SCRANTON, Pa. — Just after midday on a mild June afternoon, Lakee Harris’s phone started to ring.
“And how was that chicken?” Harris asked Joanne Gaetano, the woman on the other end of the call.
“I would rather the chicken uncooked,” Gaetano replied. “But if it, but it doesn’t matter. It was good.”
This had nothing to do with poultry, Lackawanna County law enforcement said.
It was code for cocaine, according to an affidavit prepared by police, and Gaetano’s preference for uncooked chicken meant she would rather the drug in powder form instead of cooked into crack.
Narcotics investigators, then in the fifth month of an investigation into a drug trafficking ring run by the Crips street gang, listened in to the wiretapped phone call.
The details of that call, and scores of others, were made public Tuesday with the unsealing of criminal charges against city residents Harris, 45, Gaetano, 60, and seven other people.
“Today's message is clear, criminal enterprises are not welcome,” Scranton Police Chief Thomas Carroll said during a news conference. “When you do come, you will be arrested.”
Investigators from the city and state police, county district attorney’s office and state attorney general’s office spent roughly a year investigating a drug organization at the Blue Face Global Hookah Lounge in North Scranton, the site of the former Castle after hours nightclub and a “notorious hotbed of criminal activity and violent incidents,” said District Attorney Mark Powell.
The club was operated by Dwight Smith, 50, of Dickson City, and Damion Williams, 44, of Carbondale, who are among those facing criminal charges for their alleged involvement.
Others arrested in the bust are Jermaine Wilson, 43, of Mercer; Keith Fox, 47, of Scranton; Lee Wood, 47, of Scranton; Nicole Young, 34, of Scranton; and Lawrence Myers Jr., 37, of Scranton.
Many of the attorneys representing the defendants did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Peter Moses, an attorney who represents Smith, said he and his client are “eager” for a preliminary hearing tentatively scheduled later this week. Smith contests the charges and maintains his innocence, Moses said.
A county judge on Tuesday granted an injunction sought by the district attorney’s office and ordered the Blue Face lounge to temporarily shut down, court records show. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for later this month.
Several shootings during the last few years in Lackawanna County involved patrons of the lounge who committed crimes right after leaving the business, according to the district attorney’s office.
That included shootings at a strip club in Old Forge and at a Waffle House in Scranton, prosecutors said.
Powell said during a news conference those incidents “began an ongoing effort to infiltrate, with investigative tools, the activities at Blue Face lounge.”
The probe involved dozens of drug purchases by informants and a wiretap to listen in to phone calls.
A covert camera near the Blue Face — called the “spot” in intercepted communications — captured suspected customers and associates arriving at the club to make a buy.
Physical and electronic surveillance recorded Harris’s trips to New York City to resupply on drugs. Harris, investigators believe, is a “higher level trafficker” who kept others in the organization stocked.
During the investigation, dubbed "Operation Blue Face," officers seized more than one kilogram of cocaine, 500 grams of methamphetamine, and thousands of pressed pills containing fentanyl, ecstasy, and methamphetamine.
“Our concerted efforts from all law enforcement have been focused on eliminating gang activity, and it takes time,” Powell said. “It takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of work, but today is an example and a significant blow to the Crips and their illegal activity.”