Early in his policing career, Logan was stationed in the Canadian Arctic, patrolling Iqaluit and remote communities along the northeastern tip of Hudson Bay. It was here that he learned about the immense value of one of the strangest mammals on the planet—the narwhal, also known as “the unicorn of the sea.”

His early criminal ventures were tentative and cautious, but the nondescript Mountie from Saint John, New Brunswick would evolve into the criminal mastermind behind one of the biggest and most brazen wildlife smuggling rings ever uncovered in the US.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s now certain Gregory Logan would never have become a criminal if he had not been a cop first.

In the Canadian Arctic and Greenland where these whales are found, it is still legal for Inuit to harvest limited numbers each year—their blubber is a delicacy—but what caught Logan’s attention were the ivory tusks that protrude from the male narwhal’s head. These uniquely winding ivory tusks—actually an overgrown tooth whose evolutionary purpose still baffles scientists —can reach three metres in length and are coveted by antique dealers and private wildlife collectors. They are particularly valuable in the US, where importation of Canadian mammal ivory is illegal.

The agent confronted Logan, who even though selling the narwhal as a private citizen, identified himself as an RCMP Officer. In his faxes to the agent—all on RCMP letterhead—he denied knowledge that exporting the tusks were illegal.

In May of 1999, an Ohio-based special agent with the US Fish & Wildlife Service noticed an unusual item for sale on eBay: a narwhal tusk. The agent eventually seized the tusk, and on further investigation, discovered that the American eBay seller had bought it from a Canadian named Gregory Logan.

Logan began legally buying narwhal tusks from his Arctic contacts while still on active duty. He left the Arctic, and by 1999 he was selling them in Canada, where it is legal if sold with the proper permits. But the real money in narwhal ivory is importing it into the US, where a 1972 import ban has unwittingly created an extremely lucrative black market.

“Having completed almost 25 years [sic] service in the Mounted Police,” he wrote in one 1999 fax that would later be used as evidence against him, “it would not be my position or intention to knowingly avoid the laws of any country.”

A key part of his modus operandi from this point forward was to abuse the trust associated with his RCMP status, to suppress suspicion of his criminal behaviour, even after retiring in 2002. In the end, the American eBay seller was convicted of wildlife offences, while Logan was given the benefit of the doubt. He was let off with a warning.

This first encounter with the law did not deter Logan from selling more narwhal ivory in the US. “Rather than resume a law-abiding life,” wrote his US prosecutors later, “he devised a complex plan to smuggle an inconceivably large number of narwhal tusks into the United States and send the proceeds from the sales of those tusks to Canada.”

The payoff was high, but Logan was playing a risky game. The fatal flaw in his entire operation—as his first eBay customer presaged—was that some of his US customers, if confronted with potential jail time for their complicity in smuggling narwhal tusks, were more than willing to give him up in exchange for reduced jail time.

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