Another Connection

Beneath a midnight Mediterranean sky, French customs agents last week approached the shrimp boat Caprice des Temps (Whim of Time) off the Riviera coast. The owner, a 58-year-old fishing-fleet operator named Marcel Boucan, refused to answer a radio order to cut his engines, so the agents fired shots across the vessel's bow and boarded it. Boucan frantically threw mysterious papers overboard and, while being taken back to port, slipped over the side. The next morning he was recaptured, exhausted, near the walls of Marseille's harbor fortress.

The agents had been watching the Caprice des Temps for some time --though for what they were never exactly sure. Captain Boucan had associated with cigarette smugglers in the past and his 60-ton, 216-ft. boat had been extensively refitted for transatlantic crossing (it had in fact made two trips to Miami). But it had not of late ventured noticeably from the coast --and certainly never to the shrimp-fishing grounds.

Once the ship was captured, the French police could not find a reason to hold either the vessel or its skipper. An initial search revealed nothing. Then, a full day later, the agents suddenly noted that the ship's concrete ballast seemed to be oddly positioned. They attacked the concrete with pickaxes. In the center they discovered a cache that contained 40 plastic bags of pure heroin--presumably processed in the South of France and destined for the U.S. French officials announced that the narcotics haul was the largest in history: 937 Ibs. of pure heroin worth between $180 million and $400 million on the streets of New York City, depending on the extent to which it is diluted. It was enough to supply every addict in the U.S. for a month.

Two other drug developments: in Geneva the district attorney issued an arrest warrant for Huchang Davallou, a member of the imperial entourage of the Shah of Iran, and charged him with supplying 35 gm. of pure opium to an Iranian resident of Geneva. Police discovered that Davallou was protected by diplomatic immunity. The Shah angrily broke off a skiing holiday in St. Moritz and, with Davallou in hand, quickly schussed back to Teheran. Swiss papers noted sarcastically that the Shah's regime had executed scores of Iranians for the same offense: trafficking in drugs.

In Istanbul, a 14-year-old English tourist, Timothy Davey, was sentenced to six years and three months in prison on charges of conspiring to sell more than 50 Ibs. of hashish. As a public uproar erupted in Britain, the Turkish embassy in London vainly noted that the schoolboy could have received a much more severe sentence. The outraged British found the Turkish court's heavy-handed treatment of the boy difficult to understand. For centuries, Turkish farmers have grown fields of poppies that have become a prime source of the heroin sold in the U.S. Only last June, in response to pressure and financial aid from Washington, the Turks promised to stop growing poppies after the 1972 harvest.

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