October 30, 2024 • 33 mins
In 1979, the Vermont State Police received a tip about a group of drug traffickers moving massive amounts of drugs through Vermont. Part of the operation was focused on the small farmhouse that Brandon deWilde had once owned, next to Suntreader Studios. The State Police set up a massive surveillance operation before busting the traffickers in what was described as the largest drug bust in Vermont history at that point. The ensuing legal drama and its aftermath created one of Vermont's most wanted men. Find out more from two retired members of the Vermont State Police as well as neighbors and people who lived in the area at the time.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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When you find yourself traveling along an old dirt road in your town, or even in a place
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you've never been, try to imagine the things that have happened there and who might have
lived there.
The dirt road you're thinking of might be treeline, bordered by thick forests and hills
with swamps on either side.
Or maybe it stretches off forever in a straight line through a dusty desert.
Your imagination probably doesn't take you to actors, rock stars, and even drug traffickers.
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But there's a reason they say truth is stranger than fiction.
My name is Anthony Cerdelli.
I'm a journalist.
Well, a sports journalist living in Southern California.
I'm about to tell you a story about the dirt road in Vermont that I grew up on.
When I found out the truth behind the urban legends about this small part of Sharon, Vermont,
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the place where I spent a lot of my childhood, my mind was blown.
This is True Stories from an Old Dirt Road.
So far we've covered Academy Award nominated Brandon DeWilda and what he did when he owned
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my house in Sharon in the 1960s.
After that, I told you the story of the music studio that would later move in next door,
Sun Treader Studios, and its impact on the music industry, which included the recording
of the hit Fog Hat song, Slow Ride.
Unbelievably there's more.
Among the older Sharon residents, the next event is probably the most well known.
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Still, since it happened, it's receded back into the memories of the people who heard
about it and experienced it.
That it I'm referring to is a drug bust, a massive one, that went down in the spring
of 1979.
At the time, it was the biggest drug bust in the history of Vermont, depending on who
you ask.
The after effects of this drug bust rippled out for close to two decades and made one
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of Vermont's most wanted men.
There may or may not also be buried treasure involved.
And it all happened, once again, at the house my parents would buy just six years later
in 1985.
To tell this chapter of the story, I'm going to introduce a few important people.
The first is retired Vermont State Police Major Robert Valley, who was a corporal at
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the time and one of the members of the state police overseeing the investigation.
The next, Nicholas Ruggiero, is a retired trooper who was a member of the surveillance
team staking out the drug operation.
Then we have some familiar names from previous episodes.
My old neighbor Dennis Mason, another former neighbor of mine Michael Livingston, Jareese
Bergstrom, co-founder of Sun Treader Studios, and Barry and Sarah Clark, the tenants who
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rented the house right after the drug bust.
You won't hear from any of the drug traffickers involved in this story because I struck out
trying to reach them.
Despite my best efforts, everyone involved either ignored my calls or was otherwise unreachable.
If you hear this and you're a drug trafficker involved in that 1979 drug bust in Sharon
Vermont, please reach out to me.
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You can find my contact info in the show notes.
In addition to my interviews, a lot of this information comes from the investigation report,
which I was sent by the Vermont State Police after making a FOIA request.
Our story begins with Valley, who was a member of the Vermont State Police Special Investigations
Unit.
The unit was helping a friend of Valley's, a fraud investigator with the state police,
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on surveillance in a white-collar case.
That investigation produced a significant lead.
We ended up working this case with him and doing some things and ended up arresting this
man that was a fugitive from a drug case outside of Vermont who'd been living here under assumed
identities and so forth.
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And that's how we happened on to him through that accounting case, if you want to call
it that.
In the debriefing of that person, since I was working with my friend, I started looking
at some of the materials that we found when we arrested him.
It included some notebooks and things that I was able to, working back some of the intelligence
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on the data, could see that it appeared to link to people that we might know from our
intelligence.
And it was through that informant development and actually debriefing him, talking to him
further about what he knew.
He had been in the drug business, he had picked up some drugs from places.
Well, you've probably read all the reports that show that aspect of things.
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But anyway, through that person in contact, he provided enough information that we could
independently verify about locations and people, and some of which we already had some awareness
of but not to the specificity of this person actually being involved with getting drugs
from the people.
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According to the investigation report, the informant told the state police he had purchased
500 pounds of marijuana from a group of people at a home in Sharon, Vermont.
That home was the one my family bought in 1985.
But who were the group of people?
The ringleaders were two 27-year-olds, Roger Dusharm, who according to the investigation
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report was the drug trafficking expert, and David Lace, who was the money guy.
Both were local, one living in nearby Quechie, Vermont, the other in Jamaica, Vermont.
They were assisted by a third man, Gary Butz, also 27 years old of Massachusetts.
Though they were young, they were experienced drug traffickers, according to Valley.
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They had already done boatload cases, transactions prior to us catching them with the stash at
your old home.
So, if you're into boatload operations, Lace had been an owner of a restaurant in the London
area, in Vermont, a place called the Bailey-Rosson House.
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But we were semi-aware that something was happening at the Bailey-Rosson House, but
nothing that we could ever make a case on.
This was prior to the Sharon case.
But they talked about loads going into, when he was running that restaurant, you know,
a place where they stuffed a huge property just full of bales and bales and bales of
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marijuana and stuff like that.
And they dealt in cocaine too.
And so, there's no question there was connection to organize criminal smuggling activity.
My source that put us originally, gave us enough information to work, to identify your
old house.
I mean, he was picking up, you know, 50, 100 pounds at a time to take to places in Connecticut
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and New Jersey and places like that.
So it was, it was basically a trans-shipment place, a storage place.
And then you distribute beyond that.
So usually, they would have runners, you know, take this stuff from the stash house, your
house was a stash house at the time, and then run it out to someplace, some meat point on
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a major highway someplace in New England.
What were your impressions reading the notes and the daily activities?
Like, these people were dangerous or just kind of like, I almost got the feeling a little
bit that they came off as the suspects were enjoying themselves in some points when they
were also interacting with the community and stuff like that.
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From the perspective of dangerousness, no, they didn't evidence that type of behavior
any of the times.
Obviously, when you're involved in high scale drug trafficking, that can always be a consideration.
But this particular group of people, they were going to the UNH at the University of
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New Hampshire together and dropped out of school to get into the drug business.
They were basically, I don't want to call them a bunch of stumble bums either, because
they made a lot of money.
They weren't sophisticated enough.
I mean, at one point in time in debriefing, they made like $750,000 a piece on one of
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their operations.
They went to Vegas and blew most of their money.
They didn't have a lot of sophisticated ideas other than to go and blow the money and have
a ball for a while or buy a restaurant or you know.
They really were entrenched in a way.
They were more like some college kids that just went off on this lark and it lasted for
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all it lasted.
They weren't master criminals, so to speak.
Roger Duchar, in follow up later.
I don't know if that's in the report you read or not, but I remember going to Central Falls,
Rhode Island.
I'd have been with Ted Handoga, but we went down to talk to Roger's father, who was a
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retired corrections officer for the state.
It might have been in Massachusetts, the Worcester area, but Roger came from a family of seven
kids or whatever.
And his father was like, you know, if he's believable and he seemed to be at the time,
he said, you know, we went up there.
We visited him a couple times.
He had an antique business in Vermont in Quechie.
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He had this antique shop and whatnot.
He says, if he ever had any money, he didn't share it with us or the family.
He was actually kind of upset to think that all kinds of money went through the kids hands
over the years.
And, you know, he was just lumpy dumpy running antique shop up in Vermont.
For those who are wondering who Teddy Handoga was, he was the DEA agent liaising with the
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Vermont State Police on the case.
According to the investigation report, the informant alleged that the traffickers used
pickup trucks with camper caps on them to transport drugs to and from the house in Sharon,
which had a barn.
The trucks would pull into the barn, load up and leave.
That information was extremely helpful to Valley and Roy Holton, the other investigator
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leading the case.
Still, they needed proof.
To get proof, they needed evidence.
To get evidence, they needed a warrant.
To get a warrant, they needed probable cause.
And to get that, they needed surveillance.
And that is where things start to get interesting.
Like I said, when I was a kid, once I outgrew catching creatures in our pond or goofing
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around in the woods, I started to think Sharon was boring.
At one point, after we moved to Hanover, I even invited some of my friends back to Sharon
to play paintball in the woods.
It was always fun to imagine we were in some World War II battle or part of some action
movie we'd just seen.
But little did I know, more than 20 years before I did that, there were actual state
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police officers sneaking through the woods in tactical gear, night vision goggles, and
spotting scopes.
The surveillance operation was huge, and that would come into play during the trial.
But more on that in part two of this episode.
This was a pretty extensive surveillance.
Kind of amazing actually, especially after, as I went up through the ranks, I was eager
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beaver investigative type of trooper at the time I did this.
But you know, when I retired, I was a major in charge of one of the divisions and much
more into the bureaucracy and the budget writing of how you do business.
And it was strictly amazing that our boss at the time was a Wesley Newman in the criminal
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division.
It's amazing that we were allowed to have the resources we had to actually pull this
thing off.
And as a matter of fact, I don't know if that's mentioned in the official reports or not,
but we had dubbed it Operation Shoestring.
As a shoestring budget.
Wow.
Yeah, after the case was made, because who knew there was actually going to be a case
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made.
It took quite some time, quite a number of days of surveillance and very expensive operation.
The personnel that were chosen, a lot of times it had to do with their backgrounds and abilities
either in criminal investigation or also being either search and rescue type trainings because
the surveillance teams were going in through the woods in order to not be identified as
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being in the area and so forth.
They were going in with night vision equipment after hours.
It was a pretty interesting thing to do.
And also at the same time, to make sure that those officers that were doing the surveillance,
I had to be sure that we weren't going to be in violation of not having a search warrant
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because we were observing from afar.
The surveillance operation began on March 9th, 1979.
At that point, it was just sporadic surveillance by Valley and Holton and early members of
the investigation team.
They needed to confirm information that had been supplied to them by the informant to
justify the increased surveillance operation.
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By April 24th, the surveillance operation grew.
The investigation report listed a whopping 16 members of the team, all with the Vermont
State Police, who went in teams of two and rotated every eight hours for 23 days.
When retired trooper Nick Ruggiero looks back at his career, being a member of this surveillance
operation stood out.
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It was wild.
Remember what I told you?
My background is I grew up in the Bronx.
And so there I am up in the middle of nowhere in your neighborhood there, dropped off at
midnight with night binoculars so we could get to a spot to get to where we were not
going to be seen by anybody.
So that was a bit of every night.
Plus, you had to be there by midnight.
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I lived in Colchester.
So I had to leave Colchester to get down there to get picked up in that pickup truck to get
dropped off by certain time and I couldn't miss it.
So we're under a lot of pressure to perform what you had to do.
But it was fun from the aspect that was an enjoyable case, putting it together.
What was it like being stuck out there in the spring?
I know it's like one day can be snow, the next day can be raining, the next day can
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be 80 degrees and sunny and there's mosquitoes and blackflies.
What was your what was it like sitting out there in the swamp all night?
You got it.
It hurt some nights.
Some nights you're just sweating and it rained.
But we brought gear with us and we were there for the elements.
And we just laying out in the woods because we wanted to keep an eye on who's coming and
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going from the place because there was a lot of traffic coming and going as we learned.
Here's Robert Valley again.
The teams had to keep a notebook.
I was relying on them to keep some accurate notes and so forth.
And those of us that were going to try to put together the search warrant kind of stuff
afterwards.
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Those field notes eventually made it into the investigation report I read, which is
where I gleaned a lot of the information about what the day to day surveillance was like.
Some of it was pretty mundane, even the observations of the illegal activity.
But then there were some very interesting moments and reading about it in the matter
of fact tone that the troopers wrote in was pretty comical at times.
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You could almost feel they wanted to elaborate more, but they were professionals.
And eventually this is going to be seen by the judge who would issue the warrant.
So they had to keep it PG rated.
First of all, the information provided by the informant and early surveillance of the
house provided some interesting details.
The house is guarded 24 hours a day.
And according to trooper Roy Holton, who led the investigation with Valley, quote, it was
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noted that various guards would be quite nervous late in the evening hours as they would often
turn on the outside lights around the residence for no apparent reason.
Hey, Vermont can be pretty spooky at night, especially if you're doing something illegal.
The day to day operations were what you would expect from drug traffickers who thought they
were alone.
Like on April 25th, 1979, when it was noted that quote, in the early morning hours, 120
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to 415, Ducharme was observed by surveillance as doing paperwork at the kitchen table or
on May 8th, 1979, from 1800 hours to 2240 hours when Ducharme was again observed doing
paperwork and counting money.
Cars pulled up, drivers got out carrying duffel bags and carried them into the house.
Other times trucks with camper caps pulled up and removed or loaded items from the bed
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of the truck.
Sometimes they used nicknames to refer to the suspects because they didn't know them
by name.
Gary Butz was Shadow Boxer.
David Lace was Red Jacket.
Lace's brother Daniel, an associate of the group, was named Big Boy.
Ducharme got the nickname Clean Cut Dude.
When it comes to the more incriminating stuff, I'll leave out the names.
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Like on the evening of the first day of full surveillance, when Corporal Michael LeClair
and Corporal Joseph Miller saw one of the crew, quote, snorting something on the counter
in the house.
Between standing guard at the house and trafficking drugs, sometimes it just sounded like a vacation.
Like later on that first evening when LeClair and Miller witnessed a female associate of
the group, quote, smoking a joint, drinking wine, and on one occasion looks like she's
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mixing drinks.
A large paper bag with a roll of white paper on top is where the last joint came from.
One rainy late April day, one of the suspects went fishing in the pond, something they did
a lot.
Sometimes the surveillance equipment would go haywire, like when LeClair and Miller reported,
quote, note, our surveillance was hampered tonight by equipment failure, spotting scopes
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and field glasses fogged up and surveillance was done without use of the same.
The suspects continued to drink beer and fish as Vermont's sometimes chilly, sometimes
rainy early spring gave way to warmer weather.
Then on April 29th at 615 a.m., two men arrived at the house.
One goes in, then comes out again, grabs a shovel from his Jeep, and the two men walk
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back into the woods.
Could they have been searching for some night crawlers to go fishing?
Maybe, but the report doesn't say they went fishing after.
It also doesn't say they carried anything else into the woods, but it makes me wonder,
what were they digging?
Could they, as the urban legend said, have been burying money or drugs?
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More on that in a bit.
Continuing on, there was more of everyday life in Vermont mixed with drug trafficking.
On April 30th, 1979, two officers observed butts kill a snake with a rock in the front
yard.
As April gave way to May, there's more moving of heavy boxes and duffel bags to and from
cars and of course more fishing and drinking beer.
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This went on in sun, rain, cold, heat, fog, humidity, and as all of us know who have experienced
spring in Vermont, black fly season, the itchiest season of the year.
Corporal LeClair noted on one quiet May evening, quote, no activity except for wild ducks,
beaver, jumping trout, and black flies.
On one cold and windy day, the drug traffickers even mowed the lawn and raked the yard.
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An officer noted in parentheses that it was green up day.
Perhaps the most out of the ordinary observation came on May 7th, 1979 at 1040 in the morning
when on a clear and warm morning, two members of the surveillance team were unlucky enough
to witness the following.
Quote, 1040, male comes out of the house, sits in lounge chair, sun bathes, receding
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reddish brown curly hair, mustache, beard, 160 pounds, 5'11", wearing green shorts.
11 a.m. male of 1040 a.m. masturbates.
1115, cold wind blowing, male goes back inside the house.
I'll leave it at that.
And some kids from the neighborhood showed up on surveillance.
Luckily, not on that day.
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On May 12th, 1979, when two members of the surveillance team described, quote, 1136 a.m.,
two kids, 10 to 13 years, come from Main Road, knock on door, subject answers in gym shorts
and t-shirt, kids go to dock to fish.
As we learned from Dennis Mason, apparently an unnamed member of the surveillance team
grew frustrated with watching so many people fish when he couldn't, especially from where
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they conducted their surveillance.
Hidden away at the far side of the pond.
The one at the head of the dam was very exasperated to watch them fish because they didn't know
how to fish and he did.
Think about that.
For as often as they went fishing and people from the neighborhood visited, no one ever
saw the state police concealed at the opposite end of the pond, with barely anything between
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them but the pond, which is about the size of a football field, and some cattails.
At one point, the team was almost discovered.
At 5 45 p.m. on May 13th, Officer LeClair wrote, Maroon Ford station wagon pulls in
and appears to be only asking permission from Shadow to fish the pond.
Two older guys and a small boy.
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The people in the Maroon Ford wagon just screwed up our surveillance and we had to move out.
The final few days of drug trafficking at the Sharon's Dash House seemed quaint.
There was more fishing, more yard work, playing with the dog and sunbathing in the warm Vermont
spring air.
Still did they know what was about to descend on them?
Well, maybe one of them had an idea.
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Or it was the paranoia brought on by long nights, drug use and isolation.
On May 15th, one of the members of the group who was assigned to watch the Stash House
left and was observed by members of the surveillance team, this time in a car conducting roving
surveillance.
The officers noticed the car had been at the Stash House and surreptitiously followed it
to Brooksies, an old diner that burned down when I was a kid.
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On Brooksies, the man who the surveillance team members said appeared drunk, used a payphone
to call someone and demand to be relieved from his guard duties.
His drunken intuition or the bad feeling he had or whatever it was turned out to be warranted
because a day later, the Vermont State Police decided to execute the search warrant they'd
been working for.
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At 9 p.m. on May 16th, they served their search warrant and arrested Butz, who was at the
Stash House, as well as Dusharman Lace, who arrived together during the raid.
According to the report, after just a few hours, they had found several hundred pounds
of Lebanese hashish.
This importantly is not the town of Lebanon, New Hampshire, which sits just 20 miles or
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so south of Sharon on I-89, but the country.
This distinction caused some momentary confusion for a local judge that the police needed to
sign off on another search warrant.
That was always a kind of a comical thing.
The night that I went over to get this additional search warrant signed from the judge and he
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was staying over at the hotel in New Hampshire.
There wasn't anything in White River.
He stayed across the river in West Lab.
Woke him up in the middle of the night and I had taken one of the slabs of hash with
me and when I was telling him about what details we had legitimizing the search of additional
property, I said, that's a seal of Lebanon on the bag of slab of hashish.
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And he said, right here in Lebanon?
No, Your Honor, not this Lebanon.
Oh, wow.
And he was, you know, I woke him up and he says, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
Which that was Judge Bristow, who actually later became a public safety commissioner
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in Vermont.
With the confusion about which Lebanon the hashish came from cleared up, the state police
impounded cars, arrested other members of the group and set about the daunting task
of counting the drugs and money.
By the time they were finished, it came to a staggering total.
According to the Valley News article covering the bust, the final tally came to five million
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dollars worth of Lebanese hashish and Colombian marijuana and two hundred fifty thousand dollars
in cash.
Obviously, this was a huge amount of drugs and money.
Two hundred fifty thousand dollars in 1979 is the equivalent of over one million dollars
today.
And I'm not even going to try to deduce the value of the hash and weed.
With legalization, maybe it would be worth less.
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Who knows?
It's still a lot.
But according to Valley, finding drug operations this big in Vermont actually was becoming
a problem.
Had there been some cases this size in Vermont in your time?
It's out of the ordinary in the sense that I've worked a number of cases since that time.
We were aware that Vermont was always a very good place for large scale traffickers to
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come and secrete themselves, so to speak, because of the nature of the state.
There's a lot of rural areas.
The nature of people in Vermont are such that there's people that come in here with large
amounts of money or unexplained wealth.
And Vermonters that are local to the area don't really question that.
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They're kind of accustomed to that.
A number of people want privacy or they're not really that interactive with the locals,
perhaps.
But nobody's really become suspicious of that in Vermont because it's kind of the way it
is.
It's right in the center of New England where within a few hours' time you can be within
New York City, Boston, Montreal, Providence.
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You can be in all these major metropolitan areas.
So it's a very good place for people to come and do criminal activity and be out of the
limelight.
So we were aware of that kind of thing and we had intelligence from time to time and
worked with other state agencies around New England when some of their actors would be
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using Vermont as a place to either do business or, for example, we had another, which I helped
the DEA with, another case with a guy that was a major manufacturer of LSD and PCP in
New England.
But they do some of the cooking in places like rural camps in Vermont or when we arrested
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this particular person, he was arrested over in the White Mountains in New Hampshire where
they were cooking at that time.
So, you know, the major actor actually lived outside the Rutland, Vermont area, had a family
there and nobody ever questioned how he made his money.
Whatever.
You can always say you're a consultant, you're into stocks, you're into whatever.
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So where did all the money and drugs go?
It's pretty easy to follow in the investigation report.
With that much money and drugs, the Vermont State Police took great pains to maintain the
chain of custody, especially when it didn't just come from the house in Sharon.
Rogero pulled over one of the suspects and found a load of cash.
We pulled them over and we asked them whose car it was.
No, it's not my car.
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He walked away from it on the back road there in Sharon.
And when I opened it, there's the duffel bag.
You open the duffel bag and there's bundles of cash.
And I remember saying that I thought it was Bob Belly and I that were there together.
I remember saying to Bob Belly, I just built the house up in Colchester at the time.
And thinking, hey, there's my garage because it was five grand bundled.
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My boss at the time, Wes Newman, he had to take that money after we counted it.
And he had a whole dollar to import as a safe place.
I felt bad for him because he had the responsibility to that money.
He couldn't lose it, obviously.
It was just a lot of work to deal with it.
But bear in mind, too, back in the old days, we didn't have counting machines.
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We had to count that by hand.
And there was about six officers that he put into a room and he rotated them in so that
we come up with the same totals over time.
And I remember counting that money for several hours.
It got to be a pain in the ass in that regard.
The state police cataloged everything they found.
In addition to drugs and money, there were some interesting artifacts.
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In David Lace's car, they found $185,790 in cash and hashish and fishing waders and
lures, among other things.
In Roger Ducharm's car, they found cocaine and the Associated paraphernalia.
In another associate's car, they found more fishing gear, including a tackle box and multiple
rods as well as an Orvis catalog, the popular fishing and outdoor company.
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In the house, they found another $5,000 in cash, a coin collection, a small amount of
cocaine and rolled up paper currency used to snort that cocaine.
And lots and lots of drugs.
Specifically, hashish and marijuana, which was all eventually burned.
There's one question that went unanswered.
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Did they find everything?
Not everyone in the neighborhood thinks so.
The first couple to move into the house after the bust also saw something that suggests
maybe the police didn't find everything.
Also there was an urban legend that they left some drug money buried out there or drugs.
Had you heard that?
Was there any, did anyone ever show up with a shovel?
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Yes.
We never heard that there was money.
I mean, we used to talk about it, but yeah, there was a guy who did show up with a shovel.
And that was when I said to Barry, I think he's here to bury somebody.
And I think he left before anybody got back, but he didn't leave with anything.
So the place was really quite famous.
Everybody in town knew about it.
And I remember running along the back little path one day and practically tripping over
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this piece of plastic that sort of materialized.
That got nowhere out of the ground.
And I remember getting a shovel and digging it up because the story was they didn't think
they'd gotten everything.
The people who had moved in, I think there'd been one or two couples prior to us moving
in here who lived here said, you know, they looked at every little nook and cranny, you
know, because it was such a big deal.
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But I guess at the time it was the biggest drug bust.
Even the former Vermont State Police troopers, Robert Valley and Nick Rogero, weren't in
entirely sure they found everything.
The seizing of the money brings me to another question, another kind of interesting urban
legend that my parents have mentioned and a couple of the neighbors have mentioned.
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There's an urban legend going around that the police suspected they hadn't found all
of the money or drugs and that the traffickers had buried it somewhere in the woods.
Are you confident you guys found everything or could there still be something lying around
out there?
I don't recall, I mean, I certainly know that we did its thorough searches, there's what
we thought we possibly could.
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I think we were either aware of or might have been cautious enough.
There was always concern about and I don't remember where this came from, people putting
cash in PCV.
So whether or not that was specific to this case or not, but I know we were aware of it
(30:59):
and look for that kind of information and detail, but yeah, for sure, it goes to this
case specifically.
Rogero wasn't so sure they got everything.
He told me the crew was pretty adept at hiding money, including inside unused septic tanks.
I was intrigued by how well they modified the residence that they were in to sort of
(31:20):
hide their proceeds or store their stash, so to speak.
They had a ton of cash.
I'm not surprised that these stories your folks may have because the other thing is
after they were all arrested, we watched the other house over in Middlebury area for a
while and these New Jersey cars would show up.
(31:41):
People that were there during the arrests early on and they were still looking for things.
They went to the property, they searched, they had access to it so we couldn't keep
them out of it, but they kept coming up almost like looking for something.
So that made me think certain things got biased because we didn't know enough about their
operation.
I know these guys stashed a lot of things a lot of places, but unless they cooperated,
(32:06):
we really were going blind.
I can say one thing.
My family has owned that house now for nearly 40 years.
The house has been renovated a few times, my mom has planted numerous flower gardens
and my dad has planted a vegetable garden every year since they bought the place.
(32:26):
There's been a lot of digging and to this day, we've never stumbled upon anything,
but there are acres and acres of woods there, so you never know.
This story isn't done.
Any Law and Order fan knows there's a trial upcoming and the trial over this drug bust
was pretty fascinating.
That in the next episode.
You can find this podcast on every major hosting site like Apple Podcasts, Spotify and more.
(32:50):
If you like it, please share it with others.
It's a story I'm passionate about telling and I'd love as many people to hear it as
possible.
Finally, if you can, please give it a good rating so more people can discover it.
Till next time.
When you find yourself traveling along an old dirt road in your town, or even in a place
(00:14):
you've never been, try to imagine the things that have happened there and who might have
lived there.
The dirt road you're thinking of might be treeline, bordered by thick forests and hills
with swamps on either side.
Or maybe it stretches off forever in a straight line through a dusty desert.
Your imagination probably doesn't take you to actors, rock stars, and even drug traffickers.
(00:35):
But there's a reason they say truth is stranger than fiction.
My name is Anthony Cerdelli.
I'm a journalist.
Well, a sports journalist living in Southern California.
I'm about to tell you a story about the dirt road in Vermont that I grew up on.
When I found out the truth behind the urban legends about this small part of Sharon, Vermont,
(00:56):
the place where I spent a lot of my childhood, my mind was blown.
This is True Stories from an Old Dirt Road.
So far we've covered Academy Award nominated Brandon DeWilda and what he did when he owned
(01:18):
my house in Sharon in the 1960s.
After that, I told you the story of the music studio that would later move in next door,
Sun Treader Studios, and its impact on the music industry, which included the recording
of the hit Fog Hat song, Slow Ride.
Unbelievably there's more.
Among the older Sharon residents, the next event is probably the most well known.
(01:41):
Still, since it happened, it's receded back into the memories of the people who heard
about it and experienced it.
That it I'm referring to is a drug bust, a massive one, that went down in the spring
of 1979.
At the time, it was the biggest drug bust in the history of Vermont, depending on who
you ask.
The after effects of this drug bust rippled out for close to two decades and made one
(02:05):
of Vermont's most wanted men.
There may or may not also be buried treasure involved.
And it all happened, once again, at the house my parents would buy just six years later
in 1985.
To tell this chapter of the story, I'm going to introduce a few important people.
The first is retired Vermont State Police Major Robert Valley, who was a corporal at
(02:27):
the time and one of the members of the state police overseeing the investigation.
The next, Nicholas Ruggiero, is a retired trooper who was a member of the surveillance
team staking out the drug operation.
Then we have some familiar names from previous episodes.
My old neighbor Dennis Mason, another former neighbor of mine Michael Livingston, Jareese
Bergstrom, co-founder of Sun Treader Studios, and Barry and Sarah Clark, the tenants who
(02:51):
rented the house right after the drug bust.
You won't hear from any of the drug traffickers involved in this story because I struck out
trying to reach them.
Despite my best efforts, everyone involved either ignored my calls or was otherwise unreachable.
If you hear this and you're a drug trafficker involved in that 1979 drug bust in Sharon
Vermont, please reach out to me.
(03:12):
You can find my contact info in the show notes.
In addition to my interviews, a lot of this information comes from the investigation report,
which I was sent by the Vermont State Police after making a FOIA request.
Our story begins with Valley, who was a member of the Vermont State Police Special Investigations
Unit.
The unit was helping a friend of Valley's, a fraud investigator with the state police,
(03:33):
on surveillance in a white-collar case.
That investigation produced a significant lead.
We ended up working this case with him and doing some things and ended up arresting this
man that was a fugitive from a drug case outside of Vermont who'd been living here under assumed
identities and so forth.
(03:55):
And that's how we happened on to him through that accounting case, if you want to call
it that.
In the debriefing of that person, since I was working with my friend, I started looking
at some of the materials that we found when we arrested him.
It included some notebooks and things that I was able to, working back some of the intelligence
(04:18):
on the data, could see that it appeared to link to people that we might know from our
intelligence.
And it was through that informant development and actually debriefing him, talking to him
further about what he knew.
He had been in the drug business, he had picked up some drugs from places.
Well, you've probably read all the reports that show that aspect of things.
(04:41):
But anyway, through that person in contact, he provided enough information that we could
independently verify about locations and people, and some of which we already had some awareness
of but not to the specificity of this person actually being involved with getting drugs
from the people.
(05:03):
According to the investigation report, the informant told the state police he had purchased
500 pounds of marijuana from a group of people at a home in Sharon, Vermont.
That home was the one my family bought in 1985.
But who were the group of people?
The ringleaders were two 27-year-olds, Roger Dusharm, who according to the investigation
(05:24):
report was the drug trafficking expert, and David Lace, who was the money guy.
Both were local, one living in nearby Quechie, Vermont, the other in Jamaica, Vermont.
They were assisted by a third man, Gary Butz, also 27 years old of Massachusetts.
Though they were young, they were experienced drug traffickers, according to Valley.
(05:44):
They had already done boatload cases, transactions prior to us catching them with the stash at
your old home.
So, if you're into boatload operations, Lace had been an owner of a restaurant in the London
area, in Vermont, a place called the Bailey-Rosson House.
(06:04):
But we were semi-aware that something was happening at the Bailey-Rosson House, but
nothing that we could ever make a case on.
This was prior to the Sharon case.
But they talked about loads going into, when he was running that restaurant, you know,
a place where they stuffed a huge property just full of bales and bales and bales of
(06:26):
marijuana and stuff like that.
And they dealt in cocaine too.
And so, there's no question there was connection to organize criminal smuggling activity.
My source that put us originally, gave us enough information to work, to identify your
old house.
I mean, he was picking up, you know, 50, 100 pounds at a time to take to places in Connecticut
(06:53):
and New Jersey and places like that.
So it was, it was basically a trans-shipment place, a storage place.
And then you distribute beyond that.
So usually, they would have runners, you know, take this stuff from the stash house, your
house was a stash house at the time, and then run it out to someplace, some meat point on
(07:18):
a major highway someplace in New England.
What were your impressions reading the notes and the daily activities?
Like, these people were dangerous or just kind of like, I almost got the feeling a little
bit that they came off as the suspects were enjoying themselves in some points when they
were also interacting with the community and stuff like that.
(07:38):
From the perspective of dangerousness, no, they didn't evidence that type of behavior
any of the times.
Obviously, when you're involved in high scale drug trafficking, that can always be a consideration.
But this particular group of people, they were going to the UNH at the University of
(08:03):
New Hampshire together and dropped out of school to get into the drug business.
They were basically, I don't want to call them a bunch of stumble bums either, because
they made a lot of money.
They weren't sophisticated enough.
I mean, at one point in time in debriefing, they made like $750,000 a piece on one of
(08:25):
their operations.
They went to Vegas and blew most of their money.
They didn't have a lot of sophisticated ideas other than to go and blow the money and have
a ball for a while or buy a restaurant or you know.
They really were entrenched in a way.
They were more like some college kids that just went off on this lark and it lasted for
(08:50):
all it lasted.
They weren't master criminals, so to speak.
Roger Duchar, in follow up later.
I don't know if that's in the report you read or not, but I remember going to Central Falls,
Rhode Island.
I'd have been with Ted Handoga, but we went down to talk to Roger's father, who was a
(09:11):
retired corrections officer for the state.
It might have been in Massachusetts, the Worcester area, but Roger came from a family of seven
kids or whatever.
And his father was like, you know, if he's believable and he seemed to be at the time,
he said, you know, we went up there.
We visited him a couple times.
He had an antique business in Vermont in Quechie.
(09:35):
He had this antique shop and whatnot.
He says, if he ever had any money, he didn't share it with us or the family.
He was actually kind of upset to think that all kinds of money went through the kids hands
over the years.
And, you know, he was just lumpy dumpy running antique shop up in Vermont.
For those who are wondering who Teddy Handoga was, he was the DEA agent liaising with the
(09:59):
Vermont State Police on the case.
According to the investigation report, the informant alleged that the traffickers used
pickup trucks with camper caps on them to transport drugs to and from the house in Sharon,
which had a barn.
The trucks would pull into the barn, load up and leave.
That information was extremely helpful to Valley and Roy Holton, the other investigator
(10:19):
leading the case.
Still, they needed proof.
To get proof, they needed evidence.
To get evidence, they needed a warrant.
To get a warrant, they needed probable cause.
And to get that, they needed surveillance.
And that is where things start to get interesting.
Like I said, when I was a kid, once I outgrew catching creatures in our pond or goofing
(10:41):
around in the woods, I started to think Sharon was boring.
At one point, after we moved to Hanover, I even invited some of my friends back to Sharon
to play paintball in the woods.
It was always fun to imagine we were in some World War II battle or part of some action
movie we'd just seen.
But little did I know, more than 20 years before I did that, there were actual state
(11:02):
police officers sneaking through the woods in tactical gear, night vision goggles, and
spotting scopes.
The surveillance operation was huge, and that would come into play during the trial.
But more on that in part two of this episode.
This was a pretty extensive surveillance.
Kind of amazing actually, especially after, as I went up through the ranks, I was eager
(11:24):
beaver investigative type of trooper at the time I did this.
But you know, when I retired, I was a major in charge of one of the divisions and much
more into the bureaucracy and the budget writing of how you do business.
And it was strictly amazing that our boss at the time was a Wesley Newman in the criminal
(11:47):
division.
It's amazing that we were allowed to have the resources we had to actually pull this
thing off.
And as a matter of fact, I don't know if that's mentioned in the official reports or not,
but we had dubbed it Operation Shoestring.
As a shoestring budget.
Wow.
Yeah, after the case was made, because who knew there was actually going to be a case
(12:12):
made.
It took quite some time, quite a number of days of surveillance and very expensive operation.
The personnel that were chosen, a lot of times it had to do with their backgrounds and abilities
either in criminal investigation or also being either search and rescue type trainings because
the surveillance teams were going in through the woods in order to not be identified as
(12:35):
being in the area and so forth.
They were going in with night vision equipment after hours.
It was a pretty interesting thing to do.
And also at the same time, to make sure that those officers that were doing the surveillance,
I had to be sure that we weren't going to be in violation of not having a search warrant
(12:55):
because we were observing from afar.
The surveillance operation began on March 9th, 1979.
At that point, it was just sporadic surveillance by Valley and Holton and early members of
the investigation team.
They needed to confirm information that had been supplied to them by the informant to
justify the increased surveillance operation.
(13:16):
By April 24th, the surveillance operation grew.
The investigation report listed a whopping 16 members of the team, all with the Vermont
State Police, who went in teams of two and rotated every eight hours for 23 days.
When retired trooper Nick Ruggiero looks back at his career, being a member of this surveillance
operation stood out.
(13:37):
It was wild.
Remember what I told you?
My background is I grew up in the Bronx.
And so there I am up in the middle of nowhere in your neighborhood there, dropped off at
midnight with night binoculars so we could get to a spot to get to where we were not
going to be seen by anybody.
So that was a bit of every night.
Plus, you had to be there by midnight.
(13:58):
I lived in Colchester.
So I had to leave Colchester to get down there to get picked up in that pickup truck to get
dropped off by certain time and I couldn't miss it.
So we're under a lot of pressure to perform what you had to do.
But it was fun from the aspect that was an enjoyable case, putting it together.
What was it like being stuck out there in the spring?
I know it's like one day can be snow, the next day can be raining, the next day can
(14:22):
be 80 degrees and sunny and there's mosquitoes and blackflies.
What was your what was it like sitting out there in the swamp all night?
You got it.
It hurt some nights.
Some nights you're just sweating and it rained.
But we brought gear with us and we were there for the elements.
And we just laying out in the woods because we wanted to keep an eye on who's coming and
(14:43):
going from the place because there was a lot of traffic coming and going as we learned.
Here's Robert Valley again.
The teams had to keep a notebook.
I was relying on them to keep some accurate notes and so forth.
And those of us that were going to try to put together the search warrant kind of stuff
afterwards.
(15:04):
Those field notes eventually made it into the investigation report I read, which is
where I gleaned a lot of the information about what the day to day surveillance was like.
Some of it was pretty mundane, even the observations of the illegal activity.
But then there were some very interesting moments and reading about it in the matter
of fact tone that the troopers wrote in was pretty comical at times.
(15:28):
You could almost feel they wanted to elaborate more, but they were professionals.
And eventually this is going to be seen by the judge who would issue the warrant.
So they had to keep it PG rated.
First of all, the information provided by the informant and early surveillance of the
house provided some interesting details.
The house is guarded 24 hours a day.
And according to trooper Roy Holton, who led the investigation with Valley, quote, it was
(15:53):
noted that various guards would be quite nervous late in the evening hours as they would often
turn on the outside lights around the residence for no apparent reason.
Hey, Vermont can be pretty spooky at night, especially if you're doing something illegal.
The day to day operations were what you would expect from drug traffickers who thought they
were alone.
Like on April 25th, 1979, when it was noted that quote, in the early morning hours, 120
(16:18):
to 415, Ducharme was observed by surveillance as doing paperwork at the kitchen table or
on May 8th, 1979, from 1800 hours to 2240 hours when Ducharme was again observed doing
paperwork and counting money.
Cars pulled up, drivers got out carrying duffel bags and carried them into the house.
Other times trucks with camper caps pulled up and removed or loaded items from the bed
(16:41):
of the truck.
Sometimes they used nicknames to refer to the suspects because they didn't know them
by name.
Gary Butz was Shadow Boxer.
David Lace was Red Jacket.
Lace's brother Daniel, an associate of the group, was named Big Boy.
Ducharme got the nickname Clean Cut Dude.
When it comes to the more incriminating stuff, I'll leave out the names.
(17:01):
Like on the evening of the first day of full surveillance, when Corporal Michael LeClair
and Corporal Joseph Miller saw one of the crew, quote, snorting something on the counter
in the house.
Between standing guard at the house and trafficking drugs, sometimes it just sounded like a vacation.
Like later on that first evening when LeClair and Miller witnessed a female associate of
the group, quote, smoking a joint, drinking wine, and on one occasion looks like she's
(17:24):
mixing drinks.
A large paper bag with a roll of white paper on top is where the last joint came from.
One rainy late April day, one of the suspects went fishing in the pond, something they did
a lot.
Sometimes the surveillance equipment would go haywire, like when LeClair and Miller reported,
quote, note, our surveillance was hampered tonight by equipment failure, spotting scopes
(17:46):
and field glasses fogged up and surveillance was done without use of the same.
The suspects continued to drink beer and fish as Vermont's sometimes chilly, sometimes
rainy early spring gave way to warmer weather.
Then on April 29th at 615 a.m., two men arrived at the house.
One goes in, then comes out again, grabs a shovel from his Jeep, and the two men walk
(18:07):
back into the woods.
Could they have been searching for some night crawlers to go fishing?
Maybe, but the report doesn't say they went fishing after.
It also doesn't say they carried anything else into the woods, but it makes me wonder,
what were they digging?
Could they, as the urban legend said, have been burying money or drugs?
(18:27):
More on that in a bit.
Continuing on, there was more of everyday life in Vermont mixed with drug trafficking.
On April 30th, 1979, two officers observed butts kill a snake with a rock in the front
yard.
As April gave way to May, there's more moving of heavy boxes and duffel bags to and from
cars and of course more fishing and drinking beer.
(18:49):
This went on in sun, rain, cold, heat, fog, humidity, and as all of us know who have experienced
spring in Vermont, black fly season, the itchiest season of the year.
Corporal LeClair noted on one quiet May evening, quote, no activity except for wild ducks,
beaver, jumping trout, and black flies.
On one cold and windy day, the drug traffickers even mowed the lawn and raked the yard.
(19:12):
An officer noted in parentheses that it was green up day.
Perhaps the most out of the ordinary observation came on May 7th, 1979 at 1040 in the morning
when on a clear and warm morning, two members of the surveillance team were unlucky enough
to witness the following.
Quote, 1040, male comes out of the house, sits in lounge chair, sun bathes, receding
(19:36):
reddish brown curly hair, mustache, beard, 160 pounds, 5'11", wearing green shorts.
11 a.m. male of 1040 a.m. masturbates.
1115, cold wind blowing, male goes back inside the house.
I'll leave it at that.
And some kids from the neighborhood showed up on surveillance.
Luckily, not on that day.
(19:57):
On May 12th, 1979, when two members of the surveillance team described, quote, 1136 a.m.,
two kids, 10 to 13 years, come from Main Road, knock on door, subject answers in gym shorts
and t-shirt, kids go to dock to fish.
As we learned from Dennis Mason, apparently an unnamed member of the surveillance team
grew frustrated with watching so many people fish when he couldn't, especially from where
(20:20):
they conducted their surveillance.
Hidden away at the far side of the pond.
The one at the head of the dam was very exasperated to watch them fish because they didn't know
how to fish and he did.
Think about that.
For as often as they went fishing and people from the neighborhood visited, no one ever
saw the state police concealed at the opposite end of the pond, with barely anything between
(20:43):
them but the pond, which is about the size of a football field, and some cattails.
At one point, the team was almost discovered.
At 5 45 p.m. on May 13th, Officer LeClair wrote, Maroon Ford station wagon pulls in
and appears to be only asking permission from Shadow to fish the pond.
Two older guys and a small boy.
(21:03):
The people in the Maroon Ford wagon just screwed up our surveillance and we had to move out.
The final few days of drug trafficking at the Sharon's Dash House seemed quaint.
There was more fishing, more yard work, playing with the dog and sunbathing in the warm Vermont
spring air.
Still did they know what was about to descend on them?
Well, maybe one of them had an idea.
(21:24):
Or it was the paranoia brought on by long nights, drug use and isolation.
On May 15th, one of the members of the group who was assigned to watch the Stash House
left and was observed by members of the surveillance team, this time in a car conducting roving
surveillance.
The officers noticed the car had been at the Stash House and surreptitiously followed it
to Brooksies, an old diner that burned down when I was a kid.
(21:47):
On Brooksies, the man who the surveillance team members said appeared drunk, used a payphone
to call someone and demand to be relieved from his guard duties.
His drunken intuition or the bad feeling he had or whatever it was turned out to be warranted
because a day later, the Vermont State Police decided to execute the search warrant they'd
been working for.
(22:09):
At 9 p.m. on May 16th, they served their search warrant and arrested Butz, who was at the
Stash House, as well as Dusharman Lace, who arrived together during the raid.
According to the report, after just a few hours, they had found several hundred pounds
of Lebanese hashish.
This importantly is not the town of Lebanon, New Hampshire, which sits just 20 miles or
(22:29):
so south of Sharon on I-89, but the country.
This distinction caused some momentary confusion for a local judge that the police needed to
sign off on another search warrant.
That was always a kind of a comical thing.
The night that I went over to get this additional search warrant signed from the judge and he
(22:50):
was staying over at the hotel in New Hampshire.
There wasn't anything in White River.
He stayed across the river in West Lab.
Woke him up in the middle of the night and I had taken one of the slabs of hash with
me and when I was telling him about what details we had legitimizing the search of additional
property, I said, that's a seal of Lebanon on the bag of slab of hashish.
(23:16):
And he said, right here in Lebanon?
No, Your Honor, not this Lebanon.
Oh, wow.
And he was, you know, I woke him up and he says, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
Which that was Judge Bristow, who actually later became a public safety commissioner
(23:38):
in Vermont.
With the confusion about which Lebanon the hashish came from cleared up, the state police
impounded cars, arrested other members of the group and set about the daunting task
of counting the drugs and money.
By the time they were finished, it came to a staggering total.
According to the Valley News article covering the bust, the final tally came to five million
(23:58):
dollars worth of Lebanese hashish and Colombian marijuana and two hundred fifty thousand dollars
in cash.
Obviously, this was a huge amount of drugs and money.
Two hundred fifty thousand dollars in 1979 is the equivalent of over one million dollars
today.
And I'm not even going to try to deduce the value of the hash and weed.
With legalization, maybe it would be worth less.
(24:19):
Who knows?
It's still a lot.
But according to Valley, finding drug operations this big in Vermont actually was becoming
a problem.
Had there been some cases this size in Vermont in your time?
It's out of the ordinary in the sense that I've worked a number of cases since that time.
We were aware that Vermont was always a very good place for large scale traffickers to
(24:47):
come and secrete themselves, so to speak, because of the nature of the state.
There's a lot of rural areas.
The nature of people in Vermont are such that there's people that come in here with large
amounts of money or unexplained wealth.
And Vermonters that are local to the area don't really question that.
(25:08):
They're kind of accustomed to that.
A number of people want privacy or they're not really that interactive with the locals,
perhaps.
But nobody's really become suspicious of that in Vermont because it's kind of the way it
is.
It's right in the center of New England where within a few hours' time you can be within
New York City, Boston, Montreal, Providence.
(25:30):
You can be in all these major metropolitan areas.
So it's a very good place for people to come and do criminal activity and be out of the
limelight.
So we were aware of that kind of thing and we had intelligence from time to time and
worked with other state agencies around New England when some of their actors would be
(25:51):
using Vermont as a place to either do business or, for example, we had another, which I helped
the DEA with, another case with a guy that was a major manufacturer of LSD and PCP in
New England.
But they do some of the cooking in places like rural camps in Vermont or when we arrested
(26:13):
this particular person, he was arrested over in the White Mountains in New Hampshire where
they were cooking at that time.
So, you know, the major actor actually lived outside the Rutland, Vermont area, had a family
there and nobody ever questioned how he made his money.
Whatever.
You can always say you're a consultant, you're into stocks, you're into whatever.
(26:37):
So where did all the money and drugs go?
It's pretty easy to follow in the investigation report.
With that much money and drugs, the Vermont State Police took great pains to maintain the
chain of custody, especially when it didn't just come from the house in Sharon.
Rogero pulled over one of the suspects and found a load of cash.
We pulled them over and we asked them whose car it was.
No, it's not my car.
(26:58):
He walked away from it on the back road there in Sharon.
And when I opened it, there's the duffel bag.
You open the duffel bag and there's bundles of cash.
And I remember saying that I thought it was Bob Belly and I that were there together.
I remember saying to Bob Belly, I just built the house up in Colchester at the time.
And thinking, hey, there's my garage because it was five grand bundled.
(27:19):
My boss at the time, Wes Newman, he had to take that money after we counted it.
And he had a whole dollar to import as a safe place.
I felt bad for him because he had the responsibility to that money.
He couldn't lose it, obviously.
It was just a lot of work to deal with it.
But bear in mind, too, back in the old days, we didn't have counting machines.
(27:39):
We had to count that by hand.
And there was about six officers that he put into a room and he rotated them in so that
we come up with the same totals over time.
And I remember counting that money for several hours.
It got to be a pain in the ass in that regard.
The state police cataloged everything they found.
In addition to drugs and money, there were some interesting artifacts.
(28:03):
In David Lace's car, they found $185,790 in cash and hashish and fishing waders and
lures, among other things.
In Roger Ducharm's car, they found cocaine and the Associated paraphernalia.
In another associate's car, they found more fishing gear, including a tackle box and multiple
rods as well as an Orvis catalog, the popular fishing and outdoor company.
(28:26):
In the house, they found another $5,000 in cash, a coin collection, a small amount of
cocaine and rolled up paper currency used to snort that cocaine.
And lots and lots of drugs.
Specifically, hashish and marijuana, which was all eventually burned.
There's one question that went unanswered.
(28:46):
Did they find everything?
Not everyone in the neighborhood thinks so.
The first couple to move into the house after the bust also saw something that suggests
maybe the police didn't find everything.
Also there was an urban legend that they left some drug money buried out there or drugs.
Had you heard that?
Was there any, did anyone ever show up with a shovel?
(29:07):
Yes.
We never heard that there was money.
I mean, we used to talk about it, but yeah, there was a guy who did show up with a shovel.
And that was when I said to Barry, I think he's here to bury somebody.
And I think he left before anybody got back, but he didn't leave with anything.
So the place was really quite famous.
Everybody in town knew about it.
And I remember running along the back little path one day and practically tripping over
(29:34):
this piece of plastic that sort of materialized.
That got nowhere out of the ground.
And I remember getting a shovel and digging it up because the story was they didn't think
they'd gotten everything.
The people who had moved in, I think there'd been one or two couples prior to us moving
in here who lived here said, you know, they looked at every little nook and cranny, you
know, because it was such a big deal.
(29:56):
But I guess at the time it was the biggest drug bust.
Even the former Vermont State Police troopers, Robert Valley and Nick Rogero, weren't in
entirely sure they found everything.
The seizing of the money brings me to another question, another kind of interesting urban
legend that my parents have mentioned and a couple of the neighbors have mentioned.
(30:16):
There's an urban legend going around that the police suspected they hadn't found all
of the money or drugs and that the traffickers had buried it somewhere in the woods.
Are you confident you guys found everything or could there still be something lying around
out there?
I don't recall, I mean, I certainly know that we did its thorough searches, there's what
we thought we possibly could.
(30:38):
I think we were either aware of or might have been cautious enough.
There was always concern about and I don't remember where this came from, people putting
cash in PCV.
So whether or not that was specific to this case or not, but I know we were aware of it
(30:59):
and look for that kind of information and detail, but yeah, for sure, it goes to this
case specifically.
Rogero wasn't so sure they got everything.
He told me the crew was pretty adept at hiding money, including inside unused septic tanks.
I was intrigued by how well they modified the residence that they were in to sort of
(31:20):
hide their proceeds or store their stash, so to speak.
They had a ton of cash.
I'm not surprised that these stories your folks may have because the other thing is
after they were all arrested, we watched the other house over in Middlebury area for a
while and these New Jersey cars would show up.
(31:41):
People that were there during the arrests early on and they were still looking for things.
They went to the property, they searched, they had access to it so we couldn't keep
them out of it, but they kept coming up almost like looking for something.
So that made me think certain things got biased because we didn't know enough about their
operation.
I know these guys stashed a lot of things a lot of places, but unless they cooperated,
(32:06):
we really were going blind.
I can say one thing.
My family has owned that house now for nearly 40 years.
The house has been renovated a few times, my mom has planted numerous flower gardens
and my dad has planted a vegetable garden every year since they bought the place.
(32:26):
There's been a lot of digging and to this day, we've never stumbled upon anything,
but there are acres and acres of woods there, so you never know.
This story isn't done.
Any Law and Order fan knows there's a trial upcoming and the trial over this drug bust
was pretty fascinating.
That in the next episode.
You can find this podcast on every major hosting site like Apple Podcasts, Spotify and more.
(32:50):
If you like it, please share it with others.
It's a story I'm passionate about telling and I'd love as many people to hear it as
possible.
Finally, if you can, please give it a good rating so more people can discover it.
Till next time.
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