Raids Net 8 Drug Ring Suspects
Police: They Sold Crack In Pompano
September 18, 1998|By TESSIE BORDEN and LARRY LEBOWITZ Staff Writers
POMPANO BEACH —
Federal and local police officers early Thursday arrested eight people in a drug ring that they charge with distributing 22 pounds of crack a week for the past five years in neighborhoods from Collier City to Carver Homes.
Vice detectives from Pompano Beach teamed up with FBI agents about 4 a.m. to raid several houses where the suspects were staying.
The operation, named after its main target, was dubbed ``Chicken Feed,'' _ but police said it brought in much more than that.
Rounded up were:
Craig Bouval Frazier, 31, of Pompano Beach, known as Chickenman because his father once raised fighting gamecocks; Kristie Ann Jones, 21, who police believe is his girlfriend; Ira Chester Tyson, 41, whose rap sheet is 67 pages long, according to police; Andre Jordan, 21, of Pompano Beach; Keith Flowers, who claims to have fathered 20 children, and at 6-foot-4-inches tall and 480 pounds is known on the streets as Big Keith; Brian Anthony Robinson, 27, of Pompano Beach; and Louis F. ``Muggy'' Brown, 29, of Pompano Beach.
Police also charged another man, Yves Mesadieu, 37, a Haitian who owns an import-export company who was already in jail on other charges.
The current charges against the eight involve drug sales from October 1996 to August 1998. Police also recovered $1,000 in cash, crack and powder cocaine, and three handguns.
``We hope we made a dent in drug distribution in the Pompano Beach area,'' said Sandra King, Pompano Beach police spokeswoman.
Pompano Beach vice detective Nate Osgood said this is how the ring operated:
Mesadieu brought the powder cocaine in his freighter from Haiti to the Port of Miami, where Frazier and others would pick it up and transport it to Pompano Beach. There, the cocaine was cooked down into crack rocks at different locations, including the home of Frazier's mother.
Frazier then delivered the cocaine to Jones and Jordan, who distributed it to Flowers, Brown, Tyson and Robinson. They sold the crack to street-level dealers. Whenever those dealers needed larger amounts of drugs, the middlemen went to Jones or Frazier and ordered it.
In addition, each person in the organization was responsible for traffic in a different area in the city: Flowers had Carver Homes, Tyson was responsible for what they called ``The Ugly Corner'' near 17th Terrace and Hammondville Road, and Jones had an area near the 2100 block of northwest Ninth Street they called ``The Hole.''
``They had the entire city locked down,'' Osgood said.
Detectives said the organization became prominent around 1996, shortly after federal and state drug agents arrested and convicted three competing Pompano Beach dealers, Calvin Wright, Robert Russell and Anthony Jackson. Frazier essentially consolidated all three drug markets, federal officials said.
Osgood said Frazier called himself the ``Teflon Don'' because charges didn't stick to him. He has been arrested on homicide charges twice: manslaughter in the mid-80s in a fast food restaurant hold-up in which a woman was shot by an accomplice, and the second time in February 1997, when he was charged with second-degree murder in the shooting death of a 15-year-old who was trying to steal his car.
Johnny McCray, who defended Frazier on the earlier charge, said a judge sentenced him to a youthful offender facility for four years and then two years of probation. He did not serve the full sentence.
Frazier was out on bond for the second charge, in which a judge ruled there wasn't enough evidence for a first-degree charge and set a bond of $50,000.
Osgood could not say how much the group made in drug profits. But agents estimate that a kilo of powder cocaine turned to crack can sell on the street for $40,000.
``After a while, it becomes a matter of mathematics,'' said Hardrick Crawford, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI office in Miami.
Osgood said witnesses told him it wasn't unusual for Frazier to have between $100,000 and $500,000 at his house at any given time.
Police said the money went largely for good times: Super Bowl tickets, prize fights, and women. Last year, Frazier's mother's four-bedroom home underwent an extensive renovation. Osgood also said much of the money went to real estate in other people's names.
``We believe he has a lot of hidden properties,'' he said.