Jason Louie Tong’s vehicle was carrying a large amount of drugs when it was searched in June 2023. This encounter with law enforcement in Butte, Montana, set off a chain of events that ended last week with Tong getting sentenced to 11 years in federal prison.
Tong’s crime spree included stealing motorcycles, boats, a four-wheeler and was spread over 100 miles from Butte to just outside Bozeman to rural Beaverhead County, according to a county sheriff who worked the case.
Tong’s story exemplifies the multiplying workload small-town sheriff’s departments face in Montana and Wyoming. They track down criminals over huge swaths of land with small, underfunded staffs. Officers often spend hours each day just driving, tracking down nomadic and rangy criminals.
What starts as a simple drug bust mushroomed into a morass of other crimes, stretching resources thin and maxing out the bandwidth of officers on the frontlines of the fight against fentanyl and other dangerous drugs. It also led to an accusation Ton bear-sprayed a girlfriend.
Back in June 2023, law enforcement witnessed Tong getting out of a vehicle in Butte that was later found to hold 253.9 grams of methamphetamine.
At that point, there was an attempt to flip Tong and turn him into an informant, but that didn’t work out.
“The task force got involved and they tried to make him an informant,” Beaverhead County Sheriff David Wendt told Cowboy State Daily.
The drug task force wanted to cut a deal with Tong, said Wendt, but Tong “absconded.”
Then in August 2023, the Beaverhead County Sheriff’s Office got a domestic violence call from an area southwest of Dillon, Montana, in a remote part of the county known as Bloody Dick. The name comes from an English fur trapper named Richard "Bloody" Leigh.
“They're up at a house up Bloody Dick,” said Wendt. “And him and his girlfriend got in a fight, and he bear-sprayed her. And then she took off out a window and met somebody coming down the road and then that's how we got notified and we went up there and found him. Then he had some fentanyl on him, probably a bag of about 1,000 pills.”
Tong later admitted he routinely traveled to the state of Washington to pick up methamphetamine and fentanyl for distribution, according to a Jan. 23 statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Missoula announcing his sentence.
“Tong indicated that he had traveled to Washington multiple times to obtain drugs for distribution in Montana and that each trip yielded 5 to 10 pounds of meth and 10,000 to 50,000 fentanyl pills,” stated the release.
“The fentanyl is the worst of it all,” said Wendt, describing how drug trafficking networks based in Montana’s urban areas are spilling over into rural counties with limited law enforcement resources.
“Beaverhead County, it's 200 square miles bigger than the state of Connecticut. And there's eight of us,” said Wendt. “We're on call, well, basically 24/7. And we're still buried.”
One Crime Leads To Many
A search of Tong’s residence in the Bloody Dick area of Beaverhead County revealed loot allegedly stolen from nearby Gallatin County,
“There at that cabin, like motorcycles, enclosed trailers, boats,” said Wendt, listing off the items his staff recovered, cataloged and worked to return to the proper owners.
Wendt said Tong, “somehow got a code to one of those secured storage units and he’d just go in there and hook up like an enclosed trailer and then take off.”
In one enclosed trailer, Wendt said, “He had three KTM motorcycles. And you know, the KTMs, they're the high dollar ones.”
“We were tied up on that for weeks,” said Wendt, recalling how a single drug bust snowballed into many hours of work for his staff. “You get into searching that property and then you got to find all this equipment that was stolen and trailers and motorcycles and it ties up a lot of time.
“Twenty years ago, our big thing was like marijuana and DUIs or domestics. And now we got internet crimes. The type of crimes these days is a lot different. So we're just buried in cases.”
Pattern Repeats In Wyoming
When it comes to big counties and a small staff at the local sheriff’s department, Wyoming feels Montana’s pain.
Allen Thompson, executive director of the Wyoming Association of Sheriffs and Chiefs of Police (WASCOP), told Cowboy State Daily. “We have very similar counties and land size and low population that gives us the same kind of struggle.”
“I call it the windshield time when you're working a case in a county that's 10,000 square miles,” added Thompson. “You're driving across the county to try and catch someone and do a follow-up interview and they are not there. Or you're working two cases on two sides of the county and all your follow-up involves a three-hour drive in between those. So those are all very common issues that we face in Wyoming.”
Thompson — who is a former county commissioner and sheriff of Sheridan County — said the difference between Wyoming and Montana is Wyoming doesn’t rely as heavily on mill levy support from local property taxpayers.
Sheriff Wendt in Beaverhead County, Montana, watched the most recent push for a local tax levy to pay for additional officers fail at the ballot box.
In Wyoming, said Thompson, as he meets lawmakers in Cheyenne during the 2025 Legislative Session, “We’re making sure that legislators are mindful of the impact any law or bill would have on local law enforcement, including that very important recruiting and retention component.”
This includes how legislators deal with rising real estate prices and property taxes.
“We're pricing out the people that lived here and built the state. That affects recruiting and retention by officers not affording to move to that area,” said Thompson.
At the same time, rising real estate costs motivate property taxpayers to ask legislators to cut them a break.
“The response from the Legislature is to come up with ways to cut those taxes,” said Thompson. “And when you do cut the taxes, then that eventually is going to trickle down and impact local municipalities and county sheriff's offices budgets. So it's kind of a fine balance there.”
David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.
