Man who mugged seniors for crack gets 8-year term
A man who mugged three people in the West Island last year, including a 92-year-old woman while he was out on bail, was sentenced on Thursday to an eight-year prison term.
Marino Conti, 63, was living in Pointe-Claire when he robbed three people in an attempt to feed his addiction to crack cocaine. His victims included the 92-year-old woman, who had to be taken to a hospital to be treated for high blood pressure, and another elderly woman who used a cane to get around when she was robbed on Feb. 22, 2017.
“If you tell anyone, I will kill you,” Conti told one of his victims after he snatched her purse. He used a fake revolver to scare his victims.
Conti, a heavy-set man, registered little reaction as Quebec Court Judge Linda Despots summarized the evidence in his case before delivering the sentence. Between November and March, he pleaded guilty to five counts of robbery and two counts of theft as well as a series of related charges.
As part of the sentencing process, Conti said he suffered from anxiety most of his life and fell into a depression after his marriage ended in divorce in 2007. He began using crack cocaine and abused the drug to a point where he lost his job as a trucker. In 2014, after having lost everything he had that was of any value, he carried out a series of robberies.
He was arrested by the Montreal police that same summer and was released.
While the 2014 case was still pending, he decided to undergo drug addiction therapy and succeeded, Despots said while reading from her decision. His personal life changed significantly again after a relative he had been residing with decided to move out. Conti blamed the change for his return to using crack cocaine again in 2017.
He admitted he was high when he mugged the women and that his motive for the robberies was to get money to buy more crack.
Prosecutor Sylvie Dulude had requested that Conti be sentenced to a prison term of up to 12 years. But Despots noted that Conti had no previous criminal record and that he had made efforts to address what contributed most to his crimes — his addiction to drugs.
“But the Court cannot set aside the number of events and the number of (victims) involved,” the judge said before sentencing Conti to a series of prison terms he will have to serve consecutively. The time Conti has already served behind bars while awaiting the outcome of his case was calculated to be 27 months, which means he has 69 months left to serve.
His lawyer, Alan Guttman, said he found the sentence to be high. He noted that Paul Thomas Bryntwick, 67, one of Canada’s more notorious bank robbers, received the same overall sentence on Wednesday, at the same courthouse, for his role in a carefully planned robbery where two armoured car guards were threatened at gunpoint and tied up before Bryntwick and an accomplice made off with $170,000.