Jorge Barrera
APTN National News
The seer told him he should make a small feast of frybread for the dead.
Leave it in the bush with a shot of whisky because someone put a hex on you using graveyard dirt, the seer said.
There also is a shipment coming soon across the river, said the seer, the courier will lose it in the ice.
Richard “Acid” Adams wrote these prescriptions and predictions in black ink on a white piece of paper from a Hilton hotel. The note is still kept by Adams’ mother Jolene Adams along with his braided lock of black hair.
She received the braided hair in a blue Ziploc bag handed to her by Richard Adams’ former girlfriend and mother of his two youngest children. Jolene Adams received it in July 2009, the same month U.S. authorities indicted Richard Adams for smuggling marijuana from Canada into the U.S., across the river, in a Drug Enforcement Authority operation called Cash Cow.
The same month he vanished. He was 46.
“As soon as I touched his hair I knew he was in big trouble,” said Jolene Adams, sitting at her kitchen table in her home in the Snye section of Akwesasne which sits in Québec but is only accessible by road through the U.S.
She last saw her son on July 5, 2009, a day before he and two other men roared across the St. Lawrence River from Snye in his Baja speedboat to a house Richard Adams rented from a Marina owner in Summerstown, Ont.
“When he came and he told me was going to be gone for a few days I really didn’t question it because he comes and goes all the time,” said Jolene Adams.
Then the days turned to weeks turned to years.
Lawsuit claims West Eng Gang member involvement
This past July, the family obtained an official declaration of death from the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. Then, this week, the family filed a statement of claim in a lawsuit against Akwesasne Mohawk Police Chief Jerry Swamp and one of his investigators Leroy Swamp for negligence and incompetence in their investigation to find Richard Adams.
The lawsuit also names several people it alleges hold pieces to the story behind his disappearance including a wheelchair bound man named Shane Maloney, a reputed high-ranking member of the Irish Mob known as the West End Gang in Montréal. Maloney is currently in a Quebec jail awaiting a 2017 trial on charges of conspiring to import cocaine into Canada as a result of a major 2012 Sûreté du Québec drug operation known as Project Loquace.
It’s no secret Akwesasne’s location, straddling the Quebec, Ontario and New York State borders, make it a tempting location to move contraband goods across the international boundary. One can take a boat from the northern shore east of Cornwall, Ont., cross the St. Lawrence River into the St. Regis Village or Snye sections of Akwesasne and then drive across the U.S. border without the need of passing through customs. Just take a left onto Hwy 37 and your next stop is Boston or New York City.
Many of the current smuggling routes were carved in the 1980s and early 1990s when Big Tobacco used Akwesasne smugglers to move cigarettes into Canada.
The tobacco companies would export their product to the U.S. and then smuggle them back to avoid the high taxes in Canada.
The business proved lucrative to some in Akwesasne, a community of farmers, artists and iron workers. Richard Adams’ father Roy was an iron worker. For some, they had a choice, work on the iron towers and bridges of America which required weeks away from family, or stay close to home and make a living criss-crossing the waters of their own territory, moving product considered illegal by two countries they didn’t necessary recognize as having jurisdiction over Mohawk land.
For over 20 years Richard Adams lived a life speeding between the shores of the river moving contraband for the underworld.
He was good at it. He made cash. Lots of cash.
Then, he was gone.
Adams’ sister Della Adams received a message last year from an individual in Kahnawake, a Mohawk community that sits just south of Montreal.
“Truth is Richard (Acid) Adams is with Jimmy Hoffa. The same day he went to (an) old Montreal underground parking lot for a meet,” said the message.
This is all the family has ever had to go one. Cryptic messages, whispers and speculation.
Richard Adams is in Manila. Richard Adams is in Brazil.
He’s dead.
But where was the body?
The family asked seers.
“We have seen many seers and every one of them have the same story, every one of them have said that he’s gone,” said Joelen Adams. “He has told through the seer, he has told us that he wants us to pursue this investigation because he wants us to know how he died.”
One seer said they saw a cage and a river.
Operation Cash Cow
On the morning of October 20, 2008, a man named Jason Baldassare drove a rented Hyundai Sonata to a compound owned by Richard Adams in Snye. Adams had previously moved a load of marijuana across the river and he gave Baldassare two hockey bags holding 27 kilograms of Quebec-grown marijuana.
Baldassare drove out of Adams’ compound into a net set by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
Two weeks earlier, DEA agents, with a Department of Homeland Security surveillance craft circling above and intercepting radio communications stopped a rented Toyota Sienna minivan on Ryan Rd near Chateaugay, NY, about 7 km south of the Canada-U.S. border, with about 104 kg of marijuana.
Operation Cash Cow was in full swing. Armed with informants and the smuggling organization’s radio frequencies, the DEA took down the network, which moved Quebec-grown marijuana throughout New York State, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, one member at a time.
Adams fled across the river a day before the indictment against the organization was unsealed in U.S. Federal Court to a house he rented from Winston McIntosh, the owner of Whimpy’s Marina near Summerstown, Ont.
McIntosh was on his deck that Monday afternoon when he saw Adams in his Baja speedboat roaring to the dock at his rented house.
“It was coming awful fast…I knew they were in a hurry, I could sense it,” said McIntosh.
McIntosh said there was a man waiting for Adams with an older model, green Chevy pickup truck. Adams and a second man jumped out of the Baja which then turned and roared away. Adams climbed into the green pickup truck and the third man drove off in Adams’ green Mercedes which was also parked at the rental house.
Trail gone cold
Here is where fog begins to envelop the story.
Adams may have stayed in nearby Lancaster, Ont., for a couple of days before he went to Montreal. What happened in Montreal remains a mystery, at least on the public record. It’s believe Adams at one point may have stayed at a home near Montreal owned by man named Adam Harris, who is described in the statement of claim filed by Adams’ family as someone “closely involved with the criminal operations.”
Adams also met with his then-girlfriend Tanya Barilko while in Montreal. This is when he is said to have cut his braid and given it to Barilko who later gave it to his mother.
Adams told some associates he was going to get a new identity and that his contacts were going to help him flee the continent.
Dean Doxtator, from Oneida on the Thames First Nation, said he was one of the last to see Adams alive in Montreal. Doxtator, who is named in the lawsuit, said Adams expressed regret and remorse at the time.
“He said he was sorry for what he did to the family getting into where he was in the situation,” said Doxtator. “He didn’t want to cause any burden. I think it was more like shame to his family. He knew what he was into, who he was dealing with.”
Doxtator, who found out this week he was named in the lawsuit, said he is willing to say all he knows in an affidavit. He believes Adams is dead.
The lawsuit also named Maloney who dealt directly with Adams. Maloney was convicted in December 2013 for ordering the beating of an off-duty Montreal cop in Mexico in January 2011 who was caught trying to take photographs of the gangsters partying with other Quebec police officers. Maloney is currently at the Rivieres-des-Prairies Detention Centre in Quebec awaiting trial on 13 drug, gang, conspiracy and firearms related charges stemming from Project Loquace.
Adams and Maloney are also both listed in U.S. court documents as associates of former drug king pin Jimmy Cournoyer, also known as Cosmo, who was the head of a $1 billion “drug empire” which smuggled marijuana from Canada into the U.S. and then used the proceeds to import cocaine back to Canada. Cournoyer was linked to the Italian Mafia, the Hells Angels and the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico.
Couronyer pleaded guilty in 2013 and is now in U.S. prison.
The DEA investigation into Cournoyer gathered speed after agents moved against an Akwesasne smuggling ring in 2009 headed by Kenny Cree, Randy Square and David Sunday two months before the indictment was filed against Adams.
The DEA managed to flip Cree, according to a New York Times article, who was facing a lengthy prison sentence.
The Adams family’s lawsuit names Cree and alleges he was “instrumental in the death of Richard Adams.”
APTN attempted to contact Cree through one of his lawyers, but received no response.
Akwesasne Mohawk Police failed to follow leads
Jolene Adams blames the Akwesasne Mohawk Police for letting her son’s trail run so cold.
“I don’t know how many phone calls I made to the police station and got no cooperation and nothing, nothing from them,” said Adams
The Mohawk police did have leads.
On Jan. 27, 2010, the RCMP in Montreal told Det.-Const. Norman King that Richard Adams was “not in this world anymore,” according to an Ontario Provincial Police report from an investigation into the Akwesasne police’s handling of the case.
That same month, the OPP Drug Enforcement section first told King that Adams was vacationing out of the country in the fall of 2009 and then that he was “deceased and that the family was aware of this,” said the report.
The report also said the Akwesasne police possessed two of Adams’ cell number but never obtained a production order to track the cell phone’s usage. Both phones were in service in the fall of 2009. One cell phone, which operated on a Telus plan, was “cancelled by the subscriber” on Dec. 3, 2009.
An analysis of the Akwesasne police’s investigation done for the family by Ottawa lawyer James Foord, of Foord Davies, concluded “it seems clear that little has been done to meaningfully investigate (Adams’) whereabouts.”
Adams disappeared a year after his brother was killed in a traffic accident in front of his parent’s home. Jolene and Roy Adams have only one surviving child, their daughter Della.
“Unless somebody has gone through a death of a child, nobody understands the pain and the grief of losing one. The gravity of the pain is so great,” said Jolene Adams. “It’s more pain because we didn’t know whether (Richard Adams) was alive or dead.”
The missing and murdered men of Akwesasne
There was a bigger issue at play behind Jolene and Roy Adams’ decision to file the lawsuit and that is the high number of missing and murdered men from Akwesasne.
“There is more to this court action than Richard. We have young men that have been murdered that have gone missing where the police have not done a proper investigating if an investigation ever did exist,” said Adams. “This is about our community. I am not dismissing Richard’s role in the illegal stuff that has been going on in our community, I am not dismissing that…All this stuff that is happening, they are hurting the community, they are hurting our young people. There is a whole generation that is being hurt right now because of this illegal trafficking of drugs, aliens and I don’t know what else.”
As for calling out violent underworld figures, the family said they’ve moved beyond fear.
“A lot of people are saying it’s dangerous. But I am 75 years-old. I don’t need to see any more than what’s going on right now. I am not afraid that something is going to happen to me,” said Roy Adams.
Adams was a father to six boys.
His last girlfriend, Tanya Barilko, is also named in the lawsuit.
Barilko could not be reached for comment.
@JorgeBarrera
