Drug smuggler waits to learn his fate
Crown asks for 12 years as judge postpones sentencing until June
More than four years after coming from B.C. to Saskatchewan to move cocaine across the international border, Ronald Charles Learning will wait even longer to find out his fate.
After hearing sentencing submissions Friday, Regina provincial court Judge Marylynne Beaton reserved her decision until June. Earlier this month, Beaton found the 33-year-old man guilty of possession of cocaine for the purpose of trafficking.
Learning was arrested in October 2011 by members of the Regina Integrated Drug Unit for his small role in Saskatchewan’s biggest cocaine smuggling network. From the Vernon, B.C., area, Learning was a one-time courier hired to pick up 30 kilograms of cocaine near the remote SaskatchewanMontana border and haul it the West Coast. He was caught as part of an international undercover sting, dubbed Project Faril by the RCMP.
Between late 2009 and the fall of 2011, the smuggling network, headed by Brock Ernest Palfrey of B.C., moved 1.3 tonnes of cocaine from California to the Saskatchewan border, where it was picked up and hauled to B.C., often in hidden vehicle compartments. When caught, Learning was driving a Ford Windstar that had been outfitted with hidden compartments in the floor of the vehicle.
Crown prosecutor Doug Curliss asked for a sentence of 12 years, based on case law, the amount of cocaine (worth a street value of about $2.4 million) and the belief that Learning was not just a onetime courier.
“You don’t simply get connected up with a criminal organization and be given kilos of cocaine without building up a certain level of trust,” Curliss told the court.
Curliss’s assertion that Learning had previously acted as courier also hinges on a recorded comment to a police agent about needing a bigger hidden compartment in the vehicle for future trips.
But defence lawyer Glenn Verdurman, who suggested Learning should receive a sentence of between five and seven years, called his client a “substitute driver” whose “amateurish” execution of meeting up to acquire the cocaine shows that he was not a regular courier.
“That is a leap I don’t think this court should be prepared to take,” Verdurman said of the Crown’s submission that Learning took multiple trips.
“It was nothing short of buffoonery in terms of these people trying to find each other at the border. It’s obvious that Mr. Learning was not a professional that had done this before.”
Court heard how Learning, who’d only been given a scrap of a map, initially got lost and almost ran out of gas while looking for an open service station in the middle of the night in rural Saskatchewan. The agent had to go find him, and bring him back to a location for the exchange.
“Making a quarter million a load, and you got a f---n’ map on the back of smoke pack,” the police agent scoffs at one point during the exchange, according to the recording.
A total of six men were caught in Canada and the U.S. and charged for their role in the large-scale smuggling ring. Learning is the last of them to face sentencing.
During his trial last year, court heard from a man, who cannot be named by court order, who was responsible for trucking the drugs to the border from California. After he was caught by U.S. Homeland Security in April 2011, he agreed to become an agent for the police, and made three more “controlled” shipments at the behest of the RCMP. The last one, his 16th, was to Learning, whom he’d never met before.
The exchange in an abandoned farmyard south of Val Marie in the province’s southwest was monitored by hidden police officers and recorded by a listening device.
Officers tailed the van from the border to Salmon Arm, B.C., where Learning was arrested in the driver’s seat. Inside the vehicle, police found several cellphones, high energy drinks and bricks of what Learning believed to be cocaine. An officer testified they couldn’t risk having real drugs hit the street, so substituted them with fake cocaine — but for a small sample — before they hit the border.