Mob-tied drug trafficker to be released on parole
A convicted cocaine trafficker with close ties to members of the Montreal Mafia will be released from a penitentiary soon even though the Parole Board of Canada was advised he is likely still a high risk of reoffending.
Vincenzo Armeni, 63, has made the parole board look bad before. In 2006, he was out on full parole when he was arrested following a Sûreté du Québec investigation that uncovered a conspiracy to sell 750 kilograms of cocaine that had been stored in a home in Blainville. When the SQ moved in and made arrests, only 250 kilos of the cocaine was left in the house.
At the time of his arrest, Armeni was still serving a 10-year sentence he received in 1998 for having smuggled more than 160 kilograms of cocaine into
Canada. The fact that he was on parole was one of the reasons why then- Quebec Superior Court Justice Richard Wagner (now the Chief Justice of Canada) delivered what was considered to be an exemplary sentence in Armeni’s case on Oct. 19, 2007. Wagner ruled that Armeni would have to wait until his previous sentence expired, in 2008, before he could start serving a 19-year sentence. Wagner also decided Armeni should not be credited any of the time he had spent behind bars following his arrest in 2006 against the 19-year sentence.
Armeni appeared to be stunned at the length of his sentence as Wagner read from his decision at the St-jérôme courthouse in 2007. When Armeni was returned to a federal penitentiary, Correctional Service Canada informed him that he was serving a 29-year aggregate sentence that began in 1998.
In November 2016, the Parole Board of Canada turned him down for parole. But this time around the board was left with no choice but to determine if conditions should be imposed on the release. Armeni will reach his statutory release date, the twothirds mark of his sentence, soon. Almost all offenders serving time in federal penitentiaries in Canada automatically qualify for such a release if they haven’t been granted parole previously.
Following a hearing on Wednesday, the board decided to impose five conditions in all, including one that prohibits him from entering “establishments recognized by the police as being associated with organized crime.”
It imposed the conditions after Armeni’s case-management team, the people who prepare an offender for a release, advised the board that it “estimates that you still present a high risk of reoffending.”