A former grand wizard of a Kentucky-based Ku Klux Klan organization has been sentenced to 48 months in prison on federal drug and gun charges.
Ronald Wayne Edwards, who founded the Imperial Klans of America in 1996, was sentenced Thursday before U.S. District Judge Joseph McKinley in federal court in Owensboro.
Edwards had moved his Klan compound from Muhlenberg County to outside of Dawson Springs in 2003.
Edwards pleaded guilty in March to charges he trafficked in methamphetamine and painkillers and carried a gun during at least one drug transaction.
His longtime girlfriend, Christina A. Gillette, who admitted to drug charges, was sentenced to 12 months and one day in prison.
Both also received three years of supervised release.
The sentencings come a little more than a year after a drug sting in which FBI agents swarmed Klan compound on Old Price Road near Dawson Springs.
Prior to the arrests on May 18, FBI agents were investigating information that the former Klan leader had trafficked meth and Lortab pills in Dawson Springs, Central City and Bardstown in 2010.
