Inside FBI Undercover Operation ‘Dead Hand’ Targeting Montreal Mafia & CJNG Traffickers

He had been on the road for days, steering a big rig from Los Angeles, where he had allegedly picked up 4 kilograms of heroin and 15 kilos of cocaine. He found the warehouse at 3:18 p.m. and pulled over when a man waiting outside walked up and leaned through his window.

That’s when RCMP officers pounced. Cops had been hiding outside the warehouse for 50 minutes. They arrested the driver and the man who came to meet him. The driver was still clutching a $20 bill when he was grabbed. An officer looked at the serial number: FYW3742405, the very bill needed to unlock the transaction, according to FBI allegations in recently unsealed court documents.

Inside the vehicle, police say they found tightly wrapped bricks of heroin and cocaine. The longer the wait the more their questions ate up a group chat.

American authorities say their investigation shut down two separate but related drug rings moving large quantities of cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin from Mexico to Los Angeles, and then smuggling it into Canada. One network was feeding Quebec and the other Ontario.

Truck Driver Turned FBI Undercover Informant

Bou, like traffickers before and after him, grasped the economic law of cocaine and meth: The further they’re moved from their source, the more valuable they become. Successfully siphoning a trickle from the flood crossing America’s southern border with Mexico and moving it across its northern border with Canada adds great value, enough to make you rich.

Bou wanted to be rich and was scaling up to include drug warehouses in suburbs around Los Angeles, from which he doled dope to a network of truck drivers to haul north.

In August 2021, the RCMP told American cops about Bou, and a narcotics suppression team in Orange County started watching a low-rise condo in Alhambra, east of downtown L.A.

The cops watched Bou drive rental cars around town collecting boxes and bags before meeting up with truck drivers; and they watched the drivers hide those boxes and bags in their 18-wheelers, some with Canadian license plates and some registered in California. The truckers then headed north on the web of interstate highways.

It seemed a big case, one investigators could dine out on, but Bou ended up being just the appetizer because one of the traffic stops had an unexpected ending.

In return, the driver agreed to work as an informant.

Going Undercover

U.S. documents, including grand jury indictments and lengthy affidavits sworn by FBI agents summarizing their operations, were obtained by the National Post. The allegations contained in the documents have not yet been tested in court.

The informant told the feds that before his own arrest, Sidhu told him to contact a man nicknamed “Primo” to arrange cocaine pickups around Los Angeles. Primo was later allegedly identified as Eduardo Carvajal, 50, of Guadalajara, Mexico.

What allegedly emerged from the partnership was an active network of truck drivers shuttling drugs from California into Ontario, using the Detroit-Windsor tunnel, the Peace Bridge in Niagara, and the Blue Water Bridge connecting Michigan to Sarnia.

The snitch was a natural at logistics, and others wanted him to arrange their transportation as well, making him a trusted cog in overlapping drug smuggling machines. Once he started working for the FBI, he was told to get back into business while guarding his heavy secret.

10 kilograms of cocaine were allegedly given to the Informant as payment by Eduardo Carvajal and delivered by Carlos Barragan in March 2023.

“Bro whenever you have time send me the token,” the informant texted. The Token is a unique serial number on a banknote used to confirm identity at drop-offs, the FBI says.

Kumar allegedly sent the informant a photo of a U.S. dollar bill showing serial number G43659809B and said a flight was booked from Calgary to L.A. the next day. The informant forwarded the serial number to Soto.

U.S. Customs monitored a Sept. 5, 2022, flight from Canada that arrived at Los Angeles International Airport. Kumar rented a Toyota Corolla while surveillance teams set up around the planned meeting spot in El Segundo, just south of the airport.

Officers watched Kumar and another man move items from one vehicle to another, according to U.S. allegations. Kumar was given the address of a Best Western in Baltimore and a new banknote serial number, and off he drove, the FBI says.

Kumar is alleged to have made another pickup, in Hemet, California, from a man who arrived in a Honda Accord. When agents ran the plate of the Honda, they found it was registered to Corell Carbajal Garcia. Two weeks after the Hemet handoff, police raided Garcia’s home. They allegedly found cocaine and $80,000 cash in a safe, but also something more intriguing.

“Car Parts” Ledger

Corell Carbajal Garcia

Agents believe “car parts” is code for cocaine 530 is the number of kilos Garcia had delivered and 601 is the number of kilos he was given to distribute. The difference between the units received and those delivered was 71. Agents counted the bricks of cocaine in the house…there were 71.

“Bro I’m ready,” he texted.

Carvajal allegedly told the informant, on a phone call recorded by the FBI, about his partner, a man he called “The Italian.” He described him as a good friend from Canada who spent his winters in Guadalajara, Mexico.

“The Italian,” the FBI alleges, was later identified as Roberto Scoppa.

Scoppa has no criminal convictions and is the owner of a Quebec recycling firm. However, he shares a notorious family name. His brothers Andrea (Andrew) Scoppa and Salvatore Scoppa were influential Mafia leaders in Montreal before they were killed in 2019 during a mob war.

A photo of Carlos Barragan holding a modified AK-47-style rifle was found on his phone.

On Nov. 28, 2022, a man the FBI identified as Carlos Barragan, 51, of Long Beach, California, parked a Jeep Cherokee in front of a PetSmart in a strip mall in Signal Hill, just north of Long Beach. Sharma pulled up in a tractor-trailer and put a large box from Barragan’s Jeep into the cab of his truck, according to FBI allegations.

“Drop done brother thank you,” Carvajal texted to the informant afterward, and then a Signal group chat was started for himself, the informant, and Scoppa, the FBI alleges. That was the fateful trip that ended with Sharma being arrested outside the warehouse in Montreal.

According to police, the next day, Scoppa wrote to an accomplice: “Okay, tell me when the car is 20 minutes away, my guy will tell you where to go.” “At the corner of Chabanel,” he would add later before writing “My guy will arrive in a Jeep.”

When the informant was summoned to Mexico to personally discuss things, it must have been terrifying. He headed south anyway.

Jalisco trafficker Eduardo “Primo” Carvajal

Summoned to Mexico

Guadalajara, deep in west Mexico, is a city of considerable history and charm. In the underworld, though, it is known as the birthplace of one of Mexico’s first cocaine cartels, and its state, Jalisco, as home to one of the country’s most violent narco groups, the CJNG.

It was here that the FBI’s secret informant arrived on Dec. 16, 2022, to meet with bosses who had recently been stung by costly losses of men, money, and products because of his betrayals.

But did they know? The FBI documents don’t reveal how the snitch was feeling. It’s inconceivable he wasn’t terrified.

He first met Carvajal, the alleged narco known as “Primo.” Carvajal quickly started talking to him about “The Italian.” He told the snitch his partner’s real name was Roberto Scoppa and that they had worked together for 8 years; Carvajal even showed him a photograph of Scoppa’s passport, the informant told his FBI handlers afterward.

Carvajal wasn’t fingering him as a rat; the Mexican seemed worried the informant thought his partner, the Italian, was one. The next night, the informant met with Soto, another of the Mexicans he was setting up, at Soto’s home in Guadalajara, the FBI alleges.

This time, the snitch felt comfortable enough to wear a wire to secretly record his conversations. 

Scoppa, however, introduced himself to the informant, according to allegations in FBI documents, and got down to business. The corridor between Toronto and Montreal was “heated,” Scoppa allegedly said, and when truck drivers get caught some of them talk, so he had an idea — but he didn’t want the snitch to share it with anyone else.

“Scoppa cautioned however that the driver must wear gloves so that there are no fingerprints on the drugs,” the FBI summary alleges.

Who is the Rat?

Scoppa mused it could have been a rat, according to the FBI’s summary. He told the others he learned from a lawyer that Toronto police tipped off the Sûreté du Québec about the delivery, according to allegations in an FBI document. Maybe the driver got flagged by cameras on the highway, he said. He doubted the problem was the drop-off spot because it was “clean,” according to the FBI summary.

“Scoppa said he did not want to point fingers” and added “the truth would come out” during the court process.

The four of them then went to dinner. As they ate, the FBI claims Scoppa said the busts are a good warning because “a little thing like that” could “trickle down to us” and then “we’ll have problems.” He suggested capping loads at 100 kilos a month, the summary alleges.

“100 a month is perfect,” Scoppa allegedly said, claiming he makes $1 million a year with that method, the summary alleges. Carvajal lamented having to deal with small bills; Scoppa said he uses Tether, a popular cryptocurrency.

A month later, the informant went back to Mexico, this time to meet with a boss of the other network he was snitching on, the one allegedly feeding Sidhu, known as King, in Ontario. It was a shorter trip. 

Walking into Sandoval’s house, the informant was distracted by a rack of rifles hanging in the kitchen, and more guns in a cabinet next to the bathroom, he later told the FBI. If Sandoval was to do something nasty to a visitor, it wouldn’t be his first time. In 2008, when Sandoval was selling cocaine and meth and going by the name Jorge Cuevas-Mares, he lured a member of his organization across the border into Mexico, where he kidnapped him and held him for a month until the man’s family paid a debt of $500,000. After that, Sandoval pleaded guilty to drug charges and was released from prison in 2016.

Hells Angels MC Montreal

The men then discussed a proposal for the informant to move 80 to 200 units out of Los Angeles each week. Then they all went for lunch. The informant walked safely back into America before dinnertime.

The very next day they started exchanging serial numbers and phone numbers to begin hauling dope, authorities allege. Police watched one exchange, followed the truck, pulled it over, and found 70 kilos of cocaine.

“Brother we got a problem,” Soto allegedly texted the informant afterward, and then told him about the highway seizure. The informant asked if he had broken the bad news to Sandoval.

“Ima tell him in a bit brother,” wrote Soto, according to the FBI documents, “I’m just trying to figure best way to tell him.” Maybe Soto was thinking of all those rifles.

The informant was himself soon summoned down again to Mexico to explain directly to Sandoval what happened on the highway. The informant went. He even wore a wire.

On Feb. 20, 2023, the snitch crossed into Mexico and was driven to see Sandoval, the FBI claims. Although Sandoval was upset, the FBI summary says, he agreed to keep working with the informant but said for the next 8 loads he was paying a lower rate.

As this informant was spinning Scoppa and the Mexicans, he was allegedly also busy doing the exact same thing with a second group, the Ontario branch, allegedly run by Guramrit Sidhu, a bald man with a salt and pepper mustache and goatee.

He supervised a whirlwind of trucks and deliveries, with rapidly changing drivers and coded language, the FBI claims.

In text messages, “water” was code for meth and “girls” for cocaine; “Lisa” meant Los Angeles, authorities say. The FBI compared his hyperactive machinations to conducting an orchestra.

Investigators started tracking Sidhu’s alleged drug pickups in California through the informant on Sept. 12, 2022, when banknote serial numbers started zipping back and forth, the FBI claims.

Just after midnight, on Sept. 27, 2022, after the 80 kilos had crossed into Canada and arrived at a trucking yard in Brampton, Sidhu went and retrieved it himself, the FBI alleges, and he took it to his Brampton home.

When daylight broke, Sidhu allegedly took the boxes to a parking lot and passed them to another distributor, according to the allegations.

By late October, though, the informant and a second FBI cooperator started posing as the drivers for Sidhu’s loads, the FBI says, taking the drugs from a distributor, and turning them over to the feds.

Operation Dead Hand Takedown

By then, two federal indictments had been unsealed in an L.A. courthouse naming 19 accused, and search warrants and arrest warrants had been executed in California, Florida, Texas, Montreal, Brampton, and Calgary to grab as many suspects as possible before media arrived.

Martin Estrada, U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, publicly named Scoppa as one of the leaders arrested, emphasizing the link to the Mafia in Canada. In the same indictment, Canadian truckers Sharma and Kumar were also named.

194 kilograms of meth that Ivan Gravel Gonzalez was allegedly delivering for Guramrit Sidhu, in October 2022.

Sidhu was named as the boss of the second branch of Operation Dead Hand. Quebec resident Ivan Gravel Gonzalez was named as one of Sidhu’s underlings.

By the time the press conference started, 13 of the 19 accused men had been arrested. Another two soon joined them behind bars, leaving four as wanted fugitives: Carvajal and Soto, named as Mexican leaders; Garcia, the alleged distributor with the “car parts” notebook; and Esteban Sinhue Mercado, 24, of San Jacinto, California, an alleged distributor.

Scoppa says he has always held a job and describes himself as an asset to the company. He offered to surrender his passport, wear a GPS bracelet, and not communicate with the co-defendants and anyone named in the charges. He is willing to commit $100,000, with no deposit, to prove that he will not violate his conditions. His request will be debated at the end of the month.