The witness, Guzman’s former right-hand man Alex Cifuentes,
said the hit on the dealer was never completed, according to the New York Times
and other media outlets covering the trial. Cifuentes, a Colombian, provided no
details of who in the motorcycle club he contacted.
Sgt. Brenda Winpenny, of the anti-gang Combined Forces
Special Enforcement Unit, said Wednesday that the testimony about a link
between Canadian Hells Angels and Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel is not startling news
to law enforcement.
“It is no surprise that this information is coming to light,
as the arms of the Hells Angels, especially Canadian Hells Angels, are
far-reaching locally, nationally, and internationally,” Winpenny said. “The
scope of their criminal involvement in the drug trade and other ventures is
global and, as we’ve seen time and time again, there is almost always violence
associated to it.”
In his 2018 book Hunting El Chapo, former U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration agent Andrew Hogan described Guzman’s deep links to
Canada and B.C. in particular.
Hogan said Sinaloa cocaine would be moved across the Arizona
border and up to the Washington-B.C. border “where the loads would be thrown on
private helicopters. The birds would jump the border and drop the coke out
among the tall lodgepole pines of British Columbia.”
In this Jan. 19, 2017 photo, authorities escort Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, center, from a plane to a waiting caravan of SUVs at Long Island MacArthur Airport, in Ronkonkoma, N.Y.
“Chapo’s men had connections with sophisticated Iranian
organized-crime gangs in Canada,” Hogan wrote. “A network of outlaw bikers —
primarily Hells Angels — were also moving his cocaine overland and selling it
to retail dealers throughout the country.”
Hogan also said he and the other officers working on the
special task force to capture Guzman “were caught off guard by his deep
infiltration of Canada.”
He noted that Guzman had a young Sinaloa man set up as a
college student in Vancouver in about 2009 “to run his drug distribution and
money collection throughout Canada.”
The Vancouver Sun reported on some of Guzman’s cartel
connections in B.C. in 2014. His cartel contacts in Metro Vancouver were
dropping off hockey bags stuffed with hundreds of thousands of dollars destined
for Guzman’s U.S. bank accounts.
One of the B.C. men later convicted in
California in the Sinaloa case was connected to Montreal’s West End gang and
some B.C. Hells Angels, according to court documents obtained at the time.
Former RCMP Supt. Pat Fogarty said Wednesday that the Hells
Angels had “a continuous working relationship” with other Canadian organized
crime groups and with Mexican and other cartels.
Through their connections, the groups “facilitated the
transport, distribution and financial requirements for cocaine distribution in
Canada,” said Fogarty, now CEO of the Fathom Research Group.
Hells Angels spokesman Rick Ciarniello did not respond to a
request for a comment on the testimony at the Guzman trial.
SOURCE: Vancouver Sun