Judge rules cop guilty of 11 charges
York officer acquitted of attempted robbery because heist wasn’t fully planned
A veteran York Regional Police officer has been convicted of several corruption charges Wednesday, but acquitted of attempting to rob a storage facility that he was tricked into believing contained illicit drugs and cash.
Superior Court Justice Vanessa Christie’s decision convicting Richard Senior of 11 offences, including theft, uttering a forged document, drug trafficking, unauthorized use of computers, breach of trust and possessing a firearm obtained by crime, is only the first part of the process.
Defence lawyers John Struthers and Ashli Pinnock intend to argue Senior was entrapped to commit the offences in an elaborate sting involving undercover agents and wiretaps.
Christie did not read her massive, 188-page ruling during a Zoom hearing Wednesday morning and instead cited only the bottom line. Senior, who had been a police officer for about 15 years during the 2018 undercover operation, showed no emotion as he watched via video conference. The ruling was emailed to counsel during a short recess.
Senior was arrested on Oct. 9, 2018, as part of Project Tadeau involving two undercover officers, one of them deployed to work as his partner. Called UC1, the undercover officer testified the operation was started to investigate if Senior was checking licence plates he had no valid reason to search. More “objectives” were added as the investigation continued, he told court.
During the judge-alone trial in January, court heard hours of wiretaps relating to seven different events.
Christie convicted Senior of stealing $300 that should have been paid to a confidential source, uttering a forged document by submitting a false intelligence report about his exintimate partner, along with unauthorized use of a computer and breach of trust in relation to improper licence plate and criminal record check queries.
He was also found guilty of offering to traffic cocaine he expected to find in a warehouse that didn’t exist, and breach of trust for advising a man he was under police investigation using information he obtained from a fake intelligence report.
The Newmarket judge acquitted Senior of four offences, including attempted robbery, despite accepting the position of prosecutors Peter Scrutton and Mable Lai Senior that Senior intended to rob a warehouse he’d been duped into believing was real.
“Cst. Senior’s detail-oriented efforts and utterances demonstrate his intention to carry out the robbery, and he took numerous steps in preparation toward that goal,” she wrote.
Some of the wiretaps played in court captured Senior and UC1 plotting the warehouse plan, discussing their need to be armed and to get duct tape and zip ties to use on the occupants who might be found there. The evidence included video surveillance of Senior at Home Depot and receipts for two rolls of 3M black duct tape and two packages of zip ties.
Some of their secretly recorded banter was comical, with the pair jokingly referring to themselves as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Cagney and Lacey, SpongeBob SquarePants, among other names. “They then discussed the fact that they may seriously need code names, at which point they came up with Ren and Stimpy,” Christie wrote.
While the evidence clearly established Senior believed there would be cash and cocaine at the facility, and that he would potentially profit greatly, “it is the view of this court that the preparation was not complete.”
“While the preparation was detailed, there were still significant aspects of the ‘operational plan’ that had yet to be determined,” Christie wrote. On Oct. 9, the day of his arrest, “there were still too many unknowns for Cst. Senior’s actions to amount to an attempt.”
However, she convicted him of stealing a loaded York police shotgun to commit the robbery at the suggestion of an undercover agent who first raised the idea of busting into the storage facility.
A week in June has been set aside for entrapment arguments.