Ex-NFL Player Charged as Drug Kingpin Gets 15 Years in Prison After Pleading Guilty to One Count of Drug Conspiracy

The
Government pursued a drug kingpin charge against former Dallas
Cowboys and Chicago Bears wide receiver Sam Hurd after he was
allegedly caught in December 2011 purchasing a kilo of cocaine from
undercover agents and agreeing to purchase up to ten kilos of coke
and 1,000 pounds of marijuana week from them. He pled guilty in
April and faced up to life in prison because of the amounts of
narcotics allegedly involved, and was sentenced to 15 years

today.

The charge was part of two years of federal investigations into
Hurd, as explained in a great Sports
Illustrated piece on the saga by Michael McKnight. Hurd
had been getting marijuana sent to him from California while
playing for the Cowboys and later the Bears, but the feds found no
evidence he ever made a profit off the marijuana he shared with
friends.

Hurd appears to have first showed up on the radar of federal
authorities when an informant tipped off an ICE agent based in
Dallas that someone (Hurd) was looking to buy a large amount of
cocaine. ICE’s purview is border security, but drug trafficking
appeared close enough. Based on the tip, they were able to seize
$88,000 from Hurd’s Escalade, which was being driven by his
mechanic, who was either the brains behind the attempted drug deal
or a go-for for Hurd, depending which you ask. Hurd actually went
to the ICE office, showing them a bank statement that listed his
withdrawal of the money and explaining it was being used to buy a
house for his mother (Hurd says now this was what the money was
allegedly for). He was unable to get the money back the federal
agents, and it appears his mechanics’ attempt to earn the money
back for Hurd was what led nearly two dozen law enforcement agents
to participate in the sting that caught Hurd and the mechanic
trying to purchase cocaine from undercover agents.

Read the whole
Sports Illustrated piece, it’s worth the read, and
marvel at the waste of life, money, and time that the war on drugs
leaves in its wake.

Hurd, notably, would not qualify under any program the Obama
Administration might embark on to lower drug sentencing because the
government still treats larger-scale drug crimes much as if they
were capital offenses, and hasn’t even made an attempt to show more
leniency to people whose lives were ruined
over far smaller consensual narcotics transactions.