The cigarettes were purchased over the Internet from a distributor in Florida or Alabama for around $14 a carton, or $1.40 a pack, and then sold them for about $6 a pack, more than a 400 percent profit, according to the Anchorage Daily News.

According to troopers, Richard Ellis, the local village public safety officer, got several tips in April that a video store in Marshall was selling cigarettes with Russian writing on them. The Alaska Department of Revenue's Tax Division, which handles the state's cigarette tax program, helped in the investigation.

The shopkeeper in Marshall had neither a license to sell the cigarettes nor tax stamps, which means the state was not regulating the import, troopers said.

The cigarette packs he was selling also lacked the required surgeon general's warning, Bales said.

"Even if they had a tax stamp on them, it's illegal to put a tax stamp on them" without that health warning, she said.

In May, Ellis seized the last of the 500 packs. The shopkeeper could face felony charges for importing illegal and untaxed cigarettes into the state.

Trooper Karl Main said he wasn't too surprised to hear that there were black-market cigarettes in rural Alaska. With higher prices and less law enforcement than most places, "rural areas can become somewhat of a popular ground for this type of behavior," he said.

The $1 per pack tobacco tax puts about $47 million into Alaska's coffers annually.

State and federal officials don't know how much revenue is lost to illegal sales.

In 2001, two businesses in the Lower 48 that sold cigarettes over the Internet revealed, at the state's request, how many customers they had in Alaska. One company reported selling cigarettes to 600 individuals in the state over a 13-month period. The other showed 400 over a 10-month period.

The state believes it lost about $600,000 in unpaid taxes in those two cases alone.

Juneau Empire