Prison kisses lead to charge
Woman accused of passing coke to inmate
Before he cut a murderous path across Milwaukee, Antonio Smith was selling drugs inside a Wisconsin prison, getting cocaine from his girlfriend who smuggled it into prison by hiding it in her bra and then passing it to him as they kissed. Smith’s longtime girlfriend, Kim Stelow, is charged with felony delivery of cocaine for her role in an operation that Smith ran inside the Green Bay Correctional Institution in 2013 and 2014, according to a criminal complaint.
Stelow, who used the nickname “Pepper” and “Snow Bunny,” is due to appear on the charge Sept. 8 in a Milwaukee County courtroom. If convicted, the 36-year-old Kaukauna woman, who has a child with Smith, faces 25 years in prison.
The complaint details an elaborate drug operation that Smith ran while he was serving time for selling drugs in Outagamie County in 2010.
Prison officials determined Smith was running the narcotics ring and transferred him to a maximum security prison for a year as punishment, according to state corrections record. But
Smith was never charged.
The case was referred to the state Department of Justice. Agency officials confirmed they reviewed Smith’s role in the drug ring but refused to release details about the case, saying doing so could jeopardize another ongoing investigation.
When Smith was released from prison in early 2015, Stelow was the one who picked him up, records show. Five months later, Smith shot and killed Eddie Powe on a Milwaukee street in a dispute centering on drug debts and jealousy over girlfriends. In an effort to erase any witnesses to the crime, Smith executed 17year-old Breanna Eskridge eight days later.
And then from inside the Milwaukee County Jail, Smith arranged for another witness, John Spivey, to be bailed out, kidnapped and killed in November 2015. Investigators detected the plot and swept Spivey to safety.
Smith’s girlfriend, Shantrell “Peanut” Lyons, who like Stelow was pregnant
with Smith’s child, was arrested and charged in the plot. Also charged were Smith’s nephew and a hitman Smith met while in jail.
It was an example of witness intimidation — and elimination — that is plaguing the criminal justice system in Milwaukee County, where the number of such cases has climbed by 250% in the past decade, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation found.
Smith, 35, pleaded guilty to the homicides and the plot in the middle of a long-awaited trial earlier this year. Stelow testified at Smith’s trial.
Smith later tried to withdraw his plea, but the judge denied it. Smith was sentenced to two life terms without a chance for parole. He has vowed to appeal.
Smith’s violent criminal history reaches back to when he was 12 and held up a woman and her son outside a Wauwatosa video store. He has spent most of his adult life locked up. In 2011, he was sentenced to four years in prison for running a drug operation in the Appleton area. Smith, who has deep roots in Chicago, has run criminal enterprises from Illinois to Milwaukee and up to the Fox Valley for years.
He is currently being held at Green Bay Correctional Institution, the same prison where he earlier was dealing drugs.
Case started with tip
In 2013, an investigator with the state Department of Justice learned from an informant that Smith was selling cocaine and marijuana in the prison in Green Bay. According to court records, here’s how it worked:
Smith would line up prisoners who wanted to buy drugs. Those buyers would arrange to have money orders or cash sent to a post office box. Stelow would collect that money and buy drugs from Smith’s connection in Milwaukee.
Stelow then smuggled the drugs into the prison. She put the drugs inside a balloon and tucked the package in her bra. Once inside the prison, she took it out. Then she transferred it to Smith by kissing him.
Stelow later told investigators she did this five times and delivered “a bunch of drugs” to Smith.
Stelow set up the post office box under her own name along with her nicknames of “Pepper” and “Snow Bunny.”
Postal officials reported that all of the mail to that box was from prisoners and much of it was cash and money orders. They knew this because Stelow asked about missing mail and told post office employees she was getting money orders and cash.
Prison officials confirmed Smith’s role as head of the drug ring through recorded phone calls, according to prison records released to the Journal Sentinel.
In March 2014, agents arranged for an informant to buy drugs from Stelow in Milwaukee. Police watched as Stelow sold what turned out to be 27 grams of cocaine to an informant near a Dollar Tree store on N. 76th St. and W. Capitol Drive. They later confirmed her fingerprints were on the cottage cheese container containing the drugs.
Eighteen months later, agents searched Stelow’s apartment in Kaukauna and found the SUV she
was seen driving the day of the drug deal on Capitol Drive. They also found a white Chevy Tahoe in her garage, which matched the vehicle in which Smith was seen leaving the scene of the Powe homicide earlier that year.
It is unclear from the complaint the reason for the gap between the drug deal by Stelow in 2014 and her arrest in February 2016.
Two months after she was questioned by agents, Stelow received a letter from Smith in which he references the prison drug-dealing ring. He wrote that he had been questioned by federal authorities about the matter, which he called an “alleged” drug operation. Smith said he refused to talk and take a deal because “any deal will obviously involve me implicating those who I care about, one being you!”