Posted on 04/05/2009 1:03:04 PM PDT by AtlasStalled
It is a huge black market trade, and it is growing rapidly. * * * 95 per cent of the smokes come from clandestine factories on reserves, mostly from the New York State side of Akwesasne, the centre of a massive spiderweb of smuggling operations. The riverside Mohawk community of Akwesasne straddles three borders, Ontario, Quebec and New York State, and it is a smugglers' paradise. * * * The Mounties say there are 105 organized crime groups in Canada involved in the tobacco trade, from mom-and-pop operations that only deal in cigarettes to violent groups, including the Italian mafia, Hells Angels, Asian street gangs and Jamaican posses. The Mounties can point to a growing list of busts involving gangsters and illegal tobacco. The most recent was March 12, when they charged 22 people, including two Hells Angels and two Kahnawake Mohawks, in connection with a cigarette and methamphetamine ring around Quebec City. This kind of thing makes even the Mohawks who are involved in the business nervous. The Mohawks of Kahnawake have mixed feelings about the trade. Although it employs many people on the reserve, they don’t want gangsters on the streets. In Akwesasne, police have seized AK-47s and rocket launchers, several people have been killed during police chases with smugglers, and Hells Angels ride down the street in their colours.
(Excerpt) Read more at thechronicleherald.ca ...
And the modern-day prohibitionists-by-exorbitant-taxation expected anything different?
Or you could just order them from Europe. I think Switzerland ships them out - no duties or taxes, just a small shipping fee.
Pretty much every smoker I know in Canada smokes bootleg smokes.
Another example of why so many felons vote for DemocRATS. Look at the job opportunities that the DemocRATS have created with their tobacco tax increases.
Remember when the milkman would deliver milk to the box on your porch? That is how common cig smuggling is up there. The primary scheme is “reimportation” - the cigs are legally shipped, tax-free, out of the country.
Then they are smuggled right back in.
This new tax is a mafia wet-dream.
>>>> a cigarette and methamphetamine ring <<<<<<
Predictable. In fact I did predict it several years ago, and it’s only been a matter of time and waiting.
The feds have finally raised cig taxes to a level that encourages criminal enterprise.
Coming to a city near you.
(Disclaimer: I don’t smoke, and I don’t care if others do.)
If they would legalize tobacco this would end. :~D
Hey, look at this way: It’s jobs ceated by the stimulus.
>>>>> Or you could just order them from Europe. <<<<<<
Not really. When I smoked in the past (I’ve quit), I ordered from Switzerland and I guess so did many others until the feds seized an entire DHL jet at JFK, filled to the brim with European cigs.
Later I received a U.S. Customs notice that I could come to JFK and pay my duty taxes to retrieve them, but I decided it wasn’t really worth a 400 mile round-trip.
Canada has a fake reality sit com called Trailer Park Boys.They had one episode where the three main charactors come up with a plan by stealing Patrick Swayze’s[who is kind of an on going inside joke on the show]antique toy train and con these three imbeciles to build tracks across the border where they smuggle their latest crop of primo weed to non other than Sebastan Bach of Skid Row fame who sends them a shipment of American cigarettes which they can bootleg on the Canadian side of the border.This article reminded me of that show.It’s kind of hilarious when their plan backfires due to their Nemisis trailer park supervisor and his pot bellied sidekick assistant supervisor who spoil[as usual]their diabolical plan.
Wasn’t smuggling a popular pastime/profession in Colonial times (in an effort to avoid the king’s taxes).
You know, I’m down right tempted to smuggle cigs just to “fight the system”.
As the Mohawk cigarette dealer puts it: "Are they going to buy a carton at $87.50, plus tax, or a baggie for 10?"
In 2006, illegal smokes had 16.5 per cent of the market, 22 per cent in 2007 and 32.7 per cent in 2008. Imperial says that amounts to $2.5 billion in federal and provincial taxes evaded in 2008.
Kind of speaks for itself.
The stupid libs think that they can tax anything they want at any rate they want and the people just keep paying and paying.
fightin’ the system like two modern day robin hood....
I just finished rolling my own first carton at a cost of $18.
The price of a pound of tobacco went from $1 to $25...our government sucks rocks.
According to the RCMP the organized crime groups that smuggle contraband tobacco into Canada are the same ones smuggling marijuana into the United States:
Millions of smokers across Canada rely on the cigarettes — which retail for as little as $5 a carton, compared with up to $90 for a carton of legal smokes. According to the RCMP, which is engaged in a futile battle against the smugglers who crisscross the St. Lawrence at will, all of the tobacco manufacturers on the U.S. side are run by organized crime groups. “It’s all the way from mom and pop groups to Hells Angels,” says Sgt. Michael Harvey, of the Cornwall, Ont., RCMP detachment. “We’ve identified 25 organized crime groups in the Cornwall area that are involved in the illicit tobacco trade, the illicit drug trade, gun smuggling, people smuggling and currency,” he says. “And it’s all related. The same organized crime groups that are producing the cigarettes north are the same ones using the same smuggling routes to move the drugs south.”
And the May 2008 shooting death of Daniel Simonds, a 31-year-old former U.S. Marine in rural upstate New York, underscores the point. According to federal prosecutors in New York, Simonds was murdered after he attempted to cut cigarette magnate Alan Jacobs out of a marijuana deal:
About a year before the shooting, Mr. Simonds had gone to work as an electrician at a cigarette factory owned by Alan Jacobs in Akwesasne, the reserve at the heart of the contraband tobacco business. Mr. Jacobs’ family business — Jacobs Tobacco Company — is headquartered in a modern 47,000-square-foot factory in an industrial park on the U.S. side of the Akwesasne reserve, just a few kilometres from the Canadian border. * * * Police and prosecutors say that after he started working on the reserve, Mr. Simonds started to do marijuana runs for Mr. Jacobs. * * * Mr. Jacobs, police and prosecutors say, was buying high-grade Canadian hydroponic marijuana from Canadian Hells Angels, smuggling it into Akwesasne and shipping it to customers elsewhere in the United States — part of a lucrative two-way trade over the border that made Mr. Jacobs rich. * * * Prosecutors and police believe Mr. Simonds and Mr. Jacobs had a falling out after Mr. Simonds decided to start serving a marijuana customer in Ohio himself, cutting Mr. Jacobs out of the deal.
http://thechronicleherald.ca/News/1115009.html
Like blood oozing from between clenched fingers, the populace will find escape from the ever-tightening iron fist of debilitating taxation in any way they can.
http://www.house.gov/jct/x-3-09.pdf
The Government is planning on smuggling with the SCHIP bill - they even wrote a provision in the bill...
Study Concerning Magnitude of Tobacco Smuggling in the United States
(sec. 703 of the bill)
Present law does not require the Secretary to submit a tobacco smuggling study to Congress.
The provision requires the Secretary to submit to Congress a study concerning the magnitude of tobacco smuggling in the United States and to recommend the most effective steps to reduce it. The study would include a review of the loss of Federal tax revenue due to illicit tobacco trade in the United States, and the role of imported tobacco products in such illicit trade.
Effective Date
The study will be completed no later than one year after the date of enactment
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