CANADA'S BIGGEST BUST

Huge Heroin Haul Had The Power To Control The Market

RCMP say they have nabbed the leaders of a sophisticated, well-financed
Asian criminal syndicate that planned to flood the streets of Canadian
cities with high-grade heroin from the Golden Triangle.

In two separate, massive busts in Vancouver and Toronto in the past week,
the Mounties, working in co-operation with Chinese and Hong Kong police,
netted 156 kilograms of heroin and arrested 10 people -- the largest
seizure in Canada ever.

The biggest bust was in Burnaby, where police found 99 kilograms of pure
heroin concealed in the steel beams of a shipping container.

In Toronto, the heroin was hidden in plastic eggs among a shipment of
preserved duck eggs, a delicacy shipped regularly from Asia.

RCMP said the Toronto and Burnaby busts were separate investigations and
separate shipments, although some of the same people were involved.

"The group is highly sophisticated, well-organized and well-financed
criminal organization," said Insp. Terry Towns of the Vancouver RCMP drug
section, whose Asian Organized Crime Unit worked for 20 months on the case.

In the Vancouver case, dubbed Project E-Congee, police tracked the
shipment, which was listed as 13,000 cartons of plastic shopping bags, from
the southern Chinese port city of Shenzhen until it arrived in Vancouver
Aug. 18.

The container was then taken to a warehouse at the 5,000 block of Still
Creek Ave. in Burnaby.

Police raided the warehouse last Saturday and found 55 airtight bricks each
containing about two kilos of heroin that were hidden in hollow beams
beneath a false bottom in the container from China.

The drugs would be undetectable by X-ray and the hole in the floor giving
access to the beams was sealed over with filler.

Police arrested four men at the warehouse and three others, believed to be
Hong Kong nationals, later.

The Toronto operation, which had been under investigation for more than a
year, netted 57 kilograms of heroin as well as 17 kilograms of pills, some
of which were identified as the popular designer drug ecstasy.

The drugs arrived on a container ship in Vancouver and were sent on to
Toronto by train before being tracked to a warehouse in Scarborough. They
were packed in small plastic bags, then put into 1,700 plastic
eggs. Police had to crack 174,000 real duck eggs to find the 1,700
drug-filled replicas.

Three people were arrested in connection with the case.

Police in Toronto said the shipment seized there would provide 2.85 million
individual doses, and estimated its Toronto street value at $142 million,
or $50 a dose.

The Vancouver shipment, though larger, was worth less -- $104 million at
Vancouver street prices of $35 a dose.

Hundreds of people were probably behind an operation of this magnitude,
RCMP Supt. Ben Soave said in Toronto.

"It takes an organization with a great deal of sophistication, with a huge
international network, to put the whole shipment into a single container,"
he said.

In addition to the drugs, police also seized over $1 million in cash in
both raids and are now tracking assets acquired by the criminal groups.

Police said in both cases the drugs were to be sold in Canada, and would
have provided addicts with more than six million individual doses. The
shipments are believed intended to be stockpiled for later distribution.

"This organization is importing heroin in such a volume that it could
control the price of the heroin market," RCMP spokesman Cpl. Grant Learned
said.

Police expressed concern that a lower street price could make the herion
more affordable to youth.

Vancouver has an estimated 10,000 heroin addicts. Last year B.C. recorded
over 400 drug overdose deaths, mostly from heroin use.