News Release
U.S. Department of Justice
United States Attorney
District of Rhode Island
April 13, 2009
Felon sentenced to 224 months for drugs and guns;
Karim Abdullah previously served a federal sentence for street gang racketeering
A federal judge has sentenced Karim Abdullah to 224 months in prison for trafficking in crack cocaine and being a felon in possession of firearms. In June 2007, State Police detectives and a Providence detective found four handguns and crack cocaine in Abdullah’s apartment. He had been released from federal prison about a year before, having served 115 months for offenses committed while he was “chief enforcer” of the Latin Kings street gang in Rhode Island.
United States Attorney Robert Clark Corrente announced the sentence, which U.S. District Court Judge William E. Smith imposed on April 10 in U.S. District Court, Providence. Two years of the 224-month sentence imposed on Abdullah is for violating terms of supervised release that was part of his prior sentence.
On March 16, 2008, Abdullah, 33, pleaded guilty to possessing with intent to distribute crack cocaine and being a felon in possession of firearms. At the plea hearing Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth P. Madden said the government could prove that, on June 15, 2007, Rhode Island State Police detectives and a Providence detective executed a search warrant at an apartment on Carpenter Street. As they entered the apartment, Abdullah was standing by a window, holding a pistol. He dropped the pistol when detectives ordered him to do so. At various places in the apartment, detectives found about 33 grams of crack cocaine, quantities of MDA and marijuana, four handguns, and ammunition. Detectives arrested Abdullah on state charges, and he was subsequently prosecuted federally as part of Project Safe Neighborhoods, a federal initiative against gun violence.
In 1996, Abdullah, who uses various spellings of his name, pleaded guilty to racketeering, assaulting a suspected informant at the Rhode Island ACI, and being a felon in possession of a firearm. He was one of more than a dozen Latin Kings who were defendants in Rhode Island’s first ever federal racketeering prosecution of members of a street gang. Five of those defendants are serving life sentences for gang-related homicides and other offenses.
Under Project Safe Neighborhoods, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, working with Providence Police, ATF, the Rhode Island Attorney General’s Office, and other agencies, aggressively prosecutes federal firearms offenses in an effort to incarcerate those responsible for gun violence and deter others from committing gun crimes. Since 2001, federal firearms prosecutions in Rhode Island have more than doubled and gun offenders have been sentenced to a total of more than 900 years in federal prison.