Drug Depot

BARRIE POT LINKED TO COCAINE IMPORTS

"High-grade marijuana is produced here, the hydro is stolen from here,
the water is stolen, our insurance rates go up, and basically, the
criminals produce it for free. But guess what? It's not marijuana
that's being sold on our streets - it's cocaine."

Giant warehouses that act as a front for steamy jungle-like
greenhouses filled with thousands of marijuana plants, heavy with buds
sticky and rich with THC; an innocuous private airplane laden with
eight hockey bags stuffed with cocaine; hidden farm fields with acres
of pot plants with stalks the sizes of hockey sticks; vats of GHB, the
'date rape' drug being sold on the Internet across the world; two dead
bodies lying in a field, horribly beaten and shot in a convoluted
scheme involving prostitution, violence and drug deals gone bad.

These are the scenes coming out of 'hometown' Barrie and area in the
past few years that seem to be putting this city, that used to be
known as the doorway to cottage country, on the map for other reasons.

The number of drug busts labelled "Ontario's first" and "Canada's
first" in recent years have officials wondering if Barrie is becoming
the bedroom community to Toronto's drug-dealing criminals, or if
Barrie is just getting bad all by itself.

"It's a race," says Det. Staff Sgt. Rick Barnum of the OPP Huronia
Combined Drug Enforcement Unit, which uses a team of drug enforcement
officers from Barrie and other police services throughout Simcoe County.

"It's hard to keep up with it all. I can definitely say this is one of
the busiest areas in the country."

But it is the "absolute epidemic" of marijuana grow operations that
have the drug team struggling to keep up.

And while marijuana is said to be the "soft drug" in the public eye,
Barnum says these giant grow operations that use high-tech equipment
and potent, dangerous chemicals to turn over crops of "super plants"
are not about marijuana - but they have everything to do with cocaine
and organized crime.

"The marijuana industry is directly related to cocaine - there is no
doubt about it," he says.

"High-grade marijuana is produced here, the hydro is stolen from here,
the water is stolen, our insurance rates go up, and basically the
criminals produce it for free," he says.

"But guess what? It's not marijuana that's being sold on our streets -
it's cocaine."

While our "triple-A-grade" marijuana often called "B.C. Bud" gets
shipped south, cocaine is coming north in the exchange between drug
lords. Barnum says the public and politicians have "lost focus" by not
grasping that link.

"The amount of cocaine hitting our streets in the past year is
unprecedented," he says. "It's unreal. It's unheard of. And it has
everything to do with grow operations."

Barnum was one of the officers involved in Canada's largest indoor
drug bust Jan. 9 when tactical units swarmed the former massive Molson
brewery that overlooks Highway 400.

Police uncovered a $100-million-a-year pot factory operating at such a
sophisticated level that even hard-nosed drug squad members were
shaking their heads in astonishment.

"It was incredible. I sat down and looked around and thought - holy
cow!" he said, recalling his astonishment when he gazed around the
jungle of 30,000 plants.

Even living accommodations were provided for so-called "gardeners,"
who tended the crop around the clock to crank out a harvest three or
four times a year. It was clear that millions of dollars in equipment,
as well as electricians and other high-level experts , were in on the
deal.

"It was kind of sad," said Barnum. "I thought, man, oh man, if this is
what's it's come to, how are we going to keep up? We need help."

The giant Barrie bust effectively put Canada on the map as one of the
No. 1 pot producers in the world.

"It's not the distinction the City of Barrie was hoping for," said
Barrie Police Chief Wayne Frechette, who noticed the irony in a road
sign on the outskirts of the city that welcomes people to "the most
popular destination for business" in Canada.

"The same things that make it popular for legitimate business, make it
popular for illegitimate business," he says, citing accessibility to
Highway 400, airports, its central location and cheap labour."

Barnum says Barrie and cottage country are especially good targets for
grow operations.

"Highway 400 is a great little conduit to Toronto - real estate to buy
houses or land for grow operations is cheap compared to the city - and
cottage country, with all its winding creeks and rivers, has amazing
growing conditions," he says, sounding like a travel agent, but none
too happy about it.

The span of thickly-forested cottage country just north of Barrie
makes a perfect hide-a-way for big-time drug-dealer projects, he adds.

Considering the cocaine connection, it isn't just a coincidence that
just days after the Molson drug bust, a trial began in this same city
to delve into a criminal underworld where two known Montreal drug
dealers used Barrie as the drop-off point to unload eight hockey bags
stuffed with 593 pounds of 84-per-cent pure cocaine from a plane at a
small airport just north of this city. Rather, it is what the drug
cops expect to see in light of the rash of marijuana grow-ops.

In that case - another "Ontario's largest" for cocaine drug busts -
two Barrie men, pilot Lyle Niemi and sales rep Darcey Roy, who ran a
local air charter, are now waiting for a judge to render his verdict
today.

During the trial, the court heard ominous-sounding wiretap evidence
from the so-called drug lords who hired the Barrie air charter, that
read like an old-fashioned gangster movie.

Transcripts of RCMP wiretaps show dialogue between known cocaine
kingpin Dean Roberts, now spending 19 years in prison, and other
suspects who talk in code, with cryptic phrases of "threatening my
guys," and of starting a "war" if ploys go wrong.

While there is no "Baby Face," the wiretaps reveal colourful players
with heavy accents and names like "Poppa," "Moustache Pete," "Big
Freddy," "Porcupine," and "the Magician."

There is a boss named "Crazy" known to go "looney-tooney" and scream,
holler and "freak out" if plans get messed up.

Code language for an aircraft is a "limo," money is "cake" and if you
have a cold and can't use the cell phone, it really means the "heat"
is on to you.

It was only a couple of years earlier that an area just north of
Barrie was once again the hot spot of then "Ontario's largest" pot
bust. Police police helicopters spotted acres and acres of marijuana
as harvesters ran out of the fields.

Fifteen armed police officers spent 10 hours hacking the plants down
with machetes, stuffing 30,000 plants into 70 trucks and carting them
off to the Orillia dump. But that plan didn't go well.

The first night die-hard pot-smokers headed for the dump with shovels
and flashlights, and found the potent heap hiding beneath a pile of
compost. They came with garbage bags , they came by boat and they came
by truck to load up, and they worked till sunrise.

"It was like pot heaven," said one unnamed source, who was there. He
said the newly-slugged "dump weed" was on Orillia streets for months
afterwards. In the end, the man who was charged with running the
sophisticated grow operation got off with a light sentence.

Yun Ming Tin, 40, of Scarborough, plead guilty to the production of
30,000 marijuana plants and was sentenced to 30 months in jail Jan.
19, 2003. Nobody knows how many previous crops might have been
produced on the farm.

Justice Elizabeth Earle-Renton said she took into account the impact
the "ordeal" had on Tin's wife and family.

"You do not have a criminal record, you appear to be an extremely
hard-working individual and a person who has great concern for the
welfare of his family - I am keeping in mind your guilty plea and the
impact that all of this has had on your family," she said in sentencing.

Two other hired hands on the farm got conditional sentences.

For comparison's sake, those sentences totalled less time than a local
man convicted of smuggling a single joint between the cheeks of his
butt into the Barrie jail. The man was serving a weekend jail sentence
when he was caught with the hidden joint and Justice Gary Palmer
slapped him with a four-month jail sentence.

Federal prosecutor Denis Parent had asked for a five-year jail
sentence in the farm grow operation and was not happy with the sentence.

He says the public and politicians are "blind" to the impact on this
area because of the growing drug problem.

"We are definitely seeing more and more drugs coming into this area,
and it's getting scary," said Parent, who prosecutes several hundreds
of drug cases a year in Simcoe County. "People don't think we have
organized crime or drug addicts in Barrie - we do."

Parent says the law needs to do two things - get tougher on the
"gardeners" who tend grow operations and work harder to catch the
"brains" behind them. "The reason why it hasn't been nipped in the
bud," says Parent, "is the gardeners are always left behind and the
brains get to walk away."

Light sentences in grow operations are a thorn in side of both Barnum
and Frechette because undercover drug cops take huge risks and use up
hours of surveillance trying to catch the bad guys who choose to
operate in Canada where conditional sentences are the norm.

And it's not just the organized crime element that judges should
consider, they say - THC levels that make the plant potent have
increased from three per cent to 18 to 30 per cent since the 1970s and
1980s, and grow houses use dangerous chemicals that pollute the
atmosphere, the water, and damage the lungs of vulnerable children who
live nearby.

"You walk into one and the smell is so strong your eyes start to water
and you know it can't be good," he says.

In the wake of it all, thousands of houses - secretly used as grow
houses - are slapped with a fresh coat of paint and resold to
unsuspecting buyers after the interior of the houses have already
begun to mould and rot, and wires are rusted and bare from the
humidity making them "death traps."

Targeting and infiltrating the brains at the top is the direction the
drug unit is heading, says Barnum, who adds organized crime is a
system so deep-rooted that a crooked businessperson would have a hard
time starting up a new operation because territories are already
'marked' by the bad guys at the top.

"If you try to close in on another person's territory somebody will
leave you a little reminder on your doorstep," said Barnum, who
insists wherever there is a grow-op, organized crime is lurking nearby.

One murder case is now being unravelled in a preliminary hearing in
the Barrie courts after a couple was found slain and left in a field
off a county road north of Barrie in a convoluted scheme that involves
grow houses, drugs and prostitution.

Bong Thi Bui and her husband Dung That Ton, both 44, and who were
facing charges related to a grow house, were killed by hit men who
shot the couple and then finished them of by beating them to death
with rocks in May, 2002.

Another Barrie case, also an "Ontario's largest" at the time, involves
large quantities of the date-rape drug known as GHB, which was found
in a warehouse in a scheme that spread its tentacles around the world
as it was sold over the Internet.

Four local people are charged in that case which is also at the
preliminary trial stage this month in Barrie court.