Former drug kingpin Rayful Edmond, whose dealing fueled the 1980s crack epidemic in Washington, D.C. died Tuesday, months after being released from prison.
He was 60.
Edmond, when he was 25, was sentenced to two life prison terms with no possibility of parole after his conviction in 1990 for conspiracy and operating a criminal enterprise. Prosecutors had charged that he pulled in $2 million weekly from a vast drug-selling network that brought up to 1,700 pounds of cocaine into D.C. monthly during the late 1980s.
In his heyday, the charismatic dealer was known as the “king of cocaine,” and so many homicides were committed during that time — though Edmond himself was never found guilty of any violent crimes — that Washington, D.C. became known as the “murder capital” amid a crack epidemic there.
Edmond’s sentence was reduced after he became an informant in 1994, when he was caught working with a Colombia drug cartel from his Pennsylvania prison. He spent the next 20 years cooperating in dozens of drug and homicide cases in and outside D.C. that helped convict at least 100 people, NBC affiliate WRC-TV reported.
He had been released to “community confinement” in August and was scheduled to be fully freed on Nov. 8, 2025, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons told The Washington Post last summer. Instead, Edmond died at a Florida halfway house, U.S. Bureau of Prisons spokesperson Kristie Breshears told the outlet, without giving a cause of death.
