ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 16, 1997 TAG: 9702170066
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SONTAG
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE and TODD JACKSON STAFF WRITERS
A peeling sign below the trailer park reads "Chestnut Hill Family Community," and for three generations of the Craighead clan, it was the site of a thriving family business.
From the trailer of the 90-year-old family matriarch to her 25-year-old great-granddaughter's home down the road, thousands of dollars and a lot of crack were moved in and out of the dilapidated park.
Twenty people, not all of them related, were charged in a federal indictment last fall, making it one of the largest drug conspiracies in Roanoke federal court in recent years. Three of the defendants went to trial earlier this month and were convicted, while the rest pleaded guilty.
At least one of the Craigheads, a longtime Franklin County family, got into crack dealing to support his addiction. Others saw it as an easy way to get ahead.
For Cassandra "Pokie" Craighead, a struggling single mother, it was simple economics.
"I was having trouble paying bills," the 25-year-old testified, "and I was shown how to double $100 by buying crack cocaine" and selling it.
Cassandra Craighead began selling crack three or four years ago. In 1994, her mother, Elaine Craighead, 43, followed suit. By early the next year, her grandmother, Nannie Sue Craighead, 60, joined in the business. Investigators drew up a family tree to keep everyone straight.
Relatives even sold crack from the trailer of Cassandra Craighead's great-grandmother, police said, although the 90-year-old apparently was unaware of it and was not charged.
Cassandra's cousin, Edward Shelton, who was addicted to the drug, served as a runner for his relatives and sometimes cleaned their trailers or washed their cars in exchange for rocks of crack.
Bertha Shelton, Edward's mother and Nannie Sue Craighead's sister, said she doesn't blame her family for contributing to her 30-year-old son's crack addiction, which started before his relatives began dealing.
"He's doing a whole lot better since he's been in jail," she said. If he hadn't been caught, "I'd have done buried him by now."
Bertha Shelton, who still lives in the Chestnut Hill trailer park, said she didn't consider her relatives' crack dealing any of her business and made a point of staying inside her home when she wasn't at work.
By last year, there was so much competition in the dozen-lot trailer park and at the park she lived in down the road that it was getting harder to sell a quarter-ounce quickly, Cassandra Craighead testified. She agreed to provide information against her relatives and other co-defendants in hopes of reducing her sentence.
Shelton's defense attorney, David Walker, tried to discredit Cassandra Craighead's testimony, asking the jury: "Can you imagine that - giving up evidence against your grandmother? What kind of person does that?"
But it took an outsider, a professional informant, to gather the hard evidence to bring down the drug ring, which was being supplied by Anthony Wayne Harris, a local 26-year-old with a New York drug connection. He was one of the defendants who pleaded guilty.
The middle-aged informant - who is not being identified because of the danger of his job - testified that when he showed up at the trailer park he would quickly be surrounded by competing salesmen.
The informant was so good at winning suspects' trust that, at one point during the Chestnut Hill investigation, a dealer offered to loan him money so he could buy $1,000 worth of crack.
The informant, who has made his living in recent years working almost solely for police agencies, has no law-enforcement training but proved an unshakable witness on the stand.
"I'm reasonably good at it," he testified. "I've been fairly successful. I like to help the police. I don't like what drugs are doing to society."
Investigators say it would have been close to impossible to bust the Chestnut Hill operation without the informant's help. Franklin County investigators were known to the dealers, and there were few discreet vantage points to watch the ridgetop trailer park.
But the traffic generated by the Chestnut Hill crack houses made neighbors take notice. At the height of the business, complaints to the Sheriff's Office were up 300 percent, Lt. Ewell Hunt said.
Crack customers stopped at a nearby country store to buy lighters, cigarette rolling papers and other paraphernalia. Traffic through the trailer park was heavy at all hours of the day, with customers sometimes backed up on Virginia 619 five cars deep, Hunt said. Customers from Roanoke, Lynchburg and Henry County were spotted there, he said.
The government believes the dealers were making significant profits on their dealing, yet they continued to live in a trailer park strewn with trash, in old units with broken windows, rusted walls and rickety steps. One abandoned trailer was used by addicts who needed to trade sex for drugs.
In court papers, Nannie Sue and Elaine Craighead both reported that they spent $60 a month on rent.
The lone indicator of luxury in the park are several satellite dishes attached to the sides of trailers.
Government witnesses, mostly customers, helped frame a bleak picture of life inside the trailer park.
One addict testified that when she ran out of money, she would send her 13-year-old daughter to the trailer park to try to persuade dealers to give her crack. Another witness, the son of one of the defendants, testified that he didn't know how many children his father had.
Hunt, who has spent his entire life in Franklin County, said some of the drug dealers at Chestnut Hill used to hold laborer jobs around the county, but turned to crack as a quick and easy way to make some money.
The Chestnut Hill case was one of the county's most significant in years because of the community impact it carried. There are no other areas in Franklin County posing this kind of problem, Hunt said.
"Hopefully," he said, "we can keep it enough under control that I don't think we'll have a real problem."
Federal, state and local drug agents raided the trailer park the morning of Sept. 26 and arrested most of the people who were charged. The arrests came at the end of the yearlong undercover operation dubbed Operation Clean Sweep.
The case was prosecuted federally because the Drug Enforcement Administration has more resources to fund a year-long case like this and because the penalties are stiffer. Most of the defendants face sentences of 10 years to life when they are sentenced in coming months.
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