Wire actress, caught by wiretap, pleads guilty over heroin
Felicia “Snoop” Pearson, 31, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute heroin, a day before her trial was set to begin.
Judge Lawrence Fletcher-Hill accepted the plea, suspending a seven-year sentence with credit for time served and ordering three years of supervised probation with provisions for out-of-state travel for work.
The plea allows Pearson to move on with her acting career, instead of spending more than a year with charges hanging over her, attorney Benjamin C Sutley said outside the courthouse.
“I can’t say she would have been found not guilty,” Sutley said. But Pearson interrupted, saying: “I would have been found not guilty.”
Pearson was one of 64 people charged in March in Operation Usual Suspects.
The federal indictment states that since 2008, members of the conspiracy bought heroin from New York and marijuana from California and sold the drugs on the streets of Baltimore.
Pearson was caught on a wiretap conspiring with Shawn Johnson and Jeff Gibbs, who bought heroin in bulk from New York and distributed the drugs in Baltimore, prosecutor Rebecca Finn told the court. Johnson paid Pearson to store drugs and money, including drug proceeds, at her apartment.
When another member of the alleged conspiracy was kidnapped by rival dealers, Johnson told him to go to Pearson’s apartment to get money to pay a ransom. Police interrupted the abduction outside Pearson’s apartment and found heroin in the abducted man’s car. Pearson occasionally sold heroin for Johnson, Finn added.
Some of the people involved in the wider case helped take care of Pearson when she was a teen, but she has now “learned a valuable lesson about how some loyalties you keep and others drag you down”, Sutley said.
Pearson said she knows everyone in Baltimore. Asked how she’ll avoid falling into the same situation in the future, Pearson said: “I’m moving to LA”
The Wire ran from 2002 to 2008 and was filmed in Baltimore, shining a light on the city’s struggle with poverty and drug violence.
This was not Pearson’s first brush with the law. She was convicted of second-degree murder in a slaying committed when she was 14. She served five years and was released in 2000.
