Brooklyn Judge scolds pill peddler for contributing to opioid crisis, gets eight years

June 28, 2017 By Paul Frangipane Special to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Hydrocodone pills, opioid painkillers similar to oxycodone. AP Photo by Toby Talbot

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A Brooklyn Judge sentenced a 65-year-old army veteran to eight years in prison Wednesday and railed on him for contributing to the opioid crisis by selling thousands of oxycodone pills and forging over a hundred prescription pads.

“You were buying…literally thousands, thousands of oxycodone pills and selling them for substantial amounts of money,” Judge Leo Glasser said down to Doraymus Robinson in Brooklyn Federal Court. “Those pills are more serious than cocaine and heroin.”

Robinson, with at least seven prior arrests, paired with his ex-wife, Carolyn Richardson, to peddle thousands of oxycodone, methadone and Xanax pills obtained by phony prescription pads filled at numerous pharmacies in New Jersey between Jan. 1, 2015 and July 30, 2016.

Richardson pleaded guilty on April 6, 2017 and is set to be sentenced Aug. 2.

In one deal, a confidential informant to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) bought three blank prescription pads from Robinson for $3,000.

The couple obtained Dr. Carl Anderson’s DEA registration number to forge the pads at a printing shop.

Between Jan. 1 and Oct. 5, 2015, 20 “patients” filled prescriptions under Anderson’s name.

Prosecutors said in court documents that the couple circulated about 1,044 grams of oxycodone. t an estimated street price of $1 per milligram, the amount of drugs would have been worth over a million dollars.

The couple kept their stash in public storage at Stop and Store Storage Facility in Staten Island. Upon a Jan. 5 search of the storage unit, ordered by Judge Ramon Reyes Jr., authorities found thousands of pills in prescription pill bottles, a Ruger gun, over 150 blank prescription pads in Anderson’s name and a notebook of the prescription transactions, filled with fake patients and pharmacies.

“I’m trying to get back home to my kids,” Robinson said in court. “I’m sorry for everything I did.”

Robinson has a 16-year-old son in jail, for reasons unbeknownst to him and a 36-year-old son.

Robinson’s lawyer, Paul Petrus Jr., argued for a five-year sentence he said was justified by Robinson’s two years of army service in the 70s as well as his health conditions and drug abuse.

Robinson sat down during the sentencing, reportedly needing a hip replacement that he will be given in prison.

In 1985, Robinson became a bus driver while he was consumed by the crack epidemic in New York.

“I’m not terribly moved by the fact that you’re 65-years-old and have some health problems,” Glasser said to Robinson. “While you were driving a bus, you were using crack every day.”

In his over two-decade run of arrests, five of them included drugs charges, including a 2012 New Jersey charge for filling a phony prescription for pills. Robinson served less than a year in prison on all of his previous convictions.

Glasser intended to break that trend Wednesday, attributing the seriousness of the crime to the opioid crisis, saying bluntly, “people are dying from opioids.”

Oxycodone addictions often lead addicts to seek cheaper opioids, like heroin, which can be laced with the deadly drug, fentanyl.

There were 223 overdose deaths in 2015, according to a statement by the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. And in 2016, there were almost more than three times as many overdoses than homicide deaths, according to the acting District Attorney Eric Gonzalez.

Robinson limped out of the courtroom meticulously opening and closing his mouth and gripping his cane.

“I think that he got a significant sentence,” Petrus said. “And I know that the family is taking it very hard and he is too.”