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Former AKC Judge/Holsteiner breeder arrested in major drug bust



 
 
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Old April 11th 05, 12:36 AM
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Default Former AKC Judge/Holsteiner breeder arrested in major drug bust

Anyone here ever enter a dog under this judge or his wife Judy Spink?
both
were field trial judges, but Judy still shows up active in the AKC
field trial judge listing. They bred Golden Retrievers in Beaverton
Oregon.



The big fall
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
STEVE WOODWARD

Douglas B. Spink once mesmerized Portland's business netherworld with
contentious high-risk deals and a penchant for death-defying sports.
His pastime of leaping from bridges, cliffs and radio towers "is the
absolute extreme self-reliance in my mind," he once wrote in an e-mail
to The Oregonian. "There's nobody there but you, and if you don't do
everything right you WILL die. No second chances."

Last week, the Reed College graduate's luck, in a sense, ran out, when
federal agents captured him near the Canadian border, allegedly
smuggling what federal agents estimate to be more than $34 million of
cocaine into Washington.

Spink, who will be 34 next week, finds himself in a federal detention
center at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, indicted by a federal
grand jury on a charge of possessing more than five kilograms of
cocaine with intent to distribute. He faces 10 years to life in prison
if convicted..

The arrest is the latest -- and most serious -- chapter in Spink's
colorful history of penny-stock corporate takeovers, angry creditors
and shareholders, fraud judgments, millions of dollars in unpaid debts
and a personal bankruptcy still pending three years later.

Spink, the accused drug dealer, forms a picture far removed from Doug
Spink, the child of Pennsylvania privilege, who attended a private
academy, went fox hunting with his father, played squash and rode in
elegant horse competitions. He earned an MBA and, like his father,
became a mergers-and-acquisitions man, buying and selling companies.

But Spink, who suffers from a mild form of autism known as Asperger
syndrome, left a trail of bad blood and lost fortunes -- his and
others.

And in the past two years, his own emotional world has spiraled
downward after the death of his best friend in a skydiving accident.

"He's owed a lot of people a lot of money," said Erika Helgesson,
Spink's former executive assistant at defunct Worldmodal Network
Services. Helgesson said Spink owes her $30,000 for seven months' pay.

Spink's enemies exulted at the news of his arrest.

"That's wonderful," said one, Kit Kung, a New Jersey businessman who
won a $5.7 million judgment against Spink and his companies in the
messy wake of a takeover struggle a few years ago. Kung and his
partners never collected the judgment.

Even Spink's mother, Claire Spink of Harmony, Pa., is a creditor -- to
the tune of $80,000.

"At least," she emphasized.

Spink listed her as a creditor when he and his estranged wife, Judy
Spink, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2002. Claire Spink said her
money went, among other things, to finance Spink's MBA education at the
University of Chicago and to buy expensive show horses.

"I'm just stunned and obviously brokenhearted," said Claire Spink, who
noted that she and her son have not talked in four years. Douglas Spink
and his only sibling, a sister, have not spoken in nine years. Family,
friends in the dark

In recent months, Spink's whereabouts have been a mystery not only to
his family, but also to his creditors and the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in
Portland.

Spink's father, Jack Spink, said he has spent the past 21/2 months
trying to locate his son, who canceled plans to visit the elder Spink
during the year-end holidays.

"I'm completely in the dark," said Jack Spink, a Pennsylvania
businessman who learned of his son's arrest from a reporter. He and
Claire Spink are divorced.

The last time Jack Spink saw his son was in 2003, when he traveled to
Calgary, Alberta, to see Douglas compete in an international horse
jumping competition.

Last April, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Randall L. Dunn ordered Matthew
Slayton, Douglas Spink's stepson, to produce documents related to the
whereabouts of his stepfather. The public record doesn't indicate
whether Slayton complied, and M. Vivienne Popperl, attorney for the
U=2ES. Trustee's office in Portland, declined to say.

According to acquaintances, Douglas Spink departed Oregon for British
Columbia sometime after his bankruptcy, which still is pending in
Oregon. In Canada, Spink has devoted himself to breeding the German
Holsteiner show jumping horses he bought while living in Oregon.

Helgesson, Spink's former assistant, said Spink was in Portland as
recently as two weeks ago, visiting Paul R. Peterson, a friend and
former business partner.

At the time, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were
extremely interested in Spink'swhereabouts. Agents begin to track Spink

A month before, in January, U.S. Border Patrol agents had run into
Spink in the Loomis National Forest, 10 miles from the Canadian border,
along a route known for clandestine narcotics smuggling. Spink, who had
a satellite phone in the rented 2004 black GMC Yukon, "acted very
nervous," according to a sworn deposition by Chad Boucher an
immigration special agent. Spink said he was there for recreation,
Boucher testified.

Afterward, federal agents began to track Spink's various travels in his
1996 Chevrolet Tahoe. He crossed the border from Canada five times in
February.

On the evening of Feb. 28, Spink crossed for what turned out to be the
last time.

After he came through the Sumas, Wash., port of entry, Immigration and
Customs Enforcement agents followed him to Everett, Wash. There, he met
an unidentified person driving a truck that the agents associated with
a known narcotics-smuggling operation.
At 7:40 p.m., the driver of the truck unloaded four large dark
suitcases and one small suitcase. Spink, according to Boucher, loaded
the suitcases into the back of his sport utility vehicle. He pulled out
onto U.S. 2, heading east to Monroe, population 13,795.
Alerted by the federal agents, Monroe police stopped Spink for driving
5 mph over the speed limit. A drug-sniffing dog detected the drugs.
After obtaining a search warrant, the police found the suitcases.

They were filled with bricks of cocaine weighing about 169 kilograms,
or more than 372 pounds.

For Spink, who remains officially bankrupt, the alleged $34 million
drug fortune was short-lived. A federal judge appointed a public
defender because Spink could not afford a lawyer.
"We certainly had a happy childhood," said his mother, who recalled
that Spink started a club of students opposed to alcohol in high
school. "It's a terrible waste of potential."




HeraldNet
The Herald - Everett, Wash. - www.HeraldNet.com

Published: Friday, March 4, 2005

Drug arrest follows tragedy
Friends say adventurer was grieving loss of friends

By Scott North
Herald Writer

The man charged in what is believed to be Snohomish County's largest
cocaine bust has spent much of the past three years in an apparent
emotional free fall - publicly grieving the deaths of friends,
reportedly losing a fortune, and now, potentially, his freedom.

Douglas Bryan Spink, 33, remained jailed Thursday in the federal
detention center in SeaTac, charged with possessing 372 pounds of
cocaine with an estimated street value of $34 million.

Spink is accused of being caught with the drugs during a traffic stop
Monday on U.S. 2 in Monroe. He is scheduled to appear Tuesday for a
detention hearing in U.S. District Court in Seattle.

Spink lives in Canada, where he had run a Chilliwack, B.C., farm that
bred jumping horses. He moved there not long ago from Portland, Ore.,
where, starting in the late 1990s, he was well known for risky business
ventures and a passion for extreme sports, especially parachuting from
cliffs, bridges, tall buildings and radio towers.

Word of Spink's legal predicament spread quickly Thursday.

"He owes me $50,000, and he's burned a lot of people," said Mark Paul,
a business consultant in Oregon who said he was among the many
creditors who remained entangled in the legal morass left by the
collapse and bankruptcy of Spink's businesses in 2002.

The arrest created a buzz among people who know Spink through his
pursuit of BASE jumps, an acronym that refers to hurling oneself from
buildings, antennas, spans and earth formations.

"I was shocked, but not entirely surprised," said Karin Sako, an expert
parachutist and rock climber who lives in Southern California. She met
Spink during 2001 through a former boyfriend, Dwain Weston, then one of
the world's most accomplished BASE jumpers who worked as a computer
consultant in Portland.

In numerous Internet postings, Spink described Weston as his best
friend and "soul mate," the person who taught him how to jump from
bridges and cliffs.

Weston died in October 2003 when he crashed into the Royal Gorge Bridge
in Colorado. He had jumped from a plane and was speeding through the
air wearing a "wing suit," a garment he hoped would allow him to "buzz"
the bridge.

Weston's death came a little more than a year after another one of the
people Spink considered his jumping buddies, an Oregon forensic
pathologist, died in a jumping accident in Switzerland.

"BASE has brought me together with truly the most amazing, beautiful,
interesting, complex, frustrating, intellectual, spiritual, courageous,
ridiculous, hare-brained, brilliant people in the world. It has then
taken them from me, one after another," Spink wrote in an Internet
forum three days after Weston's death.

He added: "If you join our sport, this will happen to you - it is
wonderful, and it absolutely sucks."

Spink also knows a great deal about rock climbing and mountain travel,
and he used that knowledge in pursuit of jumps from backcountry
locations, said Robin Heid, a longtime sky diver and journalist who was
a pioneer of BASE jumping.

Heid had organized the event at which Weston died. He said it wasn't
long before Spink posted Internet messages alleging that the mishap
could have been prevented, and that Weston's death was a suicide, not
an accident. That triggered a series of unpleasant exchanges between
the two on various sky-diving bulletin boards.

Spink reacted angrily in July when somebody who didn't know Weston made
a passing reference in an Internet posting.

When someone also posting on the board asked why he was so angry and
bitter, Spink said he had reasons.

"Bitter? Yeah, well I'll be happy to hear your feedback on my mental
state when you've walked in my shoes for a few miles," he wrote.

"That is, take your best friend, have him commit suicide, know you
could have prevented it, and stir. That's a start. Mix in a heap more
fatalities, then stir with a whole box-full of knives in the back from
'friends' without integrity or respect. That's the appetizer. Then
we'll get to the main course."

On Feb. 16, Spink posted a message on an Internet bulletin board for
climbers detailing how he had jumped off a cliff near Winthrop to honor
the memory of a Seattle-area BASE jumper who he said had committed
suicide days before.

Spink is an intense man and his exposure to death seems to have sparked
in him a "volatile search" for meaning, Sako said.

"There were times he extended great compassion and caring and
sensitivity to me," she said. "I've always, and still do, like that
quality in him. I've also been on the other end of some not so
compassionate, sensitive things."

Whatever happens next, Sako said she hopes Spink benefits from the
experience.

"For better or worse, I do hope the best for him," she said. "I don't
think anyone is a victim in life. We are certainly responsible for our
own actions."

That's a reality BASE jumpers understand, she said.

Reporter Scott North: 425-339-3431 or .

Copyright =A91996-2005.
The Daily Herald Co.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

 




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