Attacks were financed through currency exchange houses — an economy of Iranian underground banking and sanctions evasion tied to Middle Eastern, Mexican and Chinese criminal networks with refunds built in if the violence failed to materialize.
“If you send the Mafia, they can pick a place of their choosing,” explained to a source reporting to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “If they hit, then that’s good, but if they don’t, then I get my money back. This is how the deal is.” He attempted to hire what he believed was a Mexican cartel operative to burn synagogues in New York, Los Angeles, and Arizona.
Police associations across Canada have repeatedly warned that the country’s youth justice laws are being used as shields by serious organized crime in this shooters-for-rent market.
What there is, on the face of the American complaint and the Canadian charge sheets, is something more disturbing — a marketplace.
In 2024, federal prosecutors in Minnesota unsealed an indictment charging a full-patch Hells Angels member from British Columbia, with conspiring in a murder-for-hire plot against an Iranian defector and his companion living in Maryland. The client was the network of a drug lord American and British officials say carries out assassinations and kidnappings of dissidents on behalf of Iranian intelligence. The negotiations ran over an encrypted phone service built by a defunct Vancouver company.
An Iranian intelligence ministry, contracting a Mexican cartel, to execute a Canadian politician in Canada’s capital: every layer of the marketplace, assembled in a single American court filing.
RCMP Commissioner answered: “what we have in our holdings is we have people that are intimidating people, harassing people, but connecting the dots to a foreign entity, regardless of the country, we don’t have that.”
There is no legal architecture that treats a money-exchange business for terrorism, a cartel’s police-corruption budget, and a biker gang’s murder contract for a foreign intelligence service as what they are: the operations of continuing criminal enterprises whose leadership, financing, and facilitators can be prosecuted as such.
Canada’s closest ally is describing it under oath in open session. What does not exist is the legal machinery to act on it, the candor to tell Canadians about it, and the political will to build both.
https://www.todayville.com/from-the...will-to-counter-state-and-cartel-convergence/
The problem appears to be if a Canadian or Canadian resident commits a crime in Canada linked to a cross-border criminal enterprise where another nation finds evidence to convict the Canadian or Canadian resident the Canadian or Canadian resident hasn't been extradited. As a first step at least I think non-Canadian residents should be extradited from Canada when a nation allied to Nato supports credible evidence of links to criminal enterprise outside Canada. The RCMP Commissioner comment suggests Canada lately hasn't been part of the Five-Eyes intelligence network. Discussion last year suggested Canada would be excluded from some functions of Five-Eyes over Canada's disclosure of pre-trial investigation and evidence given defence attorneys.