Pugnacious party promoter James Dunkirk was taken into custody on Sunday after a dozen police officers laid siege to his single bedroom apartment in Cote Des Neiges. The police action forced dozens of Mr. Dunkirk's neighbours to evacuate their building. "We were all told to leave our apartments," says Edith Valencourt, who lives across the hall from the party promoter. "The police told us that the building wasn't safe, that it could catch on fire, so we had to leave."

The Cote Des Neiges résidents stood outside in the cold as they watched the chaos unfold. "There were explosions, loud ones," says Zangief Marois. "The windows shattered. It was like a scene from a war movie."

Mr. Dunkirk was the subject of a police investigation in what some officers have called the largest gun smuggling ring in Canada. "Mr. Dunkirk has a rap sheet that's longer than Tolstoy's War & Peace," says Sgt. Desmond Batista. "He's been on our radar for a long time. When we first started investigating him, we expected him to be a bit player in Montreal's organized crime community. We were not expecting him to be in charge of a gun smuggling ring worth millions of dollars."

James Dunkirk made a name for himself by organizing dubstep parties. In recent years, however, his events had become much darker. "I knew something was up when he started handing out gun to people at his events," says Lesley Williams, a 23 year old Concordia student. "I've been to a lot of parties in Montreal, but his were the only ones where people gave out glocks as prizes. I remember one day last June, he had a M.C on stage who kept going on and on about how ravers needed to be armed, so that if the police tried to shut down a party, we could fight back, and then the M.C took out a giant duffle bag and started throwing pistols at people in the crowd."

It wasn't long before Montreal police caught wind of what was going on."When party promoters start handing out assault weapons to DJs and telling them it's time to start a revolution, we're going to hear about it," says Sgt. Batista. "James Dunkirk's was over confident. He got away with a lot of small crimes for several years, and because of that he thought he could get away with smuggling thousands of guns into Canada and handing them out to ravers. Well, he couldn't."

Mr. Dunkirk fought the police off as long as he could. "It took us several hours to subdue him, and then an extra twelve to clear his apartment of all the explosives he'd been stockpiling," says Sgt. Batista. "It's unfortunate that this sort of thing is happening in our day and age. Party promoters should be out helping people have fun, they shouldn't be fomenting armed rebellion."