Another drug dealer swept up in the Yukon RCMP’s mega Project Monolith drug investigation is going to federal prison.
Asif Aslam was sentenced to 3.5 years in custody Thursday in Yukon territorial court. With credit for time served, the 39-year-old has two years and 10 months left in his sentence.
“Monolith” targeted a trafficking ring bringing drugs from B.C. into the Yukon. The RCMP have called the operation one of the most significant of its kind in the territory.
Aslam, who is from New Westminster, B.C., pleaded guilty to trafficking in cocaine late last year.
He was arrested in 2013 after arranging to send 1.75 kilograms of the drug to the Yukon through a dealer. That dealer, as it turns out, was working for the RCMP as a police agent.
The dealer’s name is protected under a publication ban. He is now in the witness protection program.
The hearing Thursday was relatively short, lasting less than an hour.
Aslam received the identical sentence as a second B.C. dealer involved in the ring, Matthew Truesdale. Truesdale was sentenced in March.
Aslam’s sentence was recommended by both the Crown and defence.
His lawyer, Ian McKay, said Aslam’s arrest was a “dark day” in the father of three’s life.
He has no criminal record and it was his first time in a jail cell.
“Transformation started for Mr. Aslam at that time,” McKay said.
He has since gone back to B.C. and started a business. McKay said his client has been straight forward and told the people he works with about his legal troubles.
He said Aslam is remorseful and recognizes that it’s his own “selfishness” that will cause him to be away from his kids while in prison.
Judges don’t get to decide which prison a criminal spends his or her sentence in. But the defence asked judge John Faulkner to recommend federal authorities house Aslam at a prison in the Lower Mainland to be close to his family and ill father. Faulkner agreed.
Contact Ashley Joannou at
ashleyj@yukon-news.com