K2: dealing in drugs

Home City News K2: dealing in drugs

Two weeks ago, The Collegian reported on a Camden, Mich., couple facing life in prison after being charged with six felonies each, including the delivery of more than 1,000 grams of a controlled substance and maintaining a drug house.

Douglas Dean Cardwell was vomiting repeatedly when officers from the Hillsdale County Sheriff’s Office and the Reading Police Department raided the house he shared with Michelle Ann Demayo and their 2-year-old son.
He claimed, according to a police report, that he had tried to get treatment for his addiction to synthetic marijuana. During the raid, his withdrawal symptoms escalated and an ambulance rushed him to the hospital.

“He had to get up in the middle of the night to smoke some to keep from going through withdrawals,” said Hillsdale County Assistant Prosecutor Rod Hassinger.
Cardwell and Demayo, his fiancé, owned and operated Addikted 2 Ink, the tattoo parlor front for their alleged synthetic marijuana store in Camden.

Cardwell’s history of selling drugs, according to a search warrant, extends for almost 20 years. He was arrested for conspiring to sell drugs in Phoenix, Ariz., in 1994; for preparation of drugs in Defiance County, Ohio, in 2001; and for possession of marijuana in Steuben County, Ind., 2011.

“He’s been a drug dealer his whole life. He’s moved around to different drugs, and now he’s on to designer drugs,” Hassinger said. “He’s defiant. He’s open, notorious, and didn’t read the law.”
As part of a multi-million dollar ring of Midwestern, synthetic-marijuana sellers, the duo rented a space in Camden for $400 a month on a month-by-month basis. Dewey Stanton, the owner of the building Addikted 2 Ink operated in, said Cardwell paid seven to eight months down in advance.
Penny Hawkins, manager of the nearby Clubhouse restaurant, said that word got out quickly about what the pair was doing.
“Nobody could park because there were so many cars,” she said.
Cardwell purchased the drug from a company he called “High Profile,” located in California. He told officers a man he only knew as “Harvey” shipped him between
$5,000 and $12,000 of spice five to six times a week.
“He was always on the phone buying what he called ‘parts,’” Hawkins said.

Cardwell admitted he never filed his income taxes because he made “so much money” from selling “potpourri.”

Demayo said it took two to three days to sell $6,000 worth of “incense.” That success

proved their downfall.
“They made too much of a spectacle. There wasn’t one person that didn’t know,”

Hawkins said. “They turned a lot of different people against them.”
Hillsdale County Sheriff Stan Burchardt said buyers came to the shop from across

Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and possibly even Illinois.
Cardwell and Demayo’s success not only attracted the community’s attention but also

that of Hillsdale law enforcement. Hillsdale Prosecuting Attorney Neal Brady and Hassinger said the store’s opening corresponded with an uptick in related crime.

“I charged a man with using another person’s financial transaction device. When he was confronted with the police about it, he said he needed money to go buy more product at the Camden shop,” Brady said. “We had a complaint here from a father in Coldwater who had called to the sheriff’s department saying that his son had overdosed after buying this product from the Camden shop.”

Burchardt said that officers from the sheriff’s office responded to the community’s uproar by talking to confidential informants in town and contacting Angola, Ind., law enforcement.

Officers from the Hillsdale County Sheriff’s office confronted Cardwell and an unidentified clerk over a moped traded for spice, on Sept. 23.

On Oct. 14, plain-clothes officers from the Hillsdale Narcotics Enforcement Team made their first undercover purchase: approximately 1.8 grams of Bizarro, a blueberry blend of spice, and 1.8 grams of Black Diamond, a strawberry blend.

According to a police report, one of the clerks said, “We have to keep expanding up here in Michigan because Ohio keeps passing ordinances against this stuff.”

After Gregory Endres, vice president of chemistry at Cayman Chemical in Ann Arbor, said that the active ingredient in the samples, PB-22, was a “synthetic cannabinoid” and an “analogue” of other schedule 1 substances, officers made a second buy on Nov. 13: another 1.5 grams of Bizarro and 3.5 grams of blueberry “Angel’s Breath.”

When officers conducted the search warrant on Nov. 14, they found Cardwell suffering from withdrawals and Demayo with dirt on her hands. She admitted to ripping marijuana plants out of their pots in an attempt to destroy them. She knew that her medical card had expired more than a year ago, and that Cardwell’s had two weeks before.

Officers seized 11 marijuana plants, 229.3 grams of suspected marijuana, 1,149.4 grams of spice, approximately 267 grams of marijuana butter, and $7,906 in cash, rolled and secured with rubber bands.

At the shop, officers seized 4.15 pounds of spice, more than 500 glass pipes, 600 packages of rolling papers, and business logs indicating $191,791 in sales.

“They seized fake urine kits they sold so people could pass urine tests,” Hassinger said. After the conduction of the warrant, the duo was arrested in Angola, Ind., waived

extradition from Indiana, and were arraigned in Hillsdale County.
Cardwell is in the Hillsdale County Jail after fleeing to Indiana, and Demayo is out on

bail. Both were unavailable for comment.