The owner of a restaurant that became a focus of a drug-distribution crackdown in downtown Richmond was convicted Tuesday of a misdemeanor charge of maintaining a common nuisance.
Richmond authorities said Alexander W. Sally, 62, was running the restaurant, Ann’s Soul Food, while drug-dealing was going on inside. The business is in the 200 block of East Broad Street.
Prosecutor Ann Cabell Baskervill said in Richmond Circuit Court on Tuesday that one drug dealer called the restaurant a “gold mine” and another characterized it as a “one-stop shop.”
Sally has denied wrongdoing. On Tuesday, his attorney, Reginald Barley, said any drug dealing inside the restaurant was done clandestinely, adding that Sally couldn’t see what was unfolding in the back of his business.
On Tuesday, the defendant pleaded no contest to the misdemeanor charge. In approving a plea agreement, Circuit Judge Richard D. Taylor Jr. sentenced Sally to one year in jail.
The judge also ordered Sally to continue to comply with a civil order that, for the past six months, has required him to operate Ann’s Soul Food only as a take-out restaurant.
Barley said he is hopeful that Sally and the Richmond police can agree on conditions that would allow the restaurant to reopen as an eat-in establishment, such as installing surveillance cameras inside.
Sally’s restaurant figured in a broad police investigation launched about a year and a half ago to target drug distribution on East Broad between North Second and North Fourth streets. Authorities arrested at least 36 people on drug violations alleged to have occurred inside the restaurant.
Baskervill said the area remains a problem, “but it’s nowhere near the open-air drug market it was a year ago.”
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