'Wire' Actress, Faced with Wiretap Evidence, Pleads Guilty to Drug Charges
In a case of life imitating art, an actress who played an assassin for a drug gang in the HBO series The Wire pleaded guilty Monday to charges that she conspired to distribute heroin.
Felice “Snoop” Pearson, 31, received a seven-year suspended sentence and three years of probation with special provisions for out-of-state travel for work, the Associated Press reported.
The plea allows Pearson to move on with her acting career, instead of spending another year or more with the charges hanging over her head, her lawyer, Benjamin C. Sutley said afterward.
“I can’t say she would have been found not guilty,” Sutley told reporters outside of the courtroom, to which Pearson responded: “I would have been found not guilty.”
Pearson was a breakout star on the hit HBO show, which chronicled the exploits of fictitious drug gangs in Baltimore’s inner city. Her character, who shared the nickname “Snoop,” was a cold-blooded killer.
She was arrested in March after being caught on a wiretap in a joint state-federal probe of an alleged drug gang accused of buying heroin in New York and marijuana in California for distribution on the streets of Baltimore. Pearson was paid to store drugs and money for the gang at her apartment in the city, prosecutors said.
This wasn’t Pearson’s first brush with the law. She previously served five years of an eight-year sentence for a second-degree murder she committed when she was 14.
