Drug mastermind ran ‘sophisticated’ operation, six-year sentence urged

The prosecutor wants a Greater Victoria man convicted of drug charges to spend the next six years in prison, arguing he was the mastermind behind the “sophisticated” scheme.

Zachary Scott Matheson, 40, was convicted in December of four counts of possession of cocaine, ecstasy and methamphetamines for the purpose of trafficking.

He and Ali Arash Ziaee were arrested in 2013 after police searched two homes in Langford and one in Saanich. At the time, police said the seized drugs — including cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy, crystal meth and GHB, the date-rape drug — were worth an estimated $542,000.

Ziaee pleaded guilty to three charges of possession for the purpose of trafficking and was sentenced in 2016 to 2 1⁄2 years in jail.

At Matheson’s sentencing hearing in B.C. Supreme Court on Friday, defence lawyer Brad Hickford urged Justice Brian MacKenzie to impose a similar sentence on his client.

But Crown prosecutor Joshua Cramer argued Matheson deserved six years because he was the operating mind behind the drug-trafficking scheme, employing, overseeing and sometimes reprimanding Ziaee.

Only Matheson had the key to the large safe filled with drugs at the stash site, Cramer said. Ziaee served as the courier, transporting drugs to Victoria from Vancouver.

The drug scheme was sophisticated, Cramer said. Matheson used safes, digital scales, money counters and a variety of encrypted telephones. The cocaine was transported in one-kilogram bricks.

Unlike Ziaee, who had no previous criminal record, Matheson has a lengthy record that includes drug and weapon offences, Cramer said.

Hickford said Matheson and Ziaee were involved together and the drug-trafficking was more of a partnership arrangement. The defence lawyer said the scheme was not sophisticated and that Matheson’s criminal record is dated.

“It’s been almost four years since the activities for these convictions,” Hickford said. “He promised his spouse he would part company with his associates.”

Court also heard about Matheson’s troubled past. In 2001, his longtime girlfriend died of a cocaine overdose. Shannon Spruyt’s parents, Bart and Patricia, were in court Friday.

“He witnessed first-hand the toll drugs took on her life,” Cramer said of the 22-year-old’s death.

s“But instead of turning his life around, he ramped up his drug dealing and the sophistication of his enterprise.”

Matheson grew up in a rough Toronto neighbourhood and ran away from home when he was 13. He had a son in the 1990s who died of sudden infant death syndrome, Cramer said.

But he has also been blessed with intelligence and has earned his welding and crane-operator tickets.

Hickford told the court that Matheson has turned his life around completely since his arrest in June 2013. He lives with his partner, who is the mother of his two children, a three-year-old son and a sevenmonth-old daughter. He works as a pipefitter in the oil fields and will be employed there again after he serves his sentence.

Outside court, Patricia Spruyt said she had come to see “that justice is served. I think it will make us heal a little bit better, knowing that that’s happened.”

MacKenzie will deliver his decision on April 3.