Ojelade, initially charged with drug possession, importing and trafficking, pleaded guilty recently only to importing. Other charges are expected to be dropped after he’s sentenced.
Lawyers will be arguing Thursday what sentence an Ontario man should get after he was caught at the Blue Water Bridge with up to $5 million in cocaine hidden in a false compartment in his car.
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Olanrewaju Ojelade, then a 29-year-old Brantford resident, was by himself in a white 2013 Chevrolet Traverse that was sent for an inspection on the Canadian side of the international crossing between Michigan and the Sarnia area on May 24, 2019, according to a short document.
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During the probe, Canada Border Services Agency officers noticed the third row of seats was loosely bolted down and the carpet was loose, too. Underneath the seats they found a fabricated steel compartment containing 48, one-kilogram packages of cocaine with a street value between $2.3 and $5.3 million, depending on how it was sold, the document says.
Ojelade, initially charged with drug possession, importing and trafficking, pleaded guilty recently only to importing. Other charges are expected to be dropped after he’s sentenced.
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In the meantime, the court document, an agreed statement of facts linked to his guilty plea, shed additional light on the incident. Investigators probed the search history of Ojelade’s seized phone and computers after his arrest and found they’d been used to look up high-end money counters and large cocaine-related arrests, including of a Toronto man arrested in Indiana in March 2019 with nearly 58 kilograms of cocaine stashed in a similar hidden compartment. Ojelade and the man talked on the phone prior to the Indiana arrest, the document says. Ojelade also frequently called and messaged another contact for several weeks leading up to his arrest near Sarnia.
Records from officials on both sides of the border show Ojelade, his partner and their children crossed into Port Huron, Mich., in a Buick Enclave on May 15, 2019, and Ojelade’s father followed soon after in the Traverse in which he was later arrested . They had dinner in nearby Fort Gratiot, Mich., then Ojelade’s family, including his father, returned to Canada in the Buick while he continued on alone in the Traverse to Hesperia, Calif., the document says.
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Ojelade arrived back at the Blue Water Bridge shortly after 3 pm on May 24, 2019 and told a Canadian border officer in a booth he was in the US for nine days for a religious function in Utah. He said he bought books and miscellaneous items for $50 and had nothing else to declare.
But he was sent for an investigation and officers, with the help of drug-detecting dogs and large vehicle X-rays, found the hidden compartment. The cocaine they discovered was later found to be between 85 and 91 per cent pure, the document says.
“This seizure demonstrates, once again, the (Canada Border Services Agency’s) ongoing commitment to stopping the smuggling of drugs into our communities,” Tom Rankin, the agency’s district director, said at the time.
At least 13 other people have been arrested at the Blue Water Bridge between March 2021 and December 2023 and been accused of smuggling millions of dollars in illegal drugs into Canada, but they were all truckers. One recently was sentenced to 11 years in prison after he was found guilty at trial of trying to bring $3.5 million of cocaine over the bridge while another was recently cleared of all charges in an alleged $9.4-million cocaine bust.
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