How Mexico’s drug gangs set up shop in B.C.
Cartels now ‘bypass the middleman’
VANCOUVER — Infamous Mexican cartels like Sinaloa and La Familia have sent representatives to B.C.’s Lower Mainland to broker drug deals with local gangs, Postmedia News has learned.
A Postmedia investigation has uncovered increasing links between B.C. drug gangs and the notoriously violent cartels that have wreaked havoc along the northern Mexico border.
For years, local crime groups travelled south to the U.S. and Mexico to work with the cartels. Police now confirm that the Mexican crime groups have moved members north so they can be on the ground in B.C. and other parts of Canada. Calgary Police recently revealed that cartel members are also operating in the Alberta city.
Vancouver Police Supt. Mike Porteous said the cartels have changed their business model, currently preferring to have their own people based in Canada to arrange cocaine shipments into the country.
“The interesting trend that I think we’ve seen over the last couple of years is the cartels are bypassing the middleman,” Porteous said. “So they are bypassing Tom Gisby and Larry Amero and guys like that.”
Metro Vancouver gangsters like Gisby and Amero used to travel to Mexico to make their deals. Gisby was shot dead inside a Starbucks in Nuevo Vallarta in April 2012. Amero, a full-patch Hells Angel, was arrested in Montreal in November 2012 as an alleged leader of an international drug ring that worked with Mexican cartels to import and distribute about 75 kilograms of cocaine per week. He is awaiting trial.
The exact number of cartel agents on the Lower Mainland is hard to pinpoint — they often cross the border illegally and are deliberately low-key, said Porteous, the officer in charge of Vancouver Police investigative services.
“They are not as identifiable — they are not driving around steroided-up … They are pretty business-like. They fly under the radar,” he said. “The people that they have here are actually very influential. And they come and go of course. But the people they have here are the people who can get stuff done.”
He estimates the high-level cartel reps in the region at between 12 and 25.
“I would say bosses — a dozen, a couple of dozen — but then they have all their little tentacles,” he said. “Even if you have six or 10 or 12, then they are going to reach out to all of the other existing gangsters that they partner with and then that becomes their group.”
The RCMP’s internal newsletter, The Gazette, published an article last year noting the increasing numbers of cartel members in Canada.
“More recently, there’s been evidence of a definite cartel presence in Canada, specifically Mexican cartels. The roles of those individuals within Canada are very much those of gatekeepers, involved in the importation and distribution of cocaine, as well as logistics and money laundering/currency movement,” the article said.
Asked for more information about cartel members who’ve moved to Canada, RCMP Sgt. Greg Cox said: “While there are people in Canada working for Mexican organized crime groups, for operational reasons, we aren’t in a position to provide any additional details on this.”
He said RCMP intelligence has “established that Mexican cartel influence has increasingly affected criminal markets in Canada.”
“Consequently, criminal activity in Canada linked to Mexican cartels has become a national priority for the RCMP,” Cox said.
The Postmedia investigation found major Vancouver cartel links in several U.S. prosecutions of Mexicans in the Sinaloa and La Familia gangs.
More than $8 million owned by the Mexican gangs was laundered in Canada in one investigation. Most of that — almost $7 million — was delivered to a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent working undercover with Vancouver Police.
Three Mexicans living in Canada and a Vancouver man were arrested in the case and deported to the U.S. All have since pleaded guilty.
One of the men — Vancouver’s Ariel Julian Savein — will be sentenced in January 2015 for laundering $811,850 of La Familia’s drug profits.
When B.C. gangsters James Riach, Barry Espadilla and Ali Shirazi were arrested in Manila last January for allegedly operating a major synthetic drug network, police there said the Canadians were working on behalf of a Mexican cartel.
The RCMP later passed intelligence to the Filipino National Bureau of Investigation about a purported cartel plot to kill Riach.
Trials for the three Canadians are currently underway and expected to last into 2015.
The cartel links continue to be investigated by authorities in Manila, one source said this month.
Several Mexicans have been arrested in Canadian drug investigations in recent years.
In September, Niagara Regional Police announced Jamie Ortiz of Mexico City was among 14 arrested in a massive cocaine smuggling operation involving cartels and Canadian organized crime.
In Kelowna, B.C. in August, Salvador Ascencio-Chavez was sentenced to 13 years for smuggling 97 kilograms of cocaine into Canada in September 2010 with two B.C. men. At the time, Ascencio-Chavez was living in B.C. illegally after having been deported following an earlier cocaine importation conviction.
Last May, 19-year-old Mexican Andy Garcia Macias was sentenced to six years after smuggling nine kilos of cocaine across the border in January east of Osoyoos Lake.
“Information from various investigations indicates that the cartels importing drugs into Canada continue to seek new smuggling methods,” the RCMP’s Cox said.
“Drugs have been seized from shipping containers, private boats, and commercial planes that have originated out of, or travelled via, Mexico and/or South America. Commercial and private vehicles are also used to smuggle drugs believed to have originated in Mexico into Canada via the U.S.A.,” he said.
Victor Manjarrez, a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, isn’t surprised by the cartels’ move into Canada. “When you talk about the Sinaloa gang and the others — people often forget that these cartels are businesses,” he said.
Increased American enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border has impacted the cartels’ ability to make money, said Manjarrez, an expert on border management and security and former law enforcement officer.
“If you are a Mexican drug lord — a cartel member — and you are looking at this and saying, geez you know in the last 10 years the United States government has doubled the size of the agency responsible for enforcing them …
“The cost of doing business is going up all the time. So what do you do? You circumvent that and you look for new markets.”
The volume of commercial and vehicle traffic back and forth over the 49th parallel creates what Manjarrez calls “border clutter.”
“The criminal element definitely tries to exploit that. What you are seeing though in places like Vancouver and other places in Canada, you are starting to see recognition by cartels that there are other markets beyond the United States.”
He said the cartel contacts in Canada would be “trusted up and comers.”
“It’s either a family member or a family friend — someone they trust with that franchise. It helps if they’re able to get legal entry documents.”
The cartels pose little threat of violence in this country, but the drugs they bring in do lead to deadly confrontations between B.C.-bred gangs who fight over control of the market, Porteous said.
“I would prefer not to see the drugs come into town at all because once they come in, that perpetuates violence,” he said.
“We want to pick it off south of the border or in a different country or wherever — because once it comes into Vancouver, then there are issues.”