Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 22, 1990 TAG: 9006220338
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Sally Ann Edelman, a Roanoke native, was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Roanoke for conspiracy to distribute marijuana.
Edelman, 43, was arrested in 1988 after a traffic stop on Interstate 81 in Roanoke County led to the discovery of 100 pounds of marijuana that had been wrapped as Christmas gifts and stored in the trunk of her car.
Authorities said Edelman was taking the drugs from St. Augustine, Fla., to New York, where she sold marijuana regularly in a "storefront operation" run out of her Manhattan apartment.
Despite evidence that showed Edelman made much more money selling drugs than art, Assistant U.S. Attorney Morgan Scott did not ask for the maximum punishment under federal sentencing guidelines.
Part of the reason, he said, was that Edelman did not fit the typical stereotype of the drug dealers who pass through Judge James Turk's courtroom.
A professional graphics artist with a master's degree, Edelman has a strong family background and worked as a volunteer at a hospice for AIDS patients in New York and at Center in the Square after returning to Roanoke.
"I've tried to be as lenient with you as I could possibly be," Turk told Edelman as he imposed a sentence one month longer than the 33-month minimum term under the guidelines.
In testimony Thursday, Edelman traced the origin of her drug dealings to the 1960s, when she experimented with marijuana as a college student and then moved to New York and discovered that smoking joints was an accepted - and almost expected - way of life within her circle of artist friends.
"We all shared it; it was like drinking a beer," she said.
Sometimes struggling with the erratic income of a free-lance artist, Edelman began to sell the drug to friends, she said.
"I had access to it and it seemed to snowball," she said.
By the time Edelman was arrested in 1988, she had built a marijuana business that Turk called an "extensive operation."
Edelman admitted Thursday that she sold drugs during regular hours - from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. - for more than five years out of her Second Street apartment.
She offered such a variety of marijuana - Colombian, Mexican, Thai, Californian and Vermont-grown - that Edelman did not contest Scott's description of her as a "marijuana connoisseur."
The operation boomed after Edelman met a man in a New York leather shop and struck a friendship that soon became a business relationship.
Edelman said she was "thrilled" to learn the man had access to large amounts of drugs. "He had great marijuana. It was very strong and I was impressed," she said.
After Edelman was arrested, authorities found $310,000 that she had stashed in two safety deposit boxes, according to Donald Lincoln, a special agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
She also had a cabin on a four-acre tract of land in Vermont, Lincoln said.
But as Edelman's marijuana business grew, so did her addiction to the drug.
By the time she was arrested, Edelman said, she was smoking marijuana every day, sometimes throughout the day.
The artist said the continued drug use clouded her judgment. "I've ruined my life," she said. "It was the stupidest thing I've ever done."
Her attorney, Barry Tatel, asked Turk to consider that Edelman's involvement in drugs began in the '60s in a culture that readily accepted the drug.
"Those times ended for some of us and they kept going for some others," Tatel said. "And in her case, it kept going and it snowballed to where we are today."
by CNB