Drug-dealing narcotics officer who outed snitches, police: Jail ‘a slow painful death' Former DEA taskforce member sentenced after dealing meth, recruiting strippers with cocaine

His fall was lurid and spectacular.

Two years ago, King County Sheriff’s Deputy Mitchell Wright was a narcotics officer assigned to a Drug Enforcement Administration task force. Today, he’s a repentant meth dealer and disgraced ex-cop looking at five years of very hard time in federal prison.

Wright’s crimes were about as near to Hollywood as real corrupt cops get – he recruited strippers to deal meth for him, purportedly outed informants and undercover officers to other dealers, and lost it all when his informant-turned-girlfriend was caught with a needle in her arm and Wright’s heroin in the syringe.

Sentencing the former deputy Friday, though, U.S. District Judge Richard Jones noted that Wright’s crimes were also painfully personal. By dealing meth, Wright helped others along the road to ruin he was walking himself.

With that in mind, Jones read Wright a poem before sending him to prison. Deeply felt by Jones, the piece – “I am meth” – was written by a teen drug addict facing a judge. He began with a promise:

My power is awesome / Try me and you’ll see

That Wright was in thrall to that power during his stunningly unsuccessful career as a dealer was acknowledged by all concerned Friday, as he appeared in U.S. District Court at Seattle and sought a break.

Talking to Jones, Wright, now 35, was contrite, direct and composed. He’d made mistakes. He wants to restart his life, to be again the man he was before it all went wrong. No tears. No begging.

"I made a lot of mistakes," admitted Wright, dressed in government-issue brown scrubs and watched by federal marshals.

Federal prison will be exceptionally hard on Wright – as a former police officer, Wright will spend his prison term in solitary confinement. In a letter, Wright described his time in federal detention as “a slow painful death.”

Addiction appears to have driven Wright’s misconduct, which prosecutors say threatened the lives of undercover officers and their informants in northern King County.

Born in Springfield, Oregon, Wright came from a law enforcement family. His father was a DEA agent, and the family moved around the United States and Canada during Wright’s formative years.

Wright was hired by the sheriff’s office in 2002 after attending Bellevue College and joined a DEA taskforce in 2009, the same year he married. The marriage didn’t last – he divorced in 2012.

Wright left the taskforce in February 2013 due to budget cuts and was assigned to the Shoreline Police Department when he was caught stealing drugs taken as evidence.

“As an ex-narcotics investigator, Wright was acutely aware of the devastating toll that methamphetamine takes on users and their loved ones,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Leah K. Bolstad said. “Despite this knowledge, he chose to use and sell this dangerous poison.”

Legal problems mounted for Wright beginning in May 2013, when a Bothell officer stopped to check on a woman parked in a truck at a McDonald’s. Seated behind the wheel, the woman had a hypodermic needle in her arm and appeared to be injecting heroin.

As it turned out, the truck was registered to Wright and the woman was his roommate and informant. Wright and the woman were romantically involved, and remained so until mid-2014.

The incident prompted an internal investigation, during which deputies found bags of heroin marked with DEA evidence numbers in the trunk of Wright’s cruiser. Investigators ultimately concluded Wright stole 1,600 oxycodone pills, a half-pound of benzodiazepine and about a teaspoon of cocaine. The street value of those drugs is estimated by authorities at $36,450 to $52,490.

Addressing the court, defense attorney Jeffrey Kradel said Wright became addicted to meth while still wearing a badge.

“The bottom line in this case is that Mr. Wright is an addict and he was an addict when he was still a law enforcement officer,” Kradel said. “He was completely and totally out of control.”

Wright made a series of outlandish claims following his arrest, including that he was immune to prosecution as an Australian diplomat, that he was in line for a job with a $400,000 annual salary and that he had six months to live due to bone cancer.

Kradel described his client as a good man turned bad by the drugs he’d been tasked with fighting. He was deep into his addiction to meth by the time he was forced out of the sheriff’s office.

“Wright has used cocaine, crack cocaine, ecstasy and marijuana infrequently, and stated that after the first time he smoked methamphetamine he was using ‘a gram a day, every day, until was arrested,’” Kradel said.

Charged in state court with the drug thefts, Wright was released from King County Jail in August 2013 and started dealing immediately thereafter. The state case against him remains outstanding, though a plea agreement has been reached; Wright is expected to plead guilty in coming weeks and will likely not be sentenced to additional time in prison.

Speaking with informants, investigators were told Wright was recruiting strippers to sell meth and heroin for him. Wright, they were told, was giving “free samples” to North Seattle strippers and hoped to take over the Shoreline-area drug trade.

Wright was also using large amounts of meth and becoming paranoid. Still, he believed he wouldn’t be apprehended.

“Wright bragged to (the informant) and his criminal associates that he could never be caught or arrested, as he knew all of the tricks that police use to investigate drug dealers,” a State Patrol detective said in court papers.

For a man whose “special skills” as a narcotics trafficker were cited by prosecutors as a justification for the sentence Jones imposed, Wright didn’t make much of a drug dealer.

Investigators set up a series of undercover drug buys from Wright, who delivered meth by motorcycle. He was selling prostitutes cocaine and heroin, and bragged in text messages to one woman that he had “super crazy coke” for her. Shoreline police – his former colleagues – recognized him cruising high-crime areas in a Chevrolet Monte Carlo with custom wheels.

A federal grand jury indicted Wright on Feb. 5. He was arrested five days later at a Kidd Valley restaurant on Aurora Avenue North.

Confronted outside the burger joint, Wright tussled with officers and attempted to toss away a glasses case stuffed with meth, cocaine and heroin. Describing Wright as “argumentative, verbally assaultive and … extremely agitated,” the State Patrol detective said in court papers that Wright appeared to be high on meth.

Wright went on to claim he’d been “screwed over” by the sheriff’s office and had done nothing wrong except “fall in love and sleep with an informant who is a good person.”

“He added that the DEA was a joke and reiterated that law enforcement should go after the real criminals, because what he had been doing was really nothing,” the detective said in court papers. Investigators claim to have found meth and counterfeit bills from Wright’s car, as well as meth and steroids from his apartment.

Wright lost it all. His job and profession, his wife and home. His car. Even his dog has been put down.

“I wish that I could tell you and everyone else that it wasn’t my fault or I have a good excuse,” Wright said in a lengthy letter to Jones. “The reality is I only have myself to blame. …

“I was raised to be a better man, not how I behaved. I broke the trust and loyalty of friends, family and left a black mark over my former department and colleagues causing the community to mistrust an honorable profession.”

Federal charges related to his drug dealing after his initial arrest followed. Bolstad described Wright as a man whose life “spiraled out of control” after he resigned from the sheriff’s office.

“He turned his back on his brothers and sisters in law enforcement, and he put people’s lives in danger by outing undercover officers and confidential informants to criminals,” the federal prosecutor said. “His actions shocked the men and women who had worked by his side to combat crime, people who had entrusted their lives to him.”

Wright denied providing information on undercover officers or informants to other criminals. Kradel described the prosecution’s claims as “vague” and unverified.

“If he identified an undercover officer to drug traffickers, did that agent have to stop working? Were cases compromised?” Kradel said in court papers. “The simple truth is that he did not out any informants, and he did not reveal an undercover officer’s identity.”

Arguing for a three-year prison term, Kradel noted that Wright’s time in custody will be exceptionally hard, through no fault of his own.

To protect Wright, Bureau of Prisons officials will likely keep him in solitary confinement for much or all of his time in prison. Such treatment will undoubtedly take a toll on Wright which other offenders would not have to pay.

“The impacts that confinement has had on Mr. Wright’s mental and physical health will never be completely understood, or perhaps even recognized,” Kradel said. “It has been equated with torture. That was obviously not the institutional intent, but that does not change the impact of the confinement.”

Jones appeared more moved by the suffering Wright had enabled than that he would endure.

Wright had seen on the street how much drug addiction takes from addicts, Jones said from the bench. Jones, a longtime judge in state court before joining the federal bench, had seen the pain too. The teen’s poem was a reminder for him, Jones said, as he hoped it would be for Wright. It ends with these words:

I’ll take everything from you / Your looks and your pride

I’ll always be with you / Right by your side

Check the Seattle 911 crime blog for more Seattle crime news. Visit seattlepi.com's home page for more Seattle news.

Seattlepi.com reporter Levi Pulkkinen can be reached at 206-448-8348 or levipulkkinen@seattlepi.com. Follow Levi on Twitter at twitter.com/levipulk.