After a three-week trial, LeClainche sent jurors into deliberations to consider 21 separate criminal charges that could have put Eighty-Six behind bars for the rest of his life. Most serious was a charge that he conspired to distribute 11 pounds of coke worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The jury, however, surprised investigators and prosecutors. The panel found Eighty-Six guilty of only three drug charges stemming from the lost-police-report incident and from a minuscule amount of coke found in his truck the night he was arrested. The jury found him guilty of possessing exactly 0.77 grams of coke -- less than the weight of a paper clip. The jurors also convicted him for those two boxes of bullets that agents found in his townhouse. But the verdict seemed like a failure for the two-year investigation, for West Palm police, and for the DEA's crack Mobile Enforcement Team.
Elroy Phillips and his ex-girlfriend, Stephanie Ann White, became known on downtown West Palm Beach streets as Eighty-Six and Little Red
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More articles on Elroy Phillips:After a Decade in Prison, Man Proves His Innocence -- Only to See Inaction From Courts, June 16, 2011
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Don't Believe Elroy Phillips Is Innocent? Read the Evidence He Collected Yourself, August 3, 2011
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Elroy Phillips Dug Up Evidence From Prison, but He Still Might Not Get a Chance to Prove His Innocence, August 4, 2011
• Elroy Phillips, in Jail on a Charge He Says He Can Prove Is Bogus, Will Get Day in Court, September 21, 2011
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"In This Place, Everybody Is Hopeless," Says Prisoner With Evidence to Prove He's Not Guilty, August 3, 2011
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Speaking by phone from prison, Eighty-Six says he became the main target because he was the only one arrested who didn't blame others. He claims West Palm agents Kapper and Ghent made up the August 2001 sale. "They got all the cops to come in and say I'm the bad guy so that I'd be the snitch," he says. "They done it with everybody else. The only reason I got 30 years is because I wouldn't snitch on everybody else. That's how they done me."
Six days after the judge sent Eighty-Six to prison, West Palm police called the city's top politicians to their Rosemary Avenue headquarters for an unrelated photo op. In a conference room across from the front desk, television cameras set up in front of city commissioners, Mayor Lois Frankel, and Police Chief Ric Bradshaw. They stood next to two billboards filled with booking mugs. The pundits came to applaud a police sting called "Operation Street Sweep" that accounted for 74 arrests in the city's open-air drug markets. Those arrested included two crooks nabbed twice because they got out of jail so fast.
But after the politicians submitted to their on-camera interviews and filed out of the room, police Capt. Dennis Crispo admitted that the busts wouldn't do much to the drug market. In fact, Crispo came clean that even the arrest of Eighty-Six didn't do a damn thing to slow the flow of coke. "Unfortunately, they fill in rather rapidly," Crispo admitted. "Eighty-Six, now he was a bad ass, so at least we got that dangerous element off the streets."
The conviction of Eighty-Six, either a victory in the war on drugs or an example of a failing campaign, won't be remembered long. After appealing his sentence, Eighty-Six is waiting to hear if the higher court will consider his case. Besides his bleak future, there's no other benefit to the government's war against him. Even those who supposedly ran the business with him will be back on the streets soon. After her testimony, prosecutors agreed to let Little Red out of prison. She completed just six months of her two-year sentence. Not long after, she came up positive for cocaine during a pee test required for probation, landing her back in prison for three months. It's not clear what happened to the $9,600 the feds gave her, which was supposedly to help her relocate; she was still living in Palm Beach County when she was arrested for violating her probation. Prosecutors filed paperwork in August to have Pumpkin's sentence reduced. He's awaiting a ruling by a federal judge, who could allow him to walk in exchange for his testimony.
As for the drug hole on Eighth Street where Eighty-Six allegedly ran his 200-rock-a-day business, police say it's back to being simply a rundown apartment complex. There's a "for rent" sign outside now for an apartment above the one where police say Eighty-Six sold his rocks. You'd think there might be an opening in town too for a new druglord, but West Palm agent Kapper admits that's already been filled. "All we're gonna do at best is slow it down," he says. "By the time we put someone away, somebody's already taken over. We're not going to do anything about that."
A week after Eighty-Six's conviction, the harshness of his sentence would be plainly highlighted. In Miami, a federal judge imposed sentence that day against Fabio Ochoa, who in the late 1990s was shipping up to 30 tons of coke to the United States every month. The U.S. Attorney's Office called it South Florida's "most significant narcotics prosecution." His sentence: 365 months -- just five months more than Eighty-Six faces.
