High seas Mafia


By Lucy-Claire Saunders


Organized crime groups and outlawed motorcycle gangs have infiltrated Canada’s West Coast fishery as a high-seas washing machine for money laundering, according to a new report released by Australian crime experts.


Growing evidence suggests that Canada’s Pacific fishing fleet is also being used to facilitate other criminal activities, including the transport of drugs and illegal firearms by outlawed biker gangs and former Soviet Union crime syndicates, according to the National Study of Crime in the Australian Fishing Industry.


The report, commissioned by the Australian Institute of Criminology, focuses primarly on criminal activity in Australia, but highlights Canada as a major player in fishing-related organized crime.


A review of RCMP files over the past 10 years reveals an established pattern of organized criminal groups using fishing vessels to conduct illicit activities.

 

In 2002, RCMP officers discovered 49 kilograms of cocaine allegedly stowed by Hells Angels in a Canadian fishing vessel.

"Case information and intelligence indicate that pleasure crafts and fishing boats remain a preferred means of transportation," says an RCMP report stemming from the seizure.


In 2003, the RCMP found hundreds of kilograms of cocaine coming into Canada on fishing boats. In it’s annual report, the RCMP stated: "This trend departs from previous years when the preferred smuggling method involved the use of marine containers."


In 2004, Douglas Cowan, a Department of Fisheries and Oceans officer in Salmon Arm told an independent regulatory panel called the Harvest Planning Committee that the "fish black market is tied closely with the drug trade . . . It is well documented within our agency that those people are trading drugs for fish or fish for drugs."


While highly profitable, drugs are only one part of the equation. As fish resources are depleted, the price for certain species continues to skyrocket, creating an extremely lucrative and corruptible market, especially in Asia.


The threatened northern Abalone - a $1 million a year industry on the West Coast before the fishery was closed in 1990 due to illegal poaching – still fetches high-stakes dollars on the plates of Asian restaurants.


"Organized crime groups are involved in anything that will make them money," said Constable Annie Linteau, an RCMP spokesperson. "If it’s lucrative, they can and they will do what it takes."


While abalone is the only species on the British Columbia coast with no harvesting allowed whatsoever, the poaching problem remains.


As recently as 2006, fisheries officers apprehended three individuals for illegally possessing 1,120 kilograms of Northern abalone, numbering an estimated 11,000 mollusks – the largest amount of Northern abalone ever seized in B.C.


"Illegal criminal activity have brought some fishing to a standstill, including Canada’s abalone industry," says the Australian report.


Depending on the type of fishing restrictions, different species are easier to poach and exchange hands in complicated networks of criminality.


Black cod, or sablefish, for example, is regulated by quotas instead of open fishing days. As a result, poachers can pillage as much as they want and unload the excess in the dark of night, says Joy Thorkelson, of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers’ Union.


Pacific sablefish is one of the most valuable commercial fish species in the North Pacific. Approximately 80 per cent of of the Canadian sablefish is sold to Japanese markets, with the rest sold in Hong Kong and throughout North America.


In 2003, Hung Shek Wong, the vice president of Western Canada Seafood Merchants and Processors Association, was fined $10,000 for illegally possessing and selling sablefish to restaurants, friends and markets in Metro Vancouver.


Detecting illegal poaching in Pacific waters has become a top priority for enforcement officials and conservationists.


To scan the more than four-million-square-kilometer expanse of the North Pacific, thought to be the location of most illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, Canada’s Air Force relies on its CP-140 Aurora maritime patrol aircraft.


Together DFO officials and their U.S. counterparts patrol the deep seas on Auroras loaded with advanced avionics, forward-looking radar and infra-red cameras. Although they’ve never been used on illegal poachers before, Auroras can carry torpedoes, mines, rockets and bombs.


Since 1993, 41 vessels conducting illegal drift net salmon fishing operations – using nets that sweep the ocean taking everything in their path, including sea mammals - have been spotted, of which 16 were boarded.


Robert Martinolich, who has been involved in drift net enforcement since 1990 as a DFO officer, says that while officials don’t know what happens to the illegal catches of drift-net boats that escape apprehension, it is believed that the fish are taken to Asian countries, packaged and "laundered" through legal markets.


Martinolich now chairs the enforcement committee of the five-nation North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission (NPAFC), which promotes the conservation of salmon and tries to stop drift-net fishing.


Martinolich suggests that either aerial patrols are getting better at finding drift-net boats, or the growing demand for seafoods and higher seafood prices may be tempting more commercial fishers to cast the illegal nets.


Last year, the Indonesian flagged vessel Rong Seng 828 was engaged in illegal drift net fishing for salmon in international waters off Canada’s West Coast. It is still unclear how the foreign perpetrators will be brought to justice.


"It has been claimed that in Canada prosecuting lawyers are not especially experienced, effective, or predictable in obtaining convictions related to fisheries crime," states the 122-page Australian report. "Even where there is a successful prosecution, there may be reluctance to impose as severe penalties, such as license suspensions and seizures of fishing equipment, to deprive fishers and those dependent upon them of an economic livelihood."


Fines and community service are easily absorbed as a cost of doing illegal business on the North Pacific, experts concur.


Currently black market prices for Abalone run as high as $110 per kilo and Shark finning rakes in over $1 billion each year. Both fish dishes are extremely popular in Asia, where the demand is increasing as earning power improves.


As B.C. strengthens its economic and cultural ties to Asia, it is unclear how this new relationship will effect the policies and policing of the waters of the Asia Pacific.


Last year, businessmen cheered when a deep water port opened in Prince Rupert because it would shave off travel time. So did criminals.

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