He wasn't the kingpin. I've met this guy 2-3 times. He is a fall guy. He got his hands very dirty in all aspects of this operation and he has no chance in court he will take the fall. The real bosses don't touch 1% of what this guy touched to make all that money he had.
Here another article I found that sheds more light.
LINK:
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/...rges_alone.htmlArticle:
MONTREAL — Montreal playboy Jimmy Cournoyer and six other men were arrested last year on charges of running a $1-billion drug trafficking operation that shuttled marijuana into the United States and spirited Mexican cocaine back into this country.
But the alleged criminal mastermind, who has reputedly worked closely and nurtured ties with both the Hells Angels and Vito Rizzuto’s Montreal mob outfit, now finds himself very alone with just over a week before his trial begins in New York City.
In a New York court Thursday, the last of Cournoyer’s co-accused, Alessandro Taloni pleaded guilty to his role as the so-called Beverly Hills-based manager for the drug ring’s cocaine operations, and will face a 10-year sentence.
“Now that we’ve cleared away all of this floatsam and jetsam, it will just be Mr. Cournoyer,” Gerald McMahon, the Montrealer’s New York attorney, said in an interview. “Everybody else is out.”
The string of guilty pleas over the last few weeks, and the decision by at least one of the men, Jose Castillo-Medina, to testify against his alleged partner in crime stacks the deck against a man who once lived the high life with a Brazilian model girlfriend, a $2-million sports car and celebrity friends in his Rolodex.
“It’s going to come down to a bunch of people saying Jimmy was the big guy, but they have a huge, huge, huge motive and incentive to lie. Jimmy is the primary target. Jimmy’s a big name, a big shot . . . and so when you’re a big target you got people coming after you,” McMahon said.
“The government would certainly like to get a big notch on their belt and that notch would be Mr. Jimmy Cournoyer. It’s my job to see that that doesn’t happen.”
The allegations against the 33-year-old Cournoyer are devastating. He is charged with running the trafficking operation between January 2002 and February 2012 that smuggled thousands of kilograms of pot into the U.S. through the Akwesasne native reserve near Cornwall, Ont. It was then transported to New York City and distributed to street dealers under the watchful eye of the city’s infamous Bonanno crime family.
He is also charged with importing cocaine purchased from Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel into the United States for distribution and for smuggling it back into Canada.
McMahon said federal prosecutors are working around the clock on the case, filing last-minute court documents at all hours of the day and night.
“I would say this. I have my work cut out for me,” he said.
One of the most recent documents, which was filed by prosecutors arguing that the jury should remain anonymous to prevent intimidation or retribution, lays out Cournoyer’s long history in the drug world both in Quebec and Ontario.
He was first arrested in 1998 at the age of 19 for growing marijuana out of the Laval apartment he shared with his brother. During the investigation, he boasted to an undercover agent that he was starting up a second, larger growing operation at a chalet in the Laurentians. He pled guilty to production and trafficking charges, but paid a fine and stayed out of jail.
Two years later, in December 2000, Cournoyer was caught by police on the Kanesatake native reserve providing “large quantities of marijuana” to be smuggled into the U.S. He pled guilty four days after the arrest, but showed no signs of slowing down.
Instead, the court documents reveal, a Peel Regional Police probe, found Cournoyer had expanded into the production and distribution of ecstasy. When police moved in to make an arrest after purchasing 10,000 ecstasy pills from one of Cournoyer’s co-conspirators on Dec. 2, 2001, Cournoyer tried to get away by pulling a gun from his waistband that was later revealed to contain “armour-piercing bullets capable of punching through the typical bullet-proof vests worn by most law enforcement officers.”
Cournoyer was jailed again in 2005 for ecstasy trafficking and gun charges in Peel Region and, while in prison, found guilty of vehicular manslaughter for the death of a passenger in his car in 2004. He was released in February 2007 and set about rebuilding a drug network that was “in tatters” because of mismanagement and theft.
That task was further complicated by the terms of his release, which had him in a halfway house for six months and forced to keep a legitimate job. But the prosecutors say he was able to get an encrypted Blackberry device into his tightly-controlled residence and to hold drug meetings while riding the Montreal subway system to the legitimate job he was required to maintain while on probation.
Later, he set up a “cover” job that let him focus on the drug operations full time while staying at the halfway house.
“It was during these day-long sojourns that Cournoyer began meeting with his powerful criminal associates in the Montreal underworld in order to obtain financing for new drug ventures and put his criminal affairs in order,” the court documents state.
That included paying off a substantial debt to the Hells Angels and meeting with “high-level members of the Rizzuto crime family” find a willing partner as he smuggled cocaine into Canada. He also allegedly provided weapons to both the bikers and the mafia in Montreal.
