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Nearly two decades after he first came to the attention of a wildlife investigator, a retired RCMP officer has been sentenced to more than five years in jail for laundering the proceeds of a massive ivory smuggling scheme that brought hundreds of narwhal tusks from Canada to the United States.Wesley VanDinter/Getty Images

Nearly two decades after he first came to the attention of a wildlife investigator, a retired RCMP officer has been sentenced to more than five years in jail for laundering the proceeds of a massive ivory smuggling scheme that brought hundreds of narwhal tusks from Canada to the United States.

Gregory Logan, a former Mountie from Woodmans Point, N.B., was sentenced on Wednesday to a 62-month term by a U.S. District Court judge in Maine. Mr. Logan had already been convicted in Canada for the ivory smuggling, for which he got a fine and house arrest. He was then rearrested and extradited to Maine, where he was indicted for money laundering.

"Today's sentence and the previous conviction in Canada send a strong message that this type of offence will not be tolerated," Glen Ehler, a regional enforcement director at Environment Canada who had been part of the surveillance operation that led to Mr. Logan's arrest, said in a statement.

According to court filings, Mr. Logan, who served as an RCMP constable from 1978 to 2002, had once been posted in what is now Nunavut and learned that narwhal tusks could be purchased from Inuit co-operatives.

Narwhals are Arctic whales known for their long ivory tusks. They are considered a species that may be threatened with extinction and it is illegal to import their parts into the United States for commercial purposes.

In Canada, only Inuit can hunt narwhals, in limited numbers. According to Environment Canada, during some years, the tusks sold by Mr. Logan accounted for about 15 per cent of the annual Canadian hunt limit in Canada.

Mr. Logan's narwhal activities came to the attention of law enforcement in 1999 when Special Agent Dan LeClair of the U.S. Wildlife Service stationed in Ohio noticed that a local man was offering on eBay a 22-inch narwhal tusk. The tusk was seized and its owner disclosed that he had purchased it for $825 (U.S.) from Mr. Logan.

According to a prosecution memorandum, when contacted by Mr. LeClair, Mr. Logan sent faxes on RCMP letterhead to assure the American agent that the sale was legal.

"Defendant was using his status as a constable to 'buy' himself the benefit of the doubt from a fellow law enforcement officer," the memorandum said, noting that Mr. LeClair eventually closed the investigation after issuing a warning.

In court filings, U.S. officials allege that for the next decade, Mr. Logan and his wife, Nina, continued running a black-market scheme, purchasing tusks from Inuit co-operatives, contacting buyers in the United States via the Internet and e-mail, and delivering the ivory by driving across the border – the tusks hidden in the undercarriage of a pickup truck and in a false bottom of a utility trailer.

As early as December, 2000, Nina Logan was sending an e-mail offer for a five-foot narwhal tusk from Baffin Island, the indictment against the couple alleges.

By April, 2009, Environment Canada and the U.S. Wildlife Service launched a joint probe, code-named Operation Longtooth.

Environment Canada officers put Mr. Logan under surveillance and watched as he placed tusks under his truck, then drove from New Brunswick to Calais, Me. They saw him drive to a courier service at Bangor airport, where he left the packages to be shipped to an American client. Two tusks were later recovered by U.S. wildlife agents.

The prosecution alleged that Mr. Logan set up bank accounts in Maine to funnel the proceeds and showed his RCMP identification while setting up a mailbox in Maine "to discourage its employees from becoming suspicious of his conduct."

Mr. Logan's defence denies that he tried to exploit his status as a former Mountie. It said he initially presented his passport and driver's licence and only produced his RCMP card – which indicated he was retired – when asked for another identification form.

In December, 2011, Environment Canada charged Mr. Logan under the Wild Animal and Plant Protection and Regulation of International and Interprovincial Trade Act. A year later, a federal grand jury in the U.S. indicted him for conspiracy, smuggling and money laundering.

Mr. Logan eventually agreed to plead guilty in Canada. He was convicted in October, 2013, on seven counts for the illegal export of about 250 tusks. He was sentenced in a New Brunswick court to a $385,000 fine and an eight-month conditional sentence, including four months of house arrest.

What he didn't know was that lawyers at the Canadian Justice Department had already signed an authority to proceed with his extradition to the United States.

A month after his Canadian conviction, he was arrested at the request of the United States.

He tried to argue in court that it was an abusive case of double jeopardy. However, he was extradited to Maine for the money-laundering charges, for which he hadn't been tried in Canada.

- With a report from Matthew McClearn in Toronto

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