Cocaine in pineapples, watermelons…Guyana link seen as Canadians arrest 6

Jan 26, 2012 News

Toronto, Canada (Toronto Sun) – Would you like pineapple with your cocaine? Some watermelon with your weed?
In a highly-tainted fruit salad caper, six Toronto-area accused drug importers were arrested after police and border agents seized coke and pot in loads of pineapples and watermelons.
“Drug dealers will stop at nothing to get their contraband into this country,” RCMP Supt. Rick Penney, Commander of the GTA Drug Enforcement Unit, said Wednesday in a statement announcing the arrests.
Sergeant Michele Paradis said the plot was uncovered first in the port of Saint John, New Brunswick, when Canada Border Services Agency officers seized a container believed to contain cocaine.
Their search turned up 19 kilograms of cocaine hidden inside 80 hollowed-out pineapples scattered throughout the shipment, Paradis said.
She said the illegal coke load was first linked to a Toronto-area address in August, and then traced to gang members with ties to co-conspirators in Jamaica, Guyana, Costa Rica and the United States.
Over the subsequent months, investigators tracked and seized other incoming drug shipments, including two trucks entering Ontario at the Windsor border crossing with 115 kilos of marijuana hidden in shipments of watermelons, Paradis said.
The cocaine had a street value of about Cad$850,000; the pot about Cad$230,000.
“It is through this type of interagency co-operation that we can thoroughly investigate and dismantle organized criminal groups,” Penney stated.
Facing drug-related charges in Toronto courts are Denise Sonia Edwards, 46 — who police say also used the last name Pilgram — and Linval Earl Brown, 52, both of Pickering; Dexter Emmanuel Boyce, 43, of Toronto; Abdool Zaman Haleek, 54, of Scarborough; Roman Clint McInnis, 42, of Keswick; and Lancelot Henry, 45, of St. Catharines.