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It was the night before Valentine’s Day 2019, and a Montreal drug dealer who made international headlines for brazenly smuggling cocaine through the city’s international airport lay semi-conscious on the ground near his car.

Passersby in the quiet Laval neighbourhood saw him and called for help.

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It was only when first responders got him to a hospital that they realized Ray Kanho, 42, had been shot in the head.

He died the next day — the latest casualty in the fight to control Montreal’s lucrative cocaine trade.

Montreal’s underworld has gotten rich — very rich — from sneaking the drug into the city by car, by air, by boat, and inside people, packages and shipping containers.

In Episode 2 of our new podcast, The Dark North: Gangs of Montreal, we go back to the 1980s, when cocaine really took off in Montreal.

Montreal’s main criminal gangs — the Rizzuto-led Montreal Mafia, the Hells Angels biker gang and the West End gang — worked together to bring immense amounts of cocaine into the city. It’s a partnership that lasted for years.

The Dark North: Gangs of Montreal is hosted by Paul Cherry, the Montreal Gazette’s crime reporter. You can subscribe to The Dark North on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.