ARTICLE - DRUG SMUGGLING TO MONTREAL

MONTREALER SENTENCED TO 7 YEARS FOR SMUGGLING COCAINE FROM HAITI ON AID FLIGHT
(Montreal Gazette) - By Sue Montgomery

Montreal resident Carmélite Massenat took advantage of the confusion and outpouring of goodwill following Haiti's devastating earthquake to smuggle 1.5 kilograms of cocaine into Canada aboard a humanitarian flight.

For her third drug-related conviction, Massenat, 54, was sentenced Monday to seven years in prison.

Once time served - which counts as double - is deducted, she has 35 months remaining in her sentence.

Quebec Court Judge Claude Parent said it was the first time he'd seen someone convicted three times for the same crime and warned Massenat that if she appeared in court again, she would be serving a much longer sentence.

Massenat travelled to the Dominican Republic on Feb., 7, 2010, a month after an earthquake killed about 250,000 people in neighbouring Haiti.

Because she had Canadian citizenship, she qualified for a seat on one of the free flights Ottawa offered to ferry those stranded in the crippled country between Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, and Montreal.

When she arrived at Pierre Elliot Trudeau International Airport in Dorval with a 17-year-old girl, customs officials discovered Massenat had drugs taped to her lower back.

She said she had been paid $5,000 to bring the cocaine to Canada.

Massenat's lawyer, Annie Laflamme, said her client has six children of her own, plus had sponsored her husband and his five children to come to Canada. They all lived in one apartment on welfare.

Massenat was driven to smuggle the cocaine to try to pay off $75,000 in debt she'd accumulated, Laflamme said.

"Obviously, she didn't choose the best way to do that," she said, as her client sat silently in the prisoner's box.

In 2001, Massenat was sentenced in Montreal to three years in prison for smuggling 1.5 kilograms of cocaine into Canada. In 2006, she received a two-year sentence in France for smuggling about 10 kilos of cocaine into that country.

In 1998, she received two years probation in Montreal for providing false information for a passport. The seven-year sentence handed down Monday was suggested by the Crown and defence, but Parent said it was at the lower limit of what was reasonable.

"It could be 10 years," he noted.