A B.C. man being sentenced in Seattle Friday for leading a major drug-smuggling ring says he’s turned his life around since the charges were laid against him in 2009.
Sean Doak wants U.S. Federal Court Judge Robert Lasnik to consider how far he’s come in his rehabilitation despite years of involvement in the B.C. drug trade.
“I have chosen to live a different life and have lost all interest in criminal activity,” Doak, 42, said in a letter to the judge filed this week.
“I recognize how bad it looks and is that I reoffended while on parole. This was a relapse in my criminal addiction and I am sorry for this.”
His lawyer Michele Shaw is asking Lasnik to sentence Doak to seven years in jail.
But the U.S. Attorney wants a sentence that is six months longer, noting that Doak “fought extradition tooth and nail” before the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear his appeal last October.
“Mr. Doak was the leader and organizer of this group because he was the one with experience, connections, money and knowledge of the Canadian drug trafficking world,” Asst. U.S. Attorney Susan Roe said in her sentencing memo.
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“Mr. Doak and his co-conspirators arranged for loads of drugs to be smuggled across the United States/Canada border by truckers, hikers and snowmobilers, and increasingly towards the end of the charged conspiracy, by helicopter.”
When some of the drugs were intercepted by U.S. authorities, Doak said in an e-mail that the loss could be as high as $5 million and that everyone involved had to share it.
“I know it sucks but can’t have 1 guy take the whole hit,” his e-mail said.
Roe said Doak met one of his co-accused, Leonard Ferris, “when they were in William Head Prison together.”
Doak was serving an earlier sentence for leading a massive conspiracy to transport tons of B.C. bud into the U.S.
“Mr. Ferris went to work for Mr. Doak as a trusted and supervising transporter after his release,” Roe said.
Ferris was asked by Doak’s brother to attend a court hearing for United Nations gang leader Clay Roueche when he was arrested in Texas in May 2008, Roe’s sentencing memo said.
The brother, Christopher Doak, was also charged in California with drug smuggling on the same indictment as UN gang associate Khamla Wong.
Roe said “this court is well aware of the scourge of drug trafficking across the border and the use of helicopters and fixed wing craft carrying hundreds of pounds of cocaine and marijuana in the late 2000s, some of which continues to this day.”
“Mr. Doak is one more in a line of Canadian drug dealers who sold their wares in the United States and who used the northern border districts as their highways,” she said.
Between March 2008 and March 2009, U.S. agents seized 240,000 ecstasy pills, 175 kilograms of cocaine and 358 kilos of marijuana from Doak’s drug gang.
The seizures took place in Washington, Idaho, Utah and California, as well as in Nelson, B.C.
Doak, along with B.C. men Colin Hugh Martin, James Gregory Cameron and Adam Christian Serrano, was charged in December 2009 for his role in the smuggling operation.
Another B.C. man involved, Sam Brown, hanged himself in a Spokane jail after being arrested in February 2009 in the midst of a cross-border run.
Serrano pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in June 2013 to one count of conspiracy with intent to distribute controlled substances and was sentenced to three years in prison.
Martin and Cameron continue to fight their extradition.
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