Why do drug traffickers risk everything to smuggle their cargo across a border? Because they can double their revenue, as shown by a drug haul found by U.S. authorities before it could be transported into Canada. When 15 kilograms of cocaine and nine kilograms of methamphetamine were seized in the Grandview Business Center in Ferndale, Wash., its street value was US$550,000. If the planned run had been completed - just 17-kilometres north, past the Peace Arch border into British Columbia - the street value would have jumped to more than $1 million, said the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It's a lesson in black-market economics. "The street value goes up the further north you go. Most of it comes from the south, south of the U.S. border," said Andrew Munoz, spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Crossing borders adds the most value. [continues 442 words]
Musical Festival Drug Deaths Prompt Mourning, Warnings Annie Truong-Le, a 20-year old political science student at Toronto's York University, volunteered with an afterschool program for students in the city's tough Jane and Finch neighbourhood where she grew up. Lynn Tolocka, 24, grew up a martial arts enthusiast in a U.S. military family who settled in Leduc, Alta., and took time off from her catering job last weekend to celebrate her 25th birthday. Both young women and Willard Amurao, 22, of Ajax died at summer music festivals last weekend, one held in Toronto and the other in Penticton, B.C. In Toronto, 13 others needed hospital treatment and in Penticton 40 people were taken to hospital, two critically, all apparently from drug overdoses or tainted drugs. [continues 829 words]
Toronto-area border guards stopped about $240-million worth of illicit drugs from reaching the marketplace, with more than half of it found hidden in commercial shipments, according to information released yesterday by Canada Border Services Agency. About $124-million worth of drugs were seized by the agency's commercial operations while about $100-million were seized from passengers at Pearson International airport with the remainder, about $17-million, found in packages mailed into the city from abroad, the agency reported. [end]
A new specialized team of drug investigators has uncovered one of the largest heroin caches found in Canada during its first investigation, one that started and finished within a month. About 140 kilograms of suspected high-grade heroin have been seized in the Toronto area and three people arrested, police are expected to announce today at a scheduled press conference. The seizure is valued at about $50-million. "I've been in this for 35 years and this is the largest seizure I've seen," said Superintendent Ron Allen, who is in charge of the RCMP's Greater Toronto Area Drug Section. [continues 188 words]
U. S. authorities say a drug network led by a 23-year-old Quebec man nicknamed "Goofy" moved nearly US$1-billion worth of drugs into the United States from Canada through a native reserve and a secluded border crossing in Quebec. Eight Canadian residents, including Steven Sarti of Brossard, Que., the alleged boss, are named in a U. S. federal indictment unsealed yesterday along with five U. S. residents charged after a two-year police probe called Operation Iron Curtain. [continues 414 words]
Juan Fernandez Kept Up His Mob Work in Prison--and Is Being Kept Inside A feared gangster who was the "pointy stick" for the Montreal Mafia's expansion into Ontario has been deemed too dangerous to release from prison. Despite Juan Ramon Fernandez spending much of his sentence for drug and murder conspiracy in maximum security, he still managed to arrange hash shipments from Jamaica, tamper with a witness testifying against him and orchestrate an attack on an inmate at another prison, all while behind bars, authorities alleged. [continues 1027 words]
Ingested Cocaine; In One Case 89 'Pellets' Passed Over Nine Days, Police Say Border guards at Toronto's Pearson international airport faced a sudden flush of travellers trying to conceal cocaine by swallowing balls of the powerful drug wrapped in plastic, forcing investigators to sift through messy evidence. Four Canadians in their 20s, two from Quebec and two from Calgary, were arrested this month after arriving from South America with unusual internal loads, police said. On May 13, two Quebec men arrived in Toronto on a flight from Bogota, Colombia, on their way to Montreal. [continues 370 words]
'Not About Tasers' The message inside the meeting room was one thing -- "we're not talking about Tasers" one speaker said three or four times during a presentation to 250 police officers and paramedics -- but the chatter outside was quite another. "I've been Tasered twice -- once sober and once drunk," said an officer during the break. "How many times have you used yours?" another asked a colleague. A third complained her force now makes her fill out a form every time she uses her Taser, while another described it as "kind of freaky" zapping someone for the first time. [continues 897 words]
Quebec Biker, Who Killed A Government Witness, Will Be Sentenced Today Richard Vallee, once a leading member of Quebec's Hells Angels, expressed some remorse for killing a government witness about to testify against him -- he was sorry that his victim was driving a classic Porsche sports car when he blew him up in 1993. After a career marked by drugs, death plots, surprise acquittals and unlikely prison escapes, Vallee will stand today in a New York courtroom to learn whether he will spend the rest of his life in jail. [continues 943 words]
White House Issues Warning About More Addictive Form The White House is blaming Canadian drug traffickers for flooding American cities with a pumped-up, addictive form of the club-drug Ecstasy and has issued a public health warning over the "dangerous new drug threat coming from Canada." Law enforcement agencies have seen dramatic increases in the number of seized tablets of Ecstasy that are laced with methamphetamine, a mixture that raises the concern of police and health officials, according to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. [continues 661 words]
Book Reproduces U.S. Dossiers From 1960s Last week's declaration by Italian police that one of the Mafia's super clans is based in Montreal is only the latest reminder of the place Canada has held in the world of transnational crime; newly released files from U.S. government archives also place Montreal at the epicentre of the world's drug trade. An intriguing 880-page book to be published next month -- an exact reproduction of the United States Bureau of Narcotics' original Mafia files from the early 1960s - -- is clear on this point: "Head of the largest and most notorious narcotic syndicate on the North American continent," it states in the file on Montreal's Giuseppe "Pep" Cotroni. [continues 697 words]
Rules Would Force Lawyers To Record Large Transactions The federal government is renewing a controversial plan to close loopholes in Canada's anti-money-laundering rules by making lawyers adhere to a law designed to sever gangsters and terrorists from their illicit cash. Canada's law societies have waged a fierce battle against the government's moves to make them follow the same rules as bankers, accountants, investment advisors, real estate agents, insurance dealers and casinos, winning a series of court battles that placed the secrecy of solicitor-client privilege ahead of the war on dirty money. [continues 719 words]
Flagship Chapter; Toronto Operation Latest In Series Of Police Offensives Before this week's high-profile arrests, pressure was mounting on the flagship chapter of the Hells Angels in Ontario -- the one with the largest clubhouse brimming with some of the most prominent and vocal bikers. Some members had become increasingly suspicious. There had been finger-pointing and confrontations. The idea of a so-called rat, a turncoat member of the Hells Angels co-operating with police against the brotherhood of bikers, had moved from the theoretical. [continues 620 words]
The imagery is irresistible: After seizing the Hells Angels clubhouse in Toronto last week, police took down a sign with the winged skull logo of the Hells Angels and replaced it with one of their own, a logo of a motorcycle wheel in handcuffs. It made a bold statement without saying a word-- the perfect marketing moment. In a battle of the brands, imagery is crucial, but the high profile action of Ontario's Biker Enforcement Unit has drawn some criticism. [continues 170 words]
TORONTO - Police tactical teams fanned out across Ontario in a series of carefully co-ordinated raids against the Hells Angels early yesterday, seizing property and making dozens of arrests in a crackdown on illegal drug trafficking. Called Project Develop, the sweep by Ontario's Biker Enforcement Unit targeted up to 40 alleged criminal biker gang members across the Greater Toronto Area, but also included arrests as far away as Langley, B.C., and New Brunswick. But the suspects may have had a hint of what was coming. [continues 390 words]
Strange Tale Of Cocaine Smuggling, Car Troubles When a New York state trooper stopped a taxi that had zipped through a speed trap in the southbound lanes of Interstate 81, the driver inside told the officer a curious story. The cabbie said he was returning from Canada, where he had driven an agitated, sweating passenger who had abandoned his car in a New York village. It was a bizarrely long and lucrative 300-kilometre trip for the cabbie, who marvelled at his good fortune that September day in 1993. [continues 1472 words]
NIK Tests Widely Used By Police A convict in a maximum-security prison admits that guards found him hiding a small bag of white powder down his pants, but convinced a Federal Court of Canada judge that, despite tests identifying the substance as cocaine, prison officials could not be absolutely certain the powder was contraband. The ruling on the burden of proof needed for prison infractions calls into question the standard use of a simple chemical kit to quickly test for common drugs -- and sends the inmate back to his cell block a prison hero. [continues 575 words]
Obstruction Of Justice TORONTO - Two RCMP drug officers, one a veteran crusader against narcotics traffickers, have been criminally charged after a justice of the peace was allegedly misled during a police undercover operation into drugs flowing through Toronto's Pearson airport. It is an unusual end to a drug probe: Instead of members of an organized crime group smuggling large amounts of methamphetamine across Canada being charged, two officers investigating the case must now face the courts, police say. The trouble started in February, 2005, after a shipment of suspected drugs was tracked by members of the Toronto Airport Drug Enforcement Unit (TADEU), an RCMP-led unit comprising officers from several Ontario forces. The container, originating in Vancouver, was destined for Hamilton, police said. [continues 286 words]
TORONTO - When Sean Erez was found crumpled and bleeding in the elevator of the Westin Harbour Castle hotel this week, shot when an alleged drug deal went awry, he could well have still been inside an American prison for his international drug trafficking enterprise. That a decade was shaved off his 15-year sentence imposed in a Brooklyn courthouse in November, 2001 -- after he applied to serve his sentence in Canada rather than in the United States -- is angering victims-of-crime advocates and police officers on both sides of the border. [continues 816 words]
MS-13 Notorious For Beheading Its Victims Their names sound as benign as any high school sports team, but their presence is increasingly deadly. Some of Toronto's 70-plus identified street gangs have worked their way into the public realm through arrests or their own bloody acts of aggression, such as the Galloway Boys, Malvern Crew, Ardwick Blood Crew and the Jamestown Crips. Others are known only on the streets and inside newly created but confidential police files: Block-13, The Gatorz, Chalkfarm Bloods and Five Point Generalz among them, several street and police sources tell the National Post. [continues 956 words]
