Sugar Shack, Daryl Shack,A neighborhood will only have as much crime as they'll tolerate.

"A neighborhood will only have as much crime as they'll tolerate," Hartley,the narcotics assistant chief said. police said that after 20 years of slinging drugs, Shack was a careful man. He tossed his cell phone every few weeks. He had dogs and a surveillance system hooked up at the house he stayed in between Shannon Ridge and the church. Investigators said he used different units at Shannon Ridge, where he was on the books as a maintenance man, to cook drugs often sold in the complex's laundry room as lookouts circled on bicycles. Police said the 41-year-old kept a handful of close operatives and a slightly larger network of addicts who sold crack on the streets. Investigators believe the addicts got a dose of free crack in the morning to get them up and out like someone else's cup of coffee. At day's end, the big sellers got another freebie, according to police. By that time, the ring had moved about $1,000 of crack within a neighborhood less than a mile wide, detectives said. <br />To trap Shack, police had a tailor-made plan. Two undercover detectives posed as construction crew leaders who made crack buys to pay their own laborers the way authorities said Shack did - with $25 doses of the off-white rocks of poison. <br />"We started off buying one piece at a time," Narcotics Assistant Chief John Hartley said of the 30 crack deals the detectives began in November. "Ultimately the goal was to get to Shack. But that took a long time." On Friday, Shack's court-appointed attorney, David Makofka, spoke from the hallway outside Courtroom 5D at the federal courthouse in Jacksonville. It was minutes after his client pleaded not guilty in his drug case. "Don't crucify him until you hear the facts," the lawyer said, becoming the first to defend Shack publicly since the man's Feb. 5 arrest in a police raid. On Feb. 6 a federal grand jury indicted Shack on 14 drug counts, including conspiracy to distribute more than 50 grams of cocaine base. Makofka said his client also denies any part in arson or human slavery offenses. <br />"When they don't have anything to talk about in the case, they talk about window dressing," Makofka said of law-enforcement agents. "The community needs to put the brakes on all these discussions and give him his day in court." <br />Shack has had those before. In 1999 a federal jury acquitted him on drug charges after law-enforcement agents nabbed Shack in connection with a 4-kilogram, or about $90,000 cocaine shipment in Fort Lauderdale. <br />Both his co-defendants went to prison. But with two prior state convictions involving felony drug charges, Shack is facing a maximum penalty of life in prison plus 390 years and a $34 million fine. Among the evidence police seized in the case was a soup mug they said he used to zap cocaine into crack cookies in the Magic Chef microwave in his Shannon Avenue house. Among the property they seized was his 2008 Ford F-250 truck, a gold ring, two diamond stud earrings and a gold Jesus pendant on a thick gold chain worth an estimated $3,000. It's not clear if authorities will seize the deed to the $380,000 home off Kernan Boulevard records show he bought in 2006 with his second wife. They are now divorced. Shack told the judge he made about $4,000 a month as a legitimate maintenance man before he went to federal lockup in Georgia. But the man's history of local arrest and booking reports dating back to 1987 alludes to a violent criminal past. In 2005, police investigated allegations Shack ordered one of his operatives to beat to death another addict who worked for him. That case never made it to court, even after officers recovered a radiator used in the attack. But police said both the victim and the accused from that case now are among Shack's five co-defendants in the federal drug indictment. <br />Police arrested 18 people they've linked to drug dealing in the Shannon Ridge area after three recent raids following the investigation they dubbed "Operation Sugar Cane." <br />The name was a nod to one of Shack's nicknames: Sugar Shack. <br />It also was the name of a limo service he had in the late 1980s. <br />Hartley, the narcotics assistant chief, said police plan to keep a presence in Biltmore even after they scoop up the four drug-dealing suspects they're still looking for. <br />"Our message to people that live there is we will not let this happen again. We don't want another Daryl Shack," he said. <br />The pastor also has vowed to make sure that doesn't happen. Detectives have promised him justice for the arson as that investigation continues. <br />But Biltmore's future mostly is up to its residents, according to the assistant chief.

Sugar Shack, Daryl Shack,A neighborhood will only have as much crime as they'll tolerate.

"A neighborhood will only have as much crime as they'll tolerate," Hartley,the narcotics assistant chief said. police said tha...

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