In June 2024, an Ontario man who was visiting Montreal parked his car, a Honda Accord, on the street in a central neighbourhood. The next day, it was gone.
The man, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals from a criminal organization, filed a police report and received an insurance payment, but he never heard about the car again.
Three weeks later, police officers staking out a warehouse in Montreal’s Saint-Laurent borough saw his car being loaded into a shipping container.
The officers watched from afar as a group of men placed the Accord deep inside the container followed by two older, used cars and then stacks of mattresses.
The warehouse, located at 407 Lebeau Blvd., was home to Albert Logistique, a business registered in Quebec whose legal activities included mattress exports to Africa.
But a police investigation found that the warehouse wasn’t just used for mattress shipments. It was the headquarters of a trans-Atlantic stolen car export network, according to police investigative documents obtained by CBC.
54,000 containers left Montreal last month.
That’s like 1,800 a day. Say it takes one hour to open a container, investigate it sufficiently without disturbing the contents, then that’s 225 working days of investigation every day.
Assuming the port has the infrastructure to allow that kind of investigation, they’d need like 300 employees to do that work.
EDIT: that would probably work out to 30-50 million in personnel, support, and infrastructure costs annually. They’d probably need to pay a bunch more money to retrofit those facilities into the port.
Would it be worth it? Maybe. But nobody wants to foot that bill.