Heroin dealer, who sold a mix called ‘Predator,’ sentenced to decade in prison

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Pittsburgh police responding to the overdose death of a man on April 17, 2015, didn’t have to look far to find his dealer.

Romel Wilson’s phone number was in the man’s cell phone, prosecutors said, as well as a series of texts indicating Wilson, a repeat North Side felon, had sold him heroin mixed with fentanyl the night before.

A detective then posed as a customer, set up an undercover deal on a North Side street and arrested Wilson. Before the bust, Wilson had warned the detective that his heroin was potent and that one of his female customers “went out” — overdosed — while he was talking to her on the phone.

Even after the arrest he wasn’t done dealing, police said.

Out on bond, he was indicted by a federal grand jury that December and a federal judge signed an arrest warrant. Detectives set up another undercover buy. This time he showed up to sell them crack cocaine.

So it goes in the daily battle against heroin dealers on the streets of Pittsburgh.

But this time Wilson won’t be dealing again any time soon.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Donetta Ambrose sent him to federal prison for a decade. He has four prior felony drug-dealing convictions in state court and never served more than two years at a time, always returning to dealing when he got out. But penalties in the federal system are much stiffer: There’s no parole and no hope of an early release.

Wilson, 34, had pleaded guilty last April to trafficking in heroin, fentanyl and cocaine base.

At the time of his arrest in 2015, the North Side was overrun by overdoses attributed to fentanyl-laced heroin stamped with the label “Predator.”

When detectives arrested him in the first undercover operation, they said he sold them bags of heroin with that stamp.

The U.S. Attorney’s office said Wilson, while not charged with drug delivery resulting in death, kept dealing despite knowing his product was causing overdoses.

His public defenders, Akin Adepoju and Andrew Lipson, argued for leniency. They said that although Wilson has been in and out of prison, he is also a father of two, worked regular jobs and sold drugs as a means to support his own substance abuse.

“He has been a fairly typical low-level opportunistic dealer who funded his own habits,” they wrote in a sentencing memo.

But prosecutors said he’s a career dealer who didn’t care whom he hurt and contributed to the heroin crisis.

“Our society has the right to engage in self-defense,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig Haller in sentencing papers. “Incarceration is societal self-defense against those who, like Mr. Wilson, refuse to stop committing crimes. There is absolutely no excuse for distributing substances that kill people and leave their families in misery.”

In addition to the prison term, Wilson will be on federal probation for six years.