CBC investigation finds numerous Montreal exporters sent stolen vehicles overseas (www.cbc.ca)

submitted 20 hours ago by HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works to c/canada@lemmy.ca

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In June 2024, an Ontario man who was visiting Montreal parked his car, a Honda Accord, on the street in a central neighbourhood. The next day, it was gone.

The man, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals from a criminal organization, filed a police report and received an insurance payment, but he never heard about the car again.

Three weeks later, police officers staking out a warehouse in Montreal’s Saint-Laurent borough saw his car being loaded into a shipping container.

The officers watched from afar as a group of men placed the Accord deep inside the container followed by two older, used cars and then stacks of mattresses.

The warehouse, located at 407 Lebeau Blvd., was home to Albert Logistique, a business registered in Quebec whose legal activities included mattress exports to Africa.

But a police investigation found that the warehouse wasn’t just used for mattress shipments. It was the headquarters of a trans-Atlantic stolen car export network, according to police investigative documents obtained by CBC.

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[-] Bluegrass_Addict@lemmy.ca 10 points 19 hours ago

so the police were witness to a crime, and did nothing to intervene.

also they all know that Quebec is used to ship cars and have for ever but they never do anything to stop it. they straight up don't care.

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 6 points 18 hours ago

Might not be that simple. They may simply have observed to avoid just catching the small fish and causing the real criminals to just move elsewhere, cost of doing criminal business. Better monitor, observe, gather evidence, then take down the entire organisation, top to bottom

[-] CowsLookLikeMaps@sh.itjust.works 6 points 18 hours ago

It's been well-known that stolen vehicles are exported via Quebec for 20+ years at this point.

[-] HikingVet@lemmy.ca 0 points 17 hours ago

Okay, so why weren't they followed and arrested later when the big fish was identified?

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 2 points 16 hours ago

I don't know.

I also won't pretend to know that they didn't do that for some malicious or incompetency reason.

[-] sbv@sh.itjust.works 2 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

54,000 containers left Montreal last month.

That's like 1,800 a day. Say it takes one hour to open a container, investigate it sufficiently without disturbing the contents, then that's 225 working days of investigation every day.

Assuming the port has the infrastructure to allow that kind of investigation, they'd need like 300 employees to do that work.

EDIT: that would probably work out to 30-50 million in personnel, support, and infrastructure costs annually. They'd probably need to pay a bunch more money to retrofit those facilities into the port.

Would it be worth it? Maybe. But nobody wants to foot that bill.