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InvisibleveggieM

Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 17,538
B.C. drug traffickers expanding into meth [CAN]
    #6331951 - 12/04/06 01:26 AM (17 years, 5 months ago)

B.C. drug traffickers expanding into meth
by STEVE SUO
December 4, 2006 - The Oregonian

HATZIC PRAIRIE, B.C. -- Alex Hanson stood outside an abandoned farmhouse one evening in June, preparing to enter what he describes as the superlab that ended his drug career.

Three months before, Hanson said, he was here working with a group that converted 110-pound barrels of ephedrine from India and China into methamphetamine. Hanson walked away and went on Canadian television to describe the operation. The crew fled.

What remained were the crystals, caked to doors and crunching underfoot. Hanson stopped to scrape up a pile of remnants with a hunting knife.

"Can you smell, in the air, that sick, sweet aroma?" said Hanson. "That's how you smell production. That's the smell of money."

While crime organizations in Asia have begun to operate meth megalabs using bulk ephedrine from India and China, Canadian criminals of Indian and Chinese ancestry are now tapping some of these same sources of chemicals to mass-produce meth in Canada.

The development is of concern to the United States, where Canadian drug traffickers have a strong presence. Asian organizations in Canada already have displaced Europe as the main U.S. supplier of the club drug Ecstasy, according to U.S. officials.

Now, those traffickers are moving into production of crystal meth. Authorities in British Columbia last year seized four working labs that met the U.S. definition of a superlab, said Staff Sgt. Mike Harding of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Harding estimated there also were six chemical dump sites with enough meth waste to have come from superlabs.

"The groups that are moving the Ecstasy, the groups that have moved marijuana in the past, are the same ones that are producing meth," said Detective Constable Jim Fisher, intelligence coordinator for the Vancouver Police Department's drug unit. "So why would we not expect it to go down south? The conduit exists."

In India, authorities say suspicious purchases of ephedrine have spiked since early 2006.

"The Chinese-origin Canadians and the Indian-origin Canadians have joined together now," said A. Shankar Rao, director for the New Delhi office of India's Narcotics Control Bureau. "They have formed a cartel, and they are working very hard to procure this material."

The U.S. State Department's 2006 drug report said production of synthetic drugs "appears to be on the rise in Canada, particularly methamphetamine" and Ecstasy. Canadian labs, the agency said, "are becoming larger and more sophisticated."

The drug has multiple destinations. Karen Tandy, administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, told an international drug conference in Montreal in May that methamphetamine trafficking organizations in the U.S. and Canada have begun exporting meth to Japan.

Canadian meth also reaches the United States under a different name. Sgt. Scott Rintoul of the RCMP said about 70 percent of the Ecstasy pills seized in Canada today contain some quantity of crystal meth. Tandy has termed this formulation "bait and switch marketing," geared to create "a new host of unwitting meth addicts at potentially younger ages."

Although DEA officials say they have not seen traffickers moving large quantities of crystal alone across the northern border, incentives to enter the U.S. market have risen this year. Meth prices have doubled as Mexican traffickers struggle with new government restrictions on ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.

The threat from Canada is particularly serious in the Pacific Northwest, home to extensive distribution networks for the famed Canadian cannabis known as B.C. bud. Two British Columbians illustrate the point: Hanson and Gurdish Singh Toor.

Toor was arrested in Gresham in 2001 with a load of Ecstasy and B.C. bud, court records show. In August, police in the Indian capital of New Delhi accused Toor and Chinese accomplices of shipping hundreds of pounds of ephedrine to superlab operators in Canada.

Hanson was nabbed by the Coast Guard in 2001 in the San Juan Islands ferrying 120 pounds of B.C. bud. By 2004, Hanson was with a Chinese group involved in Ecstasy and methamphetamine trafficking, according to a Canadian law enforcement document.

Hanson's involvement in the meth trade would have continued, he said, were it not for what happened in this bleak farmhouse an hour from Vancouver, B.C.

The insider

Hanson, arms laced with tattoos, chin marked by a soul patch, cheekbones etched with lines, surveyed the wreckage inside.

There were signs of a hasty evacuation. A video he shot the month before shows a finished basement with chemicals lining the shelves. Now, the drywall was stripped to studs, and electrical fixtures dangled from wires. The only chemical was in a red jug and reeked of old fish, a smell experts say corresponds to methylamine, an Ecstasy ingredient.

Hanson, 32, said he landed here after a 10-year rise through the ranks of organized crime in Vancouver. He went from nightclub bouncer to gangster's bodyguard to collector of drug debts to pilot of the Moonlighter, a 20-foot power boat that delivered B.C. bud from Vancouver Island to Anacortes, Wash. Hanson would drive the load by car to Orange County, Calif., and return with cocaine.

Hanson's 2001 arrest aboard the Moonlighter cost him two years in U.S. prison, records show. After his release in 2003, he met a Chinese Canadian friend looking to manufacture Ecstasy. Hanson said he was responsible for production of 1 metric ton of the drug.

In September 2005, Hanson said, three groups that knew his reputation at the Ecstasy lab enlisted his help making meth. If all went well, Hanson would be asked to set up his own lab. But first, he needed to spend time observing the operation in Hatzic Prairie.

Hanson said the lab was churning out a lot of meth; he watched the crew complete one 35-pound batch and start a second. But he thought the cooks were sloppy.

About four days into his stay in March, Hanson said, he turned on the shower and received a blast of brown water. His face and body burned. He ran from the shower to the basement and found someone pouring chemical waste into a hole next to the pump that delivered water from the house's well.

"What are you doing?" Hanson remembers yelling.

Caught on surveillance

Hanson's story would sound like a movie, except that some of it was witnessed by police.

According to surveillance notes from an investigation called Project Emper, Canadian Mounties in 2004 watched Hanson arrive in a white Mercedes at a suburban Vancouver McDonald's, where he met with Chinese Canadian Richard "Four Eyed Boy" Chiu.

The Mounties' report said Chiu was a "high-level trafficker of Ecstasy, methamphetamine, chemicals and chemical precursors." Hanson, the Mounties said, "assists" Chiu "with the distribution of chemicals and precursors throughout the lower mainland."

Chiu also had a U.S. felony record for selling heroin, federal court files show.

The pair drove slowly past a storage locker where, two weeks before, a police search found enough chemicals to make 330 pounds of meth and 1,100 pounds of Ecstasy. There also was a heating mantle for a 22-liter flask, the signature of a superlab.

Chiu went to prison in February 2005 for violating parole by consorting with drug dealers. Hanson was not charged in Project Emper.

Although Hanson's activity since then is impossible to verify completely, some Canadian law enforcement officials found his TV account convincing.

"I'll go on record saying he's accurate," said Fisher, the Vancouver police intelligence officer. "What he talked about for frequency, amounts. What he talks about for organization, for tactics, his tactics and ours. Yeah, he's accurate."

Fisher and others said Vancouver's numerous organized crime groups, from Chinese triads to Indian syndicates to Iranian groups, have concentrated their profits from the region's $5 billion marijuana industry into the production of Ecstasy and meth.

"We're seeing a lot more Chinese involvement in labs with Ecstasy specifically, and methamphetamine," said Inspector Dave Nelmes, former head of the Vancouver police drug unit.

One meth lab in a $1 million Vancouver rental home last year contained 130 pounds of ephedrine, 180 pounds of red phosphorus and seven round-bottomed flasks.

Extracting pseudoephedrine from cold medicine is rare here, Nelmes said, because bulk chemicals are widely available in the port city. Ton shipments of Ecstasy ingredients have been seized in crates of Chinese soy sauce, and ephedrine and Ecstasy ingredients have been found in the same consignments.

In August, Indian authorities began pursuing one source of ephedrine shipments. It began with the arrest of Gurdish Toor.

The Indian connection

Toor started his criminal career as a high school bully who shook down students for money in Vancouver, B.C. In 1997, at age 20, he was sentenced to 18 months in jail for five robberies.

Toor had moved on to drug trafficking when he and another Canadian arrived by minivan on Nov. 21, 2001, at the Burger King on 181st Avenue in Gresham.

"They were familiar with Portland because they'd been here a number of times," said Gresham police Sgt. Pat Williams. The other man did the talking, and Toor "was more of the muscle behind the whole thing."

According to a police affidavit, the pair were sent from British Columbia to sell 43 pounds of B.C. bud and 13,000 Ecstasy tablets, but their customer was an undercover officer. Toor pleaded guilty to the Ecstasy charge. He spent six months at the Shutter Creek boot camp outside North Bend, according to the Oregon Department of Corrections.

When Toor surfaced in India this summer, he had set up front companies that acquired ephedrine for shipment to Canada, Delhi police said. He allegedly stored and tested the chemical at a luxury apartment in Mumbai.

He was arrested driving a 220-pound load of ephedrine concealed in paintings, authorities say. Three Indian nationals also were arrested, including the owner of an ayurvedic medicine factory. Delhi police said Toor and his associates are suspected of shipping hundreds of pounds of ephedrine during the past two years with help from two Chinese suspects still at large.

More cases followed. In September, 1,200 pounds of ephedrine was seized at a Delhi container depot, and another Canadian of Indian ancestry was charged. In October, police in Delhi seized a meth lab -- India's third ever -- with 1,200 pounds of ephedrine on hand. Rao, the regional director of India's narcotics control bureau, said police arrested one Indian Canadian, one Chinese Canadian, and five suspects from Hong Kong.

"They have got their logistic footprint in both countries," he said of the Canadian criminals of Chinese and Indian descent. "They are good -- Chinese are good in China and Indians are good in India, because they know the Indian topography so very well."

Cooking meth

At the farmhouse in Hatzic Prairie, Hanson's guided tour moved to a 10-foot-square room in the basement. "OK, here's where it all starts, right here," he said. "The table, the scales, the ephedrine."

The toxic shower in March was Hanson's epiphany. He has a picture of the bloody boils on his stomach. After they healed, he launched a campaign to warn people about the magnitude of Canadian meth production.

In the storage room, he rattled off the correct ratios of ephedrine, red phosphorus and hydriodic acid to pack into a 22-liter round-bottom flask. Place six of the flasks on hot plates in a semicircle. Turn up the heat.

A half-barrel of ephedrine, or 55 pounds, took 12 hours to cook. The crew removed the product for further processing, cleaned the flasks and started a new batch. Hanson said he was told the lab was in operation for more than a year.

"Everything would show up at once," Hanson said of the ephedrine barrels and other material. "There'd be a week where you'd do two barrels. And then, it shut down for a week. All the product gets sold. Acquire two more barrels, and then come back."

All the ephedrine came from China and India, he said.

"It usually lands in Montreal or Vancouver," Hanson said. "Once it's there, it just disappears and gets converted into meth."

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