VANCOUVER — A Burnaby RCMP investigation that began with a routine traffic stop last summer has ended in one of the largest drug-chemical seizures in British Columbia’s history — 6,765 kilograms of finished narcotics and fentanyl-production chemicals pulled from three homes and two shipping containers in Richmond, alongside tactical shotguns, cash, contraband cigarettes — and a multi-antenna device consistent with the signal jammers used to defeat electronic surveillance.
The Bureau assesses that a seizure of this magnitude, staged in residential properties and sea can containers in Richmond — the city that court records and Canada’s largest money-laundering investigation have established as a central node of Chinese transnational organized crime — is consistent with the industrial-scale flow of precursor chemicals from China through the Vancouver gateway that senior American law enforcement and intelligence sources have described to this publication, moving in coordination with Mexican cartel logistics.