Drug smuggling trial stars Hollywood stuntman
The long-awaited trial of four men — including a West Island resident and an Ontario stuntman who has worked on several Hollywood movies — began at the Montreal courthouse Tuesday.
The four are charged with conspiring for more than a year — January 2011 to June 2012 — to smuggle cocaine and hashish into Canada.
Prosecutor Carly Norris did not mention the amount of drugs the men are alleged to have conspired to bring in while they were investigated by the RCMP in a probe dubbed Project Célibataire.
“This is a conspiracy case,” Norris told the jury of six men and six women, noting that no drugs actually entered Canada while the men were being investigated. She informed the jury they will be presented with circumstantial evidence only — not direct evidence.
The accused are Louis Nagy, 59, of Beaconsfield; and Dean Copkov, 52; Marco Milan, 53; and Robert Bryant, 69, of Ontario. Each faces one count of conspiring to possess narcotics with intention to traffic.
Copkov is a stuntman who has credits on big-budget movies like The Incredible Hulk, Pacific Rim and the 2014 remake of RoboCop, according to the Internet Movie Database. One of the first documents shown to the jury was Copkov’s CV listing the films he has worked on and a credit-card statement for a company called Stunts for Hire, based at Copkov’s home address in Wasaga Beach, Ont. Both documents were seized from Copkov’s home.
Rob Flewelling, an RCMP officer who works for a surveillance team based in Toronto, testified about videos he secretly recorded, while seated in a parked vehicle on Feb. 10, 2012, as the three men from Ontario met at different locations that day. Among the videos shown was one of Copkov and Bryant meeting outdoors near the intersection of Queen St. and Coxwell Ave. for about seven minutes that afternoon.
Earlier that same day, Flewelling was able to record Bryant as he met with Milan outside a winery on Steeles Ave., also in Toronto.
Flewelling said he conducted the surveillance and recorded the video on a request from an RCMP detachment in St-Jérôme.
Another witness from the RCMP, computer expert Corporal Christian Theoret, testified about how he was asked to analyze computers in the lobby of a Marriott Hotel in Kingston, Ont. Theoret said two people who were subjects of the Project Célibataire investigation were under surveillance when they used the computers, which were available to guests staying at the hotel. He said the two people appeared to have driven from Montreal to Kingston, in a snowstorm on Jan. 13, 2011, for the sole purpose of using the computers for a matter of minutes. When the two people were done they immediately returned to Montreal.
“I (was assigned to) figure out why someone would drive in a snowstorm to use a computer in the lobby of a hotel that was twoand-a-half hours away,” Theoret said.
He said he was able to recover a list of the websites the two people visited that day. But the court day ended before he was able to testify about which sites were visited.
Norris told the jury that other evidence to be presented will include more than 1,000 conversations intercepted during the investigation, including emails and text messages.