Three men are expected to charged at the Montreal courthouse on Saturday after police seized what they believe is heroin and fentanyl while carrying out search warrants in the Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve borough on Friday.
According to a statement issued by the Montreal police, the warrants were part of an ongoing investigation into a series of overdoses, including at least two fatal ones, reported in the city in August.
“Large quantities of heroin and what appear to be fentanyl were seized,” the police wrote while adding they plan to release more details about the operation on Monday. The three men were arrested Friday by a team that normally investigates violent crimes in eastern Montreal.
The arrests were made on the same day Montreal police Chief Philippe Pichet told reporters, at Montreal city hall, that his police force has a “zero tolerance” stance on drug dealers who are mixing heroin with fentanyl, which is much more powerful than heroin taken on its own.
“People who put that product in their drugs will have us on their backs. I have said it in the past. It is clear we will follow them. It is clear we will track them and we will arrest them,” Pichet said. His comments were made after the Journal de Montréal published a story about how Yves Faucher, one of two men who died of what is believed to have been fentanyl overdoses, near the end of August, used heroin to cope with suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. According to the report, he helped save elderly people from a residence in Lac-Mégantic, in 2013, after a runaway freight train carrying crude oil caught fire when it crashed into the city’s downtown core. The fire ended up killing 47 people.
Faucher and his brother Gilles were found dead, on Aug. 25, inside a car parked near De Lorimier Ave. and de Maisonneuve Blvd. Police investigators believe they had injected themselves with heroin laced with fentanyl.
Since late August, the Montreal police have arrested at least 20 people in three separate large-scale operations where their goal was to round up drug dealers who were suspected of selling heroin with fentanyl in it. One of the people arrested earlier this month, Vincent Constantino, 34, of Laval is currently awaiting a sentence in a drug trafficking case that dates back to 2012. In that 2012 case, Constantino was arrested with Salvatore Scoppa, 47, of Laval, the brother of Andrea Scoppa, an alleged Montreal Mafia leader.
