In late July 1990, in the waters off Nova Scotia and at a tiny Cape Breton wharf in Baleine, smugglers looked to offload roughly two-dozen tonnes of hash worth up to $500 million.

They didn’t know the RCMP, the coast guard and the military were watching.

A judge later called their plan “one of the largest conspiracies ever to import drugs through the Nova Scotia coast.”

It involved co-ordination between people in four provinces: Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New Brunswick and Quebec. If you add in a tractor-trailer rented in P.E.I., that made it five.

“This was an extensive, well-organized and relatively sophisticated operation,” the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal said in a 1995 decision.

With some creative licence, those events helped inspire the Adam Baldwin song Lighthouse in Little Lorraine, which served as the blueprint for the film Little Lorraine, a tale of three Cape Breton coal miners who become lobster fishermen and get caught up in drug smuggling. The indie hit is now in theatres.

For Baldwin, the story’s origin begins in sadness. It was 2013 and he was in the back of a hearse in Cape Breton on the way to bury fellow musician Jay Smith.

“And as one does when they’re sitting uncomfortably in the back of a hearse on the way to a graveyard to bury their friend, I started making small talk with the gentleman driving the hearse,” said Baldwin.

The driver told him his father once had a funeral home in Louisbourg, N.S., and some family members would smuggle hash in from the ocean. The drugs would then be placed in caskets and driven across the province.

“I thought it was the greatest story I’d ever heard,” said Baldwin, who knew he had to write a song about it.

Baldwin said fellow musician Matt Mays was also in the hearse, so he felt he had to beat him to it.

While it took years for the song to come to fruition, some details needed changing.

“I couldn’t find a town in Cape Breton that rhymed with hashish … and Louisbourg didn’t rhyme with any of the narcotics that I’d heard of, so I sort of moved the whole story down the road to this little town outside Louisburg called Little Lorraine,” said Baldwin.

“And I changed the controlled substance to cocaine just to fit my songwriting purposes.”

WATCH | Adam Baldwin’s Lighthouse in Little Lorraine:

While newspaper accounts from the day don’t mention the involvement of caskets, nor does the 1995 Appeal Court decision on the case, the reality is the 1990 bust was indicative of a larger problem.

“Nova Scotia has become a favored spot for smugglers to move illegal drugs into Canada and the northern United States because of the province’s countless isolated bays and inlets,” The Canadian Press noted at the time.

In May 1990, 35 tonnes of hash were found at a beach in Ragged Harbour on the South Shore. The Canadian Press said fishermen tipped off police in the case, but the smugglers fled and no one was arrested.

A few years earlier, an overturned rental truck in Cape Breton was found carrying hash that was part of a $100-million haul.

How the operation was foiled

In early July 1990, RCMP were tipped off about narcotics possibly being offloaded in Louisbourg, N.S., not far from the isolated coastal community of Baleine.

The investigation included telephone wiretaps and following a motorhome from Shediac, N.B., to North Sydney, N.S. This led to surveillance of area motels and identified individuals with rented vehicles, including two five-tonne trucks and two tractor-trailers that would be used to transport the drugs.

Meanwhile at sea, a vessel called the Scotian Maid left Newfoundland and met up with an unknown mother ship off the Newfoundland coast where the drugs were handed over.

The Scotian Maid continued on, unaware its movements were being tracked by Canadian Forces patrol planes, the destroyer HMCS Nipigon and some coast guard ships.

‘High seas hair-raiser’

At sea, the 20-metre Scotian Maid, which was too large to dock at the wharf in Baleine, met up with the 12-metre False Bay, and handed over the product to bring it ashore.

The plot soon unravelled.

“Suddenly, over the horizon, the destroyer Nipigon and a coast guard cutter flashed into view, moving as fast as speedboats as they closed in on the bigger fishing boat,” said an Aug. 1, 1990, Hamilton Spectator article titled “Drug smugglers busted in high seas hair-raiser.”

“No ordinary fishing boat has a chance of outracing a destroyer at full throttle.

“Meanwhile, land-based Mounties, carrying automatic rifles and dressed in battle fatigues and flak jackets, swooped in on the shore crew.”

After the bust, officials held a news conference to show footage captured at sea of the incident.

“I think it must have been awe-inspiring this morning — it happened at sunrise — to see a destroyer and a coast guard vessel coming over the horizon at 20, 25 knots, when they thought they were safe and everything had gone smoothly,” said Cmdr. Carl Doucette, the Nipigon’s captain, who grinned after he finished those words.

Prison time

The 1995 Appeal Court decision said 18 people faced charges in the matter.

“Obviously, the conspiracy required a huge sum of money to finance it,” the decision noted. “Unfortunately and typically, the financiers or all of them are probably not among those arrested.”

A 1995 Canadian Press article said nine people served prison sentences for their roles in the matter, while nine others were still on trial in Quebec.

Baldwin’s song was released in 2022. He remembers later playing a concert in Sydney and heading outside afterwards to have a cigarette. Soon, dozens of people lined up to speak with him. Many told him about their family member’s roles in the drug smuggling operation.

“The song was never about drug dealing,” said Baldwin. “It’s not about criminals. It’s about desperate people.”

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