Woman who acted as ‘secretary’ for drug dealers tells court she’s learned her lesson

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A woman who collected cash for drug dealers while they moved nearly 900 kilograms of cocaine between Toronto and Montreal over the course of a year told a judge she has learned her lesson while sentencing arguments were made in her case on Friday.

“I didn’t make good choices. I didn’t ask good questions,” Marie-Pier Archambault, 33, told Quebec Court Judge Pierre Dupras while explaining how she was recruited into the group of drug dealers investigated by the Montreal police during 2021 and 2022.

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Archambault said the invitation was put to her while she was at a baby shower held for a friend she attended high school with.

She said she jumped at the chance to act as a driver. The invitation came from a man who was also later arrested, along with several other people, in 2022 in Project Auxo. The man’s trial is scheduled to begin in October.

“I was told they were looking for a chauffeur,” Archambault said. “Did I seek out to know what was involved? No. I regret that now. I was told it was to pick up money.”

She also said it took two weeks before she realized the large amounts of cash she was picking up and delivering to a longtime friend, who is now her boyfriend, were the proceeds from drug trafficking.

On Dec. 15, Archambault pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge as well as three counts related to drug trafficking.

“Every time I woke up, every time I looked at my parents’ faces, I asked myself questions because I never thought I would end up in prison,” she said, adding she was paid $500 for every day she worked for the organization and that she never asked for a percentage of the money she was transporting.

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“I never thought I was going to get rich. I see it now. I woke up. I said ‘this isn’t for me.’ I never put coke up my nose.”

Archambault broke down and sobbed several times while she answered questions from her defence lawyer, Ludovic Dufour.

She became very emotional while she recalled how her brother overdosed and died before she was arrested during November 2022. She was detained at the Leclerc detention centre when she learned her sibling overdosed on crack cocaine.

“I felt like shit,” she said.

On some of the days she worked, she was making up to four deliveries for the group. Archambault said she was eventually asked to also count the money she delivered and provided an accounting of it through encrypted messages sent to other people involved in the network. She described her role as that of “a secretary” and said she never made decisions for the group.

She delivered the money to an address on Pothier St. in Montreal where the man who is now her boyfriend, Kepler Philogene, resided while the network was under investigation. Philogene, 41, is currently awaiting his sentence in the same case.

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According to a joint statement of facts presented to Dupras on Friday: “The investigation showed there were 28 shipments of cocaine, and one involved a firearm, from Toronto during the period of the investigation. Investigators estimate 870 kilograms of cocaine were sent to Quebec among the shipments.”

The Montreal police had a hidden microphone installed at the home on Pothier St. and through it investigators learned that more than $600,000 was there on May 16, 2022 and $460,00 was there on May 23, 2022.

On May 26, 2022, police arrested two people tied to the network and seized more than $750,000, 32 kilos of cocaine and an AR15 assault rifle.

Prosecutor Laurence Lavoie pointed out to the judge that one of the other people convicted in the same case recently received a seven-year sentence for acting as a drug courier for the network.

“She was more important than a courier,” Lavoie said while asking that Archambault receive an eight-year sentence.

The prosecutor said investigators estimate the network made a profit of $1.3 million.

Archambault’s defence lawyer will make his arguments on the sentence at a later date.

pcherry@postmedia.com

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