By LANCE MARTIN
rrspin.com

GREENVILLE – Former Windsor Police Officer Antonio Tillmon, the only defendant in the Operation Rockfish police corruption case to not enter a plea, pled not guilty on Monday to all charges filed against him.

While specifics of his not guilty plea were not accessible via electronic court records, a minute entry in the federal system notes his counsel will confer with Senior Court Judge Malcolm Howard to set a trial date for the only holdout in the case. The remaining 14 defendants, exactly one-half of which are former deputies with the Northampton County Sheriff’s Office, have all entered guilty pleas and are expected to tentatively be sentenced in September.

The minute entry notes Tillmon will remain on pretrial release under the same conditions previously imposed by the court. A motion regarding his case filed last month indicated his trial would most likely be set this summer or fall.

Tillmon was originally scheduled for arraignment on May 9, but a motion to continue filed by his attorney asked for a delay until the June 14 term of court in Greenville because of the death of his mother earlier in May.

The minute entry notes Tillmon entered the not guilty plea before Magistrate Judge Kimberly A. Swank in Greenville.

Previous court records indicated Tillmon would most likely be the only one of the so-called Rockfish 15 to stand trial in the case.

Tillmon entered a not guilty plea to the counts lodge against him, which are as follows:

Count 1- Conspiracy to possess and possession with intent to distribute controlled substances;

Count 2 – Conspiracy to use firearm in drug trafficking;

Count 28 – Attempted possession with intent to distribute a controlled substance;

Count 32 – Accepting a bribe in the amount of $10,000;

Count 33- Another count of attempted possession with intent to distribute a controlled substance;

Count 34- Use and carry a firearm during and in relation to a drug trafficking crime;

Count 36 – Another count of accepting a bribe in the amount of $10,000;

Count 48 – Another count of attempted possession with intent to distribute controlled substances;

Count 49 – Another count of use and carry firearm during and in relation to a drug trafficking crime; and

Count 54- Another count of accepting a bribe.

The Operation Rockfish police corruption sting contains a 54-count federal indictment that alleges 13 current and former law enforcement officers and two other individuals protected narcotics shipments and cash proceeds during transit along the East Coast for what they believed was a large-scale drug trafficking organization that was actually an undercover operation by the FBI.

The conspiracy was ongoing since around Nov. 7, 2013 until the time of the arrests made on April 13, 2015.

 

(Lance Martin is the Editor and Publisher of www.rrspin.com. This article is published with permission.)