Mob-tied drug trafficker Vincenzo Armeni qualified for a statutory release

A convicted cocaine trafficker with close ties to members of the Montreal Mafia will be released from a penitentiary soon even though the Parole Board of Canada was advised he is likely still a high risk of reoffending.

Vincenzo Armeni, 63, has made the parole board look bad before. In 2006, he was out on full parole when he was arrested following a Sûreté du Québec investigation that uncovered a conspiracy to sell 750 kilograms of cocaine that had been stored in a home in Blainville. When the SQ moved in and made arrests, only 250 kilos of the cocaine was left in the house.

At the time of his arrest, Armeni was still serving a 10-year sentence he received in 1998 for having smuggled more than 160 kilograms of cocaine into Canada. The fact that he was on parole was one of the reasons why then-Quebec Superior Court Justice Richard Wagner (now the Chief Justice of Canada) delivered what was considered to be an exemplary sentence in Armeni’s case on Oct. 19, 2007. Wagner ruled that Armeni would have to wait until his previous sentence expired, in 2008, before he could start serving a 19-year sentence. Wagner also decided Armeni should not be credited any of the time he had spent behind bars following his arrest in 2006 against the 19-year sentence.

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