‘Major, major drug trafficker’ in Delaware who led biggest fentanyl ring gets 25-year prison sentence

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Every morning when he woke up, Dwayne Fountain sent his employees text messages with a single word — “motivation” — and an emoji of a flexed bicep.

The hulking middle-aged weightlifter and self-proclaimed personal trainer engendered awe among his workers, who called him “OG” and “Big Homie.”

The daily exhortations Fountain sent had nothing to do with encouraging fellow fitness buffs, however.

They were demands for his crew to sell more fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and xylazine.

And sell they did.

Their efforts put Fountain atop a thriving drug distribution network in Delaware, one supplied primarily by a Mexican cartel that routed his fentanyl through California and Scranton, Pennsylvania, federal court records show.

Fountain was known for mixing fentanyl, an ultra-deadly opioid, with other drugs to create his own potent brands, such as “ONE DAB,” which were stamped with an image of a panda wearing red shorts. Another fentanyl mix was called “Track Hawk.”

He even kept an industrial kilogram press at his $500,000 home in Middletown’s Willow Grove Mill neighborhood, which he used to repackage the concoctions back into bricks. He’d keep large quantities of drugs, as well as scales and mixing agents, in his rental unit on Varsity Lane at School Bell Apartments in Bear, where a teenage boy who is one of his 15 children lived with his mother.

But after his Scranton connection got busted a couple of years ago, and law enforcement agents began buying from one of his dealers, Fountain’s empire unraveled.

A raid on his home, stash apartment, and other locations used by his dealers found more than 10.5 kilograms of fentanyl, more than 3.5 kilograms of cocaine, nearly 3 kilograms of heroin, and about a half-pound each of pure meth and xylazine, known as “tranq,” which puts users in a zombie-like state. A kilogram is 2.2 pounds, and the total amount seized was about 35 pounds.

In addition, federal and local authorities also took body armor, guns and nearly $100,000 in cash, including marked bills provided by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency for undercover purchases.

Almost all the drugs were found at Fountain’s stash apartment, and the fentanyl haul was the biggest ever in Delaware, court records show.

Now Fountain, 54, and his three main dealers are behind bars, each for several years. So are his supplier and a man who delivered drugs to Delaware.

Fountain, who fought the charges, was found guilty earlier this year in U.S. District Court in Wilmington of conspiracy to distribute controlled substances and several other drug dealing crimes.

Now he’s going to prison for 25 years, under a sentence handed down last week by Colm F. Connolly, Delaware’s chief federal judge.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Welsh oversaw the investigation and led the prosecution of Fountain and three Delaware underlings — his cousin Martin Fountain, William Warren and Durell Patton. Those three received significant but lesser prison sentences.

Welsh said Dwayne Fountain, a native of Philadelphia, didn’t learn his lesson after being  sentenced to 10 years in federal prison in the 1990s for running a cocaine ring in Philly’s notorious Richard Allen Homes public housing project.

“He was a major, major drug trafficker this time,” Welsh told WHYY News. “And the drugs that he was selling this time were even worse than the drugs he was selling back in the ‘90s because he had moved on from simply selling cocaine to selling cocaine and methamphetamine and fentanyl.

“He was personally mixing those drugs, packaging them up and pushing them out into the community. So he had a heightened knowledge of how dangerous the stuff he was selling was and he just kept doing it anyway.”

In one call that authorities captured using a wiretap, Dwayne Fountain talked about the potential lethality of his fentanyl during a conversation with Warren.

“They said it’s too strong, come on man,” Fountain said, according to court records. “We all got some s*** that can make a [user] die. For real, for real. You gotta know how to mix it right.”

Welsh said Fountain was simply a cold-blooded businessman who peddled poison.

“He was selling drugs out of greed,” she said. “And he was doing so on the backs of people that were addicted to drugs and might die.”

‘Teaching people on the wiretap how to be better drug dealers’

Fountain’s attorney, Todd Fiore, did not return calls from WHYY News but had argued in court papers last month that his client should be sentenced to a maximum of 15 years in prison. Fountain is appealing his conviction.

“Mr. Fountain did not supervise anyone involved in this matter,” Fiore wrote in his sentencing memorandum. “Federal courts have ruled that leadership is the control, organization, and responsibility for other group members. Dwayne Fountain may have controlled the property where inventory was found, but he did nothing more than sell for resale.”

The defense lawyer also questioned whether Fountain really was the “kilo-level drug trafficker”  that prosecutors alleged.

“Where is all the money?” Fiore wrote. “There was less than $4,000 recovered from Dwayne Fountain’s residences.”

Fountain also had been late on his mortgage numerous times and had a “dismal credit rating,” Fiore wrote.

“No fancy cars, jewelry, clothes, etc.,” the defense memo said. “Perhaps Fountain was not the level of a drug trafficker that was initially assumed.”

Welsh countered that as an experienced dealer, Fountain knew how to maintain a low-key lifestyle in hopes of avoiding detection by law enforcement. Beyond not driving luxury vehicles or sporting flashy jewelry, she said Fountain did what many drug criminals do: changed phone numbers, used several cars and conducted drug meetings in crowded places such as the Grotto Pizza and Green Turtle restaurants.

She also scoffed at the proposition that Fountain, who was convicted by a jury after a weeklong trial in federal court, wasn’t a big-time dealer.

“It is preposterous,” Welsh said. “He was teaching people on the wiretap how to be better drug dealers. And then the best evidence that we have of him being a leader is the sheer quantity of drugs that he had in his apartment. The other people involved in this conspiracy when their homes were searched, they had very small amounts of drugs in there.

“So he was the person who was working with the supplier, the person who was getting all the drugs, holding on to them, manufacturing them, pushing them out. He was for sure the boss of this business that he created.”