They were best bros for life.

Then Bruce Hacault learned his buddy had been cheating on his wife and it was game over, no more backyard barbecues, no more weekend hunting trips.

"He involved me in a love triangle, which he shouldn't have," Hacault told a Winnipeg court Thursday. "It hurt me real bad what he did to me."

The 47-year-old Teulon man was sentenced to 12 months house arrest after admitting to initiating a series of bogus calls to police that ended with his ex-bestie dragged out of his home in handcuffs.

"What I did to him, I know I was wrong," Hacault said. "In the heat of the moment I wasn't thinking."

Court heard Hacault placed an anonymous call to Teulon RCMP at 12:30 a.m., Dec. 3, 2011, and claimed his friend was at the local hotel bar selling cocaine. Hacault said the man also sold drugs out of his house and owned several firearms.

"He said police should watch themselves," Crown attorney Vuk Mitrovic said.

Minutes later, Hacault's wife, using the name of one of the man's neighbours, called police and said there was a steady stream of traffic coming and going from his house and that she believed he was a crack dealer, Mitrovic said.

Two officers were on their way to the hotel when police received a third call from the same woman claiming she had heard two gunshots come from the house.

Police, suspecting the shooting was the culmination of a drug or domestic dispute, "decided that all police resources from the area were going to be diverted to this call," Mitrovic said.

Nine officers converged on the house, guns drawn. Police found the man at the back door where he was ordered to the ground, handcuffed and arrested.

The anonymous claims that set the take-down in motion quickly began to unravel. A police officer visited the man's neighbour who denied calling police or hearing gunshots. The man had also not been at the bar the night he was arrested.

Days later, police played the 911 calls for the man who said he was "pretty sure it was Bruce and (his wife)" and that it "sounded like Bruce had been drinking," Mitrovic said.

Police arrested the couple two months later.

Hacault pleaded guilty to mischief for the 911 calls and one count of uttering threats for phoning the man and threatening to "kick (his) ass." A charge of mischief was stayed against Hacault's wife, who claimed her husband put her up to placing the 911 calls.

"This is frankly, one of the worst public mischief incidents this court has ever heard," Judge Cynthia Devine told Hacault. "You took a private dispute and made it a public problem and created a terror and a danger in a small community ... The behaviour was childish at best."

Devine ordered that Hacault write letters of apology to his former friend, the RCMP and the neighbour his wife impersonated.

dean.pritchard@sunmedia.ca

Twitter: @deanatwpgsun