VANCOUVER — The B.C. government wants three Vancouver properties forfeited after the tenants were caught allegedly using them “to produce and traffic controlled substances and to facilitate laundering the proceeds of crime.”
The director of civil forfeiture filed a statement of claim against the units at 867 Richards St., 705-1010 Richards St. and 2803-1011 West Cordova St. and the five owners of the three condos. The three units have a combined assessed value of just over $6.4 million.
The claim says that Omid Mashinchi, convicted in the U.S. of laundering drug gang proceeds, along with a woman named Jemina Ortega, had been using the three properties for their alleged criminal operation.
“In or about February 2021, the Vancouver Police Department began investigating several individuals for money laundering and drug trafficking offences which revealed that, O. Mashinchi and J. Ortega used 867 Richards, 1010 Richards, the Cordova Street residence, and various other residential properties to produce and traffic in controlled substances and to facilitate laundering the proceeds of crime,” the latest lawsuit said.
Five months ago, the civil forfeiture director also filed a suit stemming from the same criminal investigation against Mashinchi and Ortega seeking the forfeiture of $191,000 and expensive jewelry seized by the Vancouver police during searches of the properties last March.
Neither Mashinchi nor Ortega has been charged criminally. Nor have any statements of defence yet been filed in either of the two civil suits.
Mashinchi, a former real estate agent who leased luxury properties to B.C. gangsters, was sentenced to two years in jail in Boston in 2018 after admitting to international money laundering.
During the March 2023 search of the storage locker for the Cordova Street condo, Vancouver police officers found fentanyl, just over 78 kilograms of MDMA, just over 15 kilos of methamphetamine and about 11 kilos of powdered cocaine, as well as four handguns, one of which had an obscured serial number.
At the 1010 Richards unit, police found “a narcotics’ manufacturing and production lab” with almost 14 kg of fentanyl, more than three of meth, 1.64 kg of powdered cocaine and almost 18 kg of “various other substances.”
More drugs were found at 867 Richards, the lawsuit said.
The director claimed that John and Erin Coughlan, who own 867 Richards, Ya Wen Yang, who owns the 1010 Richards suite, and Jiantong Fu and Qiong Li, who own the Cordova apartment, all “ought to have known” or were “wilfully blind to the fact that Mashinchi, Ortega and others were using the condos to engage in unlawful activity.”
The lawsuit lists the offences committed, including production and trafficking of controlled substances, several firearms counts and laundering the proceeds of crime.
Before his U.S. conviction, Mashinchi found apartments for a number of gangsters, including some in the Wolfpack, the Kang group and the Brothers Keepers.
BK founder Gavin Grewal was shot to death in December 2017 in a North Vancouver penthouse that had been leased by Mashinchi’s company — Mashinchi Investments. Mashinchi also leased out a West Vancouver house that was targeted in an unsolved drive-by shooting on Oct. 8, 2017.
U.S. court documents in the Boston case said that Mashinchi transferred funds from a bank in Vancouver to a bank in Boston over several months in 2017, knowing that the money — almost $240,000 US — was derived from drug trafficking.
