Hey Nevermorons!
What you are about to read is Part 2 of a series about Mexican drug cartels in Canada.
If you’d like to start from the beginning, I suggest starting here:
This story is based on an excellent book called The Wolfpack by veteran crime reporters Peter Edwards and Luis Horacio Najera, which I highly recommend.
I refer to Edwards and Najera as “the authors” throughout this article, and all quotes are from The Wolfpack.
This article was originally posted on my other blog, where I write about crime and corruption in Canada. If you’re interested in those subjects, I encourage you to sign up. It’s free!
And if you haven’t subscribed to Nevermore yet, there’s never been a better time than now!
The Mysterious Case of the Missing Cocaine
by Anton Bueckert
On the morning of September 22nd, 2014, authorities made the first major bust of a Mexican cartel on Canadian soil.
The operation involved the Canada Border Services Agency, the Ontario Provincial Police, the RCMP, and police from London, Toronto, Niagara, Barrie, Peel, and South Simcoe.
The arrests were the culmination of a massive investigation dubbed Project Roadmaster, which involved nearly a thousand days of surveillance and more than a dozen judicially authorized covert entries into locations believed to be connected to the Sinaloa Cartel.
The investigation centred on a warehouse at 3512 Nugent Road in Port Colborne, Ontario, near the Canada-U.S. border.
According to veteran crime reporters Peter Edwards and Luis Najera:
The overall numbers related to the Nugent Road warehouse were staggering. In 2013 alone, the cartel had imported and distributed at least 2,431 kilograms of cocaine through the warehouse, at a time when local prices were $36,000 to $39,500 a kilo. That worked out to between $87,516,000 and $96,024,500 worth of cocaine imported in just one year.
The criminal conspiracy had centred on a scheme by which huge granite slabs were shipped from Guadelajara, Mexico to Port Colborne.
Now, I’m no businessman, but that seems like an awful long way to ship granite. It’s not like Canada’s short on rocks.
The slabs were then broken open to extract the precious cargo hidden inside them.
What was this precious cargo, you ask? You guessed it - cocaine.
Surely, investigators must have been jubilant the day that Project Roadmaster reached its glorious climax. It was a narc’s wet dream.
Something historic had just happened. Detective Sergeant Shawn Clarkson of the Niagara Regional Police Service, a veteran of decades of high-level organized-crime investigations, said the Nugent Road warehouse case marked the first time he had heard of Mexican cartel members operating inside Ontario. The numbers also showed that the cartel had recently channelled some four hundred kilograms of cocaine to Southern Ontario mobsters but held another seven hundred kilograms back for themselves. That clearly gave the Sinaloa Cartel huge clout in the local marketplace—like Walmart setting up next to a mom-and-pop general store. The cartel could win the turf war on price alone, without firing a shot.
What happened next, however, probably put a damper on the day for certain intrepid investigators, who had just spent the better part of three years building their case against the baddest bad guys imaginable - the notorious Sinaloa cartel, led by the infamous Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
Police had hoped to cap the arrests off with a massive cocaine seizure. Three boulders were hauled up to RCMP grounds near the Toronto Pearson International Airport.
They expected to find three hundred kilos in each rock, which would yield about $12 million worth of the drug. Heavy machinery was rented and transported, at a cost of $20,000, to crush the massive rocks, and twenty police officers assembled to watch the work.
When it was done and the haul was measured, the police learned that they had scooped up…nothing.
The rocks were dummies, a test load. Either the cartel had caught wind of the operation or they had gotten very lucky.
The authors do not speculate about other possibilities, such as members of Canadian law enforcement choosing to divert the cocaine for fun and profit.
Everyone knows that would never happen in Canada.
Thanks for reading!
Stayed tuned for Part 3, in which I will make a meticulous study of how the cartel operated in Canada.
If anyone reading happens to be a cartel member thinking of killing me, I’d like to state for the record that everything that I have reported here has previously been reported on by Edwards and Najera.
Also, doesn’t a hit cost like 50-100k in Canada? I’ll shut up for way less than that!
To threaten me or offer me money, please feel free to shoot me an email at antonbueckert@protonmail.com. I accept e-transfers!
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