Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 14, 1995 TAG: 9506140090
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Roanoke high school athlete Alfonzo "A.D." Ward was voted most likely to succeed by his graduating class - and for a while, he was the best in his field.
The prosecutor called him the biggest drug dealer in Roanoke - until he was caught as part of a massive crack-and-guns investigation called Operation Roundball.
Tuesday, the 25-year-old, who led a guns-for-drugs operation with New York connections, was sentenced to federal prison until he's 41.
"He's a person who squandered his opportunities," Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Baer said. "He took advantage of his popularity to rise up as a big drug dealer."
A 1989 graduate of William Fleming High School, where he was a two-sport standout, Ward was a potential Division I football recruit. But he failed to score above 700 on his SATs and his chances of going to a big school dimmed. So did his aspirations, according to his family.
His sister and mother tell the story of a boy who ignored the temptations of the street while growing up in the projects because he was focused on sports and his education. But after the playing opportunities and scholarship offers dried up, Ward ran out of money and had to drop out of the small college he was attending.
"It's tragic the way the schools used him for his basketball and football ability and then threw him out like a used rag after his eligibility ran out," his sister, Toni Ward Belton, wrote the judge. "The system failed to prepare A.D. for anything other than basketball and football. This was a tragedy for A.D. All he ever wanted to do was go to school."
Ward testified at his sentencing Tuesday that he got involved in selling crack because he needed money to go back to college.
But after a while, "I lost sight of the goals I set for myself," he said. "I didn't see myself making it. I was scared of what I might become, and under the circumstances, it happened anyway."
Ward faced life in prison without parole, but because he cooperated with the government in the case, he was given a break. Baer asked that Ward be sentenced to 25 years in prison, and his plea agreement said Ward couldn't ask the judge for less than 18 years.
But U.S. District Judge James Turk went below that and sentenced him to 16 years and eight months, followed by five years' probation. The judge also ruled that Ward could not afford to pay a fine, but that he should work in prison and send money home to his two children, ages 3 and 4.
"This is a difficult case," Turk told Ward. "You're a smart young man, you've got a lot of good qualities, you have a caring family. It's hard for the court to understand how you got involved to such an extent."
Although Ward's family said his dealing began after his college hardships, a grand jury found that Ward started traveling to New York regularly to buy crack in the summer of 1989, right after he graduated from high school. At the time, the highly addictive cocaine product was just starting to reach Roanoke.
By the following spring, he was visiting New York twice a month buying crack and later began transporting guns to trade for the drug. Baer said Ward was responsible for distributing 10 kilograms - which equals 22 pounds - of crack in Roanoke and transporting between 25 and 50 guns.
"When you put that much drugs and that many guns on the street, you're a very dangerous person," Baer said. "For a year and a half to two years, he was the main drug dealer in the Roanoke area."
Ward was one of the last of about 50 defendants sentenced in the case, aside from a few who remain fugitives. He was indicted on numerous charges and pleaded guilty to two in an agreement with the government: conspiracy to commit firearms violations and of being the manager and organizer of a continuing criminal enterprise.
|n n| Ward grew up in the Lincoln Terrace neighborhood as one of nine children raised by a single working mother. Ruth Ward couldn't afford to give her kids many luxuries, but instilled in them values and the importance of an education, the family told Turk.
"He didn't know about the world beyond Tenth Street, where people lived in single-family homes and didn't have five families sharing a clothesline," Ruth Ward wrote the judge, asking for mercy.
"There was no phone or car, so his only exit to the other world was through school. Each summer of his high school years was spent working in fast-food restaurants. When his friends laughed at his meager paycheck compared to what they were making, I prayed he wouldn't get mixed up in what I suspected they were doing, yet at the same time I knew I was on borrowed time."
Ruth Ward, surrounded by family, had to leave the courtroom several times during her son's sentencing to compose herself.
Her daughter, Toni Ward Belton, testified about her little brother's life.
Belton, also a William Fleming graduate who attended college on a partial basketball scholarship, said she has received a scholarship and will soon enter Harvard University as a doctoral candidate.
She hoped A.D. would see her as an example of how education could pull someone out of poverty. Growing up in inner-city Roanoke, she said, "it's like you're doomed from birth. I was raised with the same values A.D. was. In a moment of weakness, it could have been me."
A.D. lived with Belton in Northern Virginia one summer to get away from Roanoke and worked at a Roy Rogers fast food restaurant.
"He came home and looked around and said he wasn't going to get stuck there like a lot of his friends," Belton testified. Her mother took out loans to buy A.D. a car "so he wouldn't be tempted by what was going on around him."
The prosecutor, however, said Ward was accumulating expensive cars and had titled an Acura in the name of another sister and a BMW in his girlfriend's name. His popularity as a high school athlete gave him "the ability to pull people into his organization," Baer said.
"All my life I've been trying to dodge trouble," Ward testified.
"But you ran headlong into it, didn't you?" Turk replied.
by CNB