Erin Nico, a 45 year old single mother from Etobicoke, was arrested this week for running a multi-million dollar drug ring from her two story home. “A lot of people get involved in the drug trade, but it’s not often that we find affluent soccer moms running operations of this size,” says Sgt. Lena Lovelace of the Toronto Police Force. “This was a very large bust. We seized over twenty million dollars worth of meth, and even more in cash. Ms. Lovelace played a large role in supplying the city of Toronto with this drug, and now that we’ve dismantled her operation, the city will be a much safer place.”
The police had been investigating Ms. Nico ever since she got into a physical altercation over a toy drive at her daughter’s school. “There was a brawl that she was involved in at Saint Lisa High School during a charity event,” says Sgt. Lovelace. “The police were called, but when they arrived no one was willing to talk about what had happened. That raised our suspicions that something less than kosher was going on.”
It wasn’t long before police realized that Ms. Nico had been using charity toy drives to smuggle and sell drugs. “She would buy thousands of teddy bears for these charity fundraisers, and ship them all across the country,” says Sgt. Lovelace. “Her teddy bear deliveries would always include a few crates of bears that were stuffed with crystal meth. We still don’t know what started the brawl at her daughter’s high school, but if it had never happened, we probably wouldn’t have discovered her operation.”
