‘Muscle’ in meth pipeline sentenced
ALBANY — On the crime drama “Breaking Bad,” 50-year-old chemistry teacher Walter White turned to a life of selling crystal meth after being stricken by cancer.
Three years ago, Roderick “Chop” Meskell made the same ill-fated career decision at around the same age after his wife of 20 years left him for another love interest, according to his defense attorney.
On Tuesday, Meskell’s decision came with a very real cost: Seven years and three months in federal prison at his sentencing in U.S. District Court in Albany. The 53-year-old man had served as the “muscle” for a Californiato-capital Region crystal methamphetamine pipeline moving two to three pounds east a month, prosecutors said.
In court papers, Danielle Neroni, the attorney for Meskell, asked Senior U.S. District Judge Glenn Suddaby to impose time already served for Meskell,
who has been incarcerated since his arrest on Nov, 3, 2020. Meskell, known as “Chop,” who has lived in Sacramento and Saratoga Springs, previously pleaded guilty to conspiring to sell the powerful addictive stimulant.
Neroni told the judge her client had been a businessman but that his life took a downturn after he learned that his wife was cheating on him. The attorney said Meskell then got into a serious traffic crash which put him in the hospital for several months. When the pandemic hit, she said, his nephew and future co-defendant approached with what he described as a business opportunity.
“Mr. Meskell regrets his decisions, but he made them,” Neroni told the judge.
Prosecutors described Meskell, a father of at least four children, as an indispensable member of a drug crew that obtained pure crystal meth produced by Mexican drug cartels and smuggled into the country. The operation, headed by Meskell’s nephew and co-defendant, Ali Hassan Ahmed III, 24, and which included third co-defendant, Jordan D. Lopez , 23, known as “Vintro,” shipped the product east, in part, through the U.S. postal service, between June 2020 and October 2020.
Ahmed alone would later admit that he made at least $128,000 in proceeds from the drug sales. But their ring was thwarted after the FBI and Saratoga County sheriff ’s office noticed an increase in methamphetamine trafficking in Saratoga County in June 2020. The FBI, using an undercover FBI agent posing as a drug customer, repeatedly purchased meth from the ring in a Clifton Park parking lot beginning on July 13, 2020.
During the first undercover purchase, Meskell approached the undercover agent’s car, informed the clandestine sleuth he was not just dealing with “youngsters” and explained that Meskell had been “teaching” younger associates the business of meth trafficking, prosecutors said.
“Simply put, without the defendant’s efforts to assist Ahmed in transporting the methamphetamine ... and acting as supervising ‘muscle’ for the (drug ring) in terms of training junior members and collecting payment from redistributors, the (ring) would not have been able to function,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Emmet O’hanlon told the judge in a pre-sentencing recommendation.
O’hanlon said Meskell aided his nephew, in part, by driving the meth from California to Saratoga County, where the outfit kept a stash house for the drugs in Saratoga Springs. And the prosecutor said Meskell at times made threats of violence.
“Specifically, the defendant carried various weapons, including golf clubs, a baseball bat, and a Taser to intimidate others and collect funds owed to the (drug trafficking organization),” O’hanlon stated. He said that during one meeting with a lower-level drug dealer, Meskell swung a baseball bat, batted rocks with it and told the dealer: “This is what we do to fools.”
After learning that one member of the ring was selling drugs without the knowledge or approval of the ring, Meskell described to Lopez his “specific thoughts about killing Lopez, specifying how he thought about strangling him, suffocating him, or shooting him, specifying the person from whom he would obtain the gun,” O’hanlon told Suddaby.
Meskell pleaded guilty in June 2021 to selling and conspiring to sell 50 grams or more of methamphetamine.
Lopez and Ahmed have both pleaded guilty to conspiring to sell methamphetamine. Lopez was sentenced to six-and-ahalf years in prison in January. Ahmed will be sentenced in September.