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In the opening days of a long awaited trial in Connecticut’s biggest federal drug-ring takedown, an alleged mastermind is on the stand — but not on trial.
He goes by the name “White Boy Chris.”
Meanwhile, a friend of one of the lower-level dealers actually on trial watched the proceedings Tuesday and called the whole case a “witchhunt” — in which a down-and-out dime-bag slinger faces 20 years in jail while “the guy with pounds of weed and three houses” prepares to cut a better deal.
The trial is unfolding this week in Judge Ellen Bree Burns’ second-floor courtroom in New Haven’s U.S. District Court, where Michael Thompson and Tylon “Bucky” Vaughn are fighting drug conspiracy charges.
Theirs is the first trial to come out of “Operation Bloodline,” the federal criminal sweep that resulted in 105 arrests in May, 2012.
Federal officials claimed that in Operation Bloodline they took down a sprawling group that dominated New Haven’s crack trade. The 18-month investigation by New Haven cops and federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents included 22 tapped phones. The resultant busts centered on the Tre Bloods gang, based in the Dwight-Kensington neighborhood and allegedly responsible for deadly violence in that area.
But based on testimony in the first two days of the trial, the guy responsible for bringing in kilos of cocaine from New York City, FedEx-ing pounds of marijuana from California, and shipping oxycodone pills hidden in stuffed animals from Florida didn’t live in Dwight-Kensington. His home, which has since been seized by the feds, was on a quiet street in tony Upper Westville, a block from the mayor’s house.
That man, Chris “White Boy Chris” Morley, has pleaded guilty to his own conspiracy charges and is now the government’s star witness in the case against Thompson and Vaughn.
On the stand on Tuesday, Morley told the jury how he established and developed a massive drug-dealing operation with his partner, a man known as “Big Baby,” who has also pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges.
Morley, the feds’ big fish, is trying to get off the hook somewhat by helping prosecutors reel in Thompson and Vaughn, his former Wilbur Cross high school classmates. Thompson and Vaughn, lower down in the organization than Morley, face up to 20 years in prison each, while Morley could see a lighter sentence because he’s cooperating with investigators.
Lawyers for Thompson and Vaughn, meanwhile, are seeking to show that their clients were either uninvolved in the drug ring, or just small-time dealers, not mastermind conspirators who deserve to be in federal court.
Morley, for now, walks free while Vaughn and Thompson have been behind bars since their arrests in May 2012. Morley was able to put up the cash to bond for his release while he awaits sentencing.
The U.S. Attorney’s office has been criticized for its handling of Operation Bloodline prosecutions, the slow pace of which defendants argue has deprived them of their rights.
“Unscrupulous Activity”
Morley, who’s 35, took the stand Tuesday afternoon wearing khaki pants and a blue zip-neck sweater. Under questioning from Assistant U.S. Attorney Marc Silverman, he explained how he entered a life of crime at the age of 12, and how, in his late 20s he set up a drug operation with $10,000 seed money from his stepfather.
Morley built his operation into a “one-stop shop” for drugs and stolen merchandise, according to Erik Ndrenika, the DEA agent in charge of Operation Bloodline. Morley had as many as 46 different bank accounts, through which he filtered about $2.5 million in drug money, Ndrenika told a grand jury during the investigation.
Prosecutors Tuesday played some of the thousands of phone calls they recorded as part of Operation Bloodline, featuring some drug trade slang and some bickering between drug dealers who began to suspect a snitch was in their midst. The calls also reveal how a bulk customer can return drugs when he doesn’t like the quality: It’s not a matter of saving the receipt, but of having the right “clothes.”
Morley grew up in Newhallville. He started selling stolen merchandise with his stepdad at flea markets when he was still in middle school. He later moved into selling drugs, then insurance fraud and bail-bond fraud, he said.
In 2005, he went to prison on multiple counts of larceny and forgery. When he got out, in Dec. 2006, he returned to selling drugs. When his stepdad gave him 10 grand, Morley went to New York City with Big Baby — whom he’d known for seven or eight years — and bought a half-kilo of cocaine.
Morley and Big Baby brought the coke back to New Haven, and Big Baby cooked it into crack. Morley told the jury how to make crack from cocaine on a stove-top, using baking soda and boiling water. You can also make it in a microwave, he said, but stove-top crack is preferable because the process reveals impurities.
Starting in December 2006 and until their arrests in May 2012, Morley and Big Baby ran an ever-expanding drug-dealing operation. Morley would put up the money to buy and store the drugs; Big Baby would get the cocaine from New York. They’d cook some of it into crack, known as “hard,” and sell some of it as powder, known as “soft.”
Morley estimated he moved about 40 kilos of cocaine during those years, about 10 kilos of which was converted into crack.
Eventually Morley and Big Baby branched out into weed and oxycodone pills, known as “blues.” Morley sent a friend to California and established a connection for marijuana. He’d have pounds of it sent by FedEx from San Francisco to his unwitting grandmother’s home on Alston Avenue in Westville
Morley got the oxycodone — in 30 milligram pills — from a guy in Florida with whom Morley set up joint bank accounts. Morley would deposit money in Connecticut and his connection would withdraw it in Florida and buy oxycodone. He’d hide the pills in stuffed animals and send them to Morley’s grandmother’s house in Westville.
Morley said he and his Florida connection had a total of 13 or 14 bank accounts together. Banks kept shutting them down for “unscrupulous activity.”
Meanwhile, Morley had a day job at a North Haven car dealership. With drug money, he’d buy cars on auction then re-sell the cars, effectively laundering the dirty cash.
He rented a house on Quinnipiac Avenue, which he used as a “stash spot,” a place to process and store drugs. Morley also bought a house on Curtis Avenue in Upper Westville, paid for with drug money.
Morley said he and Big Baby eventually moved away from selling cocaine, when the quality of their supply went downhill.
Silverman, the prosecutor, played a tape of a call between Morley and Big Baby, recorded in Sept. 2011, in which the two complain about the poor quality of a recent bulk cocaine purchase from New York. They had ended up with less weight after cooking it down, a sign that the drugs had been mixed with filler to add weight.
In the call, Big Baby told Morley that the New York dealer wouldn’t take back the drugs because they weren’t in the original “clothes,” the distinctive kilo-wrappers that prove where the drugs came from. Dealers have a way of marking the clothes with a symbol, or using a distinctive style of wrapping, as a way of preventing people from passing off other drugs as their own.
Morley told Big Baby that the New York connection was giving them a line of “bullshit,” that you have to take off the clothes to weigh the cocaine properly on the “clock,” the scale.
The feds would later find some of those “clothes” when they raided the Quinnipiac Avenue house on Feb. 11, 2012, along with a cash-counting machine, for stacking and bundling bills for drug runs to New York City.
In those same Feb. 11 raids, police intercepted 16 pounds of California weed that had been delivered to Morley’s grandmother’s house.
That same day, Cops found Morley at his home on Curtis Avenue, along with $50,000 in cash hidden around the house.
Prosecutor Silverman asked Morley what happened to the house.
“You guys took it,” Morley replied.
The Godfather
In court on Tuesday, Silverman asked Morley about Vaughn and Thompson, and played recordings of their telephone conversations. (Click here for a story detailing pre-trial questions raised about the wiretapping in this investigation.)
Here’s how Morley claimed Vaughn was involved in drug dealing:
Morley met Vaughn during their freshman year at Wilbur Cross. They’d been friends ever since. “I’m the godfather of his oldest child,” Morley said.
Vaughn sold small quantities of crack for Morley, usually about an “eight-ball” — 3.5 grams — per day. He also sold cocaine and marijuana.
Vaughn and Big Baby used to fight over drug debts. Sometimes Vaughn would end up getting beat up by Big Baby, who stands well six-feet tall and weighs about 300 pounds, according to Ndrenika, the DEA agent.
Vaughn tried to work around Big Baby and deal directly with Morley. In phone call on Aug. 20 2011, Vaughn asked Morley to “put me in a position off this block.” Vaughn wanted to move up in the organization, to stop “selling $20 bags” on the corner.
Morley demurred, and told Vaughn he needed to stop gambling away his earnings, stop “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” and start saving. Vaughn chuckled and said “you know me like a book.”
Here’s how Morley claimed Thompson was involved in drug dealing:
Morley and Thompson also met as freshman at Wilbur Cross. In 2010, they reconnected when Morley gave Thompson an ounce of cocaine to sell “to help him get on his feet.”
Morley continued to front and sell drugs to Thompson, from a couple hundred grams of coke up to half a kilo or a full kilo.
Thompson wasn’t reliable about paying Morley back for drugs he got on credit. Morley calculated Thompson owed him a total of about $64,000 for drugs he’d fronted to him. At about $40 a gram, that’s over 1.5 kilos worth of cocaine, not including whatever cocaine Thompson actually paid Morley for.
Prosecutor Silverman played phone calls between Morley and Thompson, which Morley deciphered for the jury. In one, in October 2011, Morley complained of a terrible toothache while Thompson complained that 500 grams of cocaine had cooked down to only about 450 grams of crack, indicating that the cocaine wasn’t very pure. In another call from the same month, Thompson asked for more oxycodone, saying he had people calling him looking for more pills.
“Where the blues at?” Thompson asked on the phone call, as the feds listened in.
Obama And Vaughn
During a lunch break in testimony Tuesday, John Barry, who said he’s a childhood friend of Vaughn’s, called the entire Operation Bloodline a “witch hunt.”
He said cops used the operation to “lock up all the small-time hustlers,” like Vaughn. Barry called Vaughn a “nickel and dime guy” who “sleeps place to place” with no fixed address, and can be heard on the DEA tapes arguing over as little as $5. (Another defendant, Jameel “Biggs” WIlkes, made the same argument in this Independent interview.)
“That’s a witch hunt,” Barry said, “when the guy with pounds of weed and three houses — he gets a deal?”
Vaughn, meanwhile, was dealing only dime bags, and now faces 20 years, Barry said. It comes down to racism, the same reason President Obama can’t get Congress to pass any laws, Barry said. Black people are just 13 percent of the general population, but make up a far larger percentage of the prison population, he pointed out.
It’s that way, “for the system to work,” Barry said. “It’s the United States.”