Pubdate: Sun, 07 Sep 2014
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2014 The New York Times Company
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Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Alan Feuer

UP IN SMOKE

One day in January 2007, the disgruntled ex-girlfriend of a Queens 
pot dealer walked unprompted into the district office of the Drug 
Enforcement Administration on Long Island. Sitting down with an 
agent, she bitterly gave vent: Her former boyfriend, the father of 
her child, was selling weed.

As a rule, the drug agency isn't in the business of settling romantic 
scores, but the woman, who had shown up with her child in tow, was 
adamant that her onetime lover was a major player in the city's 
wholesale marijuana trade. A group of federal agents started looking 
into the man.

What began that day with a woman scorned unfolded over the next seven 
years into an investigation that went beyond the wildest imaginings 
of the agents assigned to it, an elaborate case that led to the 
discovery, and subsequent arrest, of a surprising quarry: an 
international criminal who is now described as the biggest marijuana 
dealer in New York City history.

That man, a French Canadian playboy named Jimmy Cournoyer, spent 
almost a decade selling high-grade marijuana in the city, trafficking 
the drug through a sprawling operation that moved from fields and 
factories in western Canada, through staging plants in suburban 
Montreal, across the United States border at an Indian reservation 
and finally south to a network of distributors in New York. Along the 
way, Mr. Cournoyer, a martial-arts enthusiast with a taste for fast 
cars, oversaw an unlikely ensemble of underlings, a company of 
criminals that came to include Native American smugglers, Hells 
Angels, Mexican money launderers, a clothier turned cocaine dealer in 
Southern California and a preppy, Polo-wearing Staten Island gangster.

It all came to an end three weeks ago, when Mr. Cournoyer (pronounced 
koorn-WAH-yay) was sentenced in Brooklyn to 27 years in federal 
prison, finally bringing to a close the investigation that emerged in 
2007 from that domestic dispute.

The size and sophistication of his fallen empire were unprecedented, 
those who chased him say. Starting in the mid-2000s, Mr. Cournoyer 
managed the shipment of man-size bales of hydroponically grown pot 
across the border on motorboats and snowmobiles. Nearly $1 billion of 
his cash was laundered through the Sinaloa drug cartel or was ferried 
back to Canada in pickup trucks equipped with secret traps in their 
radios and gas tanks.

"We never saw anything like this guy before," said Steven L. 
Tiscione, a federal prosecutor in New York who supervised the task 
force that broke the case. "In terms of his longevity and scope, and 
the connections he had around the world, nothing, nobody, comes close."

At the height of his success, Mr. Cournoyer, who is now 34 and is 
awaiting placement in the federal prison system, drove a Porsche 
Cayenne and a $2 million limited-edition Bugatti Veyron. He was 
friends with Georges St. Pierre, a mixed-martial arts fighter, and 
dated a lingerie model. His social circle was configured such that 
once, on a trip to Ibiza, he attended the same party as Leonardo DiCaprio.

These circumstances could not have been more different from those of 
his pursuers on the task force, composed of local detectives, career 
federal agents and government prosecutors like Mr. Tiscione. The task 
force, however, had a lead, and within a year of receiving the 
woman's complaint, the Queens dealer, who was caught selling drugs, 
was facing prosecution and became an informant.

One piece of the information he provided was the alias of his 
Canadian supplier, a man known as Cosmo, whose name, he said, derived 
from his residence in the Cite Cosmo, a luxury condominium in the 
Montreal suburb of Laval. Mr. Tiscione and his team eventually 
learned Cosmo's real name by eavesdropping on his network with 
wiretaps and by putting pressure on other dealers, but they were 
unaware of his lengthy history until they contacted the authorities 
in Laval. The Canadians described Mr. Cournoyer as a seasoned 
trafficker whose criminal career had begun at age 18, when he and his 
brother Joey were arrested with a stash of 11 marijuana plants at 
their apartment.

In 1998, Mr. Cournoyer pleaded guilty in that case and was sentenced 
to probation. But two years later, he was caught again, selling 
marijuana out of his Jeep at the Kanesatake Mohawk reservation, a 
half-hour's drive from Laval. Although he pleaded guilty in that 
case, too, he escaped a serious prison term. He was arrested, for a 
third time, only 12 months later. On that occasion, Mr. Cournoyer had 
checked into a Hilton in Toronto, planning to sell 10,000 Ecstasy 
pills to a customer for $65,000. The customer turned out to be an 
undercover agent. As he tried to flee, Mr. Cournoyer was captured, 
despite, court papers say, brandishing a handgun loaded with 
armor-piercing bullets.

The lesson he learned from prison that time was perhaps not what the 
authorities intended. As Mr. Tiscione would later write in a legal 
memorandum, "Determined to never again be found in the compromising 
position of physically touching narcotics, Cournoyer began expanding 
his roster of associates and installing additional layers of 
subordinates between himself" and the drugs.

Among those subordinates was Mario Racine, a fellow Canadian, whom 
Mr. Cournoyer sent to the United States in the early 2000s, court 
papers say, to manage the increasingly giant loads of marijuana 
flowing across the border. Mr. Cournoyer had met Mr. Racine through 
Mr. Racine's sister, Amelia, the lingerie model whom he dated for 
several years. Mr. Racine organized the outfit's East Coast 
distribution. The biggest distributors were generally given up to 200 
pounds of marijuana at a time, with brand names like Sour Diesel, 
which they then resold in pound quantities to smaller retail salesmen.

Another top lieutenant was Patrick Paisse, a one-legged Quebecois who 
helped Mr. Cournoyer arrange a deal with the Hells Angels to drive 
huge loads of pot from fields in British Columbia and greenhouse 
factories equipped with charcoal air filters and off-the-grid power 
systems across the border, hidden beneath the tarps of tractor-trailers.

Mr. Paisse (pronounced pah-EES) also helped him make contact with a 
network of Native American smugglers at the St. Regis Mohawk 
Reservation, who moved their own loads south across the St. Lawrence 
River, on small boats during temperate months and on snowmobiles in winter.

The reservation, which sits along the border of New York State and 
Canada, was a perfect corridor for shipping drugs to American buyers, 
and the Native residents who worked with Mr. Paisse had long 
experience in moving contraband, like firearms and cigarettes, 
through its skein of private docks. One of the Natives who took part, 
Kenneth Cree, lived in an immense house studded with surveillance cameras.

Before long, court papers say, the trafficking operation was "pumping 
regular shipments of high-grade marijuana into the United States." 
But in 2004, one of Mr. Cournoyer's top New York distributors stole a 
load worth more than $1 million, souring relations with the Hells 
Angels, who lost out on the fee to transport the drugs.

That same year, Mr. Cournoyer crashed his Porsche, killing a 
passenger, and was imprisoned on charges related to the death. 
Although he served only a year, he was forced upon his release to 
live in a halfway house in Montreal. In his absence, his enterprise 
had fallen into "tatters," Mr. Tiscione said. But Mr. Cournoyer 
managed to rebuild it, meeting secretly with associates during 
hurried rendezvous in the Montreal subway and while on work release 
from the halfway house, where - industrious as ever - he had found a 
job driving an elderly woman to her medical appointments.

The operation was flourishing again by late 2007, when the Drug 
Enforcement Administration began to make inroads in its investigation.

Unbeknown to the task force in New York, a separate team from the 
drug agency had around that time started a sting operation against 
money launderers working with Mexican drug cartels. That fall, for 
instance, an undercover agent posing as a cartel financier had 
persuaded Mr. Racine, Mr. Cournoyer's New York manager and one of his 
closest partners, to give him $94,000 in marijuana profits, promising 
to reinvest - and cleanse - the money through the purchase of cocaine.

Though the agents in New York could have had Mr. Racine arrested at 
that point, they chose to let him go, albeit under surveillance, to 
preserve the investigation. Mr. Tiscione's task force knew that Mr. 
Cournoyer already had ties to the Hells Angels, the Mohawk smugglers 
and the Rizzuto crime family of Montreal, which ran large swaths of 
that city's drug trade. Now the task force realized that the outfit 
also had a Mexican component, and set about to infiltrate that corner 
of the business.

It took a few years, but by 2010 the agents had persuaded Mr. Cree, 
who was facing a lengthy prison term, to work as an informant. 
According to Mr. Tiscione, they had Mr. Cree engineer a money drop at 
a safe house only blocks from the Brooklyn federal courthouse. 
Calling Mr. Cournoyer one day, Mr. Cree offered to oversee the 
shipment of $200,000 from New York to Los Angeles for a 6 percent 
commission. As part of the deal, he was given the phone number of a 
man in California who would take the cash on arrival.

When undercover agents in Los Angeles called that number, they 
reached a man named Alessandro Taloni. Mr. Taloni, court papers say, 
was an Italian-born associate of the Rizzutos who also served as Mr. 
Cournoyer's manager for West Coast operations. He ran a lucrative 
money-laundering business out west, using dirty cash to buy cocaine 
from the Sinaloa drug cartel while maintaining his sideline as a 
vendor of high-end hair-care products. A former salesman at a 
Montreal men's shop, Mr. Taloni had been charged a decade earlier 
with threatening to kill the owner of a rival clothing store in an 
attempt to cow the competition.

Now the agents watched Mr. Taloni pick up the money that a courier 
hired by Mr. Cree had flown to California on a private jet. After 
fetching the delivery, Mr. Taloni, with the surveillance team in tow, 
continued on in his Mercedes-Benz to the Beverly Hills Hotel. There, 
court papers say, he met another man, who handed him a suitcase with 
a second cache of money. This was cause enough for the agents on his 
tail to stop him and later to search his apartment, where they found 
49 kilograms of plastic-wrapped cocaine and nearly $1 million, all of 
it in cash.

Almost from the moment their case began, Mr. Tiscione and the task 
force had relied on old-fashioned, grind-it-out police work. Now, 
however, the task force caught a lucky, and unexpected, break.

Dominick Curatola was a muralist turned house painter turned pot 
dealer, living on Long Island. He was a minor player, but he still 
had connections; his boss in Canada was a close associate of Mr. Cournoyer.

One day in mid-November 2010, Mr. Curatola's usual money launderer 
was unavailable, and he found himself in need of someone to help him 
move a cash shipment to Canada. According to Mr. Tiscione, Mr. 
Cournoyer volunteered his own man for the job, a Honduras-born 
trafficker named Jose Castillo-Medina.

Mr. Castillo-Medina, three years earlier, was involved in the cartel 
money-laundering operation with Mr. Racine. Now he was at it again, 
according to court papers, dispatching a woman named Elizabeth 
Jennings to meet with Mr. Curatola in the parking lot of a Staples 
store in Brooklyn. Even the government acknowledges that this was a 
onetime favor; Mr. Castillo-Medina simply picked the wrong day to be helpful.

As it happened, a different team of federal drug agents on Long 
Island had for weeks been following Mr. Curatola and were there that 
day when Ms. Jennings took from him a black Express shopping bag 
filled with $169,000, then hurried back to her apartment in Brooklyn 
to walk her dog. They were also there when Mr. Castillo-Medina 
arrived at the apartment later. When the agents searched the place, 
they found bags of marijuana, two narcotics scales, $500,000 in cash 
and coded ledgers indicating deals of more than $4 million between a 
man named Primo and a large New York distributor referred to only as 
Staten Island.

It took a wiretap investigation to finally determine that "Primo" was 
Mr. Castillo-Medina and that "Staten Island" was a Bonanno crime 
family associate named John Venizelos. Besides selling millions of 
dollars' worth of marijuana, court papers say, Mr. Venizelos, who 
favored horn-rim glasses and Ralph Lauren pastels, managed a 
Mafia-owned strip club, Jaguars 3.

Once the task force had identified Mr. Venizelos, federal agents 
descended on his house on Staten Island and then on his parents' 
house nearby. They seized more marijuana, more narcotics scales and 
more ledgers, as well as a shotgun and a loaded Glock.

They also seized an encrypted BlackBerry, Mr. Tiscione said, which 
was the device of choice for the Cournoyer outfit. Given that a 
number of the boss's men were already in custody, the agents were 
especially concerned by a message that Mr. Venizelos had sent just 
days before his own arrest, to a partner who had been captured and 
was under pressure to cooperate with the task force.

"U just got to hope they never find out u said a word, seriously 
bro," Mr. Venizelos wrote. He added, chillingly, that Mr. Cournoyer 
kept on hand a $2 million slush fund to pay for the murder of anyone 
who crossed him.

The flight to Mexico left Canada at 6 a.m. Among the passengers 
onboard that day, Feb. 16, 2012, was Jimmy Cournoyer.

After five years of flipping witnesses, listening to wiretaps and 
conducting secret stings, Mr. Tiscione and his team had finally 
gotten a Brooklyn grand jury to indict Mr. Cournoyer on drug 
conspiracy charges on Jan. 20, 2012. A month later, the newly minted 
defendant tried to abscond to Cancun.

Landing at the airport, he was immediately detained by the Mexican 
authorities. Pointing to a "red notice" alert issued in his name by 
Interpol, they refused to let him in.

Although Mexican officials tried three times to put Mr. Cournoyer on 
a plane to the United States, he refused to go, threatening, court 
papers say, to "harm the captain and the crew." Finally, he was 
hooded and escorted onto a flight to Houston.

In the year that followed his arrest, Mr. Cournoyer and his lawyer, 
Gerald J. McMahon, disputed his removal from Mexico as "a forcible 
abduction" and tried to have the sprawling case against him 
dismissed. But as the evidence mounted, Mr. Cournoyer pleaded guilty 
in May 2013, just days before his trial was scheduled to begin in 
federal court in Brooklyn.

Even though marijuana is increasingly legalized and, unlike 
methamphetamine or heroin, rarely makes for sensational headlines, 
prosecutors argued in a sentencing memorandum that Mr. Cournoyer's 
operation was a violent one and that it led to the enrichment of 
other criminal syndicates. His friends and family countered with 
letters to the Brooklyn court praising Mr. Cournoyer's good nature 
and blaming his criminal exploits on the trauma he suffered at age 
16, when his father left his family.

"That's when I started to see a change in my son," his mother, Linda 
Bremer, wrote. "He wasn't focused anymore. He was kind of a rebel. I 
thought it was because of the divorce."

Whatever his psychic pain, Jimmy Cournoyer had been driven all along 
by a singular passion, his lawyer said in an interview: a love of money.

"There's a lot of weed smokers here on the Eastern Seaboard, a lot of 
them," Mr. McMahon explained. "That's why he came to New York, for 
the capitalist markets. It was basically a Karl Marx kind of thing."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom