Brushes with Gangland, Part II: The bust

When dealing drugs, the first law is to never sell them to people you don’t know. The second is to avoid dealing large quantities of drugs to any “acquaintance” who all of a sudden decides to buy pounds of a given substance instead of ounces. The third law -and perhaps the most important one to heed -is to avoid all contact with police during a deal, even if it goes dreadfully wrong.

These age-old proverbs could have helped Elaina King when she and a friend pulled a purple Dodge Durango into the South Burlington Holiday Inn Express on a chilly Monday evening five years ago. Had the young marijuana mule decided to casually observe even one of these laws, she probably could have avoided becoming an unwitting cog in a gangland slaying more than 100 miles away in her home state.

Instead, King and another fellow named Lance Loran were forced to the ground at gun point by the “acquaintance” and another man neither of them recognized. The robbers fleeced the Durango’s keys and made off into the night with a 50-pound bale of bubonic chronic the unsuspecting couple had intended to sell them. They also lost 50 half-pound bags of hydroponic ganja they had planned to move on the weed-happy streets of Burlington.

All in all, it was a bad day for the duo, especially seeing as though the dope wasn’t theirs to begin with. In fact, it belonged to a woman named Danielle Bevins, a troubled young soul who had a smuggling safe haven on the Akwesasne Mohawk reservation straddling the New York border with Canada. Bevins allegedly gave King $500 to take the Durango and the weed to South Burlington, where she was supposed to connect with a collection of dealers from the North East.

One of those dealers was Kevin Arkenau Jr., a Jersey shore native neck deep in the trade as well as a bunch of other rather unfriendly dealings. Unfortunately for King, Arkenau and his gun-toting companion weren’t in the mood to buy drugs; especially not from a pair of 20-something low-level couriers plucked from the reservation. After all, why would any self-respecting thug buy a $125,000 worth of chronic when they could viciously take it at gun point?

The robbery was simple enough. The two assailants grabbed the keys and hit the road, leaving the bewildered stoners behind at the motel. They drove about five miles away from the motel, ditched the Durango and then sped off in a rented car. The strange spectacle was observed by at least one witness, who later reported seeing “two or three men” fire out of the truck and into another vehicle.

Fortunately for the authorities, the drug robbers never realized the 26 extraneous pounds of weed they hadn’t ordered from the reservation. King naturally figured her robbers had grabbed all the weed and reported the vehicle stolen to local police. When the cops arrived, she gave a bullshit story about visiting a sick aunt and meeting with the would-be robbers to sell them her Durango, not a field’s harvest of marijuana. When the cops found her truck and a felony amount worth of marijuana, the long arm of the fed swiftly clutched King, Loran, Bevins and a host of other dope dealers operating around the border.

Among the dealers lumped in with King and Bevins was Burlington residents John Orr and Keith Morris, though loose court records seem to suggest the two Vermonters were picked up a month earlier in a federal drug net. The feds search Morris’s apartment and allegedly seized $80,550 -including $29,650 in Morris’s bedroom -and over nearly 10 pounds of marijuana. Who says dealing drugs doesn’t pay?

Orr and Morris were apparently grabbing weed from the Akwesasne reservation, an Indian reservation. In an odd footnote, Morris wasn’t a Vermont native. He had attended Colgate University for a few years before dropping out to become a snow boarder. But before making this career move in 2000, he hailed from New Jersey.

King sure did land herself in a bit of trouble. In fact, she ended up facing a federal drug rap that could have landed her a minimum sentence of three years behind bars. But her botched dope deal turned out to be a key piece of evidence that later secured an indictment against Roger Aletras, a “career criminal” with direct ties to the Bonanno crime family and the fellow who allegedly popped a few slugs of lead into Arkenau’s head several hours after the robbery.

Most media sources have all but stated Aletras popped Arkenau to make off with what local cops randomly valued as “$125,000 worth of marijuana.” But it’s difficult to imagine that a man hell-bent on killing his apparent friend over drugs would also ignore what amounted to $62,500 worth of green sitting in a duffle bag in the Durango’s back seat.

Another strange tidbit is the witness account of a third man leaving the truck, as reported by the Burlington Free Press following King’s arrest in 2002. All in all, the whole affair seems a bit too bizarre when considering the job at hand and that Aletras, the husband of a mob captain’s daughter, probably didn’t have any pressing need to murder his associate over 50 pounds of weed.

It’s possible Arkenau got in over his head with gangland. There was a lot of gambling going on, his half-brother and “best friend” sheepishly confessed to the Saratogian after Aletras’ indictment. It’s also possible Aletras was set up for the murder having double crossed the wrong people; after all, neither the pot nor the gun used to kill Arkenau were ever recovered.

Another complicating issue in the case is that the Montreal mafia -among other gangs -is known for running drugs through the Akwesasne border. More specifically, the Bonanno family was known for controlling the movement of large quantities of weed through the reservation. There’s always a chance Arkenau accidentally ripped off the wrong shipment at the wrong time. After all, Aletras’ father-in-law was fingered in murder case where a member of the aforementioned mafia and known drug czar was shot dead. But this is a reach, to say the least.

Regardless of the motives, there’s one common theme: Marijuana. Part of the blood in this case lies in a splatter on the disparity between drug laws in Canada and the United States. King, Bevins, Loran, Morris and Orr all ended up with federal felony drug convictions stemming from the case, which is a scarlet letter few successful people carry in life. Aletras now faces the death penalty -either from the feds or nervous gangland fellows who are worried about what he knows. And Kevin Arkenau, well he already cashed in his chips.

Perhaps if there wasn’t a black market for this so-called “high-potency marijuana” or marijuana in general, the path for some of these folks would have been different. Studies have shown that pot isn’t a so-called gateway drug and most of the violence associated with it is generated specifically because of its criminalization.

Were marijuana legal in this case, King and Loran would have had no reason to mule the dope; Bevins, Orr and Morris no reason to sell it; Arkenau and Aletras no reason to head north of the Tapen Zee to rob it. Maybe the worst tragedy would have been the lot of them spending a few too many years on the couch eating Captain Crunch out of the box and listening to Bob Marley on repeat with a still-smoking bong on the coffee table

But with the “war on drugs” in full effect, the sad case of Arkenau’s murder falls into the hackneyed category of another bloody tale spawned by drug-addled freaks, hell bent on smoking cannabis and ready to wreck havoc on every shred of decency in this fair democracy. His death will serve as a galvanizing reason to continue a the policies of more drug enforcement agents, more drug task forces, more anti-drug programs and more laws to preempt drugs, such as the murderous marijuana.