J-Tornado drug investigation in N.B. meticulous but dull

A string of police officers assigned to surveillance duties in the major drug investigation dubbed operation J-Tornado described more of a whirlwind of boredom in court Monday, documenting hours spent staking out suspects duringeven the most mundane of their activities.

Five officers testified Monday in the trial of Shane Williams,34, and JoshuaKindred, 39, who are facing various drug possession, trafficking and conspiracy charges.

They were among 28 arrested by police in 2014 as part of J-Tornado, a three-year long investigation into drug trafficking in New Brunswick.

The case involved an extended RCMP sting where police covertly supplied dozens of suspected drug dealers with cell phones that had their communications routed directly through RCMP servers.

That allowed for the interception of 30,000 messages between phones but because suspects all used code names like slipscreen, heyporsche, beamer360, and tooshort8, police had to mount an extensive surveillance operation to match those names to actual suspects.

Ferrarigang& hummertime

The goal was to establish that when "ferrarigang" messaged "hummertime" it really meant Williams was talking to Kindred.

On Monday, officers such asSaint John police Cst. Neal Fowler and RCMP Cst. Adam Caissie told court about long hours staking out Williams, Kindred and others to see if they showed up to locations their code names said they would.

Sometimes the stakeouts involved arriving first at locations and parking near where suspects said they would be and sometimes itinvolved watching suspects at a distance with binoculars.

Dull police work

Often the events were unremarkable.

Kindred was meticulously documented arriving and leaving his driveway and at one point taking his mother to Swiss Chalet, while Williams trip through a Tim Horton's drive-thruwas carefully recorded, as was his visit to a Royal Bank branch.

Police cross-referenced all those movements against where ferrarigang and hummertime and others said they would be, in a long and meticulous effort to tie each suspect to a specific cellphone code name.

Later in the trial, the crown intends to show how each of the code names was engaged in the drug trade.