A 44-year-old man known as "Stuff" went to federal court Thursday to admit that he did many horrific things for a very long time at a northwest Dallas motel only blocks from an elementary school.

Eric Dewayne Freeman admitted selling heroin, meth, cocaine and other drugs, and splitting the profits with the motel's owner. And owning guns, and shooting them at people. And overseeing the dumping of dead bodies of young men and women who overdosed on his product.

"A violent criminal" is how U.S. Attorney Erin Nealy Cox describes Freeman, the lead defendant in the feds' case involving the Han Gil Hotel Town, along Dennis Road near Northaven Road.

That is understatement. Because in court documents, the man called Stuff does not admit to shooting someone he believed stole his crack. Or beating a woman with a chair leg, burning her with a butane torch and having it recorded. Or to other things the feds say he did, because others before him have copped to guilty pleas and cut deals.

Officially, Freeman pleaded guilty to three charges: conspiracy to possess with the intent to distribute a Schedule I controlled substance, possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime, and possession of a firearm by a felon.

It's such a dry account for such dreadful deeds committed for more than a year in a building that once housed a nursing home. A place that became what one former resident calls "an open-air drug bazaar." Han Gil Hotel Town was the go-to candy shop for kids from Coppell, Farmers Branch, North Dallas — where middle-class and white-collar clients checked in and sometimes were dragged out and stuffed into cars and driven to dumping grounds.

Freeman is now the seventh defendant in the feds' Han Gil case to plead guilty. Yet to fess up is Amos Mun, owner of the Han Gil, who prosecutors and defendants say took his cut from drugs sold in motel rooms rented to dealers and users alike. Mun has a new attorney, and a trial date: July 29. He wants it delayed.

In March Mun pleaded not guilty and waived his right to a hearing, and he remains in federal custody. Meanwhile, everyone he knew tells the same story:

"Mun profited from the sale of drugs out of the Han Gil Hotel by allowing individual drug dealers to sell out of hotel rooms in exchange for paying inflated daily room rates."

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That comes from Freeman's guilty plea. As does this: "Freeman admits that he paid Mun thousands of dollars in United States currency acquired from the sale of drugs." And: Mun "communicated and interacted with Freeman and other drug dealers working within the hotel on a daily basis."

Outside of Mun, Freeman was the feds' main target. Because he ran that hotel, with free rein and no fear, for about two years, ending the night of Jan. 24, when he was arrested. That is the same night DEA agents found a woman's decomposing body in Oak Cliff.

The night he was arrested, Freeman had on him more than 400 grams of heroin, some 300 grams of crack cocaine, about 90 grams of meth and a semiautomatic AK-47 Mini Draco Pistol.

On March 7, some 50 federal agents raided the Han Gil and shut it down. And ever since I've heard from former residents who worked for Stuff and escaped — several to rehab. They sold drugs; they were paid in drugs. One woman who did not want to give her name said the Han Gil wasn't a dangerous place until Stuff arrived.

And those who pleaded guilty before Freeman have shared horror stories about him.

Carlos Hernandez, among the indicted, told prosecutors that two days after Christmas 2018, a young woman overdosed in the bathroom of Room 342 at the Han Gil. She remained there for at least several hours, until Freeman wrapped her body in a comforter, then had Hernandez and another person carry the body to a waiting vehicle.

About a month later, the woman's badly decomposed body was found by Drug Enforcement Administration officers near boarded-up apartments in east Oak Cliff.

Freeman was also there when 21-year-old Justin Bruckman of Coppell fatally overdosed. He and Mun refused to let Bruckman's friends — all residents of the Han Gil — call 911, lest they attract the cops' attention. He, too, was put in a car and driven away.

A man named Kendrick Washington, or "Kiki," told feds he was one of Freeman's enforcers. Which meant he used "tactics designed to instill fear and intimidation in individuals that Freeman believed had stolen from him or owed him money." Washington says in his court documents that in that room where the young girl died, Freeman fired a gun at someone he accused of stealing his crack cocaine.

Washington also told the feds he used a phone "to record Freeman torturing the victim with a butane blowtorch."

And now Freeman has pleaded guilty in front of a judge. He faces 10 years to life in federal prison.

"The Han Gil posed a significant danger to our community," Nealy Cox said Thursday, "and we're gratified we succeeded in shutting it down completely."

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It remains a mystery why it took the Coppell cops and the feds to shut down the Han Gil, when Dallas police knew about it. There are, for now, only theories shared among prosecutors: The DEA is concerned with the cartels, and Dallas cops, already short-staffed, went for a long time without a vice unit.

We still don't even know how many people died there — the victims of overdoses, shootings or God knows what else.

All we know is the man called Stuff is going to prison, maybe for life. And soon the Han Gil will be smashed to splinters and carted off to a landfill.

Clyde Shelley Jr., the special agent in charge of the DEA in Dallas, said his agency "will pursue investigations, much like the Han Gil Hotel case, until these places are extinct."

That cannot come too soon.

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