The CBC produced an in-depth report on the founders in July 2019. Wes Weber is one of Canada’s most notorious counterfeiters, who reportedly started his first ring of illegal money at thirteen. It’s been reported that Weber, forty-nine in 2025, made so many counterfeit one-hundred-dollar bills that Canada briefly took the currency out of circulation. But Weber is bookish and shy, a computer nerd who loves cryptocurrency. He has always loved marijuana, too: he was arrested in 1999 and again in 2010 for growing pot and has served jail time for forging cheques. He grew up with his business partner, Galvano, who was a gym rat with bulky muscles and social media fame. Before he took down his Instagram account, Galvano would flaunt his lifestyle of Lamborghinis and racehorses, named Indica and Sativa, and shooting ranges in Colombia. During the Raptors playoff run, Weber and Galvano posed showing off their matching Rolex watches. Both men reportedly kept a penthouse above the CAFE shop on Fort York Boulevard in Toronto. A CAFE staff member says that Galvano travelled with bodyguards. Galvano posted on Facebook about opening his first CAFE location on July 23, 2016, two months after Toronto police conducted their Project Claudia raids. That summer, Toronto police estimated that the city had more than one hundred illegal pot shops. (New York is estimated to have over 2,900 illegal pot shops today.)
“There was no one single illegal player that really stood out other than Marc and Jodie Emery. It was more of the Wild West with no organized structure,” Mark Sraga, the city licenser, says. “I’ve heard the source [for the unlicensed shops] — and still the source today — is federally licensed medical grows growing far in excess of what they are legally entitled to and converting it to the black market.”
In 2016, cannabis was still against the law, but, as Bruce, Sébastien, and Terry presided over companies worth more than several billion dollars and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced legalization was coming, police were no longer focusing on illegal marijuana. The opioid epidemic was raging.
After Project Claudia, there were fewer illegal pot retailers in operation; however, the surviving illegal shops shut down and reopened as if playing a game of whack-a-mole with the cops. As soon as they were closed, they reopened again, sometimes in different locations, sometimes with a different name, sometimes not. The profits were enough for the illegal operators to treat closures as an inconvenience. CAFE, however, operated on a different scale. After legalization, they expanded, from two shops to four. And that’s not because the police didn’t try to stop them. At the Fort York CAFE location, the city enforcement team installed a steel door over their entrance. They were physically barring CAFE from breaking the law. It didn’t work. “Someone just cut through the door,” explains Sraga, dismayed. “They just crawled back in to defeat the locking system and were operating again the very next day.”
Sraga was disgusted, outraged. Trevor Fencott at Fire & Flower couldn’t open his legal shop in Oakville, but in Toronto, CAFE did whatever it chose and sold whatever it wanted. Sraga decided to put his foot down. “Fuck this. Let’s go to the next level,” he told his team, including his manager of cannabis enforcement. His next move will go down in the annals of cannabis history. Mark Sraga instructed his people to erect massive, heavy, imposing, concrete blocks before the entrances of the CAFE stores. The owners were blocked out of their stores — by boulders. Sraga told me, “These blocks were four feet long, almost two feet high, and two feet deep, very substantial. Nobody was going to get around them.” To erect the blocks, they had to use a flatbed truck and a crane.
Goomba is the alias of a friend who used to work at CAFE and was onsite for seven raids, arrested at one. He has a long beard and long hair and looks like a cannabis Jesus, which makes sense because he was raised in the church. CAFE, to him, was a family business: his sister worked in CAFE’s law department — they have a law department. He was a cook before he went over to CAFE in Fort York Boulevard in CityPlace. He’d work stoned. During Toronto’s huge annual Afro-Caribbean festival called Caribana, the busiest time of the year, he could bring home $300 in tips. The store was huge with cannabis connoisseurs and Americans staying locally in Airbnbs. Weber, the CAFE co-owner, is married to Michelle Kam, a top real estate agent in Toronto. CityPlace is Toronto’s largest residential development of all time, and Goomba says the CAFE team owned multiple units and had a visible, intimidating presence in the building.
In the summer of 2019, Goomba sold edibles, vapes, and drinks, months before they were approved on the legal market, and though their price on flower was roughly equivalent to that on the legal market — about $12 per gram — the vibe in the place was different from what you could find at Fire & Flower: customers could buy weed and consume drinks and edibles, and they could sit on the CAFE patio after making their purchase and listen to tunes. Fencott — in the legal market — couldn’t even sell coffee. Wes Weber was selling coffee infused — creating his own little Amsterdam.
“Tell you the truth, we never even gave a fuck,” Goomba tells me one afternoon outside Tokyo Smoke, where he worked at the time of our interview, near his home on the east side of Toronto. When the concrete blocks in front of CAFE went up, Goomba says, it only increased his sales.
“We thought that shit was funny,” he tells me, and describes how the company pivoted its business when they couldn’t open their doors. When the concrete blocks were erected before the four Toronto CAFE locations in July of 2019, Goomba helped raise a canopy in front of the shop and set up a table and chairs. He took orders from his lawn chair, and when news crews came out to film the action, the police left him alone.
It was a stain on the entire legalization experiment, according to Mark Sraga. “At the Harbord Street location, CAFE even arranged an SUV limousine service to take their customers to other stores.” He points out that once the CAFE proprietors began selling weed in an open-air drug market on the street, the crime was no longer part of his jurisdiction.
No charges were laid against Galvano or Weber. The city removed the blocks from the front doors by the end of July. Sraga retired in August. Galvano died from unexplained causes in Mexico in 2021. Someone on Reddit said it was a brain tumour. CAFE is still selling weed today from its five locations in Toronto.
Sraga doesn’t not look back at that wistfully. He says, “It would appear CAFE has deeper resources than the police.”
At Fire & Flower, Michael Haines and Trevor Fencott were now competing against CAFE with the help of Couche-Tard. They, too, had deeper pockets than the police.
On July 24, 2019, a few days before Mark Sraga retired, Couche-Tard, the retail and real estate champions, invested $26 million into Fire & Flower; which meant that now a company even bigger than Constellation Brands had put real money behind the premise that pot was moving away from its stigma, pot companies could be profitable, and real companies with massive global footprints wanted to sell weed as part of their portfolio. Fencott says the deal with Couche-Tard was designed to take advantage of the U.S. market. Retail cannabis was going to eventually come down to a game of American real estate locations, and the pot company that could dot the United States like so many franchises of Dunkin’ Donuts would be the one that could last and win. It was Sébastien St-Louis who connected Fencott with Alain Bouchard, the founder of Couche-Tard. The Quebec connection was bestowed on Fencott because St-Louis, over at Hexo, didn’t want Bruce Linton to corner the market on retail.
However, even with Couche-Tard’s war chest and retail learnings, and even after the Hunny Pot drew lineups to its doors in Toronto on April 1, 2019, the legal system was plagued by kinks and the black market. The illegal market had edibles, a cannabis product for potential new cannabis consumers. Olli’s John Aird, meanwhile, a master of licensing regulations in Ontario and business development with a small army of lawyers behind him, hadn’t sold a single product while the illegal stuff at CAFE flew from the shelf. The illegal market also didn’t charge tax.
Supply issues continued to be a problem, as was the slow adoption of the Cannabis Act. Trevor Fencott lives in Oakville, Ontario, a township, like Mississauga, Ontario, that initially declined to opt into Canada’s legal system. The Cannabis Act was supposed to kill the black market. But legal consumers, like Bruce has said, couldn’t buy what they couldn’t buy.
“Twenty-five to forty percent of Oakville’s constituents, my neighbours, are consuming cannabis, and that number is almost certainly underreported. And politicians don’t want a store that looks like a Lululemon in our own backyard?” Fencott says. “The treatment we received as pioneers in a nascent business that was supposed to be a priority for the government was absurd.”
Fencott and Haines at Fire & Flower — publicly traded national cannabis retailers with deep-pocketed backers — were trying to meet legal customer demand, but even with outdoor grows now legal across the country, the turnaround time to plant and sell marijuana was upwards of four months. Customers hadn’t, by and large, developed a taste for specific legal brands, so you could basically put any marijuana strain behind the legally mandated generic packaging. There was no advertising, and even the legal stores needed to have blacked-out front windows (which, of course, CAFE didn’t have, except when the city covered them with giant cement boulders). Consumers weren’t going to Fire & Flower to shop for a product they couldn’t get from an illegal store. Customers didn’t even have any way of knowing which stores were illegal. The illegal shops looked better than the legal ones. There was no Gucci (or, for that matter, Gap) of legal marijuana flower, not yet. And people might know Aurora or Canopy and even own shares in the companies, but a smoke test wouldn’t likely produce brand recognition, and no single product in the industry had any real buzz.
But the industry continued to be buzzy, and the mainstream struggled to cash in. At this point, I was not only writing about weed for subscription-based cannabis newsletters at the Globe and Mail and the National Post, but also helping to launch, with Josh Nagel, KIND magazine, which would eventually be distributed in the licensed retail stores and host events and award shows, much like Lift. In 1999, I had stories all over New York about Lenny Kravitz. Twenty years later, I had stories all over Canada about weed. I don’t have any particular marijuana expertise. I can’t identify terpenes based on smoking, but I fit the oddball work hard/play hard cannabis profile, love the people, and, if I’m honest, the product. I don’t smoke much but do find that weed boosts not only my creativity but also my empathy — a much better form of existence when there are two kids kicking around the house.
I remember being in Ottawa in the fall of 2019 and talking to the marketing manager at Hexo. It was the first time I heard about the cannabis tax. This is the idea that if something costs a regular company $5,000, it will cost a cannabis company $50,000, because there’s an understanding that weed companies are not only flush, but desperate to spend their money. Only, by the summer of 2019, the pendulum was beginning to turn. The Hexo guy told me he was tired of paying a premium and that profits were becoming important to shareholders. I feel almost like the mainstream press that I was part of mirrored the retail investors. We were all trying to cash in at the exact same time that the smart money already had left. The underground didn’t have this problem.
The underground — illegally — continued to bloom.
Jackson Flynn is a friend who smokes weed and worked at the Nova store on Queen Street in Toronto on 10.17 and at Tokyo Smoke at Yonge and Dundas before joining a licensed producer. Before he worked in the legal industry, he worked at an illegal dispensary. This, in his words, is what that was like in 2018:
I was supervising: fill the jars of weed in the morning, do cash drops, take the money out. It was ridiculous to sit there on some Friday nights and hit refresh [on the cash machine] — thousands of dollars per minute. I would go by with the cash drop, with the cash envelope, and take all the money out of the tills. I literally had to shove it down my pants and walk back to the office.
It was like ten, fifteen grand in the envelope in cash. Some guy would come near the store in the morning with a big duffle bag with ten pounds of weed. I’d walk two blocks with it. It was the same size as me, and at the end of the night, someone would come shove forty grand in cash down their pants and leave for the night. It didn’t even feel like a job.
We were doing production all day — twenty, thirty pounds of weed — production all day long in a basement in Kensington Market. Scaling up like fucking 1,000 one grams, 500 half quarters. Other people were making pre-rolls, doing concentrates. It was crazy. We couldn’t do it enough. We could’ve stayed there twelve hours a day and we wouldn’t be able to bag it all.
It was a movie, man.
From the basement, I moved up to budtending. There were pounds behind us and the storefront above us, and we had a little cut-out in the floor, and we’d pass up weed through the cut-out. It was like a dumb waiter from the basement to the manager’s office. We cut a square in the wall and we’d pull up the weed like that all day long. We were allowed to smoke pre-rolls. You have to be stoned to be able to sit there and fucking, “one gram,” “three point five,” all day long. It was my first job in Toronto. We got paid like eighteen dollars an hour to do it. I was nineteen. It was love.
We couldn’t keep up with the demand. All the shit we could ski up [package] would be gone within the first half of the week, but then that store got raided and shut down for a week, so I moved over to Yonge and Eglinton. Same owners. That’s where I saw big numbers. That store ruined me. Fill a jar with weed and it would sell out and that was four grand. It was dope.
Dope — but a shitshow with the fucking robberies. Two different employees let their boy in through the back door. He came running up with an actual gun and said, “Everyone down!” He cleared the place out. My supervisor had a gun to his face, but he said, “Not my money.” It was fucking jokes.
Another time we got lifted. We were doing the Square thing, the credit card reader? We were doing that for credit and debit for two months, but for three weeks some dude hooked it up to his own account before we fucking realized. Oh yeah, that guy took in quite a lot of money, 70K? After that, we never took debit or credit cards again.
Our goal was to hit 100K in one day. And finally, on the last Friday, summer 2017, we hit 101. A lot of the weed came from BC, but later we’d get bricks of hash that were stamped like some Quebec biker stuff. When I was at Yonge and Eglinton, we got hit like five times, but wouldn’t ever close. One time the police came in and shut off our power so the landlord brought in generators, put them in the back, and we were up and running the next day. He’d just go to Best Buy with a checklist for thousands of dollars — new laptops, TVs, all this shit.
We had seven stores in the city, probably each making forty grand each day, 300K they’re making, and the overhead was nothing — especially if it was their product. Growers from BC shipping it to stores they own here in Toronto. But it was sketchy as shit and you never know what can happen. Just like that, you get popped and you get shut down.
After we made all that money — we finally hit 101 — the Friday after, we were hoping to do that again, but around twelve in the afternoon I’m standing in the office, doing my thing, and all I hear is loud noises and banging. Then there’s a bunch of uniforms, like SWAT team black uniforms, they had all the gear on, their guns are out, full body suits. I look at the camera and there’s fifteen fully dressed uniforms coming in with their weapons drawn like, “Everyone against the wall!” The music was playing. Customers were against the wall, too! They thought we’d be armed, but we had no guns, no other drugs — nothing in the store except weed and money.
Some of the stores (not ours) had cocaine. They were sticking twenty-year-old kids in the store to take the risk and they were the ones walking around with 40K in cash.
At the point of my first arrest, I’m not high. It was about mid-day. They’re coming in. I opened the door and a bunch of them just rushed me, I’m just like … “Fuck.”
The cops held the customers for about two hours. The staff for about six. They smashed the ATM to get the money, smashed our vault in. But what was heartbreaking was they had this big bag and dumped all the weed in a fifteen-pound sack. That’s some shit.
Soon as they left the store, one of our security guys was waiting to meet us. We went around the corner, he took our papers and sent it off to the lawyer they hired for us. That was it.
Two days later I got a phone call. “We’re opening up another store,” I’m like, “Here we go again.”
They were like, “Twenty-five dollars an hour — cash — and you’ll get overtime.” Yup.
I went back to Kensington, then I was in Park Lawn and Lakeshore. I was working eight hours at twenty-five dollars, then another four hours at forty dollars, overtime. I’m making three hundred, four hundred dollars a day in cash and I sit in an office, spin money through a counter, and fill up jars of weed. But it never lasts.