Ex-RCMP officer who smuggled Nunavut narwhal tusks gets 62-month sentence

Former RCMP officer Gregory Logan, who served in Sanikiluaq and Iqaluit, will serve 62 months in jail, minus time he’s already served in custody in the U.S., for smuggling narwhal tusks to the U.S.. (PHOTO BY GLENN WILLIAMS)

Here’s what you shouldn’t do: smuggle narwhal tusks into the United States.

This is why a retired RCMP officer, Gregory Logan, received a sentence of 62 months Sept. 20 in a Bangor, Maine courtroom.

“When law enforcers become law breakers, it causes the rest of society to despair,” said U.S. District Judge John Woodcock as he sentenced Logan on money-laundering charges.

Woodcock also said “the narwhal whale is worth more to the rest of us alive than it could possibly be to someone [when they are] dead,” according to Bangor Daily News reports from the courtroom.

Logan, 60, was convicted in 2013 in Canada on seven offences related to the illegal sale of about 250 narwhal tusks from New Brunswick to Maine.

Logan, of Grande Prairie, Alta. and Woodmans Point, N.B., who served with the RCMP in Iqaluit and Sanikiluaq in the early 1980s, was fined $385,000 and received an eight-month community sentence, including four months of house arrest.

After that, Logan had fought, but lost, a legal battle against extradition to the U.S. to face additional charges, and was returned in March 2016 to custody in the U.S.

The time Logan has spent in jail in the U.S. since then will be applied against the sentence he received Sept. 20.

Logan’s conviction in 2013 was the result of a two-year investigation launched in 2009 by Environment Canada, the department that enforces the Wild Animal and Plant Protection and Regulation of International and Interprovincial Trade Act.

Initially, Logan’s wife Nina was also charged under the act, although those charges were eventually dropped.

Although the tusks were harvested legally in Canada, the U.S. prohibits the import and sale of narwhal tusks.

The tusks, most of which came from narwhals hunted in Nunavut, were bought legally from sources in northern Canada and arrangements to resell them in the U.S. were made via the internet.

With buyers secured, the tusks were smuggled across the border from St. Stephen, N.B., to Calais, Maine, in “a utility trailer modified with a false bottom.”

From there, the tusks were shipped via FedEx to various American buyers.

It was alleged that Logan received $700,000 from the sale of the tusks, which are worth between $100 to $125 per foot—although his lawyer said in court Sept. 20 that Logan had only made $120,000.

To bring a narwhal tusk into the U.S., you have to prove the narwhal was harvested before 1972.