MONTREAL – A huge police operation led by the Sûreté du Québec and involving the RCMP, the Montreal police and other regional squads, took place before dawn Thursday to crack down on a vast drug operation implicating organized crime across Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia.
As part of Opération Loquace, over 1,000 officers armed with arrest warrants swooped down on 30 towns and cities, including Montreal.
According to Quebec provincial police, 103 people were arrested in the operation.
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One person arrested was Shane Maloney, a man currently charged with assaulting a Montreal police officer while both were in Mexico.
In all, authorities have arrested all 103 out of 128 people sought on arrest warrants.
Police in B.C. provided investigative assistance.
Larry Ronald Amero
According to a police source, one of the people targeted in the bust on Thursday was Larry Ronald Amero, 35, described in a recent court decision, by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, as a member of the Hells Angels.
He was almost killed last year in a shooting in Kelowna.
Amero is a member of one of the gang’s chapters in British Columbia but he listed an address on Nuns’ Island in Montreal after he was recently charged at the Montreal courthouse in an impaired driving case.
Police were seen outside the same address Thursday morning.
In the impaired driving case, Amero was charged with leaving the scene of an accident in Montreal that left a young woman injured on July 11.
In addition to four other charges, he was also charged with being impaired while behind the wheel of a Mercedes sports utility vehicle when it struck a Nissan Sentra as well as four other charges.
He was arrested by the Montreal police several blocks from where the collision occured.
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