RCMP's dope dupe

Keystone narcs cost local man eight years in Thai prison

by George Maddux

 In Thailand authorities execute death sentences by bullet. That's more than mere geopolitical trivia to Alain Olivier, a 41-year-old Rosemont resident who has returned from death row in Bangkok. "I wouldn't have let them do it," he says. "I would have swallowed a gram of heroin in the cell."

 From the shackles of an overcrowded prison cell, where he spent more than eight years watching fellow inmates die from torture, drug overdoses and murder, Olivier has returned to become a minor local celebrity, best-selling author and litigant in a $27.5- million civil suit against the federal government.

 But he's still not entirely free. Flashing a parole identification card, the wiry Drummondville native explains that although he'd like to sample the occasional quaff in a pub, he'll have to wait until age 69 before he can. Staying away from bars and alcohol and asking permission to leave town are among the conditions Canadian parole officials have imposed on him in exchange for his release from the sentence imposed by what he calls a "Thai kangaroo court."

 "When I was up for parole here the psychologist said I was crazy. When I said I'd write a book, he laughed," says Olivier, whose Prisonnier a Bangkok has been a local chart-topper for nine weeks.

 Olivier's tale starts in 1986 when he was a tree planter in B.C. with a heroin habit. A gang of men, whom he'd later learn were undercover RCMP narcs from Richmond Division E, approached him to import heroin from Thailand. To convince him they were serious, a few of them borrowed his boat and returned it littered with gun shells and minus one passenger, giving the impression that they'd murdered an informant.

 After eventually persuading him to go to Thailand, Olivier says the gang tried to get him to set up a major drug deal. Olivier explained that he simply scored his small amounts from Thai taxi drivers. When the bumbling Operation Deception finally came to a head in February 1989, RCMP agent Derek Flanagan was mysteriously found dead. When a Thai court found Olivier guilty of drug trafficking, "they didn't even let me speak in my own defence," he says.

 Olivier was shackled with 25 pounds of chains and forced to sleep on a hard concrete prison floor for over eight years. He says he stopped taking heroin in 1992 when he started to believe that he might eventually be exonerated. "When you start making peace with yourself you can start to live in prison. But I never lost hope," he says.

 Eventually, a RCMP officer named Paul McEwen blew the whistle on the operation, describing Olivier as an unwitting dupe. McEwen, who has since quit the force, is expected to testify for Olivier in his suit against the RCMP.

 Olivier was returned and freed in 1997 and has since urged a public inquiry into the RCMP. He also wants criminal charges laid against the agents involved in Operation Deception. "I've offered to take a lie detector test," he says, "they refused." Olivier also has harsh words for Canada's foreign affairs policies. "They're defending guys from being sent to death sentences in the States and yet they framed me and made sure I'd get a death sentence in Thailand." :