“It was a glorious time.” — Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), Goodfellas
“Glorious” has been a byword for mobsters in Canada over the past two decades.
Lax sentencing, little oversight, and a government that has either been a) hopelessly naive; b) stupid; c) cynically playing for ethnic votes; or d) all of the above.
“Canada has become a hub for organized crime,” Queen’s University professor and globally recognized organized crime expert Antonio Nicaso told the Toronto Sun.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has identified $1.4 billion in fentanyl-linked suspicious transactions, naming China, Mexico, Canada, and India as key foreign touchpoints in the global production and laundering network. The analysis, based on 1,246 Bank Secrecy Act filings submitted in 2024, tracks financial activity spanning chemical purchases, trafficking logistics, and international money laundering operations.
h/t handy n handsome
Disruptive technologies like AI are empowering bad actors faster than law enforcement can respond.
On New Year’s morning, American citizens awoke to news of another mass-casualty terror attack. Using a rented a pick-up truck, a man plowed through revellers on New Orleans’s Bourbon Street, killing 14 and wounding at least 57 others.
This was no crude act of vehicular terrorism: the attacker employed smart glasses to reconnoiter the area before striking. He had wired his vehicle with improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and strategically planted additional bombs across the neighborhood. The materials used were not black-market contraband but commercially available technology, repurposed for destruction.
Two years have passed since sweaty, visibly shaking Air Canada manager Simran Preet Panesar gave Peel Regional Police a tour of the site of Canada’s largest ever gold heist — a hangar outside Pearson International Airport.
The warehouse manager led investigators to the spot where a white truck pulled up on the afternoon of April 17, 2023, and a man stepped out to present a doctored document.
The document, for frozen seafood that had already been collected, was quickly approved.
The pearl clutchers are at it again.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre promised Monday that, if elected, he and his government would use the Constitution’s notwithstanding clause to allow people who commit multiple murders to be imprisoned for life without possibility of parole.
The alleged wheelman in the 2023 heist at Toronto’s Pearson airport has agreed to plead guilty to arms-trafficking charges in the U.S., which prosecutors allege stemmed from an effort to spend some of $20 million worth of stolen gold on guns.
Durante King-McLean of Brampton, Ont., who has been in custody in Pennsylvania since state troopers pulled him over in September 2023, signed the deal earlier this month before it was filed on Friday — pleading guilty to conspiracy to traffic firearms, which carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison or a fine of $250,000.
They are the chilling names of Canada’s most infamous serial killers: Clifford Olson, Paul Bernardo, Robert Pickton.
All of them eventually captured, convicted and condemned to life in prison.
Sam Bankman-Fried had hoped to win freedom by making a long-shot bid for a presidential pardon. Instead, he began the next stage of his career as a federal inmate.
Earlier this week, the founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange was brought to the low-security prison at Terminal Island in Los Angeles. The 33-year-old former billionaire could spend years at the portside facility, which largely holds nonviolent offenders or those without a recent history of violence. He is set for release in December 2044, the Federal Bureau of Prisons website shows.
Victims of Mohamed Fayed, the late owner of Harrods, speak of a familiar pattern: they would be plucked from obscurity, promoted from a job on the shop floor to the offices above, invited to Fayed’s luxury apartment and sexually assaulted or raped.
More than 100 women have made allegations against the Egyptian billionaire, whose alleged campaign of abuse is said to have spanned back to the 1970s. Ex-employees speak of Fayed’s behaviour as an open secret within Harrods: some say he was known to patrol the shop floor on the lookout for attractive young women to target.
Actor Terrence Howard said Sean “Diddy” Combs tried to have sex with him in an interview where he recalled an awkward moment he once had with the disgraced music mogul, adding that his assistant later told him, “I think he’s trying to fuck you.”
Vibrant diversity strikes again.
Actor and comedian Russell Brand was today charged with rape, indecent assault, oral rape and two counts of sexual assault against four women.
Detectives began an investigation after 50-year-old Brand was accused of rape, sexual assaults and emotional abuse by several women in a joint investigation by The Sunday Times, The Times and Channel 4 Dispatches in September 2023.
The Metropolitan Police have now charged Brand – who lives in Florida – by post with one count each of rape, indecent assault and oral rape, as well as two counts of sexual assault, relating to four different women, and issued a court summons.
It was at a news conference back in January that Toronto police gave members of the public a glimpse at an investigation involving what they described as “violent” Mexican organized crime group known as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
The group, police said, was linked to the largest cocaine bust in the service’s history. Investigators confirmed that more than half of the $83 million worth of cocaine that was seized as part of the drug squad probe was found in a transport truck that travelled from Mexico, through the United States, and into Canada. Two of the six suspects arrested in the case were Mexican nationals.
Which country—Canada or the United States—has the most crime?
Most Canadians would likely say the U.S. by a wide margin. But as noted in my new study published by the Fraser Institute, while overall crime rates in Canada are below rates in the U.S., when you look at individual cities it’s a different story.
A mass stabbing at a University of Waterloo gender studies class was not a terrorist attack but a “particularly grave” hate crime meant to make people feel unsafe in those spaces, an Ontario judge ruled Monday in sentencing the attacker to 11 years in prison.
