A former fishing associate of disgraced congressional aide Arne Fuglvog will have to pay $100,000 for his own illegal fishing activities.
Freddie Joe Hankins was sentenced last week to three-years of probation and will have all of his future fishing activities recorded by an electronic monitoring device. Twenty-five-thousand dollars will be in the form of a fine and $75,000 will be a community service payment. He’ll also be required to have a statement acknowledging his wrongdoing published in National Fisherman magazine.
Hankins, of Cove, Oregon was acquitted in August of making a false statement and making a false IFQ landing report for black cod caught in April 2007. But he was convicted on two identical charges for a landing made in May. Hankins harvested about 47,800 pounds of black cod reported for the Central Gulf of Alaska area, but actually caught in the Western Yakutat area by Fuglvog’s boat, “Kamilar.”
The fish allegedly had an ex-vessel value of over $222,000 and was eventually transported across state lines from where it was landed in Yakutat to Seattle.
Taking the stand was Hankins himself who denied fishing illegally, while Fuglvog served as a witness for the prosecution.
According to the U.S. Attorneys’ Office, Judge H. Russell Holland determined that Hankins perjured himself when he denied falsifying reports. Judge Holland found that Hankins was still in a state of denial about committing the crimes for which the jury returned with guilty verdicts.
During the trial, Hankins attorney disputed the reliability of GPS data taken from the Kamilar’s navigational computer.
Fuglvog, convicted of falsifying his own fishing records, was sentenced in February to five months in federal prison, fined $50,000, ordered to pay $100,000 in a community service payment to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and be on supervised release for a year. In addition to working in the office of Senator Lisa Murkowski, Fuglvog was a former North Pacific Fishery Management Council member and a one-time candidate to head the National Marine Fisheries Service.
Matt Miller is a reporter at KTOO in Juneau.
