Ed Buck sentenced to 30 years in prison for abuses that led to men’s drug deaths
LOS ANGELES — Ed Buck, once a fixture of West Hollywood’s political scene, was sentenced Thursday to 30 years in prison for drug and sex crimes that led to the overdose deaths of two vulnerable men.
To the outside world, Buck before his arrest was a champion of causes such as fur bans and AIDS awareness, and a donor to Democratic officeholders.
But behind the walls of his Laurel Avenue apartment was a nightmare. For nearly a decade, the wealthy, white Buck lured young Black men at the lowest points in their lives — homeless, addicted, resorting to subsistence-level sex work — into what he called “party and play” sessions.
Amid squalor that belied his reputation as a man who had achieved great wealth at a young age, Buck plied the men with drugs and then sexually assaulted them while they were unconscious or immobile. In two cases, he injected his victims with fatal amounts of methamphetamine.
A jury convicted Buck last year of a host of felonies, including distributing methamphetamine resulting in death
