Drug kingpin Petties gets life
Apologizes for decisions he made
Dressed in tan jail scrubs, drug-ring leader Craig Petties smiled at his relatives as deputy U.S. Marshals led him to a holding cell, where loudly clanking chains could be heard as they prepared to take him away to serve a life sentence in federal prison.
U.S. Dist. Judge Samuel “Hardy” Mays sentenced Petties to nine life sentences to run concurrently. There is no parole in the federal system.
Minutes earlier, Petties stood before the judge and turned to face his family and then Lucy Turner, whose son was kidnapped, tortured for days and murdered by drug-ring members. Petties had erroneously believed Marcus Turner, a smalltime drug dealer, could lead them to a thief who snatched $4 million in cocaine from an organization stash house.
Petties, who admitted to having a role in four murders, smiled and said, “To my family and to the victim’s family, I apologize for the decisions I’ve made in life.”
After the sentencing, Lucy Turner said, “He was smiling and seemed relaxed. It was weird.”
Petties, who began selling drugs as a teen in the Riverview neighborhood of South Memphis, emerged as the ringleader of the organization and a broker for a Mexican cartel, routinely shipping millions of dollars of cocaine from Mexico into Memphis and other Southern cities, often on FedEx trucks.
More than 40 members of the ring have been prosecuted in Memphis.
When it was her turn to speak, Turner — a retired West Memphis police and fire dispatcher — said of Petties, “He has damaged so many lives.”
She said when she drove her 11-year- old granddaughter to school before court, the sixth-grader asked, “You going to court for that man that killed my daddy?” Turner told her, “It’s the one who ordered it.”
Turner, who now has custody of the child, explained that this will put an end to her dozens of trips to the courthouse in the decades-old case. She sobbed with joy. “We can go visit him today at the grave and tell him what happened. I feel so much relief.”
Petties pleaded guilty in 2009 to 19 charges, including the murders of a drugring enemy and friends he thought had doublecrossed him. He was initially indicted in six area murders. A member of his inner circle recently told prosecutors Petties ordered other murders carried out in Mexico.
After the sentencing, U.S. Atty. Ed Stanton held a news conference, praising prosecutors David Pritchard and Greg Gilluly, who worked on the case for years and secured guilty verdicts and life sentences for the two Petties members who demanded trials.
“This has been a long case, a tough case,” Stanton said. “It’s what we believe is the largest case of its kind not only in the Western District of Tennessee but in the state of Tennessee.”
The case began when Memphis police arrested Petties with a large amount of marijuana in 2001. The lives of the two lead investigators were threatened, but police detective Therman Richardson and Abe Collins, a special agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said they would do it again.
They foiled at least four murder plots, including one in which the hit man had already been paid.
Richardson, who went undercover to buy drugs from the organization in 2005, joined the DEA task force assigned to the Petties case in 2006. He credited Scott Leary, then an assistant U.S. Attorney in the Memphis office, with supplying critical momentum in the case. “Scott Leary was very aggressive and that allowed us to make significant strides in taking down this organization,” Richardson said.
Turner has been a reliable presence in court since her son’s murder in 2006. “David (Pritchard) and Detective Richardson held my hand the entire way,” Turner said. “They stood by my side.”