The stress of an aggressive federal probe into their activities in the mid-2000s sent Detroit drug lord Quasand (Q-Dawg) Lewis’s inner-circle into paranoid chaos in the months before the Operation Falling Star indictment landed in July 2005 leading to a near civil war within the ranks of his organization on the heels of the bloody street war it had just engaged in against a rival narcotics crew, per court documents and DEA paperwork from the Falling Star inquiry. A series of raids and seizures by the DEA in 2004 and early 2005 had people in the Lewis camp pointing fingers, according to federal records and audio surveillance. And in one case, pulling triggers.
The Lewis organization was the biggest wholesale marijuana supplier in Michigan from the late 1990s through the first half of the 2000s and Opertion Falling Star entangled Lewis’ first cousin, then-pro basketball player Robert Traylor for helping Lewis hide his drug money. Quasand Lewis, 46, is currently nearing the end of his prison term. His top female courier Annette Sanchez was finally arrested late last year after 11 years on the run from the law. Her boyfriend, Giovanni (Big G) Ruanova, Lewis’ point man overseeing drug shipments from Mexico up to Detroit, remains a fugitive.
Tensions began rising in Lewis’ organization as the feds confiscated more than $5,000,000 in cash and millions of dollars-worth of narcotics and personal property in a half-dozen searches over an 18-month period. The searches were part of the Operation Falling Star investigation prompted by one of Sanchez and Ruanova’s drug mules alerting police of a suburban Detroit hotel suite which Sanchez and Ruanova were using as a stash spot via a panic-stricken complaint to the hotel’s front desk in the spring of 2004. The frazzled and intoxicated Hispanic female courier told hotel personnel there was a dead body in the suite – Novi, Michigan police found $2,000,000 in burlap duffel bags, garbage bags full of marijuana and transaction ledgers instead.
On March 9, 2005, Lewis lieutenant Robin (Slick) Wilson survived being shot several times in an attack outside his home by two assailants who sprayed his car with AK-47 assault rifles as he got behind the wheel of his Dodge Magnum. A court-authorized tap on the cell phone of Lewis’ No. 2 in command Edward (Lemon) Walker, caught a conversation between Walker and Wilson the night he was shot where Wilson blamed Lewis enforcer and sometimes-driver Lavert (Vicious Vito) Dafney with spearheading the attempt on his life, theorizing to Walker that Dafney was the only member of the organization that had been to his new house.
Lewis, Walker, Wilson and Dafney were all indicted together on July 13, 2005 and apprehended within two weeks. Lewis’ girlfriend, Saeeda (Sissy) Walker, Lemon Walker’s sister and fellow shot-caller directly underneath Lewis, was indicted as well. They all eventually pled guilty.
Slick Wilson was Lemon Walker’s right-hand man. As part of his plea deal, Wilson agreed to forfeit over $2,000,000 in cash and his fleet of expensive automobiles. The bug on Walker’s phone also intercepted a conversation between him and his sister with Walker pressing her on the belief that Lewis and Dafney had tried to take one of his guys out.
Vicious Vito Dafney served as Sissy’s Walker’s bodyguard and collector. He was arrested vacationing with his girlfriend at Cedar Point Amusement Park in nearby Sandusky, Ohio. A search of his Canton, Michigan residence, DEA agents discovered drug ledgers, electric cash-counting machines and an arsenal of high-performance firearms.
Quasand Lewis
Lewis was nabbed by authorities trying to board an Atlanta-bound airplane at Cleveland’s Hopkins International Airport on July 25, 2005. Dafney had driven Lewis to Cleveland in the wake of the indictment dropping a week earlier and then met his girlfriend at a hotel on the grounds of Cedar Point located halfway between Cleveland and Detroit to hideout amongst the haven of roller-coaster lovers.
In addition to the Wilson shooting, the feds think Dafney could have been involved in the attempted murder of Marcus Smith, believed to be a loyalist to rival dope kingpin Thomas (Shotgun Tommie) Hodges, six weeks later. Smith, a postman, was shot in the shoulder and neck in an attack staged outside the post office he worked at in Detroit in the early morning hours of April 23, 2005, the final salvo in a two-and-a-half year street war waged between Lewis and Hodges, one-time business partners turned bitter enemies.
Almost a dozen gangland slayings, numerous shootings and at least four fire bombings were chalked up to the brazen warfare by authorities, a spat of violence that included an attempted assassination of Hodges in front of a nightclub across the street from what was at that time Detroit Police Department headquarters. Hodges went down in a separate drug and racketeering indictment earlier that same year.
Sissy Walker and Vicious Vito Dafney were released from prison in October 2015. Lemon Walker and Slick Wilson got sprung in 2011. Lewis is scheduled to be paroled in two years. Hodges, 44, came home in March 2015.
The post Operation Falling Star Redux: Raids, Seizures Had Quasand Lewis’ Detroit Drug Empire At Brink Of Internal Warfare appeared first on The Gangster Report.