Video surveillance, wire taps: Inside the Lewis Street drug bust
Four children were living in the Oakland Drive North home when a team of police, including K-9 units, came looking for Darius Strong last Wednesday and hauled the 35-year-old off in handcuffs.
The police, working with the East End Drug Task Force, also found heroin, cocaine, oxycodone pills, ammunition and a loaded 9 mm pistol in the raid. The ammo was found in a child’s room, not too far from the unsecured handgun, said Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota.
“I don’t know what could have happened if one of those kids got that gun,” he said.
“The ammunition was in one of the boys’ bedrooms,” further explained a high-ranking officer in the task force, who asked that his name not be printed due to the sensitivity of his investigative work. “The gun was outside the bedroom, in a closet crawl space.”
Mr. Strong, an ex-con who had just gotten off parole, is now facing a slew of drugs, weapons and child endangerment charges. His lawyer declined to comment for this story.
His arrest is the latest in an East End Drug Task Force investigation that stretches back to May 2013 and has netted over a dozen arrests thus far — with more expected.
The investigation included undercover agents, confidential informants, hidden surveillance cameras and the tapping of cell phones. It involved police from across East End departments, as well as county and state police, the sheriff’s office and personnel from the federal Drug Enforcement Agency and Homeland Security Investigations.
All were focused on what Mr. Spota and his lead investigators described as an open-air drug market, the likes of which they had never before seen, outside a long-vacant house at 29 Lewis St. in Riverhead. Locals had come to call the building “The Carport” due to its most distinguishing, yet sagging, feature.
Of those arrested so far, Mr. Spota and his investigators say four are confirmed members of the Bloods street gang, though attorneys for two of the accused deny the alleged gang affiliation.
After requests for a sit-down with the DA about police actions at Lewis Street — first reported by the News-Review in November, when details were still scant — Mr. Spota and two of his top investigators agreed to meet with News-Review editors at his Hauppauge offices Monday.
During the meeting, Mr. Spota also shared video clips from hidden surveillance cameras that appear to show two separate drug deals taking place outside the vacant house.
“It looked like the Fourth of July every day, there were so many people,” Mr. Spota said of the scene on Lewis Street. “It was just 24 hours a day, right in the middle of the streets they were dealing drugs. Police were being foiled by associates of the drug dealers who were blocks and blocks away. As soon as the cops came into the development the word went out, so by time the police got there the only thing there was the drugs, remnants or whatever. They would just take off.”
Riverhead Police Chief David Hegermiller soon signaled for the task force to initiate an investigation, the culmination of which came in November, when four warrants were executed in three days, including a Wednesday afternoon raid on Nov. 5 at the Lewis Street house, which is owned by a former attorney for the Town of Southold. That warrant execution was followed on Nov. 7 by three early morning raids at houses on Doctors Path and Union Avenue in Riverhead, and a home on Pine Court in Northampton. It was at Pine Court that police found Romaine Hopkins, 32, who, while not a known gang member, had the requisite connections to the Bloods gang, which had control over the ramshackle Lewis Street property, Mr. Spota said. There, he was allegedly able to sell drugs — mostly crack-cocaine and heroin — out in the open. The DA and the investigators noted, however, that violence would occasionally erupt over that turf among people with Bloods ties.
Reached this week, Mr. Hopkins’ lawyer, Anthony Scheller of Central Islip, said his office needed more time before he offered any specific comments about his client’s case.
“Obviously, he’s presumed innocent until they prove him guilty,” Mr. Scheller said. “We’ve got some investigating to do. But he’s engaged to be married, he supports his children, he has three children with his fiancée, and that’s about it right now.”
In one of the videos released this week, investigators identified Mr. Hopkins as the person who appears to be breaking up drugs atop a vehicle parked in the area that was being surveilled; it also appears that cash changes hands. In the second video, a pair of hands can be seen measuring out an estimated 25 to 30 grams of crack cocaine sitting on a folded $5 bill, which is on top of a digital scale.
Investigators declined to identify the people they believe are in that second video.
Mr. Spota said the drugs that were making their way to Riverhead and Southampton towns were coming from Harlem via Terrell Latney, 35, of Mastic. Mr. Latney was charged with third-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance, according to the DA’s office.
“The chain of command was Latney, from Harlem, to Hopkins” and others, Mr. Spota said.
Mr. Hopkins’ connections to the Bloods gang included, among others, Kotarra Jackson, a 32-year-old Riverhead native who was living in Mastic at the time of her arrest, according to the DA’s office.
“She claims to be the number one female, the highest-ranking female Blood in the State of New York,” Mr. Spota said. “Whether that’s accurate or not, we don’t know, but she certainly is up there, there’s no doubt about it.”
Ms. Jackson has served time at the Albion Correctional Facility, a women’s prison in Orleans County, for drug sales and possession, state records show. She has been charged with fourth-degree conspiracy, a felony, and is being held at the Suffolk jail on $50,000 cash bail or $100,000 bond.
Her attorney, Harry Tilis of Bohemia, vehemently denied that his client touts being a Bloods member.
“That’s what they claim, not what she claims,” said Mr. Tilis. “That’s not what they said at arraignment. They put it out there as their information. The issue is whether there is sufficient proof on the DA’s side [to prove the charges], and it seems that if they’re rushing to the newspapers, then something is amiss, don’t it? It’s puzzling to me.”
He declined to comment further, saying, “That’s why we have courts.”
In total, Mr. Spota’s office released the names and arrest details of 10 people — others had been arrested by police in November, though some of their names were not released — who were nabbed in the six raids that resulted from the investigation. The first warrant was executed on Oct. 31 in Mastic, where police recovered two long guns — a shotgun and a .50-caliber rifle — pills and marijuana from a residence, according to the DA’s office.
The names released this week also included Kenneth Belcher Jr., 27, William Brown, 28, and Anton Mack, 24, all of Riverhead. Mr. Spota’s office indicated that all three men are confirmed Bloods members. All three were charged with criminal sale of a controlled substance and criminal possession of a controlled substance.
Police had also arrested Madison Murrell, 33, of Quogue. He pleaded guilty Feb. 3 to attempted criminal possession of a controlled substance and is expected to be sentenced to two years in prison, according to the DA’s office.
Mr. Mack’s court-appointed lawyer, David Geller, said it was too soon to comment on specifics of the case, but shed doubt on the claim that his client was a Bloods member.
“I certainly haven’t seen any proof that he’s a member of any gang,” he said. “The DAs have a habit of saying everyone’s in a gang.”
Quandol Lewis, 30, of Riverhead, was arrested in the raid at the Northampton home where Mr. Hopkins was arrested in November.
His lawyer, Lori Hulse, also a deputy town attorney in Southold and a local school board member, said her client “has no relationship at all with that [Lewis Street] address.”
She pointed out that of the 10 different types of charges being leveled against the people named by the prosecution in connection with the Lewis Street investigation, her client is facing only two charges: fourth-degree conspiracy and criminal possession of a controlled substance in the fourth degree. He was released without having to pay bail.
“He’s been a resident [in Riverhead] for a long time,” Ms. Hulse said of Mr. Lewis. “He clearly isn’t being characterized in the same manner as some of the other people.”
Investigators said police were called to the Millbrook Gables neighborhood 122 times in about a year leading up to the arrests and that 78 of those calls were directly related to 29 Lewis St. They said neighborhood children were frequently exposed to an open-air drug market.
“Every morning a [school] bus would stop across the street from that residence,” said Frank Guidice, a top investigator in the DA’s office. “And in the afternoon it would drop the kids off.”
Mr. Spota on Monday also displayed a photo of a man on the building’s front lawn waving what appears to be a TEC-9 semiautomatic handgun, with about six other people standing nearby. The DA said those pictured included children.
“Here are the kids,” he said while holding up the photo, taken from a surveillance camera.
The Lewis Street house is owned by former Southold Town attorney Greg Yakaboski, who told the News-Review in November that he had “lost track” of the property after a “rental situation went bad.”
“It was a classic situation where we had bad tenants a couple years ago,” said Mr. Yakaboski. “Everything went south from there.”
The house was then boarded up by Riverhead code enforcement after unsafe conditions were found inside.
Mr. Spota said his office has not had contact with Mr. Yakaboski.
A former longtime resident of the often troubled Millbrook Gables neighborhood, between East Main Street and Route 58, said this week that she blames absentee landlords in part for the area’s problems. She called on the town to do a better job of cracking down on them.
“We have quite a few houses that have been rehabbed, and new houses,” said the woman, who still has family in the neighborhood. “They need to check on the rental houses, period, because it’s not just our neighborhood. Code enforcement needs to check them more and when they give a summons, they need to check on them again.”
Of crime and other quality-of-life issues, she said it’s not just the people who live there.
“It’s people coming in,” she said. “That’s part of the problem.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Spota said he expects the East End Drug Task Force to make more arrests in relation to the Lewis Street investigation. The task force is a coalition of law enforcement agencies operating within Suffolk County’s five eastern towns. He said 2014 was its busiest year ever, going by arrest numbers.
Of Mr. Strong’s arrest last week, Mr. Spota said, “the wiretap led us to him.”