(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The Justice Department announced Tuesday that Andrew Tate was sentenced o 144 months in federal prison for leading a drug trafficking enterprise that distributed narcotics, including crack cocaine and methamphetamine.
No, the DOJ wasn’t referring to infamous “manosphere” influencer Andrew Tate, who’s facing sex-trafficking charges in Romania. The Tate going to prison in the U.S. is a 56-year-old South Los Angeles man who goes by the nickname “Batman.”
According to the DOJ, the American Tate was the lead defendant in an indictment targeting the gang’s members and associates as part of an investigation dubbed “Operation Hoover Dam.” He was the final defendant to be sentenced in that case.
The DOJ alleged that Tate owned a business named TNN Market, from where he sold methamphetamine, crack cocaine and powder cocaine.
Tate and co-defendant Bobby Lorenzo Reed, 59, a.k.a. “Zo” and “Z,” who owned the South Los Angeles-based store H&E Smoke and Snack Shop, referred customers to one another, supplied one another, and directed their employees to participate in dozens of narcotics transactions from June 2017 to May 2018.
Reed is serving a 10-year prison sentence after pleading guilty in June 2022 to federal narcotics charges in this case.
“Tate participated in an extensive and long-running drug conspiracy to sell drugs, including methamphetamine and crack cocaine, in South Los Angeles,” prosecutors argued in a sentencing memorandum. “Tate’s role in the drug conspiracy was significant; he was the head of the entire drug trafficking enterprise pumping drugs into a vulnerable area of Los Angeles.”
While the more famous Tate might not be in American jail—yet—it looks like some in the U.S. government would like for that to change. As Headline USA reported in December, the Department of Homeland Security funded a study that links Tate, Pearl Davis and other “Manosphere” influencers to domestic terrorism.
The study stems from the Targeted Violence & Terrorism Prevention Grant Program, or TVTP—an initiative where the DHS disperses millions of dollars in grants to think tanks and academic groups, which then attempt to identify potential terrorists based on behavioral indicators. TVTP has been aptly described by some researchers as a “pre-crime” program.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
