ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, November 13, 1996 TAG: 9611130068
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER
Peter Coley doesn't dispute that he was the manufacturer of much of the country's PCP during his heyday, but he insists he hasn't been that big a supplier lately.
"I was tempted by the fast lane of the early '80s. I couldn't resist," the Los Angeles resident explained in Roanoke federal court Tuesday. "The drug dealing wasn't exciting. The life was."
When he got out of prison in late 1994 after serving time on PCP charges, that life - and its financial benefits - drew him back, he said.
It will cost him his freedom for nearly the rest of his life, as Chief U.S. District Judge Jackson Kiser sentenced the 39-year-old to more than 41 years in prison. Kiser decided against a life sentence, he said, because he believes there is a benefit to giving inmates "a ray of hope." With good time, Coley could be released when he is 74.
While his attorney quibbled over the government's estimates of Coley's manufacturing, he admitted that even by Coley's estimates, his sentence would still fall in the 30-years-to-life range of federal sentencing guidelines.
Coley was prosecuted in Roanoke after he and co-conspirators were seen heaving trash bags laden with PCP sludge - the byproduct from the manufacturing process - off a bridge in Charlotte County into a stream last spring. That began the investigation by federal drug agents in Virginia that led to Coley, who already was under investigation by police and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in California.
The amount of sludge found indicated that it came from a batch big enough to make 4 million doses of PCP, Assistant U.S. Attorney Don Wolthuis said. "The human impact simply cannot be comprehended, let alone measured," he said.
Coley got into the PCP business in the late '70s, investigators say, but didn't become big time until his cousin, a one-time government chemist, showed him how to make the drug in large quantities. Before that, PCP manufacturers didn't have the expertise to make big batches, DEA Special Agent George Hughley said.
With that knowledge and his distribution routes to the East Coast, Coley became known on the street as the "godfather of PCP," according to police. He may have been the largest manufacturer in North America of the hallucinogen known as "angel dust."
After his arrest and that of his co-conspirators in South Central Los Angeles last year, the availability of PCP and its precursor chemical dried up in that area, the "epicenter" of PCP manufacturing for the country, Sgt. Robert Baker of the Compton, Calif., police department said Tuesday.
Coley worked as an informant for the DEA beginning in 1991, when he was arrested on PCP charges in Arkansas. He testified against former associates in Chicago and gave police information about plans for gang ambushes of police in Los Angeles, possibly saving police lives, according to testimony. In exchange, his 16-year sentence was reduced to about three years and he was released in late '94.
He told the DEA he would continue to work with them and introduce an undercover agent to a money-laundering ring, Hughley said. Hughley soon discovered that Coley had slipped off to Washington, D.C.
Coley offered to cooperate with the government this time, but the DEA and U.S. Attorney's Office declined. Federal prosecutors in Washington, however, are interested in talking with him.
Wolthuis called Coley a "master manipulator" and urged Kiser to give the career offender a life sentence.
The last time Coley cooperated, Wolthuis said, "He gave up a few of his enemies and earned the good favor of the government, resulting in a profoundly reduced sentence that put him on the street, where he was able to reactivate his empire."
Coley's group acquired the necessary chemicals in California, mixing up the first stage of PCP there, then driving the chemicals to Virginia, where the process would be completed in a house near Appomattox.
Coley's girlfriend, Denise Charlerie, 28, was sentenced to five years in prison Tuesday for her part in the conspiracy, as Coley's wife watched from the back of the courtroom.
Charlerie is accused of renting cars, trucks and trailers to haul chemicals across the country and of buying a house in Charlotte County to be used as a PCP lab. In January 1995, authorities seized $73,000 from Charlerie at the Los Angeles International Airport.
Coley maintained a distribution point in Washington, D.C., from which he would fill orders for 10 to 20 gallons of PCP at a time and be paid more than $50,000 a month, according to the indictment and his cousin's testimony Tuesday. Each 10-gallon lot of PCP is equal to "tens of millions of dosage units," according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.
Coley also pleaded guilty to disposing of hazardous waste without a permit for polluting the Charlotte County creek. Kiser fined him $10,000 on that charge.
Two of his cousins - Reginald Booker, a former chemist for the Food and Drug Administration and DuPont, and Ivery Yelverton - also pleaded guilty in the conspiracy and will be sentenced this month. They were arrested transporting chemicals to make PCP across the country, stashed in a U-Haul trailer filled with used furniture. Another man from California, who bought the restricted chemicals needed to make the PCP, also has pleaded guilty and will be sentenced later.
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