http://www.macleans.ca

August 10, 2005

American guns, Canadian violence

Weapons are crossing the border by the thousands and the number of people wounded and killed in this country is mounting

CHARLIE GILLIS

John Butcher had fallen on hard times. His wife of 33 years had died after a lengthy battle with multiple sclerosis. He'd lost his job in the financial services industry, he'd run out of money and, in his late 50s, the expat Englishman had been forced to move in with his daughter. With only an entry-level job at a golf course and moonlight gigs as frontman of a blues band to earn his keep, he felt like a burden. So when a close friend approached him with a shady sounding proposition -- $500 per trip to squire envelopes stuffed with U.S. cash into Canada from Detroit -- he swallowed hard and accepted. "I was told that at my age, I would never be involved with anything that would result in a jail sentence," he says. Glancing at his surroundings -- a drafty interview room at the Toronto East Detention Centre -- he now snorts at this thought with hollow laughter.

Between desultory mouthfuls of prison-issue bologna sandwich, Butcher, now 62, unspools his tale of self-inflicted woe. He did in fact make two trips with money in early 2004, crossing the border without incident and collecting his fee in cash. But on his third trip, Canadian customs officers stopped him at the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel and searched his 1991 Pontiac Sunbird. There, in the space beneath the spare tire in his trunk, they found 23 high-powered handguns, including a TEC-9 semi-automatic, a weapon notorious within the law enforcement community for its tendency to spray bullets like water from a garden hose. Butcher maintains he had no idea he was carrying a small arsenal. "If I had, I would have thrown those obscenities into the Detroit River."