25 Years for ‘Vicious’ Crips Gang Member

A 21-year-old member of the Rolling 60s Crips gang described by law enforcement authorities as a “vicious predator” with a long criminal past was sentenced Monday to 25 years in prison for selling rock cocaine near a Los Angeles elementary school.

Anthony Wayne Fagan, whose convictions began with a knifepoint robbery of another teen-ager when he was 13, was sentenced under a federal “schoolyard” law that imposes stiff minimum penalties for selling drugs within 1,000 feet of a school.

“Even within the gang membership itself, there are relatively few hard-core, predator types,” Assistant Los Angeles Police Chief Robert Vernon said at a news conference after the sentencing. “The individual that was given this sentence today is what we’d call a vicious predator. We believe the only way to handle them is to get them out of circulation so they don’t infect others.”

Except to contest the admission of his prior convictions, neither Fagan nor his attorney spoke before U.S. District Judge Dickran Tevrizian announced the sentence, the first imposed in the Police Department’s crackdown with federal authorities on gang drug dealing.

“You are, in the court’s view, a career criminal,” Tevrizian said before ordering the sentence, which does not permit parole for at least five years.

“The youth of this country are the future of this country, and anyone dealing drugs and thumbing their nose at the institutions of this city, this county, this state, this country, deserves a very harsh sentence,” the judge said.

Fagan was convicted of two counts of selling less than half a gram of rock cocaine at a house across the street from Hyde Park Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles, and a third count of possession of 10.8 grams of rock cocaine with intent to distribute it.