24 bottles of R&R, grounded short of Shungnak

Twenty-four bottles of R&R Whiskey never reached Shungnak.

Freight handlers at Wright Air caught them first. Around 11:32 a.m. on May 21, employees flagged the Airport Communications Center in Fairbanks: two dozen 750-milliliter bottles — 18 liters of whiskey — packed into freight bound for the Northwest Arctic village, where the law bars anyone from selling or bringing in alcohol at all.

Airport police seized the shipment and started asking questions, interviewing both the man who shipped the freight and the one it was addressed to. The whiskey's street value, according to a June 22 release from Fairbanks International Airport Police: more than $9,600. That's more than $400 a bottle — a markup that explains why alcohol keeps flowing toward the communities that have voted it out.

The intended recipient now faces felony charges referred to the Fairbanks District Attorney's Office, including alcohol importation and a count tied to holding it for sale, plus a misdemeanor for violating conditions of release.

It was one of two May busts the airport police laid out in the same release.

The day after the Shungnak seizure, on May 22, officers got word that someone was trying to move alcohol to Allakaket, an Interior village on the Koyukuk River. The release is partly cut off here in the images Alaska News reviewed, but the readable portion says officers responded and arrested Zachary McCafferty on an outstanding warrant for second-degree assault. By the end of the investigation, McCafferty and Cesa Moses were charged with hauling 10.5 liters or more of distilled spirits into a dry community — a class C felony — and with attempting to possess alcohol there for barter or sale without a license, a misdemeanor. That investigation is still open, and airport police said more details, including the value of the Allakaket alcohol, could follow.

Together the cases show how Alaska's local-option system actually gets enforced. Dozens of communities off the road system have voted to limit or ban alcohol, but the bottles still have to get there — and for most villages, that means passenger luggage or air freight routed through a hub like Fairbanks. That puts the carriers loading the planes, and the police working the airport, on the front line.

Charges are allegations. Everyone named is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in court.