Chelsea Anderson was the perfect sweet girl next door. She earned money by working as a waitress at Blue Ocean Seafood Restaurant in South Carolina, and as a mother, it provided her with all the stability she needed. Her mother suffered from drug addiction and her father spent time in prison, which is why she wanted to give her daughter, who was 19 years old, a balanced life.Soon, the eatery provides him not only a job but also a partner. Jeremiah Anderson was a busboy working at the restaurant. He was the son of a professor at a Christian college, he gave her the opportunity to live a family life and she even had a daughter from a previous relationship. Soon she became pregnant with another girl and they got married in 2015. Her husband had found a better-paying job outside the restaurant. And both were saving to buy a house of their own. “We seemed like a perfect beautiful family: my husband, his daughter, my daughter, and our daughter together,” she told The Cut. “They coached their T-ball teams, and I was sitting there carrying breakfast or trying to organize three girls’ afternoon schedules – taking one to church, taking one to the dance, and running late to one’s ball game.”But soon this relationship broke down and there were fierce fights between the couple. Anderson found herself partying with fellow waitresses at the eatery and taking drugs. Her husband moved out in less than four years of marriage. This was the beginning of his future that would lead him to a life worthy of books. While she was busy paying the bills and dealing with the rest of the drugs, her daughters were looked after by her ex-husband and extended family.Eventually, her aunt Kathy Talley, a devout Christian and her mother’s sister, got Anderson and her daughters tested. “The kids come back negative and I come back positive for amphetamines, benzos and weed,” Anderson said. Each of the girls went to live with their father while he agreed to supervised visits. This was his breaking point which he shared.
a businessman
Coke was an expensive habit and in late 2018, he started selling the drug to cover the costs. She would buy one ounce of cocaine and then sell it to fellow waitresses for a small profit. Once he gained the trust of his sources, they offered him a deal. If she gave them a little extra cash every time they made a purchase, they would use it to invest in more products and pay off her interest. Within a few months, she was selling not only cocaine but also meth and using both.She left the restaurant and began living a semi-nomadic life, staying in family members’ homes and eventually motels. She would pick up supplies from different trap houses – just a few ounces of meth at a time, often taking repeats several times a day – then drive around until her “boss” sent her an address.Anderson’s inclination toward dealing coincided with a unique moment in American drug trafficking. For decades, law enforcement had been waging a chaotic war over the chemicals used to make meth. In 1988, Congress passed an act restricting access to key ingredients such as ephedrine and pseudoephedrine. New regulations put pressure on domestic producers and with less domestic meth, Mexican operations stepped up. By the 1990s, a large cartel lab could produce 150 to 200 pounds of methamphetamine every other day.The change was almost complete when Congress passed the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005, which restricted the over-the-counter sale of pseudoephedrine-containing drugs like Sudafed. The law sealed off the source of meth production in Mexico. Until the 2010s, most of the meth in the US was cartel-made “ice”, which was cheaper and more consistent than anything cooked up in an American garage.In 2013, cartel associate, Nicanor “Nico” Rodriguez, was arrested and imprisoned in a South Carolina state prison along with Robert Anthony Grassley. Gresley, often called Tony G, was a well-known dealer in the upstate who spent time smuggling meth. Now people needed workers outside the jail. The female dealers were especially helpful. The men believed that the women would attract less attention from law enforcement and would be less likely to betray them. Anderson did not think of himself as fitting into this mold: “I was just going to go in and get out very quickly. I was just trying to get up to the top quickly.” But then he met Dan.
A drug cartel Queen
Until then, she knew her owners only by their surnames, catching glimpses of them on FaceTime when they placed orders. But in late 2019, one of her suppliers told her he wanted to connect her with someone “in case something were to happen to me.” Soon after, an inmate at the SCDC jail called him on FaceTime from a restricted phone. Over FaceTime, Dane asked Anderson to move into a more prominent position. He took the promotion and by the beginning of 2020, Dane was selling about ten kilos of meth a week to Anderson.As visits with her daughters dwindled to a few hours, money diverted her to a different lifestyle, where she could spend $3000 on shopping. At the same time, she was growing closer to Den and soon made her first interstate drug deal.In early March 2020, Anderson left the trip with his young daughter to pick up several kilos of meth and a kilo of heroin. She spent the next few hours selling the goods in a hotel room and slept on the bed. The next morning, she is surprised to see the police at the door. They found a gun on the floor, approximately $2,000 in cash and “a large clear Ziploc plastic bag containing the apparent substance methamphetamine.When they interrogated Anderson, authorities already knew everything about her: who she was working with, where she had been. Until that moment, Anderson said she never really thought about where the drugs she sold came from, that she was part of an international network that supplied the state with endless amounts of meth and heroin.At this time, she was part of the largest narcotics conspiracy investigation in state history, in which the South Carolina Attorney General later prosecuted 103 people. She was arrested but Dane helped her escape to Mexico and meet another woman, Nicole Burns. Since both Dane and Burns’ boyfriends were arrested for being part of the ‘prison empire’, they realized they were free to take the lead. He contacted suppliers in Mexico and soon became prominent himself. At the time, Anderson did not see this as a turning point. “I didn’t really have time to process anything,” she says. “I was just thinking nonsense.”“Prisoners aren’t doing that anymore,” Anderson said he realized. “Now it’s girls in Mexico.” The empire was running smoothly and profitably until the third woman, Marcy Vickers, joined them from North Carolina. Vickers moved in after allegedly being caught carrying drugs in Rutherford County. Before Anderson could say anything, Vickers appeared at his and Burns’ door.In their new roles, women were intermediaries between suppliers in Atlanta and their customers in upper South Carolina. His value came from the fact that he was the only person who had everyone’s contact information and was therefore the only one who could connect the dots. They carefully planned meetings, drops and money exchanges. When Burns fell out with Dane and their friendship broke down, Anderson went to work with CJNG. In South Carolina, law enforcement continued to investigate the drug ring, and on January 12, 2023, South Carolina’s Attorney General, Alan Wilson, announced a new indictment titled “Las Senoritas”, a string of massive arrests of the prison empire. The new case got its name from the network of “señoritas” – mothers, wives, friends, colleagues, who had fled to Mexico and were now working with Sinaloa and the CJNG.His reputation linked him to a man he named Produce, who was reportedly the son of one of the original Sinaloa Cartel members and controlled the flow of drugs into parts of Texas. He taught Anderson how to smuggle drugs on a large scale. Produce disappeared soon after he was transferred to federal prison. Since the disappearance of Produce, she has been trying to reinvent herself again. The only thing stopping him is that the sentences in the Prison Empire and Las Senoritas prosecutions are so harsh that people get prison sentences of more than 25 years. She watches her girls grow up on social media, through TikTok videos and Facebook photos.At the moment, she has moved from Mexico because she needed a change of scenery.