The Underworld Podcast - The Billion Dollar Dealer Who Linked Hell's Angels, Mafia Families, Cartels, and Native American Smugglers

Episode Date: June 2, 2021

Jimmy Cournoyer brought a billion dollars of weed into New York City and the east coast through an organization that brought together the Rizzuto and Bonnano Italian Mafia families, Native American Smugglers, Hell's Angels, and the Sinaloa Cartel into one massive money-laundering, weed-smuggling, cocaine-distributing organization. And he did it all before he was 30 years old while dating a lingerie model, being besties with top MMA star George St. Pierre, and partying with Leonardo Dicaprio. With a lovely tangential story about the time Danny made a documentary about the owner of a butcher shop who ended up being Mikey "The Butcher" Virtuouso, Bonnano crime family soldier and maker of the best sandwiches in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. It's 2007 January, and a woman walks into the Long Island office of the DEA with a storytell. Seems she's pretty pissed off at her ex-boyfriend, who also happens to be the father of her child. She's got the baby with her, and I don't know what her former man did, but it must have been pretty bad because she's straight up snitching on him, not even to the local cops, but to the DEA. She keeps going on and on about how he's this big-time weed dealer. He's this major player in the industry in Queens.

I mean, she's giving them the hard sell that they need to do something about this guy and right now. Back then, this actually would have been a big deal. I mean, it's not like now where you can buy stocks and weed companies on Robin Hood, right? I remember back then there was a delivery service that was actually like a big new thing. And there used to be a huge one called Cartoon Network. and it was a big deal that you could call a phone number and someone would show up at your apartment in an hour with like all sorts of weed.

It wasn't like now where every two-bit dealer has like a fleet of Uber's and lifts delivering all over the city. I mean, you can seriously Google it. Google Cartoon Network. And you'll see some funny articles from those years about weed delivery services that were all only in New York instead of right now where it's pretty much everywhere. Anyway, this scorned ex-girlfriend is going on and on

until finally the feds are like, fine. Okay, we'll look into this guy, just leave us alone. And I actually wonder how long it took or how convincing it had to be because I imagine the feds, kind of like reporters, but more so times a million, are always dealing with crackpots of all types and reckless exaggerators coming into them with stories. And it's tough because you don't want to investigate every lunatic fringe story, but you don't want to be the guy who was dismissive of some huge, huge brick. When I used to do street reporting in New York, you had these situations where you'd go to the scene of some crime and start talking to people. They'd be telling you stories of how there was a gun battle and both sides had 8Ks. And it ended up being one guy who fired like two shots with a dusty revolver. Or one time some guy was trying to convince me the bodega guy was selling guns out of his shop to make money for Al Qaeda, which is like, no, you've just been smoking bath salts.

But at the same time, you've got to pay attention since you don't want to miss that big one. These feds almost missed it. But this woman would eventually lead to the biggest pot dealer in New York City history. A man who was able to bring together Hells Angels, the Bonano Crime Family, the Rosuto crime family in Montreal, Native American smugglers, and the Sinaloa Cartel, an extremely efficient billion-dollar organization that spanned the entire U.S. in Canada before he was 35 years old. This is a story of Jimmy Cornwall. Welcome to another episode of the Underworld podcast. Yeah, we're back. It's been a while.

Yeah, it's been, it's been a long time, and we're sorry to leave you guys. We're actually working at a deal with podcast one. It's a podcast network. And they're going to help us out. And we're going to be able to do episodes for you guys every single week moving forward. So we will never leave you alone again. Under contract once a week. We got to do them.

We got to do them. It can't be like before when, you know, Sean would spend five days on like a crazy emphetamine binge and some Berlin nightclub. And we'd have to skip it for a week and just kind of show up. Maybe put it up on Thursday. Like we got to put it up every week now. Yeah, no excuse me up and then go on the bender. But yeah.

Yeah, we'll do them ahead of time so we don't have to cut back on your bender schedule. Yeah. And you were saying he wanted to kick this episode off with a little monologue around Israel, Palestine, right? Yeah, no, we're not going to do that. Jimmy Cornwalli, they called him the pop playboy, the man who brought a billion dollars worth of weed into New York City, drove a $2 million car. This guy, I'm going to call him Jimmy because his last name. I still don't know if I'm pronouncing it right. How, I mean, that name is crazy.

Y, Y, A. Yeah. French, French Canadians, man. Anyway, he really takes the cake in terms of organization structure when it comes to putting together a criminal organization. It's like something out of a bad action movie or like a grand theft auto plot. I think what's even more impressive about this guy is that he was able to do this all as a French Canadian, which, as some you might know, it's just a massive disadvantage of getting someone

to like you. Yeah. Did you not see the film, Mesrine? Wasn't he like a French-Canadian gangster or saying? Did he go and fight with the Quebec? I don't know. I don't know. That was a pretty cool gangster movie, actually.

Yeah, there's some really good stuff. I mean, I love Montreal. I'm just kidding about all that. I'd family there and spent a lot of time there. And it's really just, it's a wild city, an exciting city too. I keep hearing about how great that place is. Like, I wasn't that into Toronto. I don't know.

I don't know. I really want to go there, yeah. Montreal is a fun time. Go in the summer. Montreal is a fun time. Anyway, a lot of this stuff was covered by the reporters at the Montreal Gazette, the Toronto star. There's reporter Alan Fuhr, I think. I can't be Fuera.

F-U-E-U-E-R from the New York Times, who did a great story on it. And actually, journalist Bob Halloran was supposed to have a book coming out about Jimmy. There's like a cover on Amazon and everything. But it never came out and his publisher wouldn't tell me why. So I thought that was kind of interesting. Jimmy was born in 1979 to a somewhat wealthy, family in the suburbs of Montreal. His dad was in the construction industry

and real estate business and Jimmy was a black belt and karate at age 10, who was also a big time hockey player, a well-adjusted charming kid. But his whole world changes when he's 16. His father deserts the family in 1996. He just leaves a note for his children and his wife.

The construction business was doing well for a while but fallen on hard times. His mom had a dry cleaning business and that collapsed. And after his dad leaves, his mom had to go on welfare, and they had to move into his uncle's apartment. And his mom would later say that his dad leaving just really affected Jimmy and changed everything. She also had a hard time dealing with everything. Apparently attempted suicide a few times.

Jimmy's 17 then. And, you know, this all, it drops a weight on him. And he drops at his school. He was working a bunch of crappy jobs to help support the family. And that's when he starts selling weed to provide for his mom and his mom. brother. This is just like nailing the Hollywood plot points here. Either that or like an M&M single. Yeah. I mean, they're like the fact that there's not a movie right now is, is, uh, is disappointing. Yeah. At 18, he gets arrested for the first time for growing weed with his brother.

Two years later, he's caught selling weed on a Native American reservation. I guess Native Canadian, you know, they call my kids natives in Canada. Yeah. Yeah, First Nations. That time he's got $50,000 on and the arrest is made by native police. Canada back then, not just the Montreal area, but British Columbia too, was just like huge in weed. The Canadian government was far more relaxed about it. I remember hearing statistics back then, like one out of every 10 houses in Vancouver was a grow house, maybe even something higher than that. But that's like one of those facts that goes around when you're stoned in college. So I'm not sure if I can verifyably say that, so look it up. Yeah, and my college it was this friend of a friend tale about someone who got high on

acid and locked a dwarf in a wardrobe. So I want to know if anyone else has heard that story. Maybe I was just super, super high. I have not. I think we say little people now, Sean. Do we say little people? I'm really sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll let it slide. Anyway, I'd say that to say this, right? He doesn't really do any jail time because it's Canada. But a year later, he's caught again, this time for trying to sell 10,000 hicks of ecstasy for $65,000. But the guy he's trying to sell to is an undercover officer. And like, bro, at some point, if you're caught three times in like four years, you got to realize you're just, you're not good at this, you know? Yeah. But maybe that's why he eventually ended up becoming the biggest weed dealer of all time because like, well, at least in New York, he didn't let a stupid thing like doubts or being bad at something stop him.

I mean, there's like a lesson there about perseverance, kids. Yeah. This time, though, he can't avoid jail time. But before he's sentenced, he starts setting up what would become his master's. massive operation. He also starts working with a one-legged French Canadian with tribal tattoos and frosted tips, a guy by the name of Patrick Pice, I think, a major trafficker. Despite his hair, this guy is a connector too. I think it's because of his hair. I say bring back Frosted Tips, like JT, Scotty-2-Hottie. This is when, this is when celebs are truly cool, I reckon.

You kids don't know this, but like Frosted Tips really had a moment in the late 90s and early 2000s. I'm not saying I ever did. I definitely didn't. But I wouldn't be surprised if Sean did. Yeah. Yeah. Not surprised at all. Yeah. So together, they set up transport with the Hells Angels. See, what Jimmy and Patrick have done is started setting up grow houses and buying from grow ops in Western Canada near Vancouver. I'm not sure it was whether there or Northern California came first, but, you know, there's a similar reputation on the West Coast there for weed growth. And these guys are getting the Hells Angels to transport it to the Montreal area. where they stashed in warehouses.

Jimmy realizes there's a lot more money to be made in selling good weed in the New York City area and the northeast in general and eventual east coast of America. There's just not that much good weed there. And massive quantities aren't really grown there. And you can take over the market and charge a premium price if you're getting all that good shit from the west coast. So they get the weed from Western Canada to those Montreal stash houses. And then they're transporting it to New York.

And how are they doing that? by linking up with Native American smugglers whose reservations straddled the border, the Mohawk reservations, I believe. Moving contraband over Native American reservations that sort of straddle these borders is huge and was already established. So is this stuff still going on now? Like how come it's easier to run stuff through reservations and other places? I don't know if it's still going on now.

I would assume so. I mean, back then it was guns, cigarettes, you know, all that good stuff. Because there's no real feds out there, right? It's out of their jurisdiction. So these smugglers that were working the reservations, they were already experienced in one way another. They're using snowmobiles in the winter and speedboats in the summer to move the product over the border, where it's then taken to Brooklyn and Staten Island to be divided up and then distributed to bigger wholesale type dealers. These smaller dealers then sell it to the smaller dealers and so on and so on until they reach the guy in your high school who claims he was connected.

At some point, he meets Mario Racine, the brother of a lingerie model, he starts dating. He becomes his main guy in the East Coast, helping Jimmy set up distribution in New York, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. He's starting to move 200-pound shipments of sour diesel to distributors up and down to East Coast. I mean, some real big boys in the weed game. Soon, they're up to 1,000 pounds a week. All right, so, like, looking behind the curtain here, guys, like, we do show each other the scripts before we go through these shows. when I saw this, I really wanted to find out how much money this guy was making. I reckon the price for a pound of sour diesel was about two and a half grand per pound.

I don't know if that's like an up to legal price or whatever. But either way, that guy is making some serious money by this point. I know when I was in high school and college around this time, quarter pounds of like Goodweed was going for like $1,000. and that was probably like one of the lowest rungs of the latter and people would generally charge like $50 for an eighth of weed but uh i mean at that level like i don't even know what the what the wholesale price is um it's always weird when they try to figure that out right when the feds will be like oh this amount was worth this much this many millions of dollars and you're wondering like

are they pricing it at what it was actually being sold that for there yeah or they're going at like the gram price on the street. So I mean, you know, it all depends who's doing it. Anyway, we should probably not reveal too much more information about our younger days. Things are going well, but that's not to say he didn't have problems at times, right? In 2004, one of his big New York distributors ripped off a load and he wasn't able to pay the Hells Angels for their transport fee. And, you know, they weren't too happy about that. It was a $1.2 million load. And the distributor just like refused to pay and then just stole it. And Jimmy had to make it right with the Hells Angels debt collectors.

Also around this time, Jimmy, who, like, you know, loves fast cars, and at one point owns a $2 million dollar Bugatti, which is the fastest street legal car, and it goes 400 kilometers per hour. The BBC calls it the greatest car ever made. I think it's called the Bogotivaron or something like that.

Veyron? Yeah, I mean, that is a sitting duck for the BBC. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. He crashes his other car, which is a Porsche, and kills a passenger. He's going to get prison time for this, and it's added to his previous exes he busts. So now he's got to serve 3.5 years. Things start falling apart a bit with the organization which much that felt like balancing a house of cards, right? Because you've got all these different

criminal organizations. They're hard people to work with. But also in jail is when he starts making some new connections. And he swears to himself that he's never going to be touching the product again. Jimmy gets out and he goes right back to building it back better than ever. He has to live in a halfway house as part of his parole. So he's having secret meetings in subway tunnels, making sure everything is being put back together. He takes a job driving an old woman around to a doctor's appointment so he can sneak out to see his partners. That's pretty good.

Also, his parole officers totally dialing that one in. I mean, I think the Canadian just doesn't, like, isn't as stringent as the U.S. system. Yeah. Is any? So now he's going to do right, right? He's getting organized. He's going to get linked up with some major players.

We're missing one major ingredient in the operation, though. And that's what to do with tens of millions. of dollars in cash that they're collecting in New York, which is like it's not easy to move that much cash, right? Some of it is trucked back up into Canada, but a large amount of it continues its journey on the black market. That money is sent by chartered private jet to Los Angeles. There, a mover and shaker in the Montreal Mafia, which is the Rizuto family, uses it to buy cocaine wholesale from the Sinaloa cartel from where it's shipped back up to Montreal and then distributed and sold by the Rizuto family. And the Rizuto family like that,

they're no joke. At one point, they allegedly grew more powerful than any of the five families in New York and are doing business with, you know, the real Italian mafiososos in Calabria and Sicily, like they're international. They're also known themselves for organizing a sort of alliance than Montreal underworlds, where all the organized crime groups and gangs of different races and other groups and whatnot work together. Oh, that's nice. Even the drug cartels in multicultural and welcoming in Canada. Yeah, it's a beautiful thing. The risuto's roast of prominence in the Montreal underworld. well, had Rizudo did, when he gunned down three Bonano family members who had gone rogue and solidified his ties with a then-Banano family crime boss, who those guys were going to make a move on.

Rizudo was also known for his ability to just work with everything, just a real slick operator, similar to Jimmy. He ended up eventually getting locked up for those murders. War came to Montreal and his family fell apart. Both his son and his father were killed. And eventually he came home from prison and tried to just reassert power, taking out enemies and just starting a bigger war. There's actually a terrible Netflix series about them, starring one of the guys from Sons of Anarchy. But, I mean, we're definitely going to do an episode on the Montreal, Rizudo family at some point. But back to Jimmy, who's now telling people he's backed by the Rizuto family.

And members of the Rizuto organization are acting as his drivers, his bodyguards, and enforcers. And they're good people to have on your side. So, yeah, we got weed grown in Western Canada, transports the stash houses in Montreal by the Hells Angels, then taken to New York City by Native American smugglers, sold by some big players, the money sent to California to be used to buy cocaine from the Sinaloa cartel to send to Montreal for the Rizudo family. I mean, it is a pretty wild setup, and just Jimmy did the whole thing. The kid was clearly a prodigy.

He's also allegedly running guns across the U.S. Canada border for the Rizzutals and the Hells Angels, but I mean, I never saw proof of that. I mean, why not, you know? This is like the polar effect, right? We had that bonus episode with Evan Ratliff. And like, it's like the opposite way that you'd expect to Mafia, Mafia, myo side to go. The guy doesn't leverage his underworld cred to go clean.

He just like spreads into more and more and more crazy stuff. Yeah, I mean, at some point you got to figure, though, like the drug money is the best money you're going to get while I move into something else that's also going to attract a lot of attention. Bonus episodes, though, yeah, we should mention the Patreon is still going. I just did an episode with Jake Hanrahan on a popular front about some of his reporting on Moroccan deep web crime lords and kingpins and things like that. And I think Sean, yeah, Somali pirates, all that, all that good stuff.

So yeah, Patreon.com slash the on the world podcast. By 2007, Jimmy is all the way up again. Everything is running as planned. But at the same time, this woman in Long Island is snitching on her ex and the feds are getting involved. Meanwhile, there's another DEA unit going after his partner, Mario, for money long for the cartel. And undercover is getting him to use the weed profits to buy cocaine for him.

I mean, they say they're going after him for money laundering, but does that count as money laundering? Like, it's not, like you can trade your weed money for Coke and then claim the Coke money as legal transactions, right? So I'm not exactly sure how,

like, how that works. It's not like the DEA to mess about in legal gray areas, is it? No, when they, when they have their site set on you, like, you know, there's no,

there's no fucking about. So, yeah, the feds are keeping an eye on, on Mario. And eventually, they get one of the Native American smugglers, and they get him to flip. So he sets up a deal where he's taking some of the organizations money to L.A. to meet the contact for the Rizzuto family that gets it to go buy the Coke.

And from this New York Times article I mentioned earlier, which is chock full of good information, and I used a lot. The quote is, when undercover agents in Los Angeles called that number, they reached a man named Alessandro Tullone. Mr. Touloni, court paper, say, was an Italian-born associate of the Rizzudos, who also served as, Jimmy's manager for West Coast operations. He ran a lucrative money laundering business out west, using dirty cash to buy cocaine

from the Sinola drug cartel while maintaining his sideline as a vendor of high-end hair care products. Let me repeat that line. Maintaining his sideline as a vendor of high-end hair care products. A former salesman at a Montreal men shop, Mr. Touloni had been charged a decade earlier with threatening to kill the owner of a rival clothing store. in an attempt to cow the competition. Cal,

co, however you want to say it. But that is just, I mean, that is, you get Peewee, Peewee Herman, right? Didn't he do that role in blow?

I mean, that is, like that's perfect, right? I mean, this, this is, this is like a Nick Cage movie.

And I feel like this Touloney guy, I don't know. Who would he, who the hell would he be in this movie? Just, it's these characters, man. God.

At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light, and I was transported to, another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows,

and they were all free. The truth is ours. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 NX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials. No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. Some follow the noise.

Bloomberg follows the money. behind every headline is a bottom line. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. Perfect. But he is not the smartest guy. He gets told by the feds who end up searching his apartment and finding 49 bricks of cocaine. He sounds like he's got frosted tips too. He might have.

I mean, that was the other guy, but who knows at this point if you work in a hair salon? I feel like the likelihood it has 50-50. So things are just, you know, they're sort of collapsing all around Jimmy and his organization now. Also around them, some minor player, this weed dealer in Long Island, which, by the way, like never trust a weed dealer

on a Long Island. They're all assholes. Every single we dealer in Long Island, definitely an asshole, and it's an amateur move for a pro like Jimmy. This guy is relatively small time, but he's got some money to launder and he has a connect to Jimmy. So he actually gets in contact with Jimmy and Jimmy sets him up with some weed trafficker who had also worked with that Mario guy. It's such a tangled web, right? Anyway, this is apparently a one-off deal.

He sends some woman to a money drop off. The feds have been following the Long Island guy and they pounce on her. Well, I mean, not just yet. They follow her as she takes 200 grand back to our apartment and then just walks her dog. And then she goes back to her apartment. The weed trafficker comes over and the feds rate it. They find all sorts of contraband, you know, an additional 500 can cash and a ledger with some info about a big distributor in Staten Island who was doing $4 million worth of deals. The ledger just refers to the dealer's name of Staten Island with, it's your Staten Island guy that hangs out with people not from Staten Island.

Everyone just calls you Staten Island anyway. It's like a common nickname. And the ledger, like I get it. I'm a list maker too. I like making notes, analog, right? But it's going to bite you, right? Like use codes or cryptographs or some shit, I don't know, blockchain or something like that. I could have, you could have found the first useful thing to do blockchain with.

Well, the first thing doesn't make me want to throw up in my fucking drink. But yeah. Hey, man, that's just because you're not an investor right now. I mean, my shit coins are doing numbers. Although this is going to air like a week from now, so I'll probably broke by then. But this story, this story, the ledger reminds me this guy actually used to know. Mikey the butcher virtuoso. I'm in. I'm in. I'm hooked.

This is a true story. So he ran a deli in my old neighborhood like a decade and a half ago on Graham Ave, East Williamsburg, real old school Italian dude. He worked there with a son. And I lived down the block for a few years and got really friendly with them because they made just incredible sandwiches

at great meat. I made a documentary about him for a school project that was literally just about the butcher shop and the changing neighborhood. You know, he was this old school Italian butcher and all these hipsters were moving in. And the sandwiches were like, You can still go on Yelp, like incredible sandwiches.

Anyway, it turns out he was a Bonano family soldier, like, for real. And I had no idea. He gets busted by the feds like two years after I made this doc. And the papers, like, they're actually making fun of him because he had a rolodex with a list of all the people he was extorting or loan sharking, including the then-governor New Jersey's limo driver, who he shook down in the walk and freezer. I think the New York Post called him a meathead, which, you know, it's kind of disrespectful to my man, Mike. Here's a quote from a post article, quote, the meticulously detailed

rolladexes and address books listed contact information for members and associates of organized crime, according to the feds. He didn't even bother to code or otherwise try to disguise his entries. For example, a slip of paper within one rolodex contained a handwritten entry, Kapo Lucchese, and the names Johnny Sideburn, Sorrello, and Glenn the wheel, Guadano, Guadano, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Frank wrote to a judge. Both men are convicted felons associated with the Lokees organized crime family, and John Sorrella, also known as Johnny Sideburns, is a captain in that family. Now the feds plan to use the rolodexes and address books to prove that Virtuoso is an ex-con

with a kind of mobbed-up friends who make him a serious danger to the community. So he ended up getting convicted but got out after a short stint on compassionate release because he was dying of pancreator of cancer. Honestly, still the best sandwiches I've ever had, and I swear to God, he was just, he was a real sweetheart, man. I really liked the dude. He was a good guy. Well, to me.

I mean, also, we should start like an underworld gangster name Hall of Fame, because Mikey the butcher virtuoso and Johnny Sideburns are going straight in there. I think I still have that documentary somewhere. Shout out to my partner, Emily Johnson at the time. I might, like, I might put that on the Patreon. on if there's interest on the YouTube channel or something, because it's, I mean, he's a charmer, you know, and the meat, let me tell you, like, I,

real, like, old school Italian hoagy, I got to stop because I'm going to keep going on. Oh, man, you did not get good sandwiches in Berlin. I really missed that. No, what was I talking? Oh, yeah. Everything is starting to be, like, the scene in Goodfellas, right, where he's making sauce and the helicopter is over his head.

You know what I'm talking about. So the ledger, there's a name there, the Staten Island guy, and he's doing huge weed deals. And Staten Island turns out to be a banana. family associate named Mikey Venizelos. And for some reason, this guy dresses like a hipster nerd. But he also owned a strip club called Jaguars in Brooklyn. And unlike Sean, I don't frequent every strip club in the city, so I can't say that I've been

there. You're just wasting your life, man. His house gets raided. They find guns and drugs and money in another ledger and moment in time, a Blackberry. Where there's a message with Mikey threatening somebody who might have cooperated with the feds against Jimmy saying the guy better hope they never find out. He said anything almost in like a kind way, I guess, because he also mentions in this message that Jimmy kept $2 million in a fund for Hitman, which kind of seems like an exaggeration.

Yeah, I don't know what I'm feeling worse about, like the exaggeration or the fact he's got a Blackberry. Or maybe that's just because it's Canadian, I don't know. I mean, how much does a New York hitman actually cost? This is the Staten Island guy who had the BlackBerry. Jimmy had that hit fun. Like $2 million is, I mean, like the prices I've always seen. quoted for these things in indictments or things like that is always like $10,000 or $20,000,

maybe even less. So, like, this whole thing kind of seems like it is exaggerated. And then we'll get to that in a little bit. You know, you go back through these old articles and you kind of see how these stories and legends get shaped. Like, lots of articles ran with this $2 million slush fund for Hitman. And, like, the only thing I saw mention of it was this text message this guy Mike sent. And the prosecutor made sure to mention it in press releases and court statements and whatnot.

And maybe there was some proof given in the trial. But I think all we really have is this text message from a Staten Island guy trying to scare someone he did deals with into not cooperating with the feds. I don't even think Jimmy got accused of murdering anyone at the trial. Oh, and here's the text, by the way. This is a quote, you, just you, just got to hope they never found out. You just got to hope they never find out you said a word. Seriously, bro, I know he has like two mill away just to pay guys to handle that once he's. is sentenced. Ah, come on. I mean, that is flimsy as fuck. I mean, what? Yeah, I don't know. Nah.

I mean, if you're a prosecutor, you're going to run with it, right? Anyway, we're in 2011, 2012 now. Years since that woman dropped a dime on Iraq's in the Long Island DA office. The guy wasn't Jimmy or close to Jimmy, but it was some high-level dealer in Queens, and the feds flipped him within a year to go after his supplier. The walls are officially closed in, and Jimmy and a whole bunch of his co-conspirators are going to go down. The feds get an indictment on Jimmy, but he's already flying on a 6 a.m. flight for Montreal to Cancun. Some reports say for a vacation, but I figure he's probably on the run. Like, if you're a multi-millionaire, you're not taking a 6 a.m. flight. No way. That's a last-minute move. When he lands in Mexico,

he gets nabbed at the airport by Mexican police because there's an interpolar West warrant notification. They hold them, then try to get him on a flight back to America, but he fights them off so hard he gets taken off the flight. Then they have to shackle him and put a a hoodie on him and put him on a different flight back to the States. He even calls the Canadian embassy at one point saying he's being kidnapped. And during his trial, his lawyer will actually make the case that he was illegally renditioned to the U.S. But he ends up pleading guilty before the real trial even starts. And there's just way too many witnesses and evidence. Canadian journalist Adrian Humphreys theorized that because he wasn't in some sort of organized crime

faction, like the mafia, biker gang, whatever you want to say, there was less loyalty. and he said he stopped counting at 14 cooperating witnesses. I mean, you can count past 14, mate. Just like do a bunch of lines in your notepad. I think it was a figure of speech to say that there were a lot of people that were just, you know, talking. More than 100 defendants would eventually plead guilty in all the investigations against Jimmy's operation. When all is said and done, they say he brought in 100,000 kilos of marijuana, 83 kilos of Coke and tens of thousands of e-pills.

which is like, you know, a pretty good summer for Sean. Yeah, yeah. That's, that's me and the Moldovan guys down the casino for about eight hours. I'm just going to do whatever I can in this podcast to make sure you can't get a regular job after it. Don't worry about that. There's no chance. Yeah, yeah. I mean, long, long fast.

Jimmy pleads guilty to avoid a life sentence without parole. And also with the hopes of being sent back to Canada, where they have a much more lenient parole system. There's a treaty that Canadian serving sentences in the U.S. can apply to serve the rest of their sentence in Canada, where the prison system is just a whole lot easier to deal with. Jimmy was facing a minimum of 20 years in the U.S. But if that's your sentence in Canada, you can get out after like seven years or 12 years. Whereas in the U.S. federal sentencing, they usually end up doing like 85% of their time, which if you get 10, you damn near do 9.

That's a deep cut. So U.S. prosecutors weren't through with the idea of him getting out so soon, and they asked the judge to give him 30 years. So if he got sent back to Canada, he would still have to serve some serious time. I wanted to make a quick point, actually, because I was looking at some stats online, and Canada's recidivism, I hate that word,

recidivism rate, like the number of people to go through... You got it, you got it. Yeah, I got it, yeah. A number of people to go through the criminal justice and, like, reoffend, is like 37%. And in the US, it's between 52 and 67, from what I could see. So it's kind of like... You know, maybe they're doing something right in Canada.

I don't know. Maybe by having lower sentences, you stop people doing more crimes. But I guess saying that again, Jimmy, I mean, he pretty much made his entire life off the back of this jail time that he did at start. So maybe he just disproves the whole shit that I just said on my soapbox. I mean, maybe the US time will be good for him. Maybe he'll learn something. Something new. He seems like he's kind of the guy who could be teaching stuff.

He's entrepreneurial. During the... Yeah, I mean, the guy knows what he was doing. During the trial, Jimmy becomes immediate darling of sorts. You know, the story of him bringing together all these different crime groups, the hard partying, the $2 million car, the model girlfriend, and they start calling him the pop playboy. There's some big deal thing about him partying with Leonardo DiCaprio and Ibiza once.

So the headline becomes like pop playboy who parties with Leo, even though maybe they were just at the same place at the same time and there was a photo of them together. I mean, who knows. George St. Pierre, who at the time was probably the greatest MMA fighter in the world and the pride of French Canadians, even writes a letter to the judge pleading for leniency. He actually got in a little bit of trouble for it.

He said some stuff like we had the time of our life. Jimmy became like a brother to me. We traveled together. We trained together. We were going to restaurants, clubs, and having a lot of fun. Jimmy's a very loyal friend who I respect very much. I've never judged him. Human relationships, same passions, sport, finn, blah, blah, blah, blah,

all stuff like that. You know, and then the sort of papers called them out. I actually knew these two or three Canadian friends. French drug dealers. I did like years ago, like 15 years ago, I was at like a Muay camp in Thailand. It's a long story. I'm terrible at Muay. Don't get the wrong idea. But there were these guys there.

It was like the guy who ran it and his two enforcers. They were very friendly guys, very French-Canadian. And they were there taking classes as well. I don't know. It was a weird scene. Jimmy ends up getting sentenced 27 years. Which, you know, I guess it was a compromise between

20 and 30 years. I mean, I didn't think this story needed a MMA fighter, but I'm not upset that there is one in there. I mean, the story is fantastic. I don't know why it's not a movie. It's got, it's got, I'm sure the rights are out there somewhere, you know? Yeah. I think the New York Times guys saw the rights and the Howering book.

Something's weird about it. Maybe there's a law, isn't there a law about profiting off your own, your own story? Because I think the Howling book was co-written with Jimmy. So that would be my guess for why it never came out, but I'm not sure. In 2021, Jimmy's name again made the news when a recovering drug out. sued him under something called the Drug Dealer Liability Act, which apparently entitles drug users to seek civil damages against people selling illegal substances. So the woman, her name is Consuelo Barberta, is seeking five million damages.

I mean, dude, if this works, like, I'm going to sue too, because the hours of productivity I lost in college or, you know, lost now decades later because my brain just doesn't work the same for how many times, you know, I've misplaced my keys, all that. Like, I could have gone to law school. Oh, man. There's a lawsuit in there somewhere. That guy that was selling me DMT at uni,

that he cost me a few thousand brain cells right there on the one go. Right. I want to hunt him down. Right? Yeah. Anyway, like, you know, I love a nice bullshit lawsuit as much as the next guy, but they're just a gift to newspapers and headline writers,

but come on. You know, this woman, of course, she was self-represented. The judge said he told her that one of the main problems with her lawsuits that she hadn't provided any evidence, that she had any contact with Jimmy or even knows anything about him except what she read of his conviction in the newspaper. And this is a quote from the woman. I was addicted to marijuana for almost 20 years,

having smoked 20 pounds of marijuana before my first attempt at sobriety in 2008. Huh. Okay. Cool. As the crispy chicken sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud. And I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper?

If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect. Like, I know I'm a handful. I'm bold. I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me. And baby, I'm a whole meal. And with seven rewards, I'm just $4. Quiet, no.

Krispy, saucy, and $4? Very. Only at 711. Valley through 62326, participating stores only well supplies, lastly app for full terms. I wrote a little song to remind you, Choice Hotels, get you more of the experiences you value. The Can Be a Hotels got it all.

A rooftop bar, have a ball. Bring a date, your squad, or even your mom. Book direct at Choiceotels.com. I mean... You know, you got to take your shot. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like, in the Netflix version of this story,

she ends up falling in love with him and busting him out of jail. But, I mean, I'm just saying we're here for commissions producers as well. We can, we can do that. You don't even, you don't even need to exaggerate this story. Like, it already is, is perfect. But, yeah, Jimmy is, is still in prison. I think he's still in the U.S., actually. I just wanted to add that, like, you have deafed.

and professionally avoided his surname throughout this episode. And so I punched it into a text to speech. So I just want to see what the hell comes out of this. I'm going to see if this is interesting at all. That's not it. Jimmy Cornwallis. That's not it. Is that not it?

No. Cornwasse, yeah, I don't know, man. You know, the idea of bringing all these organizations together, I think,

is pretty, especially someone who just seems like a regular guy at first and not someone high up in another criminalization. It's a pretty masterful stroke of genius. And, you know, if he ever gets out, I bet he'll definitely have one of these YouTube shows and, you know, that all the retired mobsters who serve their time now have motivational speaking gig,

maybe he'll get on this sort of like business conference thing about, about how to connect people, how to move people together. I mean, there's a serious career there for someone like that right now. I mean, we need to do some more stories. from Canada because I feel like I don't hear a lot, but then when I do hear the stories, they're just insane. I mean, we need to do one on the Rizuos, definitely, yeah. Yeah, there's some good stuff out there, too, about various gangs out there and various factions. Yeah, we got, we got episodes coming up. Like, every week, I've got a couple

already in the pipeline, Pink Panthers, Acapulco, really interesting stuff. Sean's got some great stuff. Like, we're here now. We're in this. We will not disappoint you guys. week after week every week our lives are set you know so spread the word

we're going to have a new store up with merch that our friends at the podcast one network will be helping us run the Patreon is still going

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we're making it we're making it work we're back thanks for sticking with us Ryan Reynolds here for MintMobil. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying.

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