‘Chucky,’ ‘Shrek’ and the ‘beautiful’ meth: How the cops wiped out a Macon drug ring
It all hinged on a snitch.
Or in the lingo of the DEA, a CS or “confidential source,” someone whose identity is so veiled in court documents that the person is not referred to as he or she, but rather as it.
Such secrecy can be vital when it comes to infiltrating and dismantling drug-dealing operations. Even ones where transactions are sometimes arranged while the top dog, who goes by the nickname “Chucky,” is at Walmart having the oil changed in his Chevy Tahoe; the same criminal mastermind who stashes his crystal-meth supply at his sister’s house in a VCR.
In early April 2019, word reached the feds that Richard Charles “Chucky” Allen III — released from federal prison five years earlier after serving roughly a decade behind bars for his role in a Middle Georgia drug-dealing conspiracy — was up to his old tricks.
In the words of federal prosecutors, Allen, back home in Macon, “had begun selling methamphetamine again.”
At his sentencing in August 2006, Allen, now 45, had told a federal judge that he wanted to apologize.
“Your honor,” he said, ”I’ve been messing with these drugs since the age of 15 years old, and for the past six years since 2000, I’ve been addicted to methamphetamine. Everything that I’ve done ... I wasn’t rationally thinking.”
Allen said he realized he had to pay the price for his crime.
“I’m sorry for anybody’s lives that I ruined with the drugs that I was out there selling,” he said, adding that he hoped there was still “enough time” for him to get out of prison and one day “change my life the way it needs to be.”
But at some point after his release in 2014, Allen got back in the drug game, and business was good.
‘Looks beautiful’
In early 2019, Allen was dealing a pure form of meth known as “ice.”
He sold it for anywhere from $300 to $350 an ounce.
On numerous occasions, he peddled it from a vinyl-and-brick-sided house where he was living in southern Bibb County. The place faces Houston Road near a small lake along a stretch of former farmland between Echeconnee Creek and a pet cemetery.
The DEA’s informant said Allen also sold drugs from his sister’s home four miles away off Allen Road.
A week after learning of Allen’s enterprise, the DEA put the confidential source to work. A series five of “controlled buys” were arranged over a span of three months. The source, outfitted with a tiny audio-and-video-recording device, was given money to, an ounce or two at a time, buy nearly half a pound of drugs from Allen.
One day in late May 2019, according to court documents filed this summer, Allen dropped by the informant’s house unannounced. Allen said his girlfriend was in the hospital and that he would be out of town a few days. Allen said he wanted the informant to have an ounce of his product while he was away, gratis — at least until the informant could pay him back.
What the DEA and local investigators really wanted to know, though, was the identity of Allen’s supplier.
In August 2019, five months after being tipped off by the informant, the DEA obtained a court order for wiretaps and began listening to Allen’s cellphone calls.
On Aug. 20 that year, Allen brokered a meth deal with a man who investigators soon learned was an inmate in a Georgia prison. It is not unheard of for narcotics suppliers, those who run afoul of the law, to keep on dealing when they’re sent to prison.
“They’re conducting business as usual,” a law enforcement source said, “but from a different location. Even though they’re locked up, they’re still active and invaluable.”
With cellphones rampant in prisons, there isn’t much stopping entrepreneurial inmates from acting as go-betweens, connecting street-level dealers with suppliers.
With the feds listening in, Allen contacted an imprisoned intermediary and set up a deal. Allen then spoke to his courier and sent him by car to the northeast side of Atlanta to pick up a kilo of meth at the upscale Oakwood Vista Apartments in Norcross.
Allen’s courier, Joshua Z. Noojin, 40, pleaded guilty in March to possession-with-intent-to-distribute charges in connection with the scheme. Noojin was sentenced in July to serve just over 10 years in prison.
It was Noojin’s trips to metro Atlanta for drug pickups in the latter half of 2019 that helped the cops zero in on Allen’s suppliers.
For not only were the cops listening, they were tailing Noojin.
According to court documents, during one of the first trips the DEA knew about, Noojin drove a black Lexus to the Norcross apartments and parked near some trash bins. Two guys soon walked up. One, who was toting a shoe box, got in the car with Noojin and then stepped out without the box.
It wasn’t clear how much the kilo had cost, but Noojin drove off and informed Allen by phone that the meth “looks beautiful.”
‘Everything was good’
The next known drug run that Noojin made was in early September 2019.
He drove a silver Chevy Impala to pick up 3 kilograms of meth from the same supplier. The asking price: $14,400.
Allen said he wanted Noojin to negotiate it down to $14,000, but whether that happened was not noted in court documents. All that was mentioned in the court papers was that Allen and Noojin talked “shortly afterwards and Allen asked Noojin if he got ‘it,’ to which Noojin replied in the affirmative.”
The night of Sept. 6, the feds intercepted communications between Allen and another supplier — another man doing time in a Georgia prison.
The man was later identified as Cristian Estrada-Santa Maria, who goes by the nickname “Strada” and was doing 30 years at Wheeler Correctional Facility for trafficking meth in Gwinnett County.
Allen arranged for a 1-kilo deal to go down in the parking lot of a Walmart near an Olive Garden in Marietta. The next day Allen texted “Strada” that if “everything was good” Allen would be purchasing “two to three kilograms of methamphetamine” a week from “Strada.”
Federal drug agents were there waiting.
On the afternoon of Sept. 7 when Noojin parked in front of the Olive Garden, a black Mercedes with a woman at the wheel pulled in beside him. A man with a grocery bag got out of the Benz carrying a white grocery bag and sat down in Noojin’s car and emerged less than a minute later minus the bag.
Then Noojin drove across the shopping plaza and stopped near a Foot Locker store.
“Noojin went into Foot Locker,” court documents note, “and was then intercepted telling Allen that everything looks good and he was going to buy some shoes.”
When Noojin returned to his car, federal agents swooped in. They searched his car and, in a black sack on the floorboard, found a gallon Ziploc bag with a kilo of meth in it.
At about the same time, cops in Macon searched Allen’s home on Houston Road and also his sister’s house on Taylor Drive. They also searched a nearby home on Allen Road where an associate of “Chucky” Allen’s named Wayne “Shrek” Tisdale lived.
At the Houston Road house, according to court documents, investigators found “baggies and digital scales in the living room.” They searched the safe in his bedroom and found 9.42 grams of “ice.” At the Taylor Drive home, cops seized 19.59 grams of meth stashed in a DVD player in a closet.
At Tisdale’s house, cops found what they described as “small amounts” of meth and also noted in his plea agreement that he had bought drugs from Allen on four occasions in the weeks prior. In July of this year, Tisdale pleaded guilty to possession with intent to distribute meth and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
“Strada” received a 20-year sentence after pleading guilty to possessing meth with intent to distribute the drug for his part in the “Chucky” conspiracy. His involvement was confirmed after agents obtained a voice-sample recording from him and matched it to a taped call with Allen where they arranged a September meth deal.
Allen, meanwhile, pleaded guilty to a meth-distributing charge for his role as the director of the Macon-area trafficking ring. He was sentenced to more than 18 years in prison.
At his sentencing in federal court in mid-August, Allen cited a motorcycle wreck he was in after his release from prison as the impetus for going back to dealing.
Federal officials note that he was under supervision from the federal probation office, both before and after his wreck, and that the probation office tried to provide him services to stay on the straight and narrow.
But court records show that less than a month after his supervision period ended, “Chucky” returned to selling meth.
This story was originally published August 30, 2021 at 5:00 AM.