Step into the world of power, loyalty, and luck. I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse. With family, canoli's and spins mean everything.
Now you want to get mixed up in the family.
Business, Introducing the Godfather at champagasino dot com. Test your luck in the shadowy world at the Godfather slot. Someday I will call upon you to do a service for me. Play the Godfather now at champacasino dot com. Welcome to the Family vdW group.
No purchase necessary. I believe we're braveitted by loss.
He terms and conditions eighteen plus.
It is Ryan here and I have a question for you. What do you do when you win?
Like?
Are you at fist pumper, a wooo, a handclop or a high fiver? I kind of like the high five. But if you want to hone in on those winning moves, check out Chumback Casino at chumbacasino dot com. Choose some hundreds of social casino style games for your chance to redeem serious cash prizes. There are new game releases weekly, plus free daily bonuses, so don't wait. Start having the most fun ever. At casino dot com. You'll were going have there Edivo overby by Lost Your Conditions eighteen plus.
You are now listening to True Murder The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them. Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history.
True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zufanski. Man watching the cup on a restaurant patio was shot dead on a busy Sunday afternoon in Toronto. Another dies in a sidewalk ambush just outside a bustling college campus. Two men in a Vancouver hotel lobby are gunned down in an attack that sends an American soccer star scrambling for cover. In Mexico, a Canadian is killed at a
Nuevo verlarda coffee shop. His death barely registering, admits the terrifying death tolls of President Calderon's war on drugs and the cartel's response, while a Montreal cop is beaten within an inch of his life in a playa Del Carmen nightclub. An infamous heckler from an NBA Toronto Raptors game turns up dead in a bullet riddled car in a midtown laneway. Throughout the two thousand tens, these and other dispeparate acts of violence entered the public awareness like isolated tragedies, but
there was nothing isolated about them. In this masterly investigation, veteran journalist Peter Edwards and Louise najer E introduced listeners to the common cause of a near decade of chaos. Meet the wolf Pack, millennial age gangsters from across the spectrum of Canada's underworld, vying to fast track their way into the criminal void left by the death of Montreal godfather Beatle Rizuto. The wolf Pack sought advantage in a steady supply of cocaine from Alchapo Guzman's Sineloia cartel, among
the deadliest and most far reaching of criminal organizations. The juniors had just stepped into the big leagues. This is the rolling landscape of the wolf Pack, a brilliant examination of a time of criminal disruption and rapid adaptation. When one gang's unchecked ambition, unwittickally gave away the most hotly contested corner of the Canadian underworld without a fight. Brazen criminal disruptors or entitled upstarts looking to get rich without
paying their dues. Whatever you think of them, you'll never forget the wolf Pack. The book that we're featuring this evening is The wolf Pack, Millennial mobsters who brought chaos and the cartels to the Canadian Underworld, with my special guest, investigative journalist and author Peter Edwards. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Peter Edwards.
Well, thanks for having me.
Dan, Thank you. That's been a little while since we've last spoke. Congratulations on this book. As I had mentioned, let's talk about just initially, because we mentioned Luis Horatio Nigeria, tell us just about the the planning and the gestation of this book.
Luis worked in Wars, which is right across the border from El Paso, Texas, and he covered organized crime and so he was kind of knee deep in this stuff, and he knew twelve journalists who either were murdered or committed suicide because of attacks on them and covered this sort of thing.
So he.
Was exposed to just an extremely rough environment, sort of like a war zone, and then his life and his family's lives were in danger. He had gotten really credible threats, and so he fled up to Canada. Another journalist, Jim rank And from the Star, a nice guy who's well connected. He introduced us and so Louise and I were kind of looking for a project and then someone told me about in Quebec, how there was a group of millennials who were functioning on a high level, but they weren't
They were like an association. They weren't the normal you know, mafia or the normal bikers, and so we found that fascinating, and when we looked at them, we found that they were tightly tied to the similarA cartel down in Mexico, the guys Louise used to cover, and so we decided just to take a look at why these guys were important and how the cartel was using them.
It was.
It was like a really interesting project to work on, and then it was a chance for me to learn about Mexico and the Internet through Louise. So it was a great opportunity for me.
Were you surprised given the expertise that you have regarding organized crime in Canada and an outlawed biker gangs in Canada? Were you surprised that some of the information you were getting.
Yeah, I mean it's hard not to accept that the internet's changing things. But I'm a bit of a ladite, like I'm not the best person on a cell phone or the best person. I'm not the guy you want to fix your computer. And then once I gave a junior and once I told the junior reporter, don't worry about cell phones. You know, we don't need them. My
technical advice isn't that great. But Louise is kind of kind of the other way, and he really sees the impact of different media sources on people, and so he was pushing me to read up on it, and it all started. The lights went on, Like the guys, the new Wave, the millennials, it all starts on the Internet and geography doesn't really matter. And so but a lot of stuff that in high school I kind of laughed at,
you know, Marshall mcluan and the Global Village. I had to go back and read that and think about that because it actually made sense before. Yeah, I thought it was kind of gibberish back then, But now you know someone who's deadly serious and who's had friends murdered and who isn't choking around about it. He's saying, you know, the stuff makes sense, and it actually did make sense.
This is a crime group that functions on the Internet because of the Internet, and this is the future, like the future of organized crime is his internet based.
Yeah, well this will definitely demonstrate that, illustrate that vividly. Let's get right to the chapter. You call Zelda and Dean Michael Witchar and his You introduced this guy and he is a hit man, so this is and you also talk about the wolf Pack, So please introduce Dean Michael Witchar and Johnny Raposo and what happened in January twenty twelve and the wolf Pack.
So Char he's a hit man for the wolf Pack, and he's very proud of it. You can get someone killed for a few thousand rucks, Like it's it's not brain surgery to shoot somebody, you know, you just find the right guy, point the gun and pulled the trigger, like kind of any more on can do it. But these guys wanted something that made a splash on the Internet, and they wanted something that was like out of a video game where a spy movie. And so Richar was
their their man he he wore make up. He would had putty that he put on his face to change his features. He dressed up like a construction worker. He had a wig, and he flew in from Vancouver and he took a real roundabout route and they made a couple of trips to Toronto to scout out the area. He had a wide assortment of guns and he didn't really need them all. He just liked liked the flash of it. And his background. He wasn't This isn't some poor kid from the ghetto or some guy brought up
from some stuff housing project. This is a kind of a board kid from the suburbs who you know, too much free time and too much video game time maybe, and he and someone with an absolute lack of empathy. He was brought in to kill someone who has taken part in a drug deal with the wolf Pack, and they a lot of times with drugs. What they'll do is is have four people buying on a and that way, if the drugs are intercepted, you don't lose everything. Like if you do that four times, you're going to at
least have some drugs come through. And it's it's kind of the safer way of doing it, and so as the drugs got closer to Toronto, one of the group decided that if he got rid of Reposo, his money would go way up. And for some reason Reposo really annoyed him, and so he got with chart to kill Reposo, and they did it when a Euro Cup soccer game was on and Roposa was sitting right under the big screen.
Like they did it as theatrically as possible in a patio in a really nice area, so that he had hundreds of spectators, and it could have been done discreetly, or it could have been done without witnesses, but they actually wanted the splash of witnesses. They wanted to make a sensation on the internet. And so he walked right
up and shot him. It was interesting because the guy sitting beside him with someone who was mod connected and had a bit of a debt, and so there was the feeling that this guy might have set up Riposo, and so you'd the guy would come and you'd shoot the guy to the right of the guy in the green shirt sort of thing like he he wouldn't know your target, but you'd know, you know what the guy sitting beside him looked like and so you just shoot the guy beside him, which is kind of a chilling pot.
If you stole the wrong care that soccer game, he would have been shot maybe. But it was at an ice cream ice cream shop, Like it was a really nice sidewalk cafe where the big feature was the Italian ice cream and they just wanted to make a splash. They wanted people to notice it. And and Withchar was just thrilled. I mean he was like it was like his prom queen. I mean, he couldn't have been happier
and announcing it on the internet. And I know someone who knows with Char from behind bars and they said that Char was bragging about how because a holy put in the guy. But he this is like an absolute total lack of empathy. And and he didn't know the person he killed. And he you know, this is someone with a family and blocks from where his mother lived, and it was no problem for him to into guy's life there.
Well you include even more to this real life whore that it was Father's day. It was it was an Italian food festival for this street, little Italy food festival and this his hero. We haven't time to go into it. But his hero, his mentor, Eddie Mello, his little son who had Mellow was murdered. His son was with him. The widow, the mother of the son was there as well,
and so there was a whole family. And again, like you say, this Father's Day, they made every attempt to make this about family and not just about their grievances.
Yeah. And I got to know or talk to Hittimilo's kids, and a really really nice guy and not criminal at all.
And he.
He taught his father was murdered. And so this kid, Reposo, took him on. He became like the nice uncle. He'd drive him around. He said that he always wrote, got to ride in the front seat, that he's treated with a ton of respect when he was a weak little kid, treated really nicely, and that that Reposa tried to fill the void that that Eddie Junior felt when he lost his father. And so Reposa wasn't some terrible knocking, knuckle dragging monster.
He was.
I mean, he's on the wrong side of the law, but he tried to be nice to people that matter to him and in a lot of ways he was a good person.
Mm hmm. So what is the description that they they they get on who shot Reposo? And then and then what does the hitman which are do?
So the description was that it was a kind of a tall, gangly construction worker with a limp, and so we charge he looks like a backup player on a basketball team. Like he's a tall, skinny, intense looking guy, and and he wore a blonde wig and a construction vest and face makeup. And so he did he killed him, and then he he very quickly bragged about it on the internet. He very quickly went into pretty good privacy and told everybody that he'd done it. And the rest
of the wolf Back were just thrilled. The person who was paying his bills, who paid and he got one hundred thousand dollars for killing him, which is a huge amount for himn like, it's it's way more than you need. But these guys aren't really dealing in reality. The guy who paid for it, he joked about how they should send him to sniper school and you know, make him an even better killer.
And the.
The hit man couldn't have been couldn't have been happier. And there were all these sort of internet cheering I mean it was sort of a bizarre thing because you've got this young kid grieving for the second time, a mob murder, hitting his family, a really nice kid, so will this kid's at one of the lowest points in his life. These other idiots are are cheering away as if they, you know, just scored a big goal in the World Cup.
Like it was.
It was a really surreal type of thing. And it was all over money. I mean, there was no Reposo, wasn't some evil monster they had to slay. He was just getting a chunk of a deal that they wanted to take his shirt.
Plain this idea about the secret stash the roposal had set aside, apparently it was supposed to be untraceable. How does this turn that much more than that?
That was interesting because the a lot of times when someone's killed and try to get their money or get their drugs quickly, like they there's usually something lying around and so and there's a huge amount of ripping off. And that's the big difference with these these cartel guys. You don't rip them off like you absolutely don't, because they have literally have accountants in the in the Greater Toronto area, and they know what's what's going in and
what's going out. And they're smart guys, and it's not a bunch of guys from a bar or a bunch of kind of rough guys. These are very smart people who it's what they do for a living. And so Reposo had had scooped up some had taken some of this the drug stash, and then his friends came in and grabbed that. What that meant was that the cartel
had been ripped off. And so you've got these angry cartel guys running around and they it's not so much losing the drugs that bothers them, it's the precedent, like they don't want to be trifled with and they want they want you to be afraid of going against them, and so the they want to do things right over the top, and so if you've ripped them off at all, you're in trouble. And so it was almost revenge from
the grave for Reposo. You know, his friends stole the money that he stole, and now the Wolf facts being blamed for it. And so that set off a sort of a lot of paranoia because you have these angry cartel people running around and the people who've just done this cowardly murder on Reposo or now they're they're in the crossairs themselves.
Mm hmmm. And you're dealing with l Chapel Guzman so in the Sinaloia cartel. So what happens with this fear that they what happens with this fear with these millennials, and what happens with the revenge in mind of the cartel.
So one of the involved with the killers a guy Caputo. He he eventually went to prison as part of the of the murder of Reposo, but they he was kind of unreachable where he was in custody. That and they what the cartail did to to make a point or I mean, it doesn't improven, but but it makes pretty good sense. His brother, who was was honest, who ran
a restaurant, who wasn't a criminal. I'm sixty four years old and no criminal record, and I'd never heard of him doing bad stuff, but he was related to, you know, a very serious criminal. He was just shot to death outside of his restaurant and it looked like he was in fear because he's trying to sell his restaurant cheaply. Like he's trying to just dump the restaurant and get out of down and he didn't do it quick enough, and so I think he caught a whiff that there
would be revenge. I mean, there wouldn't he don't get the last laugh on these cartel guys. There was in Mexico there was a monument and put up to journalists who were murdered and and so, I mean, it's a nice tribute to them. And then one morning there's that someone's head like they'd beheaded someone and stuck the head at the bottom of the monument just to let them know that, you know, we're still here. There was a police raid and they went they found out who one
of the there is the Marines. They found out who one of the Marines was and went after his family, like they need to get the last word, and they will. And so even in Canada, if they feel they've been ripped off, watch out.
Yeah. Now you take us to a couple people, the wolf Pack. One of the leaders of wolf Pack is this Robbie Alcalilo, and then he lives with a person named Amarow in an apartment in Montreal. So what happens you talk about a raid in August twenty twelve. But you also talk about these guys on the run.
Yeah, that was really fascinating because Amro he's a full Patch Shells angel, so he's totally into the program. But he's from the West coast and so he started with one charter, shifted to another charter, and then went right across the country and he narrowly escaped being murdered in Colowna. There was one of his associates was killed and he's lucky he wasn't as well. He went right across the country.
He was in a condo with Al Khalil that I think was eight thousand a month, Like it was in a really nice complex that some of the Montreal Canadians live in. Grew really at high end overlooking the river, and those two shared the place. Al Khalil, who he turned twenty five while we were working on the book,
This is a very young guy. He had I think four brothers and Palestinian refugees up and basically brought up in a war zone and looking at things the way a person in a war would look at things, very very tough, and he doesn't have to be emotional about things, like he'll just do it. He ran. It's pretty bizarre, but he ran this woman's clothing store where the belts could cost ten thousand dollars like these.
Wow.
I think he pronounced a term as belts ten thousand bucks, which I don't know if I've spent ten thousand dollars on clothing him my entire life. But they would binding his belts and the guy and he ran this boutique place, and he's twenty five years old, and he also was the guy in charge of the hitman, and so his idea of money was just not from my universe, Like he's paying the hit man probably twenty times more than he needs to because he likes the sensation it makes
on the internet. And that was kind of advertising, you know, take a week back, seriously, they'll shoot you anywhere. And the running the thigh end women's clothing store sitting up hits. And then when he got in trouble, he changed his name and so his internet name became run and Hide, which was kind of a joke, and then he just took off. They eventually caught him. I think is in West Germany. But he It also showed how geography doesn't really matter for these guys, like with the hells angels
to you. Look, you look and look at a patch on their chest, and that tells you exactly where they're from. And so you know, you can South Coast Street, Oshawa, that sort of thing. These guys wolf packed. They can show up anywhere. And when that one bunch of them took off, someone showed up in Greece, someone showed up chopped up in Columbia, someone showed up in West Germany, like you could. They're they're extremely mobile, multi ethnic. It's kind of odd because they they're not racist, where a
lot of organized criminals are racist. These guys aren't. They're sort of woke. Someone called him the Woke Pack because they they actually are. They've got some good qualities. It's just that they sell drugs and murdered people indiscriminately. Like they're not racist, and they're they've got a member is in a wheelchair, like they do some things that other organized crime groups wouldn't do. But then they're absolutely ruthless and without empathy when it comes to doing business.
Now you've introduced this u a suck there. Dac and his brother had been killed Germit. But what is the connection with Amaryll and you introduce a couple of notorious gangsters, react and bacon.
Yeah, it's kind of it's kind of dizzy when you get into the Vancouver stuff, because it's almost like I'm reading the Bible, and so and so begat so, and so begat so and so, like you have all these feuds, begat another feud. We've got another feud, and so former friends are turning on friends. And the biggest thing I forgot of all of that was that at first, it's
extremely hard to get out. Like when the one big brother was killed, he had desperately wanted his little brother to get out of this stuff, and he had actually talked to a cop about trying to help my little brother get out of it. But you can't really get out because nobody's going to believe you, Like if your brother's murdered, they're going to assume you want revenge. And if you're already a murder, what's one more?
You know?
Like it it's becomes a different way of looking at things, and a lot of them who used to be friends end up his enemies. I was talking to one guy who talked about the feeling of having dinner with somebody and you're setting up his hit. And so you've got a killer waiting in the parking lot and you're eating sushi with him in a restaurant, and then you're you're texting the killer with pretty good privacy. You know he's got the blue shirt on, he's coming out in five minutes.
But you're meanwhile you're joking with the guy or splitting the tip with him on the meal. It becomes this odd world, and they it's all about alliances and associations, but none of us them, they're all just about a deal. Like they're not ethnic, they're not geographic, they're not philosophical.
It's just greed.
And so if you and I decide to become associates, you get all of my enemies. I get all of your enemies, and I might not know who all your enemies are, so I don't know who's after me now. So you there's this joke help them being chased by paranoids, Like you have a paranoid group of people who become more paranoid because they don't know anyone who smiles at them.
And if someone says love youa bro, you know three times in ten minutes, you know, dive on the floor you're in trouble, like you're probably going to get struck.
Yeah, certainly. Now you talk about the West Coast and Vancouver, but you talk about a little place. It's a tourist place and the importance of a little place on the West Coast called Inland Whetish, Columbia called Colonna. Tell us a little bit more about that.
Connecting Colonna is fascinating because it's a beautiful, beautiful place, like it's it's kind of everything you want if you if you could win a house anywhere. You know, Colona is a pretty good spot to be. And I mean a really really nice resort there, and some of the wolf pack we were staying there, like these guys really are into the luxury stuff. And one of the Wolftack guys was whenever he got stressed out, he's going for a massage like he'd be setting up someone's murder and
then needing a needing it the stressing massage. And so his Wolftack guys are all around this really really nice resort in Klona, and their enemies from a group called United Nations, which is kind of ironic, but they they track them down and open fire on them and they killed one, They almost killed the Amoro guy we were talking about, and something that it's just different from other groups. And I'm not saying that the traditional groups are, you know,
great examples of humanity all the time. But they killed a woman and paralyzed another woman, like they just opened fire on the purse that these guys were staying in, are driving in, and so there wasn't any need to isolate the victim. When you talk to the real old school guys. They one guy told me once that it takes it's an odd feeling to walk right up to the person you're going to shoot and you know, almost smell his breath and then shoot him. These guys didn't
do that. They just sprayed the car, and that's a more cowardly way of doing it, and you'll still kill them, but you'll also you know, they put one woman into a wheelchair. They killed another woman, you know, and the woman had nothing criminal. They just had kind of bad taste in friends.
M hm. So what happens next with the wolf pack.
It's odd because the model will carry on, Like with with Louise, the very bright guy who's been watching this stuff for quite a while. His thing is that they're the present and the future, and that even if you lock these guys up, this is just the way to go now. Like with the Internet, it's the safest way to do crime because I can buy drugs off you and you don't really know who I am, and I
don't really know who you are. I just have people vouch for me, or I put up money or whatever, and it's tough for police to crack because you have encrypted messaging. We only got all this information because one of the Wolfpac guys, who you know isn't the brightest guy in the block. He couldn't remember his passwords and so he left them on a sticky note, and when police went into his condo, they found them there and
they were able to tappy in. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have a book and five guys wouldn't be in prison for murder.
M let's use this as an opportunity to stop for a second to talk about our sponsor. Did you know that there are over ten million job openings but only seven point six million unemployed job seekers and this issue is being worse than due to a mismatch of employers and qualified talent. So employers are having to go above and beyond to entice people to work for them, such as offering pet insurance, or providing discount programs, offering legal services,
or even providing identity theft protection. If you can relate to any of these challenges of growing your team, then you need to try ZipRecruiter, and right now you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter dot com slash murder. ZipRecruiter uses powerful technology to find and match the right candidates up with your job. Then it proactively presents those candidates to you. The wonder ZipRecruiter has the number umber one rated hiring site in the US based on G
two ratings. Ziprecruiter's technology is so effective that four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And now you can try ZipRecruiter for free at this exclusive web address ZipRecruiter dot com slash murder. That's ZipRecruiter dot com slash m u r d er. Zip recruiter the smartest way to hire. Now, Peter, we were talking about and you were just about to introduce Nick Nero and another aspect of this fascinating tale.
So tell us about Nick Nero, and we introduced some other people named drown Jack and Flacco and all subordinates of Carnalito. So produced us to this group of people.
Nero was a bodybuilder and fairly accomplished of that. He also took a run at being a professional wrestler, and he was a steroid trafficker, but he was well well under six feet, but he got his weight up to two eighty five without much body fat, like he was really jacked up, and then he got bored with pro wrestling as well. He was part of the big armored car heist in the Niagara region and the money was
never recovered. There's a strong feeling that Nero kept a fair bit of the money and that allowed him to buy in on drug shipments. Like if you're not part of a big group, but you have a big wad of money, then people will befriend you and they'll they'll get you to invest in what they're trying to bring in. So Nero was able to almost buy his way into the game. He wasn't the most secure, modest guy in the world, and he had two ferraris. One was brag red.
He traded up in ferrari, which you kind of wonder, why do you need us faster ferrari than the or four hundred thousand dollars one. And then he basically has a very very kind of an angry, angry guy who he at one point he wanted three people killed at the same time, and they it wouldn't take too much for Nero to turn on you. He tried to get Al Khalil to have those guys killed, and Al Khalil was trying to figure out which belt sto order for
his women's clothing stores. We have these bizarre situations where one guy's talking about ten thousand dollar belts and the other guys begging him to kill three people, and they have a conversation back and forth. And then Nero is into fashion, and so at some point he kind of loses interest in the three murders and starts talking about women's belts. Some of the stuff gets bizarre. When Nero gets stressed out, he goes to Yorkville in Toronto and
get some massages. He was all stressed out. He'd hired people to put oils on them and rub them and like expensive people. And someone who went to school with him said he was dumb as a bag of hair, and that's almost unfair to the bag of hair, Like he wasn't a break that, but but but he did. He was extremely ambitious. He was like, I don't know, when I was a kid, I used to watch this thing Pinky in the brain and had this guy who's
always trying to take over the world. He was kind of like that, huge ambitions, and he tells angels wouldn't go near him, like he couldn't get into the established groups. But on the other hand, he had a lot of money and he wanted to be in with him. He ran a gym, and he ran a restaurant. He would go to there's one restaurant Nagara Falls where some of
the old mob guys would go in near it. Would come rowing in his red ferrari and people would it was almost he might as well show up with two white tigers, like it's just too much attention them, Like these guys want things nice and quiet and narrow. Nero might as well be banging on a drum. So Nero was a very very violent guy who wasn't really really part of anything until the Wolf Pact came along, and then he really got into it like he loved the
finally being part of a group. If you hit a poster child for male insecurity, you can't do much better than Nick Nero.
So talk about his associates, and then again other than this narcissistic preoccupation with things not so serious, what are they planning?
So Nero is getting in on a big drug shipment with the wolf Pack, and so they there are four of them. One of them's Reposo. For some reason, Nero really developed just this huge dislike for Reposo. It might be because Riposo probably had this natural confidence and arrogance that that Nero just didn't have. Like I think Reposo would kind of laugh laugh at Niro, snicker at Niro. Reposo had been friends with Eddie Mello, and Eddie Mello was a world class boxer, and so Reposa knew what
what tough was. Nero was, you know, banging on his chest pretending to be a pro wrestler and posing him little little bathing suits, you know, with his body oiled up like it. Wasn't a real tough guy. He was kind of kind of a cartoon version. And I think that Nero just fixated on reposo. He also wanted his wandered the share of the money, like for them in on the deal. As you get rid of one, all of a sudden, you're you go up a fair bit. And so there was that. I think there was a
lot of insecurity. I mean, at one point Niro was staying in a halfway house in Saint Catherine's and he he claimed to be broke, but he was driving a four hundred thousand dollars red sports car, and so you know,
that would suggest he did have some money somewhere. And then people around him told him he can't keep driving that Ferrari to the halfway house, and so he started driving a Denali, which which isn't bad at all, but he was whining away about, you know, a great man like Kim shouldn't have to drive an So he had very very expensive taste and huge amount of ambition, the horrible people's skills. I mean, he he sent this one poor guy down to down to Mexico to work on
the drug deals. And the guy was a para salesman who was in the middle of a divorce and desperately needed the money, and he had no skills whatsoever. And testing drugs or just I mean, it's a pretty complicated business. He had no skills in it at all. And Nero just dumped the guy down there and then turned on the guy because the guy was complaining and whining, which
I think anyone would do in that situation. I mean, he's in an extremely dangerous spot with a different langth it's not knowing what he was doing, I mean, I think, and not being well paid and being nonverbally abused by Nero, I think anyone would turn on him. At one point, someone suggested to Nero that he treats his staff better, that he was nicer to people, he'd have more loyalty,
and Nero just couldn't take that. He was kind of he wasn't the most you know, tolerant boss, kind of a rough, rough guy.
To be around. Right, you introduced this criminal mentor Scarcella, and and then the budding association with Martino Caputo which you already introduced, but also this the role of play Adel Carmen Cantcun in Mexico.
Yeah, those are really interesting. This scarce Elo one was fascinating and I mean, he'll he'll never open up to me, and he's he's out of prison, and so he had been very close to Paul Volpi, the murdered Toronto Monsters.
Kind of interesting that he wanted to do his his parole in Nick Nero's backyard, and that would kind of interesting that all of a sudden, you're not wanting to live in York region, but you're wanting to live down in Nagar region where things are kind of the wild West and where you'd have a chance to really do something and less competition. Smart guy who doesn't say much,
who has been he's a survivor. I mean his boss got murdered and he didn't which a lot of people think, you know, suggests he wasn't the most loyal guy in the world. But he was very very smart, big, big survivor. But from the old school, but seeing that the times are changing, so and really really deep into the old old moth stuff. Playa del Carmon. That's a place where
there's a lot of face to face meeting. So there's a lot of business done on the internet, but at some point people want to actually see the other person or see someone connected to the other person, and so that's a nice resorts spot.
And so.
People in the drug trade can go there and they can just blend in with all the other partiers and people, you know, having a good time. A police officer down there, So at Montreal police officer who was very junior and inexperienced and idealistic, he went down there and saw some Hell's Angels hanging around with some suspicious people hanging around with some cops, and so he started taking cell phone pictures of it, and they caught him and beat him
with him an inch of his life. And there were wolf fat guys involved in that, and so they were had absolutely no problem with dragging a cop off to the side and beating him until he required reconstruct surgery. Down down there, there are things that happened that it would be a scandal up here that don't really make the news down there. That that was one thing I really hit me working on the book was some guys would go down there thinking they could push around these
cartel guys and they just get swallowed up. Some guys would go down there trying to hide out and they just vanish, and it's it's a way rougher league than we have here. Louise with he had twelve people that he that he bumped up against professionally who either were murdered or driven to suicide by reporting on the cartel stuff. So it's it's just a way way differently up here. It's there are rules when there are things you just
don't do. Down there, it's kind of it's gotten the other direction and you almost want to show how you'll do anything.
And so.
There's I mean, one thing that threw me for a loop was when we're looking at crime statistics, there's one for beheading, like they actually keep a crime stat for for for trafficker beheadings. I mean, you know, it's like that's just not what we have up here.
No, absolutely not. You talk about this Carnelito, the uh cartel connection and this PGP text messaging encrypted, you will feature so much of these conversations fastening.
Yeah.
The carnel Leito guy, I thought was really fascinating because he's from a place called Reinosa, and that's the place that's just absolutely lost. Like you, but the role of the police there is, you know, it's gone like they like this is a this is the place where the cartels have one. It's just which cartel has the upper hand. Yeah, very very rough place and carrent Lito was there. Crrent
Lido is a is a nickname. It's sort of like little brother, and the one that the wolf Pack was dealing with, and there was a feeling that he was about three tiers down from l Chapel Guzman, which is, you know, very high up, but I'm not at the top of the heat, but very very high up.
And he.
Just dealt with him through the Internet. So they hit this big, long relationship with him, and he very very business like, and he tried to be polite and nice, but he was clearly he was the one in charge. But they never actually knew his name. And so these Wolfpack guys are, you know, having these multimillion dollar deals in people's lives at stake, and they don't even know the name of the guy they're dealing with. And he could change his identity, you know, very quickly, like on
the Internet. I can go from being Joe Blow to you know, any saying, you know, whenever I want, just by changing my name. So they never knew really who current Ledo was and he never had the need to
show them. He could just arrange the drugs and he could kind of pick and choose and evaluate people and so he he had a lot of control up here, and they'd send up drugs where maybe sixty percent of what they send up would be accounted for, but the other forty percent would be in their hands and cartel hands, and that would allow them to make sure that nobody had full control. Like you don't want one group to have too much power. You want to you kind of
want them all to be fighting. If I'm an arms runner, I want I want to sell guns to both sides and in my perfect arms runner world, or you know, you want They don't want one group having control of the market. It's better to have everybody scrambling a bit. And so the cartail would hold back and they could reward certain people and punish certain people. A current leader
would be the guy for that. And the odd thing was that they all pragged about their association with them, but none of them saw It's sort of like the Wizard of Oz, you know. It was just being down there, you know, on the internet, and they could send them a message and they were all thrilled, you know, when he'd respond, but they didn't. The guy could walk right by them and they wouldn't know this.
US is up. This is an opportunity to stop for a second for these messages.
Hello, it is Ryan and I was on a flight the other day playing one of my favorite social spin slot games on chumbacasino dot com. I looked over the person sitting next to me, and you know what they were doing. They were also playing Chumba Casino. Coincidence, I think not everybody's loving having fun with it. Chumpa Casino's home to hundreds of casino style games. Do you can play for free anytime anywhere, even at thirty thousand feet So sign up now at Chumbuck Casino dot com to
claim you're free. Welcome bonut. That's Chumbuck Casino dot com. And lived at Chumba line were necessary daily where everybody lost in terms of conditions eighteen plus.
Hey, we're talking about Nero when he's on the run and but he doesn't realize that he's being surveilled. He has instead of the Ferrari you talk about, he's got this. Uh well, what he thinks is is pretty humble and almost not is not do his respect. But that van or that vehicle is is being has a secret recorder in there, So tell us what happens.
Yeah, Nero thought that it was. It was just like the cruelest thing ever, know that he had to drive a Gnali, a big SUV type of vehicle, when when you want to drive his Lamborghini or one of his Ferrari's. And and to make it worse, his Denali had a police listening device in it. So it's kind of at A lot of his stuff is kind of spy versus spy and people being recorded all the time. There's one guy who I've got to talk to who was on the other side from the wolf pack, and he he
talked about it's almost like a way of life. You stick a GPS under somebody's car and you monitor where they go, like everybody's GPS and everybody.
And so.
But Nero, who's not the brightest bulb out there, he is squealing away about how he has to drive a Danali and you know, houcking this happen to a great man like me and you can't drive his Ferraris anymore or not for a little while. And he's acting as if it's the cruelest thing ever. You know that that for little murderer like him has to drive a Dnali. It's there was something It's sort of weird because reading the text you really developed a dislike for the guy.
Mm hmm. Now he's under surveillance and but he has a problem with computers. He's not tech savvy like young guys usually are. And so what does he do as a result to remember his email address and the password?
Yeah, and this was one where I mean, I if it wasn't for Nero, again, I probably wouldn't have a book on this thing. What Neiro couldn't do was remember his password, and it was a an encrypted one and he puts it on a little sticky note and he puts that in the kitchen. So you know, here's here's how you get on and and the police go sneaking in, they see it, and then they go sneaking back in
three months later and it's still there. So in three months he's still I mean, maybe there are eight characters to memorize or something. But you know, by getting in there, you you see details of planning murders, you see people celebrating murders, you see drug deals, you see all sorts
of stuff. I mean, there are five people went to prison for first degree murder because Nick Nero couldn't remember his password and apparently in prison right now learned all that amuse by that, like some of them don't take that too well.
So now what happens in this story because you take us somewhere else, and also just the progress of the cartel in Mexico.
So the cartels. That one thing I really learned from working with Louise is that there are all sorts of cartels down there. Like I thought there were six and that was quite a few, and he said no, because they have all these splinter cartels coming off them and so they call them card alitos. But there are you know, probably ten times more than what I thought there were. And so you can have a really good connection down there, and you don't really know how high up their connection
is in the bigger world. And then these cartels are fighting with each other, and so you can't just quietly, you know, fold your cards and say I quit, because you've got all these enemies who want to kill you, and so unless you stay strong, they're going to kill you. So there's a lot of motivation to do well down there. It's not like here where you can make a couple of million, you know, buy a farm and put your
feet up. It's like they're things things go longer. I know of one guy he retired from from being a bad guy and just bought a nice place and and just relaxes. I know another guy who's inheriting a house from his dead aunt, and so he's going to quit being a criminal and go live in the sticks, but in a free house. And so up down there, you can't do it. You know, there's too many enemies and people assume you're going to be coming after them. So it's just just a different world.
You had talked about mentioned testing and why the testing is important to this story as well the lack of knowledge and the inexperienced person. But there is a big it's a big deal with the cartel, this testing, isn't it.
Oh, it's huge. And I mean if I'm if I'm thinking I'm buying nine of pure cocaine and you're selling me seventy pure cocaine. If I'm stupid enough to buy that off you, then you're going to make a fair bit of extra money off me. And so you really have to know what you're buying. And I mean, if I go to buy a Cadillac and you sell me some beat up Honda Civic. You know, then you know you've give made a good deal, and so there they can really test the guys who the Canadians were sending
down just didn't know how to test. The Also, if if I'm in on a drug deal with three other people and we have to split it up at the end, and I want to make sure that that my packages are as good as their packages, and so it really does matter. And the they vacuum seal the stuff so that you can't get in and tamper, and so they go vacuum seals it and put a little crust on it so that that way you'll you can know that someone along the way didn't cut in and dump in
a bunch of baking soda. With the really smart ones, what they can do is liquefy the cocaine, dump fabrics in them, ship up the fabrics as some kind of a clothing deal. You know, you're selling jeans or something, and then just get the cocaine out of the clothing. But if you don't know what you're doing, you're going to get ripped off in that because you have to know how to test and make sure they're taking it all out like it becomes you need to cure your
chemist to be as smart as their chemist. And then dumb guys don't get given the past like they It's not like a nice leak where they play by gentlemen's rules.
M what about the Gibsbee assassination and what's the wolf pack reaction.
That it's you know, it's a public place down there, So they got him in a in a Starbucks, which so you have a Canadian down there, and everything would be nice and pleasant, and the prices would be low and lots of fun if you like that. And you know the only problem is you're probably going to get shot if you're in that trade and you don't have your eyes open.
And so the.
What that sent was a message that you can't really escape down there, and that tough in Canada doesn't really translate to the tough down there. You know that it's a different league, and the it does get you out of the habit of having a coffee at the same place at the same time every day too. I mean, then if he had held back on the spot rights, he might still be alive.
What happens next with Nero Bronjack.
So they they're working on big drug Guild. And they're extremely ambitious, like they're looking at how do we get them overseas. They wanted Britain, they wanted Germany. They knew pilots, they they had the hands and shipping. I mean, their connections really were were pretty impressive. What brought them down in the end was the in my in my feeling and not all of them, but but a lot of them was they're being implicated in the Reposo murder, and so that took a lot of the big ones off
the streets. The murder we talked about before the guy shot in the ice cream shop. That was kind of too big of a case. And then it was just Nero made it too easy to solve. I mean, they they get into this encrypted email trail, and I mean I was almost slabbering when I saw the exhibits. You know that all these texts back and forth where they did everything but signed their name to the murder and then cheering someone on, and so that that that sort
of derailed things. They hit a if it wasn't for their forgetting the password and the sticky note, you know that weren't sticky note cost him quite.
A bit, and you provide all this incriminating evidence via their text messaging. It's it's incredible, all the all the spelling mistakes included in all the rabado and machismo that's included with this, and and some ridiculous stuff as well. What happens that you talk about for our American audience and international audience, but American audience. You talk about the sentences once they were sentenced to murder, the kinds of sentences that they received in Canada.
Just so the five who the Big five got, got life, but a lot of other and I mean, the weird thing is that some of the big cartel guys who are in the book are already out like there's one of them that there's a big deal that they caught him. He was a huge, big deal in the cartel in the greater Toronto area. And I got an email last week saying, look what he's doing in Spain and it looks pretty It doesn't look like he's devoted his life
to good deeds now. I mean, he's doing the same stuff in a different place.
It looks like.
It's one thing the cartel would be work with a lot of people who don't have a record and so they're not going to get big time when they do get caught, and they're not really on the police radar. And so they worked with one retiree who had worked in charity work all of his life before he decided to augment this pension with drug money. And then another guy who couldn't quite get his career going, and so he was kind of the sidekick to the retired charity workers.
They've worked another guy who had a shipping company where he'd send, you know, if you bring something back to a big department store or big, big retail out let, they they'll resell that somewhere else in the world. He ran a company that sold these rejected items. These guys didn't get get all that much time, and they get out on parole.
And so.
The odd thing was, you know, when the book was hitting the stands, some of these guys were hitting the streets like they were. I mean, they could buy the first copies of they wander.
Wow. Yeah, it is incredible. And it is incredible too because this is quite unique is that you had access to those hearings where they were up for Dapril and again you explained, well, I'll get you to explain Dapril for American listeners.
Yeah, daparil basically means that you can you can, you know, have a nice, happy day and then you just get tucked in at night, you know where you go back to where you were, but you put in the full day where every more or less wherever you want to, and you have a you make a promise not to hang around with criminals, which which is, you know, nice, but but if you were knee deep and you know, drug trafficking, there's a chance you might not live up
to your promise, and then you probably don't have a
whole bunch of other skills. So the pearl stuff. The one guy we talked about, Eddie Mellow, he was murdered by someone who was on day parole who drove down, shot Mellow and his friend to death, drove back to the Pathway house where he was supposed to be staying and was tuck in at night and didn't violate his day parole when he did two murders, and so he it wasn't until a long time later that he was actually caught the day A lot of people have your
objections to day parole, and you should be able to start getting parolled about a sixth of your way into your sense, and it's pretty hard to serve a full sense.
Yeah, it's the reality of the sentencing, especially when it's announced in the headline had role eligibility in the second degree murders, which would be first degree typically in America, second degree with the parole eligibility starting at ten years. And you see so many sentences where the proleligibilities could be twenty five, but it's said at thirteen despite their history and their background in these crimes.
Well, and the guy who killed Melo got fifty thousand dollars. He killed Melo's friends just because he was sitting with him. He was on day parole. He didn't know Mello, he had no interactions with him, and he got second degree murdered. Like it wasn't considered a planned murder. He just made a plea bargain. And he also didn't say who hired him for the murder. And so sometimes the system can
go a little on the light side. I mean, this guy, so he made his fifty thousand, killed an extra person, you know, he threw in an extra one, and then we wasn't even considered a first degree or a planned murder. It was considered a spontaneous one which was just part of cutting a deal.
Yeah, incredible, And you know we haven't for our audience, we haven't got into another a bunch of chapters where you introduced Rawl Blujos and Rios and Dak Doctor and the un group as we had mentioned, but also Jason McBride, Michael Jones, and Jagar koun Kun who pled guilty to the assassination of Francis Bacon seven years before notorious Gangster
from the West Coast. The entire story though in this is this new millennials and the way they have done things differently and the way their behavior has changed the way criminal drug trafficking and murder and organized crime works in Canada. Tell us about what you basically demonstrate and illustrate in this book, about this unique wolf pack.
That the old pyramids are gone like it used to be in the olden days, that a boss could determine someone's career rise. You know who gets what, job gets who makes money out of what. Now, if you can connect with someone with a cartel, in including a minor cartel, you can quickly make a lot of money. And now it's not a neighborhood thing. It's not an ethnic thing. It's a Internet based thing.
Now.
The a lot of things that millennials are criticized for in the outside world of you know, they always need to be pattered on the back and you know, get a participation points rebon. In the crime world, it's sort of the same way. I mean, these guys get really cranky if they don't get what they want quickly. They want to move up. They're upset that they're Ferrari isn't as good as their friends Ferrari. So so a lot of the things that you see in general society, it
shouldn't be a surprise. I guess that we see it in criminal society and the internet. One thing Louise, the Mexican journalists I worked with on this, pointed out was that you just it's the central thing now, like the there's one theorist who said, we choose our tools, and our tools mold us. You know, like there's the idea that if you're living off your phone, then you're dehumanizing
a lot of people. You're texting about, you're making quick, compulsive decisions, you're being flashy just so that you're noticed. A lot of cranky behavior we see on Twitter, we're seeing in the crime world from people who live off this stuff.
And finally, when I when you look at this and you you provide the statistics, and they're not heartening at all. They're disheartening. Despite the fight in by Caldron in Mexico to fight organized crime and I was in two thousand and six and murder in Vancouver and places like Surrey, BC, Inland British Columbia, what what are the trends regarding murder in both areas.
That down there. I mean, it's just it's just too hard to the when you look at crime stats, murder rates go up before elections. I mean, if they don't like your political platform, you good chance you get shot and then you know, hopefully someone you know, more amentable will come in. So some of the statistical stuff is is staggering. The with police, the you can't fire corrupt cops because they'll just get hired by the cartoon.
Else.
I mean, you can fire me if you want, but you're just you're just giving the cartel a good worker. So there. The what it left me thinking was is that the market, I mean, we've got to I think we should look at it on the other end and treat people with drug problems better treatment, try and get try and dry up the market on this end, also try and dry up corruption. You can't have organized crime without corruption, Like I've learned that a long time ago.
You can't. You're just a bunch of bandits until you have corrupt people on your side. And when you have a lot of money, that corupt people tend to pop up. So my fee only is fighting things like domestic abuse and drug abuse and corruption is the way to go, and to stop trying to nap these guys because there are too many of them and they're too good at it. I mean, it's it's like being blindfolded, you know, swinging a bat. You're not going to do anything. You're not
going to do it all that much. You're just going to shuffle the deck. And if you catch criminally that just means criminal be is going to make a little more money.
Yes, certainly, dug on war, the war on drug has been in you know, absolute failure and just clearly demonstrates that. I want to thank you so much Peter Edwards for coming on and talking about your latest The wolf Pack, The Millennial mobsters who brought chaos and the cartels to the Canadian underworld. Thank you so much for of you, Peter Edwards, you have a great evening. Thank you, good night.