A counterfeiter caught by North Vancouver RCMP with more than $165,000 of fake money has been sent to jail for two and a half years.
Larry Crocker, 53, pleaded guilty part-way through a trial to six charges, including making counterfeit money, possession of marijuana for the purpose of trafficking, possession of crystal methamphetamine, escaping lawful custody, impersonation and possession of an unlicensed rifle.
B.C. Supreme Court Justice Richard Goepel sentenced Crocker to four years in jail for his crimes Dec. 1, but reduced that to 28 months after giving him credit for time already spent in custody.
Crocker was busted in February 2007 essentially by chance, after he was stopped in his car by an RCMP surveillance team who saw him talking to several known drug addicts near Lonsdale Avenue. When police ran his licence plate, they found it was associated with an attempt to pass a fraudulent cheque at a Vancouver Costco store and asked him to step out of the car.
Instead, Crocker gunned the accelerator and took off. Police followed Crocker's trail to a penthouse apartment in Burnaby where they discovered large amounts of counterfeit money, along with a dismantled marijuana grow operation, stolen identification and equipment for producing fake documents including stolen Interac card-swipe devices and rolls of thin foil used to add fake security features to the counterfeit money.
Police also seized more than five kilograms of marijuana from the apartment, including a kilogram discovered in the freezer.
A woman who was living in the apartment with Crocker told police later that Crocker had managed to harvest five crops of about 100 plants each from the grow-op and that she had accompanied him many times when he sold it.
A police expert put the value of the marijuana seized at up to $55,000.
An additional search of a storage locker in the apartment building revealed a huge sum of both cut and uncut counterfeit bills, as well as more stolen mail, identification, and both fake and real credit cards.
Crocker himself was carrying several stolen credit cards, $26,000 of counterfeit money, 1.7 grams of crystal meth and 58 grams of marijuana as well as notebooks with entries about other people's banking and credit card information when he was arrested in the building's parking garage.
In a sentencing hearing held in October, Crown counsel Brian McKinley described Crocker's activities as "a shopping list of criminal offences," noting the counterfeit operation was "fairly sophisticated."
In one instance, Crocker even managed to pass a counterfeit bill at the counter of B.C. Supreme Court.
Crocker himself told the judge he's struggled to quit crystal meth - an addiction that fuelled his criminal behaviour.
This was Crocker's second trial on the same offences. In the first trial, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Peter Leask ruled most of the evidence against Crocker was not admissible in court, saying the North Vancouver RCMP violated Crocker's rights numerous times during the investigation. But the B.C. Court of Appeal did not agree and ordered a new trial.
This time, Goepel also ruled that police had violated Crocker's rights several times in the investigation, including entering the apartment without a warrant. Before lawyers had a chance to argue those issues in court, however, Crocker pleaded guilty to six charges.
