An Arizona man, Odarious Shaw, 25, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for his role in trafficking hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to Alaska.
In a harsh blow to the state’s ongoing struggle with opioid addiction, Shaw was found guilty of distributing fentanyl pills to Alaska twice a week for over six months in quantities of 40-50,000 pills per shipment.
According to court documents, Shaw would obtain the pills in Arizona and instruct buyers in Alaska to send him $150 via a money transferring service to confirm the transaction. He would then provide a date when a courier would arrive on a commercial flight at the Anchorage airport with the drugs in their checked luggage.
On June 25, 2023, Shaw’s courier and codefendant, Corrion James, 26, arrived at the Ted Stevens International Airport in Anchorage on a flight from Phoenix, Arizona, with a package containing over 41,000 fentanyl pills. James was arrested at the airport after attempting to sell the pills to the arranged buyer.
Those pills had an estimated street value of $400-600,000 in Anchorage, and as much as $4.8 million in rural Alaska. Shaw continued to try to sell drugs in Alaska after James was arrested but was subsequently arrested in Arizona in August 2023.
At sentencing, Chief U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason found that Shaw was a leader or organizer of the drug trafficking activity in this case and said that she hopes this sentence deters people motivated by greed from trafficking this deadly drug to Alaska.
“A single pill can destroy someone’s life and the amount of fentanyl Mr. Shaw supplied to Alaska could destroy entire communities,” said U.S. Attorney S. Lane Tucker for the District of Alaska.
Shaw’s codefendant, Corrion James, 26, was sentenced to over three years in prison for his role in the conspiracy. The case was investigated by the FBI Anchorage Field Office, the Alaska State Troopers, and the Anchorage Police Department as part of the FBI Safe Streets Task Force and the Alaska High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) initiative.
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Key Facts
- State: Alaska
- Agency: DOJ USAO
- Category: Drug Trafficking|Fraud & Financial Crimes|Violent Crime
- Source: Official Source ↗
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