Jury comes back with guilty verdicts in Colombo Street Boss case

Jury comes back with guilty verdicts in Colombo Street Boss case

  October 22, 2010    Dapper_Don

---

It didn’t take long for a jury to decide the fate of a Cabot man and an alleged Massachusetts mobster on trial Thursday in federal court on drug-trafficking charges.

The jury returned a guilty verdict on all four counts in a little more than two hours for George Wylie Thompson of Cabot, and Ralph Francis Deleo of Somerville, Mass., a suburb of Boston.

Prosecutors contend that both have connections to the Colombo crime family with Deleo being a Mafia “street boss.”

This is the first of three trials for Thompson. He’s also tied to North Little Rock Alderman Sam Baggett on gun charges. That trial is scheduled for Dec. 7 and former North Little Rock alderman Cary Gaines will be on trial with Thompson in 2011 on public corruption charges.

Sentencing for the pair won’t be for another 60 to 90 days, but Thompson is looking at 10 years to life in prison, while Deleo could get anywhere from five years to 40.

ADVERTISEMENT

The charges against Thompson and Deleo spring from a Dec. 12, 2008 arrest of Tri Cam Le in Lonoke County with two kilograms, or about 4.5 pounds, of cocaine. Prosecutors contend Le, who is from Vietnam, was in Thompson’s employ as a drug “mule” and was transporting cocaine from Los Angeles to Boston where he was going to deliver it to Deleo.

Le is currently serving 14 years in an Arkansas state prison after he was convicted on drug possession charges for the cocaine.

In closing arguments Thursday morning, defense attorneys claimed that Le wasn’t a credible witness because he had given law enforcement faulty information.

“Mr. Le has had five different versions of this story,” defense attorney Jason Files said. “If his story was so simple, then why does it keep changing?”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Pat Harris didn’t focus of Le; he talked about Thompson and Deleo in his closing arguments.

“You have their words, them talking about their problem,” Harris said in reference to the wiretaps gathered as evidence before a snippet was played during the closing arguments:

“Yeah, that was devastating,” Deleo said after getting the news that Le had been stopped with the cocaine in his possession. “Worse than devastating,” Thompson replied.

Harris also showed the jury the cocaine seized and that with the mountain of evidence the prosecutors had gathered over a nearly three-year investigation was just too much for the jury to ignore.