Warrant was violation of Parasiris's rights
Jurors never heard police were after drugs: evidence seized from home was thrown out
Paul Cherry, Gazette crime reporter
Published: Tuesday, June 10
LAVAL - As the six women and six men of the jury in the first-degree murder trial of Basil Parasiris enter their second day of deliberations today, one nagging question must be on most of their minds: Why did Laval police Constable Daniel Tessier and eight of his colleagues storm into Parasiris's home in Brossard on March 2, 2007?
Parasiris killed Tessier during a shootout with police because, the defendant says, he believed it was a home invasion.
The jurors have never been told why the police were there.
In a decision rendered before the jury began hearing evidence, Superior Court Judge Guy Cournoyer ruled the warrant that allowed Laval police to smash down the front door of Parasiris's house on Rimouski Cres. and conduct an aggressive predawn drug raid inside his home was a violation of his rights.
That meant any evidence the police seized inside his home that might have linked him to a small drug trafficking ring that operated in Laval was tossed out.
The warrant, authorized by Gaby Dumas, a justice of the peace, gave Laval police the green light to use a dynamic entry - meant to surprise the person being investigated - to carry out their search for evidence.
Such warrants are supposed to be granted only under extraordinary circumstances, when investigators suspect a person is keeping a large quantity of drugs and might flush away evidence if police come calling with a standard "knock and notice" search warrant.
Cournoyer ruled the warrant used to enter Parasiris's home on the South Shore was abusive and violated his Canadian Charter right to "be secure against unreasonable search or seizure."
Laval police never did find a large quantity of cocaine inside Parasiris's home.
What they did find were 13 cellphones, four pagers and eight pages of documents that a Sûreté du Québec investigator described during Parasiris's bail hearing in May 2007 as resembling the accounts of a drug trafficker. During the same bail hearing, the investigator said that while Parasiris was being interrogated he admitted to having been involved in drug trafficking for three years to solve financial problems.
The jury never got to hear about that side of Parasiris, because Laval police clearly made mistakes when applying for their warrant.
Because of Cournoyer's decision, police officers who testified in the murder trial had to be cautioned against using terms like "drug raid" or "dynamic entry," or even identifying themselves as being part of the Laval police morality-drug squad.
Using the warrant, Tessier and eight other officers were allowed to smash in Parasiris's door with a battering ram and storm in with their weapons drawn while shouting, "Police!"
It also meant they could conduct the raid early in the morning instead of during daylight hours, when standard search warrants are supposed to be executed.
The reasons why Laval police wanted to go into Parasiris's home with such force remain unclear.
Near the end of March 2006, François Leblanc, a member of the Laval police morality-drug squad, was assigned to investigate a tip from Montreal police. An informant had told Montreal investigators that three people were selling cocaine and were using Bar Le Skratch in Laval as a meeting point.
The same informant referred to one of the drug dealers as Mani; he turned out to be Laval resident Emmanuel Mavroudis. According to the affidavit Leblanc used to obtain the warrant, the informant also said: "Mani's uncle, an individual residing in Longueuil, is the supplier of these individuals. He is about 45 to 50 years old."
Based on information they gathered later, Laval police came to believe the "uncle" to whom the informant referred was Parasiris, who lived in Brossard, then a borough of Longueuil. Parasiris was 40 at the time.
(According to evidence presented at Parasiris's bail hearing, Mavroudis is his godson.)
The investigation gradually uncovered four other drug traffickers who appeared to be linked through Mavroudis.
A little more than a month after getting the tip, Leblanc gathered enough information to send a plainclothes police officer to buy drugs from the dealers. When the officer called one of the dealers, he arranged to meet her outside Le Skratch, on Curé Labelle Blvd. Hours later, she bought a half-gram of cocaine from a man who turned out to be Mavroudis.
By Oct. 25, 2006, after making several small cocaine purchases from Mavroudis and other dealers he sent to her, the same undercover officer began asking for larger quantities of cocaine. Laval investigators did this with the goal of finding out where the dealers kept their stash of cocaine.
Weeks later, Parasiris's name came up for the first time in the investigation. Nikolaos Xanthis, one of the drug dealers to whom Laval police were paying particular attention, was pulled over in Longueuil for speeding. The car he was driving, a Pontiac Grand Prix, was registered to Parasiris. Leblanc checked to see if Parasiris had a criminal record and found nothing.
One week later, Laval police investigators conducting surveillance on Xanthis followed him to an apartment in a duplex on Broadway St. in Brossard. No one appeared to live at the address. Laval police believed they had finally found the location where the dealers hid their cocaine.
While it was relatively close to Parasiris's home, the Brossard apartment still didn't link him to the drug dealers, who were all Laval residents.
The first link didn't come until Feb. 13, 2007, when investigators were following Xanthis while he was driving around and appeared to be making small drug deals.
While running errands, he stopped at Golf-O-Max, a club in Dorval where patrons practise their swings on golf simulators. It's housed in the same building as a bar, and both businesses were part-owned by Parasiris.
Police watched as Xanthis headed to an office inside Golf-O-Max and then appeared to sell drugs to customers.
After leaving the Dorval club, Xanthis travelled to the apartment on Broadway St. in Brossard. He went inside, came out a minute later, then headed for Parasiris's home on Rimouski Cres., where he stayed for about 30 minutes before returning again to the apartment.
Then, on Feb. 27, 2007, while Laval police morality-drug investigators followed, Xanthis travelled from his home in Laval to the apartment on Broadway St. While he was inside, an individual who appeared to be Basil Parasiris showed up in a car registered to Parasiris's wife, Penny Gounis.
Laval police never clearly established it was Parasiris who showed up.
A day after Parasiris appeared to have been spotted at the apartment on Broadway, Leblanc did an analysis of a beacon device that had been secretly placed on a BMW Mavroudis used to make drug deals. The device indicated Mavroudis was near Parasiris's home on Rimouski Cres. 10 times between Dec. 6, 2006, and Feb. 1, 2007. The BMW had also been to the Golf-O-Max in Dorval twice during the same period.
On the same day Leblanc did the analysis on the beacon, he received another tip from Montreal police. Citing an anonymous source, a Montreal police organized crime investigator said a man named Bill (the name Parasiris goes by), the owner of the Golf-O-Max in Dorval, was tied to cocaine trafficking.
The anonymous tipster said "Bill" sold marijuana and cocaine at the Golf-O-Max. The same tipster also supplied a cellphone number that turned out to be registered to Kosta Katsiouleris, one of the drug dealers Laval police were already investigating.
Using those bits of information, Laval police decided to include Parasiris's home as a place they wanted to search when they planned to carry out their operation targeting the other five drug dealers. They initially believed they would find a large quantity of drugs inside the apartment on Broadway St. and planned to conduct a dynamic entry there.
They also originally planned to go to Parasiris's home with a standard search warrant.
During Parasiris's bail hearing in 2007, a Sûreté du Québec investigator said Laval police changed their plans out of fear someone living in the Broadway St. duplex would hear them break down the door at 5 a.m. and tip off people whose homes would be searched an hour later.
Laval police decided to ask permission to use a dynamic entry at Parasiris's home instead. Leblanc managed to persuade the justice of the peace to approve the warrant even though Leblanc had no evidence Parasiris kept drugs inside his home.
That's the main reason the warrant and evidence resulting from it were tossed out before Parasiris's murder trial.
During a pretrial hearing, members of the Laval police morality-drug squad tried to explain why they suddenly wanted to raid Parasiris's home, using a dynamic entry. But in his written decision, Cournoyer described their reasoning as "incomprehensible."
"The use of force was not justified under the circumstances because the case did not establish that a (regular search warrant) would bring about the loss or imminent destruction of evidence," the judge stated in his decision.
Cournoyer also noted the police had no direct evidence Parasiris either supplied drugs to Xanthis or Mavroudis or that he stored drugs inside his home.
"The (affidavit) did nothing but establish the existence of contacts (visits to homes, businesses and telephone calls) between drug traffickers and Mr. Parasiris in circumstances that did not establish the reasonable probability that Mr. Parasiris is implicated in drug trafficking and was supplying Mr. Xanthis and/or Mavroudis," Cournoyer wrote.
Parasiris also faces eight weapons-related charges, including the illegal possession of three firearms.
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