Two Detroit drug peddlers plying their trade and doing dirt down in the Dirty South are headed to prison. Rudolph (Rudy Pooty) Coles and James (Jimmy the Shoe) Cheatham were both hit with recent prison sentences by federal judges in North Carolina and West Virginia, respectively, for pushing heroin brought south from Motown. The 60-year old Coles was one of the top leaders of the Detroit Boys Gang, a group of Michigan dope dealers that left the Motor City narcotics scene in the 1990s and set up drug-trafficking franchises in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Huntington, West Virginia and Knoxville, Tennessee. He was indicted in late 2013, along with over a dozen co-conspirators and family members, and found guilty at trial last month. Coles’ conviction calls for a prison-sentence of 18-to-24 years. Cheatham pled guilty back in January to selling $2,000 worth of heroin to an undercover DEA agent in West Virginia in the summer of 2015 that he admitting to scoring back home in Detroit . The 24-year old Jimmy the Shoe was hit with a two-year prison term. He’s a small fish though compared to Rudy Coles (seen in a 2013 mug shot in this article’s cover photo). The probe into the Detroit Boys Gang began in 2012 via an informant’s tip. Coles himself landed in the government’s crosshairs when a cell-phone conversation between a pair of Detroit Boys discussing the gang’s supply of heroin running low was intercepted on a wire. One of those on the wire was Rudy’s younger brother Terrance, the gang’s co-founder. “Pooty is planning a trip up north (to Detroit) for the re-up,” Terrance Coles, 57, was heard telling his Detroit Boy lieutenant. Learning from informants that “Pooty” was Rudy Coles, the DEA attached a tracking device to Coles’ beige-colored Ford Explorer SUV and followed it to Michigan and back to Winston-Salem. A search of the vehicle on Coles’ return to North Carolina on October 28, 2013 revealed 12 ounces of heroin in a secret compartment in the Explorer’s ceiling. The next day, the DEA in Detroit raided a house in Southfield, Michigan which Coles had visited for his “re-up” on his “trip up north,” and seized three pounds of uncut heroin and $35,000 in cash.
