A Morin Heights drug trafficker who supplied several kilograms of cocaine and cannabis to dealers in Newfoundland ended up with the lightest sentence meted out to people involved in the network because a Montreal judge determined he has already rehabilitated himself.

Alexandre Préfontaine, 37, was all smiles and patted his lawyer, Christian Gauthier, on the back Wednesday after they left the courtroom where Quebec Court Judge Linda Despots decided the repeat offender should only be required to serve a 90-day sentence on weekends beginning Feb. 8. The prison term will be followed by three years of probation. Préfontaine is also required to perform 200 hours of community service.

Despots agreed with Gauthier’s argument that sentencing Préfontaine to a long prison term would be “counterproductive” at this point in Préfontaine’s life because he had rehabilitated himself since his arrest by the RCMP in 2013.

Despite being the person who supplied dealers with six kilograms of cocaine, 14 kilograms of cannabis and several kilos of hashish, Préfontaine’s sentence was the lightest among the four people charged in Operation Baffle. His accomplice based in Montreal, Tan Tui Huynh, 39, and Rodney Noseworthy, a street-level dealer based in St. John’s, were sentenced to overall prison terms of 30 months. Meanwhile, Charles Noftall, the owner of an automobile repair shop in St. John’s, was sentenced to a three-year prison term in November 2017.

The RCMP began Operation Baffle in June 2012. They wanted to know who was bringing drugs into Newfoundland. They soon learned that Noftall’s garage was being used to remove drugs like cocaine and cannabis from the gas tanks of vehicles. By placing Huynh under surveillance, the RCMP found it was Préfontaine who was hiding the drugs inside the gas tanks in Quebec. Huynh appeared to act as a courier for the network, but he pleaded guilty to being in possession of 25 kilograms of Phenacetin, a pain killer prohibited under Canada’s Food and Drugs Act since 1983, when he was arrested in 2013.

Judgments delivered in the case in St. John’s reveal Noseworthy became very concerned about the volume of cocaine he was expected to handle. He testified in court that he planned to leave the group based on those concerns. He was recorded telling Préfontaine that he simply wanted to sell cocaine to street dealers and wanted nothing to do with unloading it from gas tanks or mixing it with other substances before it was sold.

“I am not mixin’ no more of this s—, f–k that, it’s either raw (cocaine) or nothing,” Noseworthy told Préfontaine at one point while the police secretly recorded their conversation.

Early in 2018, Préfontaine had his case transferred from Newfoundland to the Montreal courthouse, and on May 11, 2018, he pleaded guilty to four counts of being part of drug-related conspiracies as well as being in possession of the proceeds of crime.

During sentencing arguments, Préfontaine said he was raised by a controlling father who sold cannabis and didn’t care that two of his sons, including Préfontaine, were selling it as teenagers.

In 2007, Préfontaine pleaded guilty to being part of a large Montreal-based network that sold cannabis to clients in the U.S. He was sentenced to an 18-month prison term and admitted to Despots that he immediately resumed selling drugs after he served that sentence.

He also told the judge he fell into depression after his arrest in Operation Baffle in 2013 and that he decided to clean up his act when he was released on bail. He took courses at Collège LaSalle to earn his high school diploma and then continued to take more courses at the vocational institution. He reconnected with some of his siblings, including a sister who got him a job with a car dealership.

“Mr. Préfontaine was sincere and transparent in his testimony,” Despots said before siding with Gauthier’s recommendation on the sentence.

Crown prosecutor Marie-Michele Paquin requested a three-year prison term while arguing the charges Préfontaine admitted to were very serious and had to be denounced. She also argued that the sentence should serve to dissuade others from committing similar crimes.