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Last case settled in East Side gang indictment
By Joe Gorman
YOUNGSTOWN
Prosecutors are recommending a 12-year prison term for the last of 16 people indicted for drug dealing and other criminal activities as part of an East Side gang last August.
Darrell Mason, 24, entered guilty pleas in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court Thursday before Judge Maureen Sweeney to seven counts of trafficking in marijuana, fifth-degree felonies; single counts of trafficking in cocaine, trafficking in heroin and possession of cocaine; and two counts of being a felon in possession of a firearm.
A sentencing date has not been set yet.
Mason was a member of the gang known as the Vic Boys, which dealt drugs, and sometimes guns, around the Victory Estates neighborhood on the East Side. Police began looking into the gang’s activities more closely in late 2012 after several shootings in that area of the East Side in which either the victims or suspects had ties to the gang.
Although Assistant Prosecutor Martin Desmond said prosecutors are recommending a 12-year sentence, Tom Zena, one of Martin’s attorneys, said he’ll be arguing for a lesser sentence when his client appears again before Judge Sweeney.
The maximum penalty for all the charges is 34 years in prison.
As part of his plea, Mason not only will admit to the drug and weapons charges, he also will admit he was a member of the gang, Desmond said.
However, Zena siad that though his client will admit being in the gang, he will only admit to the crimes he was specifically charged with and no other offenses to which prosecutors say the gang as a whole committed.
Of the 16 indicted by a grand jury last August, three had their cases presented in juvenile court, and some people were indicted on crimes they committed with gang members but not as a part of the gang.
One of the men charged with being a member of the gang, Charles Moore, 23, was killed in August in a shootout that also killed another man in the Rockford Village housing project. Moore had pleaded guilty and was out on bond awaiting sentencing when he was killed.