Details emerge about Torrance Hill's drug organization

“He’s related to everybody in the world,” Shelnutt said. “He’s got more cousins than anybody I know. He’s even got cousins that work down there at the jail.”

His underlings in the drug organization included Shawn Bunkley, Santwan Holt, Vincent Johnson and Pop Riley, Hill testified during the Shelnutt trial.

Bunkley, known as “Biscuit,” was a race car mechanic from Geneva, Ga. He is now a federal inmate, having pleaded guilty to drug charges earlier this year.

In his testimony against Shelnutt, Bunkley described his relationship with Hill this way: “I wouldn’t consider him the boss; he was just the guy with the drugs.”

Hill described it in much the same way.

“I would get them the drugs and they would distribute them,” Hill said. “They would bring the money back to me, we would wrap it up and send it to Mexico.”

But Hill got his cut first.

He never testified to how much he was making personally, but he seemed to have a lot of cash stashed.

The fall of an empire

Hill had been in trouble with the law in 1999 when police found a small amount of cocaine in his home and a half a marijuana cigarette in his car. But his real problems began on May 4, 2005.

That’s when local drug agents went to a rented storage facility on Miller Road and found nearly $40 million in drugs — 484 pounds of cocaine and about 2,000 pounds of marijuana — along with more than $600,000 in cash.

Hill and four others were arrested. Even in jail, Hill continued to direct his drug organization. During conversations with his wife and girlfriend, he would order cash pickups in code. At times, he would be hooked into three-way calls with his drug runners, according to jail tapes played into evidence last week.

He was bonded out of the Muscogee County jail on the agreement he would cooperate with federal authorities, but Hill went back to running drugs for the Mexican cartel.

“He started moving dope and money,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Mel Hyde.

Hill said he had no choice.

“I owed the people in Mexico $2 million,” he said. “They told me if I didn’t help them, they were going to hurt my family. So, that is what I had to do.” Hill was arrested again on Feb. 7, 2006, after authorities found $141,000 in cash in a box at his Whisperwood apartment. That same day, another of Hill’s soldiers, Cortez Johnson, was picked up in Harris County with about 50 pounds of cocaine, with a street value of more than $5.4 million.

Hyde said all the cocaine found in Johnson’s car “were Mr. Hill’s drugs.”

That arrest took Hill out of the game.

The prosecution has tried to link Hill’s organization to a couple of slayings in Columbus, including the 2004 unsolved homicide of Edward Earl Taylor Jr., 41. Taylor was fatally shot May 15 as he worked inside High Tech Transmission on Manchester Expressway.

When asked about it by Shelnutt’s attorney, Hill was adamant.