A well-known Jamaican reggae producer’s bid for freedom went up in smoke yesterday – he was convicted of running a major pot ring that sold a ton of marijuana each week on the streets of New York for at least seven years.
Horatio Hamilton faces 20 years behind bars after federal jurors in Manhattan delivered a split verdict, convicting him of drug conspiracy while acquitting him on a gun charge.
Hamilton’s ring made bulk weekly shipments of wacky weed from California to New York.
They put huge amounts of the drug on the streets – concentrating on The Bronx, where they kept “stash houses” – between 1997 and last year.
The cash proceeds were stuffed into the lining of suitcases and hollowed-out DVD players and sent back to California, where the ring used Hamilton’s girlfriend’s home as a base, said federal prosecutors Elizabeth Carpenter and Jacob Buchdahl.
Prosecutors said it was an average workday for Hamilton on Oct. 11, 1999, when authorities nabbed him at Los Angeles International Airport with about 3,600 pounds of pot – enough to roll approximately 3 million joints.
Soon after his arrest, Hamilton, president of a reggae production company, jumped bail and traveled under aliases for five years.
Hamilton had a close call in January 2004, when authorities turned up to search his girlfriend’s house and found compressed bricks of pot.
He was outside the house and gave the cops a phony name.
But Hamilton’s luck ran out in January 2005, when he was again busted at LAX.
Defense lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman argued that Hamilton left the drug business.
“He is one of the more famous Jamaican entertainers,” Lichtman told jurors. “He was done dealing drugs and he had moved onto something more profitable and legal.”