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The 'King' sent to U.S. prison for 20 years for running cocaine and meth smuggling into Canada
For years an Ontario man was called “King” while orchestrating truckloads of cocaine and meth worth tens of millions of dollars to be smuggled from the United States into Canada, but at his sentencing in Los Angeles, Thursday, court heard of his struggles as an immigrant and of his “working-class life in Canada.”
Guramrit Sidhu, 63, of Brampton, Ont., who led a vast cross-border drug smuggling network of long-haul commercial truckers was given the minimum allowable sentence of 20 years in prison.
Sidhu was arrested in Canada in 2024 as the lead defendant in a sprawling international investigation.
He signed a plea agreement with the U.S. government in February, pleading guilty to one count of engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, admitting his management-level involvement in the network that smuggled large loads of meth and cocaine for distribution in Canada between 2020 and 2023.
Prosecutors told U.S. District Judge John Kronstadt that Sidhu’s operation was energetic and active — in just a one-month period in 2022, he arranged eight drug loads, totalling about 523 kilograms of meth and 347 kilograms of cocaine, which were seized by law enforcement. Prosecutors estimated the wholesale value of just that month’s tally was about US$16 million.
He could have faced a life sentence as a maximum penalty, but his sentence was lower for pleading guilty rather than fighting the charges at a trial.
Sidhu’s lawyer, Vitaly Sigal, argued Sidhu’s age and life struggles should merit a lower sentence.
“He will, in other words, grow old and increasingly infirm in federal custody,” Sigal told court.
“Sidhu acknowledges that his participation in a drug-trafficking enterprise was a serious offense, and he accepts full responsibility for his conduct. He does not seek to minimize, excuse, or justify what he did,” Sigal told the judge. “At the same time, the offense was non-violent. It involved no weapons, no force or threats of force, and no identifiable victim.”
Court heard that Sidhu was born in India and immigrated to Canada with his parents and siblings in 1974 when he was 11.
Sidhu’s childhood was marred by his father’s alcoholism and violence. His father was “nice when he did not drink,” but usually drank a forty-ounce bottle of liquor nightly, “making kind moments rare.”
Sidhu said he had a rough transition to life in Canada as the only Sikh family in his Ontario neighbourhood and his inability to speak English. He said he was picked on at school, got into fights nearly every day and left school early to work.
In 1986, he met his future wife. She was in an arranged marriage at the time but filed for divorce. After her divorce she and Sidhu married in a union that created rifts within the families. They moved to a home in Brampton, Ont., where they raised two children while he worked as a commercial truck driver and at a foundry, maintaining “a working-class life in Canada,” Sigal told court.
Sidhu said he slid into criminality through his own substance abuse, including heavy drinking since he was a teenager, daily heroin use from 2004 until 2011, and using fentanyl each day from 2016 to 2019, court heard. He said his family helped him quit.
Court heard Sidhu has health problems and takes medication for diabetes and high cholesterol and for opiate withdrawal.
Seven of Sidhu’s family members wrote to the judge saying they maintain their support for him despite his mistakes and urged the judge to consider Sidhu’s contributions as a good family man.
“It’s important to me that he knows he has a positive environment to return home to and the entire family is committed to doing whatever we can to help rehabilitate him and help him assimilate back into life,” his daughter wrote in a letter to the judge.
In return for Sidhu’s guilty plea, U.S. prosecutors agreed to not seek a sentence longer than 20 years and not to oppose a prisoner transfer request for Sidhu to serve the last half of his sentence in Canada.
Sidhu caught a break by being considered to have no criminal history by the U.S. court despite him having a previous conviction in Canada. In 2011, he was convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to more than nine years’ imprisonment, but U.S. sentencing guidelines do not consider foreign convictions.
Prosecutors agreed a 20-year sentence was sufficient.
“This sentence reflects the serious nature and circumstances of the offense, the history and characteristics of the defendant, and the need to protect the public from further crimes of defendant,” Assistant United States Attorney Kelly Larocque told court.
Sidhu was given credit for his nine months in custody in Canada in 2024 while he faced extradition to California for trial. Sigal entered as an exhibit a certificate from the Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General confirming Sidhu’s time in the Maplehurst Correctional Complex, a maximum-security jail in Milton, Ont., sarcastically called the “Milton Hilton,” by inmates.
Prosecutors said that after buying bulk quantities of cocaine and meth in the Los Angeles area, that originally came from Mexico, Sidhu arranged for the drugs to be hauled into Canada hidden aboard commercial tractor-trailers for further distribution.
In text messages, “water” was code for meth and “girls” for cocaine; “Lisa” meant Los Angeles. They used the unique serial number on bank notes to confirm identities of those exchanging the drugs as an underworld form of two-factor authentication.
The trucks shuttled drugs across the border, using the Detroit-Windsor tunnel, the Peace Bridge in Niagara, and the Blue Water Bridge connecting Michigan to Sarnia.
Sidhu did not know that one of the men he was working with had become an informant for the FBI. He trusted the snitch because he had worked with Sidhu before he became a cooperating witness.
The informant was the key to a sweeping joint investigation, led by the FBI, against several cross-border smuggling networks that was called Operation Dead Hand.
Sidhu was named as one of the top-level targets when two lengthy indictments were unsealed in Los Angeles. Among the other Canadians named in the indictments is a man with a notorious last name: Roberto Scoppa, brother of two leaders in a faction of the Montreal Mafia who were killed in 2019 during a mob war. Scoppa is still fighting extradition to the United States.
Sidhu is the eighth person arrested in the operation to plead guilty.
• Email: ahumphreys@postmedia.com | X: AD_Humphreys
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