U.S. court sentences Vancouver longshoreman to seven years in jail
Alvin Randhawa followed his elder brother Alexie onto the Vancouver waterfront, where both siblings worked for years as longshoremen.
Now Alvin is following Alexie into a U.S. prison after the younger man was sentenced on Wednesday in Buffalo, N.Y., to just over seven years in jail.
Alvin Randhawa pleaded guilty last August to conspiracy to export cocaine from the U.S. into Canada. Other charges against him were dropped. His plea agreement at the time said he faced a minimum U.S. jail term of 10 years. But U.S. District Court Judge William M. Skretny agreed Wednesday to an 87-month sentence, followed by another three years of supervised release.
Skretny sealed several documents related to the sentencing hearing.
The seven-year term is two years longer than the 60-month sentence handed to Alexie in 2008 after he was caught in California with 107 kilograms of cocaine linked to another cross-border smuggling operation. Alexie served four years before returning to Canada and his job as a Vancouver dockworker.
Alvin, now 36, admitted last year that from July 2010 until May 2011, he conspired with others to possess and distribute five kilograms or more of cocaine in the United States.
A large shipment of cocaine was seized from his Canadian group on Sept. 8, 2010, his plea agreement documents said, after which he and two others “began planning future smuggling runs from the United States to Canada.”
“These plans, which included retrofitting a false compartment into a tractor-trailer for the purpose of smuggling cocaine, resulted in a smuggling run in May 2011,” said the documents.
“Randhawa recruited an individual from Vancouver, British Columbia, to complete the false compartment.”
The person who made the compartment is not named in the court documents and has since died.
U.S. authorities later intercepted the tractor-trailer with 26 kg of cocaine hidden inside to be distributed to “customers” of Alvin Randhawa and his associates.
Investigators believe the organization used several bridges, including ones in the Buffalo-Niagara area, to smuggle about 2,000 kg of cocaine. One conspirator had a California warehouse where the cocaine was placed in the madein-Vancouver compartment.
The Randhawa brothers have a third sibling, Arun, also a longshoreman. He lost a Federal Court battle in June over a government decision to deny him security clearance on the docks because of his siblings’ crimes. Arun Randhawa can continue to work on the docks, but will not be able to access restricted areas or perform certain tasks without security clearance.