The Daily News reported today that a drug ring was busted in Staten Island. The NYPD discovered a $1million-a-year drug ring in an Ice Cream truck!! I guess that would be one of the last places the police would check for a drug ring. 3 people were arrested during the drug bust. I wonder if they will also be charged with child endangerment charges as well as drug charges? Read the whole story after the jump.
@Julie1205
The Lickety Split ice cream truck on Staten Island was dishing out more than single-dips – it was selling oxycodone pills to junkies for $20 a pop.
That’s what prosecutors said Thursday as they announced the indictment of 31 members of a “diabolic” black-market pill-pushing ring that racked up $1 million sales in a year.
Grownup addicts sat in their cars waiting for local kids to finish getting their treats, then lined up for their painkillers – a generic version of the powerful and highly addictive OxyContin narcotic pain reliever.
“Oh no!” said a neighbor, Michelle Levy, 40, the mom of a 5-year-old and 7-year-old who were regular Lickety Split customers.
“My kids bought ice cream every day last summer. It’s horrible, scary, that they were moving drugs. This is a close-knit community. We never suspected.”
Ringleaders Louis Scala, 29, and Joseph Zaffuto, 39, got hundreds of blank prescriptions from co-defendant Nancy Wilkins, 40, the office manager for an unsuspecting Manhattan orthopedic surgeon, officials said.
They forged them and recruited friends, relatives and neighbors to be “runners” who went to mom-and-pop pharmacies to fill the prescriptions.
They paid about $1.66 a pill, then turned them over to Scala and Zaffuto, who sold them for $20 each, prosecutors said. The runners, many of them addicts, got a few bucks or pills as payment.
“They knew who in the neighborhood was either an addict, already addicted to Oxycodone, or was in desperate financial straits,” city special narcotics prosecutor Bridget Brennan said.
She noted that the ice-cream truck operation – set up in front of Scala’s and Zaffuto’s homes in Pleasant Plains and Charleston – “was a poorly kept secret” yet no one from the community tipped off authorities.
The ring was uncovered in June when a runner was arrested for holding up pharmacies – including a drug store where he had tried to fill a suspicious prescription and was turned away.
Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan said the 42,755 pills the ring sold are just a fraction of the black market.
The number of prescriptions filled for oxycodone and other narcotic pills has skyrocketed in the city, contributing to overdoses and crime.
“We are equating this now to the epidemic that we saw when crack cocaine was first introduced in New York City,” he warned.
