SAY GOODBYE TO MY LITTLE FRIEND
Judge tosses case against heroin dealer after concluding police officers stole his statue of legendary Scarface character Tony Montana
A Superior Court judge has stayed charges against a heroin dealer after finding a Peel police officer stole a statue of Scar
face character Tony Montana from the man’s storage unit and then, along with three other officers, lied about it in court.
In a scathing 46-page judgment delivered Wednesday in Brampton, Justice Jennifer Woollcombe described the conduct of Major Drugs and Vice Unit constables Richard Rerrie, Mihai Muresan, Emanuel Panheiro and Damian Savino as “profoundly and demonstrably inconsistent with what a fair justice system requires.”
Peel police Chief Jennifer Evans ordered an internal investigation after learning about the ruling.
“I am committed to accountability to maintain the trust that we have worked so hard to build with our community,” Evans said in a news release.
The ruling stems from a 2014 Peel police investigation that resulted in five drug trafficking and possession charges against Lowell Somerville of Brampton, now 35. “The officers all lied with the intention of deceiving the court about what they’d done.” JUSTICE JENNIFER WOOLLCOMBE
According to a summary of evidence in Woollcombe’s judgment, Peel police witnessed a drug deal involving Somerville on June 23, 2014 while he was under surveillance. Police arrested Somerville for trafficking, and while searching his car, found a gram each of heroin and methamphetamine.
They obtained a search warrant for his basement apartment in Brampton, where they found more drugs including 24.2 grams of heroin. Police also discovered Somerville was leasing a storage locker in downtown Toronto and obtained a search warrant for the unit.
In their initial testimonies, all four officers said nothing had been taken from the storage unit.
But Somerville testified that after being released from custody, he went to the unit and noticed some of his possessions were missing — among them, a metre-tall, “one-of-a-kind” hand-painted wood statue of infamous fictional drug dealer Tony Montana that he kept covered with beige cloths.
“The statue is modelled on Montana’s character, at the end of the movie Scarface, at the point at which he utters the phrase, ‘say hello to my little friend,’ in reference to the gun that he is carrying,” Woollcombe wrote in her ruling.
Believing his unit had been broken into, Somerville contacted his lawyer, Kim Schofield, who requested security footage from the storage facility.
The footage, which Schofield submitted as evidence during Somerville’s trial, shows Rerrie, Muresan, Panheiro and Savino entering the facility the morning of June 24, 2014, apparently empty-handed.
In footage of the officers leaving the facility, Rerrie can clearly be seen with a large object, covered in a beige cloth, under his right arm.
Under cross-examination, and again after viewing the video, Rerrie said he’d taken a “stand-up heater” from a hallway in the facility that he said was in a green or black garbage bag and had a sign taped to it saying it was free. Rerrie testified he threw the heater out a few days later as it didn’t work properly.
In her judgment, Woollcombe noted “the shape of the object that was carried out of the facility by Officer Rerrie appears very similar to the shape of the statue of Tony Montana,” and that a heater “was really not a necessity” as it was June.
After Rerrie’s cross-examination, the other three officers were recalled to court, where they all repeated that nothing had been taken from the storage unit and, when asked by Schofield, denied having seen the Tony Montana statue in it. After shown the security footage, they all acknowledged that it showed Rerrie carrying a large object under his arm, but could not recall what Rerrie was carrying nor where the object came from.
“First, while Mr. Somerville has a criminal record and apparently makes a living selling illegal narcotics and gambling, I accept his evidence that he owned a valuable Tony Montana statue . . . I accept that the statue was stored in his storage unit, under two beige cloth coverings,” Woollcombe wrote.
“I do not accept Officer Rerrie’s evidence that he took a free heater from the hall of the facility after the execution of the search warrant . . . I have found that Officer Rerrie stole Mr. Somerville’s Tony Montana statue from his storage unit.”
While acknowledging she doesn’t know exactly what happened in the storage unit nor the motivation for taking the statue, Woollcombe wrote that “it seemed most likely that one of them found the statue and that a number of them recognized the statue as Tony Montana, a renowned drug dealer in a movie that they were familiar with . . . The irony of finding a statue of a drug dealer in a storage unit of a person they had just arrested for drug dealing is obvious.”
“Each officer knew that this was something that they had no right to take,” Woollcombe wrote.
“Perhaps because they never suspected a drug dealer would complain, or would be believed if he did, they committed what they knew was a theft of property.
“The officers all lied with the intention of deceiving the court about what they’d done.”
Somerville also said he was missing several pieces of valuable jewelry and large amounts of cash, but Woollcombe could not “conclude, on a balance of probabilities, that the officers stole these items.”
The charges against Somerville “are very serious,” Woollcombe wrote, but “the court must distance itself from this kind of egregious police conduct.”
“This was theft of valuable property during the execution of a search warrant . . . By itself, the police miscon- duct at the storage facility is completely unjustifiable and intolerable. But for me, what is worse, is that four officers attempted in their testimony, to deliberately mislead the court.
“It is only by permanently stopping these proceedings through a stay that the court can effectively distance the justice system from this gross and continuing misconduct . . . Going forward with a trial in light of the police conduct would, in my view, be offensive.”
Following the ruling, Schofield said outside court she was happy the charges against her client were stayed, but that the judge’s findings that the officers lied in court raises concerns about other cases they may have been involved with.
“The question becomes, you have perjured evidence from an elite squad — how does this affect dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of other cases in the region of Peel?” Schofield asked, saying the case presents a “challenge” to Peel police’s Professional Standards Unit.
“They must investigate and if there’s ground, lay the charges and prosecute them effectively, and let’s get to the bottom of this,” she said.
The statue of Tony Montana is still missing.