OTTAWA — When Gord Magill asked me onto his podcast on July 1, I said yes for a reason I don't often get to act on. Magill is not commenting from a distance. He is a third-generation trucker who has driven the ice roads of northern Canada, the Australian outback and the American interstate system, and who wrote End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers.
When a practitioner who has spent thirty years in the cab wants to talk about how North American workers are getting squeezed out of a critical industry by immigration scams, or as I explain, how transnational organized crime has exploited our borders and vulnerable migrants to capture an essential economic tie between the U.S. and Canada, threaten our national security and sovereignty, and move cartel loads through the freight system, that is a conversation worth having, and worth sharing with readers of The Bureau.
I asked him for the recording so I could post it here.
What made the discussion unusual is that we came at the same machinery from opposite ends. I have spent years tracing how Chinese organized crime, the Mexican cartels and Canadian-based trafficking networks use commercial transportation corridors to move cocaine, methamphetamine, fentanyl precursors and laundered proceeds between China, Mexico, the United States and Canada — including the alleged use of Canada-based long-haul trucking companies in the Ryan Wedding investigation.
Magill has watched the same corridors fill up from the driver’s seat: the exploitation of migrant drivers, the fraudulent licensing and recruitment pipelines, the unsafe carriers that vanish into a new limited liability company the moment enforcement catches up, and the economic pressure that makes a legitimate freight network easy for criminal groups to infiltrate.
One exchange is worth marking now, in hindsight. Magill asked me why one community keeps surfacing in the border seizures, and I told him this was not a matter of “profiling” or tracking Punjabi origin names across a few Blue Water Bridge seizure news cycles.
As I put it to him: “this is state level criminal intelligence I’m talking about.”
I said it because I was already in discussions with people on both sides of the border about the saturation of Indian transnational crime groups into the long-haul trucking industry. The people I was talking to are well aware of the Trump administration‘s concerns with Canada’s vulnerabilities to border exploitation and fentanyl trafficking, and some have also asked for my knowledge on the topics, a bit of background I didn’t explain on air with Gord.
That was July 1.
Six days later, on July 7, the Justice Department unsealed Operation Hard Ball: three indictments, twenty-four arrests across the United States, Canada and Europe, and India-based syndicates charged with racketeering, targeted killings, extortion and moving bulk cocaine and methamphetamine by long-haul semi-truck from the Los Angeles area to the Canadian border.
The Bureau was describing the picture before it broke into public view.
What those indictments do not reach, but United States agencies are certainly interested in, is the proliferation of fentanyl production labs across Canada that feed into the same Mexican cartel supply chain the long-haul mafia tapped for the cocaine and methamphetamine loads it ran out of California.
When Gord asked me about that fentanyl pipeline, I briefly explained a story The Bureau has reported on, in which a Drug Enforcement Administration source met with an Indian gangster in Vancouver, and an alleged Chinese fentanyl supplier, who promised he could produce massive loads of fentanyl precursors shipped from China to Vancouver’s port, and ship them south from British Columbia to Los Angeles, using his trucking company, fronted by an Indian driver.
