Kai was 12 years old when he began to warn his mother he might not make it home.
“[If] I don’t make it home by four o’clock, just know that I got snatched and somebody put me in their car and kidnapped me,” he would tell her.
His mother, whom CBC’s the fifth estate is calling Aria for her protection, moved her family to another city when Kai was a boy to disconnect from his father, who had a criminal past and street associations.
She enrolled Kai, whose name has also been changed for his protection, in community centres and drop-in spaces in Winnipeg to keep him busy and away from trouble
But Aria believes those spaces exposed her son to people who would exploit him.
She believes some staff abused their positions, allowing gang members to manipulate her son and coerce him into the drug trade — sending him thousands of kilometres away from home.
Fifth estate host Mark Kelley, left, sits down with a boy who was recruited by a gang when he was 12. He says he has been sent out of town to sell drugs more times than he can count. (Ousama Farag/CBC)
Kai said men in their 20s and 30s presented themselves as people he could trust.
“People call it grooming, people call it using. There’s many words for it, but it’s just being taken advantage of because you’re innocent,” Kai said.
For the last two years, the fifth estate has investigated the disappearances of young Black boys from the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) who are groomed and lured into drug trafficking networks in Ontario cities as far away as Sarnia and Thunder Bay, and sent further north into Indigenous communities like Ginoogaming, a First Nation.
Now, the fifth estate has heard directly from boys who live this dangerous life and say they were sent across the country to sell drugs, revealing a network that reaches even farther.
We now know of this activity taking boys as young as 12 as far west as British Columbia, as far north as Yellowknife and as far east as Halifax — places where drugs are sold at exponentially higher prices — up to 10 times the price in some cases.
In an interview with CBC’s the fifth estate, Kai recounts his first trip out of town, also known as “going OT,” when he was 12.
“You don’t know what’s in those bags. You don’t know what you’re delivering for people … you just think, ‘I’m helping the older guy, because I want to be cool like him,'” he said.
Kai said the older men picked him up, told him where he would stay and expected him to sell drugs. He was left in a remote community eight hours north of his home in Winnipeg.
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Kai said he did not fully understand what he was getting into. He had to figure it out in a place where he did not know anyone and his family was out of reach.
“You’re not telling family members,” he said. “Because not only do they not know where you are, you don’t know where you are.”
The first trip taught him more about what he calls the rules of “the game,” where the three outcomes are freedom, jail or death.
And he says he was forced to gamble for the gangs.
“You can’t just get out … whoever sent you there is expecting you to come back with a prize,” Kai said. “And if you don’t come back with anything … God forbid something happens to you.“
Now 14, Kai has made more trips out of town than he can count.
On the front line of the drug trade
Jamal, another teenager whose name has been changed for his safety, started going OT at 12. He had been away from home for more than a week and his mom reported him missing.
The now-18-year-old who lives in the Toronto area said he has been sent to communities in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario.
Jamal’s farthest trip took him to Yellowknife. He was even convinced to pay his own way.
Like Kai, Jamal said it was in Grade 7 when he was first approached to work for a gang. His family had spent a year bouncing between houses and he grew close to older people in his neighbourhood who were often around his cousins.
“I always just had the respect and looked at them like an older role model,” he said.
Jamal said those role models could offer him an escape from the instability at home.
Searching for Ontario
