CASH-RICH WEST LURES DRUG GANGS

Alberta A Textbook Lesson In Supply And Demand, Police Say

OTTAWA (CNS) - A growing tide of criminal gang members from Ottawa
has headed west over the past year, looking for new business in Alberta.

With a market full of young, cash-rich customers who want to party
hard, it makes dealing crack cocaine in Wild Rose Country a textbook
lesson in supply and demand.

Sgt. Anthony Costantini, of the Ottawa police guns and gangs unit,
said the exodus isn't going to stop any time soon.

"The bottom line is they are going out there to make money," he said.
"And there's lots of money to be made."

He estimated at least 20 members of street gangs from Ottawa have
left town over the past 12 months -- many of them are associated with
the Ledbury-Banff Crips, whom police have tied to a recent shooting
in Ottawa, among other crimes.

Police said the gang members have had little trouble drumming up
business on their new turf -- the problems have come with staying out
of trouble with police.

It's not the first time Alberta has seen an unpopular wave of
migration to its cities. Former Calgary mayor and Alberta premier
Ralph Klein once famously said Calgary was suffering from "eastern
bums and creeps" who were driving up the city's crime rate during the
early 1980s.

Staff Sgt. Monty Sparrow heads up the drug squad for the Calgary
Police Service. Since spring, Calgary has become "a more lucrative
market for cocaine," he said, and the city has seen out-of-town gang
members move in to grab a piece of the market.

"We're seeing more eastern Canadians coming in and we were aware that
there were individuals coming in from Ottawa as well," he said.

Edmonton Police Service Staff Sgt. Kevin Galvin said he knows of
specific cases where Ottawa gang members are operating out of parts
of Edmonton and Fort McMurray.

"What's really interesting is the mobility of the gangs we've been
dealing with in Edmonton and Alberta," Galvin said. "They drive in,
they get on planes. . . it's not that much of an anomaly."

He said it's hard to know exactly how big is the market in which they
are working.

"It's tough from a police perspective to say how much cocaine there
is in the city because we just don't know," said Sparrow.

Among the cocaine busts his unit made last year, Sparrow said police
found 40 kilograms of cocaine in a vehicle which had been driven into
the province from Vancouver. This is typically the way cocaine makes
its way into Alberta: It gets brought in along the highway from
Vancouver, and gets distributed by dealers who take it to their
markets. In Edmonton, police estimate a kilogram of cocaine sells for $120,000.

Calgary is the main hub where dealers obtain cocaine -- both in its
powder and crack cocaine form -- and bring it out to other Prairie
cities, including those in Saskatchewan and in Manitoba. The dealers,
including those who have arrived from Ottawa and Toronto, then move
it out to their markets.

So far, Sparrow said the city has yet to see problems with gang members on

rival turf in the ways other cities, such as Toronto, have seen in
recent years.

"We don't have turfs in Calgary, which distinguishes us from other
communities in Canada," he said. "They have anonymity in this city
and they thrive on that.

"We don't see territorial wars. We have a completely different kind
of gang here," Sparrow said.