Southern California fugitive Stephen Sok learned this month that he couldn’t outrun the law.
For nearly four years, Sok remained wanted by law enforcement from a 2010 federal grand jury indictment that alleged he possessed a whopping 45,000 Ecstasy pills with the intent to illegally distribute the recreational party drug for sale in 2008.
The case, which belongs to Assistant United States Attorney Robert J. Keenan inside the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse in Santa Ana, remained idle until San Gabriel Police Department officers found and arrested Sok on May 20.
Keenan relaunched his case the next day and requested no-bail status for the defendant, who was born in 1983 and has pleaded not guilty.
But U.S. Magistrate Judge Ralph Zarefsky refused, allowing Sok to emerge from custody with a $60,000 bail.
With U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter presiding, a June 23 status conference hearing is scheduled as well as a July 15 trial.
Sok was one of 11 individuals identified as an alleged drug dealer in 2008 following a Drug Enforcement Adminstration (DEA) undercover operation named “Taste the Rainbow” that tracked distribution of the narcotic in Dallas-Forth Worth and Southern California.
Federal officials criminalized Ecstasy (or MDMA) in 1985.

CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime ReportingĀ for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise fromĀ New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.