A Smith & Wesson 9-mm semi-automatic pistol, serial number HNJ6785, flashes briefly at the end of an eight-second cellphone video featuring several guns in open boxes spread across the white covering of a bed.
The video appears to have been filmed by a person holding a cellphone in one hand and using the other to toy with some of the guns. Font on the screen reads: Houston, 2:49 p.m., June 4, 2020.
The RCMP extracted the video from the cellphone of Tony N’Zoigba after his arrest for smuggling nine pistols into Canada from the U.S. on June 10, 2020. The one-time star athlete from Ottawa, who ran track and played football on a New Mexico military college scholarship, refused to identify the source of the guns during police questioning.
“I shall not be answering this,” said N’Zoigba, leaning back in the chair across from RCMP Cpl. Angelique Dignard.
N’Zoigba was arrested after crossing the St. Lawrence River in a 16-foot white motor boat that docked briefly along the seawall by the Blue Anchor restaurant in Cornwall, Ont.
An undercover Canada Border Services Agency officer watched N’Zoigba hop out of the boat carrying a duffel bag. An SUV with three men from Ottawa arrived moments later to pick him up.
The duffel bag held nine guns individually wrapped in plastic bags with accompanying magazines. The Smith & Wesson pistol, serial number HNJ6785, came with two 17 round mags — the gun restricted in Canada, the magazine prohibited.
The gun began its journey across the border 116 days earlier in a Houston pawn shop where it was bought by a deputy with the Sheriff’s Department in Brazoria County. The area that spreads south of Houston to the Gulf of Mexico Coast carries the slogan, “Where Texas began.”
Tracing the weapon’s path, from the deputy’s hand into the duffel bag carried across the St. Lawrence, reveals parts of the clandestine journey that turned the legally purchased Smith & Wesson into a crime gun. The 9-mm pistol passed through the private gun sale market, which is largely unregulated in several U.S. states, including Texas and Georgia.
The U.S. is the largest source of illegal handguns in Canada, according to the Department of Justice Canada.
In Ontario alone, pistols from the United States made up 90 per cent of all crime-related handguns traced by police in 2022, with Texas as a leading source state, according to the Ontario Provincial Police.
