SMALLER GANGS TAP INTO CITY DRUG MARKET

Biker Crackdown Left Gap To Fill

James Turner The string of headlines involving police take-downs of
gangs like the Hells Angels left the impression that police had
finally beaten the bad guys behind much of the organized crime in Manitoba.

But what was bad for the Hells Angels has been good for independent
operations of unlikely affiliations whose entrepreneurial spirit is
filling the cracks of the drug turf typically held by biker gangs.

Ten people charged in a recent RCMP bust of a cocaine-trafficking ring
showed that members of different Winnipeg street gangs had banded
together to grow their market share.

Later last week, the RCMP drug squad conducted a series of raids on
homes within Winnipeg.

Called Project Dock, police seized nearly seven pounds of cocaine,
drug agents and the equipment used to cut and distribute the drug.

Like the investigations targeting the Hells Angels, the raids were the
culmination of an eight-month investigation that included the use of
wiretaps.

Charges were laid against 10 men, including two that were already in
jail, on drug-related conspiracy charges.

The men are all said by police to be tied to various street gangs in
Manitoba, but not linked to a specific criminal organization.

In February, Winnipeg police also scored some major busts of what they
said were independent cocaine traffickers with no gang affiliations.

On Feb. 26, officers conducting a traffic stop discovered four pounds
of cocaine in the car they stopped. Further investigation led them to
a Minto-area home where they found and seized twenty more pounds of
the drug, along with an amount of crack.

Of the three men arrested, not one had a prior criminal record - a day
after the announcement, officers with the Street Crime Unit said the
seizure represented a "small dent in a much larger problem."

RCMP declined to be interviewed on the issue of what they see happen
to the city's drug trade after a major crackdown on drug crime occurs,
but issued a statement indicating that staying on top of it is an
expensive and challenging task for police.

Frederick Desroches, the director of the legal studies and criminology
program at the University of St. Jerome's at Waterloo, Ont. has based
a large part of his career studying the ways and means of the
high-level drug trade in Canada.

In his book, Crime That Pays: Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime in
Canada, Desrochers
interviewed 70 high-level drug traffickers serving jail time for
their crimes - in
similar fashion to the recent arrests in Manitoba, many people he
interviewed were
arrested only after prolonged and sophisticated police
investigations. Desrochers said
in an interview Thursday that despite the gang crackdown by police,
it's inevitable that
a number of other drug-traffickers would step up to fill the demand.

"They'll just move in and start finding distributors who will work for
them...it doesn't take very long - the market fills quite quickly," he said.

It's not unheard of for rivals to band together and co-operate when it
comes to drug-trafficking, Desrochers said, as the potential to make
huge profits is so great.

He added that street-gang members banding together, as in the case of
Project Dock, doesn't mean the rivals will wind up forming larger,
organized drug cartels in the long-term.

Traditional notions of top-down, hierarchical business structures
don't apply either.

"They're all independent entrepreneurs...and they value that. They
don't want to take orders from anybody," Desrochers said.

"The drug market is fluid - if your particular supplier is dry, you
still want to get some. A lot of this co-operation is a one-off
(situation) - they'll do it one time and may not do it again for a while."

Common portrayals of how independent drug organizations work are
typically wrong, Desrochers said - there's no authority at the top
violently forcing others to do his bidding. It's this facet that makes
a motorcycle gang's structure unique.

"Criminals are all about respect, they show respect to each other. A
lot of these guys are hotheads, as well. You don't slap anybody or
they'd shoot you dead on the spot," Desrochers said.

Many independents worry about growing too big, or linking up with a
larger organization, he adds, and that worry may come from wanting to
always look out for number one.

"Then you can be brought down by the mistakes other people make - if
you stay relatively small, you still can make huge money, stay under
the radar - you can control your people, and you can control
yourself," Desrochers said.