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.