One of the leaders of a drug ring that shipped heroin from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh was sentenced this week to more than eight years in federal prison, joining the co-leader from Penn Hills behind bars.
U.S. District Judge William Stickman IV gave Sean McHenry, a repeat felon from the North Side, 100 months.
His criminal cohort, Trevon Kendrick of Penn Hills, is serving 13 years.
The pair had been indicted in 2019 along with 17 others, including the son of one of the largest drug dealers ever prosecuted in Western Pennsylvania, following an eight-month wiretap investigation by an FBI-led task force.
McHenry, 29, had pleaded guilty in August to conspiracy to distribute heroin from September 2018 through October 2019.
A team of agents and police began investigating the ring in the summer of 2018, and task force officers started conducting controlled buys from McHenry in September of that year.
The FBI later obtained wiretap authorization for members’ cellphones, including three phones used by McHenry.
He was intercepted on those taps orchestrating distribution of heroin throughout the Pittsburgh region.
As the case proceeded, agents learned that McHenry and his criminal associates were shipping in large amounts of heroin from a Philadelphia source, Carlos Regalado.
Regalado, who spoke only Spanish and used an interpreter to talk to Kendrick, made multiple trips to Pittsburgh on Greyhound buses to deliver heroin, which the ring stored at stash houses on the North Side, the South Side and in Brookline for distribution.
During the investigation, agents and police seized McHenry’s Ford Expedition on April 6, 2019, at his girlfriend’s house in McKees Rocks and recovered 50 bricks of heroin and handgun ammunition. After that seizure, McHenry was intercepted on a wiretap asking his girlfriend if the truck had been towed because he “had [expletive] in there,” meaning his heroin and ammo.
The FBI arrested McHenry at a residence on Jean Street on Oct. 24, 2019, and searched the house, recovering a brick of heroin from behind a toilet in an upstairs bathroom and some 50 bricks in the toilet. Prosecutors said McHenry was trying to flush the evidence when the FBI and police showed up. Agents also recovered a handgun from some woods near the house, where McHenry had thrown it, and $1,000 from his underwear.
Numerous other members of the drug ring have gone to prison, among them Donald Lyles.
Lyles is the son of Donald Lyles of the North Side, who with his partner, Oliver Beasley of Penn Hills, ran a massive drug ring 20 years ago that was large enough to bring then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft to Pittsburgh to announce the arrests in 2002 in a case dubbed “Operation Family Store.”
In the current case, the junior Lyles served as the coordinator for Regalado’s drug trips to Pittsburgh. He is serving 70 months in prison.
Torsten covers the courts for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Reach him at jtorsteno@gmail.com.
