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Instead, he was taken back to the airport.

Exhausted and scared, while he was waiting to be put aboard a plane headed to New York, he saw a telephone and furtively made a frantic call to the Canadian embassy, saying he was being kidnapped. While his call was being transferred, a guard spotted him, hung up the phone and removed it from the room, he says.

Mr. Cournoyer fought being put on the plane, causing such a raucous that American Airlines refused to let him board. Another tantrum thwarted him being put on a plane to Los Angeles and he was locked back in a cell.

A few hours later, he was lying on the cell floor when guards swarmed in, shackled his hands and feet, placed a hood over his head and carried him onto a plane, escorted by several Taser-carrying guards, he says.

When the plane landed in Houston, he was turned over to U.S. authorities, who charged him with running a massive drug ring. He has pleaded not guilty.

His circumstances are a sharp contrast to his jet set life based in a suburb of Montreal.

‘She is part Brazilian, part Canadian and 100% gorgeous. And my client is a handsome, young man’

Mr. Cournoyer lived in Laval, where his family has significant construction and real estate holdings. There, he is said to have owned one of the world’s elite sports cars: A Bugatti Veyron.

Not for the shy, the Veyron is known as the world’s fastest street-legal production car, able to exceed 400 km/h, and declared “the greatest car ever made” by the BBC. They cost around $2-million.

Drawing less attention, however, he sometimes drove a Porsche Cayenne, which was owned by his then-girlfriend, Amelia Racine, who is a professional model.