Island-wide crackdown nets illicit alcohol, guns and gambling

A wide-rang­ing clam­p­down on il­le­gal gam­bling, tax eva­sion, smug­gled al­co­hol and firearms un­fold­ed across Trinidad and To­ba­go this week, with po­lice seiz­ing mil­lions of dol­lars in un­paid gam­ing tax­es, con­tra­band liquor and cig­a­rettes, il­le­gal weapons and large quan­ti­ties of drugs.

Be­tween Tues­day, De­cem­ber 16 and Wednes­day, De­cem­ber 17, the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice car­ried out a se­ries of co­or­di­nat­ed in­tel­li­gence-led op­er­a­tions across mul­ti­ple di­vi­sions, tar­get­ing il­lic­it trade, or­gan­ised smug­gling and gun and drug traf­fick­ing.

In Port of Spain, of­fi­cers con­duct­ed op­er­a­tions aimed at gam­ing es­tab­lish­ments with out­stand­ing tax­es. Six es­tab­lish­ments were served with Board of In­land Rev­enue gam­ing tax no­tices to­talling TT$4.5 mil­lion, and man­agers were in­struct­ed to shut down all gam­ing ma­chines un­til the tax­es were paid.

Lat­er that day, a sec­ond op­er­a­tion was con­duct­ed at a mem­bers’ club along Ari­api­ta Av­enue, where the man­ag­er was served with a gam­ing tax no­tice amount­ing to TT$2.2 mil­lion. Of­fi­cers seized items of ev­i­den­tial val­ue along with TT$69,511 in cash, and one per­son was ar­rest­ed in con­nec­tion with the op­er­a­tion of an il­le­gal gam­ing house.

That same night, of­fi­cers in­ter­cept­ed a ves­sel at Shore Pier 3 in Care­nage af­ter it was ob­served of­fload­ing box­es. Six­teen peo­ple were ap­pre­hend­ed af­ter at­tempt­ing to flee. A search re­vealed a large ship­ment of con­tra­band smug­gled from Suri­name, in­clud­ing about 1,000 cas­es of vod­ka, 200 cas­es of John­nie Walk­er whisky, 200 cas­es of Hen­nessy co­gnac, and 1,000 cas­es of At­lanta cig­a­rettes. Four trucks were al­so seized in con­nec­tion with the find.

In sep­a­rate op­er­a­tions car­ried out on Wednes­day morn­ing in the North­ern and Cen­tral Di­vi­sions, po­lice ex­e­cut­ed mul­ti­ple search war­rants at premis­es in St Au­gus­tine and Ca­roni.

At one lo­ca­tion, of­fi­cers seized 1,142 grams of cannabis, TT$115,204 in cash and US$550. Four peo­ple were de­tained in con­nec­tion with the dis­cov­ery. At an­oth­er near­by premis­es, an AR-15 ri­fle was re­cov­ered.

Fur­ther search­es led to the dis­cov­ery of a buried buck­et in an aban­doned lot con­tain­ing five kilo­grams of mar­i­jua­na, 65 rounds of 9mm am­mu­ni­tion, 239 rounds of 5.56mm am­mu­ni­tion, and 50 rounds of 7.62mm am­mu­ni­tion.

Po­lice said en­quiries are con­tin­u­ing as in­ves­ti­ga­tions progress in­to the var­i­ous seizures and ar­rests made dur­ing the is­land-wide op­er­a­tions.