Former Yellowknife bar owner gets 6 years for trafficking

A former bar owner in Yellowknife was sentenced Tuesday to six years in jail on charges of drug trafficking, stemming from a 2005 police crackdown on the city's crack cocaine trade.

The sentence for Ken Wong, 58, is more than the five-year sentence jointly recommended by the Crown and his lawyers in a plea bargain. Justice Ted Richard rejected that plea bargain Tuesday, saying it was not enough to reflect the harm cocaine trafficking had inflicted on the community.

Crown prosecutor Shelley Tkatch said the plea bargain had spared the court a long and costly trial, as well as spared investigators from the hundreds of hours it would have taken to sort out a tangle of Wong's financial files.

"The amount of savings to not having to go through that is a huge fact to consider in why we look at trying to negotiate settlements of these charges," she said.

In pleading guilty, Wong had hoped to receive a jail sentence of five years, less credit for the time he had spent in jail between October 2005 and February 2006, when he was released on bail.

Instead,Richard sentenced Wongto six years, in addition to the time served.

On top of the jailsentence, Wong was fined nearly$500,000, which was something the Crown and defence had agreed to in the plea bargain. The totalamount includes a $400,000 fine to account for the proceeds of his drug dealing, and a $96,000 fine for not declaring the drug profits on his income tax statements.

Wong pleaded guilty on July 6 to conspiring to traffic in cocaine, money laundering and tax evasion. He was arrested in October 2005 as part of Operation Gunship, an 18-month RCMP investigation that targeted Yellowknife's high-level cocaine trade.

RCMPcould notdetermine exactly how much profit Wong made from his drug dealing, whichwas carried out from the Right Spot bar he owned near downtown Yellowknife. He sold cocaine to street dealers and heavy drug users in 2004 and 2005.

RCMP say he had laundered much ofthe proceedsthrough the bar's bank account. Investigators found that funds in the account exceeded the bar's actual revenues by between $200,000 and $300,000 annually.

Wong had used some of the drug money to buy a 10-unit apartment building in Yellowknife, but Tkatch said the building is not worth seizing because it is mortgaged extensively.

Larry Mak, Wong's partner in the cocaine trade, was sentenced to 6 years behind bars on July 6.

At the time of Mak's sentencing, Tkatch said Mak was the "operating and directing mind" behind the operation, while Wong took a cut of the profits Mak made at his bar and sold cocaine himself.