Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 29, 1990 TAG: 9003290538
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"It hurts me to give a young man like you such a long sentence," Judge James Turk told Mark Anthony Jackson. "More than 20 years without eligibility of parole is a long, long sentence. But I have to abide by the guidelines."
The 22-year sentence was the minimum Turk could have given Jackson under federal sentencing guidelines. The maximum was 27 years.
Turk said Jackson had obstructed justice by giving misleading names to authorities - eight in total. Jackson had used such aliases as Damien Williams, Shawn Smith and Micheal Howard.
Jackson, 21, and his mother, Lily Battles, pleaded guilty during a jury trial in October to selling crack cocaine to get Keith Ray Smith out of jail. Smith, Jackson's brother and Battles' son, had been arrested in Roanoke on a charge of possessing crack with intent to distribute.
Testimony last year suggested that Battles was a concerned mother unwillingly caught up in a drug deal. But evidence indicated that Jackson was a regular drug dealer who smuggled crack cocaine from New York to Roanoke - often using "young, female street girls" - aboard Greyhound buses, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Bondurant said.
Last summer, after purchasing about $5,000 worth of crack from a Dominican dealer in New York, Jackson came to Roanoke with plans to unload the drugs in a hurry.
What he didn't know was that July 7 was the first night of Operation Caribbean Sunset, an effort by federal, state and local authorities to rid Roanoke of crack.
Sonja Gravely, a co-defendant who pleaded guilty and is serving an 18-month prison sentence in Connecticut, was keeping the cocaine in a corn-flakes box at her apartment in the Lansdowne housing project.
Bondurant said Jackson's sentence is the heaviest yet to be given to people arrested in Operation Caribbean Sunset.
by CNB