TORONTO

Drug dealer Dexter Boyce and former court officer John Feeney are no longer on the opposite sides of prison bars.

Both men are now in jail as each were convicted in the past year of being drug dealers in separate, unrelated crimes.

Feeney, who was once Boyce’s jail keeper, lost his job after he was convicted in 2007 for orchestrating a bully-beating, involving other guards, of Boyce in September 2004.

Boyce spilled some orange juice and refused the guards’ orders to clean it up. Feeney’s colleagues kicked and punched Boyce and then mopped the Old City Hall jail floors with his body.

Feeney, a 10-year officer, received a 60-day jail sentence for the beating.

“His life went into a tailspin,” losing his battle to a gambling addiction that cost him “$150,000 in one week” in 2009, a court later heard.

Feeney, 40, is now in Collins Bay minimum-security prison in Kingston. He was sentenced last May to eight years for cocaine-trafficking offences. In the fall of 2011, he was found in possession of 23 ounces of cocaine, $41,000 in drug profits and had sold 5.5 kilograms of the drug.

Feeney was snared in a massive drug investigation called Project Gladiator.

The wiretaps used to catch Feeney revealed allegations of crooked cops delivering drugs in police cruisers, including a rogue 14 Division cop.

Allegations of a rogue officer or police dealing drugs were investigated. No corrupt cops were found, court heard.

Boyce, meanwhile, who has 12 convictions dating from August 1994 to September 2004, is now in Metro East Detention Centre after being sentenced two weeks ago to 35-months imprisonment.

He conspired with four others to import cocaine stashed in travel brochures inside Fed Ex containers from Costa Rica to Toronto, between Nov. 18, 2011 and Dec. 1, 2011.

Boyce, 47, “was a key and essential participant” in the conspiracy as he coached drug dealers in Costa Rica how to avoid detection when shipping drugs, wrote Justice Nancy Spies.

Almost 356 grams of cocaine were seized in Panama. Boyce came to Canada in 1992 and now has a daughter, 22, who has the mental capacity of a four-year-old. Boyce began using crack once he learned of his child’s condition but quit “cold turkey” in 2005, court heard.

He faces deportation to his native Guyana once his sentence ends, Spies said.

sam.pazzano@sunmedia.ca