Legal proceedings Man sentenced to be president of Cannonball sentenced to 13 years in prison in Päijät-Häme’s extensive drug case

Päijät-Häme the district court sentenced nearly 20 people on Friday in an extensive Cannonball drug case. The longest sentence, 13 years, was received Esko Olavi Eklund42, whose court also held that he was the director of Cannonball (CMC) at the time of the offenses.

According to the court, Eklund was responsible for planning, organizing and ordering large batches of the drug trade. According to the law, Eklund left other people to take care of tasks with a higher risk of being caught. Nevertheless, the economic benefits of the drug trade ended up mainly for him, the court said.

“Eklund has procured the drug and financed the purchases, as well as organized the reception of the drug and, using the hierarchical organization of the CMC, with the help of the members of the CMC, handled the distribution of the drug. The action has been particularly systematic and shows greater guilt than usual in its perpetrators, ”the judgment said.

He received his second longest sentence, 10 years in prison Ilkka Antero Laakso, 37. Laakso admitted in court that he was the security officer of the Hämeenlinna department of the CMC, in addition to which the prosecutor said that he was also an officer at the national level. Although a more detailed explanation of the officer corps and its position in the CMC hierarchy was not obtained in court, the court nevertheless considered that Laakso played a more significant role in the CMC at the time the crimes were committed than usual.

In the story Hämeenlinna’s municipal politician, the mother of the second principal, Ilkka Laakso, was also convicted Sirpa Laakso.

Sirpa Laakso was convicted of a registration offense and money laundering. The money laundering conviction came from a money store he kept in his safe. In court, he denied the crimes.

There were 10,000 euros in the safe, which the district court found to have come from criminal sources. Sirpa Laakso denied the crime and said the money included € 7,600 in renovation money for her and her spouse and € 2,400 in CMC travel money.

At the time the money was kept in early 2021, Laakso served as the Social Democrat’s delegate to the Hämeenlinna City Council and as chairman of the city’s audit committee. In the June 2021 municipal elections, he was promoted to deputy commissioner.

The district court estimates that Sirpa Laakson must have known or considered probable that the money came from CMC’s illegal activities.

The valley was sentenced to five months in prison. The length of the sentence was affected by the fact that he was legally acting in the best interests of his son.

STT publishes the name of Sirpa Laakso due to his social status.

In the story circulated the most amphetamine and cocaine. The allegations are based on a large international operation in which criminals in various countries were tricked into using the Anom communications platform developed by the U.S. Federal Police (FBI).

Some of the defendants were aggravated by the fact that the court found them to have committed the crimes as part of an organized criminal group, the CMC. Also in the past, the CMC has been considered an organized criminal group in several judgments.

The Päijät-Häme District Court did not see any reason to assess the matter differently, although the defendants in the court claimed, among other things, that in 2017 the club would have given up, for example, officer values ​​belonging to the internal hierarchy.

“Given the undisputed special responsibilities of certain respondents in this case (e.g. security, road captain) and the undoubted signs of status in members’ group vests, the district court does not find it plausible that the organization has changed significantly since the 2017 club’s internal crisis, ”the court held.

Prosecutors last year, the Päijät-Häme District Court filed a lawsuit to close down Cannonball and its sub-association Squad 32. The main proceedings for the termination action will begin at the end of April.

In their action for annulment, the prosecutors consider that Cannonball, founded in 1991 in Helsinki, is an unregistered association whose principal and main purpose is to commit crimes.

Cannonball has demanded the dismissal of the lawsuit, saying it is not a prohibited association within the meaning of the Associations Act, but a motorcycle club with a large proportion of its nearly 200 members without a criminal record.

In the winding-up case, Eklund denied representing Cannonball or even being a member of it. Instead, two other men applied to the court to intervene, in which one of them said he was president of Cannonball and the other a member.

At the beginning of the month, the Päijät-Häme District Court ruled that a man who had registered as president could represent Cannonball in the liquidation proceedings. In the past, prosecutors had admitted that it was possible that the chairman had changed.