No one can say Erick Halkier Hansen didn’t have ambitious business aspirations. It’s sad—and arguably a loss for downtown Spokane—that he wasn’t able to find a way to fulfill those aspirations honestly.

Such thoughts have been coming to mind for me over the last couple of months, since Hansen, 58, who I interviewed for stories for the Journal years ago, was sentenced to five years in federal prison following his conviction for conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud. 

The conviction stemmed from Hansen’s actions while operating BlueStar Digital Technologies Inc. here between Oct. 1, 2010, and Jan. 1, 2014. U.S. District Court Judge Thomas O. Rise also ordered Hansen to pay roughly $2.9 million in restitution to 51 bilked investors and required Hansen to serve three years of supervised release when he gets out of prison. Another man, Michael Borzage Boyd, of Provo, Utah, was sentenced to three years in federal prison for his role in the same conspiracy.

The charges against Hansen stemmed from his solicitation of funds from misinformed investors for three separate schemes. In one of those schemes, and perhaps the most harebrained, Hansen claimed to have exclusive distribution rights to video footage of a recently deceased celebrity, and suggested investors would be able to profit from the marketing of large numbers of Blu-ray discs containing that footage. 

The Spokesman-Review quoted Hansen as saying at his sentencing hearing in September that his “arrogant enthusiasm” was what caused him to promise pie-in-the-sky profits to investors, and said he described his company as a “legitimate business” that was “doing the right thing.”

However, he and his company had been involved in previous legal encounters that suggested a concerning pattern of behavior. Those disputes included unpaid renovation bills at the Commercial Building, at 1119 W. First, where BlueStar was based, and a settled securities fraud case in Los Angeles, plus prior securities fraud charges dating back to 1999.

 Hansen drew publicity and captured the attention of economic development leaders when he arrived here in early 2007. He touted his company, then doing business as BlueRay Technologies Inc., as the first U.S.-owned-and-operated producer of Blu-ray discs, and he vowed to bring back disc production from overseas. He began working to set up, and secure customers, for a plant downtown that he predicted soon would be producing 100,000 discs a day and that eventually would employ 450 people.

In an interview with him soon after his arrival here, I found him to be sincere in his desire to develop a manufacturing enterprise, but quirky, understaffed, and disorganized in his business approach. As his legal woes mounted, he also appeared to be increasingly strapped financially, although he brushed off my questions about that, saying, “I still have enough to buy your freakin’ paper.”

Looking back, I wonder whether his venture here ever had a chance to succeed, dealing with an emerging technology where large early adopters already had established dominance. If nothing else, though, the rise and fall of BlueStar Technologies should serve as guidance to budding entrepreneurs here the importance of having a moral compass.