By Dan Glaun
MassLive.com
NORFOLK, Mass. — A corrections officer at the MCI-Norfolk state prison will serve three months of home confinement and two years of probation for a scheme to smuggle opiods to an inmate.
51-year-old William Holts pleaded guilty to a federal drug conspiracy charge in July as part of a plea deal that allowed him to avoid incarceration after sentencing.
Holts will pay a fine of $2,000, the Office of U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said in a news release. He has already forfeited $1,250 in cash and a 2006 Infiniti M35 luxury sedan.
The federal investigation into Holts’ illicit drug business began in February 2018, when a captain from the Massachusetts Department of Corrections warned the FBI of an ongoing scheme to smuggle contraband into MCI-Norfolk, a medium security state prison.
“Intelligence gathered at that time revealed that MCI-Norfolk Corrections Officer William Holts has been smuggling contraband into MCINorfolk for the last six months,” FBI Special Agent Lisa Crandall wrote in a court affidavit. “Holts is known to smuggle street clothes, to include gloves and shorts, microchips, and watches into MCI-Norfolk to provide to an inmate in his unit.”
Holts’ smuggling went beyond household items. An inmate working as a confidential informant told the DOC that Holts had asked another inmate about the going price for strips of the opioid suboxone, and had said that he was willing to smuggle in “anything except needles and heroin.”
While in the outside world suboxone is typically prescribed to help addicts quit heroin, in prison it is valuable contraband, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said. It is distributed in dissolvable strips that are easily concealed behind envelope seams and stamps.
Investigators found that Holts offered to smuggle more than 100 suboxone strips into the prison for $2,000 in cash, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.