Odour tips U.S. officer to smuggled ecstasy haul

A stinky chemical product used to conceal a large shipment of illegal drugs being driven across the border at the Windsor-Detroit Tunnel turned out instead to be a smuggler’s undoing.

A “suspicious” odour was detected in the trunk area of a green ‘98 Oldsmobile Intrigue stopped at one of the customs booths on the American side on the evening of Aug. 6, 2010. It was strange enough that the driver, Nicola Kakish, was told to pull over for a secondary inspection.

“It smelled like some kind of adhesive,” said U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent Matthew Lahr. Lifting up the carpeting in the vehicle’s trunk area, Lahr discovered a vacuum-sealed package coated in a black substance near the driver’s side rear fender. Eventually, 11 bags of pills would be discovered in the trunk area, in spaces between the engine compartment and windshield and under the console between the two front seats. The total haul was 25,205 stamped MDMA pills in an assortment of colours — 7.6 kilograms of ecstasy. The black undercoating sealant spray used to conceal the illegal drugs ended up being what got them revealed.

Lahr, one of the U.S. federal agents who conducted that initial search, testified Thursday in Windsor at the drug trafficking conspiracy trial of Kaophone Sychantha before Superior Court Justice John Desotti. Kakish, a dual Canadian-American citizen, has since pleaded guilty to drug trafficking in an American court and received a much-reduced sentence in return for agreeing to testify against Sychantha, an alleged drug kingpin.

As soon as the first vacuumsealed package was revealed during that border inspection eight years ago, the driver, Kakish, was handcuffed and arrested. Lahr testified that a special agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of Homeland Security, was alerted. And, he added, “with something this large, we’d often contact the Canadian side.” The trial continues Friday, with police and border agents from both countries expected to testify. Before Lahr took the stand, however, most of Thursday’s testimony was again taken up with the defence’s cross-examination of the Crown’s first and main witness, Kakish. Sychantha’s lawyer Frank Miller continued to pepper Kakish, a selfdescribed drug “mule,” portraying him as a liar whose testimony and changing story of his involvement in the smuggling of drugs and cash across the Windsor-Detroit border should not be believed.

Part of that lying, Miller suggested, was Kakish trying to provide cover for his friend Justin Elias, who first connected him with Sychantha, formerly of Lakeshore, and his “crew” at a downtown Windsor nightclub.

It was Elias, and not Miller’s client Sychantha, who supplied Kakish with the ecstasy he was paid to smuggle across the border, the defence lawyer said.

“That’s false information you’re providing us now,” Kakish responded from the witness stand. Miller said the only reason the prosecution’s witness was pointing to Sychantha is because police had pointed to him as a suspect and Kakish was protecting his friend. “That is incorrect,” Kakish said in a loud voice.

Elias was a co-accused in the case but had his charges withdrawn by the Crown in 2014. Kakish told the court he was facing a 15-years-plus sentence but ended up serving eight months of “intense probation,” during which he was free to leave jail during the day for work. Miller accused Kakish of continuing to lie about his involvement, even after he agreed to co-operate with police and after taking an oath to tell the truth. “There’s no question he lied, he may have lied about lying,” the judge said at one point, interrupting a heated exchange between Miller and the witness.