Latest news with #gunsmuggling
Yahoo
18 hours ago
- Yahoo
Confessions of a gun smuggler: Former trafficker reveals how she brought weapons into Canada
Everyone knows guns used by Canadian criminals are often smuggled from the U.S. Not everyone knows how — not like Naomi Haynes does. That's because she did the smuggling. A native Montrealer who's been living in the U.S. for decades, she helped traffic dozens of weapons into Canada, some linked directly to drug gangs. "I wasn't thinking about the havoc I was causing in my birth land," she told CBC News last week. "I've got my kids, I've got bills. The only thing I [was] thinking about is monetary gains. I wasn't thinking about the people who are going to be affected." CBC News established contact with Haynes while she was in prison — at first communicating by email, then with a glitchy prison video app and then in a lengthy interview following her release last year. Her story helps shed light on the thousands of guns a year in Canada that police trace to the U.S. She described, in detail, tricks of the smuggling trade. And how she managed to move drugs, cash and, eventually, guns, for many years, depending on the product — either into the U.S., between U.S. states or into Canada. Rule No. 1: Only one person per car. If the vehicle gets stopped at the border, you don't want two partners tripping over each other's story during secondary questioning. "There's only one story this way," said Haynes, 45. "If you have two drivers, there's conflicting stories, and that's when you have problems.… 'Oh, you're coming from Virginia, but your friend says [she's] coming from Baltimore.' "So just one driver, so they can stick with their one lie." I wasn't thinking about the people who are going to be affected. - Naomi Haynes Rule No. 2: Find a good hiding spot. She would stash items in hidden compartments under seats; in door panels; in the trunk. She'd also move drugs in a gas tank — in triple-sealed, vacuumed bags. Rule No. 3: Get drivers who won't arouse suspicion. Haynes didn't transport guns herself; she got pulled over too often. She'd ride in a separate vehicle. "I started paying white girls and guys to move stuff for me," she said. Especially white women. They never got pulled over, she said. Until one did. Haynes was arrested in 2019, charged with smuggling, and with conspiracy to make false statements; she pleaded guilty, was sentenced, and served just under five years in prison. Hers is an unusual story. She's a vegan, millennial, Jamaican Canadian political science grad in South Florida who supports Donald Trump, became a grandma and wound up in an international conspiracy. Then again, her life story was atypical from the start. Escaping Montreal "At the end of the day, you become what you know," Haynes said. She grew up around drug dealers. Her late father dealt crack, then smoked it. In a book she's writing about her life story, Haynes describes a period when he became meaner, zoned out and indifferent, his eyes bloodshot. Her book describes one sister jailed for selling ecstasy. Another sibling, her brother, led a local street gang, according to the Montreal Gazette. She grew up in the area just south of the old Montreal Forum; her grandmother worked in the hallowed hockey shrine. From childhood, Haynes earned money in unconventional ways. Her half-complete memoir, entitled The Runner: Tripped by the Feds, begins with the words: "For as long as I can remember I have had a hustle." She ran store errands for adults and got to keep the change; collected beer bottles from their parties and returned them for cash; and, later, resold contraband cigarettes. "I made my first $1,000 in the seventh grade," she writes. She was desperate to escape the scene, to flee the bad influences. Haynes harboured a childhood dream of living in the States, and in 1997, she made it happen. She enrolled in college. She got a bachelor's degree from Florida Atlantic University, according to court documents, and also studied criminal science. She started smuggling to pay for school. And she made poor choices, she says, about whom she surrounded herself with. The man who became her husband made a $5,000 down payment on a Jeep Cherokee for her; she used that vehicle and received thousands of dollars more to move hashish, hash oil and marijuana into Canada. Over the years, she shipped contraband countless times: ecstasy, cocaine, marijuana, hash and cash, occasionally driving on her own, but usually hiring someone. She'd move products from buyer to seller, often across international lines, but also domestically, say, from Florida to Chicago. It was only many years later that she started selling guns. Around 2016, Haynes was desperately low on cash — she was divorced, with a baby, not working and with an older boy playing intercity baseball. "Everybody that I always did business with always said, 'No guns, no guns, no guns,' because there's a trail," she told CBC News. But it was great cash, about $4,000 Cdn per gun. On a nine-millimetre handgun that costs a couple of hundred bucks in South Florida, it's an astronomical profit. She'd ship about 20 at a time, and there were multiple shipments. She admits to two of them, which she figures generated about $160,000. Subtracting the cost of the purchase, the driver and her partner's share, she estimates she kept about $30,000, which helped her live comfortably for a few months. And then it cost her everything. WATCH | Major Toronto gang busts connected to Hayes's network: Police started closing in on Haynes from different angles — arresting associates, seizing phones, recording conversations and catching her in lies. It started after she purchased 20 weapons from different Florida gun stores in February 2018. On March 1, a day after her last purchase, she crossed into Canada through New York. She was stopped re-entering the U.S. two weeks later at Champlain, N.Y., carrying $4,300 in cash, and multiple cellphones. Border officers seized her phones and downloaded the contents. According to court filings, they found fraudulent or counterfeit IDs for several associates and shared that with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. On the morning of April 27, two ATF agents arrived at her home in Boca Raton, Fla. She lied to them, insisting she'd been buying and selling guns to friends with legal permits. She insisted she had a storage unit. She took them to a CubeSmart facility and professed to be shocked when she found her unit empty. "You remember Martha Stewart?" ATF agent Tim Trenschel asked her, according to court documents. "The lady on TV that does fancy crafts. Do you remember that she spent some time in prison? Do you remember why?" Haynes replied: "Because she lied." The agent said: "Exactly." Haynes added: "About insider trading." The agent said: "You're way ahead of most people I talk to." WATCH | Majority of guns coming into Canada from U.S., data shows: Haynes insisted upon her truthfulness. "Listen, I get it, and I respect the law… I am being a thousand per cent honest." She was not, in fact, being 1,000 per cent honest. Far from it. The agent's observation about the risks of lying to a federal officer proved prescient. A couple of weeks later, guns she'd bought started turning up in police investigations in the Toronto area, identified despite attempts to deface the serial number. One loaded Taurus 9mm was found hidden in the panel of a car, alongside approximately $300,000 worth of cocaine. Days later, a Ruger .380 was found in another drug bust. The suspect tossed it aside while attempting to flee police. In September of that year, a friend she'd hired was stopped while crossing into Canada from New York state, carrying 20 hidden guns. Haynes was recorded following right behind her — crossing the border 62 minutes later. A number of the seized guns traced back to her circle. By this point, police had gained an informant. They were secretly recording conversations within her circle, even one involving Haynes's daughter. On Feb. 27, 2019, her daughter's boyfriend, Mackenzie Delmas, was caught. The informant delivered guns to him and Delmas was arrested immediately. Agents searched his home — and Haynes's. That's when Haynes knew she was done for. She was visiting her parents' home in the Montreal area. Her daughter called from Florida in the middle of the night with the news, and Haynes collapsed on the family couch. "I've never experienced a panic attack before in my life, but at that point, I started shaking. I couldn't talk, I couldn't breathe," Haynes said. "I was trying to gasp for air." Her mother tried calming her down, rubbing her back. She recalled her mother asking: "What's going on?" Haynes confessed what she'd been up to. The whole story. "My mother was so disappointed." At that point, Haynes made a decision: To give herself up. "I knew I was cooked," she said. "[I thought], I'm not gonna live on the run. I've got to face it. My time has come." Court documents confirm what happened next: She called the ATF in the wee hours of Feb. 28, and promised to return to the U.S. and speak with investigators. In subsequent recorded interviews on March 13 and April 3, she confessed everything: the fake identities, the illegal gun purchases, the shipments to Canada, the sales to known Canadian gangsters, her own trips north to collect cash and, crucially, her lies to police. She was arrested, and spent four years, nine months in prison, serving time in a low-security prison in Alabama. It was predictably miserable. She recalled guards treating inmates cruelly and arbitrarily — being decent to some of the meanest inmates, and mean to decent ones, people who got mixed up, in some cases accidentally, in bad situations. The worst was during COVID-19. After testing positive, she was sent to solitary confinement. "I was in the shoe for 13 days," she said. "I felt like a dog in a kennel. … The room was filthy. It was disgusting. The sinks — the water was brown. The toilet, it was disgusting." Her main diet in prison consisted of peanut butter. She gave up meat and dairy years ago, grossed out by it. Given the choice between baloney and peanut butter, she'd take the latter. She recalls paying $7 for a cauliflower once and air-frying it with a blow-dryer. But the absolute worst thing about prison? Her parents dying, and being unable to see them or attend their funeral. Her beloved mom slowly died of cancer while Haynes was in jail. By the time her father died, she was out, but she had to attend the funeral on Zoom. Haynes can't leave and re-enter the U.S. because she's fighting deportation. A Canadian citizen, she's a green-card holder in the U.S., and of her three kids, they're either living there or hoping to live there with her. She now works an office job at a landscaping company. "My mom was sick with cancer and I failed," Haynes said. "My choices and the things I was doing caused me to not be there for the person that was always there for me." What about potential gun victims: does her sense of guilt extend to them? As a vegan who avoids hurting animals, does she ever wonder whether any humans were harmed by those chunks of steel she trafficked? Initially, no, she said. As she got into the business, the only thing on her mind was money — paying the bills. Then she had four years, nine months in prison to think. And she started thinking about other people's pain, about other families and whether her guns killed any young kids in a drive-by. She now prays that those guns are confiscated. "I stay in constant prayer that they get seized," she said. "I don't want to know that I'm responsible for somebody losing their life."
CBC
2 days ago
- CBC
Confessions of a gun smuggler: How I brought weapons into Canada
Social Sharing Everyone knows guns used by Canadian criminals are often smuggled from the U.S. Not everyone knows how — not like Naomi Haynes does. That's because she did the smuggling. A native Montrealer who's been living in the U.S. for decades, she helped traffic dozens of weapons into Canada, some linked directly to drug gangs. "I wasn't thinking about the havoc I was causing in my birth land," she told CBC News last week. "I've got my kids, I've got bills. The only thing I [was] thinking about is monetary gains. I wasn't thinking about the people who are going to be affected." CBC News established contact with Haynes while she was in prison — at first communicating by email, then with a glitchy prison video app and then in a lengthy interview following her release last year. Her story helps shed light on the thousands of guns a year in Canada that police trace to the U.S. She described, in detail, tricks of the smuggling trade. And how she managed to move drugs, cash and, eventually, guns, for many years, depending on the product — either into the U.S., between U.S. states or into Canada. Rule No. 1: Only one person per car. If the vehicle gets stopped at the border, you don't want two partners tripping over each other's story during secondary questioning. "There's only one story this way," said Haynes, 45. "If you have two drivers, there's conflicting stories and that's when you have problems. … 'Oh, you're coming from Virginia, but your friend says [she's] coming from Baltimore.'" "So just one driver, so they can stick with their one lie." I wasn't thinking about the people who are going to be affected. - Naomi Haynes Rule No. 2: Find a good hiding spot. She would stash items in hidden compartments under seats; in door panels; in the trunk. She'd also move drugs in a gas tank — in triple-sealed, vacuumed bags. Rule No. 3: Get drivers who won't arouse suspicion. Haynes didn't transport guns herself; she got pulled over too often. She'd ride in a separate vehicle. "I started paying white girls and guys to move stuff for me," she said. Especially white women. They never got pulled over, she said. Until one did. Haynes was arrested in 2019, charged with smuggling, and with conspiracy to make false statements; she pleaded guilty, was sentenced, and served just under five years in prison. Hers is an unusual story. She's a vegan, millennial, Jamaican Canadian political science grad in South Florida who supports Donald Trump, became a grandma and wound up in an international conspiracy. Then again, her life story was atypical from the start. Escaping Montreal "At the end of the day, you become what you know," Haynes said. She grew up around drug dealers. Her late father dealt crack, then smoked it. In a book she's writing about her life story, Haynes describes a period when he became meaner, zoned out and indifferent, his eyes bloodshot. Her book describes one sister jailed for selling ecstasy. Another sibling, her brother, led a local street gang, according to the Montreal Gazette. She grew up in the area just south of the old Montreal Forum; her grandmother worked in the hallowed hockey shrine. From childhood, Haynes earned money in unconventional ways. Her half-complete memoir, entitled The Runner: Tripped by the Feds, begins with the words: "For as long as I can remember I have had a hustle." She ran store errands for adults and got to keep the change; collected beer bottles from their parties and returned them for cash; and, later, resold contraband cigarettes. "I made my first $1,000 in the seventh grade," she writes. She was desperate to escape the scene, to flee the bad influences. Haynes harboured a childhood dream of living in the States, and in 1997, she made it happen. She enrolled in college. She got a bachelor's degree from Florida Atlantic University, according to court documents, and also studied criminal science. She started smuggling to pay for school. And she made poor choices, she says, about whom she surrounded herself with. The man who became her husband made a $5,000 down payment on a Jeep Cherokee for her; she used that vehicle and received thousands of dollars more to move hashish, hash oil and marijuana into Canada. Over the years, she shipped contraband countless times: ecstasy, cocaine, marijuana, hash and cash, occasionally driving on her own, but usually hiring someone. She'd move products from buyer to seller, often across international lines, but also domestically, say, from Florida to Chicago. It was only many years later that she started selling guns. Around 2016, Haynes was desperately low on cash — she was divorced, with a baby, not working and with an older boy playing intercity baseball. "Everybody that I always did business with always said, 'No guns, no guns, no guns,' because there's a trail," she told CBC News. But it was great cash, about $4,000 Cdn per gun. On a nine-millimetre handgun that costs a couple of hundred bucks in South Florida, it's an astronomical profit. She'd ship about 20 at a time, and there were multiple shipments. She admits to two of them, which she figures generated about $160,000. Subtracting the cost of the purchase, the driver and her partner's share, she estimates she kept about $30,000, which helped her live comfortably for a few months. And then it cost her everything. WATCH | Major Toronto gang busts connected to Hayes's network: Law enforcement closes in Police started closing in on Haynes from different angles — arresting associates, seizing phones, recording conversations and catching her in lies. It started after she purchased 20 weapons from different Florida gun stores in February 2018. On March 1, a day after her last purchase, she crossed into Canada through New York. She was stopped re-entering the U.S. two weeks later at Champlain, N.Y., carrying $4,300 in cash, and multiple cell phones. Border officers seized her phones and downloaded the contents. According to court filings, they found fraudulent or counterfeit IDs for several associates and shared that with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. On the morning of April 27, two ATF agents arrived at her home in Boca Raton, Fla. She lied to them, insisting she'd been buying and selling guns to friends with legal permits. She insisted she had a storage unit. She took them to a CubeSmart facility and professed to be shocked when she found her unit empty. "You remember Martha Stewart?" ATF agent Tim Trenschel asked her, according to court documents. "The lady on TV that does fancy crafts. Do you remember that she spent some time in prison? Do you remember why?" Haynes replied: "Because she lied." The agent said: "Exactly." Haynes added: "About insider trading." The agent said: "You're way ahead of most people I talk to." Majority of firearms coming into Canada are from the U.S., data shows 4 months ago Duration 3:22 Donald Trump is targeting Canada with punishing tariffs over concerns about border security. But as CBC's Talia Ricci reports, data from GTA police shows Canada has to worry about what's coming in from the U.S, too. Haynes insisted upon her truthfulness. "Listen, I get it, and I respect the law… I am being a thousand per cent honest." She was not, in fact, being 1,000 per cent honest. Far from it. The agent's observation about the risks of lying to a federal officer proved prescient. A couple of weeks later, guns she'd bought started turning up in police investigations in the Toronto area, identified despite attempts to deface the serial number. 'I knew I was cooked' One loaded Taurus 9mm was found hidden in the panel of a car, alongside approximately $300,000 worth of cocaine. Days later, a Ruger .380 was found in another drug bust. The suspect tossed it aside while attempting to flee police. In September of that year, a friend she'd hired was stopped while crossing into Canada from New York state, carrying 20 hidden guns. Haynes was recorded following right behind her — crossing the border 62 minutes later. A number of the seized guns traced back to her circle. By this point, police had gained an informant. They were secretly recording conversations within her circle, even one involving Haynes's daughter. On Feb. 27, 2019, her daughter's boyfriend, Mackenzie Delmas, was caught. The informant delivered guns to him and Delmas was arrested immediately. Agents searched his home — and Haynes's. That's when Haynes knew she was done for. She was visiting her parents' home in the Montreal area. Her daughter called from Florida in the middle of the night with the news, and Haynes collapsed on the family couch. "I've never experienced a panic attack before in my life, but at that point, I started shaking. I couldn't talk, I couldn't breathe," Haynes said. "I was trying to gasp for air." Her mother tried calming her down, rubbing her back. She recalled her mother asking: "What's going on?" Haynes confessed what she'd been up to. The whole story. "My mother was so disappointed." At that point, Haynes made a decision: To give herself up. "I knew I was cooked," she said. "[I thought], I'm not gonna live on the run. I've got to face it. My time has come." Court documents confirm what happened next: She called the ATF in the wee hours of Feb. 28, and promised to return to the U.S. and speak with investigators. In subsequent recorded interviews on March 13 and April 3, she confessed everything: the fake identities, the illegal gun purchases, the shipments to Canada, the sales to known Canadian gangsters, her own trips north to collect cash and, crucially, her lies to police. She was arrested, and spent four years, nine months in prison, serving time in a low-security prison in Alabama. It was predictably miserable. She recalled guards treating inmates cruelly and arbitrarily — being decent to some of the meanest inmates, and mean to decent ones, people who got mixed up, in some cases accidentally, in bad situations. The worst was during COVID-19. After testing positive, she was sent to solitary confinement. "I was in the shoe for 13 days," she said. "I felt like a dog in a kennel. … The room was filthy. It was disgusting. The sinks — the water was brown. The toilet, it was disgusting." Her main diet in prison consisted of peanut butter. She gave up meat and dairy years ago, grossed out by it. Given the choice between baloney and peanut butter, she'd take the latter. She recalls paying $7 for a cauliflower once and air-frying it with a blow-dryer. Is there a sense of guilt? But the absolute worst thing about prison? Her parents dying, and being unable to see them or attend their funeral. Her beloved mom slowly died of cancer while Haynes was in jail. By the time her father died, she was out, but she had to attend the funeral on Zoom. Haynes can't leave and re-enter the U.S. because she's fighting deportation. A Canadian citizen, she's a green-card holder in the U.S., and of her three kids, they're either living there or hoping to live there with her. She now works an office job at a landscaping company. "My mom was sick with cancer and I failed," Haynes said. "My choices and the things I was doing caused me to not be there for the person that was always there for me." What about potential gun victims: does her sense of guilt extend to them? As a vegan who avoids hurting animals, does she ever wonder whether any humans were harmed by those chunks of steel she trafficked? Initially, no, she said. As she got into the business, the only thing on her mind was money — paying the bills. Then she had four years, nine months in prison to think. And she started thinking about other people's pain, about other families and whether her guns killed any young kids in a drive-by. She now prays that those guns are confiscated.
Globe and Mail
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Globe and Mail
The way of the gun
In an era when Donald Trump is steering the United States into an increasingly hostile brand of isolationism, one of the most important agencies in Canada's fight against gun smuggling remains, in fact, 100 per cent American. Between 2017 and 2023, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives traced more than 35,000 guns at the request of Canadian police forces, and has helped break up gun smuggling networks that stretch from Texas to the northern border. Law enforcement in both countries say sharing information on gun purchasing records remains critical, even as our political leaders seek less collaboration. During his election campaign, Prime Minister Mark Carney put it plainly: 'The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military co-operation is over.' While it's unclear how this new political reality will play out with gun smuggling, given the U.S.'s loose gun laws and the high demand for banned firearms in Canada, police agencies say they can't slow the northward flow of American weapons without working closely with their cross-border counterparts. 'Up until January, no one even questioned it, because everybody saw how logical it was. If you don't identify the person in Florida, how are you going to stop that guy from smuggling guns?' said Chris Taylor, the ATF attaché who was assigned to Canada in 2019 by former ATF director Regina Lombardo with a mission improve gun tracing rates in Canada. The ATF has long preached the importance of firearms tracing, and how that can help combat the illegal movement of guns globally. They work with the RCMP and other Canadian police forces on investigations that touch both countries, and investigators here depend on the ATF in their fight against smuggling. For more than three decades, the ATF has assigned an officer to work in Canada, out of the U.S. embassy in Ottawa, and spent millions running training workshops for police across this country. The ATF first sent a liaison to Canada in 1991, when George H. W. Bush was in the White House and Reagan-era director Stephen Higgins was running the bureau. In the past five years alone, the ATF has helped train almost 13,000 Canadian police, prosecutors, soldiers and forensic experts in everything from firearms trafficking and tracing, postblast investigations, ballistic imaging and serial number restoration. The Mounties, meanwhile, say they want more, not less, intelligence sharing with the Americans and consider the ATF an important partner, according to RCMP spokesperson Robin Percival. In 2023, the RCMP and Canada Border Services Agency agreed to exchange more data with U.S. authorities under a rebooted Canada-U.S. Cross-Border Crime Forum, as Canadian seizures showed a rising American gun smuggling problem. That agreement came after a high-profile gun smuggling case involving Quebec's Inti Sebastian Falero-Delgado, who was arrested after receiving 53 handguns, six machine guns and 80 high-capacity magazines from Texas, delivered across the U.S. border by boat outside Cornwall, Ont., in November, 2021. Mr. Falero-Delgado was sentenced in March, 2024, to 11 years in federal prison for his role in the botched scheme, which was caught on a boathouse security camera. The judge said she'd never seen so many guns moved in one smuggling run. The firearms, while banned in Canada, were legally bought in Texas under some of the loosest gun laws in the U.S. As part of the cross-border investigation that followed, 11 people were indicted in the Dallas area for their role in supplying the guns. Working closely with the ATF on the case in Texas was an RCMP liaison stationed in Dallas, who was 'uniquely positioned to observe and understand developments abroad in order to inform our decision-making at home,' Ms. Percival said. This kind of close co-operation with American agencies is critical for Canadian law enforcement interests, she added. 'With a strong and co-ordinated international presence through these deployments, we can combat transnational organized crime more effectively,' she said. Co-operation has never been more important as Canada contends with a growing problem of legally-bought American handguns and assault rifles being smuggled into this country. With its unregulated gun shows, rampant online sales and thousands of gun dealers, states like Texas are supplying Canada with guns that are showing up at crime scenes on a nearly daily basis. In Ontario, 91 per cent of illegal handguns traced by police last year, or 1,703 firearms, came from the U.S. That's up from 1,279 handguns traced to the U.S. just two years earlier, according to the Criminal Intelligence Service Ontario, a partnership between the Ontario government and the province's police forces. Seizures of American guns at the Canada-U.S. border are also on the rise: there were 839 last year, up from 581 in 2022, according to the Canadian Border Services Agency. Police forces across the country are increasingly finding the guns they're seizing lead back to pro-gun states such as Texas. With easy access to this abundance of guns in the U.S., and an eager black market in Canada willing to pay tenfold the retail value of those guns, officials acknowledge stopping the northward flow of guns has become extremely difficult. 'Knowing that this border is 8,000 kilometres long and mostly trees? I don't know how you stop it,' Mr. Taylor said, while adding he's still committed to making progress and is not doing this work 'so I get a nice wrist watch when I retire. This is done to stop those guns from coming to Canada.' Tracing, or tracking ownership records for guns, offers police on both sides of the border their best chance at identifying smuggling schemes and people buying unusually large amounts of guns. But in states like Texas, it can be difficult to tell avid collectors from would-be smugglers. And there are many ways for Texans to buy guns privately, such as weekend guns shows or through websites that post classified ads for firearms. The guns most coveted by smugglers looking to sell in Canada are those banned by the federal government, including more than 2,000 models and variants of assault-style firearms prohibited in the wake of the Nova Scotia mass shooting in 2020. Glock handguns, the firearm of choice for police, can't be imported, sold or purchased in Canada since Oct. 21, 2022. But despite the changes in legislation, police say there are more guns on the street now than there were five years ago. If Canada really wants to make a dent in gun smuggling, it needs to increase the penalties for those caught selling, moving or using banned firearms, Mr. Taylor said. The Falero-Delgado case helped pull back the curtain on an international firearms trafficking cell based in Texas, a state that has long supplied weapons to Mexican cartels. As investigators probed the Canadian case, they too were surprised at how many guns were heading north. 'If you would have told me 24 years ago that there would be guns going from North Texas to Canada, I would have laughed at you,' says Jeff Boshek, Special Agent-in-Charge for the ATF in Dallas, which operates inside an unmarked industrial building north of the city. 'When the guys first came in to brief me on the case, I just about fell out of my chair when I heard the level of trafficking that was going on to Canada. It was shocking.' While Texas is far from the border with Canada, the state's rampant gun culture and fervent gun rights lobby have created a perfect environment for Canadian smugglers to exploit. More northern states such as Illinois, Minnesota and Washington, far closer to Canada, require gun buyers have multiple licences and wait for multiday cool-down periods before obtaining a gun. In Texas, anyone with a state driver's licence can walk into a gun shop and walk out with multiple guns. While purchases of two or more handguns within a five-day period generates a federal report, the ATF acknowledges policing multiple purchasers is a politically sensitive issue in a state where gun rights are vigorously defended. 'How do you walk up on some rich guy's house, who's spending a lot of money on guns and say, 'Hey, we're your friendly neighbourhood ATF agents. We want to see these guns that you spend all this money on.' That doesn't go over very well,' Mr. Boshek said. 'You'll be on YouTube the next day.' Authorities here say Canadian smugglers typically use straw buyers – often strangers they meet at bars or strip clubs – offering them cash to buy guns. The activity is illegal, and the ATF has launched campaigns telling Texans that it's not worth going to jail for a few hundred dollars. 'Some people that you wouldn't expect get caught up in the game of firearms trafficking because they're just desperate for money,' Mr. Boshek said. 'If someone comes to you and offers you money to buy a gun, that's a clue, right? There's a reason. Either they can't personally own it, or that gun is going somewhere where it shouldn't be going, and they know it, and they're just using you as a tool.' Koji Kraft, a former professional BMX racer who now builds guns at a shop in Dallas, said most reputable dealers see themselves as 'the first line of defence' against gun trafficking. The problem is the few sellers who are willing to ignore red flags for money, he said. But while the U.S has increased penalties for people who buy guns legally and resell them to smugglers, police say the cash involved is too tempting for some. If Mr. Falero-Delgado had managed to sell the guns he picked up on the river, they would have been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars more in Canada than what they cost in Texas. Guns are so embedded in Texan culture that the ATF's efforts to regulate their sale are sometimes met with harsh pushback, particularly among groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA). Licensed gun sellers complain private sales and gun shows are like the Wild West, while registered dealers have to follow the rules and fill out forms on most transactions. 'You don't have to have a bill of sale. You don't have to have anything. You can just hand over cash,' explained Brandon Mankin, director of operations for Freedom Firearms & Outfitters, a gun shop in north Dallas popular with hunters and ex-military alike. A large moose head with a MAGA hat hangs on the wall as he speaks. He says it's hard to regulate because the NRA lobbies hard 'every time they try to put a law into effect.' In 2021, Texas changed its gun laws to allow 'permitless carry,' which gives anyone over the age of 21 the right to carry a gun in public without a licence. As part of that change, licenced gun owners no longer required a background check to buy more firearms. While U.S. law prohibits people from dealing in firearms without a license, groups such as at the NRA have long defended Americans' right to sell guns privately without recording those sales – something they view as a bedrock principle of their Constitutional right to bear arms. Into that free-for-all stepped traffickers such as Demontre Antwon Hackworth, who shortly after the Texas law changed resold at least 92 guns he'd legally bought from federally licensed firearms dealers in the state. At least 75 of those guns were bought in the span of six months from just one dealer – a retired Navy vet and Christian counsellor who sold guns out of his home in a rural suburb of Dallas. Four of those guns ended up being used in crimes in Canada, according to U.S. court records. The owner of that suburban gun shop, called Triggernometry Arms, later surrendered his licence as a gun dealer but faced no penalties for selling Mr. Hackworth the guns. He did not respond to interview requests for this story. Mr. Hackworth was sentenced to 21 months in prison in 2023 for reselling the guns. Then-U.S. attorney-general Merrick Garland said the case was an example of America's efforts to crack down on 'the criminal gun-trafficking pipelines that flood our communities with illegal guns.' The penalties for gun smuggling have since been increased to a maximum of 15 years. Without effective tracing, investigating the people bringing guns from America's most gun-loving state to neighbouring countries is nearly impossible, said Mr. Boshek. Yet in both Canada and the U.S., there are still too many police departments that fail to regularly trace the guns they seize, he said, often because of a lack of resources. 'There's no higher priority in the ATF than stopping the sources of illegal firearms. As soon as we get recoveries in places like Canada or Mexico, and we look to see who the purchaser was,' he said. 'But we need to know about it. We don't want to be the source of guns for anybody.'
