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He started a clothing company, specializing in “streetwear,” likely to mask his illicit income, court heard, and recently took another white-collar job with a financial services recruitment firm with a salary of $120,000.

“It’s amazing where life can take you if you keep an open mind and embrace change and risk,” Shin wrote in an online professional profile.

His lifestyle was riskier than his clients or employers likely realized.

Although Shin specialized in marijuana, he helped others who were selling “hard drugs,” court heard, by allowing associates to use his stash house as a bank for large cash deposits from cocaine sales.

Twice he hooked other dealers up to cut deals for large quantities of cocaine. Each time, Judge McIsaac said, “He was astute enough to keep his hands clean from these much more dangerous and potentially violent products.”

Shin reveled in the atmosphere of the drug world’s “high-life,” he told court, and said he frittered away his profits on “clothes, vacations [and] nights out in the clubs.”

(Judge McIsaac questioned the accuracy of that by noting he also purchased three houses during his exploits.)

Shin told the jury that heroin and cocaine found in the stash house was not his, but the property of colleagues who had broken their promise to stash only money.

He said he was so successful selling pot over 14 years in the trade there was no need for him to risk harsher sanctions from harder drugs.

I love my job. I make a lot of people happy

The jury granted him that possibility and found him not guilty of possession for the purpose of trafficking in heroin and cocaine, but found him guilty of possession for the purpose of trafficking in marijuana and possession of the proceeds of crime.