Jump to full article: Canadian Press, 2008-04-26
Intro: The tiny convenience store, set amidst the dive bars and seedy hotels in Winnipeg's tough north end, is just one of thousands of final destinations on Canada's burgeoning underground railroad for illicit tobacco.
An RCMP website says that officers seized 618,077 cartons of cigarettes across the country last year - an all-time record, and five times the amount seized in 2004.
Police say most of the contraband comes through the Akwesasne reserve that straddles the borders between the United States, Ontario and Quebec. It then streams up and down the Trans-Canada Highway in a steady, relentless flow of trucks, vans and cars.
"When I arrived here in 2001, there was just one manufacturer set up on the American portion of the Akwesasne Mohawk territory, and now there are over a dozen of these tobacco factories, and they are run by organized crime groups," said Sgt. Michael Harvey of the Central St. Lawrence Valley RCMP detachment based in Cornwall, Ont.
Using cheap loose tobacco from states such as North Carolina, the factories manufacture plain, unmarked cigarettes and divide them into plastic bags of 200, police say.
The "baggies," as they are often called in the underground trade, have sold like hotcakes for years in Ontario and Quebec . . .
Smuggling has become so big that RCMP detachments along the Trans-Canada Highway in eastern Ontario pull over transport trucks filled with contraband tobacco on an almost daily basis.
. . .
The Mounties and the U.S. Coast Guard have sworn in some of each other's officers, allowing them to chase smugglers across the border.
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