Front Burner - El Chapo's Canadian connections

Episode Date: January 25, 2019

One of the world's most notorious drug lords, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, is on trial in New York and a star witness just revealed a lot about Chapo's Canadian operation. The National Post's Brian Fitzpatrick explains what court documents have shown.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. Poisson. For about two months now, one of the world's most notorious drug lords has been on trial in New York, Joaquin Guzman, aka El Chapo. He was a billionaire and cartel boss. He stands

accused of ordering murders and running one of the world's most profitable and deadly drug syndicates. And a star witness just took the stand. He was Chapo's former right-hand man, Alex Cifuentes Vila, though he's mostly just known as Alex. Well, Alex, he's turned on Chapo and is testifying against him. And on the stand, he's giving away lots of details about how Guzman's empire worked. One of those bombshells came last week when Alex talked extensively about how El Chapo and the Sinaloa cartel managed to smuggle a lot of drugs, I mean a lot of drugs, into Canada. Tens of millions of dollars in cocaine, heroin, and meth. Today I'm speaking with Brian Fitzpatrick from the National Post. He's got the story of how Alex, the mafia, and a Canadian real estate agent

helped facilitate a multi-billion dollar drug empire. That's coming up on FrontBurner. Hey Brian. Jamie, thanks for having me. So Alex took the stand and he was asked about Canada. How much is El Chapo actually involved in Canada? Alex Ivoente's villa, he comes from a pretty notorious Colombian crime family that El Chapo had allegedly worked for and with for years.

He said he first met El Chapo in late 2007 and ended up living with him in the mountains. In terms of what volume of drugs they were involved in, Alex said on the stand that they were making dozens of millions from their Canadian operation. Dozens of millions of dollars or shipping dozens of millions of pounds of drugs? Making dozens of millions of dollars from shipping dozens of millions of pounds of drugs? Making dozens of millions of dollars from shipping thousands of kilos of drugs.

So Alex, this guy from this very prominent Colombian drug family, was he left in charge of the Canada operation? Yeah, he was asked some pretty pointed questions with regard to Canada and he made the admission that basically El Chapo, from about 2008 onwards, everything on that side of things was left to him in terms of sales distribution and then also ensuring that that money from the sale of the drugs came back. Alex says he traveled to Canada many times with a fake ID. Did he elaborate on that at all? Yeah, the fake IDs and the fake bank cards and the fake bank accounts, that was stuff that all came out under cross-examination from El Chapo's lawyer. And he admitted, yeah, he had held all of those while living in Mexico. He had traveled to Canada himself.

It wasn't just something that he was watching from afar. He was actually, you know, taking the trouble, it seems, if you can believe the testimony of Anarco to the letter of the law. He was saying that, yeah, he was up and down to Canada a bit. And, you know, he knew the lay of the law, he was saying that, yeah, he was up and down to Canada a bit, and, you know, he knew the lay of the land here. It's really interesting to me as well that this guy who is El Chapo's right-hand man was so involved in the Canadian operation. I just wouldn't have thought that that would have been such a priority for them. Well, it stands to reason, I suppose, for anyone of an entrepreneurial spirit,

as we clearly know Guzman was. Cocaine in particular would get more expensive the further north it came. Cocaine gets exponentially more expensive the further north you can bring it. So it might start off, they might buy it for a few thousand in Colombia. By the time that gets to Honduras, Guatemala, it's worth about 10,000 US. By the time it will get to the US itself, Chicago, you might be talking about 30,000 US to the mid 30,000s. And then when it gets to somewhere like Vancouver, Toronto, the price might have shot up another 10,000. So from an economic standpoint, it was just a bit of a no brainer. More bang for your buck. Yeah. I mean, Alex said in court that they had been working roots since 2008. It's safe bet to say they'd been operating long before that. And probably just there was a different henchman in charge rather than Alex. From a monetary standpoint, it was definitely a no-brainer.

Did Alex talk about how they specifically got the drugs from the US into Canada? How did that work? Yeah, that was one of the more eye-popping things that came out. I mean, this is a trial that has... So many eye-popping things going on in it. It's like drinking from a fire hose, trying to keep up with all of the crazy revelations. So when cocaine, for example, would leave Colombia, that would be brought out from the chore in a semi-submersible or an actual submarine. A submarine? Yeah, yeah. Well, narcos have kind of become famous for their submarine skills.

So a submarine would take it to a point offshore where it'd be met by another vessel, say it might be a fishing vessel or whatever. From there, it would travel up, primarily if they were using the Pacific route, it would travel up the coast. It might reach Honduras, Guatemala, and then on into Mexico, where the Sinaloa cartel had connections in these West Coast ports.

They would, you know, organize drop-offs for there. Once they got it into Mexico, they might keep it in a safe house. In the Sinaloa state capital of Culiacán, with a school just across the street, is one of five Chapo Guzman safe houses. We're going inside to take a look. From Mexico, they'll put it across the border in a tunnel. Sandbags, hundreds of them, it's piled floor to ceiling, sandbags filled with dirt and soil. This is the overflow soil that was

dug out of the tunnel. But it could go across in a plane. It could be as simple as somebody driving across in a car. At a legal as simple as somebody driving across in a car. At a legal checkpoint, they might use a U.S. citizen from, say, El Paso to pass back south and then pass back north with drugs. Any number of ways. Alex outlined in court that once it got to the U.S. then, from there it was kind of sent to a few hubs, L.A., Phoenix, Chicago. Mostly, he said, by car vehicles or by tractor trailer, by trucks, commercial trucks. So, yeah, any number of ways. But probably the most startling thing that made people sit up and take notice was that he said, well, we used to also just take it by helicopter and then take it east once it was in Vancouver by road.

So they would take it by helicopter from the United States to Vancouver? Yeah. Were they getting into Canada any other way? They were. He also talks about using the Pacific route by ship. You know, there's been talk forever about them using the Atlantic coast. I did read something about renting houses on Lake Champlain. Tell me more about that. That was another thing that came out on the stand is that a lot of this trial has focused on they might get a narco on the stand and they'll play him a tape. Do you recognize the people on this tape? And he'll say, yes, that's El Chapo. And so in court, they played Alex a tape of El Chapo talking to another narco. And he said, do you recognize the names on the tape?'s like yeah and he said what are they talking about he says they're talking about renting houses on each side of a border lake

a lake that straddles the border between the u.s and canada each side would have a dock for docking boats and they would run cocaine from the u.s into canada by water from rented house a to rented house b and then that they would run the cash back the other way once they had distributed those drugs to their contacts in Canada. People nearly got a shock because it was so simple. So simple. Yeah, yeah. It's like running beer back and forth. Yeah, but as I said, their plans can just run from the completely mind-blowing to the completely mundane. Submarines versus a boat crossing. Submarines versus a boat versus even people walking across the border with stuff in their pockets.

I mean, you don't like anything, anything at all. Why is Alex divulging all of this information on the stand right now in this trial in Brooklyn? So like everybody else, almost, who's taking the stand from an ARCO perspective, he's looking to cut a deal for his own ends. You know, you'll notice when he's given his testimony, he's well teed up in advance by the prosecutors. He knows the cases they're going to talk about. He has certain buzzwords that they know that they want to go through in detail. He's been

told, I suppose, if he gives his full cooperation, that he might have a shot at getting a bit of reduction in his own sentence. And that was one of the things that El Chapo's, if you look through the transcripts, El Chapo's lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, I mean, he's no slouch himself. We are looking forward desperately to come into this case and fight for Joaquin Guzman. He was, you know, attacking Alex. He was like, well, you know, aren't you only doing this to get your own reduction in sentence, which of course is true. That was one of the only times that Alex kind of clammed up.

You know, he didn't seem to want to talk to Nickman half as much as he wanted to talk to the prosecutor, as you can imagine. But yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing. It's nearly a game to them at this stage. I mean, they're making signals to each other as they're exiting and entering the courtroom. Who's making signals to each other? Well, a few of them have made, you know, certain signals to El Chapo as they left the room. And whether those are to be construed as a negative or a positive signal, nobody even knows.

I mean, you couldn't even begin to guess what they're thinking, but there's no doubt that it's almost nearly accepted at this stage that if you're caught, you're almost guaranteed to squeal and the next guy will squeal on you. At this point, there are a few Canadians who have been linked to El Chapo. On the stand, Alex named his biggest partner in Canada, and it was pretty surprising. So tell me who Stephen Tello is. Stephen Tello's 39. He's worked in real estate in Toronto. He attended Concordia.

Not an un-high-profile job, real estate? Yeah, no. According to Canadian court documents I've seen, he worked in real estate in Toronto. He's attended Concordia University, but didn't graduate. Born and raised in Montreal, so spent a lot of time between Toronto and Montreal, and also Kitchener, according to court documents I've seen. What was Stephen Tello's job in Canada? It was slightly left open to interpretation. He described Tello as his Canadian worker delivering cocaine and other drugs

to Canadian wholesalers. Then he'd collect the proceeds and make sure that this cash, you know, was sent back either to Mexico or even further south to Colombia and Ecuador to buy more drugs so that more drugs could be sent north. Tello's job, as far as the testimony from Alex made it out to be, was essentially a point man in Canada to whom large consignments of cocaine will be sent. So essentially, from Alex's perspective, he wants to be able to have people in Canada that he can drop large quantities of drugs off to. He doesn't really care where the drugs go from there, but he just wants his money.

Essentially. Vancouver was the point place and drugs would be sent east from there. It looks like they used a variety of gangs, among them the Hells Angels, but I would venture a guess that a lot of the people who were actually moving cocaine, it was kind of on a need-to-know basis, so they may not have even at street level known where it came from themselves. So how did that relationship between Alex and Stephen Tello, the real estate agent, how did it unfold? It seems to have unfolded pretty well to begin with. He talked about in court how they were making dozens of millions, to use his words, from Canada.

Everything seemed to be going, you know, pretty swimmingly. At a certain point, he said that El Chapo seemed to get a bit paranoid and was told by other workers that he had in Canada that Tello might have been, you know, stealing some of his cash. So from that point on, it started to kind of go a bit pear-shaped. How did it go pear-shaped? There's two people involved. There's Tello and then there's a secretary for Guzman that also worked for Alex. And she had also done a bit of travel to Toronto as well by the account of Alex. The two things that kind of went wrong, El Chapo suspected that Tello was stealing from him, but then he also got upset with the secretary

about the fact that he asked her to bribe a military general in Mexico that she knew because she also ran a modeling agency. And when she went to the general, the general, according to Alex, said that he wasn't interested in the deal because he hated El Chapo. So when the secretary came back to El Chapo and said, look, this guy won't take the deal, El Chapo. So when the secretary came back to El Chapo and said,

look, this guy won't take the deal, El Chapo didn't believe her. And he said, look, we're going to get rid of her and we're going to get rid of this Canadian guy at the same time. So Alex... Why did he just suddenly want to get rid of the Stephen Tello at the same time? Well, this was around January 2013. And I suppose you're dealing with the whims of a psychopath, basically. And he basically just wanted the secretary done away with because she had been the bearer of bad news and he didn't believe her that the general wouldn't take the 10 million bribe. And then it was kind of like a two for one thing. And the next thing, Alex Sifuentes had gone from a relative period of stability. I mean, this girl also worked as a secretary for him to, okay, you have to kill these two people.

So Stephen Tello is alive. So what happened? Yeah, and that was when things really got interesting. Alex is caught in the situation, according to his own telling that he had to kill two people. And he said he tried initially to convince Stephen Tello to come down to Mexico so he could kill him in Mexico. And it's unclear whether Tello kind of smelled a rat at that stage, but the way Alex described it in court, he just wouldn't come down. Then the plan B was that,

okay, he was going to involve his own wife, Alex's own wife, and that she would go to Canada to get someone to kill Stephen Tello there. So Alex's wife would go to Canada to hire a hitman to kill Stephen Tello. Yeah. So Alex's wife was summoned to a meeting with Alex and El Chapo to get this done in Canada. And he didn't offer exact details on why this was or when this was going to happen or how it was going to happen, except for the fact that he was in the process of setting up meetings with the Hells Angels. The Sinaloa cartel was going to get the Hells Angels to put a hit out on a guy that they thought was screwing them. sounds. That's exactly what he said. I mean, you would think they'd be able to do this type of dirty work themselves, but it does look like his plan A was kind of thwarted and this was the plan B. And he said he was in the process of setting up meetings. Luckily for Stephen Tello, Alex himself was actually arrested kind of not too long after

that anyway. Alex was arrested before these plans could move forward. But Stephen Tello was also sitting in a Canadian jail. Yeah, so Alex was arrested and then El Chapo was arrested before these plans could move forward. But Stephen Tello was also sitting in a Canadian jail. Yeah, so Alex was arrested and then El Chapo was arrested a few months after. So from that standpoint, Tello was quite lucky. The third thing he had going in his favour was that in April 2015, he was arrested in this giant Nova Scotia RCMP sting called Operation Harrington. The east coast of Canada is very much a point of entry for drugs coming up to Canada. RCMP seized cash, guns and more than 250 kilograms of cocaine.

15 people were arrested in Canada, including four Nova Scotians. It wasn't discussed as a Sinaloa cartel-based conspiracy by any means, but it did involve eight separate conspiracies to import drugs into Canada from the US, Guyana, Brazil, Colombia, and elsewhere. And so he actually ended up getting a 15-year sentence from this Operation Harrington that, you know, probably in a roundabout way could even have saved his life, whether he kind of knew it or not. Wow, fascinating to think about how that all came down and when it came down. Many people connected with El Chafo's Canadian operation are out of commission now. El Chafo is on trial. Alex has flipped. Stephen Tello is in jail.

They had such a big operation, though. Brian, what effect does this have on the flow of drugs into Canada? In terms of the bare stats, I mean, everything you could point to would say that, you know, things haven't really slowed in iota. I mean, you know, the thing about the dismally failed war on drugs, I suppose you could call it, is the fact that it hasn't really worked to date. I mean, they take out one kingpin and simply replace by another. I mean, even in Mexico, El Chapo's second in command, El Mayo Zambada, he's, for all intents and purposes,

presumed to be in control. His sons have kind of stepped in there. And although there's probably a lot more internecine kind of fighting going on than there was when El Chapo was there. So you're kind of chopping off the head of the snake just to be replaced by another.

Well, that seems like a real rosy place to leave this conversation. Brian, thank you so much. No problem at all. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Thanks. Stephen Tello is now facing an indictment in the United States. The allegation is that he trafficked cocaine with El Chapo for more than five years.

allegation is that he trafficked cocaine with El Chapo for more than five years. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger.

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