Quebec traffickers supplied the province of Newfoundland with cocaine between 2012 and 2013. The drug made the trip submerged in gasoline tanks of vans. On site, coke was mixed with a carcinogenic substance in order to sell more and thus increase profits. This is how they got caught.
In order to recover the drugs that were hidden there, the traffickers first pumped the fuel from the vans of vans used to transport narcotics between Quebec and Newfoundland.
This is a rather unusual ploy that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) uncovered with its Baffle investigation project, which led to the arrests of Quebecers Alexandre Préfontaine and Tan Tai Huynh.
Silver and painkillers
Préfontaine, who lives in Morin Heights in the Laurentians, is also due to return to court this week for pleadings on his sentence. The Crown has already advised the court that it believes the 37-year-old Quebecker deserves six years in prison.
Tan Tai Huynh on a picture of the SPVM in 2006.
The RCMP became interested in Montrealer Huynh in the spring of 2012 after he rented a house in St. John's, Newfoundland, where Préfontaine came to live with him.
The police then found that Huynh often sent large amounts of cash - between $ 8,000 and $ 25,000 - to Montreal, which the RCMP believed to have come from the sale of drugs.
The money was sent by the UPS and Purolator courier services or transported by Huynh himself, in his luggage, during round trips by plane.
The investigation intensified in October 2012 when the Saint John-based RCMP seized a box addressed to Huynh accomplices in a courier company's warehouse.
Alexandre Préfontaine, escorted by the RCMP to the St. John's Courthouse in Newfoundland on March 6, 2013
The package contained two kilograms of powdered anesthetics (lidocaine and benzocaine), which traffickers often use to "cut" cocaine and thus sell more cocaine.
But above all, there were also 506 grams of a powdery substance that analyzes identified as phenacetin. It is an analgesic that Health Canada removed from the market in 1983 because it is carcinogenic and particularly harmful to the kidneys.
Phenacetin, which is also banned in the United States and Great Britain for the same reasons, was probably smuggled abroad by this network.
"Three times better" ...
Surveillance and wiretap operations have established that the network led by the two Quebecers had no qualms about mixing this substance in the kilos of cocaine sold in the capital of Newfoundland, according to court documents consulted. by The Journal.
"It is a cutting substance that may be attractive to traffickers because it allows the effects (the high ) of the cocaine ingested to be prolonged and, thus, to falsely suggest to consumers that this coke is superior quality ", testified Detective Sergeant Stephen Conohan during the legal proceedings against Tan Tai Huynh.
The RCMP has unknowingly recorded partners of this Montrealer boasting that their cocaine was "three times better" than their competitors, to the point where consumers "lost their heads".
They said that they could double the amount of cocaine they were selling on the street and bar market by adding phenacetine to coke, which had a price per kilo of $ 58,000 in that part of the Maritimes, about $ 8,000 more than in Montreal.
However, when they were talking to each other, these same traffickers did not hesitate to describe this product as "shit".
In the fuel
The RCMP managed to install microphones inside the Charlie Noftall auto mechanic garage, which housed the network headquarters in Saint John. Thus, the federal police discovered the rather singular way in which the organization imported cocaine - as well as marijuana - from Montreal.
Tan Tai Huynh, a Montrealer, was lying under this van that contained 25 kg of phenacetin when the RCMP arrested him in the act on March 4, 2013.
The drug, wrapped under vacuum in plastic bags, was hidden inside the fuel tanks of the Ford F-150 or Chevrolet Silverado pickup trucks used to travel between Quebec and Newfoundland.
The drug bags literally bathed in the fuel. Once in the garage, we first emptied the fuel tank with a pump before extracting the goods.
"It made me fall when I knew that," Rodney Noseworthy, who was sentenced to 20 months in prison last February while Charles Noftall was sentenced to three, admitted to the police. years of penitentiary.
On the day of his arrest, Montrealer Tan Tai Huynh was caught red-handed by the police as he was lying under a van picking up 25 kilograms of phenacetine hidden in the gas tank on March 4th. 2013.
Huynh was guilty of conspiring to sell phenacetin in 2017 and got away with a one-year prison sentence. His lawyer convinced the judge that the Montrealer had returned "in the right way" after his arrest.
Longtime accomplices
Alexandre Préfontaine and Tan Tai Huynh have been arrested together by the Montreal Police Department (SPVM) 13 years ago, while working for both the Italian mafia and the Asian underworld.
The two Quebecers pinned by the RCMP for supplying the capital of Newfoundland with cocaine are long-time accomplices.
In the spring of 2006, investigators from the organized crime division of the Montreal police made 24 arrests at the end of the operation named Paravent. Préfontaine and Huynh were among them.
This network exported an average of more than 100 kg of marijuana per week to the United States and had annual sales of around $ 20 million.
It resulted from a business partnership between the Italian mafia and a gang of traffickers of Vietnamese origin.
The organization was led by Anthony Di Maulo - a nephew of former Montreal Mafia No. 2 Joe Di Maulo who was shot dead in front of his home in Blainville on November 4, 2013 - and his mother-in-law , Thi Mi Nguyen. This duo had been sent to the penitentiary for three years.
Arrested event
Préfontaine and Huynh were sentenced to 18 months and 10 months' imprisonment respectively for their more minor role in this consortium of traffickers.
Huynh had also been given a year of additional detention for assaulting two police officers while attempting to escape them at the time of his arrest in this case.
Knowing that the suspect was carrying cannabis, the two police officers of the SPVM had ordered him to immobilize his vehicle. Huynh stopped for a moment, then continued for 500 meters as the police clutched the doors of his car.