Pubdate: Thu, 26 Apr 2012
Source: Mirror (CN QU)
Copyright: 2012 Communications Gratte-Ciel Ltee
Contact:  http://www.montrealmirror.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/267
Author: Patrick Lejtenyi

HARSH HASH BUZZ

What Last Week's Bust Says About Montreal's Port, Drug Market and the Mob

By now, the marijuana world is buzzing with last week's news of the 
huge RCMP-led bust of Montreal-bound Pakistani hash-all 43.3 metric 
tonnes of it. Dubbed Project Celsius, the investiga-tion began in the 
summer of 2010, following the discovery of hash stored in containers 
at the Halifax and Montreal ports. It involved law enforcement 
agencies in Canada, the U.S., Pakistan, Italy and Belgium, and 
resulted in the arrest of nine Quebecers, all linked to Montreal's 
West End Gang. The hash, which had been seized in Europe and 
Pakistan, and smuggled in coffee, food items and clothing, had an 
estimated street value of $860-million, according to the Mounties.

RCMP communications rep Corporal Luc Thibault says the seizures took 
place over the course of many months, and that they only announced 
the operation after they had made their arrests. They say they got 
their men: all nine had been the targets of the investigation, and 
they are not looking at other suspects. Three of the suspects worked 
for companies hired by the Port of Montreal; none worked directly for 
the Montreal Port Authority.

But while there's no denying the size of the operation, not too many 
people are worried about a new, imminent hash drought in Quebec.

INDUSTRY REGULATIONS

According to veteran marijuana activist Marc-Boris St-Maurice, the 
bust, while eyebrow-raising, likely won't affect either the supply or 
even the price of a gram of hash here. The hash market is a tightly 
regulated moneymaker for a small group of criminals who have their 
own rules about the trade.

The local kingpins, generally considered to be the Italian Mafia and 
the Hells Angels, are not supply-side economists. The amount and 
quality of hash on the streets is strictly controlled, with rules 
about who sells what to whom, where, when and in what quantity, says 
St-Maurice. "If they have a lot of hash, they'll sit on it," he says. 
"They can sit on it for years.

"Certainly there's price fixing. Everyone agrees on what it should 
sell for, and there's no undercutting. There's tons of politics involved."

What's interesting about the Montreal hash market today, says 
St-Maurice, is the way it rebounded after what he calls the "historic 
hash drought of the late 80s and early 90s." For a decade, he says, 
hash was "virtually un-findable" here, and most people who cared 
about such things suspected it had to do with suppliers keeping the 
floodgates closed in order to drive up the price. But what they 
didn't expect was the parallel rise in technology, especially 
hydroponic techniques, that made growing pot so easy for casual users.

"More and more people got into production, and they realized they 
didn't need hashish. So the drought had the opposite effect: hash 
faded out of Quebec marijuana culture and local stuff took over."

Demand for hash returned with its availability, says St-Maurice, 
especially among older users.

The RCMP couldn't say where the hash was destined for, but given the 
quantities involved, the West End Gang's international connections 
and the Port of Montreal's historic role as a drug-smug-gling gateway 
to North America-Charlie "Lucky" Luciano used it to import heroin as 
far back as the 1930s-the 43 tonnes "certainly wouldn't be for a 
bunch of Irish guys getting stoned out of their minds," says D'Arcy 
O'Connor, author of Montreal's Irish Mafia: The True Story of the 
Infamous West End Gang.

THE POST-MATTICKS ERA

The Port had long been the fiefdom of notorious West End Gangster 
Gerald Matticks, until he was arrested in 2001. Although O'Connor 
says the now-paroled Matticks is "on a strict leash not to go near 
the Port," he is not sure the former head of the Coopers and 
Checkers' Union is quietly enjoying retirement. "The West End Gang, I 
assume, still has control over the ports," he says. "I'm sure the 
Irish guys haven't all gone totally straight or moved to Toronto."

He recognizes one of the names of those arrested, Alain Charron, 63, 
from Val Morin, as a West End associate from the 1980s, and various 
court cases and investigations over the years have shown that the 
Gang is the principal supplier of hash to the Italian Mafia. And 
despite recent troubles of their own, they still wield a lot of power 
in the local drug trade.

The RCMP's Thibault won't speculate on whether the arrests have dealt 
a death blow to anything, but did say that, "Somehow, somewhere, 
someone lost a lot of money." However, St-Maurice-who thinks the RCMP 
regularly overestimates the cash value of drug seizures-doesn't think 
much will change, no matter how much hash is discovered and 
destroyed. "There are busts all the time, and none of them put a dent 
in supply," he says. "If there is a dent, someone will step in and fill it."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom