The Billion Dollar Dealer Who Linked Hell's Angels, Mafia Families, Cartels, and Native American Smugglers
41:50 Share

ButcherBox, you guys have heard me talk about it before. It is a service that I used even before they were an advertiser because I like getting high-quality meat and seafood that I can trust online.

right to my door, 100% grass-fed beef, free-range organic chicken, pork-raised crate-free, and wild-caught seafood. We are only like a month and a half away from chili season. You're going to want to stock your freezer with a lot of meat. That's not going to cost you that much at all. It's an incredible value. There's free shipping. You can curate it to customize your box plans, and it gets delivered right to your doorstep.

No more annoying trips to the grocery store or the butcher. It's going to save you time and save you money. Sign up for ButcherBox today by going to butcherbox.com slash underworlds and use code underworld at checkout to get $30 off your first box. Again, that's butcherbox.com slash underworlds and use code underworlds. It's 2007, January.

And a woman walks into the Long Island office of the DEA with a story to tell. Seems she's pretty pissed off at her ex-boyfriend, who also happens to be the father of her child. She's got the baby with her. And I don't know what her former man did, but it must have been pretty bad because she's straight up snitching on him, not even to the local cops, but to the DEA. She keeps going on and on about how he's this big time weed dealer. He's this major player in the industry in Queens. I mean, she's giving them the hard sell that they need to do something about this guy and right now.

Back then, this actually would have been a big deal. I mean, it's not like now where you can buy stocks and lead companies on Robinhood, right?

I remember back then there was a delivery service that was actually like a big new thing. And there used to be a huge one called Cartoon Network. And it was a big deal that you could call a phone number and someone would show up at your apartment in an hour with like all sorts of weed. It wasn't like now where every two-bit dealer has like a fleet of Ubers and Lyfts delivering all over the city. I mean, you can seriously Google it, Google Cartoon Network, and you'll see some funny articles from those years about weed delivery services that were all only in New York instead of right now where it's pretty much everywhere. Yeah.

Anyway, this scorned ex-girlfriend is going on and on until finally the feds are like, fine, okay, we'll look into this guy. Just leave us alone.

And I actually wonder how long it took or how convincing it had to be because I imagine the feds, kind of like reporters but more so times a million, are always dealing with crackpots of all types and reckless exaggerators coming into them with stories. And it's tough because you don't want to investigate every lunatic fringe story, but you don't want to be the guy who was dismissive of some huge, huge brick.

When I used to do street reporting in New York, you had these situations where you'd go to the scene of some crime and start talking to people and they'd be telling you stories of how there was a gun battle and both sides had AKs and it ended up being one guy who fired like two shots with a dusty revolver. Or one time some guy was trying to convince me the bodega guy was selling guns out of his shop to make money for Al-Qaeda, which is like, no, you've just been smoking bath salts. But...

At the same time, you got to pay attention since you don't want to miss that big one. These feds almost missed it. But this woman would eventually lead to the biggest pot dealer in New York City history. A man who was able to bring together Hells Angels, the Bonanno crime family, the Rizzuto crime family in Montreal, Native American smugglers, and the Sinaloa cartel in an extremely efficient billion-dollar organization that spanned the entire U.S. and Canada before he was 35 years old.

This is a story of Jimmy Cornwaye. Welcome to another episode of the Underworld Podcast. Yeah, we're back. It's been a while. Yeah, it's been a long time and we're sorry to leave you guys. We're actually working on a deal with Podcast One. It's a podcast network and they're going to help us out and we're going to be able to do episodes for you guys every single week moving forward. So we will never leave you alone again. Under contract once a week. We got to do them. We got to do them.

It can't be like before when Sean would spend five days on a crazy amphetamine binge in some Berlin nightclub and we'd have to skip it for a week and just kind of show up, maybe put it up on Thursday. We got to put it up every week now. Yeah. No excuses. Just going to see him up and then go on the bender, but yeah. Yeah. We'll do it ahead of time so we don't have to cut back on your bender schedule.

Yeah. And you were saying you wanted to kick this episode off with a little monologue around Israel-Palestine, right? Yeah, nah, we're not going to do that. Jimmy Cornway, they called him the pot playboy, the man who brought a billion dollars worth of weed into New York City, drove a $2 million car. This guy, I'm going to call him Jimmy because his last name, I still don't know if I'm pronouncing it right. I mean, that name is crazy. Y-E-A?

Yeah. French, French Canadians, man. Anyway, he really takes the cake in terms of organization structure when it comes to putting together a criminal organization. It's like something out of a bad action movie or like a grand theft auto plot. I think what's even more impressive about this guy is that he was able to do this all as a French Canadian, which as some of you might know, it's just a massive disadvantage of getting someone to like you.

Yeah. Did you not see the film Mesrine? Wasn't he like a French Canadian gangster or something? Did he go and fight with the Quebec house? I don't know. I don't know. That was a pretty cool gangster movie, actually. Yeah, there's some there's some really good stuff. I mean, I love Montreal. I'm just kidding about all that. I had family there and spent a lot of time there. And it's really just it's a wild city and an exciting city, too. I keep hearing about how great that place is. Like I wasn't that into Toronto. I don't know. I don't know. I really want to go there. Yeah.

Montreal is a fun time. Go in the summer. Montreal is a fun time. Anyway, a lot of this stuff was covered by the reporters at the Montreal Gazette, the Toronto Star. There's reporter Alan Fuhrer, I think. I can't be Fuhrer. F-U-R-E-R from the New York Times who did a great story on it. And actually journalist Bob Halloran was supposed to have a book coming out about Jimmy. There's like a cover on Amazon and everything, but it never came out and his publisher wouldn't tell me why. So I thought that was kind of interesting. Yeah.

Jimmy was born in 1979 to a somewhat wealthy family in the suburbs of Montreal. His dad was in the construction industry and real estate business. And Jimmy, you know, was a black belt in karate at age 10. He was also a big time hockey player, you know, a well-adjusted, charming kid. But his whole world changes when he's 16. His father deserts the family in 1996. He just leaves a note for his children and, you know, his wife.

The construction business was doing well for a while, but falling on hard times. His mom had a dry cleaning business and that collapsed. And after his dad leaves, his mom had to go on welfare and they had to move into his uncle's apartment. And his mom would later say that his dad leaving just really affected Jimmy and changed everything.

She also had a hard time dealing with everything. Apparently attempted suicide a few times. Jimmy's 17 then. And, you know, this all, it drops a weight on him and he drops out of school. He was working a bunch of crappy jobs to help support the family. And that's when he starts selling weed to provide for his mom and his brother. This is just like nailing the Hollywood plot points here. Either that or an Eminem single.

Yeah, I mean, the fact that there's not a movie right now is disappointing. At 18, he gets arrested for the first time for growing weed with his brother.

Two years later, he's caught selling weed on a Native American reservation. I guess Native Canadian, you know, they call my natives in Canada. Yeah. Yeah. First Nations. That time he's got $50,000 on him and the arrest is made by native police. Canada back then, not just the Montreal area, but British Columbia too, was just like huge in weed. The Canadian government was far more relaxed about it. I remember hearing statistics back then, like one out of every 10 houses in Vancouver was a grow house, maybe even something higher than that.

But that's like one of those facts that goes around when you're stoned in college. So I'm not sure if I can verifiably say that. So look it up. Yeah. And my college, it was this friend of a friend tale about someone who got high on acid and locked a dwarf in a wardrobe. So I want to know if anyone else has heard that story. Maybe I was just super, super high.

I have not. I think we say little people now, Sean. Do we say little people? I'm really sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll let it slide. Anyway, I say that to say this, right? He doesn't really do any jail time because it's Canada. But a year later, he's caught again, this time for trying to sell 10,000 Hicks of Ecstasy for $65,000.

but the guy he's trying to sell to is an undercover officer. And like, bro, at some point, if you're caught three times in like four years, you got to realize you're just, you're not good at this, you know? Yeah. But maybe that's why he eventually ended up becoming the biggest weed dealer of all time because like, well, at least in New York, he didn't let a stupid thing like doubts or being bad at something stop him. I mean, there's like a lesson there about perseverance, kids. Yeah. This time though, he can't avoid jail time.

Before he's sentenced, he starts setting up what would become his massive operation. He also starts working with a one-legged French Canadian with tribal tattoos and frosted tips. A guy by the name of Patrick Pace, I think, a major trafficker. Despite his hair, this guy is a connector too. I think it's because of his hair. I say bring back frosted tips, like JT, Scotty Too Hotty. This is when celebs are truly cool, I reckon.

You kids don't know this, but like Frosted Tips really had a moment in the late 90s and early 2000s. I'm not saying I ever did. I definitely didn't. But I wouldn't be surprised if Sean did. Yeah. Not surprised at all. Yeah. So together they set up transport with the Hells Angels. See, what Jimmy and Patrick have done is started setting up grow houses and buying from grow ops in Western Canada near Vancouver. I'm not sure it was whether they're in Northern California came first, but, you know, there's a similar reputation on the West Coast there for weed growth.

And these guys are getting the Hells Angels to transport it to the Montreal area where they stash it in warehouses.

Jimmy realizes there's a lot more money to be made in selling good weed in the New York City area and the Northeast in general and eventual East Coast of America. There's just not that much good weed there. And massive quantities aren't really grown there. And you can take over the market and charge a premium price if you're getting all that good shit from the West Coast. So they get the weed from Western Canada to those Montreal stash houses, and then they're transporting it to New York. And how are they doing that?

By linking up with Native American smugglers whose reservations straddle the border, the Mohawk reservations, I believe. Moving contraband over Native American reservations that sort of straddle these borders is huge and was already established. So is this stuff still going on now? Like how come it's easier to run stuff through reservations and other places?

I don't know if it's still going on now. I would assume so. I mean, back then it was guns, cigarettes, you know, all that good stuff because there's no real feds out there, right? It's out of their jurisdiction. So these smugglers that were working the reservations, they were already experienced in one way or another.

They're using snowmobiles in the winter and speedboats in the summer to move the product over the border, where it's then taken to Brooklyn and Staten Island to be divided up and then distributed to bigger wholesale type dealers. These smaller dealers then sell it to the smaller dealers and so on and so on until they reach the guy in your high school who claims he was connected. At some point, he meets Mario Racine, the brother of a lingerie model he starts dating.

He becomes his main guy on the East Coast, helping Jimmy set up distribution in New York, Brooklyn, and Staten Island.

He's starting to move 200 pound shipments of sour diesel to distributors up and down the East coast. I mean, some real big boys in the weed game soon. They're up to 1000 pounds a week. All right. So like looking behind the curtain here, guys, like we do show each other the scripts before we go through these shows. When I saw this, I like really wanted to find out how much money this guy was making. I, I, I reckon the price for a pound of sour diesel was about two and a half grand per pound.

I don't know if that's like an up to legal price or whatever, like, but either way, that guy's making some serious money by this point. I know when I was in high school and college around this time, quarter pounds, uh,

of like good weed was going for like a thousand dollars and that was probably like one of the lowest rungs of the ladder and people would generally charge like fifty dollars for an eighth of weed but uh i mean at that level like i don't even know what the what the wholesale price is um it's always weird when they try to figure that out right when the feds will be like oh this amount was worth this much this many millions of dollars and you're wondering like are they pricing it at what it was actually sold out for there yeah

Or are they going at like the grand price on the street? So, I mean, you know, it all depends who's doing it. Anyway.

We should probably not reveal too much more information about our younger days. Things are going well, but that's not to say he didn't have problems at times, right? In 2004, one of his big New York distributors ripped off a load and he wasn't able to pay the Hells Angels for their transport fee. And, you know, they weren't too happy about that. It was a $1.2 million load and distributor just like refused to pay and then just stole it. And Jimmy had to make it right with the Hells Angels debt collectors. Also around this time,

Jimmy, who loves fast cars, and at one point owns a $2 million Bugatti, which is the fastest street legal car, and it goes 400 kilometers per hour. The BBC calls it the greatest car ever made. I think it's called the Bugatti Veyron or something like that. Veyron? Yeah. I mean, that is a sitting duck for the BBC. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. He crashes his other car, which is a Porsche, and kills a passenger. He's going to get prison time for this, and it's added to his previous ecstasy bust. So now he's got to serve 3.5 years.

Things start falling apart a bit with the organization, which must have felt like balancing a house of cards, right? Because you've got all these different criminal organizations. They're hard people to work with. But also in jail is when he starts making some new connections and he swears to himself that he's never going to be touching the product again.

Jimmy gets out and he goes right back to building it back better than ever. He has to live in a halfway house as part of his parole. So he's having secret meetings in subway tunnels, making sure everything is being put back together. He takes a job driving an old woman around to her doctor's appointment so he can sneak out to see his partners. That's pretty good. Also, his parole officers totally dialing that one in. I mean, I think the Canadian justicism just doesn't like isn't as stringent as the US system. Yeah. Is any. Yeah.

So now he's going to do right, right? He's getting organized. He's going to get linked up with some major players. We're missing one major ingredient in the operation though. And that's what to do with tens of millions of dollars in cash that they're collecting in New York, which is like, it's not easy to move that much cash, right? Some of it is trucked back up into Canada, but a large amount of it continues its journey on the black market.

That money is sent by chartered private jet to Los Angeles. There, a mover and shaker in the Montreal mafia, which is the Rizzuto family, uses it to buy cocaine wholesale from the Sinaloa cartel

From where it's shipped back up to Montreal and then distributed and sold by the Rizzuto family. And the Rizzuto family, like they're no joke. At one point, they allegedly grew more powerful than any of the five families in New York and are doing business with, you know, the real Italian mafiosos in Calabria and Sicily. Like they're international.

They're also known themselves for organizing a sort of alliance in the Montreal underworld where all the organized crime groups and gangs of different races and other groups and whatnot work together. Oh, that's nice. Even the drug cartels are multicultural and welcoming in Canada. Yeah, it's a beautiful thing. The Rizzuto's rose to prominence in the Montreal underworld. Well, had Rizzuto did when he gunned down three Bonanno family members who had gone rogue and solidified his ties with a then Bonanno family crime boss who those guys were going to make a move on.

Rizzuto was also known for his ability to just work with everything, just a real slick operator, similar to Jimmy.

He ended up eventually getting locked up for those murders. War came to Montreal and his family fell apart. Both his son and his father were killed. And eventually he came home from prison and tried to just reassert power, taking out enemies and just starting a bigger war. There's actually a terrible Netflix series about them starring one of the guys from Sons of Anarchy. But I mean, we're definitely going to do an episode on the Montreal Rizzuto family at some point. But back to Jimmy, who's now telling people he's backed by the Rizzuto family.

And members of the Rizzuto organization are acting as his drivers, his bodyguards and enforcers. And they're good people to have on your side.

So yeah, we got weed grown in Western Canada, transports to the stash houses in Montreal by the Hells Angels, then taken to New York City by Native American smugglers, sold by some big players. The money sent to California to be used to buy cocaine from the Sinaloa cartel, to send to Montreal for the Rizzuto family. I mean, it is a pretty wild setup. And just Jimmy did the whole thing. The kid was clearly a prodigy.

He's also allegedly running guns across the U.S.-Canada border for the Rizzutos and the Hells Angels. But, I mean, I never saw proof of that. I mean, why not? You know, this is like the Paul LaRue effect, right? We had that bonus episode with Evan Ratliff. It's like the opposite way that you'd expect a Mafioso to go. The guy doesn't leverage his underworld cred to go clean. He just, like, spreads into more and more and more crazy stuff.

Yeah, I mean at some point you got to figure though like the drug money is the best money you're going to get. Why move into something else that's also going to attract a lot of attention? Bonus episodes though. Yeah, we should mention the Patreon is still going. I just did an episode with Jake Hanrahan on Popular Front about some of his reporting on Moroccan deep web crime lords and kingpins and things like that. And I think Sean – Yeah, I'm going to be in tune. Yeah, Somali pirates, all that good stuff. Yeah.

So yeah, patreon.com slash the Underworld podcast. By 2007, Jimmy is all the way up again. Everything is running as planned. But at the same time, this woman in Long Island is snitching on her ex and the feds are getting involved. Meanwhile, there's another DEA unit going after his partner, Mario, for money laundering for the cartel.

And undercover is getting him to use the weed profits to buy cocaine for him. I mean, they say they're going after him for money laundering, but does that count as a money laundering? Like it's not like you can trade your weed money for Coke and then claim the Coke money as legal transactions. Right. So I'm not exactly sure how like how that works. It's not like the DEA to mess about in legal gray areas, is it? Now, when they when they have their sights set on you, like, you know, there's there's no there's no fucking about.

So yeah, the feds are keeping an eye on Mario, and eventually they get one of the Native American smugglers, and they get him to flip. So he sets up a deal where he's taking some of the organization's money to LA to meet the contact for the Rizzuto family that gets it to go buy the Coke. And from this New York Times article I mentioned earlier, which is chock full of good information, and I used a lot, the quote is –

When undercover agents in Los Angeles called that number, they reached a man named Alessandro Toloni. Mr. Toloni, court papers say, was an Italian-born associate of the Rizzuto's who also served as Jimmy's manager for West Coast operations. He ran a lucrative money laundering business out West, using dirty cash to buy cocaine from the Sinaloa drug cartel while maintaining his sideline as a vendor of high-end hair care products.

Let me repeat that line. Maintaining his sideline as a vendor of high-end hair care products. A former salesman at a Montreal men's shop, Mr. Toloni had been charged a decade earlier with threatening to kill the owner of a rival clothing store in an attempt to cow the competition.

cow cow however you want to say it but that is just i mean that is you get peewee peewee herman right didn't he do that role in blow i mean that is like that's perfect right i mean this this this is this is like a nick cage movie and i feel like this taloni guy i don't know who would he who the hell would he be in this movie just it's these characters man god yeah perfect but he i

He's not the smartest guy. He gets tailed by the feds who end up searching his apartment and finding 49 bricks of cocaine. He sounds like he's got frosted tips too. He might have. I mean, that was the other guy, but who knows at this point if you work in a hair salon, I feel like the likelihood of that is 50-50. So things are just, you know, they're sort of collapsing all around Jiminy's organization now.

Also around them, some minor player, this weed dealer on Long Island, which by the way, like never trust a weed dealer on Long Island. They're all assholes. Every single weed dealer on Long Island, definitely an asshole. And it's an amateur move for a pro like Jimmy. This guy is relatively small time, but he's got some money to launder and he has a connect to Jimmy. So he actually gets in contact with Jimmy and Jimmy sets him up with some weed trafficker who had also worked with that Mario guy. It's such a tangled web, right?

Anyway, this is apparently a one-off deal. He sends some woman to a money drop-off. The feds have been following the Long Island guy, and they pounce on her. Well, I mean, not just yet. They follow her as she takes $200,000 back to her apartment and then just walks her dog. And then she goes back to her apartment. The weed trafficker comes over, and the feds raid it. They find all sorts of contraband, an additional $500,000 in cash, and a ledger with some info about a big distributor in Staten Island who was doing $4 million worth of deals.

The ledger just refers to the dealer's name as Staten Island. If you're a Staten Island guy that hangs out with people not from Staten Island, everyone just calls you Staten Island anyway. It's like a common nickname. And the ledger, like I get it. I'm a list maker too. I like making notes, analog, right? But it's going to bite you, right? Like use codes or cryptographs or some shit. I don't know, blockchain or something like that.

You could have found the first useful thing to do blockchain with. Well, the first thing doesn't make me want to throw up in my fucking drink, but yeah. Hey, man, that's just because you're not an investor right now. I mean, my shit coins are doing numbers. Although this is going to air like a week from now, so I'll probably be broke by then. Yeah, you'll be broke. But this story, The Ledger, reminds me of this guy I actually used to know, Mikey the Butcher Virtuoso. I'm in. I'm in. I'm hooked. This is a true story.

So he ran a deli in my old neighborhood like a decade and a half ago on Graham Ave, East Williamsburg. Real old school Italian dude. He worked there with his son. And I lived down the block for a few years and got really friendly with them because they just – they made just incredible sandwiches, had great meat. I made a documentary about him for a school project that was literally just about the butcher shop and the changing neighborhood. He was this old school Italian butcher and all these hipsters were moving in. And the sandwiches were like – you can still go on Yelp, like incredible sandwiches. Right?

Anyway, it turns out he was a Bonanno family soldier, like for real. And I had no idea. He gets busted by the feds like two years after I made this doc. And the papers, like they're actually making fun of him because he had a Rolodex with a list of all the people he was extorting or loan sharking, including the then governor of New Jersey's limo driver, who he shook down in the walk-in freezer. I think the New York Post called him a meathead, which is kind of disrespectful to my man, Mike.

Here's a quote from a Post article, quote, the meticulously detailed Rolodexes and address books listed contact information for members and associates of organized crime, according to the feds. He didn't even bother to code or otherwise try to disguise his entries. For example, a slip of paper within one Rolodex contained a handwritten entry, Capo Lucchese, and the names Johnny Sideburns Sorello and Glenn the Wheel Guadano? Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Frank wrote to a judge.

Both men are convicted felons associated with the Locasey organized crime family, and John Sorella, also known as Johnny Sideburns, is a captain in that family. Now the feds plan to use the Rolodexes and address books to prove that Virtuoso is an ex-con with the kind of mobbed-up friends who make him a serious danger to the community. So he ended up getting convicted but got out after a short stint on compassionate release because he was dying of pancreatic cancer.

Honestly, still the best sandwiches I've ever had. And I swear to God, he was just he was a real sweetheart, man. I really liked the dude. He was a good guy. Well, to me. I mean, also, we should start like an underworld gangster name Hall of Fame because Mikey the Butcher Vershioso and Johnny Sideburns are going straight in there.

I think I still have that documentary somewhere. Shout out to my partner, Emily Johnson at the time. I might like, I might put that on the Patreon if there's, if there's interest on the YouTube channel or something. Cause it's, I mean, he's a charmer, you know, and the meat, let me tell you, like I real like old school Italian hoagie. I got to stop. Cause I'm going to keep going, man. You did not. What was that? Which is in Berlin. I really missed that. No. What was I talking? Oh yeah. Yeah.

Everything is starting to be like the scene in Goodfellas, right? Where he's making sauce and the helicopter is over his head. You know what I'm talking about. So the ledger, there's a name there, the Staten Island guy, and he's doing huge weed deals. And Staten Island turns out to be a Bonanno family associate named Mikey Venizelos. And for some reason, this guy dresses like a hipster nerd. But he also owned a strip club called Jaguars in Brooklyn. And unlike Sean, I don't frequent every strip club in the city. So I can't say that I've been there. You're just wasting your life, man.

his house gets raided. They find guns and drugs and money in another ledger and moment in time, a Blackberry where there's a message with Mikey threatening somebody who might've cooperated with the feds against Jimmy saying the guy better hope they never find out. He said anything almost like a kind way, I guess, because he also mentions in this message that Jimmy kept $2 million in a fund for hit men, which kind of seems like an exaggeration. Uh,

Yeah, I don't know what I'm feeling worse about, like the exaggeration or the fact he's got a BlackBerry. Or maybe that's just because it's Canadian, I don't know. I mean, how much does a New York Hitman actually cost? This is the Staten Island guy who had the BlackBerry. Jimmy had that hit fund. Like $2 million is...

I mean, the prices I've always seen quoted for these things in indictments or things like that is always like $10,000 or $20,000, maybe even less. So this whole thing kind of seems like it is exaggerated, and then we'll get to that in a little bit. You go back through these old articles, and you kind of see how these stories and legends get shaped. Lots of articles ran with this $2 million slush fund for Hitman, and the only thing I saw mentioned of it was this text message this guy Mike sent.

And the prosecutor made sure to mention it in press releases and court statements and whatnot. And maybe there was some proof given in the trial. But I think all we really have is this text message from a Staten Island guy trying to scare someone he did deals with into not cooperating with the feds. I don't even think Jimmy got accused of murdering anyone at the trial. Oh, and here's the text, by the way. This is a quote. You just you just got to hope they never found out. You just got to hope they never find out. You said a word.

Seriously, bro. I know he has like two mil away just to pay guys to handle that once he is sentenced. Ah, come on. I mean, that is flimsy as fuck. I mean, what? Yeah, I don't know. Nah. I mean, if you're a prosecutor, you're going to run with it, right? Anyway, we're in 2011, 2012 now. Years since that woman dropped the dime on her ex in the Long Island DA office.

The guy wasn't Jimmy or close to Jimmy, but it was some high-level dealer in Queens, and the feds flipped him within a year to go after his supplier. The walls are officially closed in, and Jimmy and a whole bunch of his co-conspirators are going to go down. The feds get an indictment on Jimmy, but he's already flying on a 6 a.m. flight from Montreal to Cancun. Some reports say for a vacation, but I figure he's probably on the run. If you're a multimillionaire, you're not taking a 6 a.m. flight. No way. That's a last-minute move.

When he lands in Mexico, he gets nabbed at the airport by Mexican police because there's an Interpol arrest warrant notification. They hold him, then try to get him on a flight back to America, but he fights them off so hard, he gets taken off the flight. Then they have to shackle him and put a hoodie on him and put him on a different flight back to the States. He even calls the Canadian embassy at one point saying he's being kidnapped. And during his trial, his lawyer will actually make the case that he was illegally renditioned to the US. But...

He ends up pleading guilty before the real trial even starts. And there's just way too many witnesses and evidence. Canadian journalist Adrian Humphries theorized that because he wasn't in some sort of organized crime faction, like the mafia, biker gang, whatever you want to say, there was less loyalty. And he said he stopped counting at 14 cooperating witnesses. I mean, you can count past 14, mate. Just like do a bunch of lines in your notepad.

I think it was a figure of speech to just say that there were a lot of people that were just, you know, talking. More than a hundred defendants would eventually plead guilty in all the investigations against Jimmy's operation. When all is said and done, they say he brought in a hundred thousand kilos of marijuana, 83 kilos of Coke and tens of thousands of e-pills, which is like, you know, a pretty good summer for Sean. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's me and the Moldovan guys down the casino for about eight hours.

I'm just going to do whatever I can in this podcast to make sure you can't get a regular job after it. Don't worry about that. There's no chance. Yeah, yeah. I mean, long, long past. Jimmy pleads guilty to avoid a life sentence without parole and also with the hopes of being sent back to Canada where they have a much more lenient parole system. There's a treaty that Canadians serving sentences in the U.S. can apply to serve the rest of their sentence in Canada where the prison system is just a whole lot easier to deal with.

Jimmy was facing a minimum of 20 years in the U.S., but if that's your sentence in Canada, you can get out after like seven years or 12 years, whereas in the U.S. federal sentencing, they usually end up doing like 85% of their time, which if you get 10, you damn near do nine. That's a deep cut.

So U S prosecutors weren't through with the idea of him getting out so soon. And they asked the judge to give him 30 years. So if he got sent back to Canada, he would still have to serve some serious time. I wanted to make a quick point actually, because I was looking at, I was looking at some stats online and Canada's recidivism. I hate that word. Recivism rate. Like the number of people that got it. You got it. Yeah. I got it. Yeah. And the number of people to go through the criminal justice system of like reoffend is like 37%. And in the U S it's,

Between 52 and 67 from what I could see. So it's kind of like, you know, maybe they're doing something right in Canada. I don't know. Maybe by having lower sentences, you stop people doing more crimes. But I guess saying that again, Jimmy, I mean, he pretty much made his entire life off the back of this jail time that he did at the start. So maybe he just disproves the whole shit that I just said on my soapbox.

I mean, maybe the US time will be good for him. Maybe he'll learn something. Yeah. Something new. He seems like he's kind of the guy who could be teaching stuff. Ah, he's entrepreneurial. During the...

Yeah. I mean, the guy knows what he was doing during the trial. Jimmy becomes immediate darling of sorts. You know, the story of him bringing together all these different crime groups, the hard partying, the $2 million car, the model girlfriend, and they start calling him the pop playboy. There's some big deal thing about him partying with Leonardo DiCaprio and Ibiza once. So the headline becomes like pop playboy who parties with Leo, even though maybe they were just at the same place at the same time. And there was a photo of them together. I mean, who knows?

George St. Pierre, who at the time was probably the greatest MMA fighter in the world and the pride of French Canadians, even writes a letter to the judge pleading for leniency. He actually got in a little bit of trouble for it. He said some stuff like,

Jimmy's a very loyal friend who I respect very much. I've never judged him. Human relationships, same passions, sport, blah, blah, blah, all stuff like that. And then the papers called him out. I actually knew

These two or three Canadian French drug dealers. I did like a years ago, like 15 years ago, I was at like a Muay Thai camp in Thailand. It's a long story. I'm terrible at Muay Thai. Don't get the wrong idea. But there were these guys there. It was like the guy who ran it and his two enforcers. They were very friendly guys, very French Canadian. And they were there taking classes as well. I don't know. It was a weird scene. Jimmy ends up getting sentenced 27 years, which, you know,

I guess it was a compromise between 20 and 30 years. I mean, I didn't think this story needed a MMA fighter, but I'm not upset that there is one in there. I mean, the story is fantastic. I don't know why it's not a movie.

It's got – I'm sure the rights are out there somewhere. I think the New York Times guy sold the rights and the Howard book. Something is weird about it. Maybe there's a law. Isn't there a law about profiting off your own story? Because I think the Howard book was co-written with Jimmy. So that would be my guess for why it never came out, but I'm not sure.

In 2021, Jimmy's name again made the news when a recovering drug addict sued him under something called the Drug Dealer Liability Act, which apparently entitles drug users to seek civil damages against people selling illegal substances. So the woman, her name is Consuelo Barbera, is seeking $5 million in damages. I mean, dude, if this works, like, I'm going to sue too because the hours of productivity I lost in college are…

you know, lost now decades later because my brain just doesn't work the same for how many times, you know, I've misplaced my keys, all that. Like I could have gone to law school. Oh man. There's a lawsuit in there somewhere. That guy that was selling me DMT at uni that he cost me a few thousand brain cells right there on the one guy. Right. I want to hunt him down. Right. Yeah. Anyway, like, you know, I love a nice bullshit lawsuit as much as the next guy, but they're just a gift to newspapers and headline writers, but come on.

You know, this woman, of course, she was self-represented. The judge said he told her that one of the main problems with her lawsuit is that she hadn't provided any evidence that she had any contact with Jimmy or even knows anything about him except what she read of his conviction in the newspaper. And this is a quote from the woman. I was addicted to marijuana for almost 20 years, having smoked 20 pounds of marijuana before my first attempt at sobriety in 2008. Okay, cool. I mean, you know, you got to take your shot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, like in the, in the Netflix version of this story, she ends up falling in love with him and busting him out of jail. But I mean, I'm just saying we're here for commissions producers as well. We can, we can do that. You don't even, you don't even need to exaggerate this story. Like it already is, is perfect. But yeah, Jimmy is, uh, is still in prison. Um, I think he's still in the U S actually.

I just wanted to add that like you have deftly and professionally avoided his surname throughout this episode. And so I punched it into a text to speech. So I just want to see what the hell comes out of this. I'm going to see if this is interesting at all. That's not it. Jimmy Cornwall. That's not it. Is that not it? No. Cornwall. I say Cornwall. Yeah. I don't know, man. Uh,

You know, the idea of bringing all these organizations together, I think is pretty, especially someone who just seems like a regular guy at first and not someone high up in another criminal organization.

It's a pretty masterful stroke of genius. And if he ever gets out, I bet he'll definitely have one of these YouTube shows and – that all the retired mobsters who serve their time now have motivational speaking gig. Maybe he'll get on this sort of like business conference thing about how to connect people, how to move people together. I mean there's a serious career there for someone like that right now.

I mean, I, we, we need to do some more stories from Canada cause I feel like I don't hear a lot, but then when I do hear the stories, they're just insane. I mean, we need to do one on the resuros. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. There's some good stuff out there too, about various gangs out there and various factions, uh,

Yeah, we got episodes coming up. Like every week, I've got a couple already in the pipeline. Pink Panthers, Acapulco, really interesting stuff. Sean's got some great stuff. Like we're here now. We're in this. We will not disappoint you guys. Week after week. Every week. Our lives are set.

you know, so spread the word. We're going to have a new store up with merch that, that, that our friends at, at the podcast one network will be helping us run. The patron is still going new interviews, patreon.com slash the underworld podcast with bonuses, Instagram, Twitter, all that stuff. We're, we're, we're making it, we're making it work. We're back. Thanks for sticking with us.