Prominent Democratic Party activist gets 30 years in ‘party and play’ drug deaths
2022.04.15 04:36
FILE PHOTO: Ed Buck arrives for a campaign rally in Hollywood, California, September 22, 2010. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson/File Photo
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A wealthy former Democratic Party activist convicted of giving fatal doses of methamphetamine to two men he invited to his suburban Los Angeles home for sex was sentenced on Thursday to 30 years in federal prison.
Ed Buck, 67, was found guilty on nine criminal counts in a in a U.S. District Court trial last July stemming from his role in soliciting men for sex games in which prosecutors said he gave out drugs or injected them into his partners.
Two of the men suffered fatal overdoses at Buck’s apartment in West Hollywood: Gemmel Moore, 26, on July 27, 2017 and 55-year-old Timothy Dean in January 2019.
Buck, a prominent local and national figure in Democratic politics who contributed to the campaigns of President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, was sentenced by a federal judge on Thursday to 360 months in prison, according to a U.S. Justice Department release.
A restitution hearing in the case was scheduled for May 16, the statement said.
Prosecutors said at trial that the wealthy political donor targeted homeless, drug-dependent or otherwise vulnerable men, most of them Black, for his “party and play” sessions. Buck did not testify in his own defense at trial.
Jurors found him guilty of two counts of distribution of methamphetamine resulting in death, four counts of distribution of methamphetamine, one count of maintaining a drug-involved premises, and two counts of enticement to travel in interstate commerce for prostitution.
