It was March 12, 2015, and Stephen Tello was having second thoughts.
The following day he was due to meet a man called Joe at a steakhouse in Toronto. Joe was a transportation broker who, for the right price, had told Tello he could smuggle huge amounts of cocaine into Canada. He could have drugs collected at sea in the Caribbean, he said, before swapping them onto fishing trawlers closer to Newfoundland, for safe passage to harbour.
The two had met before, but their first deal hadn’t worked out. Now Tello, who lived a double life as a Toronto real estate agent and an underworld player, was getting suspicious. He had seen “weird cars” last time they met, he texted Joe. This time, he said, they should park in separate areas before taking cabs to the meet-up. Joe made no objections, and awaited Tello’s next move.
Slowly, Tello had become the key piece in a complicated puzzle, and Joe was the person tasked with putting that puzzle together. His working title was in fact “UCO Joe,” and he was the lead undercover agent in a two-year RCMP sting codenamed Operation Harrington.
Joe followed the clues from Canada’s east coast to the nightspots of Montreal and Toronto. Before long, the trail led much further south, to the Caribbean and Colombia. Eventually, RCMP realized it led all the way to Mexico and Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzman, who in July 2019 would be sentenced to life by a Brooklyn judge for running a $14 billion empire, in the process becoming one of the world’s most notorious drug kingpins. The RCMP noticed, too, that Canadians who entered El Chapo’s orbit kept ending up dead. Tello, as it would turn out, survived, by the skin of his teeth.
