THE POT MAN; BLOG NUMBER 148; SEP 12, 2014

THE MESSAGE:

The Rise and Fall of the Biggest Pot Dealer in New York City History

In January 2007, the scorned ex-girlfriend of a Queens pot dealer sat down in a district office of the DEA and revealed that her former boyfriend and father of her child, was selling pot and was a major player in the city’s wholesale trade of weed.

The subsequent investigation developed into an elaborate case that led to the arrest of an international criminal, a French Canadian playboy named Jimmy Cournoyer, who is now described as the biggest marijuana dealer in New York City history.

Jimmy spent almost a decade selling high-grade marijuana in the city. His operation included production facilities in western Canada, staging plants in suburban Montreal, and Native American smuggling agents. He made extensive use of Hells Angels distributers, Mexican money launderers, a cocaine dealer in Southern California and a Staten Island gangster.

The size of Cournoyer's   empire was unprecedented. Starting in the mid-2000s, it managed the shipment of large, hydroponically grown pot bundles, across the border via 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 with stash compartments.

At the height of his success, 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.

 

“By 2009, Cournoyer was delivering some 1,000 pounds of marijuana to New York per week, and making plans to expand his business to send 5,000 pounds of marijuana per week,” Steven L. Tiscione, a prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, wrote in court filings. Tiscione had doggedly pursued a lead and uncovered one of Cournoyer's dealers in Queens NY. The dealer was caught selling drugs, and was facing prosecution. He became a key informant.

One piece of the information he provided was the alias (Cosmo) of his Canadian supplier (Cournoyer), a name taken from his luxury condo in the Montreal suburb of Laval. 

Mr. Tiscione through wire taps and inquiries, learned from Canadian authorities that Cournoyer was 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.

HIS ARREST BACKGROUND

In 1998, Cournoyer pleaded guilty of possession for the purpose of trafficking  and was sentenced to probation. Two years later, he was caught again, selling marijuana 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 in Toronto 12 months later, after planning to sell 10,000 Ecstasy pills to a customer for $65,000. The customer turned out to be an undercover agent.

In order to avoid further incarceration, 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 to manage the increasingly giant loads of marijuana flowing across the border.

Cournoyer had met Racine through Racine’s sister, Amelia, the lingerie model whom he dated for several years. Racine organized the outfit’s East Coast distribution. The biggest distributors were generally given up to 200 pounds of marijuana at a time which they then resold in pound quantities to smaller retail salesmen.

Another top lieutenant was Patrick Paisse, a one-legged Québécois who helped Cournoyer arrange a deal with the Hells Angels to drive huge loads of pot from British Columbia. Paisse also helped set up contacts with a network of Native American smugglers at the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation, who moved their own loads south across the St. Lawrence River.

The reservation, which sits along the border of New York State and Canada, was a perfect corridor for shipping drugs to American buyers. The Native residents who worked with Mr. Paisse had experience in moving contraband, like firearms and cigarettes, through its network of private docks. 

The operation was flourishing by late 2007, when the Drug Enforcement Administration began to make inroads. A separate team from the drug agency had, around that time, started a sting operation against money launderers working with Mexican Drug Cartels. An undercover agent posing as a cartel financier had persuaded Racine to give him $94,000 in marijuana profits, promising to reinvest and launder the money through the purchase of cocaine.

Mr. Tiscione’s task force knew that Mr. Cournoyer  had ties to the Hells Angels, as well as the Mohawk smugglers and the Rizzuto crime family of Montreal. 
His organization ran large swaths of that city’s drug trade. Now through the efforts of the partner bureau, Tiscione realized that Cournoyer's outfit also had a Mexican component, and set about to infiltrate that corner of the business.

By 2010 agents had found and persuaded a Mr. Cree, one of the Native American smugglers who was facing a lengthy prison term, to work as an informant. According to Mr. Tiscione, they had  Cree engineer a series of money drops beginning  at a safe house only blocks from the Brooklyn federal courthouse. As part of the sting, Cree called  Cournoyer and offered to oversee the shipment of $200,000 from New York to Los Angeles for a 6 percent commission. To conclude the deal, he was given the phone number of a contact in California who would take the cash from Cree upon his arrival.

When undercover agents in Los Angeles called that number, they reached a man named Alessandro Taloni, an Italian-born associate of the Montreal Rizzuto family, who served as Cournoyer’s manager for West Coast operations. Taloni ran a lucrative money-laundering business out west, using dirty cash to buy cocaine from the Sinaloa drug cartel. 

Taloni picked up the money from a courier hired by Cree to deliver it to California. He was then observed receiving a suitcase from another person that contained  a second cache of money. Federal agents had all they needed to obtain a warrant.

A search of Taloni's apartment, revealed 49 kilograms of plastic-wrapped cocaine and nearly $1 million in cash.

After five years of flipping witnesses, listening to wiretaps and conducting secret stings, Mr. Tiscione and his team was finally successful in getting a Brooklyn grand jury to indict Cournoyer on drug conspiracy charges. In the face of his collapsing empire, Cournoyer fled to Cancun, Mexico. 

When he landed at the airport, he was immediately detained by the Mexican authorities. A “red notice” alert had been issued for Cournoyer by Interpol, and the Mexicans refused to let him into the country.  He was hooded and escorted onto a flight to Houston.

In the year that followed his arrest, Cournoyer's lawyer, disputed his removal from Mexico as “a forcible abduction” and tried to have the  case against him dismissed.  But as the collected evidence piled up,  Cournoyer pleaded guilty in May 2013, a few days before his federal court trial was to begin in Brooklyn. He was sentenced to 27 years in a federal prison.

THE QUESTION:

Should marijuana be legalized or decriminalized?

THE QUOTE:

"They've outlawed the number one vegetable on the planet."
- Timothy Leary

LAURELS TO: 

DEA Administrative Law Judge Francis L. Young

"Estimates suggest that from 20 to 50 million Americans routinely, albeit illegally, smoke marijuana without the benefit of direct medical supervision. Yet, despite this long history of use and the extraordinarily high numbers of social smokers, there are simply no credible reports to suggest that consuming marijuana has caused a single death. By contrast, aspirin, a commonly used, over-the-counter medicine, causes hundreds of deaths each year."

THE CLIP: