Talal Fouani admitted to laundering money for organized crime. He will not see his charges stayed despite the case taking more than 30 months to wind its way through the courts.
Talal Fouani
The delays were caused by defense lawyers, including 14 applications filed by Fouani's previous lawyer, Yoav Niv. "I have spent half a million to get here I have no more money,' Talal Fouani whines. 'My mental health is depleted.' He says he is too poor and can no longer pay for lawyers. “I don’t even have a bank account, I can’t get Legal Aid, I can’t do anything in this country anymore,” he said.
“I’m at a stage of a mental breakdown.”
Talal Fouani was busted after Alberta cops seized an estimated $55m in drugs in a cross-border investigation. Project Cobra began in 2020 and was a joint effort between the Alberta Law Enforcement Response Teams (ALERT), RCMP and the DEA.
928 kg of meth and 6 kg of cocaine were seized as a result of the three-year investigation. $7m worth of assets were seized or placed under criminal restraint, including 11 vehicles and two mansions. Nineteen firearms were seized, including handguns, rifles, submachine guns and suppressors. Ricco King, 52, faced five charges and walked again.
15 people and one business (Fouani Equity Funds Ltd.) were charged with 80 criminal offences.
King was the ringleader of the group. He beat a charge of drug trafficking, three counts of participating in a criminal organization and two counts of laundering proceeds of a crime.
King was previously busted for attempting to import cocaine in 2016. HERE. Those charges were stayed due to unreasonable delay.
Fouani survived, but his wife, Nakita Baron, 31, did not. A week after the killing, Michael Tyrel Arnold, 34, was charged with first-degree murder and attempted murder. His trial starts soon.
Fouani and his wife were shot in their Bentley outside their upscale Calgary home.
It's been 48 years since the Popeyes de Sorel officially became the Hells Angels of Montreal. The Popeyes were patched over to the Hells Angels in 1977. The Popeyes were founded by Michel "Sky" Langlois, Gilles "Super Gilles" Charette, Roger Calve and Yvon "Gorille" Bilodeau in 1965. The Popeyes had a reputation for being the most prosperous and were the most violent motorcycle club in Montreal. It was a match made in heaven.
At their peak, the Popeyes were the second-largest OMG in Canada, second only to the Satan's Choice. They became the first chapter of the HAMC in Canada. (Montreal North) Virtually none of the Popeyes spoke or understood English. Only a fraction of them were considered worthy of joining the Hells Angels.
Yves 'Apache' Trudeau was supposed to be among the bikers killed. He turned rat after avoiding his fate.
Hitman Yves 'Apache' Trudeau (the mad bomber) was a member of the Popeye MC. He committed over 40 murders.
Other Popeye members that became leading HA include Laurent 'L'Anglais' Viau, Normand 'Billy' Labelle, Robert 'Tiny' Richard, Denis 'Le Cure' Kennedy, Jean-Pierre 'Matt le Crosseur' Mathieu, Jean-Guy 'Brutus' Geoffrion and Michel 'Sky' Langlois. Langlois and Viau played a key role in the Lennoxville massacre.
What happened to "Stiches"? He caught a break and had charges dropped in Sept 2022 after cops misplaced cocaine evidence. Stiches has apparently kept that nose clean since. Cop body camera video caught events leading to the bust of Phillip Katsabanis, the South Florida rapper far better known as Stitches.
Bay Harbor Islands police arrested Katsabanis, whose albums include “Cocaine Holiday,” “I Need Rehab” and “Married to the Bricks,” on charges of felony cocaine possession and misdemeanor discharge of a firearm. Stitches called cops on himself, claiming 4 men were hiding in his business. When police arrived, they didn't find any invaders. They did find cocaine and a gun.
Stitches is said to have asked the men to leave multiple times. When cops arrived, there were no signs of a break-in or struggle and the shop was empty.
Stitches rose to fame in the mid-2010s with "Brick in Yo Face." He was a one hit wonder.
In 2017 Julian Underhill thought he had Willy Wonka's golden ticket when he found 356kg of cocaine at Caister-on-Sea near Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. Most of the cocaine was quickly recovered by cops after the public reported finding it.
Underhill wasn't going to do something that stupid. He scooped up as much as he could carry.
He sent a message to one of his mates saying he had found 'Willy Wonka's golden ticket' and told them to keep it secret. Word of the massive cocaine windfall leaked instantly to every crook in the area.
The drugs were believed to have been tied up to buoys offshore by smugglers so they could be brought ashore by smaller boats. It's thought the bags ended up on the beach after being swept away by strong winds and currents.
Underhill sold some cocaine and used some before cops came calling the next day to take his stash. He wasn't a part of the importing scheme.
Joseph 'Mad Dog' Sullivan was a mafia hitman. He started committing robberies at age 12. Sullivan carried out scores of murders for the Five Families, and was given 3 life sentences.
After four years in Attica, Sullivan did the impossible and escaped from the notorious prison in 1971. He was captured weeks later in Greenwich Village carrying a sawed-off shotgun.
Sullivan earned the nickname 'Mad Dog' from fellow inmates at Attica. Winning parole in 1975, Sullivan began working for the Genovese crime family. He single-handedly executed a dozen members of an Irish-American criminal organization headed by Mickey Spillane during the summer of 1976, which was half of Spillane's entire crew.
Michael J. Spillane was killed in 1977. Sullivan was one of the Genovese crime family's most lethal and efficient hitmen. The FBI believes that Sullivan murdered at least 35. The FBI considered him to be a sophisticated and professional assassin that never made mistakes, always got the job done, and always killed his target. Sullivan was sent to prison in 1982. He died there in 2017 aged 78.
One of Sullivan's intended targets was Carmine "Cigar" Galante, head of the Bonnano crime family. For much of the summer of 1978, Sullivan tried to carry out the hit on Galante, but failed.
It took a team of hit men to do what Sullivan couldn't — they killed Galante at a Brooklyn restaurant.
A Federal judge slammed Rudy Giuliani as ‘outrageous and shameful’. Giuliani, 80, once Donald Trump's personal lawyer, has already given up a New York City apartment, a 1980 Mercedes once owned by actress Lauren Bacall and several luxury watches. He has been disbarred and held in contempt in both New York and in Washington. A trial will determine whether he must turn over three World Series rings and his Florida condominium to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who won a $148 million defamation award against him.
Rudy Giuliani was found liable for defaming the two Georgia election workers, who became the target of nuts after the 2020 election. Giuliani violated court orders to produce evidence to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, resulting in a judgment.
Giuliani was ordered to pay damages for not proving his lies.
Giuliani was identified as “co-conspirator 1” in the federal criminal charges with Trump in the Georgia case. Freeman and Moss suffered a torrent of death threats and online attacks for over three years.
Giuliani was suspected of illegally lobbying the Trump administration on behalf of Russian spies in 2019. Giuliani hit the news about warnings made to the White House by the CIA and others about his contacts with Russian agents.
Andrii Derkach was identified by the Treasury Department as a Russian agent.
That connection led spies to learn about Giuliani's dealings with other Russian operatives. The FBI investigated Giuliani as a counterintelligence risk. Feds raided the Upper East Side apartment of Rudy Giuliani as part of a criminal probe. Ukrainian MP Oleksandr Dubinsky, who in 2019 helped Giuliani in his search for dirt on the Bidens, was charged with treason. Together with Derkach and ex-prosecutor Kostyantyn Kulyk, they joined an organization formed by chiefs of Russia’s Military Intelligence. (GRU)
In 1986 Giuliani and Senator Al D’Amato posed 'undercover' to show how easy it was to buy crack. Giuliani dressed in a Hells Angels cut, complete with club patches, including one that read “Filthy Few.”
To wear the HA 'Death Head' when not a HA member is ill advised and the 'Filthy Few' patch is reserved for those HA who have killed for the club.
The judge wasn't inclined to slap Kyle Alexander Purvis with a 10 year prison sentence in late 2013. The judge described Kyle Alexander Purvis, 36, as the 'boots on the ground' part of the operation. Starting with the 19 years Adam Kaup bought for his role in a massive cocaine scheme, the judge subtracted six months for Purvis’s lesser role in the scheme, six months for his rough background and intellectual challenges, six months for his strict house arrest and a year for Purvis’s lack of any related drug record. “That leaves 16.5 years in the penitentiary.”
Kyle Purvis’ role was to set up a warehouse on Mohawk Street to receive cocaine shipments at what looked like a legitimate company – KP Heavy Equipment. Adam Kaup was the logistics man. Vincenzo Capotorto, 48, the alleged money man, walked on all charges.
Adam Kaup, 43, pleaded guilty to importing 1,512 kg of cocaine that was to be delivered to the Brantford warehouse in 2022. Kaup also acknowledged a previous plan that brought in a large shipment in 2021 that went undetected by cops.
“It’s breathtaking,” said Justice Gethin Edward as he sentenced Kaup to 19 years in prison. Purvis was director of a heavy equipment repair and service company Deval Handling Equipment Inc. at 133 Mohawk St, Brantford, Ont. Capotorto owned the warehouse.
Purvis was charged with importing a controlled substance into Canada and possession of a controlled substance for the purpose of trafficking. Charges came a month after 1.5 tonnes of cocaine was seized by CBSA hidden inside a marine container in Saint John, N.B. The huge cocaine shipment travelled a winding route from Colombia, through Costa Rica, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic inside secret compartments in a large piece of machinery, its final destination was a bogus heavy equipment business in Brantford. Valued was pegged at $198m and it is the largest quantity of cocaine seized from a marine shipping container in Atlantic Canada in three decades.
Tyler Grant Manchur pled guilty in February 2024. He was drunk as a skunk and drove his truck through a Kelowna homeless camp flattening a tent and pinning a 50-year-old man underneath his vehicle. At first he claimed he was drugged. CCTV footage from inside the Liquid Zoo night club showed he was there for nearly three hours and "consumed approximately 11 ounces of liquor, four beers, and... inhaled an unknown substance into his right nostril." He then got into his 2019 Dodge Ram 1500 truck and at about 2 a.m. plowed through a chainlink fence at Ethel Street, and drove through the homeless camp along the Okanagan Rail Trail.
"I have zero memory of anything before midnight," Tyler Grant Manchur, 30, told Castanet. That might be true, he blew a breathalyzer twice the legal limit.
Manchur was charged with impaired driving causing bodily harm and one count of driving while prohibited. A homeless man was dragged 100 feet while inside his tent and sustained serious injuries. He later died.
Manchur says he lives in Kelowna but travels back and forth between B.C. and Alberta. This explains why he had bogus Alberta insurance. He was also busted for impaired in Alberta. His excuses included Asperger's and Tourette syndrome.
The cane toad front expands 40 to 60 km every year.
Between January 18th and 27th, thousands of volunteers in a band of territory stretching across north-eastern Australia from Darwin to Brisbane venture into the night with torches and collecting buckets. They are part of the Great Cane Toad Bust. Cane toads were introduced to Queensland in 1935 as a solution to the grey-backed beetle impacting the sugar cane industry. Today they are everywhere. Experts say there are at least 200 million of the pests. Cane toads are toxic at every life stage and are prolific breeders. Female cane toads can produce up to 35,000 eggs, sometimes twice a year. Cane toads are the poster child of invasive species.
Cane toads have toxic skin that kills native predators. Every year, the cane toads continue their inexorable march across the country. Few animals are reviled in Oz more than the white ibis. The too noisey 'bin chicken' has an iron stomach and scavenges food from anywhere. The native bird is earning new respect after it began eating cane toad.
Videos of white ibis "playing" with the toads has emerged. The clever ibis has learned to stress the toad, and then wash off the resulting toxin before consuming it whole. They won't run out of chow anytime soon.
Larivière later received his colours after being promoted to a member in good standing of the Montreal chapter. In 2018 the National Organized Crime Squad (ENRCO) seized his patches.
In the Hells Angels, having your colors in the hands of cops is a personal insult. The club's bylaws stipulate that all members "are obliged to have their jackets". The problem is that they do not have the right to have more than one jacket. 'Race' had to order another set of patches. Larivière was fined $1k for obstructing cops at the 2018 Martin Robert wedding in Montreal. The drunk biker got himself tasered by cops at the event and spent the night in jail.
Larivière was arrested again on July 6, 2020 after a dispute at the Pizzeria Sofia restaurant. The owner announced last call before closing. Unhappy that his supply of booze had ended, Larivière and a goon attacked him.
Andrii Derkach was identified by the Treasury Department as a Russian agent. 
