FBI agents. Photo: Wiki Commons.

A drug-dealing neo-Nazi from Anchorage, Alaska, will serve 18 months in prison for being convicted of property crimes motivated by antisemitism and white supremacy, the US Attorney’s Office announced on Tuesday.

In May 2021, 28-year-old Luke Foster, clad in a ski mask and hoodie, stuck stickers with a swastika and message saying, “we are everywhere” on the Alaska Jewish Museum in the city, and in September of that year returned again to tack on another sticker and etch a swastika into a door. He performed the same activity at locations on the campus of University of Alaska-Anchorage and at an LBGTQ+ bar.

According to court documents, Foster first emerged as a suspect in the string of vandalisms after FBI investigators discovered that his cellular phone had connected with eight cell towers near the site of each crime in the time frames in which they were committed. Later, a review of Foster’s social media yielded evidence that he sold psychedelic mushrooms, which prompted an undercover operation in which officers purchased the product from him. From there, they secured a search warrant for his home and car and found more drugs, equipment used in manufacturing drugs, firearms, ammunition, thousands of dollars in cash, and a box of Nazi paraphernalia, which contained the swastika stickers.

“Mr. Foster’s hateful acts of pro-Nazi vandalism across our city have causes significant harm to multiple communities and his trafficking of drugs put the people of Alaska in danger,” Alaska US Attorney S. Lane Tucker said on Tuesday. “Antisemitic crimes and those targeting the LBGTQ+ community have no place here. Our US Attorney’s Office will continue to work with our law enforcement partners to identify, investigate, and prosecute that target our communities to instill fear and distrust.”

Few antisemitic incidents occur in Alaska, where there were all of three in 2022, according to an annual audit issued by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in March, but Foster’s crimes are demonstrative of how far across the country acts of antisemitism reached in 2021, when the number of such incidents reached the highest levels ever recorded since the ADL began tracking them in 1979. 2021’s numbers were surpassed in 2022, which had a 36 percent increase in antisemitic incidents.

Earlier this month, a New Jersey teenager pleaded guilty to communicating a threat to attack synagogues, and in June, a federal grand jury indicted 19-year-old Seann Pietila from Pickford, Michigan for allegedly threatening to commit a mass shooting and live stream it on social media.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.