It's a long way -- literally and figuratively -- from Chiefswood Road in Ohsweken to the Southern District of New York courthouse on tiny Pearl Street in the heart of downtown Manhattan.
It's a journey that Jerry Montour, the native CEO of Six Nations cigarette-maker Grand River Enterprises, has had to make on more than one occasion as he watches the wheels of American justice grind slowly on.
For the past six years, Montour and GRE have been fighting the attorneys general of 31 different U.S. states over GRE's ability to have its cigarettes sold south of the border.
The irony of GRE's American court battle is striking.
Two months ago, Montour appeared before a parliamentary committee in Ottawa and told members that the growing problem of contraband tobacco is crushing the Canadian side of his business.
In the U.S., however, GRE's products have been declared contraband and banned from sale in at least 21 states -- from Arizona to Wyoming.
The company launched its court case in 2002 to prevent the states named in the lawsuit from enforcing legislation that would put GRE's products on the contraband list.
For Grand River Enterprises, the stakes of the court case are huge.
In 2005, the company sold 3.6 billion cigarettes in the U.S., even though GRE products are only available in some states.
That's more than three times as many cigarettes as GRE sold in Canada that year.
The case has been highly contentious and, at times, acrimonious.
Hundreds of documents and thousands of pages of material have been filed in court over the years. The entire court file has to be wheeled out in a buggy when requested for viewing.
At one point, the exasperated judge was even forced to issue an order prohibiting the two sides from sending any more faxes to his office because the machine was overloaded with the back-and-forth exchanges between the lawyers.
The story starts in November 1998 with a landmark victory over major tobacco producers called the Master Settlement Agreement, known simply as the MSA.
The attorneys general for 46 states hammered out a tough agreement with the four largest U.S. cigarette-makers at the time, which required them to make annual payments in perpetuity to cover the present and future health-related costs associated with smoking.
More than 400,000 Americans die each year from tobacco-related illnesses, a lawyer for the U.S. National Association of Attorneys General told the court.
If an adolescent's tobacco use continues over a lifetime, that person has a 50 per cent chance of dying prematurely from smoking.
The agreement also included massive back payments to be made by the companies to cover health costs absorbed by the states in the past.
Over 25 years, the cigarette companies signing on to the agreement will end up paying an estimated $206 billion to the various states.
The MSA restricted advertising of tobacco products, provided funding for public education programs and required the cigarette companies to make public the millions of documents that were produced during the discovery phase of lawsuits involving the states.
In exchange for signing on, the cigarette-makers were released from any past or future lawsuits by the settling states.
Once the original agreement was reached, other cigarette manufacturers were also given the option to make an application to sign on.
Eventually, the agreement covered the makers of more than 99 per cent of the U.S. cigarette market.
Grand River Enterprises was not among the cigarette companies that signed on to the Master Settlement Agreement.
To prevent some of the smaller companies from trying to get around the MSA by not joining, the 46 states then enacted their own escrow statutes that required non-MSA manufacturers to deposit money into a trust account -- or escrow, as it's called.
The payments are based on a per-cigarette formula for all units sold by the company in that state and they're similar to what would be paid under the Master Settlement Agreement.
Like the MSA payments made by settling producers, this money could be used by the states to recoup health costs associated with smoking.
But some companies -- including GRE -- soon discovered a loophole in the escrow statutes.
The companies were required to deposit money into escrow for all of their sales in a state, but their actual escrow obligation would get recalculated under a complicated formula based on each state's share -- figured out down to the seventh decimal place -- of total cigarette consumption in the U.S.
Unintentionally, the statutes allowed companies to get rebates on their escrow payments if their share of cigarettes sold in the state was higher than the state's share of the national market.
What it really meant was that companies could put up more money at the front end than required and then receive a significant rebate.
What GRE and the other companies figured out was that if they loaded up all of their U.S. sales in just a few states, they could get back almost all of their escrow deposits.
In 2005, for example, court heard that GRE's escrow obligations for North and South Carolina were slightly more than $28 million, but $27 million of that would get returned to GRE.
The other important factor, especially for a native-owned company such as GRE, was that any cigarette sales that took place on a U.S. Indian reservation were exempt from the states' escrow payment laws.
In 2004, there were only five MSA states where GRE was selling cigarettes off-reservation.
In an Arkansas court case involving GRE, for example, the state's attorney general noted that GRE had taken advantage of the loophole to gain big refunds, which "permitted Grand River Enterprises to undercut competition, generate significant short-term profits and avoid its obligation to establish funds from which Arkansas could recover its medical assistance costs."
By 2005, the states had amended their escrow statutes to close off the loophole. No longer would companies be eligible for massive rebates, and tobacco manufacturers that didn't comply with their escrow payment obligations could find their cigarettes banned from sale.
In April 2006, less than two weeks before nearly $16 million in escrow payments was due, GRE decided it wanted to join the Master Settlement Agreement.
The Southern District of New York courtroom in Manhattan was called to order in a special session at one minute past 4 p.m. on Holy Thursday, April 13, 2006 -- an hour before the Good Friday long weekend was to start.
One hour earlier, GRE's lawyer showed up in Judge John Keenan's chambers seeking a temporary restraining order.
The company wanted to stop the states from enforcing their escrow laws against GRE and to prevent them from banning the sale of GRE cigarettes.
It was an ex parte motion, meaning that GRE was going to court without giving notice to the other side in the dispute.
"I was supplied with papers that are literally -- and I say literally, meaningfully -- literally 4 1/2 inches thick. Were I the greatest speed-reader in the world, I could not have possibly read this by now," an angry Keenan told the court.
"I was not a happy camper."
In two days, GRE would owe about $16 million to comply with escrow obligations, and if the money wasn't paid, the states would be in a position to declare GRE cigarettes contraband and ban their sale.
Within the first couple of minutes of calling court to order, the judge turned to Leonard Violi, lawyer for Grand River Enterprises.
"First question," said the judge. "How long have you known about the fact that money is due on Saturday, and if you don't pay that, you will be banned from selling cigarettes?"
The answer: GRE had known since mid-January, yet the company had waited until two days before the money was due to seek a temporary restraining order.
Ten days earlier, on April 3, 2006, GRE contacted the U.S. National Association of Attorneys General to request admission into the Master Settlement Agreement.
The letter was received by the NAAG on April 5, 2006.
In its accompanying letter, GRE said if it didn't hear from the group by April 7, it would take the silence to be a rejection of the application.
The lawyer representing the attorneys general later pointed out that it can take many months to review an application and carry out due diligence before a decision is made.
More importantly, he said, no tobacco company will be accepted into the MSA until it pays off all of its back escrow obligations and agrees to not challenge the legality of the agreement in court at some later time.
GRE hadn't paid off its escrow debts and the company had made it clear it intended to fight the legality of the MSA in court even if it was granted admission.
"By joining the MSA, we shouldn't have to give up our rights to be heard on whether or not the law is either constitutional or consistent with the federal antitrust laws," said Violi, GRE's lawyer.
The frustrated judge refused to grant GRE's temporary injunction and ordered everyone to return to court the following week to hear arguments and testimony under oath.
Throughout its six-year court battle in the U.S., Grand River Enterprises has suggested in documents that the company faces irreparable harm and imminent peril if the states get their way.
"My client's position is it's their last chance, their last hope," Violi told the judge. "They have been corralled."
In October 2004, GRE president Steve Williams filed an affidavit that painted a very grim view of the company's future if the lawsuit was to fail.
"During the last 18 months, Grand River has been able barely to survive," Williams said in his affidavit.
The states named in the lawsuit have "decimated (GRE's) ability to compete in the U.S. market" and their actions "are now choking off the sales venues for Grand River's products to the point that Grand River's existence is in serious jeopardy," he said.
"Grand River cannot and will not survive if it does not obtain legal redress," Williams said.
A delay of another year in obtaining a judgment would be "a further delay that Grand River simply cannot bear and remain in business," he added.
That was October 2004.
GRE's financial statements and court testimony suggest a different story, however.
In 2005 -- when the company was to be struggling to stay in business, according to Williams' suggestion -- GRE sold 3.6 billion cigarettes in the U.S.
That was a 50-fold increase over the company's U.S. sales in 1999. In fact, from 2004 to 2005, GRE's U.S. sales jumped by about 60 per cent.
Sales of one GRE brand in South Carolina alone went to 1.6 billion in 2005 from 44 million cigarettes in 2002.
In 2003, GRE paid nearly $24 million in management bonuses to its small group of seven shareholders.
In 2004, GRE's gross sales were $202 million, and about $23 million was paid to the shareholders in management bonuses.
In 2005, GRE's shareholders were paid an estimated $18 million in management bonuses.
When Montour, the CEO, took the stand for two days of examination on April 26 and May 1, 2006, he testified that the massive shareholder bonuses were paid out that way to take advantage of the owners' native status when it came to personal and corporate taxes.
Montour said that much of the estimated $65 million in shareholder bonuses in the previous three years was loaned back to the company by the shareholders to help keep the company operating.
But he also admitted that GRE's owners took at least $22 million of the bonus money out of the company for their own use.
On top of that, GRE also paid out $5 million in bonuses over five years to other company executives, including a $750,000 bonus to Peter Montour, Jerry's father.
Montour also testified that his salary as CEO of Grand River Enterprises at the time was $1,500 a week -- $78,000 a year.
"They don't live lavish," the lawyer for GRE told the court. "They don't, you know, have a high lifestyle."
In 2005, Montour and his wife spent $880,000 to purchase a 3,000-square-foot Mediterranean-style villa perched along the escarpment's edge on the west Mountain.
Montour subsequently demolished the house, obtained a $515,000 building permit in June 2006, and built a new house, reported to be 9,000 square feet in size, on the property.
The lawyer representing the attorneys general told the judge that the $16 million owed by GRE to clear up its escrow obligations was less than the $22 million taken out of the company in bonuses by the shareholders from 2003 through 2005.
He also told the judge he didn't understand GRE's rationale for trying to join the Master Settlement Agreement in the first place.
Joining the MSA would allow Grand River Enterprises to sell cigarettes in each of the 46 settlement states. But paying off the back escrow would also allow GRE to sell in every state.
To join the MSA, Grand River Enterprises would have to make back payments of $204 million, including $77 million alone for cigarettes sold on native reservations prior to 2005.
That's far more than the $16 million it would have cost the company to clear up its escrow debts outside of the MSA and be allowed to sell across the U.S., including on-reservation sales that weren't subject to escrow payments.
GRE's application to join the MSA "doesn't make sense," the lawyer for the 31 attorneys general told court.
"The states cannot look kindly on the application made by Grand River," he said. "In fact, we cannot conclude that it was made in good faith."
There were a number of other interesting financial details about GRE revealed during five days of court hearings in April and May 2006. Among the revelations:
* GRE made a profit of almost $41 million in 2004, with almost $40 million of that due to Canadian operations, even though the company sold more than twice as many cigarettes in the U.S. than Canada.
* Montour said GRE's profit on cartons sold in the U.S. was as low as 10 cents. In Canada, profits were in excess of $8 a carton.
* At the time, GRE sold cigarettes in Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, Vietnam and some African nations, in addition to Canada and the U.S.
* Wahta Springs, a water bottling company on the Wahta reserve in Muskoka owned by Montour and the other GRE shareholders, had sales of about $11 million in 2005.
* Not all of GRE's small group of shareholders even get a vote on some of the company's financial decisions, and one of the people with a vote isn't a shareholder -- president Steve Williams. Those with a vote are Montour, Williams, Ken Hill, Curt Styres and Scott Smith.
* Of GRE's $202 million in gross sales for 2004, $128 million of the sales were made to shareholders of GRE and affiliated companies.
But when he was asked to identify these companies that bought nearly two-thirds of GRE's cigarettes, Montour said he didn't know.
"You are the CEO of the company?" the lawyer representing the attorneys general asked Montour.
"Yes I am," Montour said.
"As you sit here you cannot identify for us the related companies or shareholders to whom Grand River made $128 million in sales?" the lawyer asked.
"No," Montour testified. "I can tell you how many cigarettes I sold. I can tell you the margins. I can tell you in the United States what the margins are."
"I asked you a simple yes or no question," the lawyer continued.
"And the answer was no," replied Montour.
GRE's court case launched against 31 U.S. states continues to drag on slowly.
In February, company president Steve Williams was examined under oath for two days in Manhattan, while Montour faced another two days of examination in May.
But this time, GRE successfully applied to have the two men's testimony kept from the public under a confidentiality order.
Six years after the suit was launched, the discovery phase of examinations hasn't concluded and the judge recently extended that deadline by another two months.
A trial date is still far off in the distance.