Southcentral

 

Some people collect coins. Others collect jewelry or trading cards. But Kenai’s Kelly Bookey collects Coca-Cola memorabilia, and in large amounts.

What began as a small inheritance of Coca-Cola merchandise after a friend’s death 30 years ago has since grown to museum-level proportions. Bookey estimates that he has 4,500 pieces in his collection, spanning two bedrooms and a bathroom. Bottles, glasses, wall hangings, sports memorabilia, even underwear make up just a fraction of his collection.

“I’ve got a little bit of this, a little bit of that, but I’m always looking for more,” Bookey said.

Bookey frequently scouts yard sales, antique stores and the internet to add more to his collection. For friends and family, he says that the collection makes gift-giving easy.

“I’m starting to outgrow the rooms, and I don’t know what I’m going to do with it all,” Bookey said. “I’ve got the two rooms and the one bathroom completely done, but we’ll just find more space somewhere.”

One of his favorite Coca-Cola pieces is also one of the first he ever acquired. After the death of a close friend, Bookey received his Coca-Cola money clip that he carried with him everywhere he went. The clip has since broken, leaving Bookey on the hunt for a new one.

The most sentimental piece in the collection is a Coca-Cola fountain from his father’s former Kenai restaurant, Bookey’s. He is also fond of a Coca-Cola poster he snagged from the 2006 Arctic Winter Games.

“There were only two of them, and I told them in the office that I was getting them,” Bookey said. “I got one, and they caught me stealing the second one, so I let them have it.”

Bookey acquires new merchandise for his collection pretty regularly. On this particular day, he points to a set of Coca-Cola pocket knives that a friend just dropped off. He also spoke of his son who recently picked up about 50 Coca-Cola items from an estate sale in Reno. Many of those items are still in the original box, which he says is sometimes worth more than the item itself.

Since the dawn of the internet, his collection has expanded greatly. Throughout the years, he’s noticed that the best time to bid on any item of value is during a major event, such as the Super Bowl. While Bookey is the winner of many bargains, he has also been the victim of overpaying.

“Don’t drink beer and get on eBay,” Bookey said. “I wasn’t going to let them outbid me, I paid $65 for them dominos, and the next day you could’ve bought them all day long for seven to ten bucks. But I got the good ones!”

Also in his collection is a sympathy card from the Coca-Cola bottling facility in Anchorage, a letter from Coke’s headquarters in Atlanta and, to top it all off, a Coca-Cola toilet seat. While he has no idea what the value of his collection is, to him, it’s priceless.

“I’ve had a lot of people look at it and they go ‘wow,’” Bookey said. “I know there’s a lot of other people out there who collect Coca-Cola stuff, some of them probably have a better collection than I do. I like it, and to me that’s the bottom line. I like it, and I’m going to continue collecting it.” 

As you might imagine, Bookey’s favorite beverage is Coca-Cola. He says he drinks it by the gallon.

 

A small crowd gathered on a cool Friday morning at St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church in Eklutna, the oldest standing building in the Municipality of Anchorage. Bishop Alexei of Sitka and Alaska delivered a prayer in front of a large crane and several scissor lifts.

It’s the start of a project to restore the historic church, work funded through a federal grant. The building is a far cry from its heyday decades ago. Inside, layers of dust cover numerous religious icons that are more than a century old. The outside of the church needs work too, said Jobe Bernier, one of the architects working on the restoration project.

“It is rare to demo anything on a historic building, and especially a historic sacred building,” Bernier said. “We want to preserve every single thing we can, but in this case, it does have a head-height issue where people are hitting their head and has rotting logs.”

The first step in the restoration project is taking down the old bell tower.

As the crowd looked on, construction workers on Friday carefully sawed the thin wooden beams holding up the tower. A crane then steadied it and brought it to the ground.

Bernier said the restoration project is still in its early stages and he’s not sure when it’ll actually finish, but the goal is to return the church to a usable form.

“It still is important that this is a tourist site and tourist destination and informative site,” Bernier said. “However, its primary function is sacred, and that’s important to all of us. Even those of us that are not Russian Orthodox.”

Watching the tower come down was an emotional experience for many at the site, including Charleen Shaginaw, great granddaughter of Eklutna Alex and granddaughter of Mike Alex. Eklutna was the last Dena’ina shaman of the village while Mike was the village’s last traditional chief. Shaginaw said she sees the restoration project as a new beginning.

“It was like a renewal. It wasn’t an ending,” Shaginaw said. “It was like the beginning of the next 50 or 70 years that this church is going to be serving our community and our tribal members.”

The overlap of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Dena’ina Athabascans who’ve long occupied the Eklutna area has a long history. Aaron Leggett, president of the Native Village of Eklutna, estimated that roughly half of his people’s population died between 1836 and 1839 due to an outbreak of smallpox.

“The Russian Orthodox Church was in charge of inoculating its followers,” Leggett said. “And so we started to see a new religion as part of, you know, our cosmology.”

While the church is the oldest standing building in Anchorage, it didn’t originate here. Leggett said the church was originally built in Knik around 1875, but it didn’t stay there for long.

“This location was reestablished in the late 19th century, when Knik became overrun with trappers and gold miners,” Leggett said. “It was literally the Wild West.”

Legett said the church was moved to Eklutna by around 1895.

There’s also a cemetery nearby. Walking around the cemetery is a different experience than walking through a traditional Russian burial area. While Russian Orthodox followers typically bury their dead, Leggett said, the Dena’ina had a spiritual practice of cremating their remains. So the two groups came to a compromise.

“We were afraid that the spirits would get confused,” Leggett said. “So we constructed the spirit houses and, traditionally, a person’s prized possessions would be put inside the house. Things that they would need in the afterlife, like a good pair of gloves, moccasins, a good knife, some food, that kind of thing.”

Leggett said the graveyard gets a lot more visitors than in years past, so the tribe has moved away from putting personal items in the small decorative spirit houses placed above the graves.

“You will still see, sometimes, little things of nominal value, put by the graves,” Leggett said. “For example, behind me, you can see Julie’s grave, her daughters always put a fresh bottle of Coca-Cola for her.”

Like Shaginaw, Leggett is a descendant of Eklutna Alex, a longtime caretaker of the church. He said his people aren’t as tied to the Russian Orthodox faith as they used to be.

“Most of the people of my grandmother’s generation, those born before World War II, were baptized Russian Orthodox,” Leggett said. “However, most people of my mom’s generation, and certainly my generation are not Russian Orthodox.”

Still, he described the St. Nicholas Orthodox church as a reflection of his tribe’s history and its heritage, and he’s hopeful the restoration project will ensure that history is preserved.

Ketchikan’s tribe wants to change the community’s designation under federal subsistence rules to give residents more access to subsistence resources. The tribe is asking to change from urban to rural status, which would apply to all 14,000 residents in the Ketchikan Gateway Borough — and the tribe hopes that recent changes to the designation process will help it win approval.

Most communities in Alaska are designated by the federal government as rural, recognizing a lifestyle that is inextricably tied to the land. But there are urban exceptions, like Anchorage, Juneau and Ketchikan. It’s a status that’s overseen by the Federal Subsistence Board.

The urban communities don’t have a subsistence priority like the rest of the state. That means they have limited access to subsistence resources on federal lands.

Tony Gallegos is with the Ketchikan Indian Community.

“It’s an unfairness to the system because we’re urban,” he said. “We’re not considered to have access to those resources.”

For example, Ketchikan residents, including tribal members, can’t fish for eulachon in the Unuk River while residents from smaller nearby communities can — even though their ancestors have been harvesting the little smelt species for thousands of years.

Gallegos has been working on a proposal to change the community’s status from urban to rural through the Federal Subsistence Board.

“The tribe wants to remove impediments from their access to traditional foods that they depend upon. And by being in a community that’s considered urban, nobody in the community has the designation of a federally recognized subsistence user, and therefore cannot hunt and fish and gather under subsistence regulations,” he said.

Rural and non-rural status go back to 1980, when the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act or ANILCA was put into law. It designated more than 100 million acres of federal land in Alaska into parks, recreation areas and refuges. And it was then that communities were labeled rural or urban.

“It’s a big deal to rescind these things,” said Brent Vickers, an anthropologist with the federal Office of Subsistence Management. His office will make a recommendation on the proposal next fall. He says the process to change a community’s status now takes at least four years, much longer than it used to.

That’s because public input is now a major part of the process. Until 2015, it was decided mostly by numbers – things like the average household income and the number of hotels and grocery stores in a community.

“It really didn’t have opportunities for much input. It was really just based on these kinds of quantitative metrics,” Vickers said.

The process changed in 2015, after complaints and a review, to a more comprehensive approach. Now, Vickers says the board considers more factors and relies heavily on the recommendations of the Subsistence Regional Advisory Councils.

“Now, the analysis will look at all sorts of things – basically painting a picture of what these communities are like, what it’s like to live in these communities,” he said.

In Ketchikan’s case, there are about 14,000 people in the borough. But it’s also isolated on an island, off-the-road system. The community has a large Indigenous population. The tribe has over 3,000 members living locally and there are residents who belong to other tribes as well.

But the rural status wouldn’t just affect tribal members. It would qualify all Ketchikan borough residents as subsistence users, no matter their background, as long as they have been a resident for one year. Wildlife officials also would be required to prioritize their needs over commercial and sport users.

Gallegos says it’s the third time the Ketchikan tribe has sought a change. But he hopes for a different result this time. He says both Ketchikan’s city and borough have passed resolutions in support of the change.

“Right now, the tribe is trying to work within the system as it’s structured with the rules and regulations that are in place, trying to see if we can go ahead and break down this barrier,” he said.

Since the designation process changed in 2015, the federal subsistence board has only considered one proposal in Alaska. That was for the community of Moose Pass near Seward on the Kenai Peninsula. It had been considered part of the urban Seward area but gained rural status in 2021.

A Kenai doctor and his clinics’ managers face nearly two dozen felony charges in an alleged Medicaid fraud case after a grand jury indicted them Wednesday.

Prosecutors say Dr. Ray Lynn Carlson, owner of MediCenter clinics on the Kenai Peninsula, fraudulently billed Alaska Medicaid and two insurance companies — Aetna and Premera — from 2014 to 2019.

Also named in the indictment are Scott Carlson, Charise Carlson and Joseph Hurley, as well as a corporation in Ray Carlson’s name, under which he owned two MediCenter clinics, one in Kenai and one in Nikiski.

Each of the defendants faces 23 criminal counts, including fraud, theft and fraudulent insurance acts.

There is limited information about the alleged fraud in the grand jury’s indictment, but it indicates the defendants overbilled Medicaid and the insurance companies and, in at least some instances, submitted false medical billing codes.

Carlson’s MediCenter clinics appear to have closed sometime after the Alaska Medicaid Fraud Control Unit’s investigation began. According to a Peninsula Clarion newspaper story from 2019, investigators had searched MediCenter’s offices that July.

Phone numbers at both clinics are now disconnected. None of the defendants had attorneys listed in court records as of Friday.

In a tense scene on Thursday, the city towed away many of the vehicles that have crowded an Anchorage lot at a sprawling homeless camp near downtown.

Several campers were handcuffed and detained by police. The Anchorage Police Department said the city towed two buses, two box vans, a boat, a fire engine and two cars.

What unfolded at the Third and Ingra camp was a microcosm of the exasperation felt over this moment in Anchorage’s homelessness crisis, with emergency winter shelter not yet open and hundreds of people still camping on public land.

The towing — expected among camp residents for more than a week — started just as ice pellets were starting to fall on a raw October day. Cold puddles filled a pockmarked lot where a collection of vehicles had been growing since the spring, when the city shut down the large shelter at Sullivan Arena.

Frustration moved in every direction in the parking lot.

The people living in the vehicles said they were frustrated and angry that their dwellings were being carted off to languish in impound lots. One woman, Madison Greenewald, said the box truck she had been living in for three weeks was towed without a chance for her to gather any belongings from it. All she had was what was in her pockets, she said: “A screwdriver, a lighter and two bolts.”

Greenewald said she had been handcuffed after trying to push the non-operable box truck through a hole in the fence. Police said she was arrested and charged with criminal mischief.

As all this was unfolding, Mayor Dave Bronson arrived. The situation, he said, was due to the Anchorage Assembly’s unwillingness to agree to build a large homeless shelter. The Assembly has twice voted down the Bronson administration’s proposals to finish building a large shelter in East Anchorage, first after the administration pushed ahead with millions of dollars’ worth of construction work without required Assembly approval, and later after members questioned the costs associated with constructing and operating the shelter.

“All this is unnecessary,” he said, gesturing at the acres of soaked tents and vehicles. “It’s been unnecessary for more than a year. If we had a large shelter to put about 500 people in, we wouldn’t have to go through this over and over and over.”

Police officers stood by as private tow truck operators hauled away vehicles people had been living in.

The scene drew observers: A private security guard, who said he’d been working at the site since last week, had a pizza delivered, handing out slices to anyone who asked for one. Eric Glatt, an emeritus attorney with the ACLU of Alaska, stood nearby observing, occasionally filming with his phone. Two citizen journalists filmed exchanges between campers and police.

Mike Poirier, a mechanic from Mat-Su who had been living at the camp, said he was sitting in his Toyota Camry when he was pulled from the vehicle by police and handcuffed for trespassing.

“They physically removed me out of the car and impounded the car.”

Poirier said he was in handcuffs for “five or 10 minutes” until he could call his brother, who paid a fine over the phone. He was then released.

“That’s what me and my wife were living in, is my (vehicle),” Poirier said. “Now we’re homeless with nothing.”

Apollo Naff, the owner of about 15 of the vehicles, hung back and engaged on his phone, trying to figure ways to keep his fleet out of the impound lot.

Jarvis Wallace, a diesel mechanic, revved the engine of a large surplus fire truck. Police told him to stop. At one point, he stood on top of it. Later, police said Wallace was arrested and charged with interfering with vehicle impounding, violating conditions of release, criminal mischief and misconduct involving a controlled substance.

Then, in the early afternoon, a line of tow trucks arrived, parking on Third Avenue.

Soon after, Bronson showed up with city homeless coordinator Alexis Johnson and parks director Mike Braniff.

He said the visit wasn’t planned. They had been at a separate homeless camp at Cuddy Family Midtown Park and had driven by Third and Ingra, noticed the tow trucks and decided to stop, he said.

Wallace, the diesel mechanic who had twice been handcuffed by police on Thursday, approached the mayor.

“Hey, I spent a lot of time getting that thing to run,” he said, gesturing to the mammoth Anchorage airport fire truck. The mayor nodded.

“If you shut this down, it’s just going to happen somewhere else,” Wallace said. “I’ll get another big ass truck just to prove it to you.”

The mayor told him the lot was public property, and not a place to store things.

“I’m sorry it’s not working out for you, but it’s not working out for a lot of people,” Bronson told Wallace.

Bronson said that until Anchorage has a large shelter, things will not change.

Winter is coming, and the temporary shelter the city is planning to offer at the former Solid Waste Services headquarters is not ideal, Bronson said.

“It’s a garage, where we worked on garbage trucks,” he said. “That’s what I’m forced to do.”

A city bus that several people had been living in was towed away using specialized equipment for large vehicles.

Right before it was hauled off, residents had hastily pulled belongings out of the bus and piled them on the muddy ground. As the rain pelted down, they scrambled to cover the items with a tarp.

More tow trucks arrived to continue removing vehicles.

Daily News multimedia journalist Loren Holmes and reporter Tess Williams contributed to this report.

This story originally appeared in the Anchorage Daily News and is republished here with permission.

An Anchorage city commissioner and her husband have been charged with fraudulently obtaining more than $1.6 million in COVID-19 relief funds.

Officials with the U.S. Attorney’s office say 41-year-old Rosalina Mavaega and her husband, 44-year-old Esau Fualema Jr., misused money that was supposed to go to the nonprofit they founded, House of Transformations.

The money came from the federal American Rescue Plan Act. The couple applied for a portion of Anchorage’s share of the funding in May 2021 — and got it.

Prosecutors say the couple falsely claimed their nonprofit would use the money to provide housing, treatment and training services. Instead, federal charges accuse them of depositing the funds into personal accounts to finance and pay off taxes on their businesses. They’re also accused of using the money to secure a cash loan and purchase cryptocurrency.

Mayor Dave Bronson named Maveaga to two city commissions in 2022. She was expelled from the Equal Rights Commission last week after several absences. She remained listed as a member Monday on the city’s housing and homelessness commission.

The charges follow an investigation by ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News that found Maveaga and her husband received one of the city’s largest COVID-19 relief grants in 2021 despite prior fraud allegations.

The couple applied for another grant for roughly $1.4 million dollars last year, but didn’t receive it.

Elizabeth Aumavae was director of House of Transformations when federal authorities began investigating Mavaega and Fualema, though she no longer is listed on the company’s website. Aumavae’s brother, Uluao “Junior” Aumavae, is Bronson’s chief equity officer. Bronson was elected in July 2021, after the funding was granted to the couple.

A federal grand jury has indicted Maveaga and Fualema on five felony charges, including fraud, money laundering and identity theft. The two appeared in court Friday. They pleaded not guilty.

If convicted, the couple faces a minimum sentence of two years in prison.