsdend as a United Kingdom company. “About two and a half days off the United States,” Captain Dickinson said, “we saw a Coast Guard Orion.” The next day another Coast Guard aircraft flew past the Hetty. When told that the Coast Guard said they had stopped

the vessel because she fitted a profile of smuggling vessels, including reversing course over a 24-hour period, Captain Dickinson retorted: “Nonsense! We just continued on the same course. We went a bit south because of the weather. There’s a low-powered route you take across the Atlantic. The Coast Guard had all that information. “The Coast Guard,” Captain Dickinson said, “was very good to us. They asked permission to come aboard and check paperwork. “They made out that they were interested in the paper, and then they proceeded to search around.”. Under the mahogany, Coast Guard officers found 454 burlap packages. After peeling back the protective brown paper and plastic wrapping, they sliced a sample from the brown resin and took it to the wheelhouse, where the captain watched it being tested. “They were very quiet about it,” he said. After identifying it as hashish, “they took the other three crewmen off and kept me on the boat to help them take it ashore.” One of the inspecting customs officers said that the hashish “was packed in oval-shaped slabs, 2.5 centimetres thick, weighing about a kilo, which were packed in burlap in batches of 28.” “The pile,” said the customs officer, “made a seven by four by one metre heap which stretched from one side of the hold to the other.” Captain Dickinson said that he never saw the hash-

ish, not when “stevedores loaded the mahogany in Surabaya,” not at sea, when he “checked the mahogany for movement because some of the bands broke,” and not on the shore when he “never even saw it come out of the hold,” saying: “They hadn’t unloaded the boat when I was taken away.” Asked how he thought the hashish had got aboard his ship, Captain Dickinson replied: “I don’t know what I can say. “I’m not saying anything to anyone at this stage. Whatever you say, they can screw around. We’ll just have to see what comes out in court.” The captain says he has faith in the United States’ judicial system, and gives the appearance of being cheerfully confident that he and his shipmates will not be convicted. “Considering we were in international waters and on a foreign vessel, we were out of the jurisdiction of the United States. With internation law, basically the United States cannot do anything to us.” Asked how he was going to pay for his defence, the captain gave a wry grin. “I’m not sure,” he said. He paused, then said: “With the help of some friends.” The United States Customs Department has put a forfeiture value of $NZ675,000 on the Hetty and her mahogany cargo. The Intelligence agency of the Federal Drug Enforcement Agency says the hashish could have been acquired for anything between SNZ6 million and SNZ4O million depending on where it was bought.