Fugitive has quiet 23 years on lam, then child-support case leads to arrest in '78 record pot bust
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Steven "Lance" McCain has been a lot of things in the last 23 years.
He's been a ski bum who dazzled friends with stories of past adventures. He's been a quiet family man, an unassuming motel clerk and handyman who impressed his neighbors with his devotion to his young sons. He taught himself to fly planes. And he lost his family to divorce.
Yet all this time, Steven McCain also was Michael Lund, a federal fugitive and former freestyle skiing champion from Seattle. Now, in his mid-60s, he is locked up in Colorado awaiting extradition to Seattle to face the charges he fled back in 1978: that he orchestrated an attempt to smuggle millions of dollars worth of marijuana from Colombia, a scheme thwarted by what was, at the time, the biggest pot bust in Northwest history.
Now his own family and friends, past and present, are marveling that Michael Lund managed to live a relatively normal life for 23 years, from California to Wyoming to Colorado and Nevada - only to be tripped up because, in the end, he apparently was so stubborn in his refusals to pay child support that a judge in Colorado had him arrested.
"He was just a hard-working guy, friendly, quiet, and he seemed like a good father," said Mike Ayler of Auburn, Colo., the stepfather of Lund's two sons. "We were just hoping he would pay the child support he owed. I don't think any of us knew what was really going on. I don't think his own wife had any idea he led a double life."
Lund, who has used different dates of birth over the years, but is believed to be 65, was arrested Friday by federal agents after he was fingerprinted during the child-support arrest in Arapahoe County, Colo.
He appeared this week before a federal magistrate in Denver and is expected to be back in Seattle in about two weeks to face the smuggling charges.
"In the meantime, I'm going to have to gather my retired (Drug Enforcement Agency) agents to go over the file," said interim U.S. Attorney Jerry Diskin.
The law requires that Lund be tried on four drug counts listed in the 1978 indictment and face penalties under the federal drug statutes that were in effect in 1978: each count carrying a maximum of up to five years in prison, a fine of up to $15,000, or both.
While that's significant prison time if convicted, he would be facing considerably more if he were to be tried under the laws in effect today, Diskin said. Under today's laws, he would have been facing a maximum of four 10-year prison terms and fines up to $500,000 for each charge.
"But does he get a break for having been an effective fugitive for all this time? No, he does not," Diskin said.
The botched smuggling caper, involving a marijuana-stuffed freighter called the Helena Star, might sound like a gang-that-couldn't-shoot-straight flick.
In 1978, Lund was a 42-year-old darling of the Northwest and national skiing community, a "hot-dogger" who helped give birth to the sport of freestyle skiing. He won prizes, got his picture in the papers, and had a lot of fun.
"It was a wild thing, the whole escapade," said Patricia Karnik, now of Jackson, Wyo., who was Lund's girlfriend then and later served community service for her role in the Helena Star caper. "We were an interesting crowd, we free-stylers."
But it was also an interesting time to be young and adventurous, Karnik recalls. The wild parties, the hippie die-hards. And dreams of getting rich in the drug trade.
The plan, according to Karnik and court documents, was that the Helena Star, loaded with 37 tons of marijuana worth about $75 million, would sail from Colombia to the Washington Coast, where Lund, an avid and skilled sailor, would use a sleek, 61-foot sailboat called the Joli to shuttle the drugs ashore.
Lund bought the yacht from Bill Niemi, now a retired Seattle businessman who once headed Eddie Bauer. They met in San Diego, where the Joli was moored. Lund offered $285,000, with a $55,000 down payment.
"I assumed Mike would hand me a cashier's check, and instead he opens this briefcase with $55,000 in used $20 bills inside," said Niemi, who later testified against Lund before a grand jury. "I look back, at Lund handing me a bag of $20 bills, $55,000. Isn't that something, after all these years? It's good cocktail conversation."
Lund sailed the Joli to his home on Sequim Bay on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and he and Karnik awaited the Helena Star.
It never arrived.
On April 17, 1978, the Coast Guard seized the ship in a high-profile bust. Lund and Karnik heard the news and drove south, she said.
"I dumped him off somewhere in Oregon," said Karnik, who now lives a quiet life gardening and selling radio ads, "and I never saw him again."
According to interviews and court and credit records, Lund almost immediately became Steven "Lance" McCain. He went to Santa Barbara, Calif., where he met Wendy Starcher, a 27-year-old Pennsylvania girl. She became Wendy McCain in 1980. In 1982, they had a son and named him Michael, his father's real name.
A couple of years later, they moved to Jackson, Wyo., and they had another son, Hans, in 1987.
In the mid-80s, McCain walked into the Parkway Inn in Jackson, and asked owner Tom Robbins for a job. They became fast friends. Robbins let the McCain family live at another motel he owns. McCain worked as a clerk and handyman at the Parkway. His wife worked around the motel and at a local grocery store.
"He was a very fine person, probably the best father I have ever known," said Robbins, who lives on Orcas Island during the off-season. "Lance was about as straight an arrow with me as you could possibly be."
McCain would take Robbins' hotel guests on skiing excursions at Jackson Hole. "He didn't ski down the regular runs, he went straight down through the trees. People used to come back and say, `I've never seen anyone ski like that.' "
McCain used to tell stories about his skiing and sailing adventures in Seattle, Robbins said, never letting on that he was on the lam. One yarn, about sailing a yacht up the West Coast, was a clear retelling of the purchase of the Joli, Robbins now knows. But no one then caught on.
"It's easy for people to blend in here in Jackson Hole," said David Gonzales, a Jackson author writing a book about the town and its ski-bum culture. "People don't question each other here. If you're a good skier, and you don't mind buying a few beers at the Mangey Moose, nobody asks any questions."
So McCain/Lund spent his time in Jackson playing guitar and teaching himself to fly gliders and other planes. And he taught his children to ski almost as soon as they could walk, his friends recall.
At Christmas, Robbins said, McCain would hike or ski into the woods, hide presents under a tree, then return later to the spot with his small son on his back. They would cut down the tree and his son would see the presents. Then McCain would say, " `Oh, look what Santa left for you,' " Robbins said. "He spent all his spare time with his kids."
But in 1989, McCain's wife filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. She got the kids, the new Saab, the furniture and the charge cards.
"That kind of destroyed him," Robbins said. McCain packed up and moved back to California, taking a job in aviation, at a small airport in Susanville, near Redding in Northern California.
In the early 1990s, he moved back to Santa Barbara, into the home of Tori Somics, whose husband had befriended him. Somics said McCain was sick, so her husband asked him to stay.
Somics said McCain eventually worked with her husband. She wouldn't say what they did, nor would she give any other information about her former housemate except to say she had not heard from him in several years.
"We all have things in our past, you know?" she said. "None of those things make us bad. He was a good friend, and I'm just not saying anything else about him."
Wendy McCain is now remarried in Aurora, Colo., where she works at a middle school and goes by the name Wilhelmina Ayler. She was away on a school camping trip yesterday and couldn't be reached. Michael McCain is now a freshman at Colorado State University. Hans attends the middle school where his mother works.
The boys went and visited their dad in California often, said Mike Ayler, their stepfather and a former friend.
"He was a good father, and a good person, I guess, except at paying child support."
And that, it appears, is what ended his life as Steven McCain.
Colorado court records show that last September, McCain's ex-wife filed suit in her hometown, alleging that McCain had not been paying the $380 a month he owed for his teenage boys.
"He just fought it so hard, and he'd been getting off so cheap for so long," Mike Ayler said.
Early this month, the judge in the case found McCain in contempt of court. When McCain arrived in Colorado to answer the charge, the judge ordered him jailed.
Jailers took his fingerprints, and sent them to a state computer database as a matter of routine. At that moment, Michael Lund was reborn.
"He's been right here in our fugitive file," U.S. Attorney Diskin said.
Now some of his friends wonder whether Michael Lund/Steven McCain ought to be punished for the marijuana smuggling after living a law-abiding life for so long.
"I would think that would be extremely harsh," said Robbins, McCain's boss at the motel. "What's the purpose? He's one of the finest people I've ever known."
Those who knew Michael Lund never knew what happened to him.
"I'm just so stunned," Karnik said. "All of us in the ski world thought he would be notorious forever."
Seattle Times staff reporter Mike Carter contributed to this report.
Ian Ith can be reached at 206-464-2109 or iith@seattletimes.com.