A Rock Fell on the Moon

by Alicia Priest

Speculation aside, in the first trial Dad convinced jurors he had some legitimate claim to the disputed ore. In the second trial, however, the more he pontificated about how he’d mined and transported his ore, the more the new jury believed otherwise.

  With most people, that would have been the end of it. But not with Dad, even with his defeat before the BC Court of Appeal. In fact, that defeat left him more determined to exact some measure of revenge. In letters home from jail, he vowed to “sue the pants off” the smelter, which had processed the ore and paid the proceeds to UKHM before the first trial. (To this day, I can’t fathom why UKHM got the goods, given that ownership of the ore was never proven in court; it was only proven that Dad and Poncho didn’t own it. Perhaps the corporate bully got what it wanted, not only with the smelter but also with the law, which never batted an eye at the payout.)

  Dad filed a civil action against the American Smelting and Refining Co. in BC Supreme Court in December 1966. But by March he had abandoned the effort, turning his attention south of the border. The next year notice was served on ASARCO that Gerald H. Priest was suing the smelter for breach of contract. It was an audacious gambit but one that Dad’s new lawyer in Seattle felt was worth pursuing.

  Nelson Christensen was a Seattle lawyer working for a prestigious firm by the name of Howe, Davis, Riese & Jones. Dad explained how he had delivered nearly $200,000 worth of raw ore (with Dad, the value of the ore skyrocketed with every mention) to ASARCO in June 1963 and how two years later he had been convicted of theft. But well before he had been found guilty the smelter processed the disputed ore and cut UKHM a big cheque. “That’s a violation of the contract I had with ASARCO,” Dad told Christensen. “Isn’t it?”

  It was an intriguing question. By then, Dad barely had two spare nickels to rub together. Likely, Christensen agreed that his legal costs would be deferred in the event that the courts ruled in Dad’s favour or the parties settled out of court.

  The filing of the claim against ASARCO rang alarm bells at UKHM for obvious reasons. Before ASARCO paid UKHM, the smelter had required the company to agree that if Alpine or someone such as Gerald H. Priest recovered funds from the smelter, UKHM would pay it back.

  Dad’s next day in court was before the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, with the hearing held either in Spokane or Seattle. David Wagoner, a Seattle lawyer working for another of the city’s big firms—Holman, Marion, Perkins Coie & Stone—argued that Dad’s previous criminal conviction in Canada prevented him from launching a civil action against the smelter. Like the presumption of innocence, it is also an accepted legal truism that anyone convicted of a crime cannot profit from it. Christensen argued that the smelter had breached the terms of the contract prior to Dad’s criminal conviction by smelting the ore before Canadian courts issued any ruling. After considering both arguments, the court ruled in ASARCO’s favor. But the fight wasn’t finished. Dad appealed to the United States Court of Appeals, Ninth District. And there, finally, he was victorious—it was his first legal win since his troubles began six years earlier. On March 20, 1969, with his family unravelling and oblivious to his international legal forays, the appeals court overturned the lower court’s decision.

  Surely, the court stated, the manner in which Dad was convicted must be considered. Was the judgment trustworthy? If there was any doubt, then Dad should not be prevented from making his case before the US courts. The circuit court judges concluded that Dad’s earlier conviction was tainted because of the peculiar reverse onus charge. With that, the door was opened for a full-fledged civil action in the US.

  By August of that year, UKHM’s lawyers were worried. If a trial in the US went ahead, weeks of court time would again be swallowed up at huge expense to the company. And at the end of the day, UKHM would likely be holding the bag if the court ordered a payout. Soon after, ASARCO’s lawyers called Christensen with an offer for an out-of-court settlement. Dad took the money. How much? According to Mom, he received $80,000, half of which went to his lawyer. Once he’d paid his sugar daddy Robert Campbell the $16,000 he owed him for his legal fees, Dad was left with $24,000. Not long after, he bought a small wood-sided bungalow in Slocan City, a forgotten village in BC’s West Kootenays.

  The house would be the one tangible thing Dad would garner from his Moon claims. And it would come from UKHM, the company he’d devoted twelve years of his working life to; the company that created Elsa, where he spent the happiest years of his life; the company he stole from, and that did its utmost to ensure he was punished. It was a paltry and ironic victory.

  Epilogue

  What Really Happened?

  I strolled up old Bonanza. The same old moon looked down;The same old landmarks seemed to yearn to me;But the cabins all were silent, and the flat, once like a town,Was mighty still and lonesome-like to see.

  In the summer of 1992, my husband Ben, our one-year-old daughter Charlotte and I visited Dad in Slocan City, where he lived with his second wife and his son Andrew, the boy he’d always wanted. On that late summer day, as we drove into the lush and verdant Slocan Valley, my excitement was diluted by a heavy dose of trepidation: our stopover would be the first time Dad would meet his son-in-law and his granddaughter, and it would be my peacemaking with a father I’d been largely estranged from for twenty-three years. I also anticipated meeting Andrew, my twenty-eight-year-old half-brother, whom I’d last encountered as a round-cheeked, saucer-eyed toddler.

  When the family fractured back in 1969, Dad wrote me for the first two years or so, his envelopes occasionally stuffed with a five- or ten-dollar bill. “Treat your mother and yourself to a banana split on me,” he’d write. That was the sum total of alimony and child support he offered. When Mom asked for a divorce three years after they split, Dad sent her Vancouver lawyer Elspeth Munro Gardner a startling letter, every word a stinking lie.

  Dear Madam:

  Before you proceed with an action by Mrs. Priest, I feel that you should be informed of the following:

  In 1969, Mrs. Priest did desert her home and did refuse to return to it.

  She was supported until 1970 when she refused an offer of a home. She did refuse, previous to our separation, the services of a marriage councilor [sic]. On written statement of her own doctor, she is or was in 1969, in an impaired mental condition.

  Last, but not least, is the fact that in 1971 I divested myself of all my properties and forwarded the sum of 327 thousand dollars via Switzerland and Poland to a Children’s Aid Society in North Viet Nam [sic] and am now penniless, unemployed, and in possession of only the simplest necessities of life.

  I occupy a log cabin on the shore of Slocan Lake. A snowshoe trail of about one mile connects me with the nearest road. I have lived in the vicinity of Slocan since September 1970.

  Our correspondence halted after my parents’ uncontested divorce one year later. The truth is that after working in Yellowknife for Terra Silver Mine for two years, Dad married a woman with a twelve-year-old daughter, and together they had a son and moved to Logan Lake near Kamloops, BC, where he worked for Lornex Copper Mine until his retirement in 1986. I could count the number of his letters since the divorce on one hand and the number of times we’d seen each other on two fingers. Depending on his mood, he addressed me as either Alice or Alicia and signed off as “Pappy,”“Dad,” “your father” or “G.H. Priest.” He never forgave me for not asking him to “march me down the aisle” in 1989. “That’s what fathers do,” he later grumbled. But there are things I couldn’t forgive him for, so I skipped the apology.

  Our sorry history aside, Dad was all grins, hugs and brazen hospitality when we arrived in Slocan City. We were directed to come for lunch to his “second” house, not the bungalow he bought with the money from UKHM, which my grandparents once inhabited and where he now lived with his second family, but a three-room log cabin bathed in sunlight. Dad told us the dwelling was his alone—his
sanctuary when his wife and son drove him “to distraction.”

  As we stepped out of the car, Dad rushed forward with a tight embrace for me, and a brief handshake for Ben. Taller and thinner than I remembered, he had a fringe of grey hair rimming the back of his head and was close to toothless. What few teeth remained were yellowed, worn-down stumps, except for an artificial bridge of four incisors. He was clean-shaven and wearing dark jeans cinched tightly above his waist, a freshly washed but permanently stained tan work shirt and crumpled cowboy boots. His pants stopped a good 3 inches above his ankles. Despite his joy at seeing us, his downcast eyebrows and intense glower gave him that avian predator expression I knew so well. All in all, the word “pathetic” comes to mind.

  Margit, his wife, hugged me and kissed Charlotte. She was a short, plump woman with thinning dyed red hair, a high rounded forehead, large dark eyes, bright orange lips and long orange fingernails, and spoke with a heavy German accent. She was also a good twelve years Dad’s junior. In a high-pitched, singsong voice, she began to ask about our trip but was summarily dismissed by Dad, who said he wanted us all to himself. Andrew would not be making an appearance, he added.

  “Ben, bet you’re glad to get your family out of that cesspool of a city, even for a few weeks. No place for a thinking person, let alone a place to raise a child!”

  “Oh we love the Kootenays all right,” Ben replied. “But we like Vancouver too.”

  Ushering us proudly in, Dad urged me to sit at the small kitchen table while he fixed lunch. Close by, a wood-burning stove threw out warmth and the smell of roasting fowl. As Dad set the table I looked around. The cabin was clean and cozy, with log walls sparsely decorated with retro northern kitsch. A flock of green ceramic ducks was in flight on one wall, rows of hardcover books with titles like Quiet Flows the Don and Haji Baba of Ispahan backed against another. An old glass kerosene lamp sat on a small wooden table. There was no electricity in the cabin.

  We ate a remarkably good meal of juicy chicken, browned potatoes, boiled carrots and fresh bread. Throughout lunch, Dad conversed nervously, tickling Charlotte, throwing me backhanded compliments and recounting one outdoor adventure after another. Then out came a plate of store-bought chocolate chip cookies. Apparently, these were for the women and children, because at that point Dad pulled out a plastic bottle of red wine. Around the bottle’s neck dangled a tiny black bull on a string.

  “This’ll put some hair on your chest, Ben,” he said, getting out two short-stemmed goblets. “Sangre de Toro—Blood of the Bull. It’s a man’s drink.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty good stuff,” said Ben. “Thanks.”

  Wine poured, Dad opened a door by the stove and signalled Ben into another room.

  “I call this my den for men. No females allowed,” he said, grinning in my direction. “I spend a lot of time here.”

  I smiled and said us “females” would rather be enjoying the sun anyway. But as Dad and Ben took their seats in threadbare chairs, I glanced through the open door. Staring back, from walls, desktops and side tables, were large framed photos of Mom in her resplendent prime, Vona and me as carefree cherubs, Omi beaming and leading one of us by the hand, and Caesar guarding his charges—all females except for the dog. A phonograph and turntable with our favourite vintage records waited in one corner. His now scuffed and scratched guitar and harmonica sat cradled in a stand. A standing brass ashtray brimmed with ash and cigarette butts. Even our old decorative rug with the exotic Persian camel market scene was there, though the pattern had become barely visible. And on one wall, a wooden rack displayed three gleaming hunting rifles. No direct sunlight entered the room and a dusty pall hovered over the artifacts. What was his den for men? A shrine to better days? A mausoleum of memories? His personal time machine?

  Suddenly, I had to get out of that haunted house and into the sunshine. Grabbing Charlotte, I bolted outside into blinding light, letting the warmth wash over me like a balm. I wondered what cauldron of twisted thoughts Dad cooked up when he sat brooding hour after hour in that room. And how did Margit and Andrew view his obsession with a world they were so patently excluded from? Within twenty minutes, we had said our farewells and were back in the car.

  “Don’t be a stranger,” Dad called out as we turned up the main road leading out of town.

  It is spring 1998 when I find the courage to ask Dad for the truth about his thieving days so long ago. I’ve heard various versions over the decades since, and most of the time I pretend to forget it ever happened. But so many years have passed, and with a family of my own I need to hear his story from his own mouth. I write to him, hoping for the final and definitive word on the matter. We’ve been back in touch through letters and occasional short visits, but the six years since we’ve reconciled have been tumultuous, to put it politely. It’s been twenty-nine years since we lived together as a family in Calgary, more than a generation ago. During that time, Mom had four open-heart operations that left her with three artificial valves and a pacemaker. She remarried in 1975—much to Omi’s chagrin—and enjoyed fifteen years with a low-key, fun-loving Englishman until his death in 1990. In 1996 she travelled to Germany for a reunion with her brother who had travelled from his home in Siberia. They had not seen each other in 56 years. Tenacious Vona, in the meantime, single-handedly picked her broken self up and moved to Vancouver where she completed a high school diploma while working as a legal secretary. At UBC, she pursued a degree in zoology followed by medical school and a residency in psychiatry. She practices her profession in the BC Interior where she has a 10-acre hobby farm populated by horses and many other animals. She never married and never had another child.

  At the time of my 1998 inquiry about what really happened, Dad is living alone with a small buck-toothed dog and a free-flying parakeet in the basement of a derelict house on a sad street in Castlegar, BC. Parakeet poop is everywhere, especially in the kitchen sink under the bird’s wooden perch.

  He quickly writes me back with his answer to my “what happened at the mine” question. Despite all we’ve been through and as well as I thought I knew my father, I am stunned by the long and convoluted fairy tale he sends me on four scrawled pages.

  While working for UKHM, Dad writes, he chanced upon some records from an old assay office based in Keno that hadn’t been in use for years. Reading them, he discovered that back in the thirties three “sleigh loads” of high-grade ore, 35 tons each, had been dumped over the far side of Keno Hill. The ore, the files explained, originated from what was called the Million Dollar Stope of the old Wernecke mine.

  “I found them, and because I did, I wanted them,” he writes. “The ore was supposed to go down to Mayo Landing (where you were born!), but either by theft or guile, those sleighs were dumped over the edge.”

  Enlisting Poncho’s help, and that of his trusty snowmobile, Dad says he hauled two sleigh loads (70 tons) of ore to a pickup spot on Duncan Creek Road. The third sleigh load was hard to access but Dad agreed that if Poncho could retrieve it, the entire load was his. But Poncho got greedy, and demanded half of the two sleigh loads as well. When Dad refused, Poncho stole 700 pounds of precipitates from the mill and, unbeknownst to Dad, added it to the shipment. That’s why Poncho was found guilty at the first trial and Dad wasn’t. At the second trial, Dad didn’t have a chance.

  “The trial was one of ‘reverse onus’—such laws have been knocked out by the Bill of Rights, and don’t exist today,” he writes. “UKHM… got $250,000 of taxpayers’ money to prosecute me. I only had $5,000 in defense and as the Russian proverb says, ‘When denim rubs against velvet, denim wears out.’”

  Once he explained how he found the ore, Dad tackled the fun part of his story. Because ASARCO had smelted the ore before the first trial and had given the proceeds to UKHM, they were in a position to be sued. Prison guards smuggled a letter out for Dad to the Law Society of Seattle outlining his case. The letter landed in the hands of
a young lawyer eager to take up the fight. So eager, in fact, once Dad was out of jail, he represented him for free.

  “At the house on Main St. I got a phone call from some Colonel Blimp type at the defense’s lawyers in Vancouver,” Dad writes. “He was bursting a blood vessel with rage, and called me ‘the most despicable character he had ever known’ because of course he’d heard that the suit was going on in the States. Swine that I am!”

  The suit proceeded, with Dad demanding $400,000 in damages. Of course the smelter hired the “most expensive Jewish law firm in New York” and after “two days and two nights” of bargaining, the case was settled out of court “for a large sum.”

  Dad’s lawyer cautioned him against bringing such a large amount back to Canada as the government could seize it on the grounds that no one can profit from a criminal act. “No criminal act had been committed in the States so the money was safe there,” Dad adds. But not safe enough. Dad’s lawyer urged him to move the money even farther away, so after bringing back $20,000 to buy the house in Slocan, Dad flew to Liechtenstein, where he invested his hundreds of thousands at “a very high rate.”

  “Oh yes, I could have gone to live in Europe or South America,” he writes. “I never touched the money for 25 years during which it nearly tripled.”

  And then? Spurred by a rumour that Canada would require all citizens to declare their foreign assets, Dad jetted to New York and directed that all the money be deposited in an American bank in Mexico City.

  “I had, for a number of years, sent support to a little girl in Mexico. Hah! And at about the same time, a revolution had begun down in southern Mexico. VIVA Zapata!”

  He then travelled to southern Mexico but the military had sealed off the border. After meetings with the Catholic Church, in particular a group of Jesuits—“a rock hard bunch”—Dad drew up an agreement that his money would be used to set up and support an orphanage in southern Mexico.