Everyone knows guns used by Canadian criminals are often smuggled from the U.S. Not everyone knows how — not like Naomi Haynes does. That’s because she did the smuggling.
A native Montrealer who’s been living in the U.S. for decades, she helped traffic dozens of weapons into Canada, some linked directly to drug gangs.
“I wasn’t thinking about the havoc I was causing in my birth land,” she told CBC News last week.
“I’ve got my kids, I’ve got bills. The only thing I [was] thinking about is monetary gains. I wasn’t thinking about the people who are going to be affected.”
CBC News established contact with Haynes while she was in prison — at first communicating by email, then with a glitchy prison video app and then in a lengthy interview following her release last year.
Her story helps shed light on the thousands of guns a year in Canada that police trace to the U.S.
She described, in detail, tricks of the smuggling trade. And how she managed to move drugs, cash and, eventually, guns, for many years, depending on the product — either into the U.S., between U.S. states or into Canada.
Rule No. 1: Only one person per car. If the vehicle gets stopped at the border, you don’t want two partners tripping over each other’s story during secondary questioning.
“There’s only one story this way,” said Haynes, 45. “If you have two drivers, there’s conflicting stories, and that’s when you have problems.… ‘Oh, you’re coming from Virginia, but your friend says [she’s] coming from Baltimore.’
“So just one driver, so they can stick with their one lie.”
I wasn’t thinking about the people who are going to be affected.– Naomi Haynes
Rule No. 2: Find a good hiding spot. She would stash items in hidden compartments under seats; in door panels; in the trunk. She’d also move drugs in a gas tank — in triple-sealed, vacuumed bags.
Rule No. 3: Get drivers who won’t arouse suspicion. Haynes didn’t transport guns herself; she got pulled over too often. She’d ride in a separate vehicle.
“I started paying white girls and guys to move stuff for me,” she said. Especially white women. They never got pulled over, she said.
Until one did.
Haynes was arrested in 2019, charged with smuggling, and with conspiracy to make false statements; she pleaded guilty, was sentenced, and served just under five years in prison.
Hers is an unusual story. She’s a vegan, millennial, Jamaican Canadian political science grad in South Florida who supports Donald Trump, became a grandma and wound up in an international conspiracy.
Then again, her life story was atypical from the start.
Escaping Montreal
“At the end of the day, you become what you know,” Haynes said.
She grew up around drug dealers. Her late father dealt crack, then smoked it. In a book she’s writing about her life story, Haynes describes a period when he became meaner, zoned out and indifferent, his eyes bloodshot.
Her book describes one sister jailed for selling ecstasy. Another sibling, her brother, led a local street gang, according to the Montreal Gazette.
She grew up in the area just south of the old Montreal Forum; her grandmother worked in the hallowed hockey shrine.
From childhood, Haynes earned money in unconventional ways. Her half-complete memoir, entitled The Runner: Tripped by the Feds, begins with the words: “For as long as I can remember I have had a hustle.”
She ran store errands for adults and got to keep the change; collected beer bottles from their parties and returned them for cash; and, later, resold contraband cigarettes.
“I made my first $1,000 in the seventh grade,” she writes.
She was desperate to escape the scene, to flee the bad influences. Haynes harboured a childhood dream of living in the States, and in 1997, she made it happen.
She enrolled in college. She got a bachelor’s degree from Florida Atlantic University, according to court documents, and also studied criminal science.
She started smuggling to pay for school. And she made poor choices, she says, about whom she surrounded herself with.
The man who became her husband made a $5,000 down payment on a Jeep Cherokee for her; she used that vehicle and received thousands of dollars more to move hashish, hash oil and marijuana into Canada.
Over the years, she shipped contraband countless times: ecstasy, cocaine, marijuana, hash and cash, occasionally driving on her own, but usually hiring someone.
She’d move products from buyer to seller, often across international lines, but also domestically, say, from Florida to Chicago.
It was only many years later that she started selling guns. Around 2016, Haynes was desperately low on cash — she was divorced, with a baby, not working and with an older boy playing intercity baseball.
“Everybody that I always did business with always said, ‘No guns, no guns, no guns,’ because there’s a trail,” she told CBC News.
But it was great cash, about $4,000 Cdn per gun. On a nine-millimetre handgun that costs a couple of hundred bucks in South Florida, it’s an astronomical profit.
She’d ship about 20 at a time, and there were multiple shipments. She admits to two of them, which she figures generated about $160,000.
Subtracting the cost of the purchase, the driver and her partner’s share, she estimates she kept about $30,000, which helped her live comfortably for a few months.
And then it cost her everything.
WATCH | Major Toronto gang busts connected to Hayes’s network:
Law enforcement closes in
Police started closing in on Haynes from different angles — arresting associates, seizing phones, recording conversations and catching her in lies.
It started after she purchased 20 weapons from different Florida gun stores in February 2018. On March 1, a day after her last purchase, she crossed into Canada through New York.
She was stopped re-entering the U.S. two weeks later at Champlain, N.Y., carrying $4,300 in cash, and multiple cellphones.
Border officers seized her phones and downloaded the contents. According to court filings, they found fraudulent or counterfeit IDs for several associates and shared that with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
On the morning of April 27, two ATF agents arrived at her home in Boca Raton, Fla. She lied to them, insisting she’d been buying and selling guns to friends with legal permits. She insisted she had a storage unit. She took them to a CubeSmart facility and professed to be shocked when she found her unit empty.
“You remember Martha Stewart?” ATF agent Tim Trenschel asked her, according to court documents. “The lady on TV that does fancy crafts. Do you remember that she spent some time in prison? Do you remember why?”
Haynes replied: “Because she lied.”
The agent said: “Exactly.”
Haynes added: “About insider trading.”
The agent said: “You’re way ahead of most people I talk to.”
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Haynes insisted upon her truthfulness. “Listen, I get it, and I respect the law… I am being a thousand per cent honest.”
She was not, in fact, being 1,000 per cent honest. Far from it. The agent’s observation about the risks of lying to a federal officer proved prescient.
A couple of weeks later, guns she’d bought started turning up in police investigations in the Toronto area, identified despite attempts to deface the serial number.
‘I knew I was cooked’
One loaded Taurus 9mm was found hidden in the panel of a car, alongside approximately $300,000 worth of cocaine.
Days later, a Ruger .380 was found in another drug bust. The suspect tossed it aside while attempting to flee police.
In September of that year, a friend she’d hired was stopped while crossing into Canada from New York state, carrying 20 hidden guns.
Haynes was recorded following right behind her — crossing the border 62 minutes later. A number of the seized guns traced back to her circle.
By this point, police had gained an informant. They were secretly recording conversations within her circle, even one involving Haynes’s daughter.
On Feb. 27, 2019, her daughter’s boyfriend, Mackenzie Delmas, was caught. The informant delivered guns to him and Delmas was arrested immediately.
Agents searched his home — and Haynes’s. That’s when Haynes knew she was done for.
She was visiting her parents’ home in the Montreal area. Her daughter called from Florida in the middle of the night with the news, and Haynes collapsed on the family couch.
“I’ve never experienced a panic attack before in my life, but at that point, I started shaking. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t breathe,” Haynes said. “I was trying to gasp for air.”
Her mother tried calming her down, rubbing her back. She recalled her mother asking: “What’s going on?”
Haynes confessed what she’d been up to. The whole story. “My mother was so disappointed.”
At that point, Haynes made a decision: To give herself up.
“I knew I was cooked,” she said. “[I thought], I’m not gonna live on the run. I’ve got to face it. My time has come.”
Court documents confirm what happened next: She called the ATF in the wee hours of Feb. 28, and promised to return to the U.S. and speak with investigators.
In subsequent recorded interviews on March 13 and April 3, she confessed everything: the fake identities, the illegal gun purchases, the shipments to Canada, the sales to known Canadian gangsters, her own trips north to collect cash and, crucially, her lies to police.
She was arrested, and spent four years, nine months in prison, serving time in a low-security prison in Alabama.
It was predictably miserable. She recalled guards treating inmates cruelly and arbitrarily — being decent to some of the meanest inmates, and mean to decent ones, people who got mixed up, in some cases accidentally, in bad situations.
The worst was during COVID-19. After testing positive, she was sent to solitary confinement.
“I was in the shoe for 13 days,” she said. “I felt like a dog in a kennel. … The room was filthy. It was disgusting. The sinks — the water was brown. The toilet, it was disgusting.”
Her main diet in prison consisted of peanut butter. She gave up meat and dairy years ago, grossed out by it. Given the choice between baloney and peanut butter, she’d take the latter. She recalls paying $7 for a cauliflower once and air-frying it with a blow-dryer.
Is there a sense of guilt?
But the absolute worst thing about prison? Her parents dying, and being unable to see them or attend their funeral.
Her beloved mom slowly died of cancer while Haynes was in jail. By the time her father died, she was out, but she had to attend the funeral on Zoom.
Haynes can’t leave and re-enter the U.S. because she’s fighting deportation. A Canadian citizen, she’s a green-card holder in the U.S., and of her three kids, they’re either living there or hoping to live there with her.
She now works an office job at a landscaping company.
“My mom was sick with cancer and I failed,” Haynes said. “My choices and the things I was doing caused me to not be there for the person that was always there for me.”
What about potential gun victims: does her sense of guilt extend to them? As a vegan who avoids hurting animals, does she ever wonder whether any humans were harmed by those chunks of steel she trafficked?
Initially, no, she said. As she got into the business, the only thing on her mind was money — paying the bills.
Then she had four years, nine months in prison to think. And she started thinking about other people’s pain, about other families and whether her guns killed any young kids in a drive-by.
She now prays that those guns are confiscated.
“I stay in constant prayer that they get seized,” she said. “I don’t want to know that I’m responsible for somebody losing their life.”
