Since he set up shop at Gabby's Luncheonette on Courthouse Square earlier this year, authorities allege Richard Mahan has had more than omelettes and home fries for sale.
The culmination of a five-month probe, investigators with the Lackawanna County district attorney's office on Monday raided a Hill Section home described as the 36-year-old Moscow man's "stash house," seizing enough cocaine and marijuana to bring in more than $150,000 on the street.
"This quantity of cocaine is huge," said Lackawanna County Assistant District Attorney Shane Scanlon, referencing a single brick of uncut cocaine weighing about a pound.
In total, detectives found 633 grams of cocaine, 407 grams of marijuana and 18 Vicodin pills in the room he rented at 812 Madison Ave. for $1,000 a month.
"All that cocaine is uncut, untouched," Mr. Scanlon said.
The value of the cocaine seized - about $65,000 - would have at least doubled once Mr. Mahan diluted it with a cutting agent and packaged it for sale, Mr. Scanlon said.
Mr. Mahan's room on Madison Avenue - rented from the father of an old girlfriend who authorities said was not aware of Mr. Mahan's drug business - was used strictly as a stash house for Mr. Mahan's product and the tools used to prepare it for sale, Mr. Scanlon said.
From the cocaine itself to the powder used to cut the drug, the scale to weigh it and the bags to package it, investigators found evidence of every step of the production process in Mr. Mahan's room.
"You see every tool here that you would need to produce and sell - the strainer, the cut, the raw, all the bags," Mr. Scanlon said.
After the raid on Madison Avenue, Mr. Mahan was taken into custody at his 103 Brooke St. home in Moscow, authorities said.
Over the course of the investigation, which included a series of controlled purchases of the drugs from Mr. Mahan, Mr. Scanlon said investigators established that "there were (drug) sales coming out of the restaurant" at Linden Street and North Washington Avenue.
To conduct his illicit business so near the Lackawanna County Courthouse, where daily the very investigators and prosecutors behind his arrest stream in and out, was "very brazen" on Mr. Mahan's part, Mr. Scanlon said.
Mr. Scanlon credited investigators' timing for the amount of narcotics seized in the raid Monday, which coincided with Mr. Mahan resupplying in the New York area.
Mr. Mahan was arraigned Tuesday morning on three counts each of possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance and possession of a controlled substance along with one count of possession of drug paraphernalia.
He was taken to Lackawanna County Prison in lieu of $75,000 bail. A preliminary hearing was scheduled for Sept. 20.
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