NEWPORT NEWS, Va. – A Hampton Roads man was sentenced Monday to 30 years in prison for distributing a quantity of fentanyl that resulted in someone’s death.
Arnold Burgess
During the sentencing hearing, the court noted that 50-year-old Arnold Burgess had appeared in court on various criminal charges at least 43 times during his life.
Court documents say in November 2016, a man was found dead in his home after overdosing on fentanyl. Telephone records and eyewitnesses identified Burgess as the drug dealer who provided the victim with the drug.
Five months after the victim’s death, Burgess was arrested in Stafford County with 1/4 kilogram of fentanyl. Records say he was connected with the William Joe drug trafficking organization, which was responsible for selling heroin on the Peninsula for years before the organization’s senior members were arrested in 2017.
The case was investigated as part of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF) Operation Broken Finger. The OCDETF program is a federal multi-agency, multi-jurisdictional task force that supplies supplemental federal funding to federal and state agencies involved in the identification, investigation and prosecution of major drug trafficking organizations.
