Almost six years after Sanford Hately sailed a refurbished fishing boat from Indonesia to B.C. with a cargo of 12 tonnes of hashish, he has been convicted of conspiracy to commit an indictable offence.
His brother, Joel Hately, was also convicted of the same offence in Vancouver Provincial Court April 13. Both men come from the Sunshine Coast.
At the same time, seven other people were convicted of various offences connected with the smuggling operation, which police said was the biggest hash bust in B.C.'s history. In 2000, five other people were convicted in Nanaimo in connection with the same smuggling ring. Most of them were sentenced to between three and four years in jail.
The Hately brothers and their co-conspirators were busted in November 1998 after more than a year of RCMP surveillance. Sanford Hately was the captain of the Blue Dawn, a 30-metre fishing boat registered out of Halifax, which was described by police as the "mother ship" of the smuggling operation.
The Blue Dawn sailed from Halifax to Crete in the fall of 1997, continued on to Southeast Asia in 1998, then returned to B.C., tracked all the way by the RCMP, together with U.S. drug enforcement officers, Coast Guards from both Canada and the U.S. and law enforcement agencies from several countries. On Nov. 4, 1998, Canadian Armed Forces aircrews watched as the Blue Dawn met another fishing boat, Ansare II, in the Pacific Ocean northwest of Vancouver Island. The RCMP seized both boats and found 9.6 tonnes of hash on the Ansare II and 2.35 tonnes still aboard the Blue Dawn.
The Hately brothers and the other smugglers are scheduled for sentencing in Vancouver Provincial Court on April 29.
