Canada's Largest Drug Bust | Narco Wars: The Mob

You have to be pretty top notch in your profession just to survive it all. You get heavy turbulence; you got to slow the aircraft down because you could have structural failure, like losing a wing. Wouldn't be much fun! A North Atlantic storm in November, it's a pretty impressive event to put it mildly.

My name is John Raymond Bourange. I'm what you would call a mercenary pilot. I fly for hire to he who pays the most. I had 4,343 kilos of cocaine, and I was flying from Colombia directly to Canada. Normally the flight would be about nine hours, give or take, but I ran into the storm for about 45 minutes or an hour before I broke out. And lo and behold, there were the F-18s. Then they were off to my beer, and the other guy came up close beside us, flying around me.

They can signal to go down, and I just waved to them. They can't shoot at you, but they were running out of gas. We were just timing and saying, "Okay, how long is it going to be before they're going to run out?" It was interesting; he gave us a nice little show. I went down to treetop level and flew the rest of the way. Treetop level below radar, so nobody knew where the airplane was.

The authorities put out an alert to all the airports: "There's a big white conveyor somewhere in Canada. If anybody sees it, report it." I should have arrived around six o'clock in the morning, but I arrived at quarter to nine instead.

I was standing out on the runway waiting for the crew hired to go and do the pickup. We looked all over the place, couldn't figure out where the hell these guys were. Turns out they'd been there since three in the morning. At around 7:30, they decided I wasn't coming, and they left. So anyway, I started walking, and the truck went by. I hitched a ride, and he gave me a lift all the way down to the lumber camp.

That's where I was when the RCMP arrived by helicopter because the police had blocked off all the roads. So they asked, "What's in the airplane?" I said, "Cocaine." He says, "How much?" I says, "A lot." It's being touted as the biggest drug bust in Canadian history and probably the most dramatic.

The seizure of 4,300 kilos of cocaine really reverberated through the DEA. There's a staggering amount of cocaine, coupled with the fact that it was flown directly from the north coast of Colombia into Canada. I would have made around 45 million; it's a pretty good payday for one day's work. That's not bad.

I was arrested, pled guilty, and got 23 years. That was it. I became famous, but I take things with a grain of salt. It was, and I believe it still is, the biggest bust ever in Canada.