Federal Bureau of Prisons public record. Look it up yourself. Richard Grundy III, street name White Boy, barely 30 years old, life sentence, no parole, no appeal left, no way out. Here’s what I need you to sit with before we go anywhere else. >> >> This man who the US attorney called one of the most dangerous drug bosses Indianapolis had seen in 25 years walked out of a Marion County courthouse in September of 2017 a completely free man.
Murder charges gone, conspiracy gone, seven homicides they linked him to since 2013 gone, one count of dealing marijuana time served two years of non-reporting probation. The judge sent him home. He held a press conference on the courthouse steps, said he wanted a CDL license, said he wanted to live a normal life.
The FBI had been listening to his phone calls the entire time. They heard every word of it. The same afternoon he walked out, they already had the seizure that would end his life as a free man. Eight weeks later, they knocked on the door. Indianapolis, Indiana 12th most dangerous city in the country that year. 140 bodies in 2013 alone. This is where he built it.
This is where he ran it. This is where it ended. This is White Boy. Marion County prosecutor Terry Curry stood in front of the cameras in October of 2015 and called it exactly what it was. He said, quote a dangerous gang intent on distributing drugs in our community and promoting violence and fear to protect their illegal business operation.
That’s the Grundy Crew, but the name comes with a history that goes back further than 2015. By the time the state brought those charges, the Grundy Crew had allegedly been operating for at least 2 years. And the way IMPD detectives first put the name Richard Grundy the third on their radar, four dead bodies in the span of 72 hours in the winter of 2014.
January 28th, 2014, 7:00 p.m., a Citgo gas station near East 19th and Rural Street on Indianapolis’s East Side. Tyrese Dorsey, 23 years old, and William Davis, 25, were shot and killed. A gunman had apparently been lying in wait. Both men died at the scene. Three days later, February 1st, 2014, officers respond to a report of shots fired.
They find Carlos Jefferson, 22 years old, and Julius Douglas, 23, inside a truck on the 3400 block of North Hovey Street. Both shot multiple times. Both declared dead. Four men, three days, same organization. Before those two incidents, there’s Kendrick McNeely, 21 years old, found dead on an East Side street on October 21st, 2013. Head injury.
Prosecutors would later charge Grundy with ordering his death. Homicide detectives identified a man named John Means as the alleged trigger man for the January and February killings. They believed Means was the Grundy Crew’s hitman. They believed Grundy gave the order. Richard Grundy Jr., his own father, allegedly watched one of the killings and called his son with the news.
This was a family business in every sense of the phrase. Now, here’s where it gets deep. The Grundy crew wasn’t just about bodies. The bodies were the enforcement mechanism. The actual business was a multi-state marijuana trafficking pipeline. Product came from Phoenix, Arizona, moved through the United States Postal Service.
During the initial investigation, >> >> USPS alone intercepted nearly 800 lb of marijuana. Another 3,200 lb in suspicious packages were linked to the crew. By October of 2015, when prosecutors finally moved, there were 11 people charged, more than 110 total charges. Murder, conspiracy to commit murder, criminal gang activity, drug dealing, corrupt business influence.
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Grundy the third was at the center of all of it. The only problem? The state’s key witness wasn’t who she said she was. People love to say the system failed here. It didn’t fail. It got played. The state’s murder case against Grundy relied heavily on one witness, a woman who had been relocated and was receiving protection money from the Department of Justice.
>> >> From September of 2015 to February of 2016, she collected $6,098 from the DOJ for living expenses while cooperating with investigators. The problem, and this is almost too on the nose, was that she had fabricated her identity. Two of the three addresses she provided to investigators didn’t exist.
Her name was fake. The DOJ had been sending relocation money to a ghost. When investigators figured it out, the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office released a statement saying simply, “The successful prosecution of those charges relied in great part on a witness’s statements. Once she was excluded as a witness, we were unable to move forward.
” In April of 2016, the murder charges were dropped. >> >> Then the alleged hitman, John Means, went to trial on the Douglas and Jefferson killings. Hung jury, retried, acquitted. The Dorsey and Davis charges against Means were dropped in April of 2017. That’s it. Six people dead, allegedly on one man’s orders.
Zero murder convictions. Not one. While all this was unraveling, the streets were passing their own judgment. Multiple sources told investigators that a $50,000 bounty had been placed on Grundy’s head. 50,000. Cash. By his enemies. July 9th, 2017. >> >> 3:30 in the morning. Grundy and his cousin, 28-year-old Jasmine Moore, had been at the Sunset Strip Club on West 16th Street.
As they left, gunshots rang out near Long’s Bakery on North Tremont Street. Jasmine Moore was fatally shot. Police believed Grundy was the intended target. Then, 12 days later, on July 21st, 2017, gunmen ambushed the funeral procession for Jasmine Moore. Children hitting the ground. Mothers hitting the ground. Three people shot. One of them was Richard Grundy III.
Let that land. He survived getting shot at a funeral for the cousin he was standing next to when she got killed. And then, September 21st, 2017, >> >> he stood in Marion County court and pleaded guilty to one count of dealing marijuana. Time served. 572 days in the Marion County jail counted as his sentence.
>> >> Non-reporting probation. He walked out. A reporter asked him what he planned to do. He said, and I quote, “I want to live a normal life. I want to live where I ain’t got to look over my shoulders or be harassed every time that I’m pulled over by a police officer.” He said he was moving to the West Coast.
Maybe take some classes. Maybe get his CDL license. Hours after he left that courthouse, the FBI had the seizure that would become the first brick of his federal case. The man walked into the rest of his life without knowing it. While the state was tripping over a fake witness and dropping charges, the FBI was running something completely different.
They named it Operation Electric Avenue. And that name matters >> >> because federal operations don’t get names like that unless they’re serious. This wasn’t a reactive bust. This was a sustained, coordinated, multi-agency campaign that had been building since at least 2016. The lead case agent was FBI Special Agent Carrie English out of the Indianapolis Field Office.
Her work on this case was so thorough, so complete, that when it was over, when Grundy was convicted and sentenced to life, she received the FBI Director’s Award for Excellence in Investigation. The highest recognition the Bureau gives to an individual agent. One woman. One case. One kingpin. Life sentence.
While the state was watching its case collapse, English and her team were listening. Six to seven months of federal wiretaps, controlled buys, undercover agents, and confidential informants walking into transactions, buying drugs from Grundy’s people and walking out with evidence. Surveillance video, travel records, text messages, thousands of phone calls.
And here’s the detail that should make your stomach drop. As Grundy was walking out of that Marion County Courthouse in September of 2017, >> >> having beaten every charge the state threw at him, investigators were already on tape capturing him arranging new drug deals between Indianapolis and Phoenix.
He wasn’t even out of the parking lot before he was already on federal record for the next case. The operation he was running during those federal wiretaps moved more than 400 lb of methamphetamine into Indianapolis, plus large amounts of heroin, cocaine, and marijuana. The total street value, $3.5 million dollars in 15 months in one American city.
Here’s how the pipeline worked. Grundy and his inner circle, including a man named Ezell Neville, who would serve as his principal meth distributor, pooled money together to buy product in Phoenix, Arizona from suppliers Gilberto Viscara Millen and Mario Villaseñor. Then they needed to move the cash to Phoenix, so they put it on a Greyhound bus.
Two couriers, Christopher Bradford and Deonna Golston, boarded a Greyhound in Indianapolis carrying $84,500 in cash. They were stopped in Albuquerque, New Mexico on August 1st, 2017. The money was seized. A man named Andre Mosby made runs between Indianapolis and Phoenix >> >> carrying drug proceeds one way and methamphetamine the other.
The drugs came back and were staged at a place called the Island Club Apartments in Indianapolis. 26 people total were indicted. But Grundy was the architecture. And while all of this was being built against him, he was on Facebook. He posted photos of himself holding stacks of cash. He posted a video on November 3rd, 2017, 2 weeks before the FBI raids, explicitly threatening to kill federal cooperators.
He dropped a rap song on SoundCloud with lyrics including, “We get violent if you’re telling.” And, “Bitch, you better close your mouth for them feds.” He wrote publicly, “Don’t wait till I die or go to jail. I’m here now trying to do something with my life.” Bro was posting his own evidence while the FBI was collecting it.
Bold or catastrophic? Probably both. November 17th, 2017, 6:00 in the morning, FBI SWAT teams hit 24 locations across Indianapolis and Phoenix simultaneously. 30-plus firearms seized, $100,000 in cash, heroin, meth, marijuana, prescription drugs. 8 weeks after walking out of court a free man, Richard Grundy III was back in handcuffs.
US Attorney Josh Minkler stepped to the podium and said they wanted Indianapolis to be, quote, “The most inhospitable place in the country to sell illegal drugs.” Operation Electric Avenue was over. Richard Grundy’s life, as he had known it, was over. He just didn’t that yet. The federal case went to trial on July 8th, 2019 in Indianapolis.
It was over in two days, not because Grundy won, because the judge discovered that a confidential list of juror names, information that the court had explicitly ordered defense attorneys not to share with their clients, had been found inside Richard Grundy the third’s cell at the Marion County Jail. Let me say that again more slowly.
The court had put extraordinary protections in place specifically because Grundy had a documented history of threatening witnesses and trying to influence proceedings. Defense attorneys were allowed to see juror information, but were legally prohibited from giving it to their clients. Grundy had the list in his jail cell.
The judge declared a mistrial. Grundy then filed a motion to represent himself. He told the judge, “People doubt my abilities. If I lose, I’m going to get life.” He withdrew that motion before the retrial. The case was moved 180 mi away to Evansville, Indiana to the Winfield K. Denton Federal Courthouse. Judge Jane Magnus Stinson was sending a clear message.
“You are out of your home environment. Your people cannot reach this jury.” Every morning during the retrial, Grundy and his four co-defendants were woken up before dawn in their federal holding cells in Henderson, Kentucky, transported across the Ohio River, and brought into court in a city where nobody knew their names.
Evansville police were notified that Grundy’s associates might travel south. US Marshals recorded the names of everyone who walked through the second security checkpoint outside the courtroom. They were treating this like the national security case it effectively was. On July 29th, 2019, the retrial began.
99 potential jurors were called from across Southern Indiana. One man said, and I appreciate his honesty, >> >> Indianapolis or Evansville, I just don’t care about those guys because it doesn’t affect my house and my kids. Another potential juror said she doubted she could convict anyone because a lot of systems are broken in our country.
Neither of them made the jury, someone else did. Assistant U.S. Attorney Lindsey Karwoski stood up to deliver her opening statement and said, quote, choppers in the closet, pounds in the den. She told the jury she was quoting a rap song written by one of Grundy’s own drug couriers. Choppers meant guns.
Pounds meant the narcotics being purchased in Phoenix. The crew documented their own operation in verse, and then the federal government read it into the court record. Grundy’s defense attorney, Kenneth Riggin, had a countermove. He told jurors, Richard Grundy is a young man who started his own record label, MOB Family Entertainment.
Look, I respect the hustle of the defense bar, but that was not going to land against wiretaps, surveillance video, travel records, and the testimony of more than 20 co-conspirators >> >> who had already pleaded guilty. And then came the moment that nobody expected. The prosecution called Richard Grundy Jr., Grundy’s own father, to the stand.
The man who had been charged alongside his son in 2015. The man who walked away with time served. He took the oath and testified about the $80,000 in suspected drug proceeds that federal agents found inside his home on the day of the November 2017 raids. Father, son, same money, opposite sides of the courtroom.
The prosecution’s most significant witness was a long-time Grundy associate named David Carroll who had pleaded guilty and was cooperating. The defense called him {quote} “the Walmart of drug dealers” and said he was being {quote} “rewarded handsomely” for his testimony. Maybe, but the jury heard him. And then, Richard Grundy the third did something that surprised everyone in that courtroom.
He testified. He was the only witness called by any of the five defense teams. He took the stand alone for all of them. He told the jury he hid his identity during the investigation because he feared harassment by police. He explained his tattoo, a dead rat, the symbol of anti-snitching culture, that investigators had first noted in a 2014 cell phone video by saying it expressed his disdain for informants who cooperate with law enforcement.
His own attorney afterwards said, “I think he surprised everybody being on the witness stand and he did a stellar job for himself.” The jury deliberated for 9 and 1/2 hours. They came back on day 14, guilty on every single count for all five defendants. December 12th, 2019, Richard Burnett Grundy the third stood before US District Chief Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson in Indianapolis Federal Court.
He spoke. He said he accepted his punishment. He said he planned to appeal. Then the judge gave him life. United States Attorney Josh Minkler walked out to the cameras and explained it in plain language that I want every person listening to hear because most people don’t actually know how federal sentencing works.
He said, “Quote, for those of you more familiar with the rules of state prison and not familiar with the rules of federal prison, parole has been abolished federally. So, when someone is sentenced to life in prison, what that means is that you die in prison. You do not get to take a free breath of air for the rest of your life.
No parole, no early release, no board hearing in 15 years where he gets to tell them he’s changed. He dies in there.” FBI Special Agent in Charge Grant Mendenhall added this, “Mr. Grundy was under the mistaken impression he and his crew could run their criminal enterprise and flaunt their illegal activities in the face of the law without fear of consequence.
” And then Minkler said the quiet part loud. He said, “This is as big a win as our criminal justice has had in this city in the last 25 years. 25 years. >> >> One man, one case.” His co-defendants didn’t do much better. Ezell Neville, 30 years. Andre Mosby, 20. Derrick Atwater, 18.
James Beasley, 19 and a half. The Phoenix supplier, Gilberto Viscara-Millan, 25 years. David Carroll, the government’s star witness, 8 years. >> >> More than 20 members of the Grundy crew convicted in total by plea or by jury. The operation was dismantled. The Phoenix pipeline was cut. The Island Club Apartments stash was gone.
And in 2021, when Grundy appealed to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing the District Court had violated his Sixth Amendment rights by blocking him from representing himself, the court issued a 66-page ruling. >> >> They said, quote, “Grundy posed obvious and legitimate security concerns even with counsel.
” Read that. The federal appellate court said in writing that this man posed such significant security concerns that restricting his access to documents wasn’t unconstitutional. It was necessary. Not a violation of his rights. A reasonable response to who he was. The appeal was denied. Life sentence upheld. Everybody remembers the kingpin.
Almost nobody remembers the names. Kendrid Mince was 21. Tyrese Dorsey was 23. William Davis was 25. Julius Douglas was 23. Carlos Jefferson was 22. Five names, five human beings ages 21 through 25. And then there’s Jasmine Moore, 28 years old. >> >> Grundy’s own cousin killed outside a bakery at 3:30 in the morning on July 9th, 2017, while he was standing right there.
Nobody was ever charged with her death, either. None of their killers were ever convicted. Not one. The state linked the Grundy crew to at least seven homicides between 2013 and 2017. Built investigations, relocated witnesses, watched case after case collapse, hung jury, acquittal, dropped charges while the bodies kept adding up.
In the end, the only thing that put Richard Grundy III away forever wasn’t any of those deaths. It was methamphetamine, money laundering, continuing criminal enterprise, $3.5 million in drugs, not a single murder conviction. Think about that. His sisters lost their jobs just for carrying his name.
His father went from co-defendant to federal witness against his own son. The Grundy name cost everyone around it something. And 400 lb of methamphetamine flooded into a city that was already drowning. That is the ledger. That is what it actually cost.
