Fugitive junkyard operator indicted

MACHIAS – The Washington County grand jury on Tuesday indicted a 65-year-old environmental criminal from Meddybemps on two counts of failure to appear.

Junkyard operator Harry Smith Jr. is sitting in a jail near Boston after police apprehended him in November working at a salvage business near Everett, Mass. The junkyard dealer, who has been on the lam for more than two years, failed to report to jail after being convicted of various crimes, including hazardous waste offenses committed at his junkyard in Meddybemps. Earlier this year Smith was added to Maine’s Most Wanted list.

“One count [by the grand jury] was a felony charge because it was a felony charge that he failed to appear for,” First District Attorney Paul Cavanaugh said Tuesday. Cavanaugh presented the case on behalf of the Maine Attorney General’s Office.

Smith left the state after the Maine Supreme Judicial Court rejected his appeal of convictions for hazardous waste crimes and he failed to show up to serve a one-year jail term. Smith also failed to serve a six-month sentence for violating probation.

In July 2003, the Superior Court in Washington County ordered Smith to serve six months in jail for violating probation linked to criminal convictions concerning tire stockpiles at his junkyards in Meddybemps.

At the time his probation was revoked, Smith was free on bail after his convictions in February 2003 for hazardous waste crimes committed at the same junkyards in Meddybemps. He was sentenced to one year on the hazardous waste crimes but appealed the convictions to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. The court denied his appeal on Dec. 2, 2003, and he was ordered to serve his one-year sentence.

To date, he has served neither the six-month sentence for the probation violation nor the one-year sentence for the hazardous waste crimes.

Assistant Attorney General Leanne Robbin, who has been handling the Smith case, said from her office in Portland on Tuesday that Smith remains in jail in the Boston area.

Robbin said that Gov. John Baldacci has signed the necessary paperwork to have Smith extradited. “He has not waived extradition,” she said. “He has made a claim through his attorney that he is not competent to waive extradition so we are going to have to [jump] through the hoops to get him back.”

Robbin said that Smith’s sons had told the junkyard dealer’s attorney that he had trouble recognizing them. When asked if the excuse sounded like something out of “Law and Order,” Robbin said, “It did seem a little fictional to me.”

If convicted on the two most recent charges, Robbin said that Smith could be sentenced to up to five years on the first count and up to 365 days on the second count.

She said that this time Smith would not be allowed to choose when he would report to jail. The last time that happened, Smith failed to appear and it set in motion a move by the state to add Smith to the Maine Most Wanted Web site.

She said the state took Smith’s failure to appear very seriously and wanted to send a message: “to deter not only Harry, but people who are in Harry’s position, from ignoring the court’s directive to report to jail and not pass go or collect $200, whatever,” she said.

Robbin said that if Smith had reported, he would have had his jail time behind him. “He had a 21/2 year vacation. On the other hand, if he had reported at the time he was originally ordered to, he’d be done by now,” she said. “He’d be spending his golden retirement years at home instead of behind bars.”

Shortly after Smith went on the lam, local rumors had him living in Central America or fishing in Argentina.

Although Smith was missing, the Department of Environmental Protection remained interested in his junkyard activities. Last year, the DEP went back to Meddybemps, looking through trailers and digging through basements looking for more dangerous chemicals. Hazardous chemicals were found at Smith’s mother’s house on Route 191 in Meddybemps.

The cost of the cleanup at Smith’s junkyards included the Eastern Surplus site in Meddybemps, which belonged to Smith’s father and was declared a federal Superfund site in the 1980s.