POLICE NAB U.S. ECSTASY RING BASED IN OTTAWA

170 Arrested In Joint Bust

Michael Friscolanti and Sheldon Alberts, with files from Adrian Humphreys
National Post, with files from CanWest News Service

TORONTO and WASHINGTON - Police across Canada and the U.S. arrested nearly
170 people yesterday in connection with a sophisticated drug ring that used
Ontario as a base for one of the biggest Ecstasy rings in the United States.

Authorities say the massive organized crime network, allegedly operated by
a Toronto man and an Ottawa woman, was behind nearly 15% of all the Ecstasy
- -- a popular nightclub drug -- found in the United States.

The alleged kingpin, Ze Wai Wong, 46, was picked up early yesterday while
he slept at his Scarborough condominium. The Chinese national is well-known
to police; he was arrested in 1994 and later ordered deported, but it
appears he never left. "He was the mastermind," said Chief Superintendent
Ben Soave of the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, a task force of
investigators from Toronto police, the Ontario Provincial Police and the RCMP.

"He was the operations officer for the whole organization and he was the
one responsible for sending these shipments down south," he told a packed
news conference, where thousands of seized pills, stacks of money and other
drug paraphernalia were on display, guarded by three officers armed with M-16s.

Thi Phuong Mai Le, a 38-year-old Vietnamese woman known in her Ottawa
neighbourhood as "The Queen," was the network's "chief financial operator,"
Chief Supt. Soave said. She was in charge of laundering millions of dollars
in drug profits, he said, some of which ended up in Vietnam.

"We have arrested the finance department, the rest of middle management,
and the sales force," Chief Supt. Soave said.

"It is no longer a viable criminal operation."

When it was viable, police say the operation, believed to be linked to
Chinese Big Circle Boys and Vietnamese criminal gangs, was a highly mobile
smuggling and trafficking enterprise with tentacles in U.S. cities as wide
ranging as Los Angeles, New York, Baton Rouge and Des Moines, Iowa.

For the past five years, authorities say the network distributed at least
one million Ecstasy pills every month in the U.S., while at the same time
moving millions of dollars through other legitimate and illegitimate
enterprises.

Police say that all came to an end yesterday morning, when hundreds of
officers in 16 U.S. cities, as well as Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal,
conducted a series of well-co-ordinated raids.

Mr. Wong faces 39 criminal charges, including conspiracy to traffic a
controlled substance. Seven of his alleged closest associates are also
behind bars, as are nearly 30 people in Ottawa, most of whom are related to
Ms. Le.

"We accomplished what is believed to be the largest, single United
States-Canadian enforcement action ever taken against Ecstasy traffickers,"
said Karen Tandy, administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

"The Wong/Le organization was a full-blown criminal machine," she
continued. "In addition to a huge Ecstasy business, this same organization
was running large-scale, high-potency marijuana grow operations in Canada,
credit card fraud, identity theft schemes and illegal gambling."

The wide-ranging investigation that led to yesterday's arrests began in
May, 2001, when U.S. authorities informed their Canadian counterparts that
large portions of "E" were entering the country from Ontario.

The investigation later grew into three separate probes -- Operation Okapi,
Operation Codi and Operation Candybox -- that came to a head last summer,
when police raided three suspected Ecstasy labs in the Toronto area.

Officers seized 377,000 pink, green and purple pills, 120 kgs of Ecstasy
powder worth more than $33-million and other equipment, such as presses,
scales, dyes and vacuum packers.

Police say the laboratories were capable of producing more than 250,000
pills -- with a street value of $25 each -- every day.

"Although the term 'lab' conjures up images of a clean, sterile
environment, these labs were anything but clean and sterile," Chief Supt.
Soave said. "And the ingredients going into these pills are suspect at best."

It was those early raids that helped police pursue the alleged higher
echelons of the drug network who are now in custody.

At a press conference in Washington, James Comey, the deputy U.S.
attorney-general, said traffickers smuggled Ecstasy powder from the
Netherlands into Canada, where they were pressed into pills and shipped
into the U.S., often in heat-sealed bags concealed in the fuel tanks of cars.

Couriers used at least four Canada-U.S. border crossings to smuggle the
drugs south, he said. On one occasion, authorities in Vermont seized
US$750,000 from the fuel tank of one Canadian-bound vehicle.

U.S. indictments unsealed yesterday also reveal how the cartel used prepaid
cellular phones -- which do not require proof of identification to purchase
- -- to co-ordinate drug transactions. Members spoke in coded language when
arranging smuggling and distribution throughout the U.S., the indictments
say, and they often fretted about unpaid debts.

On Jan. 14, 2003, "an individual was murdered with a meat cleaver" in
Flushing, N.Y., after a dispute with the Wong cartel over an unpaid drug
debt, one indictment says.

Ms. Le, who operated under the alias "Big Boobs," was allegedly in charge
of laundering the group's profits. Authorities say the cartel used U.S.
money remitter firms, including a California and Texas-based company called
U.S. Tours and Travel, and Georgia-based An Chau Services, to launder the
money through large cash deposits in American banks.

In Ottawa, police also raided Vi Vi Fashion, a clothing shop run by Ms. Le
in the city's Little Italy neighbourhood.

"It was a very small operation, but a legitimate sewing and clothes
manufacturing plant," said RCMP Staff Sgt. Jacques Lemieux, the project
manager for Project Codi. "But it gave the group a legitimacy as to why
they had the houses and why they drive the cars they did."

Ecstasy, a hallucinogenic drug widely available at dance clubs across North
America, is believed to be responsible for a growing number of deaths in
Canada.

"Certainly the information in our file suggests that this is a problem that
has not gone away," said Dr. Barry McLellan, Ontario's acting chief
coroner. "We're still finding Ecstasy showing up in our toxicology testing
and we're still seeing tragic deaths."

Chief Supt. Soave also warned that despite the magnitude of yesterday's
arrests, "E" is still widely available.

"This has not turned off the source of Ecstasy in Canada," he said.

However, he said the arrests should deter other criminal networks from
thinking they can operate unscathed in Canada.

"The bottom line is each and every criminal organization, whether through
threats, intimidation or homicides, brings violence and fear into our
communities," he said. "These arrests send a strong message to criminals
that borders will not stop us from prosecuting them."