South San Francisco Man Who Stole Fish to Buy Crack Gets Rehab
Categories: Law & Order
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| Those crackers are like crack! |
His three-year prison sentence will be suspended as long as he enters a drug treatment program, since his crime was non-violent and "driven by addiction," the judge explained.
That theft, perhaps the first ever to establish a fish-to-crack exchange rate, was brazen, if not quite on par with Bubbles from The Wire dropping a fishing line from the top of a roof to reel in the ziplock bag of smack hidden in a pile of tires behind the dope boy.
On Oct. 14, 2011, Bates was supposed to deliver a truckload of fish to Newport Fish Company customers in the Sacramento area, but the fish never arrived. Instead, Bates later told police, he traded the product for $400 worth of crack cocaine, which likely netted him more than four grams of rock.
Authorities located the abandoned truck four days later. Most of the fish was gone -- and the few remaining slabs of meat had rotted.
In May, Bates pleaded guilty to auto theft, and the prosecutors agreed to drop embezzlement charges.
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