Rayful Edmond III, the long-ago drug kingpin whose army of dealers and mountain of profits made him a symbol of the District’s murderous crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s, has been moved from a federal penitentiary to “community confinement” and is set to be released late next year, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons said Thursday.
Edmond, 59, has been behind bars since his arrest in April 1989. Initially sentenced to life in prison with no eligibility for parole, he became a government informant during his decades of incarceration, providing an “unparalleled magnitude … of cooperation,” a judge wrote in 2021 in significantly reducing his sentence.
Now the city’s bygone “king of cocaine,” as he was dubbed, appears to be inching closer to freedom, with “a projected release date” of Nov. 25, 2025, the Bureau of Prisons said.
A lawyer for Edmond did not return calls seeking comment Thursday.
In a statement, the bureau said Edmond was transferred Wednesday to “community confinement” under the supervision of the agency’s Nashville Residential Reentry Management Office.
The Nashville office is responsible for “providing oversight to halfway houses in Kentucky and Tennessee,” according to its website. The bureau declined to say where Edmond is being confined.
“Community confinement means the individual is either [in] home confinement or a Residential Reentry Center,” meaning a halfway house, the statement said. “For privacy, safety, and security reasons, we do not specify an individual’s specific location while in community confinement.”
Edmond, who was convicted of federal drug-trafficking charges in D.C. and sentenced in 1990, oversaw a sprawling operation that smuggled as much as 1,700 pounds of cocaine into the city each month in the latter part of the 1980s, authorities said. They estimated that Edmond raked in about $2 million per week in those years.
The huge profits available in the crack trade spawned open-air dealing in many areas of the District back then, with competing street crews guarding their turf — and encroaching on others’ territories — through nightly gunfire. As D.C.’s annual homicide toll climbed sharply in the late 1980s and early 1990s, peaking at nearly 500, the city acquired the nickname “America’s murder capital.”
The epidemic of crack dealing and bloodshed ravaged communities all over the country. Edmond himself, though, was never found guilty of any violent crimes.
During his years of imprisonment, authorities said, Edmond cooperated extensively in investigations of drug and homicide cases in the District and elsewhere. In return for his help, federal prosecutors in D.C. asked a judge in 2019 to modify Edmond’s sentence of life without parole, allowing him to someday go free.
“I am very remorseful,” Edmond said at a 2019 court hearing on the government’s motion. It was the first time he had apologized to D.C. residents for the wave of addiction and violence he helped bring to their city. “I am sorry for everybody I hurt, for everybody I disappointed,” he said. “If I ever get the opportunity, I will do my best and whatever it takes to make up for all of my crimes.”
Prosecutors sought an adjusted sentence of 40 years, but U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan went further in his 2021 ruling, reducing Edmond’s sentence to 20 years. While Edmond’s “involvement in the criminal enterprise damaged this community deeply and resulted in the destruction of the lives of many individuals,” Sullivan wrote, the “unparalleled magnitude” of his cooperation warranted a significant reward.
At that point, Edmond already had been behind bars for nearly 32 years, far more time than his new 20-year sentence. But he had another sentence waiting to be served: 30 years in federal prison for dealing drugs in the U.S. penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pa., while he was an inmate there.
Edmond’s lawyers asked a federal judge in Pennsylvania to reduce that pending 30-year term so it would be covered by the extra time that Edmond had served on his modified sentence in the D.C. case.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Harrisburg, Pa., on Thursday declined to comment on Edmond, referring questions to the Bureau of Prisons. In its statement, the bureau said that Edmond’s effort to have his sentence reduced in Pennsylvania was successful and that his remaining period of incarceration can be measured in double-digit months.
“He has now served over 35 years in federal custody,” the statement noted.
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