LEWISTON – A local man was sentenced to nearly 30 years in prison Tuesday for his role in a crack trafficking ring that brought the drug from Jamaica into Maine.

Easton “Jamaican Bill” Wilson, 40, was ordered to spend 26 years and eight months in a federal prison. Wilson was also ordered deported back to Jamaica upon his release from prison.

The sentence was handed down in U.S. District Court in Portland after Wilson pleaded guilty in November to six counts overall. He was convicted on multiple counts of conspiracy to traffic more than 50 grams of crack in the Lewiston area and with importing at least 5 kilograms of the drug.

Wilson is one of nearly a dozen people charged with operating the crack network that runs along the East Coast.

“It’s a conspiracy that spans from Florida, North Carolina, Massachusetts and Maine,” Maine Drug Enforcement Supervisor Gerry Baril said after an earlier court hearing. “There are cells in Miami, in Charleston, in Boston and in Lewiston.”

The investigation into the trafficking network is the same that snared former Bates College Professor Linda Williams last spring. Prosecutors say Wilson was one of several men who occasionally lived with Williams at her Bardwell Street home.

Investigators said Williams allowed Wilson and others to cook crack cocaine in her kitchen, loaned them her car and let them hide out and conduct drug deals from her house.

Police and drug agents raided Williams’ home April 11, 2003, arresting several who were inside the house. Williams, a tenured music professor at Bates, was sentenced earlier this year to five years in a federal prison.

The investigation into local ties to the international crack network began in December of 2002. It was then that a couple was caught in North Carolina after swallowing 500 grams of crack. Drug agents said the cocaine was bound for the Lewiston area, and a massive investigation began.

Police said the leaders of the network would look for drug addicts in the cities where they settled, including Lewiston.

“They would recruit local cocaine and crack addicts in these communities to act as mules for the organization,” Baril said.

Those people would fly to Jamaica, where they would swallow up to a pound of cocaine in balloons or other packaging. Once back in the United States, they would excrete the drugs and turn it over to operators of the drug operation, Baril said.

In Lewiston, most of the cocaine would be cooked into crack, to serve the demand for that drug on the streets, investigators said.

Nine people are still waiting to be tried or sentenced on charges stemming from their roles in the crack conspiracy. According to Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Toof, Wilson’s sentence is the longest handed down so far in the case.

mlaflamme@sunjournal.