LONDON Sean Sutherland said all the easy money he made illegally dealing in cocaine, guns and grenades kept him in the criminal business.
“I was greedy, your honour,” the 33-year-old Ancaster man told Justice Kelly Gorman in Superior Court in London. “I was very greedy and it felt good, at first, bringing in all that money.”
And the money was exceptional. During the year that an OPP undercover operation was doing business with Sutherland, Sutherland sold them drugs, plus 81 grenades, a grenade launcher, 26 firearms and three grenade projectiles, all while under a court-ordered 10-year weapons prohibition and mostly in a parking lot outside a Brantford retail business.
“At the end, though, I was glad I was caught and stopped,” Sutherland said. “By that point, I couldn’t even sleep at night when I thought I had become counted upon for what I was bringing in.”
Sutherland was sentenced to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to eight counts for his part in the operation. With time served factored in, he has 10 years left to serve.
The total sentence was a joint submission from the Crown and the defence, characterized by assistant Crown attorney Meredith Gardiner as “extremely lenient,” given the nature of the offenses.
When Sutherland was arrested in March 2021, police laid a whopping 135 charges against him related to his dealings. Seven other people were arrested in the swoop culminating from two years of undercover work to crack down on illegal drug and gun sales across Southwestern Ontario in what police called Project Weaver.
Five of the eight charged were from London, including Ryan Daigneault, the former president of the London Outlaws motorcycle club. His case is still before the courts.
Also charged with two men from Brantford and a woman from Paris.
Sutherland’s indictment was pared down to eight charges. He pleaded guilty in October, just seven months after he was arrested.
Defense lawyer Reid Rusonik said at the sentencing hearing that his client’s criminal record was limited and included an assault for which he received a weapons prohibition.
Sutherland, he said, worked for a highway paving company and other construction companies. Two years before the pandemic, he opened a liquidation business in Brantford involving re-selling returned Amazon products.
The pandemic flattened the business and “a bad friend had an idea that, unfortunately, Mr. Sutherland was all too quick to act on, and that leads us to where we are today,” Rusonik said.
His first contact with an undercover officer was in November 2020, through text messages to sell drugs. Once they met, he told the officer he could sell him hand grenades.
The first delivery of six grenades was made in a backpack with the weapons wrapped in various pieces of clothing.
In total, there were about eight transactions that included selling more grenades, a grenade launcher, hand guns and rifles for a total of about $280,000. Some of the weapons were prohibited and at least one gun had the serial number obliterated. At one point, Sutherland suggested to the officer he could get a rocket launcher.
In March 2021, Sutherland and another man started to be suspicious their customer was an undercover police officer. Tracking devices were put on the undercover officer’s vehicle and they also were able to track down previous household addresses, where they demanded the current owners to tell them where he lived. One of Sutherland’s guilty pleas was to criminal harassment.
After he was arrested, Sutherland took every course he could at the Elgin-Middlesex Detention Centre, including Bible studies and was the designated “tea server” on his range unit that allowed him to help jail staff by serving meals, cleaning and sorting laundry.
In July 2021, while in custody, seven firearms, six grenades and ammunition were surrendered to the Toronto police firearms enforcement unit at a designated drop site “on behalf of Sean Sutherland.”
In her decision, Gorman said Sutherland’s commitment to giving up all the weapons, even while in jail “speaks volumes to your remorse and to the prospect of rehabilitation.
“This was a good-faith effort to make things right,” she said.
Sutherland was allowed out of custody for a month in December under strict conditions before returning to jail to await sentencing.
“I want my family members to hear me say, one more time, and in front of everyone, that I did do absolutely everything that’s been said I did wrong,” he said.
Sutherland told Gorman he had “embarrassed and humiliated people I love,” particularly his children. And it is “a relief not to be doing what I had been doing anymore,” he said.
“I never thought it would come to what it has and I believed something I knew couldn’t be true when the buyers told me they were just survivalists.”
Gorman said she recognized Sutherland feels “just horrible for what this has done to your family.”
She encouraged him to “keep on track” while serving his prison sentence.
“This can be an example to your children and to your family about how you can come back from this humiliation. It really can,” she said.
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