Hard-hitting and wised up, Smokescreen is a documentary account of the scuzz-filled career of one Cal Broeker, a curiously valiant ex-butcher from small-town New York who morphed into what the Brits call a “supergrass.” In the 1990s, Broeker was an informant for the Mounties; his territory was the eastern seaboard, and his mission was to act as a broker for cigarette smugglers, counterfeiters, and various dealers in mayhem.

With his bureaucratic, often unreliableRCMP handlers on one side and nervous, often psycho criminals on the other, thebook follows Brocker as he walks some exremely mean streets: one moment he’s sipping cold coffee at a dawn money -laundering exchange, and the next he’s sweating through a hidden-microphone sing.

The book’s pacy, verite style works well – we get a real sense of the boredom and confusion surrounding most criminal transactions – and the authors hammer hoome several discomfiting truths. Some examples: that it profits the tobacco companies to turn a blind eye to cigarette smuggling; that the laws proecting native reserves also protect criminals; that Canadian justice is structurally incapable of addressing organized crime; and that most lawbreakes are gready, egotistical, shortsigted types (otherwise they’d be more difficult to deceive).

Smokescreen’s near worshipful treatment of Broeker is a problem, however. Much of this can be written off as heroic overkill, except for the fact that having set up Broeker as a soul-searching kind of guy, the authors shirk the biggest soul-searching question of all. The book would have us believe that this closemouthed, old-fashioned adherent to the warrior code never felt torn by breaking the creed of silence: in other words, Broeker the lone wolf can also be viewed as Broeker the big snitch. That, it seems, is another smokescreen entirely.