An ex-Mountie on trial in Surrey for misusing a police database to get information about the Bacon brothers has now been charged in the U.S. with conspiracy to smuggle cocaine into Canada and recruiting a border guard to help him do it.

An ex-Mountie on trial in Surrey for misusing a police database to get information about the Bacon brothers has now been charged in the U.S. with conspiracy to smuggle cocaine into Canada and recruiting a border guard to help him do it.

Abbotsford resident Rapinder (Rob) Sidhu, and co-accused Anthony Jurcev, were indicted by a grand jury in Seattle this week, according to court documents obtained by The Vancouver Sun.

Sidhu is in the middle of a trial in Surrey Provincial Court for allegedly impersonating a police officer on July 31, 2007 to get the address of the Bacons from the RCMP’s Operational Communications Centre. He is back in court in that case in September.

The U.S. indictment alleges that beginning at least by the middle of 2007 until at least May 2008, Sidhu and Jurcev worked with convicted smugglers Rob Shannon and Devron Quast “to operate a cocaine transportation organization based in British Columbia.”

“On a regular basis during this time period, the B.C. cocaine organization exported, and attempted to export, loads of cocaine from the United States to Canada,” the indictment says. “The cocaine was concealed in vans and recreational vehicles.”

The indictment also says that Sidhu, who left the RCMP in 2003 in the middle of an internal investigation, “recruited an employee of the Canada Border Services Agency, who agreed to allow and did allow vehicles containing cocaine to pass through his lane at the Lynden/Aldergrove Port of Entry.”

That border guard, Jaspal Grewal, pleaded guilty in a Seattle courtroom in July to his role in the criminal gang. He is to be sentenced in October. Both Shannon and Quast earlier pleaded guilty to their roles in the smuggling organization, which U.S. authorities allege was run for the benefit of the Hells Angels in B.C. and involved more than $19 million worth of marijuana and cocaine going back and forth across the border over five years.

So far, 24 B.C. men have pleaded guilty to their roles in the massive operation.

Neither Sidhu nor Jurcev could be reached for comment Friday. Jurcev had been named on an earlier indictment filed by the U.S. Attorney.

The indictment alleges Sidhu and Jurcev were behind two intercepted shipments of cocaine, totalling 478 kilograms. One load was found inside a recreational vehicle stopped by police in Orange County, California on July 24, 2007. The other was located inside luggage in a minivan intercepted in Everett, Washington on May 16, 2008.

And the indictment claims there were many more cocaine shipments that police did not intercept.

“Members of the B.C. cocaine organization communicated with each other via prepaid cellular telephones and encrypted BlackBerry messages, and other secretive means, often referring to each other, themselves and the cocaine using nicknames and codes,” the indictment says.

The U.S. also wants the two men to surrender any assets they received from their alleged cocaine smuggling.

Sidhu pleaded guilty in July 2003 to causing “fear of personal injury” in another domestic case. He also pleaded guilty in 2005 to two counts of fraud over $5,000 and received a 12-month conditional sentence concurrent on both counts.

 

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Drug Dealing, Counterfeiting, Smuggling: How North Korea Makes Money

North Korea used to be an industrial powerhouse. Not anymore. Today, the country can't feed its own people. Its cities go dark every night for lack of electricity.

Yet helplessness wasn't the original plan. The original plan for the country's economy had a name. It was called "juche," or self-reliance. The idea was that all North Korean problems should be solved by North Koreans.

Every North Korean knows the concept of juche inside and out. The country takes self-reliance very seriously. And if self-reliance requires drug-dealing and the smuggling of counterfeit goods, then so be it.

 
But before we get to that, there are a few other ways the North Korean government can make money.

It can sell what few assets it has to its neighbors. So China takes coal and magnesium out of North Korea's mountains and harvests fish from North Korean waters. Those sales put millions of dollars into Kim Jong-Il's hands.

In fact, North Korea doesn't just rent its land. It rents out its own people: the government sends its citizens to Russia to chop down trees and to special South Korean factories near the border that need cheap labor.

This works out great for Kim Jong-Il. Those Russian and South Korean companies pay North Korea in dollars and then the North Korean government pockets that money and gives near-worthless local currency to the workers.

And North Korea has one more legal export: monuments. It turns out that giant, ugly statues are one of the few exports of North Korea.

There's a whole division of the North Korean government that specializes in building those statues for dictators around the world, according to Curtis Melvin, an econ grad student who runs the blog North Korea Economy Watch.

"You can go as far back as the 1970s to find monuments the North Koreans have built in Africa and that's sort of continued to this day," he says.

All these legal exports added up to roughly $2 billion in 2009. In addition to that, North Korea brings in a lot of money through blatantly illegal activity.

To learn more about the country's illegal exports, we spoke with Ma Young Ae, a defector who used to work as a North Korean spy. Ma now lives in Virginia where she runs a North Korean restaurant. But back in Pyongyang she was one of the country's elites.

Ma worked for Kim Jong Il's internal police force. Her job was was to track down drug smugglers. That sounds like pretty normal law enforcement, except for one difference. She was supposed to stop small-time Korean drug dealers in order to protect the biggest drug dealer in the country: the North Korean government.

Ma told us the North Korean government produced opium on a large scale. But it hid its poppy fields from most of the population. Ma only saw the fields because she was an insider.

After harvesting the fields, the government would put its empty factories to use. The government would turn on its production lines at night and process opium, Ma says. Then they would pack the product in plastic cubes the size of dictionaries and smuggle it out of the country through China.

This was in the mid-eighties, when opium was the big drug. These days the drug of choice for export out of North Korea is ice, also know as methamphetamine.

Ma never smuggled the drugs herself. But she did smuggle something else. When she traveled in China, tracking down those non-government-approved drug dealers, the government didn't give Ma a corporate credit card.

Instead, she was given a wad of counterfeit dollars. This is another of North Korea's exports: Counterfeit $100 bills known as super-notes.

Nobody was going to just accept a brand-new $100 dollar bill from a North Korean. Instead, the Chinese would give the North Koreans sixty real U.S. dollars for every fake $100 bill.

It was during these trips that Ma noticed that the Chinese across the river had a much better standard of living than the North Koreans. So, when she had the chance, she defected.

Besides the illegal drugs and the counterfeit currency, North Korea is believed to deal in lots of weapons: rifles, missiles, perhaps even nuclear technology. Just a couple of weeks ago in Lybia, the rebels found a bunch of North Korean rocket launchers in a box labeled "bulldozer parts."

It's impossible to say how much money all this illegal activity brings in. Melvin says the government's primary goal is to maintain control of the country, not to maximize revenue.

What we do know is that Kim Jong-Il makes enough money to give the country's small elite a pretty good life. Despite international sanctions, he's always getting caught sneaking in iPods, Mercedes, Cognac and big screen TVs.

Meanwhile, the rest of North Korea gets barely enough to survive.

 

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Violent Mexican drug gang, Zetas, taking control of migrant smuggling

One of Mexico's most powerful criminal gangs has muscled into the migrant-smuggling racket, changing what had been a relatively benign if risky industry of independent operators into a centralized business that often has deadly consequences for those who try to operate outside it.

Los Zetas, who earned a reputation for brutality by gunning down thousands of Mexicans in the ongoing battle for drug-smuggling routes to the United States, now control much of the illicit trade of moving migrant workers toward the U.S. border, experts in the trade say.

They've brought logistical know-how, using tractor-trailer trucks to carry ever larger loads of people and charging higher prices, as much as $30,000 per head for migrants from Asia and Africa who seek to get to the United States.

They've also brought an unprecedented level of intimidation and violence to the trade. Los Zetas or their allies often kidnap and hold for ransom poor migrants who try to operate outside the system. If relatives don't wire payment, the migrants sometimes are executed and dumped in mass graves or press-ganged into jobs with the criminal group.

Nearly a year ago, Zetas gunmen were implicated in the slaughter of 72 migrants at a ranch near San Fernando in Tamaulipas state, barely an hour and a half drive from Brownsville, Texas.

Other mass graves discovered in northern Mexico also may be the work of Los Zetas pushing to control smuggling to the United States.

Alejandro Solalinde, an activist Roman Catholic priest who runs a migrant shelter in the town of Ixtepec, in Mexico's Oaxaca state, said Los Zetas had been merciless with migrants.

"Los Zetas control the trafficking of persons," he said. "They are crueler and kill more easily. . . . They are voracious. They ask for more and more and more money."

Even with an apparent drop in the numbers of migrants moving through Mexico, people smuggling is a huge business.

A U.N. report last year titled "The Globalization of Crime" estimated that Mexican smugglers rake in $6.6 billion annually from the 3 million Latin Americans who are taken across the southern U.S. border each year. Two weeks ago, Mexico's National Institute of Migration said that 6 out of 10 migrants paid traffickers to help them cross the U.S. border, while 43 percent used them to traverse Mexico as well.

While such estimates routinely are disputed, officials acknowledge that drug gangs have found a new revenue source in human trafficking. Mercedes Gomez Mont, the top immigration official in Chiapas state, which borders Guatemala, cited criminal investigations by the Mexican Attorney General's Office for her declaration that while "organized crime derives its greatest income from drug trafficking . . . in second place is human trafficking."

The ascendancy of Los Zetas in migrant smuggling, formerly the preserve of relatively small independent operators known as "coyotes" who smuggled groups of 20 or fewer migrants north, has transformed the business.

Mexican officials report regularly finding tractor-trailer trucks loaded with as many as 250 migrants in their holds. The heavily armed drivers, who travel with escort vehicles, make payoffs at police and immigration checkpoints.

Two such tractor-trailers were detained at a checkpoint May 17 near the Chiapas state capital of Tuxtla Gutierrez. X-ray equipment revealed the ghostly outlines of human cargo, and when officials opened the holds they found 513 people from El Salvador, Ecuador, China, Japan, Guatemala, India, Nepal, Honduras and the Dominican Republic — a United Nations gathering of migrants.

 

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