Twelve members of a Fairview gang, with ties to a larger California street gang, have been sentenced in federal court for drugs, weapons and money laundering charges, which were filed against them more than a year ago.
On Wednesday, Isaiah Holloway, 27, was the last of the group to be sentenced. Chief Judge Timothy Burgess of the U.S. District Court in Alaska sentenced him to 12 years in prison for his crimes. He will serve longer than any other member of the organization charged in the gang’s criminal case.
(Click on image to enlarge. Photos courtesy of the U.S District Attorney’s Office.)
In a release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the agency wrote that Isaiah Holloway played a role “in a conspiracy to distribute heroin, cocaine, and crack in Anchorage.” He also laundered thousands in drug money, and was in possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug conspiracy.
Isaiah Holloway — who also went “Z” and “Zaya” — pleaded guilty for conspiring with others to sell drugs and launder the money earned from the illegal trade.
According to court documents, from 2013 through December 2015, when Isaiah Holloway was charged, he and 11 other people sold drugs in Anchorage. Their group called themselves the Fairview MOB, or 326 MOB, and were associated with Compton, California’s Campanella Park Piru Bloods. The Fairview MOB members flaunted the association on social media and posted music videos, which romanticized the gang lifestyle.
Isaiah and Ishmael Holloway, Lamont Moore, Michael Reynolds, Dorian Topps, Angelo Charter, Karl Maddox Jr., Christopher Meeks, Felton Reynold, Delano Williams, Leonard Moore Jr. and Malia Green were all eventually charged with crimes connected to the Fairview MOB.
In addition to more than a decade in prison, Isaiah Holloway will also spend five years after his release on supervised release and a forfeiture of $76,335 in drug proceeds. His brother, 24-year-old Ishmael Holloway, was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Moore, 37, the only member from Compton, was also sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Michael Reynold, 24, was sentenced to five years in prison. Topps, 23, and Charter, 27, were sentenced to four years in prison. Meeks, 23, was sentenced to 40 months. Felton Reynolds, 28, and Williams, 26, were sentenced to 20 months. Leonard Moore Jr., was sentenced to 15 months and Green was sentenced to 8 months.
The organization’s bust came after a spike in violence around Anchorage in 2015. Several shootings that ended in death and injury were caused by drug-related crimes, the Anchorage Police Department said following the violence. As a result, the agency created a special task force.
But by the time the group was indicted, four of them were already facing state crimes for a shooting and murder.
Michael Reynold, aka “Boogie,” was charged with two counts of first-degree murder for a January 2015 double homicide at an east Anchorage fourplex. But according to a sentencing memorandum for his drug trafficking sentence, the charges were dropped in October 2016 because of the state’s “inability” to prove the crimes beyond reasonable doubt.
“Michael Reynold appears to have gotten away with murder,” the court document states. “Actually, two murders.”
Isaiah and Ishmael Holloway, as well as Lamont Moore, were arrested on charges connected to a shooting of a man in May 2015, in a parking lot on Karluk Street. The man who suffered gunshot wounds claimed to be a Crip, the Bloods’ rival gang.
Isaiah Holloway and Lamont Moore were charged with attempted murder. Ishmael Holloway was charged with evidence tampering in the incident.
According to an online court database, the Holloway brothers are expected to have change of plea hearings for crimes related to the shooting in January.
A 13th conspirator, Dearon Walton, (pictured left) remains at large, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
But who are the Fairview MOB?
Frank Russo, the deputy criminal chief for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, said they are brothers, cousins, friends or former Anchorage high school classmates, who mostly call Anchorage home and identified their gang ties in their tattoos.
“The way we understood the group is many of these young men and women grew up together in Fairview,” Russo explained. “They went to high school and that evolved into hanging out together after high school and committing crimes together.”
And, for some of them, the 2015 charges were not their first run-ins with the law.
“Some of these men were 23 years old and they were in the highest criminal history category that there is in the federal courts,” Russo said. “Twenty-three-years-old, which I have never seen before. So, what that tells me is obviously, we can’t prosecute our way out of the problem, but we all have more work to do as a community to make sure that that doesn’t happen to our young people.”
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