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Drug ringleader found dead hours before sentencing

Drug dealer moved from music to drugs to suicide

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By Tom Beyerlein and Mary McCarty
Staff Writers Updated 9:55 PM Saturday, June 27, 2009

It began in the late 1970s as a small circle of friends with a common interest in smoking pot and getting high. By its peak a few years ago, it had grown into a $15 million-a-year interstate drug trafficking operation that brought some 11 tons of marijuana into the Dayton area.

“The numbers involved,” said U.S. attorney’s spokesman Fred Alverson, “were just staggering.”

When it all came crashing down with a massive police raid in 2005, ringleader Jeffrey Cost went on the run. He made threatening phone calls to intimidate witnesses, once leaving an answering machine message with only the sound of gunfire.

After two years as a fugitive, Cost walked into the Dayton Federal Building in March 2007 and surrendered to U.S. marshals. He struck a plea deal with federal prosecutors, agreeing to testify against 20 men and women charged as his lieutenants. He also agreed to forfeit to the feds two homes, two SUVs, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and $970,000.

Cost rented a hall and threw a party to celebrate his last days of freedom the weekend before he was to be sentenced to federal prison.

Just hours before he was scheduled to be sentenced the morning of Thursday, June 18, Cost’s wife found his body in the driver’s seat of his car in the garage of their Bellbrook home. The Greene County coroner’s office said it was an apparent suicide from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Cost taped a suicide note on a car mirror: “Sorry, I just can’t face being a loser at 60 years old anymore.”

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