A resident of Canada was sentenced today in federal court in Sacramento to nearly 10 years in prison for drug trafficking.
Kyle Deryk Legere, 27, of Surrey, British Columbia, received a 117-month sentence for conspiring to distribute MDMA, a popular club drug also known as ecstasy. U.S. District Judge John A. Mendez issued the sentence based on charges filed in the Eastern District of California in 2010, according to a federal Department of Justice news release.
According to court records, Legere organized and managed a drug and money transportation business. Officials described it as essentially a black-market operation styled after DHL or UPS that serviced several drug trafficking organizations in he United States and Canada.
Between 2004 and 2010, Legere and his couriers were hired to move huge amounts of narcotics and money into and out of the United States. In one month alone in 2008, Legere's organization moved more than 600,000 MDMA pills into the United States, officials said.
Legere paid his couriers as much as $20,000 per trip and used encrypted communications devices to direct the movements of the people working for him. The encrypted data transmitted by these devices was stored on off-shore servers in the Territory of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, authorities said.
The case resulted from a joint investigation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Fremont Police Department.
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