Aug 24, 2009 04:30 AM
Betsy Powell
Courts Bureau
The trail of guns led from Chicago to Guelph, where a year ago a coked-up man went berserk and fired shots into his neighbour's apartment and car.
Then it continued to Ottawa, where a 26-year-old man was fatally shot after answering a knock on an apartment door just before Christmas.
A month later, in Vaughan near Weston and Rutherford Rds., three residents were held hostage at gunpoint during a home invasion. Two men pleaded guilty to the crime last month.
These incidents are seemingly unrelated, except they all involved firearms that trace back to Ugur Yildiz, the former owner of a Chicago gun shop and shooting range who admits smuggling 234 firearms into Canada three years ago.
Police have recovered 40 so far.
They've been discovered in a Toronto cab, a pile of leaves, a garbage can, an abandoned house and a duffle bag behind a fridge, all linked to known drug dealers and suspected gang members in the GTA and beyond, police say.
"The havoc wreaked upon the Toronto area by Yildiz's firearms deal is not even close to being over – approximately 200 firearms are still unaccounted for, last known to be in Canada," reads the sentencing memorandum filed in United States District Court in the Northern District of Illinois, eastern division.
Yildiz, a 39-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen from Turkey, pleaded guilty in March under the Arms Export Control Act.
His sentencing hearing resumed Friday in a Chicago courtroom where U.S. prosecutors are looking to double the maximum sentence from five years to 10. The judge is to pass sentence Sept. 18. The 10-year sentence "is ... a message to our Canadian neighbours ... that we will punish conduct which jeopardizes their safety accordingly."
At one time Canadian authorities suggested they might extradite Yildiz to stand trial here. Officials last week refused to say whether that was still being considered. The maximum sentence for trafficking and importing firearms in Canada is 10 years imprisonment.
The trail of Yildiz's guns into Canada began in September 2005, when the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms revoked Yildiz's licence to sell firearms after finding his store had some 500 gun-control violations. A day before closing, Yildiz transferred the stock into his name.
The following spring, Yildiz loaded the arsenal into his minivan and drove across the Detroit-Windsor border. Records show he made the trip three times between April and June, according to the plea agreement.
Yildiz's guns – serial numbers intact and registered to him – started turning up in the GTA almost immediately. "This was particularly unusual (as) Illinois was not usually a source for illegal guns in Toronto," the memorandum says.
Canadian law enforcement started an investigation called Project Blackhawk. In June 2008, officers from a number of police forces executed dozens of search warrants in Ontario. About 40 suspects were charged with 300 drug and weapons offences.
Yildiz claimed he planned to store the guns in a Windsor storage facility before exporting them to his native Turkey.
U.S. prosecutors allege Yildiz transferred the firearms to Huy Ta, alleged to have ties to an Asian organized crime ring. Yildiz knew Ta "planned to use more than 200 guns in connection with crimes," the document says.
But Randall Barrs, a Toronto lawyer representing Ta, said there is not a "scintilla of evidence" that his client has gang ties nor that he bought Yildiz's gun cache.
"Ta's position is he never met Yildiz and Yildiz's position is he never met my guy," Barrs said last week.
Ta was convicted of illegally possessing three of Yildiz's firearms and is serving a four-year sentence after shooting up a neighbour's residence in Guelph in January 2008.
A preliminary hearing was held in July and the judge is to release her ruling Sept. 3 on whether to commit Ta to trial on firearms importing and trafficking charges.
Yildiz told U.S. authorities another Canadian man, Daniel Wasiluk, stored the firearms for him and at one point offered him $20,000 for the cache, which Yildiz said was worth $30,000. This fall in Toronto, Wasiluk has a preliminary hearing scheduled on charges of importing firearms.
"That is fiction," Wasiluk's lawyer, Christophe Preobrazenski, said last week. "He is a hard-working young man with no criminal record working in real estate. The guy (Yildiz) wanted to see some property in Windsor so he showed him around."
Sataya Vongkosy, of Richmond Hill, has pleaded guilty to illegal possession of firearms, including those registered to Yildiz.
"This case confirms what we've known all along, that guns from legal markets in the U.S. are diverted to illegal markets here," said Wendy Cukier, a professor at Ryerson University and president of the Coalition for Gun Control.
In 2006, Toronto police traced 120 of 181 guns used in crimes here back to the U.S. The following year, almost 70 per cent of 705 guns used to commit crimes in Ontario originated south of the border.
"The U.S. never hesitates to call press conferences to complain about Canada's immigration laws, or drug laws, that they say threatens their security, yet their inadequate gun laws are felt around the world," Cukier said.
