Hey Folks,
What you are about to read is Part 3 of a series about the Sinaloa Cartel gained a foothold in Canada.
If you would like to start at the beginning, you can start here:
As previously note, on September 22nd, 2014, authorities made the first major bust of a Mexican cartel on Canadian soil.
The arrests were the culmination of a massive investigation dubbed Project Roadmaster, which involved nearly a thousand days of surveillance and more than a dozen judicially authorized covert entries into locations believed to be connected to the Sinaloa Cartel.
The investigation centred on a warehouse at 3512 Nugent Road in Port Colborne, Ontario, near the Canada-U.S. border.
According to veteran crime reporters Peter Edwards and Luis Najera:
The overall numbers related to the Nugent Road warehouse were staggering. In 2013 alone, the cartel had imported and distributed at least 2,431 kilograms of cocaine through the warehouse, at a time when local prices were $36,000 to $39,500 a kilo. That worked out to between $87,516,000 and $96,024,500 worth of cocaine imported in just one year.
The criminal conspiracy had centred on a scheme by which huge granite slabs were shipped from Guadelajara, Mexico to Port Colborne, Ontario.
Now, I understand why the cartel would do things this way - a concrete slab requires special machinery to break open, which means that no low-level employee at any step of the way would know what was inside them. Ascertaining that would require a special order from a supervisor, I’m guessing would only come at the behest of police. The job of shipping companies is to get things from Point A from Point B. They’re not paid to be nosy.
I’m guessing that the concrete slab strategy makes paying off customs officials a lot easier. You have to admit, it’s got to raise some eyebrows along the way.
It might be natural to wonder why such extraordinary efforts were necessary to ship such modest stone into this part of Canada, especially since the Niagara Escarpment is already home to plenty of boulders. The imported slabs were too rough to produce, say, kitchen countertops, although they were adequate for landscaping or the construction of retaining walls. Still, a journey of several thousand kilometres seems a lot of bother for some garden-variety rocks.
When they arrived at their destination, the slabs were broken open to extract the precious cargo hidden inside them.
What was this precious cargo, you ask? You guessed it - cocaine. Apparently, each one contained 300 kilos of cocaine.
The rectangular rocks were the shape of giant slabs of butter, each weighing 15,400 kilograms—roughly a dozen times the weight of an average car. Throughout Tuesday, February 28, 2012, six of them travelled on flatbed trailers to a warehouse at 3512 Nugent Road on the outskirts of Port Colborne, Ontario. One by one, a forklift picked up the slabs and carried them out of public view to the rear of the secluded industrial building.
Here are some pictures of that warehouse:
I think that it’s interested to note the access roads.
You gotta hand it to these cartel guys. They sure picked an ideal location. Too bad they didn’t do such a great job at choosing people.
HOW THE SLABS GOT TO PORT COLBORNE
Originating in Guadalajara, a shipment of granite arrived at the port of Montreal on February 9 . From the port, only a short distance from Alkhalil and Amero’s penthouse condo, the large stone slabs travelled by train to 200 Fenmar Drive in a heavily industrial area in the northwest corner of Toronto, and were then trucked on the final leg of their journey to the bulrushes, rusty cars and wild turkeys of Nugent Road in Port Colbourne.
The pin on this map shows the location of 200 Fenmar Drive:
Another load of six massive quarry stones arrived in Montreal on May 13 and found its way to the Nugent Road warehouse on a flatbed truck. On June 21, even more quarry stones followed. Some were even wrapped in plastic.
In total, SLM Logistics Corporation was responsible for at least twenty-two shipments of the massive granite stones.
VITO BUFFONE & SLM LOGISTICS
SLM Logistics Corporation was owned and operated by Vito Buffone, a name that didn’t set off alarm bells in police or organized-crime circles. Buffone lived in a mansion in Bolton, northwest of Toronto, in an enclave of mature pine trees and three-car garages, just minutes from the Glen Eagle Golf and Country Club and several white-fenced horse farms.
Buffone made a living scooping up electronics like power tools or Xboxes that were returned to major stores by dissatisfied North American customers, and then reselling them in less demanding markets in Central and South America. In addition to damaged and returned electrical goods, he dealt in close-to-expired soft drinks and anything else that might fetch a good price elsewhere. It wasn’t a rock star job, but he was good at it and made good money. Buffone’s North York and Brampton warehouses were one-storey, sprawling, brick, totally forgettable buildings in grey industrial zones, where the most common sort of vehicle was a transport truck. Buffone ran the kind of operation that was just what the cartels wanted as they pushed into Canada—a low-profile cover that knew all about shipping. And recently, Buffone’s company had shown an interest in moving quarry stones.
RAUL BULHOSEN RIOS
That new interest came after Buffone developed a relationship with Raul Bulhosen Rios, the sole director and president of an Ontario incorporated business called BVP International Trading.
Bulhosen Rios was an unmarried Mexican national with permanent resident status in Canada. He was born in Mexico on June 4, 1972, and had been in Canada for eleven years, after time living in Miami, where he’d started his own trading company, ostensibly selling goods at flea markets in Mexico. He was one of the new generation of narco juniors, and his move north to Canada was part of his promotion within the Sinaloa Cartel. His English was strong, although he largely kept to himself.
Bulhosen Rios was a gambler with expensive tastes, including a watch he bought from a Mississauga jeweller for $36,000.
PRO TIP - If you’re a gangster, steer clear of jewellers. You’ve probably heard of Donnie Brasco, but have you heard of Robert Mazur? Two of the most successful federal agents of all time posed as jewellers.
The authors continue:
[Raul Bulhosen Rios] could afford such indulgences because of his role as a money handler for the Sinaloa Cartel, which involved handling more than $16.8 million as payment for cocaine between December 23, 2013, and June 30, 2014. For this six months’ service, he was paid more than $1.8 million.”
Interestingly, he seems to have been able to scrub his name from Google search results.
BORJA VILALTA-CASTELLANOS
A woman named Merv Erdogan listed BVP International Trading as her employer since 2009 in a letter to RBC Financial when she set up her banking in Canada. That was interesting, since BVP wasn’t even incorporated until three years later. She was also interesting because she lived with a man named Borja Vilalta-Castellanos in a condo on the 700 block of Humberwood Boulevard, near Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. The modern condo tower was luxurious and anonymous, in a bustling, multicultural enclave where Hispanics didn’t stand out.
Vilalta-Castellanos was a Spanish citizen with visitor status in Canada. With his educated, even aristocratic, demeanour, Vilalta-Castellanos was another of Toronto’s newly arrived narco juniors. The earliest he was known to visit Canada was on February 11, 2012, when he was twenty-seven years old. He arrived on a six-month visa and did not apply for status in Canada.
Like Bulhosen Rios, Vilalta-Castellanos didn’t possess the hardened look of a gangster and had no criminal record, outstanding charges or registered firearms. Born on September 15, 1984, in Spain, he looked like an ordinary Millennial, frequently seen jogging with earphones and wearing an earnest expression.
The accepted wisdom from law enforcement, when Vilalta-Castellanos eventually came to their attention, was that he had been sent to Canada to earn his chops in the Sinaloa Cartel, and that he was protected by his brother, José Manuel Castellanos, known as “Chaparrito” (Shorty), who was a big-deal accountant in cartel circles in Spain and Mexico. Younger brother Borja wasn’t a major success. There were even fears he could be a bit of an idiot and might draw heat onto the Canadian operation. His big brother knew Borja had to get better and tougher to survive, and in one intercepted communication, admonished him with the sentence “I’m talking to you as your boss.”
In the world of the twenty-first-century cartels, gunmen were a dime a dozen but good accountants had clout. Financial specialists like Manuel Castellanos wielded much of the real power in the Sinaloa organization.
Officially, Vilalta-Castellanos worked as the trading sales manager for BVP International Trading, which required him to make frequent trips to Mexico. There would be nine documented times when he landed in Toronto using his Spanish passport between January 1, 2012, and May 28, 2014, flying in from Madrid, Cancún or Mexico City.
Vilalta-Castellanos’s real job was that of a cartel broker. He used encrypted communications to connect cocaine producers with drug traffickers, while also scoping out financial loopholes across the world through which to launder the proceeds of crime.
These two new narco juniors, Bulhosen Rios and Vilalta-Castellanos, had no bodyguards and didn’t bump shoulders with high-profile local mobsters; they were doing very well for themselves but knew the value of discretion—or a degree of discretion, anyway.
The authors go on to mention that Vilalta-Castellanos owned a vintage Porsche worth about $500,000. I guess keeping a low profile wasn’t exactly his strong suit.
Fun fact: he served less than four years of his 13.5 year sentence.
PROJECT ROADMASTER
The overall numbers related to the Nugent Road warehouse were staggering. In 2013 alone, the cartel had imported and distributed at least 2,431 kilograms of cocaine through the warehouse, at a time when local prices were $36,000 to $39,500 a kilo. That worked out to between $87,516,000 and $96,024,500 worth of cocaine imported in just one year.
For whatever reason, the warehouse on Nugent Road came to the attention of the police, as did its manager, John Edward Oliver.
Police officers involved in Project Roadmaster, a massive investigation involving eight law enforcement agencies, slipped into the Nugent Road warehouse in Port Colborne during the wee hours of Friday, April 18, 2014. On a table in the office area, they found a telephone list that included contact information for Vito Buffone.
Officers swabbed the warehouse for trace amounts of cocaine. Positive traces were found on the floor near a large saw and on its controls and blade, as well as on the intake valve of a wet vac, a set of coveralls and a pair of work gloves. Their evidence gathered, they quietly left.
JOHN EDWARD OLIVER & DEAN BRENNAN
John Edward Oliver was one of two people who had a key to the Nugent Road warehouse. In 2014, he was 67 years old and retired. He had no criminal record.
Dean Brennan was his 38-year-old friend and a courier for the cartel.
After police started watching the Nugent Road property, they saw Oliver picking up a load from the warehouse, and a listening device was subsequently planted in the reitree’s Nissan Versa.
Audio recording from that device revealed that Oliver suspected that the warehouse was under surveillance, and a kilo of cocaine had mysteriously gone missing.
In a phone conversation with Brennan on May 7, 2014, Oliver recalled all the times that he thought he spotted police sitting in front of the Nugent Road warehouse, eyeing the operation. He thought he saw them, and he thought they saw him watching them. Meanwhile, in the back of the warehouse, out of sight, were “chunks of fuckin’ rock with all the drill holes in them.”
The conversation shifted to what Oliver called the “missing product.” A kilo of cocaine might have been stolen. Maybe cops had snuck in and taken it, just to screw with their heads.
It wasn’t time to panic—yet—but this was deadly serious. Oliver kept counting and recounting the cocaine in his head, and wondering why a chair in the office appeared to have moved overnight. At first he thought his office had been visited by Vito Buffone, and then he started to worry.
Well, it wasn’t just the chair factor,” Oliver said. “There was a box that I had counted and it’s twenty-five pieces and then I took five number twos out…twenty pieces and, uh, every time I counted it, all I got was fuckin’ nineteen, what the fuck, so I, so I just assumed that Vito had come in to get some for somebody…he does meet with the big kahunas all the time, so…so he probably just came in with—as much as he doesn’t like to—and grabbed it and, uh, left and…when it was brought to my attention, I said, well, was Vito not in here and took the…my fuckin’ chair was moved—drastically moved—I leave everything exactly the same…the point where I leave the files on top of the boxes, the papers a certain way.”
Oliver was paranoid and didn’t seem willing to believe the obvious conclusion - that a kilo of coke had been stolen, meaning that someone had been in the warehouse.
His strategy of leaving everything “exactly the same way” is interesting, but it does not to seem to have served him here, as he seems to have been unwilling to believe the evidence of his own eyes.
The authors never explain what happened to the missing kilo of coke, but given that the police are known to have had access to the warehouse, I would suggest that the likeliest suspect would be a crooked cop. Or maybe it was Brennan.
It’s worth noting that the police were able to enter the warehouse, but the authors do not specify how.
“Do you think Vito’d give the other key away?” Oliver asked. “I had the locksmith in. Me and the locksmith did it. Then I set the four numbers…”
“And you gave one other key to Vito?” Brennan asked.
Yes,” Oliver replied.
“So that’s only two people, then,” Brennan said.
They were right back where they started. Only two people knew the password to get into the building, and one of them was their boss. The other was Oliver.
This passage is somewhat ambiguous, as Oliver implies that a key was necessary to enter the warehouse, but also mentions setting a four-number code.
Was Oliver keeping 20 kilos of cocaine behind a single four-digit combination lock? That’s not smart! A four-digit code is pretty susceptible to shoulder surfers, isn’t it?
Couldn’t someone (Brennan, for instance) simply have noted the combination by surreptitiously observing Oliver entering the code from the corner of his eye?
Also, most combination door locks I’ve used give you unlimited chances to enter different combinations. Couldn’t an intruder simply have entered different combinations until one worked? Keep in mind that we’re talking about a warehouse in an industrial zone.
If I were trying to solve this theft, I would have to conclude that anyone who knew what the warehouse was being used for was a suspect, especially if they had entered it and knew that there was a single point of failure.
There is no mention of security cameras or motion sensors. It seems to me that security protocols were pretty lax at this warehouse, considering how valuable and portable cocaine is.
Even the fact that Oliver needed a locksmith to install the lock isn’t a great sign. How hard is it to install a lock?
CARLOS CESAR PRECIADO-VARGAS
Vito Buffone’s boss in the Sinaloa Cartel was a man named Carlos Cesar Preciado-Vargas, who resided in Mexico.
In late 2013, Preciado-Vargas made a special visit to Canada, which included a surprise inspection of the Nugent Road warehouse.
Massive granite stones had littered the Nugent Road property, begging for a police investigation. That was simply unacceptable. They had a special machine for crushing the stones into less suspicious pieces, and yet no one—not one of the Canadians—seemed capable of using it. Could they really be so stupid?
JEFFREY KOMPON
A man by the name of Jeffrey Kompon appears to have been the smartest person associated with this bumbling group of drug traffickers. The authors do have a lot to say about him, presumably because he adhered to security protocols more assiduously than others.
Jeffrey Kompon slept with a gangster “go bag” by his bed. The man purse contained his passport, a cellphone registered to his alias of Sameer Mirza, a key to a safe holding $40,020 and another key to a safety deposit box containing $305,000, vacuum-sealed and foil-wrapped, as well as $4,000 in cash, sticky notes with passwords, a debt list and a USB stick… And yet, when the tactical unit swooped in with guns drawn on Monday, September 22, 2014, they pounced with such speed Kompon didn’t have time to grab his go bag and disappear.
The authors go on to note that Kompon was “suspected of being near the top echelon of the Canadian side of an organization that had smuggled thousands of kilograms of cocaine inside granite boulders from Mexico into Southern Ontario—near the top, as in right under Vito Buffone.”
Kompon himself may have been a pro at keeping a low profile, but that didn’t save him.
There were, however, plenty of incriminating references to Kompon in the more than 100,000 communications in English and Spanish that had been intercepted by law enforcement officers. And in the execution of warrants at approximately thirty locations, officers seized over a hundred electronic devices, including the silver iPhones taken from Kompon’s bedside table, with their PGP encryption, in which he went under the name Sameer Mirza and the code name “Pitbull.”
Then there was the tracking device police had placed on Kompon’s Chevrolet Tahoe jumbo sport utility vehicle, which had yielded lots more evidence about clandestine meetings with his co-accused, including John Edward Oliver (code-named “Taxi”), who had also been tracked by a GPS device tucked under his Chevrolet Avalanche muscle truck.
Also raided by police were SLM Logistics in Brampton and BVP International Trading in nearby Mississauga. And of course, police stopped by the warehouse on Nugent Road in Port Colborne. The building was easy to find: it was the place with all the granite rubble out front.
When police arrested John Edward Oliver at his residence on Falconridge Court in St. Thomas (another inauspicious locale, in this case deep in the heart of Southwestern Ontario farm country), they found a yellow folder labelled “Magic Accounting.” In it was a handwritten paper trail for 464 kilograms of cocaine, worth more than $17 million at a street price of $37,000 a kilo.
As noted in Part 2 of this series, police failed to seize any drugs in the conclusion to Project Roadmaster. Nevertheless, prosecutors were able to obtain many convictions.
How, you ask?
In the end, the drug traffickers were done in by their own meticulous record-keeping. In addition to the arrests of fourteen suspects, police seized a USB memory stick from Raul Bulhosen Rios’s bedroom at his residence in Mississauga. On it were Excel spreadsheets and handwritten documents, including a spreadsheet titled “1068.xlsx,” which included entries and payments made by “Victoria,” a code name for Vito Buffone, and “Otros” (others).
At the top of the spreadsheet, the total amount of payments is listed as $13,047,700. In addition, the spreadsheet shows payments totalling $3,036,046 to “Bortex” (believed by police to be Borja Vilalta-Castellanos), “Mesolo” (believed to be Raul Bulhosen Rios) and “Gorgo” (believed to be Carlos Cesar Preciado-Vargas).”
So there you have it, folks.
The reason that I have gone into such detail about this case is that it is extremely rare to have such detailed information about how Canadian drug trafficking works.
It is work noting that we have no way to know how many Mexican cartels are active in Canada, but we do know that the Sinaloa Cartel isn’t alone.
The authors note:
With the Wolfpack mostly a spent force and the more recent wave of Canadian operators and cartel men in Ontario now behind bars, the Sinaloa Cartel no longer had the Canadian cocaine market all to themselves. Others could smell opportunity.
The Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion is also believed to be active in Canada
“Sometime in 2014, Abigael González Valencia slipped quietly into Montreal. González was from the little-known Los Cuinis organization and was the financial operator of the affiliated Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG). A 2015 RCMP report drawn up in Mexico City noted that he travelled on a bogus Canadian passport, under the false name of Paul Jonathan Pak Toledo.
There are also reports that Mexican cartels have partnered with indigenous street gangs in the Prairies, notably in Edmonton, where they are reportedly trying to take over the city’s drug market.
So far, there isn’t really any reason to think that Mexican cartels are any worse than any worse than the Hells Angels, say, who are headquartered in B.C. Hopefully the arrival of Mexican cartels doesn’t mean that they will start using the same gruesome tactics in Canada that they use at home.
Only time will tell.
Wow. series is riveting. TY!