Accused says he posed as cocaine trafficker in bid to scam $80,000

Restaurant manager calls plot involvement ‘worst nightmare of my life’

Toronto restaurant manager Cosmin (Chris) Dracea tried to scam a seasoned scam artist and got badly burned himself, an organized crime trial heard Thursday.

“It was the worst nightmare of my life,” Dracea told the University Ave. courthouse.

Dracea, 41, and Giuseppe (Pino) Ursino, 65, of Bradford, Ont., each face two counts of cocaine trafficking for the benefit of a criminal organization and one charge of conspiracy to commit an indictable offence.

The prosecution’s star witness, Carmine Guido — a selfdescribed wise guy and ‘Ndrangheta associate, who worked with the RCMP as a paid police agent — described Ursino as a boss in the GTA ‘Ndrangheta organized crime network.

Dracea, a Romanian-born father of two whose wife attends the case daily, told the court Thursday he tried to scam Guido out of $80,000 in a bogus cocaine trafficking scheme.

Guido earlier told the court that he was heavily involved in fraud, drug trafficking, debt collection and enforcement before agreeing to work for police.

“Are you a member of organized crime?” Dracea’s lawyer Kathryn Wells asked him. “No,” he replied. Dracea, who’s also represented by Anthony Doran, said he was only posing as a cocaine trafficker. He said he was recruited by a man named Gianfranco Caputo to scam Guido out of $80,000 in the bogus drug importation scheme.

“I’m not in the drug business,” Dracea testified. He said he had no idea that Guido was a police agent at the time.

Dracea said Caputo introduced him to Ursino.

Guido earlier testified that Ursino was his boss in the local ‘Ndrangheta.

“Did Mr. Ursino know about this scam?” Wells asked.

“No, he didn’t know,” Dracea said.

“Were you taking direction from anyone?” Wells asked.

“From Gianfranco Caputo,” Dracea replied. Caputo has not been charged. Dracea said part of the scam involved providing Guido with a kilo of cocaine, which Wells called “a huge mistake.” Guido pled guilty to trafficking that cocaine at the outset of the trial.

As the scheme to scam Guido became increasingly dangerous, Dracea tried to end things by proposing what Wells called “more and more ridiculous methods of importation in the hopes that Carmine Guido would walk away.”

Court heard earlier that proposed schemes included bringing cocaine into the country in jerk chicken sauce from Jamaica, bellies of fish from Peru and cocaine-saturated cardboard from Costa Rica. Dracea worked at the attempted scam between October 2014 and May 2015, court heard.

Wells told the jury that Dracea couldn’t get Guido to walk away from the schemes because Guido “was making $15,000 a month, and his letter of agreement (with RCMP) stipulated that his award would be performance-based — meaning the more people taken down as part of the project, the more money he was likely to get.”

Court heard Guido eventually agreed to a $2.4-million payment for his services to police.

The trial continues.