Chapter 19
The RCMP's Largest Drug Seizure
What would amount to the RCMP's largest-ever drug seizure, and one directly connected to the West End Gang, ironically had its roots in a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center where people were attempting to kick the habit.
The plot began in the Heritage Home Foundation in Huntington, Quebec, 46 miles southwest of Montreal, near the New York State border. The foundation's director was Catherine Cosgrove Toman, a psychotherapist who'd previously worked at Addington House, another Montreal rehab center. She also happened to be the wife of Peter Toman, a West End Gang associate and convicted fraudster from the Town of Mount Royal.
Over an eight-month period between August 1, 1996 and March 31, 1997, Toman had been grossly inflating the value of the accounts receivable for two failing companies he owned—Trekka Sportswear Inc. and Vêtements Avenues des Amériques Inc., both on Chabanel Street in Montreal's garment district—in order to secure bridge financing from the National Bank of Canada and the Bank of Nova Scotia. When his companies went belly-up and declared bankruptcy in March 1997, the banks were left holding the bag to the tune of almost $2.5 million, and they accused Toman of fraud. He was arrested, tried and found guilty. On April 13, 2005, he was sentenced to two years to be served in the community and was ordered to make full restitution to the two banks. A motion by the Crown to have him serve prison time was rejected by the Quebec Court of Appeal on December 5, 2005.
In a desperate bid to come up with the money to reimburse the banks, or else face jail time, Toman, at the age of fifty-nine, turned to the world of drugs. And in a very big way. In fact, he intended to make a lot more money than he owed the banks. He devised a plan to smuggle tons of hashish from Pakistan by ship into Canada, and approached James Frederick Cameron, a former heroin addict who worked at the Heritage Home Foundation, in order to set the plan in motion.
Cameron had previously been busted on drug charges, but was now doing his best to stay clean. He saw this overture from Toman as an opportunity to earn some quasi-legal money as an RCMP informant and to later disappear under a different identity. This led to Project Chabanel, an 18-month RCMP sting operation. Cameron, who was paid several hundred thousand dollars for his undercover work, is now living under another identity, either in his home province of Nova Scotia or in Ontario.
In November 2004, Cameron contacted the RCMP and told them about the scheme. As fifty-one-year-old Staff-Sergeant André Potvin, head of the Mounties 136-member drug section in Montreal, recalls today, “We received information [from a source whom he will only officially identify as “James”] that Peter Toman was seeking to introduce a very large shipment of hashish into Canada, and he wanted to find a method of transportation. So we set up Project Chabanel [named after the street where Toman had once operated his bankrupt companies] and began to investigate.”
Toman's point man on the other end of the deal was fifty-seven-year-old Sidney “Sid” Lallouz, who was connected to the Montreal Jewish mafia and had close ties to the West End Gang and the Italian mafia. In 1983 he'd been sentenced to two-and-a-half years for conspiring to import 700 kilos of hashish into Montreal from Pakistan and was released in 1985. A few years later he was sued by various Montreal banks for $5 million for his role in suspicious real estate transactions in Old Montreal, as well as for tax evasion. He immediately fled to Spain to avoid prosecution, but snuck back into Montreal in 1994, using his Hebrew given name of Sidney Chimeon. He became co-owner of a health spa and small shopping mall, both of which went bankrupt, leaving investors holding the bag for almost $1 million. He was also suspected to have been involved with renegade cop Jean Belval in the 1994–1996 Marché Central shopping center financial scam in Montreal North, which had fleeced the Roman Catholic Sisters of the Good Shepherd nuns out of some $85 million. He was never charged in that case. By 2004, Lallouz was in Pakistan, where he was setting up the proposed shipment for Toman.
RCMP Montreal drug squad head, André Potvin
Potvin and his drug squad then set up what is undoubtedly the most elaborate (and expensive) sting operation in the history of the RCMP. But the rewards, in terms of contraband seized, would be enormous, amounting to 22.5 tons of high-grade hashish originating from Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“We set up a sting through our undercover man [Cameron] who by this time had gained [Toman's] trust,” explains Potvin. “You can compare it to going fishing, and [Toman] really caught onto the hook.” Toman was looking for a boat with a trusted captain that could pick up the drug shipment and deliver it to Canada. The RCMP provided it by chartering a 150-foot cargo vessel out of Halifax and a “captain” who, in reality, was an RCMP agent. The fake captain met with Toman, who paid him $195,000 cash up front and the promise of another $5 million once the hashish was delivered and sold. The plan was to rendezvous with another cargo vessel off the coast of Angola where the drugs would be transferred to the Canadian vessel, which would then bring it back to Canada.
Potvin adds, “We now had a covert boat, but we needed to have a second boat just in case something went wrong. You're going out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and obviously there's [RCMP] officer safety involved in case of possible attacks, or burns from the drug lords or whatever . . . Because once [the drugs] are taken aboard by the recipient, you're kind of opening yourself up to the people that gave it to you. If those guys want to do a burn on you, they can call any of their buddies and say, ‘Listen, we just gave 22.5 tons of hash to a Canadian boat. Do you guys want to rip it off?’ Which could have happened.” So the Mounties enlisted the help of the Department of National Defense, which agreed to put the Canadian Navy frigate HMCS Fredericton at their disposal.
HMCS Fredericton
In early April 2006 the covert ship, with 15 armed RCMP officers aboard posing as crew members, sailed out of Halifax. On the same day, the Fredericton with its complement of about 200 sailors and a squad of RCMP officers pulled out of St. John's, Newfoundland, staying about 20 miles behind so as not to be picked up on radar as the pickup ship approached the southern coast of West Africa.
On May 10, 2006, the RCMP pickup vessel and the delivery ship, which had sailed from East Africa and had rounded the Horn with its cargo of hashish, met approximately 200 miles off the coast of Angola. The coordinates for the rendezvous point had been established earlier between Lallouz and the “captain” of the covert ship and the vessel, with a Filipino crew, that was delivering the drugs. Using GPS and brief UHF radio communications, the two boats eventually pulled alongside one another in a calm sea, and 959 bales of hashish, each weighing about 50 pounds, were transferred from one ship to the other. Neither vessel could be identified, since both had their hull names and port of origin covered over.
The delivery vessel immediately headed south while the RCMP's covert ship sailed west to meet up with the Fredericton a day later where its bales of hash were offloaded and stored in the frigate's holds. Both then steamed back to Halifax. The 43-day mission at sea had been accomplished. All that was now left was to arrest those who had set it up.
The operation and transfer at sea “went like clockwork,” says Potvin. His only regret is that, although he had headed the operation, he was not aboard either Canadian ship when the drug transfer took place. “I should have been,” he explains, “but my son was in the RCMP training camp at the time and he was scheduled to graduate on April fourth. I wasn't going to miss out on that [ceremony], so there was a superintendant from the RCMP on the Fredericton to act as the commanding officer for me.”
Once the Fredericton had delivered its cargo to Halifax, it was offloaded and shipped by a heavily guarded convoy of trucks to the RCMP's Montreal storage vaults on St. Antoine Street. Potvin now had to close the trap. “So basically what we did is we [via the undercover agent posing as the ship's captain] told Toman that we would bring the dope right into Montreal [and] he didn't have to worry about any trucking; we guaranteed him door-to-door service.” The next arrangement was to deliver a sample ton of the hash to Toman where he could pick it up and test it for quality before having to pay any more money.
On Friday morning, June 2, 2006, the boat's “captain” arrived in a rental truck with the sample ton, consisting of 20 bales of hashish, at a hotel parking lot on St. Jean Boulevard in Pointe Claire on Montreal's West Island, where Peter Toman and his twenty-year-old son Andrew were waiting for them in their own rental truck. The truck-to-truck transfer was closely observed by Potvin and other RCMP officers seated in unmarked cars parked some distance away. “We didn't want to make the arrest then,” explains Potvin, “because he was going to deliver it to some obvious buyer, and we wanted to see who.” The Mounties followed Toman's truck to a home on the outskirts of St. Jean sur Richelieu, about 30 miles southeast of Montreal, where the bales were being unloaded into a garage. And that's when the cops pounced.
“We arrested Peter and his son Andrew, as well as another individual who subsequently wasn't charged because we could not make a case against him that he knew what was being stashed in his garage,” recalls Potvin. He adds, “[the Tomans] were taken completely by surprise—especially Peter when he actually met the undercover operator [the supposed boat captain]—because until then he had no idea that the whole thing was linked to the actual transport” of the drugs. “He probably thought it was somebody that tipped off the police here, and that we just acted on a tip.” The two were being handcuffed and read their rights and, says Potvin, “It was kind of interesting. Here we had Peter utilizing his son to do this, but [Andrew] was worried about his dad and saying, ‘Don't harm him; he's an old man; he's not violent.’ And Peter's just saying, ‘Keep your mouth shut; keep your mouth shut,’ which he eventually did, because when we ended up interviewing them [back at RCMP headquarters] they didn't have much to say.”
Later the same day Potvin and his men arrested Sidney Lallouz, who had flown back to Montreal, expecting to become a rich man with his share from the sale of the hashish.
It's estimated that the 22.5-ton shipment would have netted Toman and Lallouz more than $19 million by selling it wholesale at $8,500 per kilo off the boat. Potvin says that Toman's likely buyers were the Hells Angels and other organized gangs in Montreal and, “as we later found out from our U.S. counterparts, a good chunk of it was scheduled to go to New York City and Boston.” Once the hash was broken down and sold on the street at $10 to $15 a gram, the RCMP estimated the value of the seizure at approximately $225 million.
22.5 tons of hashish aboard the HMCS Fredericton
On the other side of the balance sheet, Potvin says that Project Chabanel cost the Canadian taxpayers “close to 7 or 8 million dollars . . . the bulk of it for wages of the hundreds of police officers involved . . . and also a big chunk went to the military for the use of the frigate to cross the Atlantic twice.” He chuckles as he recalls, “One day [the Fredericton] gassed up, and I think it was like $250,000 worth of fuel. And my boss was telling me, ‘I hope they don't send us the bill.’ But sure enough [the Department of National Defense] did.” Nevertheless, shrugs Potvin, “It all comes out of the same pocket at the end of the day; it's all the Federal government.”
On August 15, 2006, Peter Toman pleaded guilty and received an 11-year sentence for his role as the mastermind behind the scheme. He was granted day parole in a halfway house on April 28, 2008, and gained full parole on March 28, 2010, after having served one-third of his sentence. His son Andrew also pleaded guilty the same day and, since he had no previous criminal record, was sentenced to only two years in prison. He was paroled eight months later in June 2007. Sidney Lallouz was tried separately and on September 25, 2006, he was sentenced to six-and-a-half years for his role as the broker in the attempted shipment. After having served the statutory two-thirds of his sentence, he was paroled on January 24, 2011, but with many stringent conditions attached.
Several minor players were arrested in connection with the scheme, including the infamous Donald Matticks. But he was soon released for lack of evidence. Another was Shawn Daoust, Peter and Catherine Toman's thirty-year-old son-in-law from Candiac, Quebec. He had previously served prison time for marijuana production, and on August 15, 2006, he was handed a four-year sentence for his role in the smuggling plot. He was paroled two years later.
Following Project Chabanel, RCMP Staff-Sergeant Potvin and his squad made several other successful drug busts, some of which were tied to the West End Gang. They consisted mostly of seizures of cocaine smuggled by container ship into Montreal by various means, including a June 2007 shipment of 160 kilos of coke hidden in buckets of frozen mango puree from Mexico.
One bust that turned sour against Potvin and his drug squad was Operation Cabernet. (All of the RCMP's Montreal “projects” or “operations”—a name that is used interchangeably—begin with the letter “C”, the letter designated by the federal force for the province of Quebec).
Operation Cabernet, which began in late 2005, was similar to Chabanel in that it involved a sting operation that would lure drug smugglers into an RCMP trap using a decoy ship's captain. The targets were West End Gang associates Christopher Tune, fifty-two years old; Steeve Morin, twenty-seven; Martin Belhumeur, thirty-five; and Daniel Rivard, forty-six, all of whom had previous drug-related convictions. The four had come up with a plan to smuggle up to a ton of cocaine by boat from Colombia via Venezuela and Martinique to Montreal in the summer of 2006. But, like Peter Toman, they first had to find the right boat and a willing captain. And that's when Pierre “Panache” Tremblay entered the picture.
Tremblay had a colorful background. He was in a halfway house on drug charges in November 1998 when he was arrested by the RCMP for his role with West End Gang member Raymond Desfossés and two others to import 210 kilos of cocaine into Canada aboard a private plane in 1989. In 1991, while out on day parole, he and Desfossés were forced to sink several tons of hashish on a boat off the south coast of Nova Scotia when the truck that was supposed to pick it up never showed up. Using a diver, Tremblay later tried to recover the drug shipment, only to find out that it had already been retrieved by the RCMP. He was re-arrested and found guilty of drug smuggling in November 1998, and given a 15-year sentence in 2000. In January 2005, while on conditional parole, he agreed to work as a tipster for the RCMP, and on September 2, 2005, he signed a contract with his Montreal RCMP drug squad investigator and handler, John Golden, which promised him $400,000 to work as an undercover agent. Tremblay is probably the first person to have signed such a deal with the RCMP while still on conditional parole. And that is where the drug squad's problems began, especially once it turned out that Tremblay was still an active drug dealer while working for the cops.
Wearing an RCMP-supplied hidden wire, Tremblay met with Christopher Tune at the Atwater Market on March 31, 2006, and a couple of times thereafter to discuss the plan by which Tune and Daniel Rivard intended to smuggle the Colombian cocaine into Canada. Another West End Gang associate, Donald Waite, attended one of the taped meetings in order to check out Tremblay's street cred as a “bad guy” rather than a police plant. Tremblay's role was to introduce Tune to a trustworthy boat captain who would pick up the drugs off the coast of the island of Martinique.
The deal was eventually set up. But unlike the complex Chabanel Operation, there was no need to go to sea. The Mounties figured they had enough evidence from the incriminating taped conversations as well as telephone wiretaps to go directly to court instead. Tune and his cohorts were arrested that December on charges of conspiring to import between 500 and 1,000 kilograms of cocaine into Canada and were held without bail to await trial. Martin Belhumeur died of heart failure in January 2009 at a Rivière des Prairies detention center, and the trial for the others began later that year.
However, on January 25, 2010, Quebec Court Judge Hélène Morin ordered a stay of proceedings after Tune's lawyer, Julio Peris, filed a motion pointing out that Tremblay had been violating his parole conditions by associating with known criminals while working as an RCMP informant to gather evidence against the accused. As a result of the judge's ruling, Tune was released from custody. Similar rulings were later made in the case of the other defendants, who will remain free unless the Crown comes up with additional evidence to appeal Judge Morin's decision.
Despite the setback in that particular operation, Project Chabanel remains the feather in the RCMP drug division's cap. “It was our biggest drug seizure ever,” boasts Potvin. “When we were taking it off the Fredericton [docked in Halifax Harbor], we had about 100 or so RCMP officers making a human chain from the ship's hull onto our trucks, and it took almost two hours. That's how much dope there was!”
If Project Chabanel was its biggest single-handed drug bust, the RCMP would soon find itself as a major player in one almost twice as large. On April 18, 2012, nine Montreal-area men were arrested during Project Celsius, involving the attempted importation of 43.3 tons of hashish from Pakistan, with an estimated end value of $860 million if it had arrived and been sold by the gram on the street.
The investigation was launched in the summer of 2010 by the RCMP’s Montreal C Division drug section, working with the Montreal National Ports Enforcement Team. It was initiated after the Canada Border Services Agency found hashish in shipping containers at the ports of Montreal and Halifax in 2009 and 2010. The hashish, hidden under the guise of such things as sacks of fertilizer, clothing and coffee, was in nine containers that had been loaded and transited through several ports before being routed to Canada. Some of the suspicious containers were seized in Pakistan, while others were intercepted en route to Canada, specifically in Italy and Belgium. Working with the DEA and the Anti-Narcotics Force of Pakistan, the RCMP tracked several suspicious shipments to identify the points of entry of the drug and destroyed most of it before it entered Canada.
The nine Montreal-area men, several of whom are tied to the West End Gang, allegedly controlled the logistics of the transportation and entry of the hashish into Canada. Three of them are members of the International Longshoremen’s Association, a union based in the Port of Montreal. Among the accused are forty-four-year-old Bryan Forget, a former Gerald Matticks associate, and sixty-three-year-old Alain Charron, a former Dubois Gang hitman and later a Dunie Ryan associate. All nine pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy to import hashish for the purpose of trafficking. They were initially denied bail and their trials are scheduled to be held in 2013.