HOW MEXICO'S DRUG WAR WASHED UP ON CANADA'S WEST COAST

Vancouver Task Force Struggles With Fallout Of Crackdown On Cartels

VANCOUVER - Constables Phil Gomes and Mike Clark - a.k.a. Shake 'n'
Bake - are 27 and 28, clean-cut and solidly built, and together form
the newest and least-known front in Mexico's drug wars: Canada.

Members of the coveted Integrated Gang Task Force in British
Columbia, their orders are to "disrupt and dismantle" drug gangs,
many of which maintain a cocaine lifeline to Mexico.

They don't talk about it much, but they spend their days chasing down
the "bad guys" and "sitting on" drug houses around Vancouver and the
Lower Mainland of B.C.

While the U.S. Attorney General's Office calls the Mexican drug
cartels a "national security threat" and says 230 American cities
have been infiltrated, the port city of Vancouver may be Canada's
first to feel the fallout from the crackdown on Mexico's drug lords.

Already this year in the Vancouver area - nicknamed the gang capital
of Canada - there have been 30 shootings (with 12 fatalities)
directly linked to the gang shakeout in Mexico and tracked by the
Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs. Some 130 gangs
operate in B.C., among them Red Scorpions, United Nations, MS-13,
Bacon Brothers, Hells Angels and various independents - all with ties
of varying degrees to lucrative Mexican cocaine, among other drugs
from other places.

"Vancouver and British Columbia are unfortunately the focus of the
largest number of organized crime groups in Canada," warned Peter Van
Loan, federal public safety minister and solicitor-general, in a
speech in Langley this year. A few days earlier, a gangster died
nearby in a Mexican-style execution by machine-gun fire at the
Thunderbird Village Mall.

In Mexico, where nearly 11,000 have died since Mexican President
Felipe Calderon launched his government's "war on drugs" in 2006,
drug-fuelled gangs impale heads on stakes and dissolve thousands of
corpses in acid.

In Tijuana, a border town almost due south down the I-5 from
Vancouver, there are three, maybe four drug murders a day and cartel
henchmen take down local cops for sport.

In Vancouver, police are witnessing an escalation in the brutality of
killings. Recently, in an apparently targeted hit, a gangster shot a
young mother in her car as her 4-year-old sat in the back seat. Once,
such actions were forbidden by established drug protocol. Now,
collateral damage is routine in the slaughterhouse of gangland hits.

IT'S THE "ARMED and dangerous" label describing the parolee that
chills when it pops up on the police laptop. It's in bold type, hard to miss.

Still, Gomes and Clark have no choice but to locate the guy. They
climb out of their Chevy Tahoe and begin that unconscious pat-down of
gear cops do. They check vests and pockets and give their side arms a
tap; Gomes carries a Glock and his partner, Clark, a Sig-Sauer P-226.

It's coming up on 10 p.m. on a Friday, and they're on rounds in
Langley, on the south side of the Fraser River, about 40 kilometres
from Vancouver. They're doing a curfew check on an "associate" of the
United Nations, a criminal organization with ties to Mexico and the
world's deadliest drug cartels.

It's a full moon, but the light is watery. This could turn bad: a
lethal force option. Gomes heads up the walk to the three-storey
townhouse, rings the buzzer, and then knocks.

"POLICE," he shouts. "Open up!"

The man isn't home - a breach of recognizance - and they'll issue an
arrest warrant. Their mood brightens but, as Gomes says, "You just
never know what's on the other side of the door."

RCMP SUPT. Pat Fogarty, operations officer with the Combined Forces
Special Enforcement Unit (CFSEU), attributes the spike in
Vancouver-area gang shootings directly to the police crackdown in
Mexico. What's more, he knew it was coming.

"We saw this Mexican war starting to shake things up six months ago,"
he says in an interview in a hotel lobby in Surrey, a neighbouring
municipality to Langley. The hotel is across the street from another
site on our narco-murder tour, the parking lot of the busy Guildford
Mall, scene of a recent execution.

"Things had been going well (in the cocaine trade) - and we're
talking about a significant, efficient business," says Fogarty, 41.
With his tailored brown suit, snappy loafers, red hair and freckles,
he has the preppy look of any professional about to make a PowerPoint
presentation. Except his is about the genesis of guns, gangs and drugs.

"Suddenly, you reduce supply and," he says in understatement, "things
start to happen."

Sometime last fall, he saw the price of cocaine on the street soar
from the $29,000-$32,000-a-kilo range to more than $55,000 per kilo,
although it's gone back down to the regular price in recent months.
"Next thing you know, (dealers) are saying they can't get their hands
on coke at any price. They're losing customers - and, remember, this
is a leveraged business. So the war disrupts the flow of cocaine and
people fight to survive ... this is about power and greed."

Fogarty makes another point, one that's similar to arguments just as
often heard these days in Mexican border cities Tijuana and Ciudad
Juarez, where police attribute wildly escalating brutality to the
military crackdown on cartels and a seismic shift in the value system
of the latest crop of narco lords (if one can indeed talk about
ethics among thieves, kidnappers, scoundrels and assassins).

"I hear it all the time - the problems with the new generation,"
begins Fogarty. "There doesn't appear to be one gang that controls
the rest in B.C., but there are a lot of shootings among a new
generation that's quick to the gun and wants fast money, fast cars
and women, and doesn't want to work hard. The established value
system, I'm told, is eroding."

Fogarty elaborates: "These young guys want to be feared and respected
fast - but what seems to be missing are the more mature, powerful
elements who put them in their place and say, 'Hey, we don't do
things that way.'"

It's about survival. The older generation of gangsters, according to
Fogarty, cleaves to a low profile, very low. They're not big on Dodge
City shootouts and understand the dangers of public outrage hovering
at the boil and police all over the place. It's their business, and
they've got a lot to lose. Like everything.

Fogarty pauses, laughs: "Youth today!"

IT'S ALMOST 2 a.m. on Saturday morning, and Gomes and Clark have
clocked well over a hundred kilometres, checking in on bar and
restaurant programs where staffers text police when gangsters show
up. They cruise mall parking lots where the drill's the same: type in
the plate numbers and see what pops out of the system. In between,
they inhale four-cheese pizzas and gallons of Timmy's brew.

Before the bars close downtown, their teams hit the Gastown bar scene
and scope out the rat-infested alleys of the Downtown East Side,
where the sick prey upon the weak, exploitation at its cruellest.
It's up to addicts to place their orders from idling cars, as
tattooed driver/dealers show off portable drug buffets - all you can
ingest for a price, possibly death. And so convenient.

Dealers on foot roughly shake awake drugged-out zombies and try to
force down that last 20-rock of crack cocaine or another cheapo tab
of ecstasy. Ultimately, however, nothing clears out an alley like the
slow drive-by of a big, black cop-mobile.

It's been an okay night. Gomes and Clark have their arrest warrant to
take another Red Scorpion gangster out of circulation, albeit
temporarily and if he can be located. A fellow team collars three
gang "associates" in Langley, charging one Red Scorpion with murder
in the machine-gun execution and another with attempted murder by sledgehammer.

They have a couple of hours of paperwork before they take a break and
do it all again tomorrow night. Gomes and Clark may not see it this
way, but they are integral to the drug war on Canada's northern
front. Neither do they mention their bravery citations: Gomes (home
squad, Delta) for pulling elderly residents out of a nursing home
with a gas leak; Clark (from the Vancouver department) for tackling
dangerous home invaders on the run.

"Hey, hoser, how's it going?" asks a buddy, leaning in on the driver's door.

"Just living the dream," says Gomes. "Living the dream."

*SIDEBAR*

BY THE NUMBERS

10,700 Estimated death toll during Mexico's three-year war on drugs

$168 million In seized drugs, plus luxury homes, vehicles and boats
as a result of Vancouver-based Project E-Paragon's international drug
sweep with more than 100 arrested (announced in 2008)

755 Members of the Sinaloa Cartel (in western Mexico) arrested in
Xcellerator, an operation announced in February by U.S. Department of Justice

$1.6 billion Worth of U.S. military and aid package to Mexico as a
result of Xcellerator

252 Per cent rise in marijuana grow-ops in Metro Vancouver,
1994-2004, as estimated by police

40,000 Estimated number of Mexican troops fighting drug war across Mexico

0 Countries with zero presence of illegal drugs

6 Major Mexican major drug cartels

230 U.S. cities infiltrated by Mexican cartels

Common ingredients in crystal meth: Depending on recipe, an average
of 6 or 7. Can contain battery acid, red phosphorus, iodine crystals,
ammonia, propane and lye (as in cleaning products) and white gas (lantern fuel).