From ‘Superstar’ Cop to Drug Kingpin

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On a cold afternoon in late October 2023, Freddie Wayne Huff walked into the federal courthouse in Greensboro flanked by U.S. marshals. Huff wore an orange jumpsuit, his movements constricted by the chains around his wrists and ankles.  

After two years in federal detention, Huff, then 43, looked tired and numb. His sharp hazel eyes darted between his attorneys and the judge, barely acknowledging his son, ex-wife, and a few other relatives seated two rows behind him. 

That Huff was once one of the finest drug interdiction officers in the country, responsible for millions of dollars in drug and cash seizures, was not in dispute this afternoon. Everyone—his legal team, the judge, even the prosecutor—commended his 12-year career as a Lexington police officer and later as a North Carolina state trooper. 

“He was a superstar at the job,” U.S. prosecutor Randall Galyon said in court. “He was fantastic.”  

Yet they were bewildered by his transformation from drug interdiction officer to drug kingpin. Using his knowledge gained from a decade of busting drug runners, Huff exploited law enforcement procedures to save cartels millions of dollars and catapult himself to the top of North Carolina’s drug trade.  

For five years, from 2016 until his arrest in 2021, Huff ran a sprawling drug empire, stretching 1,400 miles from the Mexican border to North Carolina and fueled by a network of unlikely accomplices: a former cell tower technician, U.S. Army veterans, a former Marine Corps sergeant. 

From his stash house in Lexington, he became the main supplier for networks in Winston-Salem, Greensboro, Fayetteville, Charlotte, Atlanta, Orlando, Norfolk, Philadelphia, and Texas. 

That afternoon in court, Huff acknowledged his role as the mastermind of a multimillion-dollar drug empire. But even as he admitted his guilt, he downplayed the significance of his law enforcement past. 

“It’s an exaggeration as far as using my knowledge of law enforcement,” he told the court before sentencing, his voice flat and drained. “Maybe I had a little advantage, but it wasn’t to the extent that it’s being made out to be.” 

Prosecutors said it was precisely that knowledge that made Huff so effective at evading Border Patrol agents and drug-sniffing dogs at the U.S.-Mexico border in Laredo, Texas. And it was because of those skills that they said Huff and his accomplices were able to traffic 2,000 kilograms of cocaine and 25 kilograms of heroin to North Carolina and other parts of the country. 

Huff and his team concealed the drugs in passenger cars, tractor-trailers, and appliances like washers and dryers, then sold them to dealers.

North Carolina media outlets briefly reported Huff’s arrest and conviction, but The Assembly has uncovered revealing new details to provide the deepest account yet of Huff’s rise and fall. 

We obtained and analyzed thousands of pages of documents related to Huff’s work, including incident and arrest reports from his decade with the Lexington Police Department and various court records, some of which have not been previously reported. 

“Maybe I had a little advantage, but it wasn’t to the extent that it’s being made out to be.” 

Freddie Huff

That included interviewing nearly two dozen people, including Huff and another federal inmate by phone. This article also includes comments Huff made to Seth Harp, author of the new book, The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces. I assisted Harp in researching the book, although I had first started reporting about Huff a year earlier.

Taken together, this reporting shows how Huff forged alliances with some of the most notorious cartels on the map, including Los Zetas, Jalisco, and Pacifico in Mexico, and a Puerto Rican gang operating out of Florida. 

“You gotta have multiple suppliers because if one gets taken off, you’re fucked,” Huff said in an interview from Fort Dix federal prison in New Jersey, where he has been since 2024–and will likely remain for many years. 

A Special Instinct

Growing up in Lexington, Huff dreamed of becoming a police officer, an aspiration nurtured by his father, also named Freddie Huff. The senior Huff was a board member of the local Crime Stoppers chapter for over 15 years. 

When young Freddie was 13, a family friend at the Lexington Police Department gave him a real badge. Photos show the young Huff in a navy blue button-down shirt, the shiny brass badge and nameplate gleaming against the fabric. Completing the look were matching pants tucked into black boots, a utility belt with a plastic 9mm, and a perfectly sized police cap.  

“He was well took care of, and just like his dad he got a heart of gold,” the elder Huff told The Assembly. “He was just a special child.”

Huff graduated from West Davidson High School near Lexington in 1998, where he played football and basketball and ran cross country while maintaining a strong academic record. “I was a straight-arrow,” Huff said.

Two years later, he completed his basic law enforcement training program at Davidson-Davie Community College. After a brief stint working at an auto glass store, he joined the Lexington Police Department in 2003, when he was 23.

Huff had a special instinct for spotting drug runners. “Even in patrol, he was able to identify people who were involved in drugs,” former Lexington Police Chief John Lollis, who led the department from 2005 to 2012, said in an interview.

In 2009, amid growing concerns about drug trafficking in North Carolina, law enforcement agencies with jurisdiction along Interstate 85, including the Lexington Police Department, formed highway interdiction teams to patrol the stretch that runs through Davidson County, a major corridor for drug traffickers.

Huff, who is 6-foot-2 and more than 200 pounds, was drawn to the adrenaline-fueled pursuit of drug smugglers rather than the somber investigations of petty or even violent crimes. His passion for the cat-and-mouse game led him to seek out the interdiction team, where he was in his element. 

On I-85, within a 5-mile stretch of Mile Marker 87, Huff carved out his reputation not just in Lexington but across the country. Between 2006 and 2012, he seized a staggering $5 million in cash, according to an Assembly analysis of his incident and arrest reports. That’s a remarkable sum for a small police department, not to mention for one officer. 

If Huff suspected an interstate driver of drug trafficking, he’d find a reason to stop them. Following too closely, failure to maintain lanes of travel, impeding traffic, and improper display of license plates were among the pretexts he used to justify his stops, according to the incident and arrest reports.  

On a December day in 2006, parked near Mile Marker 87, Huff detected a small, easily overlooked detail: the absence of two rear mud flaps on a Freightliner tractor-trailer with Texas plates. The seemingly minor infraction gave Huff a reason to pull the truck over–a stop that uncovered a hidden compartment containing $507,128 in cash, according to an incident report reviewed by The Assembly. 

“He could spot things that I wasn’t able to spot,” Lollis said. “But when he showed them to me, they were plain as day.” 

Lollis said Huff was skilled at processing information. “He could cut through a conversation and see things the average officer needed years and years of experience to watch for,” Lollis said. 

“Even in patrol, he was able to identify people who were involved in drugs.”

John Lollis, former Lexington Police chief

Huff had a knack for catching even the smallest inconsistencies in a driver’s story, which he then leveraged to conduct remarkably effective searches. He knew every nook and cranny, every possible hiding place, from the dashboard crevices to the undercarriage and the gas tank. 

“I basically started learning what’s not supposed to be there,” Huff said. “I had to clear every void in that vehicle. If I can look inside every spot, there’s nothing there.”

On the interstate, Huff mostly targeted vehicles with out-of-state license plates. When he was a Lexington police officer, he seized cash from 85 vehicles; 59 were registered outside of North Carolina, according to an Assembly analysis of his incident and arrest reports. 

The interdiction team’s success, fueled largely by Huff’s efforts, paid for a $1.7 million training facility in 2010.  

Huff’s reputation spread within the law enforcement community. He was a federally certified instructor for the Drug Enforcement Administration and trained agents in New Orleans, New York, Los Angeles, and Virginia. 

Huff’s impact on the Lexington Police Department was so profound that his departure in 2013 after 10 years on the force led to a significant decline in drug forfeiture revenue. According to a local news report, between 2006 and 2013 the department seized more than $6 million in cash, with a peak of $1.1 million collected during the 2009-10 fiscal year. 

In the 2013-14 fiscal year, the first full period following his departure, Lexington’s drug forfeiture revenue plummeted to $60,057, according to the report. Since then, annual drug forfeiture revenues have consistently languished below $60,000, with some years yielding barely a few thousand dollars.  

Fall From Grace

On January 11, 2014, two State Highway Patrol troopers conducted a traffic stop on a white 1998 Ford Crown Victoria at a driver’s license checkpoint on the I-40 westbound ramp in Iredell County. 

In the back window, they spotted an official State Highway Patrol hat, the kind troopers wear while in uniform. When questioned, the driver revealed that he had purchased the hat from Trooper Huff online for $360.

Internal investigators also discovered that Huff had sold other items, including his state-issued patrol boots.  

After initially denying he’d sold any items, Huff told investigators that he sold the boots to buy a better pair. He’d lost money in the process. The state-issued boots sold for a mere $0.99 on eBay, less than he’d paid for shipping. 

While Huff avoided any criminal charges for selling pieces of his uniform, his initial denial cost him his job in March 2014. Having that on his record made it impossible to get another job in law enforcement. 

“I lost everything—lost my certifications, they blacklisted me, lost my expert witness status,” he said. “Lost everything that I had.”   

Huff’s law enforcement legacy was forged on interstate highways. Soon, those same routes would become the stage for his most daring adventures.  

Bad White Boy

After he was fired, Huff launched a used appliance business in Lexington that quickly expanded across North Carolina and other states. But even as the business flourished, Huff harbored a lingering resentment toward his former employer.  

“I had told myself if anything ever falls into my lap, I was going to use every fucking thing I had known, learned, and taught—against them,” he said. 

Huff marketed his appliances nationally, and customers came from across the country to buy from him. Among them were a couple who ran a used appliance store out of McAllen, Texas; Huff said he didn’t know their last names.

From the moment they walked into the warehouse, Huff said he felt that familiar prickle of suspicion. “I was like, ‘Ehh, this screams cartel,’” Huff recalled thinking.

“I lost everything—lost my certifications, they blacklisted me, lost my expert witness status. Lost everything that I had.”   

Freddie Huff

To test his suspicions, Huff included a few broken appliances in his shipments to McAllen to see if they’d report any issues. 

“They didn’t say a fucking word,” Huff said. “So I pretty much figured it out.”    

Over time, Huff cultivated a friendship with the woman, who visited frequently. Their conversations drifted from business to more personal matters. Huff knew someone in the illegal marijuana trade, and the idea of getting into the business had been simmering in the back of his mind. 

One afternoon in 2016, as the woman wandered his warehouse aisles, he casually mentioned his interest. 

“I asked her because I knew she was from McAllen,” Huff said. “And down there in the valley is where [most] of all cocaine comes into the United States. As a matter of fact, when I was working on the interstate, almost every passenger that I stopped from McAllen had drugs on them.”  

Huff said the woman connected him with Rudolpho Trevino, the owner of an appliance store that operated in a McAllen shopping mall. Trevino was associated with the violent Los Zetas cartel. 

Huff said the store was a conduit for a major drug trafficking operation. They refurbished used appliances, but those beyond repair were loaded with cocaine and sent to Huff and other distributors across the country.  

“We load them back with money and send them straight back there,” Huff said. 

Huff and a friend met with Trevino one afternoon in 2016 in a restaurant parking lot in Riverside, California. Huff said he and the friend wanted to get into the marijuna business, but Trevino had other ideas.  

Trevino emerged from a car, impeccably dressed in designer clothes, his nails perfectly manicured. “He screamed cartel,” Huff said. “He looked like the Mexican Kenny Rogers.” 

They talked inside the car. According to Huff,  Trevino said: “What about bricks [of cocaine]?” 

Huff said he was taken aback. But before he could respond, his friend said yes. “I looked at him like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’” Huff said. 

Still, he agreed to the deal.

Huff said Trevino’s shipment arrived in Lexington a few weeks later: 25 kilos of cocaine, concealed inside washers and dryers. He said Trevino flew into the local airport in Davidson County on a private jet and met Huff at his home in Lexington.  

Over drinks, Trevino darted among topics, never lingering on any one subject for long. Huff said Trevino was sizing him up, evaluating the man who might become a key player in his operations.  

Huff had managed to move every ounce of the 25 kilos in just 24 hours. Trevino was impressed. “You’re the baddest white boy I’ve ever seen,” Huff said Trevino told him.  

In court documents, federal investigators said a Huff accomplice told them that Trevino supplied cocaine to Huff. Trevino has not been charged, and The Assembly was not able to reach him for comment. 

Huff said his agreement with Trevino helped transform him into one of the most prolific cocaine distributors in North Carolina. 

‘He Can’t Be a Cop’ 

After an arrest within his distribution network forced Trevino to lie low, Huff said he went months without supplies. But someone else came to his rescue: an Army veteran in Moore County named Timothy Dumas, then 42. 

Dumas was an imposing figure. He’d served 20 years, including four tours in Afghanistan, according to his certificate of release from active duty. He was built like a football player, 6 feet tall and 200 pounds. He wore a Thin Blue Line bracelet on his wrist and often carried a chrome-plated Smith & Wesson revolver or a desert tan Hellcat semiautomatic. 

Dumas’ partnership with Huff, which began in 2018, broadened their reach. Their network stretched from Florida to Virginia and included Fort Bragg. Dumas used his pickup truck, its bed filled with mismatched furniture, to conceal a compartment in the back used to hide drugs.

In summer 2019, Jaime Fontanez, a cell tower technician, was working in Minnesota when his uncle called to say Dumas wanted to meet him. Dumas, who was Black, and Huff met Fontanez at his home in Kissimmee, Florida, but Fontanez remained wary of Huff.

“He was white, and I was scared of him. I told Tim, ‘I’ll deal with you, but I don’t want to deal with Freddie,’” Fontanez, who is Puerto Rican, said from a federal prison in Florida. “To be honest, I’m not racist, but he looked like a cop from the start.” 

Despite his initial suspicions about Huff, Fontanez never considered looking into his background.

“He used to do so much cocaine,” Fontanez said. “He was dealing with all these people in North Carolina—all those Black guys. The Bloods, the Crips, everyone. They respected him. So I thought, ‘He can’t be a cop.’” 

Huff lived large. He rented a $1.3 million house in Charlotte as well as a  $414,000 house in Lexington, according to court records. He had a gray Lamborghini Huracan that was registered in his mother’s name and a white Cadillac Escalade registered to his wife.  

Fontanez was impressed by how quickly and easily Huff moved the drugs. “He used to take 20 kilos and move 20 kilos,” Fontanez said. “It was crazy; he used to magically move them.” 

With a steady flow of cocaine from Orlando, Huff and Dumas supplied dealers across the southeastern U.S. and as far north as Pennsylvania. Huff said shipments from Trevino resumed, and Huff also forged connections with the Jalisco cartel, one of the most powerful and dangerous drug cartels in Mexico. 

Huff had access to at least three reliable suppliers, and maintained a steady supply even as other traffickers struggled due to the pandemic. 

“You got a Black guy and a white guy selling to Mexicans,” Huff said, laughing.  

But not for long. On December 1, 2020, Dumas and a Special Forces soldier were shot and killed during a drug deal. Their bodies were found in a secluded training area at Fort Bragg.  

Federal prosecutors later charged Kenneth Maurice Quick Jr. of Laurinburg with their deaths. He is awaiting trial in federal court. 

A Decoy at the Checkpoint 

Around 10 one night in 2021, the scent of marijuana clung to Fontanez’s car, triggering a drug-sniffing dog at the Laredo Border Patrol checkpoint. 

Though Laredo sits on the U.S. side of the border, travelers heading north pass through a secondary checkpoint. It was the fourth time in as many months that Fontanez had been stopped, and the agents were growing suspicious, he said. 

Huff was two cars behind in a rental SUV, dressed in a crisp suit and tie. Rahain Deriggs, a former Marine Corps sergeant who had become Huff’s right-hand man, watched with Huff as Fontanez was pulled for inspection.  

For an hour, agents interrogated Fontanez while K-9s circled his car. They also ran the vehicle through an X-ray scanner. “I had nothing, so they had to release me,” Fontanez recalled.   

“He was dealing with all these people in North Carolina—all those Black guys. The Bloods, the Crips, everyone. They respected him. So I thought, ‘He can’t be a cop.’” 

Jaime Fontanez

By then, Huff and Deriggs, their SUV trunk loaded with 10 kilos of cocaine wrapped in shop towels soaked in ammonia to hide the smell, were already heading up I-35 to their San Antonio hotel.  

The plan, simple but audacious, had worked again. Fontanez, the decoy, had lit up a joint just before the checkpoint to draw the attention of the agents and their dogs. 

“[Huff] was always two cars behind me,” Fontanez said.  “Once he saw the dog smelling me, that’s when he used to go past. He was a white guy, you know. … He used to look like a lawyer, and he used to just pass the border.”   

But the hour-long search spooked them. “I was getting hot the fourth time,” Fontanez said. “It was like, damn, this is the fourth time that he does this; what’s going on?” 

It wasn’t their first close call. At around 2 one morning, Huff said he was driving four kilos to Asheville in his Lamborghini when the tire pressure light flickered on. 

He pulled into a desolate gas station, its fluorescent lights casting long, eerie shadows. Two local cops, their faces creased with the weight of late-night shifts, were nursing coffees. Their eyes widened when they saw the Lamborghini, a rare spectacle in this corner of North Carolina.  

When the officers asked what he did for work, Huff was ready. He said he was a neurosurgeon rushing to do an emergency surgery in Asheville. After his car had been towed to a mechanic, the officers gave Huff a ride halfway. 

He said he sat in the passenger seat of the police car, with four kilos of cocaine tucked neatly in a Louis Vuitton bag at his feet. “I’m in a police car going 100 miles an hour to take me like 40 miles down the road,” Huff said. “I got off on it. I loved it.”  

A Desperate Gamble

At 6:50 a.m. on May 28, 2021, the Sosa family was jolted awake in their Winston-Salem home by the sound of their front door crashing through. 

Two figures in full black tactical gear—ballistic helmets, vests bearing U.S. Marshal patches—stormed in. AR-15s and SCAR rifles in hand, they moved with precision, their commands sharp and authoritative as they barked “Search warrant!” at the family, according to Huff and court documents reviewed by The Assembly.

Michael Sosa, the primary target, and another man were cuffed at gunpoint. The other five members of the family were ordered to stay put.  

Outside, a Dodge Charger idled in the driveway, its blue lights flashing erratically into the growing morning light. 

But the two men weren’t U.S. marshals. It was Huff and Deriggs.

It wasn’t the first time they had impersonated federal law enforcement officials to reach their target. For Huff, who had spent five years navigating the dangers of drug trafficking without resorting to violence, this was the surest way to avoid it. 

“I knew that it would be the safest way for everybody if they thought it was the police,” Huff said. “They’d be passive, and we’d be passive. We do what we do and leave—nobody gets hurt.” 

The kidnappings were Huff’s last-ditch effort to salvage a crumbling empire and to protect his family. Dumas’ death had left a gaping hole in the organization, and an undercover sting in Laredo a month before, where sheriff’s deputies seized $210,000 intended for a cocaine buy, crippled his cash flow.  

A customer had told Huff that Sosa had cocaine in his possession that someone else had stolen from Huff.

“I was like, well, this my fucking saving grace right here. We’ll break even; everything will be fine,” Huff said. “We were going to get our shit; we weren’t going to do a fucking robbery.” 

Inside the Sosa home, everyone cooperated, believing they were dealing with law enforcement. The intruders collected $24,000, an assortment of jewelry, several firearms, and nearly a kilo of cocaine. 

“I knew that it would be the safest way for everybody if they thought it was the police. They’d be passive, and we’d be passive. We do what we do and leave—nobody gets hurt.” 

Freddie Huff

Huff said the cocaine’s packaging, a distinctive vacuum-sealed brick, indicated it was his.  

Just as they were preparing to slip out with their haul, a 57-year-old member of Sosa’s family clutched her chest. Forsyth County emergency communications received a call about a woman in distress at 7:35 a.m.; the caller identified himself as a neighbor who heard someone yelling for help.  

But the caller was Huff. “She was faking it,” he said, “but I wasn’t taking that chance.” EMS arrived at the scene at 7:54 a.m., just as Huff and Deriggs were stepping out the door, according to a dispatch log obtained by The Assembly. 

Huff waved them in, and the pair quickly left for the stash house.

But the absence of standard police protocol, coupled with the men’s hurried departure, triggered the suspicion of the EMS crew, who alerted Winston-Salem Police. 

On His Trail

Officers from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office had been surveilling the stash house. That afternoon, they followed Huff as he left in his white Cadillac and arrested him at a nearby convenience store. 

They had traced the EMS call and eventually placed Huff and Deriggs at the scene of the robbery.

The officers had been on his trail since Dumas was killed in December 2020 and the FBI received a tip that Huff was a major drug trafficker in the area.  

By March 2021, multiple confidential informants had passed information to investigators about Huff and his operation. 

Late that month in Laredo, officers with the Webb County Sheriff’s Office pulled over an Uber driver carrying Deriggs and seized $210,000 in a green military-style duffel bag. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute cocaine, and was sentenced to 17 years in prison.

Fontanez was arrested the same day en route to the stash house with 500 grams of cocaine. He also pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years in prison. 

In court documents, Huff said he’d had a good childhood with a close family that watched movies together and camped in the backyard. However, he said he’d been sexually abused by a neighbor as a young child, something he’d only recently revealed to a therapist. 

He also said he had a traumatic brain injury from a car accident in 2010 that caused him to have seizures, which was confirmed by medical records. When he was in jail in 2021, he attempted to hang himself with a bed sheet. 

But Huff accepted responsibility for his crimes and pleaded guilty. He admitted to distributing cocaine in North Carolina for several years and running drugs and money throughout the southeastern U.S. 

Huff wanted the judge “to know that he feels like he was a model citizen up until he began distributing controlled substances,” court records said. 

As he sat in court in October 2023 bracing for a potential life sentence,  prosecutors painted a picture of a man who leveraged his police training to shield drug cartels. The defense pointed to a decade of service and a man who “fell from grace … because of a dishonesty about some boots that were sold.”

U.S. District Court Chief Judge Catherine Eagles sentenced him to 21 years in prison. 

“I felt good. I know it sounds crazy, but I felt good,” Huff said of dodging the life sentence. “I actually felt like I won the fucking lottery that day.”