ABINGDON, Va. – Initially, federal prosecutor Zach Lee thought his investigation of a crack-cocaine ring would extend little further than the five men targeted.
But the case quickly ballooned beyond Bristol, and eventually exposed a North Carolina-based music production company as a sham cover for the drug ring. From there, the investigation netted federal indictments against 50 people in three states, and racked up eight life sentences.
In an award ceremony Wednesday, prosecutors, police and federal officers from the 10 agencies involved in the investigation celebrated its success with Lee at the Washington County Sheriff’s Office. “Once you got more information, it wasn’t just five people, it was the entire [drug] organization,” Lee, an assistant U.S. attorney, said after the ceremony.
Washington County Sheriff Fred Newman said he was surprised when the investigation kept growing.
“We didn’t, early on, think it would be anywhere near the number of indictments handed down,” Newman said.
The real key to the investigation’s success, U.S. Attorney Timothy J. Heaphy said during the ceremony, was the cooperation among the agencies involved. Otherwise, the ring’s multi-state reach might never have been exposed.
“Criminals don’t respect those jurisdictional lines ... they exploit those geographical boundaries and [department] egos,” Heaphy said.
In this case, Heaphy said, local prosecutors passed on the chance to win big convictions and instead sent information up the federal chain, paving the way for more arrests in other jurisdictions. Local police and sheriff’s departments passed up the chance to secure federal grants based on area crime statistics and arrests, he said.
And federal agents and prosecutors dropped any pretense of going only for the big cases, instead agreeing to tackle the small ones, too.
“We focused together on the problem ... from the $5 rock to the kilo shipment,” Heaphy said.
Members of the drug ring, working through the hip-hop Kant Stop Record label, sold more than $2 million worth of crack cocaine between 2003 and 2008, when investigators announced the initial roundup of arrests. Since then, 49 people have pleaded guilty or have been successfully convicted, records show. One person is still a fugitive.
On Wednesday, Lee said he dreamed up the investigation years ago, while an assistant prosecutor with the Bristol Virginia Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office. Again and again, he saw the same names on the court docket for low-level drug crimes. By mid-2005, some of those people were being linked to a company called Kant Stop records, previous Bristol Herald Courier articles show.
Lee just knew bigger crimes could be uncovered if the defendants were followed past the city lines. But he couldn’t look past city lines, at least not until he landed a job as a federal prosecutor in late 2005. His plan began to materialize two years later.
Logistically, he said, it could have been a nightmare trying to coordinate local sheriff’s and police departments, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the Virginia State Police to work with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Enforcement.
“There were people in the community that put their heart and soul into it,” Lee said. “It definitely shows ... it can be done in any community.”
mowens@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2549
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