A repeat Wilkinsburg heroin dealer who won a rare acquittal in federal court last year along with his son was convicted Wednesday in another major drug case involving the prison system.
A federal jury deliberated about 90 minutes before convicting Omari Patton, 44, on five counts of trying to obtain and smuggle drugs into the U.S. prison system for himself and another inmate.
Patton’s son, Dashawn Burley of Monroeville, had pleaded guilty in the case this week.
Trial evidence established that while an inmate at the federal lockup at Fort Dix, N.J., in 2018, Patton directed his son to mail envelopes to him at the prison and to send other envelopes to another inmate at a prison at Ray Brook, N.Y.
All the packages were disguised to look like legal mail from a lawyer, but the lawyer was bogus, and the envelopes contained paper saturated with a synthetic cannabinoid called K2.
Patton and Burley went on trial last March in connection with the prison drug ring. Both were acquitted. Trials are relatively rare in federal court and acquittals even more rare; the conviction rate in the federal system is about 95%.
But a few months after that defense victory, the pair were indicted again on similar charges. The grand jury also indicted Ross Landfried of Moon and another man, David Curran of Pittsburgh, on counts of possession of K2 and attempting to obtain K2 while in prison from 2017 to January 2019.
Ross Landfried is the brother of the convicted prison drug ringleader, Noah Landfried of Moon.
Patton, Burley, Curran and the Landfrieds were among 27 people indicted in 2019 on charges of dealing drugs across Western Pennsylvania and inside the prison system. The members smuggled drug-saturated paper for inmates to smoke or chew to get high.
Inmates paid for the paper with their prison accounts, with the money transferred from those accounts to the accounts of inmate dealers.
Patton was already well familiar with large-scale drug investigations. He was once part of the largest drug ring ever prosecuted in Western Pennsylvania as an underling to Oliver Beasley and Donald Lyles in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The two ran a huge cocaine and heroin operation. When it was dismantled, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft came to Pittsburgh to announce it.
The Landfried brothers also have a history with large-scale trafficking. Both were convicted in federal court in Illinois and sentenced to prison in 2010 for shipping more than 2 tons of marijuana from Mexico into Pittsburgh.
Patton and his son will be sentenced in June. Patton remains in custody. Burley is free on bond.
Torsten covers the courts for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Reach him at jtorsteno@gmail.com.
