Buggy-driving smugglers? It’s so far-fetched, it could be true

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This article was published 07/01/2017 (3399 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s a crime thriller, a murder-mystery and a high-stakes cop show, but it’s seems unlikely there will be many tire-screeching car chases in the new CBC drama Pure.

The series, which premières Monday at 9 p.m., takes place mostly in an Old Colony Mennonite community in rural Ontario, where pickup trucks and horse-drawn buggies enjoy shared status as the preferred methods of four-wheeled conveyance.

By conventional crime-drama standards, Pure is a series with a deliberate sense of pace. But slowness of the storytelling in no way diminishes the power of what seems poised to become an addictive yarn.

Pure takes place in the out-of-the-way community of Antioch, Ont., where a young Mennonite named Noah Funk (played by Ryan Robbins) is surprised to learn he is a candidate for the about-to-be announced position of pastor. It’s not a job he has sought or really even considered, and he’s well aware that — in this community, at least — it’s a role that carries a high level of risk.

Whomever is appointed pastor will have to deal with the small but powerful faction within the community involved in an elaborate Mexico-to-Canada drug-smuggling network. It’s a dangerous business, as evidenced by the brutal murder of a Mennonite family in the series’ opening moments, with drug boss Eli Voss (Peter Outerbridge) directing his traditionally garbed henchmen to retrieve a cocaine stash from the vehicle before setting it on fire and disposing of its occupants’ bodies.

A local cop named Bronco Novak (AJ Buckley), who happens to have been Noah’s high school tormentor many years earlier, is assigned to investigate, and despite his co-workers’ immediate dismissal of the burned-out car at the crime scene as the handiwork of joyriding teens, Bronco finds evidence there’s something more sinister involved.

A clue at the scene connects the car to a Mennonite colony in Mexico, and when Bronco calls the U.S. drug-enforcement agency’s southern-border office to see if there’s a connection, he gets a quick education from Special Agent Phoebe O’Reilly (Rosie Perez) about the decades-old “Mennonite mob” drug network.

If this sounds like an unlikely storyline, consider this: in the mid-1990s, Free Press sports columnist Paul Wiecek — then the paper’s police-beat reporter — wrote an extensive investigative series called The Mennonite Connection, which examined the movement of marijuana from Mexico to Manitoba.

“Man, that takes me back,” Wiecek said this week when I described the CBC series and related it back to his series two decades ago. “Those were the days when a journalist could conduct a drug-smuggling investigation in Mexico and still leave the country with his head attached. Seems quaint now.”

Indeed, it’s a much more lucrative and dangerous drug-trafficking operation — involving cocaine, not pot — that’s at the centre of Pure. In the series opener, Noah must make a crucial decision when it’s learned a young boy has survived the burned-car massacre and has turned up in their community. The drug-smuggling faction is eager to turn the child over to Voss, but Noah opts to offer him protection.

By saving the boy, at least temporarily, he puts his own children in jeopardy. And it becomes clear to Noah that he must make it his mission to gather the necessary evidence to bring the drug ring down from the inside.

It’s a fascinating tale — one that Wiecek thinks was overdue for TV-series examination.

“In retrospect, it’s hard to believe it took someone this long to turn this material into something for the screen,” he said. “Drugs, religion and a smuggling ring so bold that they were moving drugs across not one, but two, borders? You couldn’t make that plot up.”

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @BradOswald