1,000-kilo cocaine haul worth $250M on street the biggest in OPP history

The OPP showed off the largest ever drug seizure of its nearly 110year history Monday morning.

Three men have been arrested, accused of importing 1,062 kilograms of pure cocaine. The drugs were displayed by police during a news conference in four specially constructed glass containers, each with a dimension of about four feet tall by eight feet wide.

“This is a massive seizure, bigger than I’ve ever seen in my 33 years of policing,” OPP commissioner Vince Hawkes said during the news conference at OPP Headquarters in Orillia.

Uncut, the cocaine — said to be 97 per cent pure — is estimated to be worth about $60 million. Cut and on the street, police say the value increases to at least $250 million.

Typically, cocaine found on the street is about 30-40 per cent pure, OPP deputy commissioner Rick Barnum explained. Once cut and supplemented with filling agents, such as fentanyl, the amount of product increases to between 2,122 and 3,183 kg.

Police say the cocaine was brought to Canada from Argentina via ocean-going vessels. It would arrive in Montreal disguised in garden stones and be transported into Ontario, where it would be distributed throughout the province and the entire country.

“This such a large amount that — cut several thousands and thousands of times — results in a lot of product that could be on the street,” Hawkes said.

“More product than we’d see just for Ontario.”

The stones would be transported on palates, inside 40-foot-long containers, each stacked about fourto-five feet high. Mixed in among legitimate quartzite, random stones would be slightly hollowed out and filled with cocaine, before being resealed with concrete.

The discovery of the cocaine was not made by Canadian Border Service Agency drug dogs, but rather through a number of other investigative methods. Once seized, the dogs were used to see if they could sniff out the contraband, and were unsuccessful.

Barnum called the people behind the operation professionals. Without the investigative phase, it would have been “near impossible” to know there was any cocaine being smuggled at all.

“(The dogs) do amazing work, they really do,” Barnum said. “In this case, inside (the stones) ... there was other masking substances on there to throw a scent. Once you seal it up and pile a bunch of other rocks around, you’re not going to get that.”

Project HOPE began in March as an intelligence operation, Barnum said, with the first two accused arrested in May. The third accused was arrested in July.

With the investigation, police were focusing on persons who were bringing the cocaine the Greater Toronto Area. What they soon discovered was what Barnum called “an intercontinental smuggling operation,” later confirmed to have connections to Mexican drug cartels.

Luis Enrique Karim-Altamirano, 52, of Vaughan, Mauricio Antonio Medina-Gatica, 36, of Brampton and Iban Orozco-Lomeli, 45, of Toronto are each charged with importation of cocaine and possession of cocaine for the purpose of trafficking. Karim-Altamirano, the only of the three still in custody, was also charged with drive while disqualified.

Both Karim-Altamirano and Orozco-Lomeli are Canadian citizens, Barnum said. Medina- Gatica is a native of Costa Rica.