Gangland

by Jerry Langton

  Since then, marijuana farming in B.C. has become a huge industry. A 2006 study by Burnaby, B.C.-based Simon Fraser University indicated that the people of BC not only have a much more relaxed attitude toward marijuana than other Canadians do, they are also much bigger consumers. The province itself estimated the value of the rapidly growing crop in 2006 at $6.3 billion, and Larry Campbell, a senator and former mayor of Vancouver, has made repeated calls for marijuana not simply to be decriminalized in the province, but legalized.

  The farming of BC Bud has become incredibly sophisticated. While there are still thousands of amateur marijuana farmers in British Columbia, the BC Bud brand name refers to a specific type of super-potent pot grown using specific methods. The process begins with shipping containers which are taken to isolated rural or wild areas. They are then fitted with halogen lights that are computer-timed to provide an optimum amount of artificial daylight. These are supplemented by sprayers that provide a constant cloud of mist, keeping the plants moist and heaters to maintain a constant temperature. Since the primary method of detecting marijuana farms in Canada—where they are usually called “grow-ops”—is to investigate residences that use much higher than normal levels of electricity, BC Bud growers often use their own electricity from diesel generators, solar panels and/or wind turbines.

  The resulting product is so potent, that it is considered the gold standard of marijuana. And its high quality guarantees it a high price. The price it demands tends to rise the farther away it gets and many published reports have stated that in places like Miami, BC Bud is sometimes traded ounce for ounce for cocaine, a transaction that would be unthinkable with any other type of marijuana.

  So high are the profits in dealing with BC Bud that police have arrested traffickers transporting it by kayak, through tunnels under the border, by airplane and helicopter and even in the backpacks of teenagers on a school bus taking Canadian kids to study in Port Roberts, Washington.

  Enter the Hells Angels

  And, of course, wherever that kind of money is being made illegally, there will be violence. For generations, British Columbia's drug trade had been in the hands of the Hells Angels, who left the work of dealing and distributing to support groups, or what police call “puppet gangs.” The most notable of them—the United Nations—was actually formed in opposition to the Hells Angels, whose puppet gangs would often target teens of Asian descent for abuse. Despite engaging in a number of brawls with Hells Angels supporters, the management of the United Nations could not resist the rewards of trafficking and became the Hells Angels' primary puppet gang in mainland British Columbia. Because the United Nations was a multiethnic gang, they could more easily make deals with communities the Hells Angels and their supporters could not reach. “We have a completely new infrastructure that supports the movement of cocaine, ecstasy, marijuana, you name it,” said Pat Fogarty, RCMP superintendent with the combined forces special enforcement unit.

  The United Nations had been fighting a bloody turf war in Vancouver and the nearby Fraser Valley with another multiethnic gang, the Red Scorpions. After dozens of shootings and stabbings of young people associated with those and other gangs, and the seizure of items like AK-47s and bulletproof vests, the police acknowledged that drug trafficking violence had created a gang war in British Columbia. “As police, we've always been told by media experts to never say or admit that there is a gang war,” said Vancouver chief constable Jim Chu. “Well, let's get serious. There is a gang war, and it's brutal.”

  On the morning of September 27, 2009, residents of a Puerto Vallarta condominium community heard gun shots. Witnesses say that a masked man with an AR-15 shot two men in the pool area from a distance, and that another man with a handgun shot them again at close range. The local paper Noticias Puerta Vallarta ran pictures of the two bodies. One was shirtless, the other was wearing a souvenir T-shirt from Toronto's Hockey Hall of Fame.

  The victims were identified as B.C. natives and former construction workers Gordon Douglas Kendall and Jeffrey Ronald Ivan, who had moved to Puerta Vallarta a year earlier. When the names were released, Canadian reporters phoned their friends and family but nobody would describe what the two did for a living. The Canadian consulate in Puerta Vallarta issued a press release stating that the murders looked like they were done to “settle a score.” Then the police made it a little clearer. “Both the organized crime team and the gang task force have been aware of these two males for a while,” said Sergeant Bill Whalen of the RCMP's Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit. “We've been aware that these two males have been involved with the drug trade for a while. We've been aware of ... some of their activities recently in Mexico.” And a friend of theirs eventually came forward. “He went down there to do some stuff for the Hells Angels, as far as I know,” the man, who refused to be identified, told reporters. “I tried to talk him out of it. I knew this was going to happen. He was involved in a nefarious venture, to say the least.” The Hells Angels denied the two men were members of their organization—but they always do.

  And Kendall and Ivan were hardly the first shooting victims in Mexico from B.C. and not the first connected to organized crime, either. On July 12, 2008, two Vancouver-area residents—Guatemala-born Elliott “Taco” Casteneda, a 28-year-old Abbotsford, B.C., realtor, and Lebanon-born Ahmet “Lou” Kaawach, a 26-year-old car customizer from Vancouver—were sitting down to lunch at a restaurant in the Santa Teresita neighborhood of Guadalupe when they were shot and killed. Both men were high-ranking members of the United Nations gang and were said to be “close friends” with its leader, Clayton Roueche. Kaawach had fled to Mexico after he was deported from Canada due to a weapons charge.

  Six months later, two other men from British Columbia—28-year-old Brendhan Stowe and 26-year-old Nguyen Minh Trung Do—were shot by a lone gunman with an automatic weapon as they were enjoying the show at Mermaids, a topless bar in Cabo San Lucas, at about 1:30 a.m. Stowe was hit in the leg, while Trung Do took a serious hit to the neck and is now in a wheelchair. Though neither man had extensive criminal records, or was ever charged, the RCMP said they “were well known to police.”

  Mexican refugee claims in Canada

  As the Drug War in Mexico intensified, the number of Mexicans applying for refugee status in Canada jumped from a steady 1,000 a year to a peak of 9,309 in 2008. Almost all of them came through British Columbia. Far more Mexicans traveled to Canada as tourists, and simply stayed in the country without documentation. The RCMP and other organizations said that many of the immigrants came to traffic BC Bud. Since the Mexican military and the U.S. Border Patrol had clamped down on the Mexico–U.S. border, it made sense for traffickers to target the U.S. from the comparatively relaxed Canadian border. And they were not, police allege, all low-level cartel mules. Some came to purchase large amounts of BC Bud, and since large amounts of cash are difficult to smuggle into Canada, they were bartering cocaine for BC Bud. Suddenly, even small towns in British Columbia had communities of Mexican immigrants, mostly undocumented. And at the same time, those places started seeing rapid increases in cocaine and methamphetamine arrests, as well as gunfire. “The Mexican cartels are a factor that has contributed to the violence,” said Fogarty. “The situation is quite serious insofar as historically there have not been shootouts in public places here, so the people are concerned for their safety.”

  The skyrocketing number of refugee claims led many Canadians to question their validity. “My concern is we're going to be swarmed by Mexicans [from] the U.S. who don't have status there and can come to the border because they don't need a visa to come to Canada,” said Francisco Rico-Martinez, a refugee who came from El Salvador in 1990 and who is now codirector of the Toronto-based Faith Companions of Jesus Centre, a resource center for Latin American refugees. “We're starting to get calls from Mexicans in the States—five to six a week—hoping to file refugee [claims] in Canada. But we may not even know half of the Mexicans here who are without status, because they don't
need visas to come.”

  The number rose so quickly that the Canadian government felt compelled to act. As of July 14, 2009, Mexican nationals would need to apply for visas to visit Canada. “In addition to creating significant delays and spiralling new costs in our refugee program, the sheer volume of these claims is undermining our ability to help people fleeing real persecution,” said Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney. “All too often, people who really need Canada's protection find themselves in a long line, waiting for months and sometimes years to have their claims heard. This is unacceptable.”

  That made things hard for legitimate Mexicans refugees who now had to apply for visas in advance, meet the requirements and wait to hear for an answer. The concept angered people like Juan Escobedo, who fled to Toronto after finding his life threatened repeatedly in Mexico. His struggles began with a June 2008 incident in which men who said they were members of Los Zetas kidnapped him and his wife, nearly drowned him, beat him and then told him he was going to work for them and that they would use his house for trafficking. “They said, ‘We want a place from which to make sales and you are going to work for us, you understand?’” Escobedo told reporters. “My wife was sick [with cancer], and even so. They made her sell drugs from our house.” The Escobedos' four children also lived in the house with them.

  Escobedo could not refuse—he said Los Zetas paid his neighbors to watch him—and could not leave because his wife, an Oaxaca state employee who worked as a cleaner at the Social Security Institute, only qualified for free chemotherapy in their home state. Escobedo said he openly dealt drugs on the private bus he drove, while passengers and police routinely ignored the transactions.

  On one occasion, the couple were kidnapped and blindfolded. When the blindfolds were taken off, he said, they were in a room with other bound people, some he knew. Then two masked, armed men walked in with another bound man. They beheaded the third man in front of the crowd and warned everyone in the room that they would receive the same treatment if they tried to escape.

  In September, Escobedo's wife died and he refused to work for the cartel any longer. He received a visit from a man he knew to be a state police officer. “He said, ‘You’ll keep on working for us because you work for us,'” Escobedo told reporters. “I really didn't want to, so he said, ‘Here it's not whether you want to or not,’ and he pulled out a knife. I didn't know if he wanted to kill me or what his intentions were, but he stabbed me twice in the leg.”

  Unable to take it anymore, Escobedo sent his kids to live with relatives and used his life savings to buy a ticket to Toronto. When he arrived, he applied for refugee status. He had five dollars in his pocket. Fortunately for him, it was granted.

  Canadians were sharply divided on the issue, with advocates on both sides of the visa requirement argument. Rico-Martinez, whose profession is to help refugees, said while there is a need for safe countries like Canada to take in authentic refuges, it had been all too easy in the past for Mexicans who were not actually in danger to abuse the system. “We can't have a blank-check solution that discriminates [between] people who need to come for protection [and] those with resources to come,” he said. “To address the issue, Canadian officials need to reach out to the Mexican public and educate them about our immigration and refugee system.”

  While the Canadian mainstream media continued to stress the refugee angle (perhaps because it's a hot-button issue with two clearly defined sides), the bulk of arrests of Mexican nationals in Canada were not those who had made refugee claims. On September 22, 2010, a Sinaloan named Victor Perez Rodrigues was arrested along with Canadians Clifford Roger Montgomery, Barry Michael Ready and Tariq Mohammed Aslam when they attempted to import a fruit-grinding machine from Argentina to Kelowna, British Columbia. Inside the machine were a little more than 213 pounds of cocaine. On October 5, a raid on the Colour & Culture Trading Corporation, an import-export firm based in a downtown Vancouver office tower, netted the RCMP 600 pounds of meth, cocaine and marijuana. Arrested were Tijuana native Eduardo Sierra Gonzalez, as well as Jason Quinn Lawrence and Francisco Javier Gomez, owner of Colour & Culture, both of Vancouver. Neither Perez Rodrigues nor Sierra Gonzalez were asylum seekers, both having entered Canada as tourists and just hadn't left. The RCMP linked both to established Mexican cartels.

  While the police and prosecutors acknowledge that there are Mexican cartel members (or at least associates) operating within the Canadian drug trafficking system, the consensus opinion is that they are not, at present, major players within the country. Instead, the overwhelming majority of cocaine in the country comes from people like Kendall and Ivan (if not specifically them) who travel to Mexican resorts like Acapulco and Mazatlán or American cities with strong Mexican gangs like San Diego, Los Angeles and Las Vegas to make deals for cocaine from the major cartels, especially the Sinaloa.

  “Anywhere there are narcotics to be sold, [the Mexican cartels] want to be in on that action. They are consistently and constantly looking to expand,” said Robert Gordon, director of Simon Fraser University's School of Criminology. “So we're going to start seeing these organized criminal elements in places we've never seen them before.”

  And law enforcement is seeing them in Canada. “I've dealt with Mexican cartel types up here [in British Columbia]; they do exist,” said Fogarty. “You have to see this as a north-south trade ... marijuana comes down and cocaine heads up.”

  Chapter 13

  The Violence Escalates

  After the brutality of 2009, the nation breathed a tiny sigh of relief (or at least closure) when authorities arrested suspects for the killing of the Angulo Córdova family early in 2010.

  Chiapas state police, reinforced by army soldiers, stopped a luxury car at a routine checkpoint in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the state's capital and largest city, on January 2. The men inside seemed nervous, so the police asked to search their vehicle. At that point, the group's leader admitted that they were narcomenudistas (street-level drug retailers) and offered the police a bribe to let them go. When the police refused, the man who appeared to be the group's ringleader changed his story. He told the cops that they were members of Los Zetas and it would be very dangerous for the officers if they were not allowed to continue.

  Police arrested the three men—Gudiel Iván Sánchez Valdez, Dorilian López Alatorre and Elías León López—and seized their car, their weapons and an ounce of cocaine. The boss was Sánchez Valdez—a member of Los Zetas known as “El Chito” (the Cool) and “El Poblano” (the Guy from Puebla)—who later admitted to leading the group that assassinated the Angulo Córdova family. He said that the hit was ordered as retribution for the death of Arturo Beltrán Leyva and that he was paid $12,000.

  This incident was followed by a stunning series of arrests. With intelligence gathered by sources they would not reveal, the Federales surrounded a car in Culiacán. The lone man inside presented a driver's license that indicated he was Carlos Gámez Orpineda. Police searched the car, finding a .45-caliber handgun and 31 small packages of what they believed was cocaine. Lab tests proved that the powder was indeed cocaine and that the driver's license was a fake. Interrogation led to the man admitting that he was actually Carlos Beltrán Leyva, brother of recently killed Arturo, the “jefe de jefes” (boss of bosses) of the Beltrán Leyva Cartel. Carlos' role in the gang was not made clear, but it was apparent that he had not taken over as boss.

  At about the same time, the DEA informed Mexican authorities that their intelligence revealed a plot to break another brother, Alfredo Beltrán Leyva (who had taken over the reins of the gang for the period that began when Arturo was killed and ended when Alfredo was arrested), out of prison. The Mexicans beefed up security, but the assault never came.

  Still, revenge for the arrest of Carlos Beltrán Leyva was swift and public. A man named Hugo Hernandez Robles was kidnapped in the Sinaloa city of Los Mochis the day Beltrán Leyva was arrested. His link to the drug trade or law enforcement is unclea
r. Hours after police announced who they had in custody on national television, Hernandez Robles turned up: pedestrians found his arms, legs and skull in a cardboard box on one side of town; his torso was dropped off in front of a police station in a plastic cooler; and the skin from his face was sewn over a soccer ball found in the town square in a clear plastic bag, It had a note with it that read “Happy New Year; it will be your last.”

  Later that day, two more bodies were spotted hanging by their necks from a highway overpass in Culiacán. Spanning them was a banner that read, “This place already has an owner.”

  These novel ways of sending messages were indicative of the war being played out by the cartels. Theirs was a terror campaign designed not just to frighten the public and intimidate the government, but also to show the other cartels that they were willing to go the extra mile to defend their territories. “Criminals earn respect and credibility with creative killing methods,” a high-ranking Mexican law enforcement official, who preferred not to have his name published, told The Los Angeles Times. “Your status is based on your capacity to commit the most sadistic acts. Burning corpses, using acid, beheading victims ... this generation is setting a new standard for savagery.”

  The end of the Simental gang

  The Carlos Beltrán Leyva arrest paled in comparison to what happened January 12. At 6:00 a.m. on a calm Tuesday morning, residents of and visitors to the well-heeled resort town of La Paz on the southern end of the Baja Peninsula were awakened by what sounded like an explosion followed by the roar of two military helicopters. Five busloads of soldiers had been deployed at the corner of Avenida del Paz Vela and Calle Sardina, in the heart of Fidepaz, the town's ritziest neighborhood.