Feds: Detroit-U.P. drug connection busted

Gwinn — Federal agents have smashed an alleged drug pipeline between Detroit and a remote corner of the state that they say helped a Detroit man feed a growing demand for heroin and cocaine in the Upper Peninsula.

Lamarol “Shawn” Abram’s alleged drug ring operated for three years between Detroit and the tiny mining town of Gwinn until federal drug agents indicted the 37-year-old man and his girlfriend in July. They are charged in a drug conspiracy, and a hearing is scheduled for Sept. 22 in federal court.

The case against Abram mirrors a trend of drug dealers rushing to the U.P., where there is less competition for drug customers and greater profits than in metropolitan cities like Detroit.

Prosecutors say Abram’s alleged drug ring operated 451 miles northwest of Detroit out of homes on the former K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base. The base closed 20 years ago this month and morphed into a breeding ground of poverty, lawlessness and drugs, residents say.

“It’s like an apocalyptic movie,” said Sarah Derwin, a Gwinn resident and health educator with the Marquette County Health Department. “It’s really desolate.”

The base, a half-hour south of Marquette, was an isolated outpost for Abram’s alleged drug ring, which operated in the Gwinn area. There are several ranch-style duplexes in a neighborhood once filled with families of air crew members who worked on nuclear-armed B-52 bombers that served as a first line of response in case of a nuclear war with the former Soviet Union.

The drug ring disintegrated at a house on Thunderchief Street, 10 months into an investigation that started with a snitch.

In February 2014, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration launched an investigation into Abram allegedly hauling heroin and cocaine from Detroit to Gwinn, according to court records. The drugs were sold throughout the area, the DEA said.

Abram’s lawyer declined comment.

It’s unclear what brought Abram to the former mining town, but court records allege he launched a conspiracy to sell cocaine and heroin in Gwinn in 2012.

That would have been two years after Abram finished a five-year prison sentence for cocaine conspiracy in Pennsylvania, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration Special Agent Jeffrey Poikey wrote in a court filing.

While on parole, Abram started conspiring to distribute drugs in the Gwinn area, prosecutors allege.

The former Air Force base, where 25.5 percent of area families live in poverty, offers a tantalizing opportunity for enterprising drug dealers, Derwin said.

“From a business model, it’s really smart,” she said. “If you have a product nobody else has up here, and you introduce it at a cheap rate, in the long run, maybe in six months or a year, you’re going to make out like a bandit.”

The Upper Peninsula is a new market for heroin dealers from metropolitan cities such as Detroit, Chicago and Milwaukee.

“Why is that? The price for heroin in Detroit (and) Chicago is only $15 to $20 for a tenth of a gram,” Detective Lt. Tim Sholander of the Upper Peninsula Substance Enforcement Team said during a presentation earlier this year. “Drug dealers up here are selling it for $40 to $50. So drug dealers are now traveling to the U.P., setting up shop here because they know a large amount of people are addicted to prescription pills and will soon be addicted to heroin.”

Derwin said patrols by the Michigan State Police and nearby Forsyth Township Police are irregular and that isolation and the rural atmosphere can make it more difficult to uncover drug manufacturing and dealing.

“Because it is so remote up here, the availability of heroin and stuff like that is scarcer,” Derwin said. “It’s low income and with low visibility by law enforcement, you get stuff like meth and heroin and it brews all over.”

Marquette County has one of the highest drug-related death rates per 100,000 residents in the Upper Peninsula, though the rate is just below the state average, according to the Michigan Department of Community Health.

Against that backdrop, Abram set up shop in Gwinn, prosecutors allege.

In April 2014, a confidential source claimed to have started selling heroin and cocaine for Abram in 2012, according to court records.

Every few weeks, the source would pick up the drugs in Detroit and haul them to the Gwinn area.

The source usually would travel with Abram’s girlfriend, Megan Tinney, who helped haul the drugs, according to a search warrant affidavit obtained by The Detroit News.

Her lawyer could not be reached for comment.

Tinney, 25, lives in a rental home on the former base on a street called Hercules. Rentals are commonplace in Gwinn. After the base closed, the Sault Tribe acquired about 275 homes and redeveloped the houses into rental units.

Tinney lived there with her two children and Abram, who also has a home in Detroit, according to the DEA agent.

The base is about 10 minutes north of Gwinn. Visitors entering the shuttered base pass a two-tone beige building, barracks built for enlisted men and women who moved out two decades ago.

Shattered glass covers a concrete walkway and grass outside the three-story barracks and purple-flowered weeds sprout from cracks along the sidewalk. Plywood and particle board, some coated in black mold, covers the windows.

A former clinic once run by the 410th Medical Group is open to the elements. Broken windows offer a glimpse inside the sprawling complex, showing peeling paint, shattered glass, mangled window blinds and more mold.

A small, white Baptist church is also here. The name: “New Hope.”

The base offered a new start for Detroiter Carlton Murray Jr. in 2012.

Murray, 36, an unemployed adult foster care worker who grew up near Van Dyke and Six Mile, visited a childhood friend in Gwinn and decided to move into a home on the former Air Force base in 2012.

Instead of hope, Murray found trouble.

According to federal court records, Murray became a drug mule for Abram, hauling cocaine and heroin from Detroit to Gwinn.

Sometimes, according to the DEA, Murray transported the drugs from Detroit in a car. Sometimes, he’d use the Greyhound bus.

His life as a drug mule ended in May 2014. That’s when the DEA arrested Murray, who immediately started cooperating with investigators — cooperation that helped him receive a lighter sentence: 30 months in prison.

“Murray was not a street thug, a gang member, or even closely associated with the suppliers and distributors from whom he picked up and delivered drugs,” his lawyer, Michael Manning, wrote in a court filing.

Manning took a dim view of the former air base.

“That residential location,” Manning wrote, “is impoverished and riddled with drugs.”

Gareth Evans chose the base two years ago because rent is cheap ($400 a month) and he is unemployed. Evans stays despite being warned by neighbors that heroin dealers are moving in, while forcing out meth dealers.

“You hear a lot,” Evans, 30, told a reporter last month, while smoking a cigarette on his back porch overlooking an empty space that once housed military barracks. The barracks were demolished after a fire. “Some unsavory, some a lot more unsavory ... like prostitution for drugs.”

Ten months into the Abram investigation, a confidential source was spilling unsavory allegations.

On Dec. 11, 2014, a confidential source working with investigators met Abram’s girlfriend in Gwinn, according to the DEA.

Tinney got into the source’s car, according to court records, and they drove to a home on Thunderchief on the former Air Force base. Undercover detectives say they watched Tinney go inside the home and emerge minutes later. When Tinney entered the confidential source’s car, she sold the informant a small bag of heroin, the DEA agent alleged.

According to court records, a source told investigators Tinney was a drug mule, a user and a distributor, hauling heroin from Detroit to Gwinn.

In late April, investigators learned Tinney was on board an Indian Trails bus that had left Detroit, bound for Gwinn.

She never made it home. A detective arrested her on a heroin charge after the bus stopped in Escanaba at 4:35 a.m. on April 21.

Inside her luggage, investigators found drug paraphernalia and fentanyl, a powerful pain medication — but no cocaine or heroin.

rsnell@detroitnews.com

(313) 222-2028

Freelance writer John Barnes contributed.