Professional money laundering networks are growing in Canada, washing vast sums of cocaine and fentanyl cash, and helping to drive up prices in Vancouver and Toronto real estate. Canada’s federal government proposed a new federal anti-money laundering task force last week, specifically to tackle these concerns. But according to U.S. law enforcement sources, Canada has been aware of this for over a decade. This story explains untold international details behind recent RCMP investigations, missed early warnings, and lessons from Australian police, that could jump-start Canada’s late response to these growing risks, sources say.

In January 2008, a team of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents travelled to Ottawa to meet with RCMP leaders. They had stunning news. The DEA said an elite group of Middle East narco-terrorists in Colombia was using Canada as a key money laundering hub.

According to a former senior U.S. official with knowledge of the meeting, the DEA had “dirty calls” — meaning calls providing criminal evidence of cocaine shipments and cash movements in Canada — from narco-kingpins in Colombia to a network of operatives in Halifax, Vancouver, Calgary, and London, Ont.

The evidence included allegations from an elite Colombian police unit and extensive DEA phone tap records.

But RCMP leaders didn’t want to pursue the cases, according to the former official. He said the RCMP cited differences between Canadian and U.S. court disclosure rules, and questions about the DEA’s use of confidential sources.

The U.S. source believes the RCMP missed an early opportunity to fight the incursion of sophisticated professional money laundering networks with ties to China, the Middle East, Colombia and Mexico that are now plaguing Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal.

“We were dumbfounded,” the U.S. source said.

But by 2014, police officials in Canada and the U.S. finally agreed. The DEA agents tapping phones in the hills of Colombia had been right all along.

A resurgent offshoot of Pablo Escobar’s notorious Medellin Cartel, now called La Oficina, was doing business with terrorists.

La Oficina and numerous other cartels, according to DEA records, were using services from an elite business wing of Hezbollah — the Islamist party and terror organization based in Lebanon.