Four charged in big weed bust
It had all the elements of a comic crime caper worthy of such esteemed novelists as Elmore Leonard or Donald Westlake. But this wasn’t fiction and tonight four men are facing the hard reality of prison life, having been accused of involvement in a scheme to send three thousand pounds of weed to Miami in a supposedly empty shipping container. This afternoon the suspects were marched from the police station to Magistrate’s Court. They are forty one year old Augustine Cuffy Marfo, a well known wine maker from Crooked Tree, forty two year old Belize City laborer and U.S. deportee Avingston Arnold, and two of this season’s more unusual prisoners: Mennonites Herman Friesen and Peter Wiebe of Shipyard. The tale woven by police is an intricate one. They say that at the end of March Marfo imported a containerload of plastic wine bottles from Jamaica. The cargo of bottles was discharged a few days later at the port and taken to Marfo’s home in Crooked Tree. Police allege, however, that hidden behind a secret wall in the container was a load of marijuana that sailed with the bottles all the way from J.A. That same container was then taken several weeks later, on orders of one “Charles Jones,” believed to be Marfo, to the Home of Friesen in Shipyard, where the weed was unloaded and stored at an unknown location. After at least one false start another container was ordered by Jones and around May twentieth was taken to Indian Creek Village, where a false compartment was constructed in it allegedly by Wiebe to specifications ordered by Arnold. The Jamaican ganja was then said to be put into to the new container and it was returned to the port as empty to await transfer back to Hyde Shipping in Miami, where it would later be claimed by Marfo. Unfortunately for the entrepreneurs the container was found to be lopsided when being loaded and the rest is history. As for the plot to re-export the foreign weed it was either an ingeniously daring plan or the CARICOM equivalent of bringing coals to Newcastle. In any case police say that at least three more suspects are being sought and hint that some well-known names may suffer some embarrassment. Until that happens Marfo has been charged with importing marijuana and the four men are charged jointly with conspiracy to export and attempting to export the seductive herb. Bail for the four was set at twenty five thousand dollars each. Only Marfo met that requirement and was freed while the others will await their next trial date on July twenty eighth in a cell at Hattieville — a space probably no less confining than a forty-foot container.
