Toronto Star Referrer

THE WOLFPACK

How Nick Nero, part of a group of criminals known as the Wolfpack Alliance, hooked up with El Chapo’s Mexican cartel in a bid to become the biggest drug importer in Niagara Region

PETER EDWARDS AND LUIS HORACIO NÁJERA

EXCERPT FROM THE WOLFPACK

Nick Nero had plenty of time on weekdays to obsess about massive profits and murder. He was required to spend his time from Sunday night to Thursday night at a halfway house in a Salvation Army hostel in downtown St. Catharines, alongside a squatty, one-storey Unitarian Congregation church and a couple of lowrent doors down from Delta Bingo. Nero was easy to spot on the rough strip, amidst the homeless men and ex-cons and unfortunates on mobility scooters. He was the one with the comic book biceps who arrived and left in a $400,000 cherry-red Ferrari Italia.

Nero was confined to the halfway house on weekdays as a result of two convictions. The first was for his role in the theft late on the night of Dec. 11, 2003, of roughly $3 million from an armoured car parked outside a Royal

Bank ATM machine on Dufferin Street in Toronto. Driver Joseph Bruni had rigged the armoured car’s back door to open easily so that bags of cash could be shuffled into a waiting white Ford van, where Nero and Michele “Mike” Stante were waiting. Stante used Nero as his personal trainer at Nero’s gym; when their scheme unravelled, Stante told authorities that he feared Nero. Much of the missing money was found in a barn near Niagara Falls, but Nero’s share of the loot — about $1 million — remained missing, even after Nero was convicted for playing a role in the heist.

With that kind of cash, Nick Nero became a somebody at age 26, and he wasn’t about to let go of that status, even if it meant drawing the wrath of the parole board.

Nobody had pegged Nick Nero for great things when he was growing up in Niagara

Falls, as he was neither book nor street smart. He wasn’t particularly athletic or goodlooking. “He never really fit in,” a former schoolmate said, describing him as “dumb as a bag of hair.” That said, Nero did have plenty of ambition and daring, and as one look at his tightly drawn face made clear, he possessed a deep inner pool of anger to fuel him.

He channelled his rage into bodybuilding, adding stacks of muscle onto his squatty figure, especially his once sunken chest. At the age of 18, he paid $3,500 to study in a rundown warehouse in northeast Hamilton to become a professional wrestler, with the dream of making $75,000 a year on a newly formed minor pro circuit. One of his instructors was the son of the Missing Link, and Nero planned to bill himself as Iron Man. He told writer Wade Hemsworth of the Hamilton Spectator that he could benchpress 600 pounds. That was a ridiculously high figure, even for someone pumped full of steroids, but somehow it seemed possible as the journalist watched him hoist and slam fellow trainee grapplers. “He’s 5 foot 8, weighs 278 pounds, and has a chest big enough to rest his dinner plate on,” Hemsworth wrote.

“I liked bodybuilding, but it was kind of boring,” Nero told Hemsworth. “You just go in shows. I want to be an athlete, not just a guy who works out.”

It was around this time that Nero’s skin took on an orange glow from tanning salons and his voice became raspy, like someone imitating the gruff banter in gangster movies. His dreams of a pro wrestling career didn’t go far, and as he moved into his mid-twenties he still seemed to profoundly lack confidence. “He was insecure about everything,” the old schoolmate said.

So when the court ordered Nero to give back the $1 million from the armoured car robbery, Nero didn’t return a penny, which explained why he wasn’t granted full parole on Nov. 3, 2009, but just day passes. The money likely also explains how, prior to his conviction, Nero had come to be connected with Zavisa “Zav” Drecic, a fullpatch Hells Angel from Welland, near Nero’s hometown of Niagara Falls. Now that Nick Nero was a millionaire, the biker presented himself as a possible business partner. Drecic didn’t have to like him, just exploit him.

Drecic was small, balding, chubby, clever and particularly well connected in the underworld. He was also keen to seek out opportunities and ruthless as a shark. “You could tell he was dangerous, but he always had a smile,” said a police officer who knew him.

Drecic was adept at fitting into various groups. He was close to newly arrived criminals from the former Yugoslavia, as well as established local outlaw bikers and mobsters. When he shifted from the Hells Angels charter in Niagara to the powerful Woodbridge branch north of Toronto, Drecic had more chances to bump shoulders with the big boys of the Ontario Hells Angels and well-established mafiosi.

Drecic had always seemed game for anything that would make him money, including tobacco and alcohol smuggling, and Nero — and Nero’s money — gave him an opportunity to enter the lucrative cocaine trade. Plenty of up-front capital allows you to haggle for wholesale prices and pay half of what your competitors might pay to suppliers from Mexico. But just as Drecic’s interest in Nero’s cocaine schemes was making good on its promise, Nero’s ambitions were slammed to a halt when fullpatch Hells Angel Dave “Shaky” Atwell of Toronto turned paid police agent. Drecic was busted for selling Atwell the date rape drug gamma hydroxybutyrate acid (GHB), stimulant ephedrine and cocaine, while Nero was nabbed for selling Atwell cocaine while on parole for the armoured car heist.

Nero had wept publicly in court the day of his drug trafficking and armoured car theft convictions, in an altogether pitiful spectacle. “Greed is probably what’s gotten me here today,” Nero sniffled, blaming cocaine for costing him his marriage and custody of his son. “My life’s been destroyed with this, this product. I don’t even know how to describe it. This destroyed my family … I chose to profit from something that destroyed my family.”

Between sobs and deepities about the evils of greed and artificial stimulants, Nero vowed to devote his remaining time on earth to promoting health and fitness, not drugs. “I want to pay my debt to society,” he said. “I want to do my time. I want to get out and I want to raise my family right … Cocaine destroyed my family. There’s no need to destroy other families.”

Before he could start making the world a better place, Nero faced a prison sentence of almost nine years for trafficking cocaine, possession of cocaine for the purpose of trafficking, possession of stolen property over $5,000 and theft over $5,000. Nero might cry about how badly he wanted to repay his debt to society, but he still hadn’t repaid the $1 million from the armoured car theft when he was released on day parole on Nov. 3, 2009, two and a half years after his conviction, with stipulations that he:

not possess, use or access the services of a pager, cellphone, BlackBerry or other personal mobile telecommunications device;

provide his parole office with a monthly statement of income, expenses and debts;

not associate with any person known to be involved in criminal activity; and

abstain from the purchase, possession or consumption of non-medically prescribed drugs.

Upon his release, Nero set out to immediately violate every one of those conditions as he launched plans to become the biggest drug importer in the history of the Niagara Region. He might still be socially awkward and dumb as a bag of hair, but he also had the $1 million, as well as plenty of attitude and a massive chip on his shoulder. “He thinks he’s Robert De Niro in the movies,” said a Niagara police officer who watched Nero morph into his version of a goodfella.

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2021-10-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-10-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

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