Drug ring players receive heavy prison terms, fines
Eighteen persons involved in a major distribution operation supplying illegal drugs in four states will spend nearly a century in prison.
The Polk County Drug Task Force and the Polk County District Attorney’s Office announced today that 18 individuals will serve a combined total of 83 years in prison and pay nearly $2 million in fines following their arrest in a July 2015 drug bust.
A total of 28 people were arrested during the July 29, 2015 bust that took several “major players” out of the Southeastern illegal drug market. Of those 28 arrested, 18 of those were recently adjudicated and sentenced.
According to Drug Task Force spokesman and Cedartown Police Chief Jamie Newsome, the bust was a result of an investigation spanning several months and cooperative, hand-inhand local and state law enforcement work. “This meth distribution hub, centered in Polk County, served as a network that supplied drugs to Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama. This hub produced multiple pounds of illegal drugs and filtered $90,000 worth of transactions per week,” Newsome said.
Newsome said the most notable sentences and fines resulting from the bust included those of Michael Hackney, sentenced to 30 years to serve 10; Ulises Borja, sentenced to 39 years to serve 30 and fined $1.4 million; Alejandro Pineda, sentenced to 30 years to serve 10 and deportation after sentence served; Jada Howard, sentenced to 30 years to serve 10 and fined $200,000 and Christian McMordie, sentenced to 30 years to serve 15 and fined $200,000.
District Attorney Jack Browning said that the successful prosecution of the case was the direct result of the outstanding teamwork between the Polk County Drug Task Force and his office, which worked together on a daily basis, from the initiation of the investigation through preparing the cases for trial.
“The dedicated officers who invested countless hours to the investigation, and the ongoing daily briefing and stra- tegic planning meetings between our office and the Polk Drug Task Force, are what ensured the successful prosecution of the case. Polk County, and the Northwest Georgia area in general, became a little safer place with the dismantling of this organization and with the sentencing of these drug distributors to lengthy prison sentences,” Browning said.
The bust in 2015 also resulted in the seizure of two properties, multiple firearms, five vehicles and $13,000 in US currency. The property and money seized as a result of the bust has since been used as funding for the Drug Task Force.
“All law enforcement leaders in Polk County take the drug problem seriously and cases such as this demonstrate and prove what we can achieve when we all work together,” Newsome said. “Cases like this call for great commitment and sacrifice on the part of these agents and I commend them all for their dedication to duty. This particular case used physical surveillance, electronic surveillance, and wire taps which were extremely important to the case but requires a significant commitment of manpower resources.”
The Polk County Drug Task Force and the Polk County District Attorney’s Office would like to thank the Cedartown Police Department, the Polk County Police Department, the Rockmart Police Department, the Polk County Sheriff’s Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Chattooga County Sheriff’s Department.
‘This meth distribution hub, centered in Polk County, served as a network that supplied drugs to Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama. This hub produced multiple pounds of illegal drugs and filtered $90,000 worth of transactions per week.’
Jamie Newsome
Cedartown police chief