A former Burnaby gun store owner and Burnaby South basketball star who pleaded guilty to trafficking more than 100 illegal firearms has been sentenced to an additional four years in prison.
In a separate case, Aleksandar Radjenovic, 29, earlier had pleaded guilty to hiring a hit man to murder three men and had been sentenced to 18 years.
On Friday, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Bruce Butler ordered that he serve the firearms sentence consecutively to the counselling-to-commit-murder sentence, giving him a total sentence of 22 years.
Radjenovic, who owned the Royal Sportsman gun shop in Burnaby, was charged in September 2006 with trafficking in firearms.
He'd taken possession of 300 handguns at the Vancouver airport and transported them to a facility in Burnaby, where he told an associate to remove all the markings.
Instead of selling them as deactivated weapons in his shop, which would have been legal, he decided to sell them illegally.
He delivered 127 restricted, semiautomatic guns with the serial numbers removed in five cardboard boxes to another man in an underground parking garage. Radjenovic was also actively pursuing deals for the remaining handguns, and was caught on police wiretaps speaking in coded language about the weapons to another person.
The judge found that the accused, who was born in Yugoslavia and grew up in Croatia before coming to Canada, was the central figure in a sophisticated scheme to traffic weapons to criminals.
"Mr. Radjenovic was driven by greed. He was at or near the top of the hierarchy," Butler said.
But Butler found that there were mitigating factors, including his guilty plea, his young age, his strong support in the community and his good prospects for rehabilitation.
The accused committed the counselling-to-commit-murder offences after he was released on bail on the firearms charges.
The global sentence of 22 years for the two criminal cases will be reduced to 17 years following credit for pre-sentence custody. He has already launched an appeal of the 18-year counselling sentence. Radjenovic would be entitled to apply for parole after serving one-third of his sentence.
"I'm truly sorry for everything I've done," Radjenovic told the judge prior to sentencing. "I promise to do my absolute best so nothing repeats itself like this."
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