23 people charged with illegally selling alcohol in Bethel, including 18 cab drivers

More than a dozen Bethel cab drivers were charged Thursday for illegally selling alcohol to their passengers, according to the Alaska Department of Law.

The charges follow an undercover investigation led by troopers from the Western Alaska Alcohol and Narcotics Team. Between December 2015 and April 2016, the troopers made about 50 undercover alcohol purchases in Bethel from people who lacked a license, said a statement from the Department of Law.

During most of that time, Bethel didn't have any legal alcohol sales. Legal alcohol sales in Bethel began in April 2016, and the next month, the city opened its first liquor store in more than 40 years.

Regardless of the timing, the 24 defendants, including 18 cab drivers and one cab company, didn't have a license to sell alcohol, said Assistant Attorney General John Haley.

Charging documents filed Thursday and signed by Haley describe each of the dozens of interactions the undercover troopers had with cab drivers.

In most, a trooper exchanged $50 plus a cab fare for a 750-milliliter bottle of R&R whiskey. Often, the driver took the undercover trooper to a home, went inside with the trooper's money and came back out with a bottle of whiskey. In a few instances, the driver called someone to arrange a sale in a parking lot or the driver already had the bottle in the cab, according to charges.

Prosecutors have charged several people who allegedly worked with the cab drivers to illegally sell alcohol, including one woman who gave the undercover trooper a bottle of whiskey and said she had "lots" more, and a man who drove his Jeep Cherokee to meet the cab and swapped cash for alcohol.

"It's pretty rare to have an investigation with this many defendants and this many search warrants," Haley said in an interview Friday.

[Troopers launch raids in Bethel bootlegging investigation]

As a result of the sting operation, prosecutors also charged a former night manager at the Tundra Suites motel with illegally selling alcohol. An undercover trooper asked the manager in December 2015 where to buy alcohol in Bethel and the man offered him two bottles of R&R whiskey for $100, according to charges.

The 18 cab drivers charged include employees from Quyana Cab Co., Kusko Cab Inc., Alaska Cab Co. and Taxi Cab Co., according to the Department of Law.

Undercover troopers bought alcohol from nine Quyana Cab drivers, according to the charges.

Several times, the trooper asked if it was possible to get more alcohol in the future, the charges said, and the drivers "generally answered" that the trooper "could simply call dispatch and ask for a cab because all Quyana drivers could sell alcohol."

The manager of the Quyana Cab Co. declined to comment on the charges Friday because he had not yet seen the documents.

The owner of the Taxi Cab Co. could not be reached Friday afternoon.

Miae Young, whose husband owns Alaska Cab Co., said drivers may have dropped passengers off at homes where they knew alcohol was sold, but she disputed that the drivers sold alcohol themselves.

"They just dropped them off at the house," she said. "That's all."

Just one of the drivers charged worked for Kusko Cab, according to charges. Naim Shabani, co-owner of the company, described the driver as "one bad apple" who had worked at the company part-time for about six months. Shabani said he fired the driver when he was contacted by troopers about the investigation.

"This was very disappointing to all of us," he said. "We're a 46-year-old company. We're a well-known brand in the community."

Shabani said bootlegging operations were no secret in Bethel, describing the illegal selling of alcohol as "rampant." He said people in the past had called Kusko Cab's dispatch looking for booze.

"People would call the phone, literally, and say, 'Hey, can somebody bring by a bottle,' " he said. "They weren't discreet about it."

Dispatchers were told to send the callers away, he said.

Since Bethel's liquor store opened, he said, "bootlegging in Bethel has gone down significantly."

"Unfortunately, it still exists," he said. "But it has gone down."

According to the charging documents, troopers launched their investigation into bootlegging in Bethel after receiving tips for several years that "many Bethel cab drivers" were illegally selling alcohol out of their taxis.

When troopers checked information from the state-monitored Bush order program, they found "many taxi cab drivers" had "unusually large alcohol purchases," with several buying more than 100 liters of liquor in 2015, charges said.

While the charges are largely based on undercover purchases in 2015 and 2016, they do include a more recent buy from March 2017 when a trooper asked an Alaska Cab driver for a bottle of alcohol and the driver sold the trooper one inside the taxi for $50, according to the charging document.

The defendants charged Thursday all face at least one count of selling alcohol without a license — a misdemeanor with a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a $25,000 fine, according to the Department of Law. Quyana Cab Co. also faces numerous counts of selling alcohol without a license — the penalty is up to a $500,000 fine.