by Paul Cherry, Montreal Gazette
Influential organized crime figure Raynald Desjardins has been sentenced to a 14-year prison term for his role in the conspiracy to murder Mafioso Salvatore Montagna.
During a hearing at the Gouin courthouse on Monday, Superior Court Justice Andre Vincent approved a joint recommendation made by the prosecution and the 63-year-old criminal’s defence lawyer Marc Labelle.
With time served factored into the sentence, Desjardins is left with six-and-a-half years left to serve. He spent almost exactly five years detained while awaiting for his case to finish. Each day that he served behind bars counted as a day-and-a-half against his overall sentence.
Montagna was murdered in November 2011 and Desjardins and a group of men who were in on the plot to kill him were arrested on Dec. 20, 2011.
As part of a series of facts both sides in the case agreed could be entered into the court record, Desjardins admitted that there was an agreement to kill Montagna and that he and the other co-conspirators used BlackBerry pin-to-pin messages during the plot. They believed the messages made under BlackBerry’s messaging system were encrypted, but the RCMP were able to read the messages through access to BlackBerry’s global decryption key.
The messages were intercepted during an ongoing investigation into drug trafficking. But it became clear Desjardins and the others focused on plans to kill Montagna after someone tried to kill Desjardins in Laval on Sept. 16, 2011.
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In another part of the admissions, Desjardins admitted it was he who set up the meeting, on Nov. 24, 2011, that Montagna was lured to before he was killed.
Montagna was shot inside the home of Jack Simpson, one of the co-conspirators, on Île-Vaudry St. in Charlemagne, a municipality east of Montreal.
Simpson and five other men pleaded guilty to playing a role in the conspiracy earlier this year. They have a sentence hearing scheduled at the Laval courthouse for Tuesday. But a lawyer for the prosecution informed Vincent on Monday that it was unclear whether both sides will be ready to proceed.
Source montrealgazette
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