Suspected meth accomplice indicted on charges

JOHN DAVIDSON\Frontiersman reporter

PALMER -- A man arrested in August for helping to manufacture methamphetamine was indicted by a grand jury last week in Palmer Superior Court.

On Dec. 9, a grand jury indicted David Legalley, 41, on two counts of second-degree misconduct involving a controlled substance, a class A felony, and one count of fourth-degree misconduct involving a controlled substance, a class C felony.

When probation officers dropped in to check on Legalley in his Willow home this summer, they found him preparing key ingredients used to make methamphetamine, according to court records.

Legalley was on probation at the time for a 2003 conviction for fourth-degree misconduct involving a controlled substance. Legalley, who served one year on his sentence for running a marijuana growing operation, told troopers he had been hired to prepare several key ingredients for meth production at another location. In an affidavit filed by Investigator Mike Ingram of the Mat-Su Drug Team, Legalley said he was in the process of extracting pure ephedrine from pseudoephedrine, which he was weighing and packaging to be transported to a different location.

Pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient in many over-the-counter cold and sinus pills, contains ephedrine, the active ingredient in methamphetamine. To get meth out of cold pills, however, is a long and tedious process, which is why so-called "meth cooks" will often hire someone to prepare the ingredients and extract the raw ephedrine before cooking meth, Ingram said.

Legalley also told troopers he was paid to perform the tedious task of cutting away striker plates from thousands of matchbook covers so the red phosphorus, also used in meth production, could be extracted at a different location. Legalley claimed he was getting paid $500 for his work.

Mat-Su Drug Unit investigators call this a "multi-stage meth lab," a meth co-op of sorts, in which people are hired to extract pure ephedrine or perform some other task at one location and then transport materials to another location, where a meth cook finishes the process.

Sometimes hired hands simply buy necessary ingredients from various stores; others, like Legalley, have more complicated tasks, like extracting ephedrine.

"What's going on now is there's a few select cookers, and they're very proud of being cookers -- there's a hierarchy," Ingram said. "They pad themselves with other people, who buy the goods from the stores, and the main cooks let the other guys take the fall."

Ingram said there are also small pocket labs of people trying to do all the work themselves, which is possible to do because an entire meth lab can fit into a backpack.

But Ingram said he and his fellow officers at the Mat-Su Drug Team have only seen a few labs that were only for personal-use meth production.

Meth abuse and addiction is currently on the rise in the Mat-Su. More labs have been discovered this year than ever before, most of them in the Mat-Su, according to Alaska Department of Public Safety records.

Contact John Davidson at john.davidson@frontiersman.com.