Two separate drug busts in Anchorage and Juneau netted about 15 pounds of methamphetamine, according to federal charges filed Monday.
A "well-known member" of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang was arrested with his wife in South Anchorage on Friday after an FBI drug task force found 12 pounds of methamphetamine and almost $25,000 in cash at their apartment and a nearby shipping container, according to a complaint filed with charging documents in U.S. District Court. Most of the cash was found in $1,000 increments, divided using rubber bands and stored in a locked, airtight plastic container.
Along with much of the meth, inside the shipping container investigators found a backpack with a ledger listing money and quantities, and a sheet "listing names of Hells Angels prospects throughout the state of Alaska," wrote Curtis Vik, an Alaska State Trooper and task force member. A witness told investigators they saw both 42-year-old Charles Phillips and his wife, Lois, entering the container within a week before the arrest.
The container was located near a dog kennel business with no apparent connection to the crime.
Vik described Charles Phillips, who goes by the name "Pup," as a well-known member of the "outlaw" motorcycle club who has an "HA" tattoo next to his left eye.
An Anchorage chapter is one of roughly 444 Hells Angels chapters in 56 countries, he wrote. The "outlaw motorcycle gang" is known to traffic drugs in Anchorage and elsewhere.
Charles Phillips is on federal probation for drug possession and in 2006 was convicted on state drug charges for manufacturing meth, according to the document.
Both Phillipses remained jailed on Tuesday.
In the other bust, two Juneau residents were arrested Friday after a package carrying nearly 3 pounds of meth as well as other drugs arrived at a Juneau post office, according to documents filed in that federal case.
The package from an address in California held almost 3 pounds of meth, more than 5 ounces of heroin and an ounce of cocaine, U.S. Postal Inspector Kevin W. Horne said in a sworn affidavit filed with the complaint Monday. All of it was taped inside a speaker.
Horne posed as a mail carrier and delivered the package to Epstein's home after law enforcement swapped out the drugs for "representative samples" and inserted various tracking devices into the speaker, he wrote.
Authorities arrested Kevin Dominique Leonard and Chantel Jalynn Epstein after tracking the package to the Baranof Hotel in downtown Juneau, Horne said. Surveillance teams followed Leonard and Epstein into a room when a device indicated the package had been opened.
The team arrested them both after finding them in the room with multiple firearms, the document said. The window was broken and the speaker was found on a roof below.
Epstein said she was a former heroin user who had been clean for more than five years in 2015 when she was interviewed for a story on six overdose deaths in about three months in Juneau. She had an infant son at the time.
Epstein, now 28, was in custody at Lemon Creek Correctional Center on Tuesday afternoon.