She’s the great-granny gangsta.
A cane-dependent, 72-year-old retired Bellevue Hospital nurse pleaded guilty today to conspiring in a million-dollar-a-year, East Harlem-based PCP, cocaine and heroin gang.
Weepy great-grandmother Doris Smith clutched a Bible in court as she admitted to letting the gang use the basement of her W. 115th St. apartment building — where she served as co-op board president — to stash and distribute its inventory, which prosecutors say included PCP, or “juice,” by the gallon.
Despite her multiple health issues, Smith — or “Mama Dot,” as she was referred to on wiretaps — will serve no less than a five-year sentence, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Edward McLaughlin told her when her lawyer asked for less time.
“I listened to the wiretaps,” the judge told the lawyer, Kevin Sylvan. “Your client was quite involved. She knew exactly what was going on.”
Mama Dot did more than offer drug storage, the judge noted. She would telephone the gangsters — who included her own daughter and her paroled murderer son-in-law — to warn when police came anywhere near “The Office,” as her basement was called, the court papers allege.
“She tried to deflect the police,” the judge noted of Smith. “I’m not reducing it one iota,” he said of her sentence.
Smith lived in the building some 30 years, and had purchased her apartment for only $250 in 2004 thanks to the generosity of the city’s Housing Development Corporation, her lawyer said.
In taking her plea, Smith confirmed for prosecutors that her own daughter, Nicole McNair Moultrie, was a fellow gangster, along with her son-in-law, Lamont Moultrie, a paroled murderer who prosecutors call the gang’s kingpin, along with Lamont’s brother, Bernard Moultrie.
Charges against the three Moultries are pending, but some two-dozen of the 35 people arrested when the gang was taken down in January have already pleaded guilty, according to a spokeswoman for Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr.
And as further indication that the drug gang did not age discriminate, prosecutors say at least two people under the age of 16 — including an 8 year old boy — were used as lookouts. The boy was turned over to child welfare authorities after the takedown, officials said at the time.
“She has a lot of health conditions,” the defense lawyer told reporters when asked how Smith could have gotten involved. “They took advantage of her.”