They hit the throttle and sped through pitch-black water. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers spotted a vessel of some sort in the distance, near the uninhabited Celeron Island in the Detroit River at 2:35 a.m., June 5, 2020.
They cut through the international waterway that separates Michigan and Ontario, Canada and noticed something else near the watercraft: two floating bundles attached to an unconscious man by a tow strap.
According to federal court filings, they later learned the man is Glen R. Mousseau of Canada. He was wearing a wetsuit, and his “vessel” was no ordinary boat. It was a Seabob, a personal submarine, similar to the underwater jet fictional special agent James Bond used in the 1965 movie “Thunderball.”
Except, Mousseau wasn’t attempting espionage. He was trying to smuggle 265 pounds of Canadian marijuana into the U.S., Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent Christopher A. Leonard wrote in charging documents filed later the same day. Mousseau is now serving a nearly six-year federal prison sentence.
Mousseau’s arrest is one of several illustrating the increasingly sophisticated lengths Canadian smugglers are going to in order to get marijuana into the U.S., where there is a state-to-state patchwork of marijuana laws ranging from full legalization to total prohibition, creating unique economics and profit motives.
“It’s about profit,” Detroit-based Homeland Security Investigations Assistant Special Agent in Charge Matthew Stentz said.
The factors that influence those profits are supply and demand, directly impacted by legalization and prohibition.
“I think in Canada right now there is just so much of it and there’s profit to be had in the United States … especially with the high-grade, potent stuff that’s being grown within the greenhouses,” Stentz said. “That is still very desirable in states where it’s not necessarily legal.
“It’s fascinating that you can sit there and you look into parts of rural Ontario from Michigan, you can look across the water, whether it’s Lake St. Clair or the Detroit River, you can see in the middle of the night the glow of these greenhouses that are basically just mass producing this stuff on a daily basis.”
Market dynamics steer smugglers to Michigan, and ‘submersible watercraft’
Customs and Border Protection officials this year have seized nearly 15,000 pounds of marijuana at the Michigan border, predominantly in Detroit. That’s seven times as much as the 2,189 pounds seized in 2018. Homeland Security Operations, the federal law enforcement arm that investigates smuggling, has seen its seizures boom at other northern borders, including Buffalo. There were 1,071 pounds seized there in 2016, versus 41,000 in fiscal year 2021.
Conversely, marijuana seizures at the southern border, marijuana’s traditional route into the U.S., has experienced a steep decline. Customs officials seized nearly 723,000 pounds of marijuana at its southern checkpoints in 2016, compared to about 200,000 this year, a 72% decrease.
In Detroit, the size of the marijuana shipments are growing, while the frequency of seizures are on the decline. According to CBP statistics, there were 1,337 “seizure events” in 2019, versus about 700 in the last year.
Most of the Canadian-smuggled…
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