Arthur Brun was pulling off Kaumualii Highway with a Walmart bag full of meth resting on the shotgun seat when he saw the flashing lights of a police cruiser in his rearview mirror. He took a breath and pulled in front of the Lihue post office, across the street from the palm-lined lawn of the historic county building where he worked Wednesdays as a council member. He had a meeting there in a couple of hours.
The officer walked up to his car. Brun recognized him, a barrel-chested haole lieutenant named James Miller. Kauai, Hawaii, is a small island, and Brun, as a community leader, knew most of the high-ranking cops.
Miller told Brun he’d been pulled over because of the tint on his windows. Brun responded that his front windows had been rolled down. It was the back windows, Miller said, and he asked Brun to roll those down. The officer scanned the inside of Brun’s Honda sedan. Soon, a police dog was barking at the door. Miller asked Brun to step out of the car. “You didn’t stop me for the tint,” Brun said. “This isn’t right.”
The Collapse of a Double Life
Miller reached across Brun to grab the keys from his ignition. Fuck you with this setup, Brun thought, shifting into drive and slamming on the gas. His car lurched forward with Miller’s arm still reaching through the window, briefly dragging the cop down the street. Brun shook him loose, peeling past the council building and through downtown Lihue. He swerved onto a side street toward the airport, with its sign wishing travelers “Mahalo: Until We Meet Again,” past rows of helicopters and tanks of jet fuel, along the bumpy road to the Ahukini Pier. It was a dead end, but it was a place where you could hide something.
For the past two years, Arthur Brun, or “Ata,” had been living two separate and distinct lives. During the day, he was a suburban dad who would umpire Little League games, volunteer at church, and perform the mundane work of municipal government, like championing a bill to expand the definition of guesthouses to allow kitchens.
But at night, he was participating in the largest drug-smuggling operation on the island. Through his connections with the shady Hawaii underworld, and the powerful United Samoan Organization prison gang, he moved a pound or two of meth a week. His crew operated with “impunity,” according to John Tobon, who supervised the case at Homeland Security. “It was unsophisticated in a manner that was not normal to the drug world,” Tobon says. “They just assumed that there was nobody there to watch.”
“They just assumed that there was nobody there to watch.”
Homeland Security officer John Tobon
It was not fun or glamorous or particularly lucrative. Most of the dealers and suppliers who worked with Brun were addicts themselves, feeding an island ravaged by addiction since the 1980s. Brun was selling, in part, to feed his own addiction, which by 2019 had left him a husk of his former self.
For years, Council Member Brun and Meth Dealer Brun had somehow managed to coexist. But now, the facade was about to collapse, leaving his community grappling with the fallout. Kauai, a rural island of 70,000 people, is tremendously insular and interconnected. Most locals knew, or at least knew of, the fallen councilman. How could a friend, co-worker, and trusted community member have screwed up so badly? “Arthur did a really great job hiding it,” says Brun’s friend and fellow council member Ross Kagawa. “Nobody had a clue.”