Drug Ring

A coast-to-coast investigation into drug sales by a group of Grateful Dead rock fans has identified four suspects in a drug ring suspected of selling marijuana, LSD and hallucinogenic mushrooms in Columbia and Ellicott City.The drugs were sent to the Baltimore area from Oregon in overnight U.S. mail, apparently in timefor last month's Grateful Dead concert, Howard County narcotics officers said.Police said the ring is suspected of shipping drugs to five otherstates and Mexico. In most of the locations, the Grateful Dead rock band had recently performed a concert, said Daniel Coon, a county narcotics officer.

A violent East Baltimore cocaine organization with direct links to a Colombian cartel has been dismantled, fulfilling the new police commissioner's vow to go after top-level drug dealers, police said yesterday. With a state judge's permission, city detectives broke the drug ring by bugging the phones of suspected traffickers and eavesdropping on their illegal activity. It was the department's first use of a high-tech crime-fighting tool usually used by federal authorities, who in the past led investigations such as the one announced yesterday.

A group of area men accused of using nightclubs as fronts for a violent, well-organized drug ring go on trial this week in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, charged under rarely used racketeering laws that helped bring down Mafia figures in other cities. Federal authorities say the Baltimore group, run by two convicted heroin dealers whose ties go back more than a decade, reached well beyond drug dealing into arson, witness tampering and attempted murder. An indictment charges that the group was responsible for arsons that destroyed two nightclubs -- one as part of an insurance fraud scheme in 2001 at the group's former operation's base, Strawberry's 5000 in Baltimore County.

Loyalty cloaked one of the largest and most unlikely drug rings in Anne Arundel history through five years of police pursuit while it flourished in a Severna Park barbershop, authorities say.In the end being played out now, authorities say, those same ties brought down John Vincent Baumgarten Sr. and the home-grown "family" of drug dealers who terrorized a community and supplied the county with a steady flow of cocaine. One of their most trusted aides provided the information to put the group behind bars, officials say.As a strange story of barbering and drug-dealing unfolds in a federal courtroom with chapters on cocaine transactions, arson, intimidation and a $25,000 contract for a hit, the sleepy Magothy River community of Cape St. Claire near Annapolis has listened agog.

For months after setting up shop in Baltimore, New Yorker Billy Guy would travel here either by the Trump Shuttle airliner or a rented limousine. He stayed at the Inner Harbor's finest hotels and collected as much as $30,000 a week in drug profits.Between Guy's visits, lieutenants in his Baltimore drug operation wired him cash. Eastern District vice officers traced $125,000 in money transfers, which Guy used to buy diamonds for his many girlfriends."It was chump change," prosecutor Stephen May says.

A low-level player in a Cape St. Claire drug ring was LTC sentenced to five years in prison Friday for his role in an alleged family-run operation that police say smuggled marijuana and 110 pounds of cocaine into Anne Arundel County over five years.Richard Terrence McArdle, 31, told U.S. District Judge Catherine C. Blake in Baltimore Friday that he was "paying the penalty" for his crimes."I know what I've done was wrong," McArdle, wearing a black suit and a close haircut, told the judge."I'm paying the penalty for what I've done, and it'll never happen again."

A man authorities describe as chief of a drug ring selling roughly $27 million in cocaine a year in Baltimore and surrounding counties has been arrested by a State Police drug enforcement task force after two years of investigation.Rashaud Williams, 32, was arrested Saturday night at a rowhouse in the 3100 block of Reisterstown Road across from Druid Hill Park.He was charged with one count of distributing cocaine, said Tfc. J. Scott McCauley, spokesman for the Maryland State Police Bureau of Drug Enforcement.

Roland Mazzone, whose 17-member, working-class drug ring distributed cocaine throughout Baltimore and Harford counties, wept and pleaded yesterday in Baltimore County Circuit Court and asked a judge to "Give me the chance, your honor, the chance I didn't give myself."But, assistant state's attorney Frank Meyer said, "Today is not LTC the day to feel sorry for Roland Mazzone. Today is the day to punish him."Judge John Grason Turnbull II agreed with Mr. Meyer and sentenced Mazzone, the former manager of the Valley View Inn in Parkville, to 20 years in prison, the first 10 years to be served without the possibility of parole.

Six New York drug dealers and a Baltimore woman were arrested early yesterday as city police cracked down on a violent drug gang that had muscled its way into Baltimore's illicit drug trade.Police said the gang members -- known as "New York boys" -- used violence and intimidation to seize control of drug activity in the lucrative drug trafficking area around Boyd and Pulaski streets, where drugs are sold openly -- mainly to motorists who live outside the area."The New York boys have a reputation of being big and bad boys, and they will shoot you," said Sgt. Jesse B. Oden of the violent crimes task force, the city police unit which made the arrests.

A 41-year-old Baltimore man was sentenced to 12 years in prison Friday for his role in a heroin conspiracy that spread through three Maryland counties, federal prosecutors announced. Alvin Williams Jr., who used his home to process the drug which was distributed throughout the city as well as Anne Arundel and Baltimore counties, pleaded guilty in April, after two days of trial. To date, more than two dozen of the roughly 30 people indicted in the case have pleaded guilty. The drug ring was run by Christian Gettis, who described himself during a February sentencing hearing as a family man living a double life: secretly dealing drugs while holding down a job in retail.