P.G. THE HUB FOR DRUG TRADE

Record busts of marijuana grow operations at either end of northern
B.C. are proof organized crime is using the North as a drug factory,
according to RCMP.

Police say Prince George is increasingly the command centre for the
violence, extortion, trafficking, theft and prostitution that go
along with the drug business.

Police intelligence and recent court testimony have drawn two
pictures of organized crime in the form of the Renegades motorcycle
club, and the Crew.

"The Crew is now very active in Quesnel as well, and I think
everywhere in the North," said Sgt. Tom Bethune of the Prince George
RCMP's task force section.

Police say each is a different puppet group of the Vancouver Hells
Angels motorcycle club, but they work together and have a monopoly on
the drug trade and regional underworld. The Renegades have been
around for about a decade, the Crew only the last few years.

Quesnel RCMP have had a busy year detecting and dismantling grow
operations. On April 3 they discovered a 300-plant crop and a gun in
a home on Blackwater Road. On April 25, bud and plants were seized at
a West Fraser Road residence. A raid on two rural residences on May 2
uncovered 300 plants and substantial cash. Quesnel police located 200
plants, guns and evidence of electricity theft at a place near 10
Mile Lake on Oct. 17.

"There are a lot of people who think we shouldn't worry about
marijuana, but let's face it, when organized crime groups are using
that as a major fundraiser we have to target it," said Quesnel RCMP
spokesman Sgt. Gary Clark-Marlow. "Several grow-ops we've taken down
have more than 1,000 plants. That's not mom-and-pop stuff."

While court testimony in Prince George has revealed a pattern of
violence used by the Crew as a fear tactic, Clark-Marlow said that
kind of brutality has not emerged in Quesnel, but "I certainly know
who the Crew is."

According to police, the marijuana trade is controlled by the
Renegades, while the Crew works the crack side of things.

Sgt. Sean Neary of North District drug section said even if a
card-carrying member of the Crew or the Renegades isn't doing the
dirty work, they and/or the Hells Angels are definitely directing the traffic.

"We've received information over the past little while that the Crew
is kind of spreading their tentacles into other areas outside of
Prince George, although we have taken no enforcement action involving
them in a regional sense to date," Neary said. "In respect to the
Renegades, in the past two months or so two were convicted of charges
and given conditional sentences, and another of their members is on
conditions. I think their membership is fairly low and due to
enforcement action, half of them are on conditions so we have had
some success disrupting their activities.

Police have had some recent success. In what is possibly the record
grow-op bust in northern B.C., RCMP took down a crop of more than
7,200 plants at Doe River near Dawson Creek on Oct. 11, valued at
more than $1 million. Charges are pending against two Lower Mainland residents.

Even more recently, Mounties in the town of Likely uncovered a
grow-op Nov. 22 that contained more than 5,500 marijuana plants -
enough, they said, to supply 2.8 million joints. Two Surrey men were
charged in that incident.