When five young drug mules, four of them Canadians and one an American, landed in Australia three days before Christmas in 2015, they weren’t whisked through customs by a corrupt border agent, as they had been promised. Nor were the bricks of cocaine in their Samsonite suitcases undetectable by border technology, as they had also been told.

Instead, their luggage was searched and border guards easily found the cocaine, valued at more than $22 million, by tugging on a false bottom built into each suitcase by members of a Mexican drug cartel.

When police officers searched the mules’ phones they found astonishing evidence — amateurish, deeply incriminating details mapping a transnational cocaine network in Canada through text messages, emails, group chats, even secret recordings made by one

See Full Page