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A group of police K9s pose in 2019 after one of the dogs, Shamus, helped state police locate 420 pounds of marijuana.
The ABF Freight Service Center on Woodend Road in Stratford, where state police watched two men transfer hundreds of pounds of cannabis from a double-locked shipping container into a rental truck that was soon stopped on Interstate-95 in Darien.
If the year were 2023 instead of 2019, a pair of California men might never have been busted with 200 kilos of high-grade cannabis flowers along Interstate 95 in Connecticut.
Maybe, Vahe Manjikian and Kevin Conrado would have legal jobs shuttling adult-use marijuana from a state-licensed grow facility to a dispensary in Connecticut’s cannabis industry, scheduled to begin before the end of 2022, amid the last gasp of Connecticut’s war on cannabis possession and use.
If not for the COVID pandemic that delayed their requested trials for nearly two years, the convicted smugglers might have faced 20 years in prison. A special state police unit watched the duo collect their cargo from a quiet Stratford freight yard, then with sirens blaring and lights flashing, according to an investigation report, pulled over their rental truck on Interstate-95 a few miles from the New York border, after Manjikian failed to use a turn signal while changing lanes.
Two significant occurrences - the pandemic and the use and commercial sale of marijuana being made legal in 2021 - left Manjikian and Conrado where they are: felons convicted of possessing a large quantity of marijuana. But they avoided prison after paying relatively minor fines after a lengthy judicial process.
The high-profile arrests, including an image of the evidence featuring a police K9 named Shamus that helped sniff out the marijuana - and other law enforcement dogs brought in for a photo op at Troop G in Bridgeport - came just five months before the COVID pandemic hit Connecticut, shut down courthouses and postponed hundreds of criminal and civil cases, only gradually picking up the speed of case flow. It served to be lucky for the defendants.
Manjikian and Conrado’s felony hearings were scheduled - then postponed - 17 times, until, finally on September 20th of last year, Stamford Superior Court Judge John F. Blawie accepted their guilty pleas for conspiracy and possession-with-intent-to-sell.
In the plea bargains pursued by a veteran private defense attorney and Stamford public defender, Manjikian, of Van Nuys and Conrado, of Los Angeles, each paid $25,000, the penalty equivalent of first-time defendants caught with a couple pounds of cannabis, under state law. Conrado could not be reached and Manjikian did not return a request for comment.
The police picked apart their cover stories under preliminary questioning and found a hastily discarded phony ID card by the side of Interstate-95, according to a report on the case recently released to Hearst Connecticut Media under the Freedom of Information Act.
When the truck was stopped near the Darien rest area, Shamus, the five-year-old yellow Labrador, in anticipation of treats from his uniformed state police partner, sniffed around the furniture in the truck, quickly standing atop a box containing 70 pounds of contraband at a value of up to about $5,000 a pound.
In all, the six-box seizure weighed 420 pounds.
If there were other drugs, such as fentanyl or heroin, the outcome in court would likely have been much different.
“Fentanyl is the game-changer,” said Edward J. Gavin, a veteran Bridgeport lawyer and a past president of the Connecticut Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, who likened the arrest of Conrado and Manjikian to a Prohibition-era alcohol seizure of 100 years ago, before the 1933 repeal of the 18th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which forced drinkers into a 14-year underground economy of illegal sales that enriched criminal syndicates and smugglers.
Gavin, who was not involved in the particular case but reviewed the report, said Manjikian, 23 and Conrado, 27 at the time of their arrests, were apparently hired couriers who might have made $2,500 for what was to be a morning’s work, renting the U-Haul truck in Yonkers, N.Y., picking up the packages in Stratford, then driving back down I-95. Instead, they were arrested by 12:30 p.m. and bailed out five hours later, each on $100,000 bond.
“It looks like these two guys are mules that we can’t stop come hell or high water,” Gavin said. “These are not the bandidos that are profiting from this.”
Gavin hypothesized that an informant told the State Police Statewide Narcotics Task Force of the impending transfer.
“So, there was going to be a pretextual stop,” Gavin said of the eventual sirens and lights behind the truck along the I-95 shoulder. “Come hell or high water they were going to get pinched. My guess is the police knew where they were coming from and where they were going to before those knuckleheads even got to Stratford.”
It was 55 degrees and sunny when the 10-foot U-Haul pulled into the ABF Freight Service Center on Woodend Road in Stratford, at 11 a.m.
The date was Friday, October 25, 2019.
The Connecticut General Assembly was still 19 months away from approving full legalization of cannabis and the creation of a new adult-use system. Ned Lamont’s successful 2018 campaign for governor included support for retail sales to keep up with the revenue bonanza that Massachusetts was realizing from the recreational cannabis market, including Connecticut residents visiting dispensaries in the neighboring state to the north.
Although the truck was rented by Conrado, Manjikian was behind the wheel when the vehicle pulled up inside the shipping center’s chain link fence, among the steel shipping containers and truck trailers, the police report stated. Manjikian walked to the office and returned with keys to open the dual padlocks on a steel shipping cube.
The two men drove up to one of the cubes, opened the locks, removed a half dozen cardboard Home Depot boxes, each weighing about 70 pounds, and loaded them into the U-Haul, the report continued. They drove back to the office, returned the keys and headed west on Woodend, then north on Lordship Blvd to I-95, where they entered and headed toward New York, with police watching their every move.
Finally, 21 miles later, near Exit 11 in Darien, after Manjikian failed to use a turn signal while shifting from the right to the center lane, State Trooper Andrew Katrenya of the task force put on his lights and siren, the report read. The truck pulled over on the right shoulder and the duo’s long process to avoid 20-year prison sentences began.
According to the state report, Katrenya pointed out that the signal infraction was the reason for the stop and asked where the truck, with an Arizona license plate, was coming from.
“Manjikian explained that he was moving his sister's belongings from Stratford, Connecticut to New York,” the police report said, adding that Conrado, asked the same question, said they had just left Manjikian’s sister’s house, an inconsistency that Katrenya used to summon Detective Joseph G. Miller and Shamus, a team since graduating from the 10-week State Police K9 training program in 2016.
From there, Shamus, trained in detecting a variety of illegal drugs, signaled the presence of cannabis in the front pockets of both men, as well as the phone in the front cabin of the truck where a hard-to-trace Whatsapp program was signaling that someone was trying to get in touch with the duo.
Asked repeatedly about what was in the truck, Manjikian and Conrado told police it was furniture.
After getting permission to inspect the truck, Miller’s report indicates that the large cardboard boxes were packed toward the front of the vehicle, with others containing home goods blocking access. The drug-sniffing dog quickly alerted police to the presence of a substance after jumping on one of the boxes.
Today, in 2022, police K9s in Connecticut are no longer trained to sniff for marijuana, but in 2019 Shamus was quick to find it.
The two suspects got into a State Police cruiser while another trooper drove the truck to the nearby rest area for further inspection in an adjacent state Department of Transportation lot. It wasn’t long before they were arrested. Both men had phony IDs too and police found one with Conrado’s picture on the ground.
Initially, they both were represented by John R. Gulash, a well-known veteran defense lawyer from Bridgeport who ended up with Conrado as his client, while Public Defender Lisa R. Stevens represented Manjikian during their 20-minute sentencing before Blawie on Sept. 20, 2021. Assistant State’s Attorney Margaret Moscati agreed to the plea deal.
“This is a very favorable outcome,” Blawie said during the virtual court hearing, warning the men that they narrowly avoided prison. “Just understand how dangerous this is.” Conrado could not be reached and Manjikian did not return a request for comment.
Gulash declined to comment on the case, but noted that during more than 40 years of legal practice, he’s watched penalties for cannabis decline sharply. “A multi-pound marijuana case isn’t what it was many years ago,” Gulash said in a phone interview. “The view is that since it’s legal to possess and use, the carry-down effect is that a lot of courts view it in a less-negative manner than just a few years ago.”
The federal Drug Enforcement Agency recently reported that more than 5.5 million cultivated marijuana plants and made more than 6,600 marijuana-related arrests in 2021, a 25-percent increase in arrests over 2020. Most of the federal arrests occurred in California, Colorado and Oklahoma.
“The fact that these interdiction efforts are growing — at great cost to the taxpayer — despite increasing momentum for legalization is a testament to the failure of federal prohibition and unnecessarily burdensome state regulatory policies,” said Morgan Fox, political director for the NORML cannabis advocacy organization. “Lack of access to banking services and capital, high barriers to entry into legal cannabis markets, and exorbitant tax rates at all levels of government are clearly hampering the ability of licensed cannabis businesses to compete with the unregulated market.”
“Twenty five thousand dollar fines kind of signal the end of the war,” Gavin said in a recent interview. In addition to finding parallels to the repeal of Prohibition nearly 90 years ago, Gavin noticed that in his lifetime, while organized crime made fortunes running illegal daily numbers operations, once the state got into the lottery business in 1972, numbers gambling dried up for crime syndicates.
“It’s like the 1920s and you were smuggling rum and no one gave a dam,” Gavin said of the current cannabis climate, as the state waits for retail sales that could generate 20-percent taxes, including Connecticut’s 6.35 sales levy; 3-percent for towns hosting cannabis facilities; and 10-to-15 percent taxes depending on the THC content in particular strains.
Gavin said courts seem to have developed judicial and prosecutorial discretion.
“I have had substantial marijuana cases, and I can’t tell you, recently, that I’ve heard of anyone going to jail for marijuana,” Gavin said. “I don’t think anybody really cares. Now with fentanyl, cocaine and heroin, that’s what the kids are dying from. So many kids are dying from fentanyl.”
He said that cannabis couriers generally have no criminal records. Manjikian and Conrado, are now convicted felons.
DeVaughan Ward, senior legislative counsel for the Marijuana Policy Project, said that at a time when only half of the nation’s violent crimes are solved, more people are realizing that it’s a waste of resources to continue the war on cannabis.
“I consider these people fortunate,” Ward said of Manjikian and Conrado. “What it does speak to is the recognition among law enforcement in the state that cannabis possession and transfer among adults is not as serious a crime as it was five, 10, 15 years ago when people got sentenced to serious time behind bars. Black and brown people in the cities were not as lucky.”
State regulators in the Department of Consumer Protection, planning the imminent adult-use cannabis market, next week are scheduled to award some of the first licenses.
State Trooper Sgt. Dawn Pagan, commanding office for public information and media relations for the State Police, said that training for new canines no longer includes imprinting for marijuana.
And Shamus, who was rewarded with treats after sniffing-out the weed that afternoon behind the Darien rest area, has retired.
kdixon@ctpost.com Twitter: @KenDixonCT
A Connecticut native and Stamford High School graduate, Ken Dixon graduated with a journalism degree from Ohio University, where he was also most-valuable player on its soccer team. He reported on suburban communities and Bridgeport City Hall, then in 1994 began covering the State Capitol and state government. He has won awards from the National Society of Professional Journalists and the National Press Club; several awards from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists; and numerous awards for news and column-writing from the state chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. He still enjoys playing soccer, and is a member of a rock 'n' roll band.