Store owner sentenced to five years after plotting robbery, murder

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This article was published 20/11/2017 (3039 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg convenience store owner who plotted to kill his business partner after their enterprise soured has been sentenced to five years in prison.

Amare Gebru, 44, plans to appeal the sentence imposed Monday by Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Vic Toews. Gebru was previously convicted of counselling to commit murder and counselling to commit robbery.

Defence lawyer Mike Cook had been seeking a jail sentence of less than six months, in order to avoid automatic deportation for Gebru, who immigrated from Ethiopia. He now faces deportation after he finishes serving his prison sentence.

Toews said Monday the defence’s request for a sentence “so substantially below” the range for someone convicted of planning to rob and murder was an attempt to “circumvent” the sentencing process as a way to avoid deportation. The judge said the sentence must be in line with the seriousness of the crime — and there weren’t exceptional circumstances in this case to warrant the defence’s requested sentence of five months and 29 days.

Cook said Gebru has instructed him to appeal the sentence, as well as his conviction.

Gebru had been out on bail until he was taken into custody Monday morning, as his wife and several of his supporters cried outside the courtroom. During Gebru’s sentencing hearing last month, more than 100 people showed up to support him.

At the time, Cook described him as a “good man who did a bad thing.” Gebru and his family fear he’ll be imprisoned upon return to Ethiopia because of past outspoken political views.

“I’ve never, in all my years of practice, seen that many people come to support somebody, which I think bodes well for him in terms of the time he’s going to spend at Stony Mountain,” Cook said Monday, describing Gebru as a “much loved and admired man.”

“Hopefully, all those people can rally together and support a unified front to help Immigration Canada perhaps keep him in Canada and not send him back home.”

Crown attorneys Mike Himmelman and Minh Nguyen sought six years on each charge, but Toews decided the two counts of counselling didn’t warrant consecutive sentences.

The bizarre case began when Gebru, a married father of three, agreed to a business deal with a woman in her late 20s to buy the convenience store on Balmoral Street formerly known as Teddy’s. The deal would end with a police investigation that included covert recordings of Gebru’s meetings with a would-be hitman, revealing Gebru spent six weeks plotting to murder his business partner.

Both had immigrated to Winnipeg from Ethiopia and bought the store together in 2011 — but each business partner testified during a trial last spring the other had contributed less money to the purchase of the store, and accused the other of stealing money from the business.

Within a few months, their working relationship turned toxic, the store was struggling and both partners wanted out of the business, but they couldn’t agree on a buyout plan.

In May 2012, Gebru approached a regular customer in the store’s laundromat and hatched a plan for the man to rob his business partner while she was headed to the bank to make a cash deposit.

“After that, he changed his mind. He says, ‘I don’t want her to be stealing money again. I just want her to be dead. So if you can be able to kill her… do it and I’ll give you money, $10,000, and I’ll sign your mortgage for you,'” the would-be hitman testified during Gebru’s trial.

The man balked at the murder plot and told Gebru’s business partner about the plan. Together, they went to police and the man agreed to wear a wire during secret meetings with Gebru.

In recordings of the meetings played in court, Gebru spoke vaguely about a “mission” he needed the man to complete.

When he testified in his own defence, Gebru claimed the tables were turned and his business partner was the one who hired a hitman to kill him, but Toews didn’t believe him.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay