Man pleads guilty to smuggling tusks
A retired Mountie faces 20 years in prison and millions of dollars in fines after pleading guilty on Wednesday to 10 money-laundering charges in the United States.
The case marks the likely conclusion of a major crossborder investigation into the smuggling of Arctic narwhal tusks, originally called Operation Longtooth by Environment Canada, because a narwhal tusk is literally a long tooth, a hollow helix of ivory as long as a grown man.
Long fabled as the unicorn of the sea, the narwhal lives mostly in Russian and Canadian Arctic Ocean waters, feeding on fish, and being hunted by Inuit. Their tusks are used in a mysterious form of communication, in which male narwhals rub them together, possibly to trade information about salt concentration in the water, as a way of avoiding being trapped under ice.
Gregory R. Logan, 59, of Saint John, N.B., smuggled 250 of the tusks from Canada, where their possession is legal but controlled, across the New Brunswick-Maine border into America, where they are illegal for importation under the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act.
He was busted in January 2013, when authorities discovered he had been smuggling them in a trailer’s secret compartment, and shipping them onward, sometimes with fake papers. In the American case, he pegged the market value between $1.5 million and $3 million.
“Logan knew that his customers would re-sell the tusks for a profit and in an attempt to increase that re-sale price, Logan would occasionally provide fraudulent documentation claiming that the tusks had originally belonged to a private collector in Maine who had acquired them legally,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Logan previously faced 28 Canadian charges with his wife Nina. Both are from Grande Prairie, Alta., and had a summer home in Maine. Her charges were later dropped, and after a 2013 guilty plea, he received the largest penalty every handed out in Canada for a wildlife offence, $385,000, plus an eight-month conditional sentence.
In negotiating that deal, Logan argued he repeatedly brought up a possible American prosecution, that he understood his deal to be a final resolution, and he was not even told of ongoing extradition proceedings until after his plea. On appeal he argued he was at risk of being convicted twice for the same offences.
That argument finally failed in appeals court last October, and he was given three days to surrender himself for extradition, though it did not happen until this past March.
In the U.S., he faces a possible 20 years in prison and a $500,000 fine per count of conviction. The terms of his extradition limited the American case to the money laundering.