Media Release

For Immediate Release

June 1, 2009

Canada a major player in global organized crime: book

Criminologist argues that organized crime has long history in this country.

A new book provides substantial evidence that organized crime has a long history in Canada and has become firmly embedded in the culture of the country. In turn, this has helped position Canada as a centre of global transnational crime.

Iced: The Story of Organized Crime in Canada, written by Saint Mary’s University criminologist Stephen Schneider, contends that organized crime is a reflection of the broader economic, political, and social forces of Canada. 

“The massive cross-border traffic in legal and illegal goods simply reflects (and takes advantage of) the massive trading relationship between Canada and the United States. The fact that organized crime in Canada was long a branch plant of American organized crime is just another expression of the umbilical economic relationship between the two countries,” says Schneider, who began a book tour for his book today. “Guided by the laws of supply and demand, organized drug trafficking and contraband markets represent the darker side of the free market economic system. The multi-ethnic character of organized crime is a reflection of the multicultural nature of Canadian society.”

The book, published by John Wiley & Sons and released last week, illustrates how Canada has been a major supplier of illegal goods and services to the United States for well over a century.

It also notes that Canada has also become a centre of operations for some transnational crime groups – specifically, an international stronghold for the Hell’s Angels. According to Schneider, there are more Hell’s Angels members per capita in Canada than any other country in the world. The country also plays host to numerous other transnational criminal groups, from other regions of the world, including Asia and Eastern Europe.

Canada supplies an embarrassingly rich assortment of illegal and contraband goods, a tradition that began when British Columbia became a major producer of smokeable opium in the early part of the century. It continued through Prohibition when the country was America’s main source of illegal liquor, and then re-emerged in the 1970s, when Canada surfaced as a major producer of synthetic drugs. By the end of the 1990s, the country had established itself as the continent’s preeminent supplier of high-grade marijuana, methamphetamines, and ecstasy. It has also become an international centre for telemarketing fraud and the counterfeiting of currency, bank cards, and digital entertainment products.

Some critics argue that organized crime has been allowed to flourish in Canada due to weak laws and enforcement.  Last year, the Office of the United States Trade Representative put Canada on its “Special 301 Watch List,” which designates countries deemed by the U.S. as failing to provide adequate protection or enforcement of intellectual property rights.

According to the book, Canada has experienced over 400 years of organized crime history; from pirates off the Atlantic coast; outlaws, smugglers, bank robbers and horse thieves in the wild west; opium traffickers and white slave traders of the early 20th century; bootleggers during the era of prohibition; the Italian mafia, outlaw motorcycle gangs, Chinese triads, and the Colombian “cocaine cowboys.”

Stephen Schneider is available for an interview to discuss his new book and other current topics related to organized crime and its enforcement.

The Halifax launch of the book will take place June 17 at 7 p.m. at The Paragon Theatre (2037 Gottingen Street in Halifax (just north of the police headquarters building). More information on the new book can be found at: www.storyoforganizedcrime.ca

Highlights from Iced: The Story of Organized Crime

By Stephen Schneider

A Brief History of Organized Crime in (Atlantic) Canada

Organized crime in Canada can be traced to the late 16th century when pirates began targeting fishing vessels operating off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Pirate ships also came to Newfoundland to rest, repair, pick up supplies, and conscript seamen and soon its main draw for pirates was as a staging area for excursions into the more profitable waters of the Caribbean and South America. One of the most notorious and successful pirates of all time, Peter Easton, was headquartered in Conception Bay in Newfoundland in the early 17th century.

During the 18th and early 19th centuries, Nova Scotia produced some of the most successful war-time privateers in the world. Privateers were essentially pirates who were issued licences by the King or Queen, which empowered them to rob merchant ships belonging to enemy countries during war time. During the war of 1812, it was the privateers who were the principal line of defence that prevented Upper and Lower Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia from becoming American territories and eventually American states. Out-capturing their American counterparts by a four to one ratio, Canadian privateers won the war at sea.

Smuggling began to escalate dramatically around the start of the 19th century as Great Britain levied more and more taxes and customs duties on her colonies. At the end of the 18th century, the contraband market in the Maritimes was so large that illegal imports now surpassed legal landings.

In addition, Canada’s inland economy was rife with larceny, corruption, and violence. By the 1860s, Western Canada was inundated with whiskey traders. By the 1880s, construction crews building the Canadian Pacific Railroad were another ready-made market for illegal whiskey merchants, not to mention, prostitutes, con artists, and crooked gamblers. By the end of the 19th century, police cases and newspaper articles revealed a number of well-organized criminal activities, including currency counterfeiting, cattle rustling and horse theft, opium smuggling, and the smuggling of Chinese nationals from Canada to the United States.

By the early part of the Twentieth Century, British Columbia was one of the world’s largest producers of smokeable opium. Between 1870 and 1908, Chinese merchants opened a number of factories in Victoria and B.C.’s Lower Mainland to convert raw gum opium into the smokeable form. By the 1880s, British Columbia was now the main North American importer, producer, and exporter of opium.

Following the enactment of national prohibition laws in America in 1920, Canada soon became the greatest source of contraband booze.

Bootlegging became a nation-wide industry in Canada, employing tens of thousands of people. Canadian distilleries and breweries regularly dealt with some of the most infamous gangsters in America and were behind the largest smuggling operations ever carried out across the 49th parallel. The single largest source of federal government revenue in Canada during American prohibition was from taxes and duties charged to Canadian-produced booze. Vessels that carried illegal booze from Canada to America were often crewed by fishermen and other experienced sailors from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland. In 1925, Maritime Merchant magazine reported that about half of the hundred vessels that made up the Lunenburg fishing fleet in Nova Scotia were engaged in the rum trade, some being leased to American bootleggers for as much as $4,000 a month. Canada’s east coast shipbuilding industry was one beneficiary of the demand for custom-built boats. New boat registrations in the Maritimes increased steadily throughout Prohibition.

From the 1950s through to the 1980s, Quebec was a major conduit for heroin smuggling from Europe to North America. Quebec’s cultural, commercial, and linguistic ties to France, the subservience of the Mafia in the province to the American Cosa Nostra, as well as Montreal’s inviting seaports and close proximity to New York, made the city a major entry point for heroin being shipped into North America.

During the 1980s, the Colombian cartels established New Brunswick as a main entry point for cocaine-laden airplanes, some carrying as much as 500 kilos. Pablo Escobar, head of the infamous Medellin cocaine cartel, sent hired mercenaries to bust out cocaine smugglers imprisoned in a New Brunswick jail. The hired gun men were also captured by police in New Brunswick.

The largest cocaine seizure in Canadian history occurred on February 22, 1994, at Shelburne, Nova Scotia, a customs marine port on the southwest coast of the province, when 5.4 metric tons of cocaine with a potential street value of a $1 billion was found in the rear hold of a 13-metre wooden fishing boat, the Lady Teri Anne.

While Outlaw biker gangs began establishing themselves in Nova Scotia in the 1960s. For years, the Thirteenth Tribe was the dominant biker gang in Nova Scotia. It was founded in Halifax back in 1968 and was originally made up of former navy personnel. On December 5, 1984, the Hells Angels established a chapter in Nova Scotia when it took over the Thirteenth Tribe of Halifax, a move made “to consolidate control of drug trafficking on Canada’s East Coast,” according to the RCMP and DEA.

During the 1990s, Quebec was home to one of the deadliest gang wars seen on the continent as around 160 people died as the Hells Angels battled their enemies over control of the drug market. Among those murdered were Robert McFarlane, a Nova Scotia businessman killed in Halifax on Feb. 27, 1997 by Hells Angels hitmen (and lovers) Dany Kane and Aimé (Ace) Simard. Dany Kane was also working as a RCMP informant at the time.

Maritime provinces have been used by Chinese criminal organizations for large-scale marijuana grow operations. In September, 2005 police seized nine thousand marijuana plants from a farm in Nova Scotia and arrested Chi Keung Mak, who could not speak English and who was known by his new neighbours simply as “John.” Also in September, police found close to 30,000 plants at a rural property in Adamsville, New Brunswick. Part of this crop included a strain of marijuana that grows less than a metre high, which supposedly is to help avoid detection by police aerial surveillance. Two Chinese males were arrested at the farm. The RCMP in New Brunswick stated that this and three other pot farms found that month in New Brunswick were the work of Chinese criminal groups that have links to Hong Kong and Mainland China.

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For More Information:

Blake Patterson
Public Affairs Officer
Saint Mary's University, Public Affairs
(902) 420.5514
E-mail: blake.patterson@smu.ca
www.smu.ca