*** The alleged kingpin, Ze Wai Wong, 46, was picked up early yesterday while he slept at his Scarborough condominium. The Chinese national is well-known to police; he was arrested in 1994 and later ordered deported, but it appears he never left. "He was the mastermind," said Chief Superintendent Ben Soave of the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, a task force of investigators from Toronto police, the Ontario Provincial Police and the RCMP. ***
TORONTO and WASHINGTON - Police across Canada and the U.S. arrested nearly 170 people yesterday in connection with a sophisticated drug ring that used Ontario as a base for one of the biggest Ecstasy rings in the United States.
Authorities say the massive organized crime network, allegedly operated by a [Scarborough] Toronto man and an Ottawa woman, was behind nearly 15% of all the Ecstasy -- a popular nightclub drug -- found in the United States.
The alleged kingpin, Ze Wai Wong, 46, was picked up early yesterday while he slept at his Scarborough condominium. The Chinese national is well-known to police; he was arrested in 1994 and later ordered deported, but it appears he never left. "He was the mastermind," said Chief Superintendent Ben Soave of the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, a task force of investigators from Toronto police, the Ontario Provincial Police and the RCMP.
[. . . .] Thi Phuong Mai Le, a 38-year-old Vietnamese woman known in her Ottawa neighbourhood as "The Queen," was the network's "chief financial operator," Chief Supt. Soave said. She was in charge of laundering millions of dollars in drug profits, he said, some of which ended up in Vietnam.
[. . . .] When it was viable, police say the operation, believed to be linked to Chinese Big Circle Boys and Vietnamese criminal gangs, was a highly mobile smuggling and trafficking enterprise with tentacles in U.S. cities as wide ranging as Los Angeles, New York, Baton Rouge and Des Moines, Iowa.
[. . . The] network distributed at least one million Ecstasy pills every month in the U.S., while at the same time moving millions of dollars through other legitimate and illegitimate enterprises.
[. . . .] The wide-ranging investigation . . . began in May, 2001, when U.S. authorities informed their Canadian counterparts that large portions of "E" were entering the country from Ontario.
The investigation later grew into three separate probes -- Operation Okapi, Operation Codi and Operation Candybox -- that came to a head last summer, when police raided three suspected Ecstasy labs in the Toronto area.
Officers seized 377,000 pink, green and purple pills, 120 kgs of Ecstasy powder worth more than $33-million and other equipment, such as presses, scales, dyes and vacuum packers.
Police say the laboratories were capable of producing more than 250,000 pills -- with a street value of $25 each -- every day.
Stop here and re-read that last paragraph. Then do the math. Can you see why there is plenty of money for bribery, along the way?
Health Danger: Adulterated? Clean?
"Although the term 'lab' conjures up images of a clean, sterile environment, these labs were anything but clean and sterile," Chief Supt. Soave said. "And the ingredients going into these pills are suspect at best."
[. . . .] U.S. indictments unsealed yesterday also reveal how the cartel used prepaid cellular phones -- which do not require proof of identification to purchase -- to co-ordinate drug transactions. Members spoke in coded language when arranging smuggling and distribution throughout the U.S., the indictments say, and they often fretted about unpaid debts.
[. . . .] "It was a very small operation, but a legitimate sewing and clothes manufacturing plant," said RCMP Staff Sgt. Jacques Lemieux, the project manager for Project Codi. "But it gave the group a legitimacy as to why they had the houses and why they drive the cars they did."
[. . . .] Chief Supt. Soave also warned that despite the magnitude of yesterday's arrests, "E" is still widely available.
