Front Burner - A gambler, cartels and a high-profile arrest inside the RCMP

Episode Date: December 7, 2020

It’s been more than a year since Cameron Ortis, the former director-general of the RCMP’s National Intelligence Coordination Centre, was arrested and charged under Canada’s Security of Information Act. The Fifth Estate’s Bob McKeown discusses the bizarre chain of events that led to Ortis’s arrest, including the vandalism of the graves of a high-stakes gambler’s parents.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. So think back to a little over a year ago now, back to September of 2019, when this alarming story broke. An arrest that's shaken not only the RCMP, but the entire intelligence community to its core. Security experts tell us it could be the biggest breach of national security in Canadian history.

A top intelligence official, the Director General of the RCMP's National Intelligence Coordination Centre, arrested and charged under Canada's Security of Information Act, accused of obtaining and distributing official secrets. Tonight, the Fifth Estate airs their investigation into the bizarre chain of events that led to the arrest of one of the highest-ranking civilians in the RCMP. Bob McEwen has the story. This is FrontBurner. Hi, Bob.

How you doing? Hi, Jamie. I'm fine. So before we get into this crazy story of how he actually came to be arrested, could you tell me a bit about Cameron Ortiz himself? Who is he? It's surprising we don't know at this point because, as you pointed out, it's over a year now that we've been, you know, had reason to know who he is. The headlines came back in September and October 2019. And I guess because of the kind of story it is, it's a story about official secrets and classified information that we just haven't seen as much of him as you'd expect with a story of this importance. Cameron Ortis was born and raised in Abbotsford, B.C., the son of a Mennonite pastor and his family.

He was a stellar student all the way through. We've called this show the smartest guy in the room, and that's what he was and probably still is, whatever room he's in in the correctional institute. still is, whatever room he's in in the Correctional Institute. He went all the way through school, got his PhD from UBC in political science. And the subject of his thesis was the internet, specifically the dark web, and transnational crime. He kind of lived in his own world in some ways. And it was a world that we only dimly could see as his professors. What Cameron was seeing all the way through that period was some of the darker sides of the Internet, how it was used by organized crime. And this was back in the early 2000s when that very topic was exploding as the universal challenge for law enforcement. And he really was somebody who was ahead of his time.

It makes him 15 years ahead of his time. The dark side is something now we sort of understand. Cameron was there 15 years before the rest of us. Wow. So that's who he was. He was the best and the brightest. And I understand he was seen at the RCMP where he was employed eventually as a kind of golden boy, right? Like he rose through the ranks quite quickly. For all of those reasons. Yes, that's true. He was taken under the wing of Bob Paulson,

who was then the commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They worked out at the gym together. They drank together, it is said by people who are around. He was considered one of Bob's boys and he burned his way up the fast track. In 2007, he was hired. In 2013, the RCMP invented its NIC, the National Intelligence Communication Center. And in 2016, Cameron Ortis was made the director general, the first time a civilian had ever been in that position in Canada's intelligence clearinghouse. And to get to this very high position, would he have been closely scrutinized throughout that rise? Well, you certainly would think so. In terms of his credentials, he obviously had them. But in looking into this, it's clear that in a way he was given the benefit of the doubt.

is given the benefit of the doubt. We spoke actually to a wonderful person named Dr. Ursula Wilder, which is a name right out of a James Bond movie. And she is the chief clinical psychologist for the Central Intelligence Agency. Her specialty is who spies and leaks and why. In terms of protecting ourselves from espionage by insiders, a key protection is to screen them out before they even become employees. To this day, our understanding is Cameron Ortis has never had a lie detector test. Wow. Which is unusual. And we put that to Dr. Ursula Wilder. And she was astounded. She said, when you're in the CIA.

She said, when you're in the CIA... The more accesses you get, the more knowledge you have, the more deep your responsibilities are, the more scrutiny you undergo. It's a catalyst, not a disincentive. I can only assume, but this is hypothetical for me, that if somebody goes up in the ranks and gets less scrutinized, that person would know that. somebody goes up in the ranks and gets less scrutinized, that person would know that. And if that person is vulnerable personality-wise to considering espionage, then that would be a time where they might see themselves as more safely able to seek a customer and engage in espionage. Right. It's interesting. I know that you spoke to some of his former colleagues. And what were their impressions of him? Well, there are two camps. There are those who see Cam still as the best and the brightest, who are totally befuddled. Everybody's befuddled

as to how this could have happened. And my initial impression of Cam was that he was, you know, a tremendously gifted and intelligent person. I mean, he was just that kind of person you could tell. However, there are those people who also now say that he – well, there's a lawsuit by three of his former analysts. They're all intelligence analysts who say that as soon as he became the director general, morale plummeted, that he harassed them, that he abused them. I know you also spoke to a former colleague who said that while he was incredibly smart. One of the difficulties that I and some of my colleagues had with Cameron is that we didn't see a whole lot of humility. Right. Yeah. Not only was he the smartest guy in the room, but he knew it.

And that apparently came across in his relations with many of the people he worked with. But the thought that he might be a traitor had really never crossed my mind. All right, so Cameron Ortiz, he ultimately is charged with some of the most serious charges someone in his position could face. He's in jail now awaiting trial, and he's looking at decades in prison if he's found guilty. And yet so much of this case, so much of what he's actually accused of doing is shrouded in mystery. So I'm hoping today you can take me through the chain of events that we know that led to his arrest. And as we mentioned at the top, it is wild. So let's wind back to where this unraveling begins with this high stakes

gambler who refers to himself as Robin Hood 702, 702 being this Las Vegas area code. And he meets this wealthy businessman, a former college football player named Owen Hansen, who makes him an offer he can't refuse. And tell me about that offer. Yeah, R.J. Cipriani is Robin Hood's real name. His Robin Hood Association is that he has founded a charity in Las Vegas where he uses the winnings or some of the winnings of his blackjack career to fund needy families in the Las Vegas area. Robin Hood 702 treats them to an all expense paid trip to Vegas. Meantime, he hits the blackjack table to try to win the money that the family owes people.

You have been chosen. I'm Robin Hood. I'm going to fly in Vegas. So he got a call out of the blue, essentially, from Owen Hansen, who is a big-time drug trafficker. Owen Hansen dealt cocaine mostly in Canada, Australia, and the US, hundreds of kilos of cocaine every year. And Hansen approached him and said, I understand you have this charity. I want to help. So here's an offer. I'm going to give you a million and a half dollars. You gamble with it. Whatever you win, you keep for your charity. You give me my original million and a half dollars back. And I let him know that gambling is not a guaranteed science, that the risk is very high, that I'm

not going to win. And he didn't care. No, no, I heard about you. I know you're good. It's okay. It doesn't matter. So RJ goes ahead, gambles the first million and a half dollars. And this is all in Australia, by the way. The two of them happen to coincide and meet in Australia. So he's at the Star Casino in Sydney. And he actually not only gets back the million and a half, he gets another $150,000, $175,000 on top of that. Right. So it's like a success. It's worked.

Exactly. But he wouldn't meet with me. And it was, I'm like, dude, I got your money. So I thought that was a little weird that he couldn't make time to meet with me to give him his million and a half dollars back. So then at one point, he says, listen, I'll get the money back in the States. I go to the States a lot. I'll see you there. And just to be clear, RJ Cipriani, he doesn't know at the time that he's dealing with this big time coke dealer, right? No, he thinks he's a businessman who's got charitable instincts.

I figured he had to be a billionaire or a billionaire's son for him to just hand me, you know, a million and a half dollars. Exactly. He doesn't know exactly who he is. So almost immediately thereafter, after the first deal is concluded successfully, he gets another call from Owen Hansen who says, I want to do that again. When I checked into my suite, I got a knock on the door and it was Owen Hansen and he had two suitcases, giant suitcases full of money. And I said, how much is there? And there was two and a half million dollars.

And this next time, right, Hansen starts to take a different tone, right? Yeah, exactly. He becomes threatening. At some point, he even said, look, we know where you live. We know where your wife is. We know what she's wearing today. And he made me think that, OK, this is really not what I want to do. Well, now Cipriani, his antennae are up.

His red lights are going off because he suspects that he's being used to launder Owen Hansen's money. And at some point I said to him, you know, I don't think I want to do this. And he said, no, I think you're going to do it. So he goes ahead and he tries to lose the money. God had directed me through my whole life. And apparently God realized that if I did this a second time, there's no way out. So I didn't win. He thinks that's the fastest way he can get rid of Owen Hansen.

And he does lose the two and a half million. I wasn't panicked until I literally does lose the two and a half million. I wasn't panicked until I literally blew the full two and a half million. That's when I went, what am I going to do? Hanson becomes very nasty and very threatening. And for literally a couple of years afterwards, he is threatening the life of R.J. Cipriani. He knows where they live. And he literally is fearful for his life. Can you give me an example of one of the crazier threats? They range from a video, a video of people beheading someone who owes them money, the goriest thing R.J. says that he's ever seen, to Hanson hiring a private investigator and former backup singer for Grace Slick and Jefferson

Airplane, by the way, a guy named Dano Hanks. He calls me out of the blue. I'd never heard of him before. He says, I understand you do locates and background checks. To go to the Cipriani family burial plot outside Philadelphia and deface the tombstone, the family tombstone. And he says, can you do Photoshop? And I go, yeah, but not real well. I'm not a master of Photoshop. He says, well, can you put me in the picture

next to the tombstone? I said, yeah, if we got a similar background, we can do that. We get there and it gets real creepy. He goes to the trunk of his car. He pulls out a shovel and a Mexican wrestler mask and he puts it on and I'm going, oh yeah. He says, can you put Cipriani's name on the tombstone with his date of birth and then the date

of death just put the words soon right and so I know this threat the defacing of the tombstone was like the last straw yeah Cipriani. And you're going to have the balls to go there and desecrate my mother and father's grave? No way. And it sort of inspires him or pushes him to go to the FBI and this leads to the arrest of Owen Hansen, the big drug dealer guy, and he's charged with smuggling hundreds of kilos of cocaine in Canada, Australia, and the U.S. And on him, police find six encrypted cell phones. And this is bringing us one step closer to Cameron Ortiz's eventual arrest. These encrypted cell phones are made by a Vancouver-based company called Phantom Secure,

headed by a Canadian man named Vincent Ramos. And Bob, what is the deal with these phones? Right. Well, if Cameron Ortis is the savant in the dark web and crime, Vincent Ramos of Richmond, B.C. is the savant in secure encrypted cell phones. I'm Vince Ramos. I'm from Vancouver, B.C. I have a background in the telecom mobile phone industry. He and his company, Phantom Secure, cornered the market in the world for these encrypted phones. And what they were really were BlackBerry smartphones with a lot of the stuff inside gutted, taken out. So the camera, the voice recorder, the internet were all taken out

and replaced by encrypted messaging system so that messages could be sent via Phantom Secure's servers in Panama and Hong Kong. And not even law enforcement could decrypt these messages. They couldn't crack the code. As far as we were concerned, it was something that we really wanted to get involved with, take those handsets out of the hands of the criminal elements to ensure that law enforcement was back on a level playing field. Vincent Ramos marketed them, at least at the outset, it seemed, to businessmen who were international travelers and wanted to protect their business secrets. But it became hugely

popular with criminal organizations. And do we have a sense of what kind of criminals are using these phones? Yeah, well, we know that at least two of the deals that Vincent Ramos did were with the Sinaloa cartel from Mexico, El Chapo's organization, his drug cartel, and the Australian bikers who are also drug distributors in Australia. And it turns out, Owen Hansen. And that was the tipping point where the FBI and the RCMP started looking at Vincent Ramos. And that ultimately led them to Cameron Orris. I'm going to go. Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix.

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Okay, so let's pick up there. So we've got the arrest of Owen Hansen, the FBI, as you mentioned, along with Canadian and Australian authorities, they start investigating Phantom Secure. In 2018, Vincent Ramos is arrested just across the border from British Columbia. And what did police find when they search a computer that they'd seized? So remember, the FBI was the first to get onto this. But because Phantom Secure was based in British Columbia, they alerted the RCMP. So it became a collaborative undercover operation between the FBI, the federal police in Australia, and the Mounties. And they were scouring phantom secure computers, of course. And in one of them, they found an email, an anonymous email to Vincent Ramos, offering essentially official secrets, official Canadian secrets, and specifying,

giving him an example of the kind of secrets they would have access to or they would give to him. And the example was an active investigation by the Maudis into Vincent Ramos. In other words, at the same time as this investigation was going on, someone was offering material from it to the person who was being investigated, Ramos. Well, it took about two years for investigators to track this down. But when they did, the trail led to the office of the director general of the National Intelligence Communications Center at RCMP headquarters in Ottawa. In other words, to Cameron Ortis. I just want to pause here for a second to just appreciate how crazy the story is, right?

Like this tale that starts with this gambler and this coke dealer and then involves these encrypted cell phones that the Sinaloa cartel are using, you know, then gets traced back to a senior intelligence officer in the RCMP who's offering information, allegedly, to the guy that owns the cell phone company who is being investigated by the RCMP. It is just, it's crazy. It's crazy. Not just a senior, the senior intelligence official in the Mounties. But yeah, it is really beyond any credulity. I've never heard of anything like this before. And so you mentioned, you know, this internal and intelligence communities who worked with Mr. Ortiz. to leak information. There are charges that he did leak information. And it seems like,

and correct me if I'm wrong here, this could go beyond his alleged interaction with this one guy, with Ramos, right? And so is it clear that we actually even know the full extent of what and who he's being accused of being involved with here? No, we certainly don't. The public and the media certainly do not know that. We have seen, the Fifth State has seen some documents in this area that give us a bit more context. We've seen documents that show that we're not talking about frivolous stuff here. We're talking about, although we can't be specific, we're talking about information that is at the heart of Canadian security and even sovereignty. So there is that obviously. But beyond that, consider Canada's international partners. We're part of the Five Eyes Alliance in international security and that's Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain. And that's Canada, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain. Now, by definition, the purpose of the five I's is to share intelligence, right?

So you can imagine what the reaction has been among our partners internationally. Right. What else could have been compromised or potentially was compromised here? Will we ever know, Bob, the extent of this? The nature of this case is that so much of the basics of it are classified. Yeah. Well, we're obviously hoping that the trial, which is at some unspecified time in the next year or two, will inform us about that. But the fact is that it's inevitable that much of the key evidence, if not all of it, is going to be classified information, classified material or official secrets, which may not, may never be made public even in court. So, you know, I think it's fair to say that in every spy case, in every intelligence and espionage matter, motivation is the key issue. Why? Why did that person do that?

And, you know, we've been hoping that when the trial takes place, whether it's in 2021 or 2022, we'll find out. or 2022, we'll find out. Because of this being fraught with secrets, we may never find out what the answer to the key question is, and the key question is why. All right. Well, Bob, I really do hope that if and when you have an update on this, you will come back on and share it with us.

Thank you so much for this chat today. We really appreciate it. You have my word on that, Jimmy. Okay, so before we go today, some record-breaking coronavirus numbers were reported in Canada this weekend. Ontario reported a high of 1,924 cases on Sunday. On Saturday, Quebec cracked more than 2,000 cases for the first time. Alberta also reported a record high on Saturday with 1,879 new cases. But there is some positive news on the COVID front. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine

has been greenlit in the UK for emergency use and as we mentioned on Friday it reportedly could receive regulatory approval here in Canada as soon as this coming week. On Sunday my colleague Rosemary Barton spoke with BioNTech executive Sean Merritt who said that doses of the vaccine have already been produced and reserved for Canada, and that the vaccine could be delivered here very quickly after its approval. So if I use the UK as an example, we got approval at 1am in the morning. We approved releases of vaccine and shipped it within 24 hours. That's all for today. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner, and we'll talk to you tomorrow.