Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 28, 1992 TAG: 9203280279
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Robert Eugene "Dickie" Cotton received the sentence Thursday in Roanoke Circuit Court.
Cotton, 56, has earned a reputation among Roanoke law enforcement officers as one of the more heavily involved players in the city's criminal scene.
"I think he has the worst record of anyone I've ever seen," regional drug prosecutor Melvin Hill said.
Cotton's criminal career began in the late 1940s, when he was a teen-ager, and includes charges of murder, rape, malicious wounding, abduction, assault, theft, robbery and drug dealing. Some of the more serious charges, including a 1979 murder charge, were dismissed.
Court officials say Cotton has been shot and stabbed almost as many times as he has been charged. Most recently, a woman he had thrown out of an unlicensed bar last summer returned to shoot him in the leg.
"If Dickie hasn't done the crime, he's been the victim of it," his attorney, Vince Lilley of Salem, said.
Cotton, a white-haired man who walks with a limp from an old gunshot wound, has long been a fixture in Roanoke courtrooms and on the city's most crime-ridden streets.
"If he didn't do it, he might know who did," Lilley said.
He was a regular on Roanoke's "Yard" in the 1960s, when the Henry Street area was a hotbed of drug dealing and other crime. More recently, he moved to another hot spot - 11th Street Northwest.
Not long after Cotton was paroled from prison in late 1990 on drug charges, police began to suspect that he was selling heroin from a bar on the 600 block of 11th Street.
In May 1991, he was charged with nine counts of conspiracy and distribution of heroin. He pleaded guilty in December to four charges; this week, Circuit Judge Diane Strickland sentenced him to 20 years.
Cotton testified Thursday that he got back into the drug business only as a way to support his ailing, wheelchair-bound mother. He said he turned to selling heroin when he did not initially receive the Social Security disability benefits that he had applied for.
He told authorities that once the checks started arriving, "I quit that s---."
Although Cotton told Strickland that he doesn't want to die in prison, Hill had asked that he receive a 60-year sentence. "He knew, perhaps better than anyone else, what the consequences were of selling drugs," the prosecutor said.
***CORRECTION***
Published correction ran on MAy 20, 1992.
Clarification
An article on March 28 stated that Robert Eugene "Dickie" Cotton, who was sentenced in Roanoke to 20 years in prison for distributing heroin, had an extensive criminal record that included a charge of rape, but that some of the more serious charges were dismissed. The rape charge was one that was dismissed. Also, the story quoted court officials who said Cotton has been shot and stabbed. Cotton says he has never been stabbed.
Memo: CORRECTION