Twenty Kilos Out of Four Addresses and a Ring Leader Named in the Release: Niagara’s Major Drugs and Gang Unit Charges Five, and the Sixth — Matthew Russell, Wanted on Nine Counts Including a Loaded Gun — Has Been Outstanding Since June (August 31, 2026)

NIAGARA FALLS — The item that is new here is an absence. On Monday, August 31, 2026 the Niagara Regional Police Service republished its region-wide drug trafficking file as Update 1, and the update says one thing: Matthew Russell, 33, of Thorold is still not in custody. The warrants in this file were executed on June 23, 2026 — this is not a takedown that happened today — and the nine counts standing against him include possession of a loaded regulated firearm, possession of a firearm knowing the serial number has been tampered with, and possession of a firearm contrary to a prohibition order.

Detectives are asking anyone who sees him to call 911 and not to approach him. That instruction, set against a charge sheet built on a gun with its serial number defaced, is the whole reason the force went back to the file after ten weeks.

The Charge Sheet Splits Cleanly in Two

Read the six charge lists side by side and a division appears. Five of the accused face drug counts and proceeds-of-crime counts and nothing else. Kyle Knight carries eight, spread across fentanyl, crystal methamphetamine, Oxycodone and cocaine, with two counts each on three of those four substances and a proceeds count over $5,000. Curtis Bennett and Linda Pizzi each carry the same four-drug set. Jody Roberts carries three. Jeffery Russell carries three drug counts and a proceeds count over $5,000.

Matthew Russell is the only one with a firearm on his sheet, and he has five firearms counts: possession contrary to a prohibition order, careless storage, possession of a restricted or prohibited firearm without a licence, possession of a loaded regulated firearm, and possession of a firearm knowing the serial number has been tampered with. A single 9 mm semi-automatic handgun was recovered across the four warrants. Nothing in the release states which address it came out of, but the charge distribution is the only place in this file where the force has drawn a line between one accused and the rest.

Twenty Kilos, and Which Number Is the Load-Bearing One

The four quantities do not read the way the valuations do. Oxycontin is the largest by weight at 7 kilograms, and cocaine the second at 6, but the force prices the cocaine at nearly three times the Oxycontin. Crystal methamphetamine is 5.1 kilograms and is valued at $22,500 — roughly $4.40 a gram, the cheapest thing in the inventory by a wide margin, and a figure that says more about the wholesale collapse of methamphetamine pricing in southern Ontario than about the size of this seizure.

The number to hold onto is the fentanyl. At 2.68 kilograms it is the smallest quantity on the list and the second most valuable at $70,000. Measured against the doses at which fentanyl is retailed on the street, 2.68 kilograms is a quantity in the hundreds of thousands of units. For a service whose recent files have run in the hundreds of grams — 833 grams out of a Lundy’s Lane hotel room, 65 grams across a nine-accused downtown initiative — a 2.68-kilogram recovery sits an order of magnitude above the ordinary run of the beat.

Bought Outside, Stored Inside, Sold Inside

The release describes a shape rather than a name: drugs purchased from outside the region, stored at multiple locations across Niagara, sold within Niagara. Four addresses were warranted on the same day. Three of them are in Niagara Falls and one is in Thorold, which is where both Russells are from.

Distributed storage across separate municipal addresses is not how an individual dealer operates. It is a hedge: no single warrant takes the whole inventory. It is also, in the ordinary course, a supply relationship with somebody upstream and outside the region, and the release says nothing about who that is. No source of supply is identified. No partner agency is credited. The word gang appears in this file only in the name of the unit that ran it, and the force has attached no criminal organization to any of the six accused. This briefing attaches none either.

Ten Weeks and Still Wanted

The interval is the story of the update. Warrants on June 23, bail hearings on June 24, and then a two-month silence broken on August 31 by a republication whose only new content is that Matthew Russell has not been found. Sixty-nine days elapsed between the takedown and the renewed appeal.

The force has not said whether it believes he is still in Niagara, has not described a vehicle, has not named a partner service assisting in the search, and has not disclosed the prohibition order that underpins the first count against him — when it was imposed, by which court, or for how long it runs. A photograph has been published. None of the allegations against any of the six has been tested in court.