For more than three years, a Kansas City man allegedly lived the life of a drug lord, with a luxury apartment on the Plaza, a downtown loft and a row of three busy east side drug houses.
Federal prosecutors say 48-year-old Andre Taylor, also known as “Dre,” distributed at least 265 pounds of cocaine and 2,000 pounds of marijuana.
But there were problems typical of the trade – informers, phone taps, a greedy associate and an unreliable hit man.
On Wednesday a federal jury convicted him of four counts that carry an overall sentence from 10 years to life in prison.
His convictions: Conspiring to distribute large amounts of cocaine and marijuana from Feb.1, 2010 to Feb. 25, 2014, conspiring in an attempted murder for hire, possessing a machine gun to be used in said murder and abetting the distribution of cocaine.
According to a press release from federal prosecutors:
A Mexico cartel supplied drugs to Taylor, who sometimes traveled to Mexico to buy them for resale in the Kansas City area.
Taylor bragged that he personally sent $20 million back to Mexico.
Many buys took place in, around or outside three Taylor family residences at 23rd and Hardesty streets.
FBI agents built their case with confidential sources and phone taps, and during one of the calls they discovered the planned murder.
Taylor believed co-defendant William E. Brown, 43, “a one-time trusted associate,” stole $500,000 from him and about 28 pounds of cocaine from Taylor’s downtown loft.
In a phone call he told a man, “it’s necessary to kill him,” and in another he told Kenneth V. Cooper than he had a “hammer” for him to use.
Cooper said he was going to come and get it. Jackson County deputies later stopped the vehicle Cooper was in, smelled burnt marijuana and their search turned up a MAC-10 style homemade machine gun, with 18 rounds of ammunition.
The jury also convicted Taylor’s associate Victor Vickers, 29, of conspiracy to distribute marijuana.
Besides those two, 17 co-defendants have pleaded guilty to charges in the same federal indictment.
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