Canadian drug dealer handed a 27-year sentence
A Canadian drug kingpin dubbed the "Pot Playboy" was sentenced to 27 years in prison for leading a $1 billion international drug trafficking enterprise, prosecutors said.
Jimmy Cournoyer, one of New York's biggest marijuana suppliers, pleaded guilty in May 2013 to charges of money laundering and conspiracies to manufacture and distribute marijuana and cocaine. The 34-year-old Quebec native was sentenced on Wednesday in US federal court in the Brooklyn borough of New York City.
Cournoyer's Montreal-based organization had ties to drug cartels, prosecutors said. Proceeds financed a lifestyle that included a supermodel girlfriend, celebrity hobnobbing and a Bugatti Veyron, a 16-cylinder supercar known by automobile aficionados as the epitome of exclusivity and luxury.
Cournoyer had a $2 million hit fund to punish anyone who cooperated with the government, and he tried to threaten witnesses, the authorities said.
He was arrested in 2012 while attempting to enter Mexico and was transferred to New York, where prosecutors said he sold marijuana smuggled in from Canada.
"His territory - all of North America. His goal - to extend the deadly narcotics trade as far as he could," the US attorney in Brooklyn, Loretta Lynch, said after Cournoyer's plea.
The marijuana was grown in British Columbia and then taken to Quebec. Cocaine from Mexico was smuggled into Canada.
(China Daily 08/22/2014 page11)
