Pubdate: Fri, 22 Jan 1999 Source: San Francisco Examiner (CA) Copyright: 1999 San Francisco Examiner Website: http://www.examiner.com/ Forum: http://examiner.com/cgi-bin/WebX Contact: Eric Brazil, The Examiner Staff Page: A 4 DRUG LORD SENTENCED AFTER 20-YEAR FLIGHT Sausalito Man Set Up New Lsd Lab In Canada One September day in 1976, Nicholas Sand quietly slipped out of his Sausalito houseboat and vanished, leaving behind a 15-year prison sentence, frustrated FBI agents, a probation officer and a whiff of mystery that lingered for 20 years. On Friday, Sand's run for daylight ended. He's going to prison for 20 years. Throughout the halcyon hippie days of the '60s and early '70s, Sand, a disciple of Augustus Owsley Stanley, grand master of the LSD culture, had been one of the Bay Area's leading manufacturers and distributors of the hallucinogenic drug. His escape was an embarrassment to law enforcement. Indicted in 1973 for manufacturing LSD and income-tax evasion, Sand was convicted by a federal jury in 1974 and sentenced to 15 years in prison by Judge Samuel Conti. An appellate court subsequently freed Sand on $50,000 bail. On Sept. 11, 1976, two FBI agents who had been conducting surveillance and a probation officer who had arrived to give Sand the news that his appeal had failed converged on Sand's Sausalito houseboat, only to find that he had skipped out. On Sept. 26, 1996, the law caught up with Sand in Canada. He has been behind bars since. Justice was delayed, but Friday, Sand, 58, appeared again before Judge Conti, who threw the book at him. In addition to his original 15-year sentence, the judge tacked on five more years, to be served consecutively - that is, after he has completed the longer sentence. "The defendant was a serious drug manufacturer when he was last before this court in 1974," Conti said. "He continued in that business and committed other serious crimes on his 20-year odyssey." When Sand appeared before Conti at his original sentencing, the judge reproached him for having "contributed to the degradation of mankind." As Sand stood before him again, Conti recalled, "He told me, "Your honor, I'm very sorry for what I've done. I would never do anything like that again' and that he had reformed (his) ideas and goals," Conti said. In fact, Sand never gave up manufacturing LSD and dealing drugs. He simply moved his operation to Canada, where, living under false names with false identities taken from dead Canadian citizens, he created an LSD lab that flabbergasted Canadian Royal Mounted police when they busted it in 1996. Street value of the drugs found in Sand's Vancouver-area laboratory was $6.5 million. "The LSD alone had a value of $3.2 million," the Supreme Court of British Columbia found when it sentenced him to nine years in prison last February. Sand, the Canadian court said, "was the head of the organization that manufactured these drugs and received 75 percent of the profits. This was an expensive, sophisticated laboratory . . . on a par with one that would be found in a university." Mountie Staff Sgt. Kenneth Ross told The Examiner that at the time of his arrest, Sand's lab "was literally better than the Health Canada lab" and produced extremely high-quality LSD. Sand "is an icon in the world of illicit drugs," he said. Sand's drug organization is believed to have had operations in Belgium, Mexico and Honduras, as well as the Bay Area. Its distribution network included Hells Angels and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a cult founded by the late LSD guru Timothy Leary. In arguing for his innocence on the bail-jumping charge, Sand said that he had never been formally notified that he should appear for sentencing in 1976. Judge Conti found him guilty of the charge in October. - --- MAP posted-by: derek rea