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Dec 31,2006 - Jan7,2006 |
The rise of the White Collar Mobster
Part 9 - Canada now a haven for money-laundering activities
By Antonio Nicaso
Originally Published: 2001-06-24
Once upon a time in Canada there was the Mafia enterprise. Many organizations were managed on a mom-and-pop basis. There was a boss giving orders and a swarm of picciotti ready to carry them out. Activities were linked to well-delineated areas: drug trafficking, extortion, gambling.
Money-laundering was done using crude methods: revenues were reinvested in restoration, trade or the construction industry. There were few if any external contacts.
"Nowadays things have changed. Many organizations are now drug trading, rather than peddling, but more than that they tend to establish ventures with other groups," explains Sergeant Pietro Poletti, of the Criminal Intelligence Service of Canada. "This implies less of a territorial and more of a financial dimension. Language is no longer a barrier, and more and more often investigators find situations that once were unthinkable, like a criminal partnership in illicit activities, strategic alliances, not organic connections, that rise and dissolve in a brief span of time."
The spearheads of this new trend are the Sicilian and the Calabrian Mafias, in addition to the Russian Mob, Colombian cartels, Chinese Triads and Biker gangs. Often Native gangs get involved in operations, especially when located on reserves straddling the U.S.-Canada border, ideal buffers in eluding customs controls.
The most important cities in the Mafia geography remain Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
Toronto, which until a short time ago was described as a "New York on Valium", is today a metropolis where at least 18 different criminal organizations can be counted. Luckily, there are no mob wars among them. The only exception was a feud in the early Nineties between Vietnamese and Chinese gangs over control of certain areas.
The stronger organizations are those of the 'ndrangheta and La Cosa Nostra, but also those based on the Republics of the former Soviet Union, the Chinese Triads, the Big Circle Boys, the Colombian cartels and the Mexican cartels, with a recent strong increase in the latter.
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